Consciousness

Prof B Rangaiah
Department of Applied Psychology
Pondicherry
University
Puducherry
Meaning
•In cognitive psychology, consciousness is the awareness of the
self and the environment, and is a fundamental part of human
nature.
•Consciousness is your individual awareness of your unique
thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations, and environments.
Essentially, your consciousness is your awareness of yourself and
the world around you.
•It's a subjective experience that includes thoughts,
feelings, memories, sensations, and environments.
•Consciousness is important to many psychological theories and has
several purposes, including: Processing information, Choosing
actions, Setting priorities, Learning and adapting to new
information, and Making decisions.
Definition

•William Wundt elements of consciousness – introspection - William

James stream of consciousness – soon rejected in psychology – in
the last few years - still disagreement about how consciousness
should be defined
•Questions about consciousness are extraordinarily difficult –
the phenomenon that’s invisible to anyone other than the
experiencer.
•Rough definition: ‘Consciousness is a state of awareness of
sensations or ideas, such that you can reflect on those sensations and
ideas, know what it “feels like” to experience these sensations and
ideas, and can, in many cases, report to others that you’re aware of the
sensations and ideas.’
Consciousness guided by unconscious frameworks

•Intellectual activities - elaborate “support structure” —

processes and mechanisms working “behind the scenes.”
•Activities like thinking, remembering, and categorizing all feel
quick and effortless - cognitive unconscious
•Generally aware of your mental products but unaware of your mental
processes.
•Your conscious experiences are constantly shifting and changing
States of Consciousness

 Dreams

 Hallucinations

 Hypnosis

 Meditation

 Sleep

 States induced by psychoactive drugs

Altered types of consciousness

•Coma
•Confusion
•Delirium
•Disorientation
•Lethargy
•Stupor
Levels of Consciousness

•Conscious: Everything you are aware of

•Preconscious: Information you are not currently aware of that you
can pull into awareness if needed
•Unconscious: Memories that are outside of awareness
and inaccessible
•Non-conscious: Automatically bodily functions that occur
without awareness and sensation
•Subconscious: Information that is out of consciousness and
not immediately available to consciousness
History - Early philosophers

• The origin of the modern concept of consciousness is often attributed to

Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690.
• Locke defined consciousness as "the perception of what passes in a man's
own mind"
• René Descartes (1596–1650) is generally taken to be the first philosopher
to use conscientia in a way that does not fit this traditional meaning.

• The French philosopher Rene Descartes introduced the concept of mind-body

dualism or the idea that while the mind and body are separate, they do interact.

• Descartes proposed the idea of cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"),
which suggested that the very act of thinking demonstrates the reality of one’s
existence and consciousness.
Early psychologists
• Early psychologists used introspection to study consciousness,
analyzing their own thoughts and experiences.
• Structuralists used a process known as introspection to analyze and report
conscious sensations, thoughts, and experiences.
• Once psychology was established as a discipline separate from philosophy
and biology, the study of the conscious experience became one of the
first topics studied by early psychologists.
• William James compared consciousness to a stream that is
always changing.
William James

• William James is usually credited with popularizing the idea that human
consciousness flows like a stream, in his Principles of Psychology of
1890.
• According to James, the "stream of thought" is governed by five
characteristics:
• Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness.
• Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing.
• Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous.
• It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself.
• It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others.
Modern Approaches

•The 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s: Research with patients with amnesia,
split brain, and blindsight found that patients could respond to
stimuli they denied seeing.
•The 1980s and 1990s: A resurgence of research into
consciousness led to the creation of specialty journals and
professional societies.
•The 1990s and beyond: Consciousness has become a thriving area
of research in psychology and neuroscience.
•Research has focused on the neural mechanisms of consciousness,
the difference between conscious and unconscious perception, and
self- consciousness
• Theories of Consciousness
The Dissociable Interactions and Conscious Experience
(DICE)

•The model was proposed by Schacter based on evidence from

neuropsychology, including disconnections between processing
and consciousness.
•The DICE model defines consciousness as the subjective
experience of being aware of one's perceptions, thoughts, feelings,
actions, and memories
•The DICE model assumes that:
•There are independent memory modules
•There is no conscious access to details of procedural knowledge
•When information is processed, the systems or modules
are changed and a perceptual residual is left behind
Knowledge Modules
DICE…

•The conscious awareness system: enables subjective awareness of

many types of information coming from various knowledge
modules.
•Knowledge modules: they store learned information
(semantic memory)
•The executive system: produces outputs to CAS – inititates actions
– flexible response in novel situation
•The procedural/habit system: no inputs to CAS – learned
– automatic cognitive and motor – nonconscious
•The declarative/episodic: events – context – personal experience
Conclusion

