Consciousness Goes Away?

Posted on January 18, 2009
Filed Under Peirce, Philosophy, Science | 15 Comments

dali.jpgElsewhere Blake made the following comment that really brought into focus a few things I’ve been thinking of the past couple of years.

The problem is that our “intelligence” goes away every time we sleep or get hit on the head. Our consciousness is clearly dependent on a functioning brain-nervous system in some sense.

For various reasons I’m starting to come around to the point of view that we’re never truly unconscious. Rather our memory simply doesn’t function (either recording or recalling). The reasons for my view on this are a bit complex. But here are a few experiences that lead me to it. (Yeah, I’ll leave the philosophy out for now)

(1) someone “spiked” a drink I had with something once. (I think I’ve told this story before) I went through the night quasi-normal but unconscious. No one thought anything weird of me. Sort of akin to a zombie. But there would be these moments where consciousness would return and I’d become aware that I had been unconscious and was terrified because I felt like I didn’t have control over myself. Then biff. And it was gone.

As best I can figure out some drug was added to my pop. Hopefully not for nefarious purposes but who knows. After talking about it with various people the general thought was that my short term and long term memory was knocked out for a while. This is apparently common in people who suffer alcohol blackouts as well. (Interestingly there are apparently some drugs, which given early enough, can restore the memory function)

My point though is that I was really conscious the whole time. It’s just that our conception and phenomena of consciousness is wrapped up in a process. It’s rarely just a moment of pure presence the way Kant, Descartes or the Empiricists thought. Rather it’s wrapped up in memories of the just-recent and expectations of the almost-now. You can removes aspects of that perception within consciousness and I think the raw 1st person perception remains. But the phenomena itself changes.

(2) the same thing happens when you dream. Having toddlers who are teething I don’t often get a good night’s sleep. Often upon waking I remember my dream. Within minutes the memories of the dream disappear no matter how hard I try to remember them. They are in my short term memory but somehow never make it to mid-term let alone long term memory.

When I am interrupted in a dream what I suspect is going on is that systems of awareness are coming online that were offline. (Forgive the computer metaphors) Yet I’m conscious during the whole situation. What changes is that memory is one of the units affected as these new awarenesses become active. I’m convinced, however, that even while asleep I am conscious in the raw sense. It’s just that what I am conscious of changes and my faculties and capabilities change. It seems like I wasn’t only because I’ve forgotten I was conscious.

We assume the periods of no memory entail no consciousness. But I don’t think that accurate.

Now I do think that perhaps “consciousness” is just too broad and loaded a term. Some may object to some of my claims. But I suspect, as with many things in philosophy, the debate is ultimately semantic. What I wish to say is that there is a first person awareness that is always active. That may not be consciousness in all uses of the term. However I can’t think of a better term to use.

Related posts:

  1. Peirce and Consciousness
  2. Consciousness and Responsibility
  3. Recalling Memories Locks Them
  4. Consciousness
  5. Vallicella on Consciousness
  6. Mind and Matter: the three non-reductionist alternatives

Comments

15 Responses to “Consciousness Goes Away?”

The picture is Dali’s Sleep, in case you were curious.

I think you make a good point about confusing memory with consciousness. But if first-person perception is a function of neurons, then it seems to me that true unconsciousness must be possible, even if it doesn’t occur as often as we think.

I was listening to a podcast where a person had some kind of medical problem that put them into a coma for some time. After they came out of the coma, they thought that they had bits and pieces of memories from during the coma, but the memories turned out to be from when they were coming out of it. Apparently the memories were recorded before the brain had regained a sense of time. I had never thought of that before.

I’ve always wondered would happen if someone were cyrogenically frozen, and then brought back years later. Certainly any biologically based consciousness would cease. Would their spirit be conscious, or remain tied to their body, during that time?

I don’t think first person perception can be a function of neurons. At least not in any straightforward way.

But I tried to leave it vague so as to not shut out people who think our first person perspective can be reduced to neural firings.

Dream sleep is generally considered a conscious state. What happens is sensual awareness and responses are blocked. When we are conscious (including dream sleep) an ecg will register a lot of complexity. When we are unconscious the brain waves from various parts of the brain become entrained and lose variation. Nothing really is going on. Processing of higher functions has apparently stopped. Drug induced states are probably not a good measure of what is going on while conscious or un.

But who knows. Maybe there’s a planet exactly orbiting Earth across from the sun we can never see and maybe when we are unconscious we really are conscious, but the brain science says not likely. When the brain goes off, memory formation does stop, but so do all the things we usually see when looking at a conscious brain.

Maybe what you mean is that our spirit still is perceiving existence on the other side of the veil. Science can’t touch that, so I’d be OK with that. But when the brain goes off line, we go off line as far as brain science goes.

