Foundations of Consciousness

Antti Revonsuo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780415594660
• eBook ISBN: 9781351629614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

The conscious mind is life as we experience it; we see the world, feel our emotions and think our thoughts thanks to consciousness. This book provides an easy introduction to the foundations of consciousness; how can subjective consciousness be measured scientifically? What happens to the conscious mind and self when the brain gets injured? How does consciousness, our subjective self or soul, arise from the activities of the brain?

Addressing the philosophical and historical roots of the problems alongside current scientific approaches to consciousness in psychology and neuroscience, Foundations of Consciousness examines key questions as well as delving deeper to look at altered and higher states of consciousness. Using student-friendly pedagogy throughout, the book discusses some of the most difficult to explain phenomena of consciousness, including dreaming, hypnosis, out-of-body experiences, and mystical experiences.

Foundations of Consciousness provides an essential introduction to the scientific and philosophical approaches to consciousness for students in psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy. It will also appeal to those interested in the nature of the human soul, giving an insight into the motivation behind scientist's and philosopher's attempts to understand our place as conscious beings in the physical world.

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1 Psychology and the scientific study of consciousness

Chapter outline

• Psychology literally means the study of psyche or soul.

• Psychological science originally defined itself as the science of the conscious mind.

• During most of the 20th century, psychology did not accept consciousness as a legitimate topic of scientific research.

• Currently, consciousness is one of the hottest research topics of 21st-century psychological science.

• Consciousness is studied by psychological science in collaboration with philosophy and cognitive neuroscience.

• Although consciousness involves many philosophical problems, it can now be studied by empirical psychology and neuroscience.

Psychology focuses on the study of psychological reality

The overall goal of science is to describe and explain how the world works. “The world”, of course, is a rather complex thing to study. Therefore, different branches of science are specialized in the study of the different levels of complexity in the world. Some phenomena, like atoms, X-rays, black holes, and Higgs bosons, reside at the purely physical levels of organization, studied by physics, astronomy, and cosmology. Other, more complex phenomena, such as DNA molecules, flu viruses, lotus flowers, dragonflies, and squirrels reside at the chemical or biological levels, studied by chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and neuroscience.

If the world, and science along with it, is organized according to the different levels of complexity, where does the conscious human mind, and the psychological science that studies it, fit in? What is the psychological reality like and how might it be studied scientifically? This question has been surprisingly hard to answer. Throughout its history, psychology has struggled to define itself and the reality it studies, and one of the major problems here has been whether consciousness can be taken seriously as a topic in psychological science.

Literally, “psychology” means the study of the soul (from Greek psyche, soul). Modern psychological science could hardly define itself by referring to something as spiritual and elusive as the “soul”. Thus, during its history, spanning the last 150 years, the science of psychology has fervently tried to get rid of the religious and philosophical baggage that the notion of the psyche, our mind as a spirit-like “soul”, was originally burdened with.

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Therefore, in the history of scientific psychology, the concept of “soul” was quickly replaced by the concept of “consciousness”. This move seemed to work well, at least for a while. The notion of consciousness preserves our intuitive idea that psychological science studies the very same human mind that each of us intimately knows and feels from the inside. Psychological science studies our subjective psychological reality or the subjective stream of mental life. We call that reality “consciousness” rather than “soul”.

From the internal perspective, our conscious mind appears to us as a sentient being inside our head who looks at the world through our eyes, has perceptual experiences, feels the human body and its movements and its emotional states from the inside, and controls its behaviors with a free will. In the conscious mind, we experience our pains and pleasures, the happiness of our lives as well as the painful sufferings; our bodily needs such as hunger, thirst and sexual desire; our fears, loves and other emotional states. We also have thoughts ceaselessly running through our conscious mind in silent internal speech, sometimes accompanied by mental images. Even when we are asleep, the conscious mind is not totally absent, but we experience private adventures in imaginative and sometimes bizarre dream-worlds.

The human conscious mind consists of a ceaseless stream of subjective experiences. Subjective experiences, in all their endless forms most beautiful, represent one of the most fundamental topics of psychological science.

Early psychology as the science of the conscious mind

In the 19th century, the first psychological scientists figured out that subjective experiences such as simple color sensations can be systematically measured. The participants in psychological laboratory experiments were presented with different kinds of carefully controlled physical stimuli (colors, tones, weights). They reported the subjective experiences elicited by those stimuli. To do so, they used a method called introspection. In introspection, a person looks into their own mind and, consequently, carefully describes the contents of their consciousness. The subjective contents of consciousness and their relation to objective stimulation of the senses thereby became measurable.

