I know it sounds a bit absurd to ask such a question. It is like asking someone whether he or she is asleep! If you are not conscious, there is no way you can answer my question.
But wait a minute. Have you not noticed the fact that there are occasions when you are deeply engrossed in your thoughts, and you don’t care a hoot even if a lion just comes and stands in front of you? Were you conscious at that time?
So, consciousness is a bit tricky word. When a surgeon puts you under general anesthesia, you become unconscious. Even if the surgeon cuts open your body you don’t react at all.
Consciousness can be mainly of two kinds. Your preparedness to react to an external stimulus OR your being aware of something. When you are under anesthesia, you don’t respond to any stimulus.
So, you are unconscious. When you are lost in your thoughts, then you are not paying attention to whatever is happening around you. You are conscious, but not conscious of whatever is happening, other than your thoughts. You get what I mean?.
But philosophers talk of consciousness as a ‘subjective’ experience that can never be explained in terms of happenings in the brain. These people are called dualists who believe that there is something else other than matter – or brain, that gives us our experiences.
For quite sometime this concept of consciousness was a bone of contention between scientists who believe that everything can be explained in terms of brain and those who insist that there is ‘something else’ other than the brain.
Till recently, scientists were at loss to explain some of the simplest of our day-to-day experiences in terms of how it works within the brain.
When you look at any object, different regions of our brain work on different parts of the object trying to identify a specific feature.
For example, when you look at a Sapodilla tree, some networks of neurons focus on the leaves and identify them as those of Sapodilla tree. Some others focus on fruits and identify them as Sapodilla fruits. Others may identify the branches and trunk etc. There is no single group of neurons that identifies the entire tree as Sapodilla tree.
But the conscious experience you get is not as a collection of leaves, fruits, branches, trunk, and so on but that of a unified Sapodilla tree! Who puts all these pieces of information to give you the idea that it is indeed a Sapodilla tree? If you look into the brain, there is no single region that gathers all these pieces of information and constructs an image of a Sapodilla tree.
Further, each of these networks of neurons could refer to various memory areas that store information about the Sapodilla leaf structure, appearance of fruits, branches and so on. Basically, the information could be spread in various parts of the brain and not in one single place. It is not possible to have a permanent path to all these regions since we may look at different things at different times and having a permanent connectivity is almost impossible.
This was what puzzled the scientists for quite some time.
Various theories were put forth. One interesting theory among them was the ‘Global workspace theory’ put forth by Bernard Baars in the late 1980s.
Very briefly, our brain dynamically establishes communication pathways between various regions of the brain as the need arises, to enable the otherwise disjoint areas to communicate.
These pathways are setup by special neural networks in the midbrain structure called the Thalamus.
The need for setting up such a dynamic connection is either demanded by those regions that want to talk to each other or when the brain pays attention to some object, say a Sapodilla tree.
To enable this dynamic connectivity, there are bidirectional connections from various parts of the brain to and from thalamus as well as layers of neurons called relay neurons that make the communication possible.
So, when the connection is setup, disjoint pieces of information processed by different brain regions are either collected together and passed to memories or used by speech producing systems to express the experience that we saw a Sapodilla tree. No replica of the tree is created anywhere, but only the inferences are shared to give a conscious experience.
When you were lost in your thoughts and suddenly a lion came and stood in front of you, your eyes had seen the lion, they might have even identified it partially, but you were not aware. That is because you were not paying attention to those brain regions that were identifying the lion. You were not paying attention because the thalamus was fully occupied by the thoughts that were going on. The required connections could not be setup and so, you could not be conscious of the danger!
This is how the scientists explain consciousness objectively.
But as usual, philosophers disagree. They stick to their idea of subjective/ objective divide.
And our self-claimed spiritual Gurus use it to make their mysterious theories more puzzling. They talk about consciousness, superconscious-ness, universal consciousness and so on, without defining any of them. That is the advantage of becoming a Guru😉
A series revolving around Mind – Science of Mind, Philosophy of Mind, Notions of reality, Mind modulation, Domains beyond Mind, and so on. © Dr. King 2019
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