Pondering the degrees of consciousness
I have spent a considerable amount of time pondering the nature of conciseness.There is, of course, no certainty regarding the very nature of consciousness except that for something to be conscious there must be something it is like to be it -- that is we associate a experience with its existence.However consciousness, so far as we have encountered it, seems to be determinately present or determinately absent.There appears to be no middle ground, a state of partial consciousness, that we are capable of conceiving.
The mind can be partially aware of something, but this awareness in itself can not be partial (rather, we've never known it to be).For instance, when you're lost in thought during a *insert a subject averse to your liking* class, you have a vague sense of your surroundings.There is a teacher standing at the front of the room, perhaps scribbling some diagrams on a board, and there are a bunch of identical desks lined up in the rest of the room occupied by students exhibiting various degrees of interest in her lecture.While you may be partly aware of what is going on in the classroom -- since a segment of your attention is diverted to guessing the contents of your lunchbox -- your partial awareness only pertains to how much of the experience you are alert to, the experience itself isn't partial -it is wholly, determinately present.
Consider the case of a patient in a persistent vegetative state.In such cases the assessment of conscious awareness is complicated, and often quantified inadequately.Clinically, consciousness is defined on two basis: wakefulness and awareness (Di Perri et al., 2014).Wakefulness refers to alertness -- clinically determined by eye opening.Awareness refers to the contents of consciousness -- clinically determined by obeying commands, non-reflex motor actions, or localized response to pain.Why I think these methods are an inadequate measure of consciousness is because the assessment here is not of the consciousness of the patient as much as it on how much of it the patient can communicate to us.
This assessment can be made more accurate by using functional imaging or EEG computational methods which use neurological activity to determine conscious behavior.There have been cases where patients determined unconscious by the aforementioned clinical tests, showed neurological activity supportive of conscious behavior.Recently, there has been medical research that probes the concept of Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC) defined as "the minimal neuronal mechanisms jointly sufficient for any one specific conscious percept."
NCC is based on the premise that consciousness is discretely present or absent, lacking any states in-between.This has been, and continues to be, the premise of medical ethics in addressing cases of patients who are in a persistent vegetative state, minimal conscious state or the like.A person can be conscious or unconscious, we do not even acknowledge the possibility of the existence of various degrees of consciousness.I think its primitive to draw a line that divides consciousness, a phenomenon what we already harbor such little knowledge about, so absolutely.
It is less implicative to treat consciousness as if it could exist to different degrees in the commonplace, but it becomes important to at least consider this possibility when a life is at stake.Or maybe this consideration has no physical implications, and is so abstract a notion that the only way it could manifest in usefulness is by enriching the philosophical literature on the topic.It is admittedly difficult to even begin to articulate an argument on the existence of degrees of consciousness, some would even say it is impossible to imagining a state but awareness in itself is partial because imagining it is in itself an act of determinately present consciousness.But as Eric Schwitzgebel said -- the lack of successfully imagined in-between cases of consciousness is a feature of the imaginative test rather than a feature of reality.
The mind can be partially aware of something, but this awareness in itself can not be partial (rather, we've never known it to be).For instance, when you're lost in thought during a *insert a subject averse to your liking* class, you have a vague sense of your surroundings.There is a teacher standing at the front of the room, perhaps scribbling some diagrams on a board, and there are a bunch of identical desks lined up in the rest of the room occupied by students exhibiting various degrees of interest in her lecture.While you may be partly aware of what is going on in the classroom -- since a segment of your attention is diverted to guessing the contents of your lunchbox -- your partial awareness only pertains to how much of the experience you are alert to, the experience itself isn't partial -it is wholly, determinately present.
Consider the case of a patient in a persistent vegetative state.In such cases the assessment of conscious awareness is complicated, and often quantified inadequately.Clinically, consciousness is defined on two basis: wakefulness and awareness (Di Perri et al., 2014).Wakefulness refers to alertness -- clinically determined by eye opening.Awareness refers to the contents of consciousness -- clinically determined by obeying commands, non-reflex motor actions, or localized response to pain.Why I think these methods are an inadequate measure of consciousness is because the assessment here is not of the consciousness of the patient as much as it on how much of it the patient can communicate to us.
This assessment can be made more accurate by using functional imaging or EEG computational methods which use neurological activity to determine conscious behavior.There have been cases where patients determined unconscious by the aforementioned clinical tests, showed neurological activity supportive of conscious behavior.Recently, there has been medical research that probes the concept of Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC) defined as "the minimal neuronal mechanisms jointly sufficient for any one specific conscious percept."
NCC is based on the premise that consciousness is discretely present or absent, lacking any states in-between.This has been, and continues to be, the premise of medical ethics in addressing cases of patients who are in a persistent vegetative state, minimal conscious state or the like.A person can be conscious or unconscious, we do not even acknowledge the possibility of the existence of various degrees of consciousness.I think its primitive to draw a line that divides consciousness, a phenomenon what we already harbor such little knowledge about, so absolutely.
It is less implicative to treat consciousness as if it could exist to different degrees in the commonplace, but it becomes important to at least consider this possibility when a life is at stake.Or maybe this consideration has no physical implications, and is so abstract a notion that the only way it could manifest in usefulness is by enriching the philosophical literature on the topic.It is admittedly difficult to even begin to articulate an argument on the existence of degrees of consciousness, some would even say it is impossible to imagining a state but awareness in itself is partial because imagining it is in itself an act of determinately present consciousness.But as Eric Schwitzgebel said -- the lack of successfully imagined in-between cases of consciousness is a feature of the imaginative test rather than a feature of reality.
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