Introspection, as it was used in psychological laboratory experiments, was taken to be the core method for data collection in the science of psychology. Otherwise, psychology was regarded as no different from the other laboratory sciences, such as physiology. But only in psychology was it absolutely necessary to use introspection to obtain any information at all about the happenings inside the test subject’s conscious mind.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, psychology defined itself as the science of the conscious mind and mostly focused on systematically charting, by introspective methods, very simple types of conscious experiences such as sensations of color and sound, and their relation to different types of physical stimulation.

20th-century psychology as the science of behavior, cognition, and the unconscious

But there was a nagging problem that contaminated introspective psychology. No one else from the outside can see or confirm what the subjects in an introspective experiment really experience, or whether their reports are accurate accounts of the conscious events inside their minds. The conscious mind is completely hidden from public and objective scientific observations.

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Any method that allows only one privileged person (the test subject, the participant in the study) to observe and describe a phenomenon cannot be truly scientific. This was the devastating argument put forward by behaviorism, the influential school of thought that took over scientific psychology in the early 20th Century. Subsequently, “consciousness” was declared to be a taboo subject in academic psychology. Behaviorists judged it to be an equally unscientific concept as the earlier metaphysical notion of “soul” – they believed that “consciousness” was merely the old notion of “soul” smuggled back into scientific psychology in a clever disguise!

Furthermore, around the same time in early 20th century, psychiatry and clinical psychology also lost interest in the study of consciousness. Instead, they focused on the newly discovered idea of the deeply unconscious mind. In 1900, Sigmund Freud argued that the deeply unconscious psychical layers constitute the most fundamental reality of the human mind. The deeply unconscious mind is utterly unknown to our conscious mind and it cannot be reached by introspection.

This is how the behaviorist assault and the Freudian attack against consciousness led to the complete rejection of consciousness from psychological science. For most of the 20th century, psychology flatly rejected consciousness. Instead, academic psychology redefined itself as the science of behavior, and later on in the 1970s and 1980s, also as the science of cognition and (mental) information processing. Clinical psychology and psychiatry defined themselves as the study of the unconscious mind and its manifestations in mental illness. For nearly 100 years, psychology ignored or downright denied the existence of consciousness.

Psychology without consciousness: the baby was thrown out with the bathwater

But a psychology ignoring and denying consciousness was doomed to fail.

Consciousness is an essential feature of our minds. It is the home of our personal psychological existence in this world. Without consciousness, there is nobody home: no subject inside you; no one living, feeling, and experiencing your life. According to most of the 20th-century psychology, your life as a person consists of robotic external behaviors, computer-like information processing in your brain, and deeply unconscious primitive angers, fears, and desires, or totally non-conscious neural activities in the brain, outside your control.

It is hard to recognize ourselves in that kind of unconscious, soulless, mechanistic image of what it is to live a human life. Without my consciousness, my life as lived and me as a person would not exist as a sentient being at all because in that case, throughout my whole life I would not feel anything whatsoever. Perhaps there would be an empty, humanlike body, looking like me, wandering around without purpose but mimicking human actions – a zombie-like, mindless creature going through the motions of my life, but not feeling or experiencing anything at all. But that kind of mindless zombie should not be of any interest to psychology, as they have no internal mental life whatsoever.

Consciousness is the soul of psychological science, in both the good and the bad. If psychology denies or ignores it and throws it away, nothing resembling our personal mental lives remains. Conversely, if the science of the mind welcomes consciousness in as a significant topic worthy of serious study, the field will be forced to face enormously difficult philosophical and scientific problems, similar to the ones that were originally connected with the esoteric notion of the soul.

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21st-century psychology welcomes consciousness back

Consciousness was bound to return sooner or later – and so it did! Within a few years around the turn of the millennium, consciousness made a sudden comeback to mainstream scientific psychology. Recently, consciousness has become one of the hottest topics in the scientific psychology of the 21st century, and one of the most cross-disciplinary topics, too. Philosophy and neuroscience closely interact with psychology to solve the mystery of consciousness. Consciousness is now widely accepted by academic psychology as the central core of our psychological reality and, therefore, a necessary part of psychological science. These days, exciting new findings concerning consciousness are regularly reported in the top scientific journals.

