The Invention of Consciousness

Auslegung: a Journal of Philosophy, 1992

The present article, The Nature of Consciousness, relates consciousness to brain activity without assuming consciousness to be a brain process capable of affecting other brain processes. Consciousness is assumed to be a pure passively emergent epiphenomenon automatically accompanying certain neural brain processes and having no influence on those processes. Consciousness simply being how we perceive sensations from outside and inside our body, including brain processes like thinking. This is in contrast to existing theories of consciousness, which considers consciousness to be a brain process capable of affecting neural brain processes, and even orchestrating major functions of the brain. It is suggested that this notion of consciousness, being able to affect brain processes, is an illusion resulting from consciously and continuously perceiving brain thought processes and erroneously getting the impression that consciousness is governing those thought processes while all the time failing to distinguish brain generated constructs from the conscious perception of them. The present notion of consciousness, being a purely passive epiphenomenon, furthermore shows promise of throwing light on the Mind-Body problem, settling the question of free will, explaining the nature of a self, and showing its relation to evolution.

Human and Machine Consciousness, 2018

I have really appreciated the help of Anil Seth, who supported my application for a Turing Fellowship and was very welcoming during my time at the University of Sussex. I am also grateful to the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science and the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex for giving me a place to work. I greatly enjoyed conversations about consciousness with my colleagues at Sussex. I would also like to thank Owen Holland, whose CRONOS project started my work on human and machine consciousness, and the reviewers of this book, who had many helpful suggestions. I owe a warm debt of gratitude to my parents, Alejandro and Penny Gamez, who have always given me a great deal of support and encouragement. Contents List of Illustrations 1 List of Illustrations All images are © David Gamez, CC BY 4.0. 2.1. Visual representation of a bubble of perception. 2.2. The presence of an invisible god explains regularities in the visible world. 2.3. Colour illusion. 17 2.4. Primary and secondary qualities. 2.5. The relationship between a bubble of experience and a brain. 21 2.6. Interpretation of physical objects as black boxes. 2.7. The relationship between a bubble of experience and an invisible physical brain. 2.8. The emergence of the concept of consciousness. 3.1. The use of imagination to solve a scientific problem. 3.2. Imagination cannot be used to understand the relationship between consciousness and the invisible physical world. 3.3. Learnt association between consciously experienced brain activity and the sensation of an ice cube. 4.1. Problem of colour inversion. 51 4.2. Some of the definitions and assumptions that are required for scientific experiments on consciousness. 4.3. The relationship between macro-and micro-scale e-causal events. 4.4. Assumptions about the relationship between CC sets, consciousness and first-person reports. 5.1. The measurement of an elephant's height in a scientist's bubble of experience. 5.2. Theory of consciousness (c-theory). 2 Human and Machine Consciousness 7.1. Information c-theory. 97 8.1. Soap bubble computer. 9.1. Testing a c-theory's prediction about a conscious state. 9.2. Testing a c-theory's prediction about a physical state. 9.3. Deduction of the conscious state of a bat. 10.1. Modifications of a bubble of experience. 10.2. A reliable c-theory is used to realize a desired state of consciousness. 11.1. A reliable c-theory is used to build a MC4 machine. 11.2. A reliable c-theory is used to deduce the consciousness of an artificial system.

Drawing on the often-overlooked transcendental philosophy of consciousness developed by Ernst Cassirer, I argue that the debate between contemporary realists and illusionists about consciousness is misconceived and misses the most interesting feature of the problem of consciousness - namely, that the explanandum, consciousness, has a transcendental status in virtue of being the condition for the intelligibility of particulars. I argue that this shows that consciousness is neither an introspectible datum, as qualia realists (like Chalmers and Nagel) suppose that it is. Moreover, I argue that it shows that it is not a theoretical posit, as illusionists, like Dennett, Frankish and Blackmore argue that it is, either. Instead, what makes consciousness escape our dominant patterns of explanation is that consciousness is neither datum, nor posit, but is instead the general foundation of sense-making. Ultimately, I argue that only once we rethink the logic of explanation in the light of the transcendental status of consciousness can we make progress in our efforts to find a way to naturalize conscious experience without thereby distorting its very meaning, and without undercutting the epistemic basis we must stand on in our efforts to make sense of anything at all.

British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2004

Consciousness was described by Freud as 'a fact without parallel'. This paper suggests that the attempts by modern psychology and neuroscience to understand consciousness have failed to appreciate that it lies for clear and necessary reasons beyond the reach of 'science' as we have understood it since the seventeenth century. The author goes on to argue that the fact of consciousness implies a world of subjectivity and uniqueness which will only be integrated with the world of empirical science if there can be profound changes in our understanding of science itself; or, alternatively, if clear bounds are recognized to science's domain.

2019

Philosophers have usually dealt with the problem of consciousness but, in the last decades, neurobiologists have undertaken the daunting task to address it scientifically. In particular, to answer how the brain produces consciousness. Here we question whether it actually does so, seeking to articulate the precise relation between neural activity and subjective experience. There is no doubt that they are intimately related. However, we argue that the thesis of parallelism (that consciousness tells no more than what is going on in the brain, but only in a different language), rather than enunciating an empirical fact, betrays a philosophical commitment. In addition, such equivalence between mental and cerebral states can be shown to lead to self-contradictions (the brain produces the world with itself in it; the brain, as an object in conscious experience, gives rise to conscious experience). Our approach endorses an integration of philosophical and scientific efforts where the scient...

Synthesis Philosophica, 2008

This paper proposes that the ‘problem of consciousness’, in its most popular formulation, is based upon a misinterpretation of the structure of experience. A contrast between my subjective perspective (A) and the shared world in which I take up that perspective (B) is part of my experience. However, descriptions of experience upon which the problem of consciousness is founded tend to emphasise only the former, remaining strangely oblivious to the fact that experience involves a sense of belonging to a world in which one occupies a contingent subjective perspective. The next step in formulating the problem is to muse over how this abstraction (A) can be integrated into the scientifically described world (C). I argue that the scientifically described world itself takes for granted the experientially constituted sense of a shared reality. Hence the problem of consciousness involves abstracting A from B, denying B and then trying to insert A into C, when C itself presupposes B. The problem in this form is symptomatic of serious phenomenological confusion. No wonder then that consciousness remains a mystery.

The Significance of Consciousness, 1998

The aims of this book are: to explain the notion of phenomenal consciousness in a non-metaphorical way that minimizes controversial assumptions; to characterize the relationship between the phenomenal character and intentionality of visual experience, visual imagery and non-imagistic thought; and to clarify the way in which conscious experience is intrinsically valuable to us. It argues for the legitimacy of a first-person approach to these issues-one which relies on a distinctively first-person warrant for judgments about one's own experience. Thought experiments are employed in which one is asked to conceive of having various forms of blindsight, so as to make consciousness intellectually conspicuous by its absence in such hypothetical scenarios. It is argued that theories of mind that would commit us to denying either the conceptual or the metaphysical possibility of these scenarios neglect the occurrence of consciousness in this phenomenal sense.

Anthropology of Consciousness, 2007

The emerging transdisciplinary field of consciousness studies merges transpersonal psychology with recent brain studies. In this paper, I argue that this new discipline must come to terms with the rhetorics of control in the history of brain research. I establish parallels between the discourses of lobotomy and psychosurgery, Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB), and cybernetics, using the work of Jose Delgado, Norbert Wiener, and Bernard Wolfe. The rhetoric of social control remains a shadow side of brain research, of the popularization of brain science, and of attempts to apply such research. keywords: lobotomy; psychosurgery; consciousness studies; cybernetics; electrostimulation of the brain (ESB).