Three stages to consciousness

[coberst]

Three stages to consciousness

 

Suppose something happens that frightens me. My blood pressure goes up, my heart starts beating very fast, the release of adrenalin creates a great burst of energy, I may even jump or start to run. All of the feelings that are a result of these biological happenings reach my consciousness and I now know that I am afraid.

 

Many non human creatures have emotions—“human emotions however have evolved to making connections to complex ideas, values, principles, and judgments”—thus human emotion is special—the impact of feelings on humans is the result of consciousness—a distinct difference between feeling and knowing a feeling—“neither the emotion or the feeling caused by the emotion is conscious”—these things happen in a biological state—there are three stages here; emotion, feeling, and consciousness of feeling—consciousness must be present if feelings have an influence beyond the here and the now.

 

We need not be conscious of the emotion or the inducer of the emotion—we are about as effective in stopping an emotion as in stopping a sneeze.

 

“Emotions are about the life of an organism, its body to be precise, and their role is to assist the organism in maintaining life…emotions are biologically determined processes, depending upon innately set brain devices, laid down by long evolutionary history…The devices that produce emotions…are part of a set of structures that both regulate and represent body states…All devices can be engaged automatically, without conscious deliberation…The variety of the emotional responses is responsible for profound changes in both the body landscape and the brain landscape. The collection of these changes constitutes the substrate for the neural patterns which eventually become feelings of emotion.”

 

The biological function of emotions is to produce an automatic action in certain situations and to regulate the internal processes so that the creature is able to support the action dictated by the situation. The biological purpose of emotions are clear, they are not a luxury but a necessity for survival.

 

“It is through feelings, which are inwardly directed and private, that emotions, which are outwardly directed and public, begin their impact on the mind; but the full and lasting impact of feelings requires consciousness, because only along with the advent of a sense of self do feelings become known to the individual having them.”

 

Damasio proposes “that the term feeling should be reserve for the private, mental experience of an emotion, while the term emotion should be used to designate the collection of responses, many of which are publicly observable.” This means that while we can observe our own private feelings we cannot observe these same feelings in others.

 

Core consciousness—“occurs when the brain’s representation devices generate an imaged, nonverbal account of how the organism’s own state is affected by the organism’s processing of an object, and when this process enhances the image of the causative object, thus placing it saliently in a spatial and temporal context”

 

First, there is emotion, then comes feeling, then comes consciousness of feeling. There is no evidence that we are conscious of all our feelings, in fact evidence indicates that we are not conscious of all feelings.

 

Quotes from The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio

[bascule]

(Note to mods: Why is this in mathematics? Might want to move it to Speculations)

 

It's a bit more involved than that. First comes sense data and initial preprocessing by brain structures which occur prior to the thalamus. Then comes the thalamus and the amygdala. The amygdala are highly involved in emotional functioning.

 

Not sure who this fellow is who you're quoting here, but he is correct that emotion can be evoked prior to cognitive processing by brain structures like the neocortex. However, emotion can also be evoked as a direct result of cognitive function, e.g. you're sitting on an airplane and realize you forgot to pack any underwear, which brings about feelings of remorse and frustration, and worry about having to find an underwear store as soon as you get to your destination.

 

I think in most situations emotion follows perception, although emotion is tied to a relatively old part of the brain called the lymbic system and in certain cases emotions can arise before you even realize what senses caused the emotion. A sudden loud noise may trigger fear and that fear may cloud your perception before things settle down in your head and you can start to figure out what the noise was.

 

I think the important take away is that there's no simple progression like "emotion, feeling, consciousness of feeling". Our brain is riddled with feedback loops. Consciousness itself can evoke emotion internally, perceptions can evoke emotion, or emotion can happen prior to even conscious perception. There's no nice 1, 2, 3 order to it.

[LimbicLoser]

Perhaps there would be little other than finer detail that could be added to bascule's post above; however I'd like to take this ball and run in a slightly different pattern--if I may.