Well I’m trying to avoid making religious or quasi-religious claims. And you are right I’ve not talked about when higher function processing stops. (If only because of my ignorance of what is going on — I have no data from which to theorize)

I didn’t realize the other states were considered conscious though. Interesting.

The problem with saying there is no consciousness without the higher order functions is simply because without the higher functions there’s nothing to be conscious of. Further even if we were conscious of a null-data state (I can’t think of any better way to put that) the fact that memory isn’t functioning means we couldn’t remember it.

But clearly to the person who thinks consciousness is “generated” out of neural functions will think it has ended when such functioning has ended. (I’m not sure we ought say higher functions though since even in a purely traditional neuro-material conception of mind given that we don’t know what generates consciousness)

As I mentioned at NCT, my opinion is similar. You suggest that conciousness is there but modulated down by the absence of memory. I suggest that conciousness is there but modulated down by the mitigation of a clocking mechanism. Sort of like putting a CPU in a “halt” state. All execution stops until an interrupt is raised.

Nice points and very nice choice of art.

Mark, I think that gets into the issue of whether consciousness is basic in some sense or emergent in some sense. If you reject both ontological emergence and substance dualism it seems hard to see that a “time mechanism” could be present. Rather any timing has to be a secondary situation.

Clark, Per assumption, unconsciousness is possible. The objective is a plausible hypothesis about why time is not perceived to elapse while one is in such a state.

Granting that time perception is possible, there are only three choices here, for any choice of boundary: an internal clock, and external clock, and self-clocking (or asynchronous) inputs.

I propose as an axiom that no material subsystem can perceive or appear to perceive time at a rate substantially different from that provided by an internal clock or a pseudo-clock derived from a composition of its external inputs. All physical systems behave this way from an external perspective.

My hypothesis is a monad (or perception center) is “clockable”, but without an internal clock. A adequately low frequency internal clock is unlikely, and in this case undesirable – sleep would be problematic. A low frequency external clock is trivial, and there are such clocks available that we can measure empirically (brain waves).

I suggest that inputs to the perception center with or without a separate clock input are necessarily self clocking, on the basis that input is possible, the above mentioned axiom, and the observation that a “clock input” is a dubious choice for a metaphysical primitive.

Absent an external clock, the result of such self clocking inputs would be that time appeared to advance whenever the inputs changed. Absent an internal clock, it could not appear to advance faster than that (following the same axiom above).

Self-clocking inputs in the absence of any regular clock could thus form the basis for a very non-linear and erratic perception of time. The addition of an input connected to an external clock would clock everything on a regular basis, making possible the perception of linear time.

Now certainly this model is subject to criticism. However, I don’t think one can posit any property dualist time perception scheme that isn’t subject to the same basic constraints. A strictly physical equivalent is subject to most of them, the only addition being a metric for how any subsystem can tell or appear to tell that time has advanced at all.

10 Michael Dorfman on January 20th, 2009 4:22 am

Clark: For various reasons I’m starting to come around to the point of view that we’re never truly unconscious

Really? Haven’t you ever fainted, or had general anesthesia?

Yes. But my argument is that one may in fact be conscious in such cases. This actually happens with anesthesia a lot. Folks have memories. What the anesthesia is doing is shutting down important cognitive processing centers. But that’s not to say that consciousness proper is lost.

My argument is that much of what we are calling consciousness is actually about memory or other high order cognitive functions. That is the problem is not a lack of consciousness but a lack of memory of consciousness or a lack of something to be conscious of.

12 Michael Dorfman on January 20th, 2009 12:58 pm

I understand your argument, Clark, I just find it unpersuasive.

Speaking as one who has been unconscious many, many times, believe me when I say that there are indeed times when the lights are out and nobody’s home. Things (quickly) fade to black, and the next thing you know, it’s a whole other time and place.

But that happens when I sleep too…

More particularly that happened in the situation when I was drugged. One moment I’m at the Olympics in Park City, next moment I’m at a parking lot at 3 in the morning.

14 Michael Dorfman on January 25th, 2009 12:32 am

So, in view of the common experience that consciousness does stop and start, what leads you to believe that it is, in fact, continuous and unceasing?

Note I’m not arguing that it’s continuous — merely that this is a possibility entailed by the phenomena as experienced. My view of metaphysics is that there are usually quite a few possibilities with at best weak arguments for picking one above an other. So I like to be most open. Plus the mind is so weird that I try to keep my options open. While I am most sympathetic to some kind of property dualism I am perfectly fine with a physicalist solution or Searle’s middle way if those end up having more evidence.

Likewise even with a property dualist solution need not entail that mind is always conscious (although that seems like the simplest case).

The reason I think this is simply because in cases where memory isn’t functioning but its demonstrable that we are conscious we have the same internal phenomena as cases where it is claimed we are totally unconscious.

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