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Consciousness
Unpacking the Consciousness Suitcase
Consciousness is a "suitcase word" and this blog unpacks its meaning.
Updated July 6, 2024 Reviewed by Kaja Perina
The MIT professor Marvin Minsky rightly characterized consciousness as a “suitcase word.” By this he meant that consciousness packs many different meanings within it.
This blog unpacks the term, starting by dividing consciousness into three smaller suitcases as follows: 1) Creature consciousness; 2) Subjective Consciousness; and 3) Self-consciousness. The 30+ bolded terms will help you see what goes into each smaller suitcase.
Consciousness 1: Creature Consciousness
Consciousness 1 can be characterized as creature consciousness, which consists of two elements, arousal and awareness. Conscious arousal refers to the level of arousal we see an organism exhibit. When a person is sleeping or knocked out, we say they are unconscious. Upon waking up, we say they have regained consciousness.
Basic conscious awareness refers to the degree of functional awareness and responsivity we see in an organism. In other words, it is what an organism doing as it interacts with the environment. For example, when a bacteria swims toward food or away from toxins, it is exhibiting functional awareness and responsivity.
It is important to note that creature consciousness can be observed from the outside in the form of behavior. In addition, all living creatures exhibit some kind of creature consciousness. When people claim that that things like cells and plants are conscious, they usually mean creature consciousness. However, creature consciousness does not necessarily mean there is subjective consciousness.
Consciousness 2: Subjective Consciousness
Consciousness 2 refers to subjective consciousness, which is what it is like to experience the world from the interior point of view. Consciousness 2 is what most consciousness researchers and philosophers are interested in. It is often referred to as the greatest mystery in science.
To get a clear picture of Consciousness 2 in humans, consider the story of Martin Pistorius, aka Ghost Boy, who got sick and was in a coma for many years. He was “locked in,” meaning that he "woke up" on the inside and had inner thoughts and feelings, even though he had stopped exhibiting Consciousness 1 on the outside (i.e., he stopped being functionally aware and responsive from the outside and thus people were not aware he was experiencing Consciousness 2).
The field of conscious potential is a term I use to characterize the Consciousness 2 state space that can manifest subjective conscious experiences (see here for more on this).
The experiences themselves are called conscious contents. In humans, conscious contents can be usefully divided up into four different categories, which I have labeled the four doors of perception. Conscious sensory awareness refers to experiencing sensations and perceptions about the external world. Conscious feelings refer to our motivational and emotional states, such as pain, fear, thirst or hunger. Conscious imagery refers to images, based on memories, creative wonderings, or future simulations of possible events. Conscious speech refers to the inner narrative voice, which is usually a kind of self-consciousness (see below).
Conscious contents are sometimes framed as qualia. John Vervaeke and I argue that there are different kinds of qualia. Adjectival qualia refer to the sensory-perceptual properties that are experienced, such as redness or the taste of wine. Valence qualia are feelings of pleasure/good or pain/bad that are attached to our experiences. And adverbial qualia refer to the framing that indexes the contents and binds the experience into a whole.
The distinction between the field of conscious potential and its conscious contents allows us to consider background conscious states. If you have ever been drunk, had a concussion, or experienced a psychedelic trip, you know that the field of conscious potential can be altered, which in turn impacts conscious contents.
We can divide background states into being typical or atypical shifts. Typical shifts in background states include things like the sleep-wake cycle and mood shifts. Mood shifts color the background state on two primary axes of energetic arousal and engagement (i.e., low versus high) and valence (i.e., negative versus positive). In contrast, altered states of consciousness refer to atypical background shifts, which can be caused by injury or disease, psychopathology, trauma, substances such as alcohol or psychedelics, sleep deprivation, meditative trances, religious rituals, or spiritual transformations.
Phenomenal Consciousness is a broader term that weaves together conscious contents and background states into a subjective state of being. Whereas consider conscious content could be a single instance of Consciousness2, phenomenal consciousness binds contents together to give a larger gestalt tied to a subjective point of view.
Access Consciousness refers to the ability to shift one’s conscious attention, which is the ability to direct one’s focus, on to conscious contents and consider them. Access consciousness is often needed if researchers are going to study phenomenological consciousness from a scientific point of view. Consider, for example, an experiment where individuals are seeing flashing pictures going by so fast that the image may or may not register in experience. The subjects are asked to push a button if they see the picture. Pressing of the button requires both that the subject has the experience and can then access it to confirm they had it and initiate the button push.
Subjective consciousness, in its full form, can be thought of as being constituted by the above components. That is, we can think of it as beginning to emerge with a restricted field of potential that has simple conscious contents like brief feelings states of pain. It then grows into a phenomenal state that integrates contents across time and then can situate them in a point of view that can direct attention on them and use them to model the world.
In considering subjective consciousness, we also need to consider the concept of the self. In the Cognitive Science Show, The Elusive “I”: The Nature and Function of the Self, my colleagues and I argued we need to divide the self into at least two layers. One is the core experiential self, which we argue emerges with mammals and birds, and relates to the ability to think, which is the capacity to cognitively extend one’s self into different possible situations. This ultimately grounds the integrated phenomenological experience in a subjective perspective.
The second layer is the ego, which is the explicitly self-conscious layer that emerges with human persons. This brings us to Consciousness3.
Consciousness 3: Self-conscious awareness
Being a subject does not mean one is self-conscious. Self-conscious awareness, the domain of Consciousness 3, is a higher order attentional state, such that both the self and its contents can be reflected upon.
The extent to which this is present in other animals is unclear. Some socially complex mammals like orcas, dolphins, elephants, and nonhuman primates seem to have some capacities for self-awareness; at the very minimum they exhibit a kind of proto-self-conscious awareness.
In human persons we see explicit self-conscious narrative awareness (e.g., "I am Gregg, a professor writing a blog on consciousness"). A major reason is human language. Questions such as “How do you feel?” and “Why did you do that?” require humans to generate stories about the self. This dynamic process of justification gives rise to both egoic consciousness (i.e., the ego), which is an internal self-conscious narrating "I" that has the sense of ownership and oversight, as well as public self-consciousness (i.e., the persona) that considers others’ opinions and strives to manage impressions. (For more on human consciousness, see here).
Other Considerations
This covers most of the territory regarding every day consciousness. Be aware that Eastern and mystical traditions add additional concepts. We also need to consider the territory beneath consciousness. Nonconscious cognitive processes refer to information processing that takes place in the brain that can never be experienced. To connect to memory, we can borrow from Freud and use the term preconscious, which refers to conscious contents that can be readily recalled. Subconsciousness refers to cognitive contents that could be attended to if one focused on them. Some of these elements are simply overlooked because of a lack of attention, whereas others are actively repressed because they are deemed threatening. This gives us the Freudian concept of the dynamic unconscious, which refers to split off material that is kept out of consciousness because it is anxiety provoking.
Conclusion
Consciousness is a complicated term with many meanings. By unpacking the consciousness suitcase into the three smaller suitcases of creature, subjective, self-reflective, and then clarifying the concepts within each we can achieve a much better and richer way of talking about it, and thus increase our understanding of it.
