|
15
The appearance of a world
Consciousness is the appearance of a world. The essence of the phenomenon of conscious experience is that a single and unified reality becomes present: if you are conscious, a world appears to you. This is true in dreams as well as the waking state, but in dreams as deep sleep, nothing appears: the fact that there is a reality out there and that your present in it is unavailable to you; you do not even know that you exist.
Consciousness is a very special phenomenon, because it is part of the world and contains it at the same time. All our data indicate that consciousness is part of the physical universe and is an evolving biological phenomenon. Conscious experience, however, is much more than physics plus biology - more than a fantastically complex, dancing pattern of neural file in your brain. What sets human consciousness apart from other biologically evolved phenomena is that it makes the reality appear within itself. It creates inwardness; the life process has become aware of itself.
Judging from the available data on animal brains and evolutionary continuity, the appearance of worlds in biological nervous systems is a recent phenomenon, perhaps only a few million years old.
In Darwinian evolution, an early form of consciousness might have arisen some 200 million years ago in the primitive cerebral cortices of mammals, giving them bodily awareness in the sense of a surrounding world and guiding their behaviour.
My intuition is that birds, reptiles and fish have long had some sort of awareness too. In any case, an animal that cannot reason or speak a language can certainly have transparent phenomenal states - and that is all it takes to make a world appeared in consciousness. Such well-known consciousness researchers and theoretical neurobiologists as Anil Seth, Bernard Baars, and D.B. Edelman have established 17 criteria for brain structures some serving consciousness, and the evidence for the existence of such structures not only in mammals but also in birds is overwhelming. The empirical evidence for animal consciousness is now far beyond any reasonable doubt. Like us, animals are naive realists.
A much more recent phenomenon emerged only a couple of thousand years ago - the conscious formation of theories in the minds of human philosophers and scientists. Thus the life process became reflected not only in conscious individual organisms also in groups of human beings trying to understand the emergence of self-conscious minds as such - that is, what it means that something can “appear within itself”.
The most fascinating feature of the human mind, perhaps, is not simply that it can sometimes be conscious, or even that it allows for the emergence of a PSM (phenomenal self-model).
The truly remarkable fact is that we can also attend to the content of our PSM and form concepts about it. We can communicate about it with one another, and we can experience this is our own activity. The process of attending to our thoughts and emotions, to our perceptions of bodily sensations, is itself integrated into the self model.
This property, as noted, probably distinguishes us from most other animals on this planet: the ability to turn the first person perspective inwards, to explore our emotional states and attend to our cognitive processes. As philosophers say, these are higher-order levels of the PSM they allowed us to become aware of the fact that we are representational systems.
Thomas Metzinger: The Ego Tunnel
|