Yet, at the same time, the ancient philosophical problems concerning the fundamental nature of consciousness, as well as its relation to the brain and the body, remain unanswered. In the study of consciousness, frontline sciences such as cognitive neuroscience and functional brain imaging have to face philosophical questions that no one has been able to solve so far.

This is where we stand now: Welcome to studying the mystery of consciousness! The science of consciousness is a multidisciplinary field. Therefore, this book necessarily covers not only the psychology of consciousness, but also touches on the philosophy and the neuroscience of consciousness. These three fields, psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience, are currently in seamless interaction in the scientific study of consciousness.

In the rest of this chapter, we will briefly look at some of the most fascinating questions about consciousness that 21st-century philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists are currently dealing with. In the rest of the book, we will go through these questions systematically and explore potential answers to them. Even if some deep mysteries might remain unsolved, there is also a lot that we already do understand about consciousness.

Three modern philosophical problems: “what is it like”, “the Explanatory Gap”, and “the Hard Problem”

The philosopher Thomas Nagel (1974) paved the way toward the modern study of consciousness with his famous argument showing that the problem of consciousness had remained unsolved and was mostly ignored by philosophers and scientists. In the 1970s he argued that even if we knew absolutely everything about the brain and behavior from the objective, scientific, or third-person perspective, this knowledge would not include any description or explanation of consciousness. Consciousness is a fundamentally subjective phenomenon, and thus experienced only from the first-person perspective. Science cannot tell us what it is like to be the conscious subject whose brain and behavior may nonetheless be fully and completely described with the concepts and theories of science.

Another famous philosophical problem of consciousness, the Explanatory Gap, was originally formulated by the philosopher Joseph Levine in 1983. This argument shows why consciousness cannot simply be reduced to brain activities in the same manner as physical phenomena can be reduced to their simpler components. Indeed, in the case of water, we can fully explain its behavior under various circumstances – how it freezes, how it flows, how it reacts with other substances – by describing the behavior of H₂O molecules at the microscopic level. It makes sense to say that liquid water flows because then the H₂O molecules can freely roll around each other, whereas frozen water is solid, because then the molecules are tightly bound to each other.

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By contrast, when we consider the relationship between consciousness and the brain, an Explanatory Gap that cannot be bridged remains. Conscious experiences feel like something, they have subjective qualities, such as the hurtfulness of pain, or the redness of the color red, the fear and terror experienced during a bad nightmare, or the rich aroma of red wine. Now, even if we could describe all the microscopic neural activities underlying these qualitative conscious experiences, there is a looming gap between consciousness and the brain: How, precisely, does any aspect of objective neural activity (such as bioelectrical waves inside brain tissue) manage to explain the experienced hurtfulness, the redness, the horror, or the aroma? There seems to be no intelligible relationship between hurtfulness and neural signaling, or redness and neurotransmitter activity, or the rich aroma experienced after a sip of Pinot Noir and the neural signals fired by neurons and spreading across the brain.

Furthermore, the qualitative differences between different experiences are gigantic: Consider the difference between an excruciating pain in your tooth and the taste of a sweet, aromatic wine in your mouth. Or the difference between two types of nocturnal dreams: a nightmare where you run for your life from ferocious beasts and a sweet dream where you finally manage to hug and kiss your secret crush. Yet, the neural activities connected to these experiences are not all that much different in quality. In one case, one bunch of neurons deep inside the brain over here keeps firing more actively; in another case, another bunch of neurons fires like crazy over there. How could those kinds of objective biological events truly explain the categorical difference between fearing for your life (as in the nightmare) and feeling in love (as in the sweet dream)? Neurons, the brain cells and their networks, in different parts of the brain are not all that different from each other. They all fire neural impulses and release neurotransmitters. Why should some neural firings result in the visions of ugly monsters and the feeling of mortal fear, whereas others result in visions of the beautiful face of a loved one and the feelings of blissful infatuation? Those two t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Foundations of Consciousness
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface: Consciousness – The Dark Energy of the Brain?
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Psychology and the Scientific Study of Consciousness
• 2 What is Consciousness?
• 3 The Philosophy of Consciousness
• 4 The History of Consciousness in Psychological Science
• 5 Methods for the scientific Study of Consciousness
• 6 Neuropsychology and Consciousness
• 7 The Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC)
• 8 Dreaming
• 9 Hypnosis
• 10 Higher States of Consciousness
• Afterword
• Glossary
• Index