Finding Perspective on the First-Person Perspective

Central to the definition of phenomenal consciousness is the notion of the “first-person perspective.” This is associated with the sensations, feelings, and thoughts that a person has, which can be communicated to others. The experience of these qualities, however, is something that is private and inaccessible by others. Your conscious first-person narrative is an experience of the world as experienced by you and only you. This is what makes it so special, and so incredibly difficult to explicate scientifically.

Research on consciousness attempts to unravel the philosophical question of what it means to have a first-person perspective with rich phenomenal qualities. As we’ve been describing in this series of posts, the scientific research on consciousness has advanced significantly in the last decades, as measurement tools that examine brain activities (e.g., fMRI, EEG) have become more accessible. Among other insights, this research has emphasized the importance of information processing networks in the brain (e.g., attention) and information storage networks (e.g., different forms of memory).

While we are far from a consensus on the questions of “what is consciousness?” and “what is its purpose?”, we do have a better understanding of the processes involved. We believe that focusing on how information processing supports consciousness is key for advancing this knowledge. Several scientific theories have highlighted possible ways that neural and biological information can contribute to consciousness (for a criticism, see Montemayor & Haladjian, 2019). This includes proposals that argue phenomenal consciousness relies on information being accessible across different brain regions (e.g., Global Neuronal Workspace Theory) or that it relies on information that is integrated beyond a certain threshold (e.g., Information Integration Theory).

Source: Illustration by Stefan Mosebach, used with permission

Nevertheless, the first-person perspective, while perfectly natural for us to understand as the core of conscious experience, evades proper treatment in such consciousness research. When we communicate to others about our experiences, we’re conveying information about our own private world. Even when we’re deep in thought, we have a first-person perspective rich with information. As I sit in my living room typing on my laptop, I think about which words I should write to clearly present my ideas. I also feel the chair holding my body. I vaguely hear the music from my stereo and the sounds of children playing on the street. I see my laptop in front of me but also get a general sense of the room with the many objects it holds. I sense a slight jitter from that third cup of coffee. There is a lot of information present and a lot of “I” statements within my first-person experience.

Is it even possible to define empirically the informational richness of this first-person perspective? Despite the advancement of research on consciousness, researchers tend to accept the view that the qualitative character of conscious contents (and the first-person perspective) are irreducible to scientific methodology. Thus, many researchers don’t touch this topic. But this misses the point in truly understanding what our phenomenal experience is, doesn’t it?

A forthcoming paper by Bjorn Merker and colleagues (2021) proposes ways around this problem within the context of current informational theories on consciousness (which have avoided directly addressing the first-person perspective). The authors argue that searching for the geometry, topology, and embodied nature of a “point of view” is necessary for an adequate theory of consciousness. Theories of consciousness must include all of an organism’s physical and biological nature, not just the neural networks supporting information processing that define the “neural correlates of consciousness.”

Admittedly, Merker’s approach is not without problems and lacks important details, such as its impact on information theory in general, or distinguishing consciousness from other types of integrated information that are not conscious (i.e., what multi-modal attention does). Nevertheless, it does highlight the importance of finding a solution to the problematic assumption that the first-person perspective is irreducible to scientific explanations.

To understand the first-person perspective in informational terms, we must define information-uniqueness in more biological terms, which can be based on metabolic or homeostatic processes. However, even then two key difficulties would remain. First, the self-referential information associated with the first-person perspective is not merely geometric, topological, or embodied—it is self-referential in a qualitative way that none of these approaches capture. There’s still a missing definition of how the “I” perspective is constructed.

Second, any projective principle about topology or geometry, even if based on phenomenological observations, will be stated in terms of formulas and mathematical principles. When described this way, many of the topological and geometric constraints (as discussed by Merker) could be satisfied by the common form of attentional processing that doesn’t require phenomenal consciousness. A clear indication of attention’s role is missing from this proposal. If consciousness can simply be reduced to attention, it wouldn’t address the notion that consciousness provides us with information that is richer or different from attentional processing.

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Ultimately, we aim to clarify such issues by focusing on information theory and its relation to both attention and consciousness on biological terms. Understanding the functional difference between attention and consciousness is an important part of this project (Montemayor & Haladjian, 2015). While detailing such a theory requires empirical investigation, the main point is that having a first-person perspective—experiencing who you are—relies on the self-contained biological processes of the complete organism. And while the debate about the “purpose of consciousness” continues, we believe it is strongly tied to homeostatic processes inherent to complex biological systems such as humans.

–Harry Haladjian & Carlos Montemayor