Somehow, we find ourselves on this planet called Earth. We do not “really” know WHO or WHAT we are or WHERE exactly we are. Though, one could say that the mystery adds to the fun!

What we do have is our experience – particularly the experience of persistent awareness (of presence of something, usually having information – a set of attributes – about the objects involved) – the awareness that never leaves us – labelled as Consciousness – yet it has almost impossible, so far, to articulate its nature in a clear and consistent manner with at least some degree of consensus. As we discussed in “Our universe, all multiverses or the entire existence?”, Consciousness could be the final frontier that most humans seem to have been ignoring or not being able to “decipher” so far.

Let us look at if there is any consensus regarding the core problem statement.

THE BRAIN-MIND-CONSCIOUSNESS PROBLEM

Scientists still do not agree about the exact nature (or even the existence, at all) of the the entities (or phenomena) labelled as Mind and Consciousness. Researchers have tried to define this problem in many ways – the most famous being the acknowledgement of this as a “hard problem” by David Chalmers.

Excerpts from “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” by David J. Chalmers, Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3):200-19, 1995:

  1. Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.
  2. To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we have to confront it directly.
  3. There is not just one problem of consciousness. “Consciousness” is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena. Each of these phenomena needs to be explained, but some are easier to explain than others.
  4. The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism.
  5. It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.
  6. If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of “consciousness”, an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as “phenomenal consciousness” and “qualia” are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of “conscious experience” or simply “experience”. Another useful way to avoid confusion (used by e.g. Newell 1990, Chalmers 1996) is to reserve the term “consciousness” for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term “awareness” for the more straightforward phenomena described earlier. If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about “consciousness” are frequently talking past each other.

Interestingly, Chalmers experienced synesthesia in his childhood.

Here is another definition by Lisa Feldman Barrett in the beginning of her paper “The Future of Psychology: Connecting Mind to Brain”, Perspect Psychol Sci. 2009 Jul 1; 4(4): 326–339, doi: 10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01134.x:

Psychological states such as thoughts and feelings are real. Brain states are real. The problem is that the two are not real in the same way, creating the mind–brain correspondence problem.

Further she states:

Throughout our history, the link between the social (mind and behavior) and the natural (brain) has felt less like a solid footbridge and more like a tightrope requiring lightness of foot and a really strong safety net. Mind–brain, and relatedly, behavior–brain, correspondence continue to be central issues in psychology, and they remain the largest challenge in 21st century psychology.

An articulation of the problem by Giorgio A. Ascoli in the paper “The Mind-Brain Relationship as a Mathematical Problem”, 2013:

  • The term “mind” is commonly employed to signify a broad variety of connotations even within the scientific discourse [10, 11].
  • When referring to the mind-brain relationship, mind is most often taken to stand for human consciousness [12].
  • Consciousness is itself challenging to define, which may be viewed as a puzzling paradox, considering that it constitutes perhaps the most immediately and intimately accessible characteristic of the life of every person.

More excerpts from the paper:

  1. The ultimate “hard problem” is to explain why any material entity should feel like anything at all.
  2. The key issue is in fact to understand what would count as a solution. In other words, if the mind-brain relationship can be explained, what type of explanation is being sought?
  3. One may find it disturbing that despite knowing so much about the structure and activity of the brain, we have a hard time “guessing” what it is thinking. But it is somehow even more peculiar that in spite of direct, detailed, continuous, and complete access to each and all conscious mental states we experience, we find it difficult to describe them comprehensively, let alone quantitatively. Indeed, it seems absurd that we can measure the concentration of Substance P in single neurons to the fifth significant digit; yet we can only measure the resulting sensation of pain semiqualitatively on a 7-point discrete scale.
  4. The relationship between mind and matter has perhaps been, in one form or another, the most debated issue in the history of human thought, and it still constitutes, in the modern “mind-brain” incarnation, an open scientific and philosophical problem. Specifically, why do certain brain states “feel” like something, and why specific brain states feel the way they do?

Robert Pepperell begins his article “Consciousness as a Physical Process Caused by the Organization of Energy in the Brain” with the following text:

To explain consciousness as a physical process we must acknowledge the role of energy in the brain. Energetic activity is fundamental to all physical processes and causally drives biological behavior. Recent neuroscientific evidence can be interpreted in a way that suggests consciousness is a product of the organization of energetic activity in the brain. The nature of energy itself, though, remains largely mysterious, and we do not fully understand how it contributes to brain function or consciousness.

Pepperell quotes Nagel (1974):

“If mental processes are indeed physical processes, then there is something it is like, intrinsically, to undergo certain physical processes. What it is for such a thing to be the case remains a mystery.”

Pepperell’s article is part of a research series titled “Neo-Naturalist Approaches to Consciousness” listing eight articles.

An example of a paper where this is not explicitly identified as a problem:

From Conscience and Consciousness: a definition by G Vithoulkas and DF Muresanu, J Med Life. 2014 Mar 15; 7(1): 104–108. Published online 2014 Mar 25:

“Consciousness” is the function of the human mind that receives and processes information, crystallizes it and then stores it or rejects it with the help of the following: (1) The five senses (2) The reasoning ability of the mind (3) Imagination and emotion (4) Memory.

Here there is no mention of any contradiction or confusion while stating that ‘“Consciousness” is the function of the human “mind’.

Neuroimaging research is another field where”mental process” are being mapped without any reference to as to what exactly is mind or a mental process. For example, an attempt in made to “provide a new way to discover the underlying structure that relates brain function and mental processes” in the paper “Discovering Relations Between Mind, Brain, and Mental Disorders Using Topic Mapping” by Russell A. Poldrack ,Jeanette A. Mumford,Tom Schonberg,Donald Kalar,Bishal Barman,Tal Yarkoni, October 11, 2012, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002707:

Also see:

  • Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness, David J. Chalmers, Journal of Consciousness Studies 4(1):3-46. [Chalmers: This paper is a response to the commentaries in the Journal of Consciousness Studies on my paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.” I have written it so that it can be understood independently of the commentaries, however, and so that it provides a detailed elaboration and extension of some of the ideas in the original paper.]

