“What is the silliest claim ever made?
The competition is fierce, but I think the answer is easy. Some people have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the “what-it-is-like” of experience.”
— Galen Strawson, Professor, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin, author of Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc.
Debates about consciousness and personal identity can be found in our earliest writings, in languages like ancient Greek and Sanskrit. Field anthropologists have reported dozens of “culturally universal” beliefs about waking consciousness, dreams, and personal identity (Brown, 1991). Mental terms make up more than half of our natural language vocabularies. Even before the first millennium BCE we can read about conscious experiences, often in nightly dreams, or as a soul journey after death.
In a 4th century BCE treatise of the Hippocratic Corpus, perhaps the oldest medical textbook we have, is a clinical study of the epilepsies by the School of Hippocrates. It points unambiguously to a brain basis for conscious experiences:
“Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain alone, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant… I hold that the brain is the most powerful organ of the human body… wherefore I assert that the brain is the interpreter of consciousness…”
School of Hippocrates: On the Sacred Disease.
Like Hippocrates, modern scientists see two separate sources: The individual experiences of subjects as they describe them, and the marks of those experiences in the brain and behavior. Modern brain evidence goes back at least to Wilder Penfield in the 1950s and indeed to Ramon Santiago Y Cajal circa 1900. Our psychological evidence can be traced to William James and his century in Europe and America.
Since the rise of neuroimaging our brain evidence has improved spectacularly, and the biological basis of subjectivity has now become a recognized goal in the sciences.
Far from contradicting each other, public and private evidence is generally mutually supportive. The conscious sight of a red object has distinctive and increasingly clear bases in the brain. Thus the historic separation between psychology and brain physiology may be changing into a unified mindbrain science.
Even so, consciousness science still resembles sex in the Victorian age: We know it’s there, but we tend to evade it. Some scientists still wonder out loud if they themselves are really conscious. In Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, etc., philosopher Galen Strawson writes:
“When it comes to conscious experience, there’s a rock-bottom sense in which we’re fully acquainted with it just in having it. The having is the knowing. So when people say that consciousness is a mystery, they’re wrong — because we know what it is. It’s the most familiar thing there is — however hard it is to put into words.
…What people often mean when they say that consciousness is a mystery is that it’s mysterious how consciousness can be simply a matter of physical goings-on in the brain. But here, they make a Very Large Mistake, in Winnie-the-Pooh’s terminology—the mistake of thinking that we know enough about the physical components of the brain to have good reason to think that these components can’t, on their own, account for the existence of consciousness. We don’t.”
Scientists cannot avoid the three fundamental questions of subjective experience, voluntary control and personal identity. Yet for seven decades in the 20th century the behavioristic movement mounted a remarkably successful campaign to exclude those questions as ‘unscientific.’ That taboo started to lift in the 1970s and 80s, but many of our technical terms still reflect the old biases.
To read more, order your copy of ON CONSCIOUSNESS: Science & Subjectivity – Updated Works on Global Workspace Theory.
Global Workspace Theory (GWT) began with this question: “How does a serial, integrated and very limited stream of consciousness emerge from a nervous system that is mostly unconscious, distributed, parallel and of enormous capacity?”
GWT is a widely used framework for the role of conscious and unconscious experiences in the functioning of the brain, as Baars first suggested in 1983.
A set of explicit assumptions that can be tested, as many of them have been. These updated works by Bernie Baars, the recipient of the 2019 Hermann von Helmholtz Life Contribution Award by International Neural Network Society form a coherent effort to organize a large and growing body of scientific evidence about conscious brains.
