# Consciousness Studies/The Description Of Consciousness

*This section presents the empirical idea of consciousness. What
consciousness is like before theories are applied to explain it. It is
based on descriptions from the Historical Review.*

## The definition and description of phenomenal consciousness

What is it like to be conscious? Before embarking on the analysis of
phenomenal consciousness it is important to have a definition of what it
is that we are attempting to explain. The article below considers
empirical descriptions of phenomenal consciousness. It shows that
phenomenal consciousness is the space, time and content of our minds
(where the content contains intuitions and feelings). As will be seen in
later parts of the book not all philosophers and scientists accept that
this \"phenomenal consciousness\" actually exists.

### Introduction

Empirical descriptions of phenomenal consciousness have been available
in Western literature for centuries and in Eastern literature for
millennia. It is often maintained that no-one can define consciousness
but there is a large body of literature that gives a clear empirical
description of it. Perhaps the claim that no-one can define
consciousness is frustration at the fact that no-one can explain
consciousness.

Weiskrantz (1988) asserted that \"Each of us will have his or her own
idea of what, if anything, is meant by consciousness\...\" and that
insisting upon a precise definition would be a mistake. Koch and Crick
(1999) stated that \"Consciousness is a vague term with many usages and
will, in the fullness of time, be replaced by a vocabulary that more
accurately reflects the contribution of different brain processes.\"

But is consciousness really a \"vague term\" and should we each have our
own idea of what it means? The empirical descriptions of Descartes, Kant
and others are summarised below under the headings of space, time,
qualia and awareness. These descriptions show that consciousness is not
a vague term at all.

### Space and Time

Kant (1781) argued that our minds must be capable of representing
objects in space and time. Experiences presuppose space and time as pure
concepts of reason. Without space, objects could not be differentiated
and would have no properties. Without representation in time, the
concepts of succession of events and simultaneity would be unknown to
us. James(1904) also describes experience as extended in space and says
that the idea that \"inner experience is absolutely inextensive seems to
me little short of absurd\". Descartes (1641, Meditation V, 3) was also
clear that imaginings and perceptions are experiences where things are
arranged in space and time: \"In the first place, I distinctly imagine
that quantity which the philosophers commonly call continuous, or the
extension in length, breadth, and depth that is in this quantity, or
rather in the object to which it is attributed. Further, I can enumerate
in it many diverse parts, and attribute to each of these all sorts of
sizes, figures, situations, and local motions; and, in time, I can
assign to each of these motions all degrees of duration.\" Descartes
was, as was so often the case, well ahead of his time by describing
continuity and dimensionality, the factors that define his view of space
as an actual vector space accessible to mathematical and physical
analysis (See section on
Descartes
for a full discussion.)

Gregory (1966) also pointed out that we see things as if they are
projected into space around us. The idea of projection was implicit in
Kant's and Descartes' descriptions, which are from the viewpoint of an
observer looking out at contents of experience, but Gregory is explicit
(although he believes that explanations based on the projection are
absurd).

Kant and Descartes describe consciousness as something extended in time
but it is Clay and James who draw this fully to our attention. James
(1890) quotes E.R. Clay who coined the term \"specious present\" to
describe how we exist for more than a durationless instant and then goes
on to say: \"In short, the practically cognized present is no
knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on
which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into
time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration,
with a bow and a stern, as it were\--a rearward\--and a forward-looking
end. It is only \[p. 610\] as parts of this duration-block that the
relation of succession of one end to the other is perceived. We do not
first feel one end and then feel the other after it, and from the
perception of the succession infer an interval of time between, but we
seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with its two ends embedded
in it.\" Notice how James' observer is at an instant but the mind is
stretched over time.

James' mental time is probably not the same as physical time. Hermann
Weyl, the Nobel prize-winning physicist, wrote that reality is a
\"four-dimensional continuum which is neither \'time\' nor \'space.\'
Only the consciousness that passes on in one portion of this world
experiences the detached piece which comes to meet it and passes behind
it, as history, that is, as a process that is going forward in time and
takes place in space\" (Weyl 1918). In other words consciousness has a
way of containing events in the same order as they occur in the world
but seems to use a mental time that is different from physical time.

