Defining Consciousness

By Dr. T. D. Singh (Bhaktisvarüpa Dämodara Swami) and Sadäpüta däsa

We are interested, however, not in categorizing patterns of behavior as “conscious” or “unconscious” but rather in understanding the actual subjective experience of conscious awareness. To clearly distinguish this conception of consciousness from the behavioral one, we shall briefly pause here to describe it and establish its status as a subject of serious inquiry. By consciousness we mean the awareness of thoughts and sensations that we directly perceive and know that we perceive.

Since other persons are similar to us, it is natural to suppose that they are similarly conscious. If this is accepted, then it follows that consciousness is an objectively existing feature of reality that tends to be associated with certain material structures, such as the bodies of living human beings.
Now, when a common person hears that a computer can be conscious, he naturally tends to interpret this statement in the sense we have just described. Thus he will imagine that a computer can have subjective, conscious experiences similar to his own. Certainly this is the idea behind such stories as the one with which we began this piece. One imagines the computerized “Mr. Jones,” as he looks about the room through the computer’s TV cameras, actually feeling astonishment at his strange transformation.

If the computerized Mr. Jones could indeed have such a subjective experience, then we would face the situation depicted in Figure 3. On the one hand, the conscious experience of the computer would exist-its subjective experience of colors, sounds, thoughts, and feelings would be an actual reality. On the other hand, the physical structures of the computer would exist. However, we cannot directly correlate consciousness with the actual physical processes of the computer, nor can we relate consciousness to the execution of individual elementary operations, such as those in Figure 1. According to the artificial-intelligence researchers, consciousness should correspond to higher-order abstract properties of the computer’s physical states-properties described by symbols such as thought and feeling, which stand at the top of a lofty pyramid of abstract definitions. Indeed, these abstract properties are the only conceivable features of our sentient computer that could have any direct correlation with the contents of consciousness.

[Here follows Fig.3 with the following explanation:

Conscious awareness of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions

“Ego”
“Thoughts”, “feelings”, and “perceptions”
Elemental sensory constructs
Sophisticated mathematical procedures
Higher operations
Elementary operations

Fig. 3. The relation between consciousness and the physical structures of a hypothetical sentient computer. If we assume that the computer is conscious, then both the contents of the computer’s consciousness and the physical hardware of the computer are real. However, the contents of consciousness can correspond only to higher-order abstract properties of this hardware. These properties are represented within the tinted section by a hierarchy of symbolic descriptions. Such properties exist only in an abstract sense-they are not actually present in the physical hardware of the computer.]

Since consciousness is real, however, and these abstract properties are not, we can conclude only that something must exist in nature that can somehow “read” these properties from the computer’s physical states. This entity is represented in Figure 3 by the arrow connecting the real contents of consciousness with higher levels in the hierarchy of abstract symbolic descriptions of the sentient computer. The entity must have the following characteristics.

[Here follows Fig.4 with the following explanation:

Conscious awareness of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions

“Ego”
“Thoughts”, “feelings”, and “perceptions”
Elemental sensory constructs
Sophisticated mathematical procedures
Higher operations
Elementary operations

Fig. 4. The relation between consciousness and the physical structures of the brain. Both the contents of consciousness and the physical structures are real, but the contents of consciousness can correspond only to higher-order abstract properties of these structures. As in Figure 3. these properties are represented by the hierarchy of symbolic descriptions enclosed within the tinted section.]

(1) It must possess sufficient powers of discrimination to recognize certain highly abstract patterns of organization in arrangements of matter.

(2) It must be able to establish a link between consciousness and such arrangements of matter. In particular, it must modify the contents of conscious experience in accordance with the changes these abstract properties undergo as time passes and the arrangements of matter are transformed.
There is clearly no place for an entity of this kind in our current picture of what is going on in a computer. Indeed, we can conclude only that this entity must correspond to a feature of nature completely unknown to modern science.

This, then, is the conclusion forced upon us if we assume that a computer can be conscious. Of course, we can easily avoid this conclusion by supposing that no computer will ever be conscious, and this may indeed be the case. Aside from computers, however, what can we say about the relation between consciousness and the physical body in a human being? On one hand we know human beings possess consciousness, and on the other modern science teaches us that the human body is an extremely complex machine composed of molecular components. Can we arrive at an understanding of human consciousness that does not require the introduction of an entity of the kind described by statements (1) and (2)?

Ironically, if we try to base our understanding on modern scientific theory, then the answer is no. The reason is that all modern scientific attempts to understand human consciousness depend, directly or indirectly, on an analogy between the human brain and a computer. In fact, the scientific model for human consciousness is machine consciousness!