Regaining Consciousness
Explaining consciousness is hindered by five common mistakes.
Posted November 23, 2021 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
The phrase “regaining consciousness” usually means recovering from unconscious states such as sleep and anesthesia. But I use it to mean rescuing consciousness from intellectual mistakes that impede scientific and philosophical understanding of a central aspect of human thinking. We need to regain consciousness from five approaches that block its explanation, pursued by dualists, exaggerators, deniers, obscurers, and underraters. Abandoning these opens the way for an understanding of consciousness based on neural mechanisms.
There is no standard definition of consciousness, but my 2019 book Brain-Mind analyzes it using exemplars (standard examples), typical features, and explanations.
Exemplars: External perceptions such as colors, internal perceptions such as pain, emotions, thoughts, and self-awareness.
Typical features: Experience, awareness, attention , starts/stops, and unity.
Explanations of: Behaviors, reports, and experiences.
A theory of consciousness has to apply to the full range of occurrences of consciousness, including sensation, emotion , and cognition . It should flesh out the explanations of experiences and behaviors by providing detailed mechanisms for awareness, attention, and other features of consciousness.
Consciousness is not just a side effect of thinking but contributes to intelligence in three ways, as described in my new book Bots and Beasts :
Unfortunately, many current approaches impede progress on consciousness, including the following:
These pitfalls can be avoided with a sufficiently rich neural model of consciousness that takes seriously its experiential aspects while explaining the full range of behaviors and reports. My forthcoming book Balance: How It Works and What It Means combines neural mechanisms of representation, competition , information integration (Tononi), and broadcasting (Dehaene) into the model shown. Then consciousness can be regained for science and philosophy .
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Paul Thagard, Ph.D. , is a Canadian philosopher and cognitive scientist. His latest book, published by Oxford University Press, is Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.