### Qualia

Qualia are types of things that occur in conscious experience. The
colour purple is a good example of a quale (Tye, 1997). Hume (1739)
pointed out of things in the mind that \"\[t\]here is nothing but the
idea of their colour or tangibility, which can render them conceivable
by the mind;\" in other words, qualia might be things in the mind rather
than attributes. Qualia appear to be exceptional and inexplicable:
Churchland (1988) writes \"How on earth can a feeling of pain result
from ions passing across a membrane?\" Descartes (Meditations VI, 6,
1641) clearly describes qualia.

### Awareness

Descartes, Locke, Hume, Reid and Kant describe conscious phenomena as if
there is an observer in their mind looking out at qualia or feeling
qualia in the space and time around about. Descartes and Kant thought
that the mind must also contain a conceptualisation or intuition of the
meaning of its space, time and content so that the qualia become grouped
into objects, the objects into events and the events into meaning and
expectation.

As Kant put it, we have \"intuitions\" about the relations between
things. In modern parlance our conscious experience appears to contain
the output from an unconscious processor; although Kant\'s term,
\"intuition,\" is a more scientific approach because it is an
observation without assumptions about causes. If the present is extended
in time, or a \"specious\" present as Clay put it, then many moments are
available through which it is possible to apprehend both a question and
its answer: the processor can frame the question and provide the answer.
The observation that our minds extend through time means that this
processor does not need to be recursive to provide the outputs we
experience as intuitions (one moment can contain an intuition about
another whilst both are in the mind).

Descartes (Meditations VI, 10, 1641) considered the origin of
intuitions: \"Further, I cannot doubt but that there is in me a certain
passive faculty of perception, that is, of receiving and taking
knowledge of the ideas of sensible things; but this would be useless to
me, if there did not also exist in me, or in some other thing, another
active faculty capable of forming and producing those ideas. But this
active faculty cannot be in me \[in as far as I am but a thinking
thing\], seeing that it does not presuppose thought, and also that those
ideas are frequently produced in my mind without my contributing to it
in any way, and even frequently contrary to my will.\" Descartes
suspected that the ideas were formed unconsciously, probably in the
brain.

### Types of Consciousness

It is sometimes held that there are many types of consciousness, Antony
(2001) lists: phenomenal consciousness, access consciousness, state
consciousness, creature consciousness, introspective consciousness and
self-consciousness. Antony takes the view that these are all
\'modulations\' of the term consciousness and do not mean that there are
in fact different types of consciousness. In other words these \'types
of consciousness\' are modulations of the intuition of content arranged
in space and time that is the singular consciousness described by Kant
and Descartes. According to this explanation access consciousness is the
time extended form of processes in phenomenal consciousness,
self-consciousness is the time extended form of bodily processes and
inner speech etc.. As an example, if we say a word then think it
soundlessly it is evident that inner speech is whole, time extended
words coming from the vague direction of the vocal chords (or both
ears), when we move a limb much of the whole movement is present in our
experience as a set of displacements at the position of the limb and
extended through time.

The nature of consciousness as described above, i.e. phenomenal or
subjective consciousness, must be distinguished from the type of
consciousness used in Medical clinical states. Clinical consciousness is
determined partly by the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS) in
the brain stem extending into higher anatomic levels of the brain
including the cortex. Alerting or arousal is the function of the ARAS
and is the doorway to awareness. Failure of this system or its
components results in clinical states ranging from a temporary loss of
consciousness as noted in head injuries (concussion) all the way to
complete coma. The comatose state includes failure of eye opening to
stimulation, a motor response more than just simple reflex withdrawal
movements and lack of verbalization. Coma can be produced by structural
lesions of the brain, metabolic and nutritional disorders, exogenous
toxins, central nervous system infections, seizures, temperature-related
extremes (e.g. hypothermia or hyperthermia) and most commonly trauma.
Included in this extreme are such entities as persistent vegetative
state and the minimally conscious state. The gamut ranges through
stupor, prolonged concussion, and transient concussion. This use of the
term 'consciousness' is not the nature of 'consciousness' as used in
this article and must be distinguished as such.

### Observations and Denials

There can be little doubt that most descriptions of conscious
phenomenology have described the same things although some have used
terms such as \'continuity\' for time and \'representation\' for space.
Our conscious experiences are the experience of being an observer that
has qualia distributed in space and time around a point. This experience
is imbued with intuitions.

Contrary to the views of Weiskrantz and of Koch and Crick there seems to
be no need to await a definition of consciousness. It has been described
for centuries. So why did these authors feel a need to suspend any
definition?

The answer is that over the years there has been no widely accepted
theory of how this empirical consciousness could occur. This led certain
philosophers such as Ryle (1949) to question whether the description of
consciousness was credible.

