“I think therefore I am.” Rene Descartes’ seductive quip nearly 400 years ago still seems to be a reasonable but elusive answer to the question that haunts all sentient beings: What is consciousness?
Now, for the first time, scientists from many different disciplines are beginning to tackle the problem with a growing belief that they can find answers to the question that is at the heart of humanity.
But first they must work their way through the thicket of the unconscious mind.
It sees things before we are aware of them. We duck a surprise blow, jump out of the way of a speeding car or make snap judgments on whether we like someone–split seconds before we become conscious of these things.
Some experts estimate that 90 percent of the brain’s workings are at the unconscious level.
A good part of our day, in fact, is spent in an unconscious state.
We perform routine tasks without remembering that we did them, wondering whether we locked the door when leaving for work, not recalling sights along a familiar commute home or playing a musical instrument.
The unconscious mind also processes unrelated mounds of information, nuggets that the conscious mind can smelt into gold. It is a phenomenon many creative people learn to cultivate.
Ernest Hemingway would stop writing for the day before finishing his last thought, sleep on it and let his unconscious fill in the details for his next morning’s writing.
The unconscious mind owes its origin to our reptilian brain, essentially a hard-wired system for survival that enables all animals to avoid danger and seek food, shelter and sex. The reptilian brain lives only for the present, the here and now.
In the past 5 million years, however, the human brain broke free of its reptilian constraints, probably as a result of a genetic quirk that favored an overproduction of brain cells. It expanded to three times the size of the brain of the chimpanzee, our closest primate relative, with which we share 98.7 percent of the same genes.
At the same time, many of the genes operating in the human brain changed their function, altering the flux of chemical messengers so that the new crop of neurons could learn from the past and plan for the future.
The brain became an information-processing organ the likes of which had never existed in nature and which many scientists believe may be unique in the universe.
The newest part of the brain, the neocortex, makes up two-thirds of the brain and it is what gives rise to consciousness–the capacity to be aware of our existence and to ponder the deepest of all questions. Where did we come from? What are we doing here? Where are we going?
Humankind’s genius, creativity, science, art, philosophy and religion arise from attempts to come to grips with these questions.
Physicists, for instance, are trying to trace how consciousness may arise out of matter; after all, everything in the brain is made of atoms.
The starting point for consciousness may be the universe, which many physicists believe is made of information.
The things we see as matter and energy are really information being transformed from one state into another. Everything, from the biggest galaxy to the smallest particle, listens and talks to everything else. And the smallest particles may come in and out of existence, depending on the information they receive.
Living things receive information from their environment–nutrients, light, shelter and danger–then act on it and send back information to the environment.
Neuroscientists are finding that the brain’s circuits respond to information coming in from the senses, work it over unconsciously and then, somehow, consciousness appears as a byproduct of complex information-processing.
The brain has become incredibly fast at processing information.
It converts data into symbols, the brain’s great leap forward. With symbols, the brain could make associations between things that are close in time and place, and, more important, things that are far apart, the basis of language and creativity.
“With this inexhaustible reservoir of symbolic information, the human brain was now able to creatively construct new mental worlds,” said German neuroscientist Rudolf Hernegger. “The first thing to become conscious is symbolic information about the external world, impinging from the outside and not generated by the nervous system alone.”
What are “symbols” to Hernegger are “subjective feelings” to Christof Koch, professor of cognitive and behavioral biology at the California Institute of Technology.
For 12 years Koch and Francis Crick, a Nobel laureate who with a partner discovered the structure of DNA, have been looking for neural circuits that turn vision, touch and other sensations into conscious images.
Because the conscious brain cannot possibly deal with the overwhelming amount of information pouring in through the senses, networks called neural correlates of consciousness, or NCCs, oversee this information and allow only small amounts to pop out as subjective feelings.
“It says that this blob is Mom. This is Dad. This is the house,” Koch said. “We can only keep a few things in mind at one time. NCCs take the complex input from our eyes, ears, skin, etc., and it makes a very compact representation of it.
“So that’s probably the function of consciousness, to enable you to have a compact representation of the environment,” he said. “Now you can do planning in your head. What am I going to do in the next minute, next hour, next day.”
Hints that neural correlates of consciousness exist can be seen in people suffering from a rare disorder called prosopagnosia, or face blindness. These people have suffered a brain injury that knocks out their neural circuits for faces. They can see eyes, ears, nose, chin, cheeks and hair but can’t put them together as a face.