 

What I would like to focus in on, in closer parameters, is the matter of 'stages to consciousness.' It appears reasonable enough to me, at least, that more clarity will be reached in more fully grasping the better understanding of conscious being a continuum, where above a certain threshold thereof, we have consciousness. In this sense, we could concieve of it in kind of 'fuzzy' stages, I would posit.

 

From time to time we will find comments kind of hand-wringing over the tendency to put it in black and white terms, such as LeDuox's "It's a linguistic quirk, or revealing cultural assumption, that the older (unconscious) processes are defined as negations of the newer one (consciousness)" (1) or the note that 'part of the problem is reflected in the fact that the very term 'uncounscious' is defined by what it is not-- not conscious--rather than by what it might be. (2) Such observations seem to not only highlight, but to also reflect, the better understanding in the field at the moment.

 

The OP refers us to some quotes from a work by Antonio Damasio (see OP) who also brings out the general gist of that subject in his contribution (along with Kaspar Meyer), Consciousness: An Overview of the Phenomenon and of its Possible Neural Basis. (3). On page 5, in that work (this contribution) we find the following observation, "Neither attention nor consciousness are monoliths but rather occur in levels and grades, from simple (core consciousness) to complex (extended consciousness)." This coincides with elements brought out in a number of studies, such as (for a small, random sample space) in S. Topolinski & F. Strack; B. Gawronski, et al.; E. Norman, et al.; J. He Biyu & E. Marcus; Anil K. Seth, et al.; M. Cabanac, et al.; S.V. Gaal, et al.; H.C. Lau & R.E. Passingham; M.A. Williams, et al.; and P.J. Uhlhaas, et al..(4)

 

What I would like to present, is the understanding that as ganglion has built towards brain, over an evolutionary time frame, conscious*--as expressed in, more specifically, neuron and astrocyte [at least for now] activity--has built towards consciousness, and in lines with the presentation of the OP (if I may here) would suggest that we can think of 'stages,' though somewhat fuzzy, and more than a simple three--as has been pointed out above.

 

* This term is used here as a noun, and not an adjective from which consciousness is derived, and thus not a matter of being conscious in the sense of experiencing consciousness as per usual dictionary entry.

 

 

 

 

 

1. LeDoux, Joseph; Synaptic Self, p 11; PENGUIN BOOKS 2002

 

2. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science Vol 4, p 441; Nature Publishing, 2003

 

3. The Neurology of Consciousness--Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropathology, Edited by S. Laureys and G. Tononi; Academic Press, 2009

 

4. Respectively: Scanning the "Fringe" of consciousness: what is felt and what is not felt in intuitions about semantic coherence. (2009) Consciousness and Cognition Vol 18, issue 3, pp 608-618;

Are "implicit" attitudes unconscious? (2006) Consciousness and Cognition Vol 15, issue 3, pp 485-499;

Graduations of awareness in a modified sequence learning task. (2007) Consciousness and Cognition Vol 16, issue 4, pp 809-837;

The fMRI signal, slow cortical potential and consciousness. (2009) Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol 13, issue 7, pp 302-309;

Measuring consciousness: relating behavioral and neurophysiological approaches. (2008) Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol 12, issue 8, pp 314-321;

The emergence of consciousness in phylogeny. (2009) Behavioural Brain Research Vol 198, issue 2, pp 267-272;

Frontal Cortex Mediates Unconsciously Triggered Inhibitory Control. (2008) Journal of Neuroscience Vol 28 (Aug) pp 8053-8062;

Unconscious Activation of the Cognitive Control System in the Human Prefrontal Cortex. (2007) Journal of Neuroscience (May), pp 5805-5811;

Conscious and Unconscious Processing of Nonverbal Predictability in Wernicke's Area. (2000) Journal of Neuroscience Vol 20 (March), pp 1975-1981;

The development of neural synchrony reflects late maturation and restructuring of functional networks in humans. (2009) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. Vol 106, no. 24, pp 9866-9871.