What consciousness does vs what consciousness is.
Consciousness, the mind, does an unbelievably immense amount of processes. Accurately identifying those that, in conjunction, produce qualia or a sense of self can, and often does, produce confusion that can lead people astray. This is compounded by the fact that the vast majority of what the mind does is done subconsciously.
I will attempt to address what the mind is. Those processes, mental and physical, that work in conjunction and produce the experience: What it is like to see a sunrise? Or, Why there is something it is like to be an organism.
I will not cover the myriad of processes the mind does that do not significantly help to produce qualia. That is more in the realm of what the mind does, and needs to be left to the Psychiatrists.
The mind is a predictive engine.
The human mind has evolved to predict what it will encounter. This affords more time, that essential component in a crisis, to figure out a way of dealing with a crisis that could threaten the existence of the organism.
Prediction of possible events is a great advantage evolutionarily. The best way to protect yourself from a lion jumping out of the bushes at you is to not get close enough to the bushes for it to be able to jump out at you. But that simple action requires memory and forethought.
Memory
Let’s first take a look at memory.
Memory is, possibly, the greatest evolutionary advantage. Knowing where to find the resources needed to maintain life is much better than just roaming around hoping to stumble upon the resources you need.
Human memory is not only a recording of what has transpired. Human memory also consists of grouping those memories into ever increasing categories for easier future retrieval. That is why, if you are having a difficult time remembering a persons face, it helps to think about the things you did together. Or if you want to remember to do something when you get home from work, you picture yourself starting it as soon as you walk in the front door of your house. These associations work because they are encoded the way memory is used.
Memory also consists of the insights gleaned from analysis of memories. Being able to review memories, find patterns, and remember those patterns helps us evade that lion jumping out of the bushes at us.
What we encode into memory.
Feelings, places, players, outcomes, perceived intent, and many more. But feelings seem to be the aspect encoded that carries with it the most information. Perhaps even one of the most used “base” general categories our mind uses for quick reference when retrieving relevant memory associations with new situations.
Feelings are not just a single piece of information. Feelings encode a great deal of information beyond the feeling itself dependent on the situation. Feelings are a base general category that our brains use to associate situations. Feelings are a deviation from homeostasis in an attempt to warn us of things that are not in the best interest of survival. Since our minds are predictive engines, these deviations from homeostasis apply not only to the present situation, but also to our analysis of the past and our prediction of the future, no matter how far in advance that prediction is.
What are feelings?
Feelings are a biological deviation from optimal functionality, from biological or psychological stimulus, to convey information for immediate action or memory encoding for future prediction.
That feeling of dread for an upcoming situation you don’t like is the association of tension in your muscles, maybe a bit of indigestion, perhaps even raised adrenal activity to facilitate the fight or flight response.
That feeling of love for someone special is the association of serotonin when you think about them, it is an easing of tension in your muscles (unless it is a first date).
Feelings, along with the environment they are experienced in, convey an immense amount of information.
Feelings are the physiological response associated with an experience, in memories, our present or our thoughts about the future, as learned from what we find salient in our memories/past experiences.
Salience
Salience is our learned importance from past experiences, arising from our classifying past/present experiences into increasingly general categories for easy future retrieval, projected onto our current experience, our memories or our thoughts of the future.
Basically salience is taught through accumulated experience.
When babies are born, they know nothing. They just hang out and watch everything. …along with crying because they have no other way of expressing a biological need they have.
In this time of observation, they are building memories and making associations that afford salience.
When they cry, a person comes and takes care of them. In examining that memory, they associate crying with getting their needs met. When the same individuals come, time and again, to take care of those needs, they associate that person with safety and getting their needs met.
As more and more associations are build up, they begin to act in accordance with those associations (beliefs). They begin to express a personality.
As children grow and experience more, their salience is guided not only by the things they do, but by what we teach them.
Children engage in rough and tumble play, continually pushing the boundaries, until a boundary is found and the crying starts. Once found, the limit is encoded into memory and the boundary becomes salient, and is ready for use in associated future situations.
As we build a salience landscape according to our needs, memories, experiences, what we have been taught and what our previous salience landscape consisted of, we forge what our salience landscape is now. As we proceed into the future and learn more, our salience landscape will change accordingly.
Who we are is a matter of what we have experienced and have been taught, as seen through the lens of our salience landscape at the time. What we will learn is a direct result of our salience landscape. That is why you can have two people with the exact same experience, but each will derive different facts about that situation.
Subconscious or Conscious?
Conscious processes deal with comparing the subconscious processes of “Prediction”, “General categories of experience”, “current biological state”, “perceived salience “, “perceived patterns” and others, to actively determine the perceived optimal action in any given situation, and to help derive new insight into past experiences through analysis, and encoding those insights into memory for future use.
The sense of Consciousness we perceive is the persistent perspective afforded by the senses used to update our prediction of what our body is experiencing in the world around it, as that prediction is being compared to past experiences.
What we perceive as consciousness is an emergent property of the way our mind works as it evaluates all of the subconscious processes in real time. It also requires a very large amount of resources.
Relegating as much as we can to a subconscious process is a biological function to conserve resources.
A sense of self
Perspective of self derives from a persistent point of view of in our memories.
There is that which is experienced and a perspective associated in our memories.
