KMC Forums - what is consciousness

The loose definition for consciousness that I usually use is "The ability to internally represent external reality." As such, my opinions and ideas of consciousness are generally closely related to language acquisition (or some form of symbolic representation that would function as a language).

We aren't aware of something unless we have a concept that we can internalize to help us understand it. For us, this is usually (though not always) done through spoken language. The fact that our minds are complex enough to develop and store vast numbers of words means that we can internally represent (be aware of) a vast number of ideas, concepts, and objects.

I believe this to be the reason we cannot, for example, recall early infancy before a certain point. Our bodies/brains are not fully developed, true, but the gradation from a child's brain and an adult's is not so great that we would expect a total lack of memory. The answer, then, is that the young child has no way to represent its experiences in a meaningful way, beyond simple urges, noises, or desires. Thus, our memories before we begin to master basic language are very limited.

Similarly, when we speak of the consciousness of animals (take an ant, for example) what are we talking about? Rote biological responses to external stimuli do not constitute consciousness. Yet we'd be hard pressed to observe much else in an ant, or any similarly simple animal (simple in neurological terms, relative to our brains). There is a famous essay on consciousness that asks what it is "like" to be a bat...what is the experience like? My answer, simply enough, is that it probably isn't "like" anything, because the bat possesses no symbolic way of representing his external world within himself. Or if it is like something, it consists of a mere 3-4 basic concepts that are vague and formless, akin to what we'd consider instincts or desires.

Dolphins, dogs, cats, etc. have limited consciousness, as evidenced by the fact that they can acquire symbols or words and respond to them. They associate a word with an action or object ("walk" or "food" perhaps for dogs) and therefore have a neurological way of interpreting an external occurrence. Monkeys more so, as well as a limited number of other species.

Helen Keller, writing later in life about early on when she could experience almost nothing due her the loss of multiple senses, said that time had no meaning to her in her early years, nor could she accurately describe what it felt like to "be" during that time. It was only once she began to learn words and concepts for such things that she could quantify them within herself. It's an interesting anecdote, and one that illustrates my point well.

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None of this touches on the "hard" question of consciousness, the debate over whether or not consciousness exists seperately from our material bodies. Materialism v. dualism. I tend to lean toward materialism, simply because we have yet to verify anything that would suggest dualism, not just in the field of consciousness but in any supposedly trans-empirical field (religion, paranormal investigations, etc.). So materialism seems much more likely to me. But it remains, like anyone's opinion on the question, just an opinion....because no one can sufficiently answer it with authority at this time.