•The DICE acronym stands for Decision making,

Intuition, Consciousness, and Emotion.
•The model captures the idea that our everyday decisions,
judgments, reasoning, and behavior are influenced by a complex
interplay between conscious and unconscious processes, and are
also influenced by intuition and emotion
•It is not a theory of mind. Tentative explanation for
conscious experiences.
Bernard Baars' global workspace theory (GWT) of
consciousness
•A psychological model that explains how consciousness emerges
from the brain's parallel neural processes
•Conscious cognitive content is available to multiple
cognitive processes, such as attention, memory, and decision
making
•The brain contains many specialized processes that operate in
parallel, and most of this activity is unconscious.
•Attention acts like a spotlight, bringing some of this
unconscious activity into conscious awareness
•The mind is like a theater, with conscious thought being like
material illuminated on the main stage.
Conclusion

•GWT analogizes the mind to a theater, with conscious thought

being like material illuminated on the main stage
•GWT also specifies "behind the scenes" contextual systems,
which shape conscious contents without ever becoming conscious.
•The theory fails to address the deeper problem of its nature, of
what consciousness is, and of how any mental process whatsoever
can be conscious
Scientific Construct

•Limited Capacity
•Global Access
•Metaphors
•The threshold Metaphor
•The searchlight Metaphor
•The tip of the iceberg Metaphor
•The novelty Metaphor
•An integration Metaphor: the theatre in the society of Mind
•Super Metaphor – combining the Metaphors
The functions of Consciousness

•Processing information
•Learning and adapting
•Decision-making
•Valence
•Temporality
•Adaptivity
•Rational thought
•Jung: thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuition.
Indian thoughts on consciousness
•Mind – body – consciousness different – consciousness is all
pervasive and illuminates the mind and body – we use it as long as we
are alive and exits when we die – still consciousness exists – therefore,
consciousness is not in mind or body, which is outside of these two
and it ever existing –
•Taittirıya Upanisad an individual is represented in terms of
five different sheaths or levels that enclose the individual’s
self.
•The physical body (annamayakosa)
•Energy sheath (pranamaya kosa)
•Mental sheath (manomayakosa)
•Intellect sheath (vijnanamaya kosa)
•Emotion sheath (anandamaya kosa )
•Sankhya system - The mind is viewed as consisting of
five components: manas, ahamkara, citta, buddhi, and
atman.
The mind – Sankhya System – five components
•manas, ahamkara, citta, buddhi, and atman.
•Manas is the lower mind which collects sense impressions. Its
perceptions shift from moment to moment. This sensory-motor mind
obtains its inputs from the senses of hearing, touch, sight, taste, and
smell. Each of these senses may be taken to be governed by a
separate agent.
•Ahamkara is the sense of I-ness that associates some perceptions to
a subjective and personal experience.
•Once sensory impressions have been related to I-ness by ahamkara,
their evaluation and resulting decisions are arrived at by buddhi,
the intellect.
The mind – Sankhya System – five components…

•Manas, ahamkara, and buddhi are collectively called the

internal instruments of the mind.
•The citta, which is the memory bank of the mind. These memories
constitute the foundation on which the rest of the mind operates.
But citta is not merely a passive instrument. The organization of the
new impressions throws up instinctual or primitive urges that
creates different emotional states.
•This mental complex surrounds the innermost aspect of
consciousness which is called atman. It is also called the self,
brahman, or jıva. Atman is considered to be beyond a finite
enumeration of categories.
Hierarchical Levels of Pranic Energy
• The state of mind is mediated by the pranic energy - Atharvaveda 10.2.31-2
• Their positions appear to be areas in the brain which map to different
points on the spinal cord.
• The lowest one is located at the bottom of the vertebral column (muladhara
cakra).
• The next cakra is a few inches higher at the reproductive
organs (svadhisthana cakra).
• The third cakra (manipura cakra) is at the solar plexus.
• The heart region is the anahata cakra.
• The throat has the fifth cakra called the visuddhi cakra.
• Between the eyebrows is the ajna cakra.
• At the top of the head is the sahasrara cakra.
• It may be assumed that the stimulation of these cakras in a proper way
leads to the development of certain neural structures that allow the I-ness to
experience the self. In other words, the cakras are points of basic focus
inside the brain that lead to the explication of the cognitive process
Vedic model
Five levels
Buddhist model

•The Buddha: consciousness is a continuous stream of water.

level types names description
9th Amala or pure consciousness Free from all karmic impurity
Level 5
8th Alaya or repository consciousn through reflective awareness
Level 4
7th Manas or self-consciousness through deluded awareness
Level 3
6th Mano or perception/ideating Cons through the senses in Level 1
Level 2
5 th Body or touching consciousne due to tactile stimulus
4 th Tongue-or-tasting consciousne due to gustatory stimulus
Level 1
3 rd Nose-or-smelling consciousne due to olfactory stimulus
2 nd Ear-or-hearing consciousness due to auditory stimulus
1 st Eye-or-seeing consciousness due to visual stimulus
Conclusion