kuzaro: переводы

→The second important insight seems to be the notion of integration: Consciousness is what binds things together into a comprehensive, simultaneous whole. If we have this whole, then a world appears to us. If the information flow from your sensory organs is unified, you experience the world. If your senses come apart, you lose consciousness. Philosophers like Immanuel Kant or Franz Brentano have theorized about this “unity of consciousness”: What exactly is it that, at every single point in time, blends all the different parts of your conscious experience into one single reality? Today it is interesting to note that the first essential insight—knowing that you know something—is mainly discussed in philosophy of mind,2 whereas the neuroscience of consciousness focuses on the problem of integration: how the features of objects are bound together. The latter phenomenon—the One-World Problem of dynamic, global integration—is what we must examine if we want to understand the unity of consciousness. But in the process we may discover how both these essential questions—the top-down version discussed in philosophy of mind and the bottom-up version discussed in the neurosciences—are two sides of the same coin.

→In any case, many of the classical theories stated that becoming conscious had to do with installing an ideal observer in your mind, an inner witness providing moral guidance as well as a hidden, entirely private knowledge about the contents of your mental states. Consciousness connected your thoughts with your actions by submitting them to the moral judgment of the ideal observer. Whatever we may think about these early theories of consciousness-as-conscience today, they certainly possessed philosophical depth and great beauty: Consciousness was an inner space providing a point of contact between the real human being and the ideal one inside, the only space in which you could be together with God even before death. From the time of René Descartes (1596-1650), however, the philosophical interpretation of conscientia simply as higher-order knowledge of mental states began to predominate. It has to do with certainty; in an important sense, consciousness is knowing that you know while you know.

→The first is that consciousness is a higher-order form of knowledge accompanying thoughts and other mental states. The Latin concept of conscientia is the original root from which all later terminologies in English and the Romance languages developed. This in turn is derived from cum (“with,” “together”) and scire (“to know”). In classical antiquity, as well as in the scholastic philosophy of the Christian Middle Ages, conscientia typically referred either to moral conscience or to knowledge shared by certain groups of people—again, most commonly of moral ideas. Interestingly, being truly conscious was connected to moral insight. (Isn’t it a beautiful notion that becoming conscious in the true sense could be related to moral conscience? Philosophers would have a new definition of the entity they call a zombie—an amoral person, ethically fast asleep but with eyes wide open.)1

→Figure 1: The rubber-hand illusion. A healthy subject experiences an artificial limb as part of her own body. The subject observes a facsimile of a human hand while her own hand is concealed (gray square). Both the artificial rubber hand and the invisible hand are stroked repeatedly and synchronously with a probe. The light areas around the hand and the dark areas in the index finger indicate the respective tactile and visual receptive fields for neurons in the premotor cortex. The illustration on the right shows the subject’s illusion as the felt strokes are aligned with the seen strokes of the probe (the dark areas show areas of heightened activity in the brain; the phenomenally experienced, illusory position of the arm is indicated by the light outline). The resulting activation of neurons in the premotor cortex is demonstrated by experimental data. (M. Botvinick & J. Cohen, “Rubber Hand ‘Feels’ Touch That Eyes See,” Nature 391:756, 1998.) Figure by Litwak illustrations studio, 2004.

→Once upon a time, I had to write an encyclopedia article on “Consciousness.” The first thing I did was to photocopy all existing encyclopedia articles on the topic I could find and track down the historical references. I wanted to know whether in the long history of Western philosophy there was a common philosophical insight running like a thread through humanity’s perennial endeavor to understand the conscious mind. To my surprise, I found two such essential insights.