Although these theories may provide a general scheme of how consciousness occurs, they leave many questions.
Yet, it is a start.
A century ago, life was thought to be an unexplainable mystery. Now we know that the mysterious “life force” is the result of DNA chemicals in our genes that are packed with information on how to build a living organism, maintain its existence and pass on the instructions to succeeding generations.
In a similar way, scientists are learning the mechanics of brain function–billions of neurons communicating through trillions of synaptic connections that use chemicals to carry messages. What is needed, however, is the discovery of a key, something equivalent to the revelation of DNA, to show how the information manipulated by the mechanical, chemical and biological workings of the brain results in consciousness.
A big clue–one that runs through the work of physicists, biologists and neuroscientists–is that everything exchanges information.
For example, when a wandering electron, which is negatively charged, bumps into a proton, which is positively charged, they exchange a mutual attraction and get together to form an atom. A gregarious carbon atom similarly will exchange informational hookups with a wide variety of other atoms to form biologically active molecules, the basis of life on Earth.
Matter and energy exchange information to change states from particles to atoms to stars, planets, galaxies and living creatures. In that sense, consciousness is a property of information exchange.
“So, how does consciousness arise in matter?” asks Piero Scaruffi, a cognitive scientist who lectures at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California-Berkeley. “From a logical standpoint, the only way out is to accept that consciousness must be a physical property.”
“Consciousness is no more `magic’ than electricity,” Scaruffi said. “We study electricity by studying the elementary particles that give rise to it. We can study consciousness if we can identify the particles and their properties that give rise to it.”
Empirical test missing
“The main problem is the lack of an empirical test for consciousness,” Scaruffi said. “We cannot know whether a being is conscious or not. We cannot `measure’ its consciousness. We cannot rule out that every object in the universe, including each elementary particle, has consciousness; we just cannot detect it.”
The discovery of electricity in the 19th Century gave people a new understanding of the world. Physicists had thought that they could explain everything mechanically. To understand electricity, however, they had to explain magnetism, because a moving magnetic field generates an electric current.
They had to admit that something as invisible as a magnetic field was a fundamental property of the universe. In a similar fashion, the explanation of consciousness may require the existence of another unseen property of the universe.
“We might have to introduce a new thing in the universe called experience,” Caltech’s Koch said. “We can argue that any information-processing system as simple as a light switch or as complex as a human brain has this thing called experience. It’s tied to matter but it’s a new thing. It’s a subjective feeling.
“Very complex systems have lots of feelings, and very simple systems have very little feelings,” he said. “I know I’m me. I know what I had for breakfast. I know I’m going to die, and all those things. My dog presumably doesn’t. But there’s no evidence to indicate that my dog, or probably all mammals, [doesn’t] have rudimentary forms of olfactory, auditory and visual consciousness without necessarily having self-consciousness.”
Some scientists contend that humans have become more conscious over time with the invention of tools and language, which gave the brain more time to think about itself.
The late Princeton University psychologist Julian Jaynes published a controversial theory in the mid-1970s arguing that early people–such as the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Mayans and Asians–were not really conscious in the modern sense of consciousness.
They were people with strong religions whose gods ordered them around like automatons. “He had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon,” Jaynes said.
Jaynes marked the evolution to consciousness with the appearance of Odysseus, the ancient Greek hero who used his brain to outwit adversity. Earlier protagonists, such as Achilles and Agamemnon of Homer’s Iliad, were more like puppets ordered around by the gods.
People today have different degrees of consciousness, Scaruffi said. “I somehow sense that some people–poets and philosophers, for example–may be more conscious than other people–lawyers and doctors.”
An unsettling experience
Marcel Proust, in his exploration of the boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind (“In Search of Lost Time”) describes a common but unsettling experience: ” . . . when I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness . . . “
Because consciousness makes people aware of themselves, and, in that respect, aware of being alone to deal with the world, many people find it discomforting.
Fanaticism–in communism, Nazism or terrorism–appeals to some people because there is “No need to think–the Party does the thinking for him, and the deciding for him,” author Elie Wiesel wrote recently.
The best antidote to fanaticism is memory, he said: “To remember means to recognize a time other than the present; to remember means to acknowledge the possibility of a dialogue.”
Even in today’s modern world we must still struggle like Odysseus to be fully conscious.