This distinction is drawn because of our need to distinguish between a threat and not a threat in our memories, to allow for quick/proper identification in new situations. To identify a threat we need to ascertain what is a threat in our environment, provided by distinguishing the difference between multiple objects. If there is a lion jumping out at me from the bushes, I need to identify what and where the threat is so I know how to get away from the threat.
Distinguishing the difference between objects we encounter, coupled with a persistent perspective across all of our encounters, as they are evaluated, leads to identification that there is something there observing. This, we call self.
With prediction, memory, feelings and salience, in conjunction with our threat identification processes, emerges a profound sense of distinction between entities. Threat identification gives us “them”, where evaluation of the result of subconscious processes helps to give us “us”.
Qualia
Qualia arises from biological encoding of feelings into memories. Feelings, being a deviation from homeostasis, encodes physical information about “good” or “bad” into our memory of a situation. That accumulated recurrence of degrees of “good” or “bad”, when associated to our present situation and past memories and future predictions, gives us a sense of qualia.
A sunrise can be “breathtaking”. A newborn baby can “melt your heart”. Landing on the moon can invoke a sense of “awe” and “wonder”. All of these are biological responses, according to our salience landscape, that gets encoded into memory in our evolutionary attempt to predict the best actions for our survival. With our society evolved greatly from the time of tribes, that sense of a need for survival is overshadowed by a sense of how “touching” the moment is.
“Why is there something it is like to be an organism?”
This perception arises from Perception of other and self as afforded through identification of things experienced as friend or foe, coupled with the associated categorized information encoded as feelings, and the predictive nature of our mind and how it uses our senses to update that prediction in real time, and learned salience.
What it is like to be human is a matter of how our brains go about making their prediction. Feeling, memory, persistent perspective, friend or foe identification. All of these subconscious processes being combined by a meta-process give us a sense of what it is like to be what we are. Our differing experiences, coupled with our salience landscape, are why each person sees what it is like for them a bit differently from others of the same species.
“Is consciousness a cognitive function?”
Consciousness is a product of both cognitive and physical functions.
Remove emotion, qualia is lost.
Remove the threat processing and the persistent distinction between internal and external threats, and you lose a sense of self.
Change the depth of function for a single, or multiple, physical and/or cognitive functions and you change the conscious experience or wipe it out entirely.
What is consciousness?
Consciousness is the product of focused and unconscious physical and cognitive functions from a persistent perspective that is usually unaware of the majority of the processes affecting it.
Consciousness arises because of the way our brains combine the subconscious processes in an attempt to make a better prediction of what we are encountering, or might encounter, to give us a better chance of survival.
Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?
Experience is the persistent perspective in memory and the present situation, of the mental process that uses the conscious and unconscious physical and cognitive functions to actively determine the perceived optimal action in any given situation.
Feelings, past experiences (mental and physical ), sensory input, desires, goals… all of these affect what we perceive as the conscious agent as this mental process does its job of actively determining the optimal action in any given situation.
Our minds combine, and draw correlations from, the different subconscious functions in an attempt to predict the optimal actions for survival. Those correlations are stored in memory, and used in the combining process. This evaluation, with persistent perspective in memory and deviation from homeostasis to drive corrective action, is the essence of experience. Take away memory and the predictive function of our mind, and, presumably, experience is lost.
Why did consciousness develop in this way?
Consciousness developed as a result of energy conservation and quick access to a wide range of past experiences through categorizing memories into ever increasing general categories.
Subconscious delineation of processes and memory encoding into ever increasing generality is a conservation of resources by not having to employ the whole of the resource intensive brain, but just portions of it. Saving the need for activation of the most amount of the brain only to figure out new/present situations, then relegating the execution of effect to smaller, subconscious, portions of the brain.
As for the predictive nature of our brain, there is an obvious evolutionary advantage to being able to not get close enough to the lion so it cannot jump out at you over the alternative of just trying to run away after it has jumped out at you.
Memory, the categorizing of that memory into ever increasing generality and the evaluation of that memory to find correlations, is essential to prediction.
From categorizing and drawing correlations from memory, from a persistent perspective, emerges the sense of self and consciousness (awareness).
Phenomenology / Qualia / Aesthetics
Phenomenology, qualia, comes about in the integration of encoded memory data, especially feeling, as it is applied to our present prediction/situation.
Aesthetics are the encoding of biological deviation from norm (feelings) in memory and our current prediction/experience as an evolved method of expressing states that are beneficial to homeostasis (pleasing) This has the emergent quality of appreciating the beauty of a painting, the coolness of the color blue, the majesty of a sunrise. The overwhelming joy in a person seeing or hearing for the first time as this new dimension of depth is added to experience.
How is this not the invocation of homunculi to explain consciousness?
Simply, it is the absence of a magical point where consciousness arises. Consciousness is the persistent perspective afforded by the constant association of memory to the present experience in order to bring experience to bare on the present and afford a better chance for survival.
This persistent perspective of the process of the mind that evaluates our usually subconscious prediction, sensory input, encoded memories (including feelings), in an attempt to draw correlations, is what generates the emergent phenomenon of what we call consciousness. This is the part of the mind that has the whole picture from the convergence of subconscious parts, and the processing of all of the parts, coupled with the memories of insights gained from that processing, is what facilitates consciousness.
There is no infinite regress needed, only the mental merging of the constituent parts and the memory encoding of the insights gained by the merger.