In most cases this sceptical analysis begins with an explanatory
discussion of consciousness such as: if information travels from the
observation to the observer then the observer contains the information
so there must be another observer within to observe this second set of
information. In this case the conclusion is that this implies an
impossible homunculus or Ryle's \"ghost in the machine\" so observation
and observer's cannot occur in the mind. This is an interesting argument
but it can also be framed to give exactly the opposite result. The
scientific form of the argument would be: the observed form of conscious
experience cannot occur if it relies on information transfer, therefore
the hypothesis that information transfer is all that is required to
explain consciousness is wrong and some other explanation is needed.
(This means that although the content of consciousness is derived from
the senses via signals in neurones, conscious experience is not these
signals flowing into a nexus). In science the observation is paramount
and cannot be discarded because it conflicts with theory.

The process of discounting an observation when an explanation fails also
applies to other aspects of consciousness studies. As Gregory (1988) put
it: \" \'If you can't explain it -- deny it\' is one strategy for
dealing with embarrassing questions such as \'what is consciousness?\'
\". If we discount these denials then the empirical observations of Kant
and Descartes and the other empiricists are the bedrock of consciousness
studies and consciousness can indeed be described as an observation
containing the space, time and content of our minds (where the content
contains intuitions and feelings).

This simple definition of the experience we call consciousness is
internally consistent and can be expressed in mathematical language.
Phenomenal consciousness is a multidimensional manifold with vectors
pointing towards the centre (the apparent observation point). The
content can be both the input and output of processors that are external
to the manifold.

*Adapted from the article The description and definition of
consciousness by
Alex Green in Science and Consciousness Review
(with permission of the author).*

A non-mathematical description of consciousness is: a collection of
events arranged in time and space that form directed elements that all
point at the same place and instant.

### The viewing point and the observer

Green\'s summary of phenomenal consciousness deserves further
elaboration and description. Science begins with empirical descriptions.
To experience phenomenal consciousness simply lean back with your eyes
open and listen. Phenomenal consciousness is the observational space and
time that is occurring and the simultaneous things within it that point
at the apparent viewing point. It includes bodily sensations, inner
speech and the smell on and around things etc. Phenomenal consciousness
is experience itself. If the experience is a lucid dream it may contain
a fantastical image, if it is a perception it may contain information
about something in the world beyond the body. Experience is not usually
an experience **of** the content of experience, experience is already
there, arranged in space and time (see note below).

![](constudgreen1.gif "constudgreen1.gif") The illustrations show the
difference between an actual 3D part of the world, 2D representations of
that part of the world, conscious experience itself and naive realism.

It is well known that a 3D object cannot be shown on a 2D surface. Its
form is specified as sets of coordinates.

![](constudgreen2.gif "constudgreen2.gif")Most visual experiences are
arranged as views. Views are represented on paper using perspective
drawings. Pictures that use perspective are scaled images of the world
as it would appear on the retina of one eye.

![](constudgreen3.gif "constudgreen3.gif")In experience itself things
are arranged as things directed at a point (vectors). Nothing flows into
the point. Experience is a manifold of events that are loosely based on
data from the retinas and other sense organs. It has contents like the
drawing on paper but instead of being a collection of ink particles
confined to 2D it is a set of vectors directed at a point.

![](constudgreen4.gif "constudgreen4.gif")Experience also involves
things arranged in time. Things can be simultaneous and there is
continuity. Arrangements in time are independent of arrangements in
space. The phonemes of a word do not overlap each other and the stages
of a movement do not create a smear. These independent arrangements in
time are akin to the way that things that are arranged left and right do
not overlap things that are arranged up and down. Left and right are
independent of up and down. In a similar way, time seems to be an
independent direction for arranging things.

![](constudgreen5.gif "constudgreen5.gif")Our experience differs from
naive realism. In naive realism experience is believed to be an
impossible physical meeting of light rays at a single point in the eye
that through some unspecified mechanism project back to their source.
**Naive realism is a primitive dynamical interpretation of experience**,
an attempt to explain an empirical geometrical form in terms of flows of
matter. In contrast, in experience there seems to be a set of vectors
directed at a point.

![](constudgreen6.gif "constudgreen6.gif") An intriguing feature of the
empirical form of experience is that things seem to be separated by
angular separations. This allows objects of any size to be represented
and explains how a page of text on our laps and the dome of a
planetarium can be encompassed in the same form.

