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Consciousness
What Does It Actually Mean to Be Conscious?
A common metaphor suggests five questionable theses.
Posted September 4, 2024 Reviewed by Tyler Woods
Metaphors invite ways of thinking. If philosophical disagreements are battles, only one side can win. If memory is a storehouse, recollection requires search and retrieval (but maybe not if memory is a matter of shaping future responses). We can, of course, decline such cognitive invitations. We can describe north as “up” even if it’s lower elevation. But if too many implications are misleading, the metaphor or analogy is inapt.
Today, I want to ask: Is consciousness like having “the lights turned on”? What patterns of thought are invited by this way of speaking?
Consciousness Is Determinately Present or Determinately Absent
Lights are normally either determinately on or determinately off. A dim light is just as “on” as a bright light. Even a flickering light is determinately on or off at any particular moment. It requires some creative energy to imagine intermediate cases.
Consequently, the “lights on” metaphor invites the thought that every entity at every moment is either determinately conscious or determinately nonconscious, rather than somewhere between. Maybe in dreamless sleep, you are not at all conscious, while in waking life, you are fully conscious. On such a view, any “half-conscious” state—for example, a drowsy, confused awakening—is determinately a conscious state, just one in which you’re not fully attuned to your situation. Also on such a view, entities whose consciousness is disputable, for example, garden snails, must be either lights-on or lights-off, either determinately but perhaps dimly conscious or not at all conscious.
If (as I've argued) some states or entities of interest are neither determinately conscious nor determinately nonconscious—states or entities somehow in an in-betweenish, intermediate condition (even if that’s difficult to imagine)—then the light metaphor becomes, to that extent, inapt.
Conscious and Nonconscious Cognition Are Similar
When you flick the lights, the furniture does not change. The table, the rug, and the pile of laundry become easier to see, but apart from absorbing and reflecting more photons, they remain basically the same. If the illuminated objects are parts of your own mind, then they, too, shouldn't radically change when the lights flick on.
On some theories of consciousness, we should expect conscious and nonconscious cognition to be similar. Suppose that nonconscious cognition becomes conscious by being targeted by some higher-order self-representational process or by being broadcast across the mind. If so, it’s natural to suppose that elevation to consciousness doesn’t radically alter the contents of a previously nonconscious process. However, an alternative family of views suggests that conscious and nonconscious processes are intrinsically dissimilar. On “recurrence” theories of consciousness, for example, conscious processes involve feedback loops of recurrent processing that differ structurally from non-conscious feed-forward processes. In a different vein, some psychologists distinguish nonconscious “System 1” cognition, which is fast, intuitive, and requires no attentional effort, from slower, step-by-step, effortful, and conscious “System 2” cognition.
If, in general, the structure of nonconscious thought differs from that of conscious thought, the conscious light metaphor risks misleading us. Furniture doesn’t normally change shape when you flick the light switch.
Consciousness Involves Knowledge
Why do we care about lights? Mostly because they help us see. Illuminated objects are more readily known than those in the dark. Cross-culturally, light is associated with knowledge and understanding. The light metaphor connects consciousness and knowledge. If “the lights are on” in a dog, or a snail, or a comatose person, they know what’s going on. If the lights are off, they are, so to speak, mere reactive machines.
If the contents of the room are the contents of your mind, illumination suggests self-knowledge. Your mental states, though being illuminated, become knowable within the perspective of the room. Alternatively, the illuminated furniture might be analogous to external objects or events of which the conscious entity is consciously aware.
Subjectivity and Phenomenal Character Are Distinct
A light source is one thing, an illuminated object quite another. Analogously, perhaps, we should distinguish consciousness itself from the objects or contents of consciousness. The light metaphor suggests that the source of illumination and the object illuminated are distinct, and that the light source is causally responsible for the object's illumination. Maybe, for example, we can turn attention to our own thoughts, and this turning of attention is the distinct and separate cause of the illumination of the thoughts.
Could the objects instead be self-luminous? Imagine not a light source amid reflective objects but rather a room of glowing objects. If there are processes that are intrinsically conscious by virtue of their own internal structure rather than by virtue of some relational feature like being a target of attention, then the most natural, vanilla interpretation of the light-and-room metaphor misleads, though adapting the metaphor to glowing objects might work.
Conscious Entities Come in Discrete, Unified Bundles
Let’s keep playing with the metaphor. In the vanilla case, every conscious subject has one light, illuminating one room. But maybe we can imagine a series of linked caverns, progressively dimmer and less directly illuminated. Maybe we can imagine multiple lightbulbs in different recesses or partly shaded by room dividers, with partly overlapping spheres of illumination.
Philosophers and consciousness scientists typically treat conscious subjects as unified and discrete. If you are (consciously) enjoying a sip of coffee, thinking about your dog, and hearing car horns in the distance, then one conscious subject is having those experiences conjointly, and no one else is having those very same experiences. Your light illuminates your experience of coffee with your experience of thinking about your dog with your experience of car horns. Someone else’s light illuminates a wholly disjoint set of (possibly very similar) mental furniture.
But maybe minds needn’t work that way. Standard animal biology makes overlapping brains rare, but if it’s ever possible to create consciousness in artificial systems, overlap might become the norm. Efficiency might require systems to share some (conscious?) cognitive centers. Conscious subjects might then overlap, defying separation into discrete bundles. Creative effort would then be needed to adapt the metaphor of lights and rooms.
If the above are all correct, the light and room metaphor works well. Employing it greases the path to correct thinking. If any of the above are not correct, we can cancel that aspect of the metaphor. We can specify that consciousness is like a light, except that it is commonly indeterminate whether it is off or on. Alternatively, we can modify or enrich the metaphor. We might say that consciousness is like a light in a room, except that unlike in a typical room, every object glows with self-illumination.
But too much modification destroys the metaphor. Incomprehensibility ensues if we attempt the idea that consciousness is like a light illuminating a room, except that the objects are self-illuminating, and often neither determinately off nor on, and there’s no relationship between illumination and knowledge, and there’s no discrete number of light sources or rooms, and objects are radically different when they are illuminated than when they are dark.
Better, if so, to say that consciousness is not like a light illuminating a room.
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