19 April 2016

How Does The Human Brain Create Consciousness

The problem with going any further than this correlational fact is that no one knows how to define consciousness from an objective, third-person perspective. We only have access to one consciousness: our own. Every other consciousness is in a sense inferred from behavior. This process of inference is a social process. We treat people as conscious because they seem conscious to us, and this seeming is a product of both our evolved perceptual systems and the cultural systems that operate on top of them. The fact that people disagree about whether a particular animal species is conscious or not suggests that there is no universal intuition about consciousness.


Descriptions like this also reveal why neuroscience will always struggle to study consciousness in all its private glory. We never actually see consciousness. All we see are its consequences in behavior. So when we look for the neural correlates of consciousness, what we are really looking for are the neural correlates of certain measurable behaviors that we think are closely related with consciousness, such as attention, self-awareness, access to information, and (perhaps most important) the ability to comprehend and communicate. If there is a type of consciousness that we are incapable of acting upon or even remembering then we will simply be unable to study it from a scientific perspective.

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