Out of any driving force in the world, what is the one factor that allowed Sisyphus to be aware of his eternal suffering, Adam to recognize his reality in the garden of Eden, and you as a reader to reflect on how it feels to be reading this paper right now? How it feels to scroll through an article, to process differing opinions, and to interact with your environment?
The answer is consciousness, arguably the most fundamental property of existence. A generally accepted definition of consciousness is the state of being actively aware of and able to perceive one's environment and self.
The primary traits of consciousness are:
Subjective Experience: The unique day to day experiences one has when interacting with themselves and their environment
Self-Reflection: The ability to think about one's own inner system, which allows for one to decide what is meaningful to them
Meaningful Decision-Making: Intentional, autonomous choices influenced by developed reasoning and creativity,
Without consciousness, rather than being fully sentient beings, we would act only out of the intuitive, survivalist dictates of our own inner regulation systems. Such existence would be classified as living “in the dark” so to speak, with any pursuits of creative or meaningful action stopping after one's homeostatic needs have been met.
The emergence of consciousness is what elevates us beyond just surviving, leading to a society that creates, questions, and reaches for greater goals beyond just biological necessity.
What is it like to be conscious?
As you read this article, you are conscious. You have made a conscious effort to read each paragraph, are aware of the environment you are reading in, and have an internal sense of how the experience feels to you.
Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper “What is it Like to be a Bat?” proposed the philosophical argument that every conscious being must have some degree of internal subjective experience. These internal experiences are vast, but some examples include perceiving the brisk cold of a snow on your skin, the sound of a favorite song, and how it feels to love another.
These kinds of subjective experiences are known as qualia. Nagel argued that all conscious beings must experience some form of qualia internally, from the experience of creating, thinking, running, etc. He proposed that if a bat were conscious, there would be a distinct set of qualia that defines the experience of being a bat, from flying to perceiving different stimuli.
In a broader context, this leads to the unique qualia that contribute to what it's like to be a conscious human. There is something to be like being a human, and this is the qualia we all face: experiencing introspection, interacting with our peers, feeling pains and desires.
It is the factor that allows for life to be meaningful in any sense, and has been said to be the “central fact of your life” according to neurophysiologist Christof Koch, who pioneered a major theory of consciousness focused on neural correlates
We are not always in conscious states, however. Death, sleep, undergoing anesthesia, and being in a coma are all examples of moments where our consciousness is not present.
Where does the light of our experience with living go during those times? How does it return, and how was it created? These are questions that remain unanswered, but in wakeful states, we obviously have direct access to our consciousness.
How does the brain produce consciousness?
The "hard problem" of consciousness, posed by David Chalmers in 1995, asks why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to the qualitative richness of experience.
Currently many scientists have continued to develop and advance theories of consciousness to solve this problem, in increasingly broad fields from physics to neuroscience to philosophy, including the likes of Michio Kaku and Sir Roger Penrose.
(In addition to a strictly academic context, one must also note that there have been centuries of authors, poets, philosophers, and theologists who have all referenced consciousness in their own works as it is an innate human experience.
From stream of consciousness authors like Virginia Woolf, to philosophers like Karl Marx speaking on class consciousness, the study cannot seem to escape written works, although in the latter examples it is less of an academic connection than a semantic reference point.)
Scholars agree the property must emerge from the brain, but how?
According to Berkeley philosopher John Searle, consciousness is a neurobiological phenomenon that is caused by lower-level brain processes in organisms. Neuroscientists like Christof Koch have proposed that consciousness emerges from specific patterns of brain activity, known as the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC).
Physicists like Penrose speculate that quantum mechanics may play a large role in explaining the nature of conscious experience and its emergence.
The question of how the brain creates consciousness in the first place remains unanswered, but there has been progress made across disciplines in attempt to resolve it.
Most recently, microtubules, microscopic structures found in the cytoplasm, have been a highly discussed topic within solving the problem of consciousness. Anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff has played a major role in advancing the idea that microtubules are the under discussed players in consciousness, and this idea has been gaining popularity in contemporary consciousness studies.
Are other beings conscious?
We know that we are conscious, and a lack of consciousness would leave us unaware of the qualitative experience found everyday life. We are clearly not in such a predicament, yet most people agree that many animals and all developed AI are in such a case.
Most animals and all AI exist, act, and develop unconsciously. When questioning if other beings can be conscious one can ask: is there something that feels like being a bat? How about a rock? Do they hold any kind of qualia within their time existing, or are they just atoms passively existing?
Followers of the panpsychist school of thought believe that all living organisms posses some degree of conscious awareness within themselves (including living plant systems), but how can we be sure?
There are many limitations when studying cross-species consciousness, and the primary limitation is the introspective nature of consciousness. A researcher cannot simply ask a dolphin if it has conscious experience of itself, due to clear communication barriers, but how else can we search for signs of consciousness?
Adhering to a strictly behaviorist analysis is flawed, as while humans do act distinctly different in our conscious vs. non conscious states, applying the same human behaviorist standards across species is not an efficient or objective means by which to asses another species “levels of consciousness”.
How can an objective metric be created to assess not only if animals have consciousness, but if anything from plants to AGI hold degrees of consciousness? A newly formed sort of Turing Test is needed, although this has yet to be properly created and accepted within the academic world.
Developing such a test could advance our society ethically, possibly leading to more empathetic relationships with animals and even AI.
Unresolved Mystery
Despite being a fundamental property of existence, consciousness remains one of the most scientifically mysterious and challenging phenomena to explain across a vast range of fields.
Advancing our knowledge of consciousness would have so many benefits on a vast range of fields, from advancements in mental health, with new therapies based on our understanding of conscious experience, developing more accurate brain-computer interfaces, developing AI, improving medical care, particularly in cases involving coma patients or individuals with severe brain injuries, and advancing the philosophical canon incredibly through this huge accomplishment.
Understanding how the brain produces consciousness would not only unlock one of humanity’s greatest mysteries but could also revolutionize fields like artificial intelligence, medicine, and ethics, which will be discussed in greater depth in future articles. A truly interdisciplinary method is needed to solve this mystery, combining science, philosophy, and everything in-between to come to a conclusive answer.