Thoughts on consciousness

Why don’t we give children and adolescents the vote, i.e., allow them to make decisions about sex, alcohol, and war? The simple answer is because we accept the premise that they are as yet too young to grasp the full consequences of their action. If they can have no conception of the consequences of their actions, then how can they attain genuine awareness of what it is they’re doing? If our working description of consciousness is as the state of awareness concerning what it is we’re doing and, crucially, why we’re doing it, we may therefore be imply the conclusion that adolescents lack it, or at least that its yet incomplete.

I find it interesting that when we recall events from the past (even fairly recent past) it still seems as if they took place at a time before we gained the property of awareness we currently posses. Perhaps we might shrug off this uncomfortable feeling: bah... I was so x back then! where x is some accessible description of one’s own character or demeanor. In other words, I was at that time not yet come to my wits... unduly influenced by a deformation of awareness. Back then, we “didn’t know” about things that we do now. How naive we were. Surely, if you would have asked us at the time we thought we were aware, then we would have affirmed it to you as confidently as we would today. But if we know today that in the past we would have, in fact, been wrong, how can we be sure that we won’t be saying the same thing about right now some days or years in the future?

A week or so ago my professor of cognition asked us the question ‘what is consciousness’. It occurred to me that, whatever it is, it must have something to do with what I call the absolute presence of now. For lack of a better term, I’m talking about the cerebral rush of colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures, that collect together to form a pool of self-hood. Mirror! Mirror! On the water, who is the most x of them all? Compared with the absolute presence of now, memories from even a moment ago are pale shadows of their former glory. As the present slides inexorably forward on a line of time, what was the present becomes a memory and its characteristic intensity of the present will be ripped from it and rushed into what is coming.

Let’s restate what’s been suggested: consciousness is inseparable from the present, and it also appears to be the mechanism that confers intensity to impressions. If these two premises are true, then it would explain why memories are so pale: since consciousness is bound to the present, it cannot be applied to impressions from the past, for if it was we would be experiencing all over again the past with the absolute presence of now. Additionally, it seems these premises may also explain our apparent inability to ascribe consciousness to some minds from the past, as well as children and adolescents. Specifically, the mechanism of consciousness may play a role in how we generate theories of other minds (i.e., are able to perceive other people and animals as having minds). Without the personal experience of consciousness, we may be unable to incorporate the property of consciousness into a theory of other minds. Since we cannot experience consciousness within impressions from the past, we are unable to believe that minds in the past had consciousnesses either. In memories, everybody is sleepwalking, going about the world, interacting with people and things, but lacking awareness.

Putting this together: ‘Consciousness’ is a sensational result following an impulse whose function is to trap our attention around colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures happening now. If it didn’t carry out this function, we might wind up making decisions upon what was true in the past (but no longer). Obviously, this could be dangerous and may have been subject to evolutionary pressure. In sum, consciousness is only another cognitive bias on a long list of others. This consciousness bias causes us impressions from the present to stand out among impressions from the past, or memories, and thus exert greater influence on decisions to be made now. Impressions from the past may still be influential, but only in a preconscious, online process in which all impressions from the past are combined into a single feeling about is happening: a sense of goodness, comfort, stress, or danger, and reoccur as a new impression and considered along side the rest occurring now. Consciousness also seems to play a role in generating theories of mind, perhaps by establishing bounds around the impressions that influencing the decisions of others. Interestingly, we don’t treat all minds equally. Children made forgivable mistakes because they didn’t know any better, but criminals had intent. Genuine internal states seem more likely to be granted to people we distrust or are threatened by, but not those whom consider benign; i.e. children, adolescents, ourselves, and perhaps a close circle of kin who we can as well imagine being more like naive pawns of external conditions during the moment of any past actions, achieving at best only a deformed awareness that cannot be culpable for the consequences of its actions.

A question for another day: If consciousness is only a side-effect of a mechanism to bias evaluations of the newest impressions, can free will exist? It would there is very little left for a will to do. Rather, the hardware of the mind is estimating a utility function, or a fitness function, and discharging a behavior most likely to maximize the function.