The apparent viewing point has caused considerable difficulty for many
empiricist philosophers (although the British Empiricists tended to
avoid it). When philosophers have stopped describing conscious
experience and tried to explain the viewing point they have often
resorted to the supernatural: Descartes, Malebranche and Reid all
explained the viewing point in terms of a supernatural soul at a point
that does the seeing or experiencing. But none of the empiricists
describe anything flowing into the viewing point; indeed nothing does
flow or could flow into and through a point. The empirical truth is that
the viewing point is a geometrical phenomenon, not the recipient of some
simultaneous flow of everything in experience. Just look, your viewing
point is where everything in experience is directed but things are not
pouring into it and it, itself, is a point, it cannot and does not
contain anything. This seems to be Aristotle\'s insight when he wrote
\"In every case the mind which is actively thinking is the objects which
it thinks.\"

The field of vectors that are the content of consciousness are also
difficult to interpret; some philosophers believe that they are in the
brain and form a representation of the world whilst others believe that
they are directly attached to things in the world beyond the body.

The empirical description of consciousness allows us to make a sharp
distinction between the scientific activities of measurement and
observation. Measurement is the change in state of a measuring
instrument in response to an event in the environment. Observation is
the occurrence of events in the geometrical manifold that we call our
conscious experience.

This section has used the descriptions provided by generations of
philosophers to characterise the **phenomenon** of consciousness. Many
modern philosophers assume that readers are familiar with these
empirical descriptions and use \"what it is like to be conscious\" as a
shorthand for these empirical reports. From the seventeenth century
onwards it was realised that these descriptions are difficult to explain
using Newtonian physics or elementary information theory.

`<font size=1>`{=html}\* Note: the term \"experience of\" should be
reserved for things that act as a source of the content of experience,
such as the QM fields that constitute the things that are sensed. We
have an \"experience of\" a flower when signals from the flower are
composed into the form of a flower in our experience. Sometimes there is
an \"experience of\" the content of consciousness, for instance when
intuitions about the content occur. See later modules for a
discussion.`</font>`{=html}

### References

-   Antony,M.V. Is \'Consciousness\' Ambiguous? Journal of Consciousness
    Studies 8(2), 2001, 19-44.
    <http://research.haifa.ac.il/~antony/papers/Ambiguous.htm>
-   Block, N. 1995. On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness,
    The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18, 2 (June 1995): 227-247.
    <http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000231/00/199712004.html>
-   Churchland, P.S. 1988. Reduction and the neurobiological basis of
    consciousness. Chapter 14 in Consciousness in Contemporary Science.
    (Editors: Marcel, A.J. and Bisiach, E.). Oxford Science
    Publications.
-   Descartes, R. 1641. Meditations on First Philosophy
    <http://www.orst.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/descartes/meditations/meditations.html>
-   James, W. 1890. The Principles of Psychology
    <http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin15.htm>
-   James, W. 1904. Does consciousness exist? Journal of Philosophy,
    Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 1, 477-491.
    <http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/consciousness.htm>
-   Gregory, R.L. 1966. Eye and Brain. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson.
-   Gregory, R.L. 1988. Consciousness in science and philosophy:
    conscience and con-science. Chapter 12 in Consciousness in
    Contemporary Science. (Editors: Marcel, A.J. and Bisiach, E.).
    Oxford Science Publications.
-   Kant, I. 1781. The Transcendental Aesthetic. Critique of Pure
    Reason. Tr. Norman Kemp-Smith. Macmillan Press Ltd.
    <http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Philosophy/Kant/cpr/cpr-open.html> See
    also this link <http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/k/kantmeta.htm>
-   Koch, C and Crick, F. 1999. 116, Consciousness, neural basis of.
    <http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/Elsevier-NCC.html>
-   McGinn, C. 1995. Consciousness and Space. In: Conscious Experience,
    Thomas Metzinger (Ed). 1995, Imprint Academic.
    <http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html>
-   Ryle, G. 1949. The Concept of Mind. Hutchinson & Co. London.
-   Tye, M. 1997. Qualia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
    <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia>
-   Weiskrantz, L. 1988. Some contributions of neuropsychology of vision
    and memory to the problem of consciousness. Chapter 8 in
    Consciousness in Contemporary Science. (Editors: Marcel, A.J. and
    Bisiach, E.). Oxford Science Publications.
-   Weyl, H. 1918. Space Time Matter. Dover Edition 1952, p. 217.

