What would it be like to be more or less conscious?

[nismaratwork]

This has always puzzled me, but it's not a proper medical question... you guys seems capable of rendering interesting opinions however. Take the case of those with damage that renders them unable to form new long-term memories. Their capacity to learn and reflect has been curtailed, but otherwise they're more frozen in place than anything else. Are they, less conscious, or even experiencing a kind of living death compared to others? If you can only reflect and elaborate on what has already been experienced, and the results of that introspection is erased within seconds or minutes... what are you?

 

[Galteeth]

I've been thinking in terms of three coordinates: intensity, grain, quality. Maybe focus would be another one for the list.

Grain, granularily. Without any grain, samadhi, smooth undifferentiated consciousness, not distinguished into different qualities. Most of our everyday consciousness, even if we can split a complex experience up into the simplest elements we can imagine, is a long way from this, having lots of fine distinctions. But even here, we might feel in some way bad, for example, without being about to quite say whether this is fear or shame or anger or sadness (or indigestion!), especially if this isn't a very intense experience; but with more grain, we can identify specific kinds of anxiety that feel very different from each other. I don't think low grain automatically goes with low intensity though; I've had intense experiences while tripping that included sensations I could equally well describe as visual or tactile, as if there's some common root shared by these senses, some level at which any choice of what to call it (sight or touch) would be arbitrary because it's as much one as the other. I suppose samadhi would be the common root shared by all experience, like the high energy states in physics where fundamental forces are unified.
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This sounds closer to what I meant by flavor. Or rather, the opposite of this. An interesting idea, but I am not so sure a "planck unit" of consciousness exists. I think information complexity, or interpretation of the complexity of information as related to time somehow, is fundamentally associated with the emergence of consciousness.

 

[Galteeth]

That's a good question. I don't think we can grasp what consciousness is like for something of a different nature than us. I sometimes wonder whether we can even completely grasp what consciousness is like for somebody else. When I'm petting my dogs I ask this question all the time. I try to imagine if I were having their conscious experience. And yet I can't, because the whole time I'm thinking sentences in my head, and trying to comprehend it with my intellect, which they don't even have. Thomas Nagel famously asked it in his article, http://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf" which you may find interesting.

I can sort of imagine it. Try to think back to when you were very very young and your reactions to things were intensely emotional. There may be some level of "thought" but it's probably only on the level of an immediate short term visualization, no words. Ever been on a rollercoaster ride when you were young that you were quite frightened of? I imagine being a dog is somewhat similar.

 

[Rasalhague]

Take the case of those with damage that renders them unable to form new long-term memories. Their capacity to learn and reflect has been curtailed, but otherwise they're more frozen in place than anything else. Are they, less conscious, or even experiencing a kind of living death compared to others? If you can only reflect and elaborate on what has already been experienced, and the results of that introspection is erased within seconds or minutes... what are you?

Suppose I find myself walking along a certain road, at twilight, feeling , say, glee. My memory would probably tell me where I was and why, how I got there, where I intend to go, whether it's morning or evening, and what thoughts, actions or events may have led to this emotion. If I couldn't make new long-term-memories, that wouldn't necessarily prevent me from experiencing a similarly complex range of impressions, albeit more confusing ones. In some cases, it may even intensify the overall experience, for example, if my confusion made me scared or angry, or just because of the continued novelty. By the "more conscious = capable of more elaborate, coherent thought" definition, this condition would presumably be rated "less conscious". Simply on a scale of intensity of consciousness as such, I don't think it'd be necessarily more or less; it would depend on the circumstance, the individual and whatever other impairment their brain may have undergone.

Our brains do many other things besides make us conscious. And normal, everyday, healthy consciousness is richly varied. Unless we've experienced, or read/heard accounts of, simpler states of consciousness (triggered by drugs, meditation, brain injury, spontaneous mystical experiences or whatever), it may be hard to imagine that conscousness could exists without the trappings of complex introspective thought, personal history, a sense of having/being a body and self distinct from the rest of the universe... But, strange to say, as far as the raw experience of a moment goes, these really are optional extras.

On the other hand, although I don't think even amnesia severe enough to box us into a few seconds's worth of continuity would necessarily diminish the intensity of consciousness, Benjamin Libet's famous experiments do seem to show that the activity in the brain needed to generate an experience takes a significant fraction of a second, without which, nothing. But at this scale, the natural match between the sequence of events in the word and the sequence of events in the mind breaks down, which is a bit tricky to think about...

This sounds closer to what I meant by flavor. Or rather, the opposite of this. An interesting idea, but I am not so sure a "planck unit" of consciousness exists. I think information complexity, or interpretation of the complexity of information as related to time somehow, is fundamentally associated with the emergence of consciousness.

It might be useful here to distinguish between complexity of information processing by the brain, and complexity of experience. If consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, we could imagine that it would take a lot of complex activity in the brain to support even the most (subjectively) simple experience. And even if the answer to the mind-body-problem did lie in fundamental physics, it could still be that subjectively simple intensity stemmed from some kind of objective complexity.

 

[apeiron]

Are they, less conscious, or even experiencing a kind of living death compared to others?

In fact, if memory serves me right, the UK sufferer subject of a TV doco did say exactly that - it is like being the living dead. So not a feeling of being less conscious, but of a consciousness with a big black gap which would normally be filled with that gentle, orienting penumbra of the recent past, recent thoughts, intentions, events, etc.

It would be a broken consciousness because every moment would have to built from scratch - some kind of sense of how did I get here, what should I be doing next - the smooth flow of intentionality and predictability we take for granted.

[Edit]: I found the quote. The case was CW, an English music producer. He said he must have been dead for many years and just come back to life minutes earlier. Then exclaimed: "Why the bloody hell can't they do anything to make conscious?" Spooky, eh?

 

[apeiron]

Benjamin Libet's famous experiments do seem to show that the activity in the brain needed to generate an experience takes a significant fraction of a second, without which, nothing.

Libet's work and much other neuroscience does indeed show it take circa 200ms for a habit-level awareness of the world, and circa 500ms for an attention-level awareness, but the reason we experience no gaps (mostly) is because we anticipate the world anyway.

The brain actually works by predicting its input (and then reworking things only after mismatches or prediction are detected).