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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