Defining Consciousness......
Psychological Paradigms
The psychologist is precariously fixed on the bridge that connects the "hard" natural sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics with the "soft" social sciences of sociology and anthropology. The mind/ body, free will/determinism and nature/nurture problems are significant issues that the psychologist investigates to connect the "spiritual" aspect of life with the empirical world. While psychology is a discipline that has undergone a number of changes in its brief history, developments in other fields have had a considerable influence on how people view psychological questions and issues. Consequently, many cognitive and physiological psychologists have found themselves engaged in research that necessitates an interdisciplinary approach.
Bolles has described the history of psychology as a story of scientific fads. These fads have ranged from phrenology in the nineteenth century to current neural network models and brain imagery. The advances and discoveries made in cognitive science and neuroscience over the past thirty to forty years have helped us develop a better understanding of how complex and wonderful our mental life is. Cognitive science is best defined as an interdisciplinary approach geared toward studying the workings of the mind and developing an integrated model of mental processes. Similarly, neuroscience is defined as an interdisciplinary approach to studying the structure and function of the nervous system.
Progress made on psychological, technological, biochemical, and philosophical fronts has brought us closer to understanding the mind/brain/soul link than at any other time in human history. Despite these advances, it is painfully obvious that there is still a considerable task ahead in developing a complete theoretical and experimental understanding of the human mind. No longer the Black Box of the behaviorists, the Gray, Neural Computer is a more contemporary model describing the brain, the organ of the mind. Cognitive science and neuroscience have changed the way we conceptualize our mental life.
Consciousness as the Object of Psychology
Consciousness and immediate experience are quite possibly the first objects of investigation for psychology as a science. The scientific study of consciousness may find its roots in William James and his descriptions of the "stream of consciousness." In the mid-1900s, consciousness was embedded in the Black Box of the mind and was avoided by behaviorists primarily interested in overt behavior and not the mind, unless it could be indexed by behavioral data.
Cognitive psychologists re-energized the study of the mind in the late 1950s, and mental activity came back into the mainstream of experimental psychology. Researchers in this area have made substantial progress in understanding the architecture and processes of mental life.
Defining Consciousness
Many experimental psychologists (as well as philosophers and theologians) have had difficulty providing a clear, complete, and exhaustive operational definition for consciousness. Consciousness is a slippery term and many (more than we have time to review) have attempted to formulate a coherent description of what this term represents. The great American psychologist, William James, avoided explicitly defining consciousness. He believed that we are all familiar with consciousness through introspection; it is a self-evident phenomenon requiring no operational defining. It was this introspective technique which was used to excess by many early psychologists that, in part, lead to a reactionary movement by the behaviorists. Later in his life, however, James would change his position arguing that consciousness was a nonentity and had no place as an object of empirical investigation. For others who have persisted in the scientific study of consciousness defining it has been wrought with complexity.
This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all-what is it?
It [consciousness] is not to be confused with reactivity. It is not involved in a host of perceptual phenomena. It is not involved in the performance of skills and often hinders their execution. It need not be involved in speaking, writing, listening or reading. It does not copy down experience, as most people think. Consciousness is not at all involved in signal learning and need not be involved in the learning of skills and solutions, which can go on without any consciousness whatever. It is not necessary for making simple judgments or in simple thinking. It is not the seat of reason and indeed some of the most difficult instances of creative reasoning go on without any attending consciousness. And it has no location except an imaginary one.
B. F. Skinner recognized in his book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, that behaviorists had been accused of neglecting the study of consciousness.
The role of the environment is particularly subtle when what is known is the knower himself. If there is no external world to initiate knowing, must we not then say that the knower himself acts first? This is, of course, the field of consciousness, or awareness, a field which a scientific analysis of behavior is often accused of ignoring. The charge is a serious one and should be taken seriously. Man is said to differ from the other animals mainly because he is "aware of his own existence." He knows what he is doing; he knows he has a past and will have a future; he "reflects on his own nature"; he alone follows the classical injunction "Know thyself." Any analysis of human behavior which neglected these facts would be defective indeed.
The problem arises in part from the indisputable fact of privacy: a small part of the universe is enclosed within the human skin. It would be foolish to deny the existence of that private world, but it is also foolish to assert that because it is private it is of a different nature from the world outside.
One form that definitions of consciousness may take is in the description of the phenomenal, experiential state in which a person is. Consciousness is the subjective experiencing of a stimulus or mental state. This state has been referred to as qualia and has received a significant amount of attention from philosophers. Using an introspective technique, people experience a unique scent when a rose is placed under their nose. Flanagan agrees with this type of definitions and believes that consciousness is a term that encompasses the variety of mental- state types which we experience. When we experience the world, we experience its sounds, tastes, and pains. Consciousness is the domain under which our perceptions are actualized. This category emphasizes our interaction with the world and the subjective, phenomenological nature of our mental life.
A second class of definition refers to consciousness as an emergent architectural concept: a central executive, processor, or attention allocation. With these definitions, consciousness is not an experience but a center where cognitive algorithms, heuristics, and higher-order processing take place. It is a location inside the Black Box that is responsible for the analysis of internal and external stimuli and output (i.e., behavioral) selection. Consciousness might be defined as short-term memory, working memory, a mental space where processing of information takes place, or a self-monitoring center. The emphasis is on developing a model (i.e., a flowchart, a blueprint) that spatially represents where the responsibilities of consciousness are carried out. This approach attempts to discern the constructs of mental life as well as its functions.
A third category of definitions defines consciousness as awareness. The ability to identify an object or to focus on specific aspects of our environment is the dominating characteristic of consciousness. Awareness is the process of locating and isolating environmental stimuli (or internal stimuli) so that it is processed for additional information. The awareness of my physical state (hunger) influences my behavior (going to the refrigerator). Awareness of our environment involves the separation of what is "me" from the environment, that which is "not me." We also can be aware of selective aspects of our internal environment (hunger pains). An awareness of both the "me" and the "not me" necessitates self- representation, other-representation, and an ability to compare the two. The ability to identify and highlight stimuli and to engage in advanced processing is what consciousness is. "Know thyself" and "know thy environment" form the basis of consciousness.
Ana
