What constitutes consciousness? Where does it reside? Is it strictly personal - or also transpersonal? Is there actually a "collective unconscious"? What happens to consciousness when we die? And perhaps most intriguing, why do we have this phenomenon at all?
Consciousness has only become a serious field of study in the scientific community within the past 20 years, though it represents a perennial focus of philosophical and theological inquiry. To define the term itself has proven difficult, alternately having been equated with a wakeful state, attention, spirituality, self-awareness. Others have gone further, suggesting awareness beyond the self, and capacity for experience. Generally, the concept is divided into two categories: phenomenal consciousness, concerning our actual experience of that which occurs in space and time, and access consciousness, the processes within us which act on these experiences.
The formal study of consciousness has resulted in more questions than answers thus far. Scientists cite two key areas of research problems: a category of "easy" ones (still considered quite difficult to adequately address) and the so-called "hard problem of consciousness".
First, the "easy" problems, called such because one has "only" to determine the mechanisms involved, concern the basic functions of consciousness: how we discriminate among sensory stimuli, integrate information from varied sources to control behavior, verbalize our inner states. While these questions haven't yet been answered, we assume that science will one day be able to do so.
The "hard problem of consciousness", however, a phrase coined by the philosopher David Chalmers, is this: why do we have these qualitative phenomenological experiences in the first place? "How" is easy to decipher, relative to "why".
Three further sets of questions have been presented within the scientific community: To what extent are humans - and other creatures, and even plants - conscious? At what point in individual human development does consciousness begin? And, can machines ever achieve a conscious state?
There are several elements critical to the understanding of consciousness: subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive a relationship between oneself and one's environment. We each have our own, inherently felt experience of this phenomenon, with a corresponding innate sense of understanding, even if we can't verbalize what we 'know'. When anyone proposes to discuss the nature of consciousness, then, or new scientific findings are presented, each person - scientist or not, specialist in this field or otherwise, tends to have opinions formulated on personal experience. That is: we each carry our own unique model of consciousness.
EEG and other measures of brain waves have been used to understand brain response in various states of consciousness, and in turn, electrical stimulation to areas of the brain can produce these states. Some have concluded as a result that consciousness resides entirely within the brain, with no particular "seat" but rather diffuse, the various regions triggering one another dynamically. For others, however, this doesn't definitively rule out consciousness elsewhere in the body. It has been proposed that, even if the phenomenon of consciousness occurs in the various regions of the brain in interrelated processes, the remainder of the central nervous system (CNS) may also be involved, including not only the brain and brain stem but the spinal cord with its autonomic nervous system (ANS) as well as the 'body brains' of the various nerve plexi, most notably the celiac (solar) plexus -- where we have the phenomenon of 'gut instinct'.
Another question that must be raised: if we can deliberately alter our state of consciousness, through processes such as meditation, trance, self-hypnosis or biofeedback, what part of our consciousness is affecting our state of consciousness? Is it simply our cerebrum acting on our brain stem, or something more? At some point, consciousness begins to look quite fragmented, or perhaps mimics a feedback loop of sorts. As Descartes so famously said, "Cogito, ergo sum" - "I think [am thinking], therefore I am."
Further, if the complete CNS, including the ANS, then why not the PNS, or peripheral nervous system? We understand that the role of the PNS is essentially one of motor function. However, we cannot say for certain that consciousness is not also conveyed by these neural pathways. Indeed, consciousness as we know it may well represent a matrix that is conducted by the entire nervous system - and perhaps even the vascular and / or lymphatic systems as well. Chinese philosophy and medical theory might conceive of consciousness as qi, a nonphysical dynamic substance conveyed by a system of vessels that closely overlays the nervous system as we know it today.
Transpersonal psychology is the study and application of those experiences which seem to take one beyond individual consciousness, to a connection with or as a conduit of a consciousness greater than one's own experience. Mystical or transcendent as well as near-death experiences provide examples, as does the vast range in states of consciousness. Both transpersonal psychology and physics in the form of quantum mechanics potentially take the concept of consciousness one step further, in terms of interstructural communication at the subatomic level, even at great distances. Carl Jung conceptualized a "collective unconscious", a matrix of consciousness shared by all members of the human species past, present, and future, which would seem to be supported by the quantum model. Mystical traditions such as Sufism or Shamanism have explored consciousness extending beyond the physical body in ways that science has not yet begun to understand. In general, Asian conceptualizations in this area view ordinary consciousness as limited and narrow, and propose various practices to expand consciousness into something much greater than one's personal experience of it, toward a goal of enlightenment.
Without even delving into the vast philosophical realm, it is apparent that the concept of consciousness is quite complex, raising more questions than providing answers. There is no denying its existence, for at its core, it is what animates the living and is absent in the dead. But its structure, location, and far more, its very function remain a mystery.
As T.H. Huxley famously said in 1866, "How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp."
Dr Anne Hilty is an health psychologist with a transpersonal orientation; she has a clinical practice in integrative psychotherapy which is additionally influenced by classical Chinese medicine, somatic psychology, and Asian shamanic traditions. Located in the Central district of Hong Kong, she can be contacted at: annehilty at gmail dot com.