THE BRAIN-MIND-CONSCIOUSNESS – MOVING FROM PROBLEM STATEMENT TO SOLUTIONS

David J. Chalmers in his paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” attempts to define the solution framework:

A nonreductive theory of consciousness will consist in a number of psychophysical principles, principles connecting the properties of physical processes to the properties of experience. We can think of these principles as encapsulating the way in which experience arises from the physical. Ultimately, these principles should tell us what sort of physical systems will have associated experiences, and for the systems that do, they should tell us what sort of physical properties are relevant to the emergence of experience, and just what sort of experience we should expect any given physical system to yield. This is a tall order, but there is no reason why we should not get started.

Chalmers proceeds to propose his own “candidates for the psychophysical principles that might go into a theory of consciousness” – a few pointers from his proposed theory:

  • The principle of structural coherence: This is a principle of coherence between the structure of consciousness and the structure of awareness. Recall that “awareness” was used earlier to refer to the various functional phenomena that are associated with consciousness. I am now using it to refer to a somewhat more specific process in the cognitive underpinnings of experience. … This principle has its limits. It allows us to recover structural properties of experience from information-processing properties, but not all properties of experience are structural properties.
  • The principle of organizational invariance: This principle states that any two systems with the same fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences.
  • The double-aspect theory of information:  The basic principle that I suggest centrally involves the notion of information. I understand information in more or less the sense of Shannon (1948). Where there is information, there are information states embedded in an information space. An information space has a basic structure of difference relations between its elements, characterizing the ways in which different elements in a space are similar or different, possibly in complex ways. An information space is an abstract object, but following Shannon we can see information as physically embodied when there is a space of distinct physical states, the differences between which can be transmitted down some causal pathway. The states that are transmitted can be seen as themselves constituting an information space. To borrow a phrase from Bateson (1972), physical information is a difference that makes a difference.

CONSCIOUSNESS AS A PRACTICE

THE PRACTICE OF MEDITATION

Millions of people (from ordinary folks to top achievers and performers) claim to immensely benefit from different types of meditation. Though, it seems, this field is still suffering from lack through scientific rigor.

From “Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation”, Nicholas T. Van Dam, Marieke K. van Vugt†, David R. Vago, … First Published October 10, 2017:


During the past two decades, mindfulness meditation has gone from being a fringe topic of scientific investigation to being an occasional replacement for psychotherapy, tool of corporate well-being, widely implemented educational practice, and “key to building more resilient soldiers.” Yet the mindfulness movement and empirical evidence supporting it have not gone without criticism. Misinformation and poor methodology associated with past studies of mindfulness may lead public consumers to be harmed, misled, and disappointed.

FACILITATING CREATIVITY

Having a better understanding of “Consciousness” might help us enhance our creativity.

From “Mind-Pops: Psychologists Begin to Study an Unusual form of Proustian Memory” by Ferris Jabr, May 23, 2012:

Kvavilashvili speculates that people who experience mind-pops most frequently might be super primers, which could in turn encourage creativity. “It could help us to process information more efficiently,” she says. “If many different concepts remain activated in your mind, you can make connections more efficiently than if activation disappears right away.”

LIST OF UNEXPLAINED (NOT FULLY UNDERSTOOD) PHENOMENA RELATED TO CONSCIOUSNESS

Absolute pitch (AP) aka perfect pitch:

  • A rare ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone.
  • Absolute pitch is more common among speakers of tonal languages, such as most dialects of Chinese or Vietnamese, which often depend on pitch variation as the means of distinguishing words that otherwise sound the same—e.g., Mandarin with four possible tonal variations, Cantonese with six, Southern Min with seven or eight (depending on dialect), and Vietnamese with six.

Bouba/kiki effect:

  • The bouba/kiki effect was first observed by German–AmericanpsychologistWolfgang Köhler in 1929. In psychological experiments first conducted on the island of Tenerife (where the primary language is Spanish), Köhler showed forms similar to those shown at the right and asked participants which shape was called “takete” and which was called “baluba” (“maluma” in the 1947 version). Although not explicitly stated, Köhler implies that there was a strong preference to pair the jagged shape with “takete” and the rounded shape with “baluba”.
  • Daphne Maurer and colleagues showed that even children as young as 2​1⁄2 years old may show this effect. More recent work by Ozturk and colleagues (2013) showed that even 4-month-old infants have the same sound–shape mapping biases as adults and toddlers.
  • Ramachandran and Hubbard suggest that the kiki/bouba effect has implications for the evolution of language, because it suggests that the naming of objects is not completely arbitrary. The rounded shape may most commonly be named “bouba” because the mouth makes a more rounded shape to produce that sound while a more taut, angular mouth shape is needed to make the sounds in “kiki”.

Ideasthesia:

  • Ideasthesia (alternative spelling ideaesthesia) is a neuroscientific phenomenon in which activations of concepts (inducers) evoke perception-like sensory experiences (concurrents). The name comes from the Ancient Greek ἰδέα (idéa) and αἴσθησις (aísthēsis), meaning “sensing concepts” or “sensing ideas”. The notion was introduced by neuroscientist Danko Nikolić as an alternative explanation for a set of phenomena traditionally covered by synesthesia.

Synesthesia:

  • Synesthesia or synaesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.
  • People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes.
  • Little is known about how synesthesia develops. It has been suggested that synesthesia develops during childhood when children are intensively engaged with abstract concepts for the first time.