tate3000: переводы

→We have also come to understand that consciousness is not an all-or-nothing affair, a phenomenon that either does or does not exist. It is a graded phenomenon and comes in many different shades. Consciousness is also not a unitary phenomenon but has many discernible aspects: memory, attention, feelings, the perception of color, self-awareness, and higher-order thought. Nevertheless, the essence of the phenomenon—what I call the appearance of a world—seems to be preserved throughout. One of the essential features of consciousness is that it situates you in this world. When you wake up in the morning, you experience yourself as existing at a specific time, at a single location, and embedded in a scene: A single and integrated situation emerges. The same is true for dreams or hallucinations, in which you not only experience yourself but also experience yourself in the context of a particular situation, as part of a world that has just appeared. We have learned that consciousness reaches down into the animal kingdom .4 We have learned about psychiatric disorders and brain lesions, about coma and minimally conscious states, about dreams, lucid dreams, and other altered states of consciousness. All this has led to a general picture of a complex phenomenon that comes in different flavors and strengths. There is no single on-off switch. The fact that consciousness is a graded phenomenon sometimes causes conceptual problems. At the same time, we are already beginning to find the first neural correlates of specific forms of conscious content.5 Eventually we should be able to discern the minimal set of properties our brains require to activate specific qualities of experience, such as the apricot-pink color of the evening sky or the scent of amber and sandalwood.

→But this is not the whole story. Frequently, a deeper, unarticulated insight may lie behind our uneasiness with reductive approaches to the conscious mind. We know that our beliefs about consciousness can subtly change what we perceive, influencing the very contents and functional profile of subjective experience itself. Some fear that a materialistic disenchantment, along with advances in the sciences of the mind, may have unwanted social and cultural consequences. As I point out in the concluding chapters of this book, these voices are absolutely right: This is an important aspect of the development of the mind sciences. We have learned that consciousness—like science itself—is a culturally embedded phenomenon.

→In the meantime, we have learned many lessons. We have learned how great the fear of reductionism is, in the humanities as well as among the general public, and how immense the market is for mysterianism. The straightforward philosophical answer to the widespread fear that philosophers or scientists will “reduce consciousness” is that reduction is a relationship between theories, not phenomena. No serious empirical researcher and no philosopher wants to “reduce consciousness”; at best, one theory about how the contents of conscious experience arose can be reduced to another theory. Our theories about phenomena change, but the phenomena stay the same. A beautiful rainbow continues to be a beautiful rainbow even after it has been explained in terms of electromagnetic radiation. Adopting a primitive scientistic ideology would be just as bad as succumbing to mysterianism. Furthermore, most people would agree that the scientific method is not the only way of gaining knowledge.

→In the early 1970s, after the heyday of behaviorism, interest in consciousness as a serious research topic began to rise. In several scientific disciplines, the topic of subjective experience gradually became a secret research frontier. Then, in the last decade of the twentieth century, a number of eminent neuroscientists accepted consciousness as a proper target for rigorous research. Now things developed very quickly. In 1994, after a conference of consciousness researchers in Tucson, Arizona, I helped found a new organization, the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC), which is aimed at drawing together the more rigorous researchers in science and philosophy. The number of conferences and journal articles increased steeply.2 The following year, I edited a collection of philosophical articles entitled Conscious Experience .3 When one of my ASSC cofounders, Australian philosopher David Chalmers, and I compiled the bibliography, spanning the period 1970-1995, it contained about a thousand entries. Ten years later, when I updated this bibliography for the fifth German edition, it had almost twenty-seven hundred entries. At this point, I gave up my attempt to include all of the new literature on consciousness; it was simply no longer possible. The field is now well established and developing steadily.

→Over the centuries, the theories we have devised have gradually changed our image of ourselves, and in so doing they have subtly altered the contents of consciousness. True, consciousness is a robust phenomenon; it doesn’t change simply because of the opinions we have about it. But it does change through practice (think of wine connoisseurs, perfume designers, musical geniuses). Human beings in other historical epochs—during the Vedic period of ancient India, say, or during the European Middle Ages, when God was still perceived as a real and constant presence—likely knew kinds of subjective experience almost inaccessible to us today. Many deep forms of conscious self-experience have become all but impossible due to philosophical enlightenment and the rise of science and technology—at least for the many millions of well-educated, scientifically informed people. Theories change social practice, and practice eventually changes brains, the way we perceive the world. Through the theory of neural networks, we have learned that the distinction between structure and content—between the carrier of a mental state and its meaning—is not as clear-cut as is often assumed. Meaning does change structure, though slowly. And the structure in turn determines our inner lives, the flow of conscious experience.