Thread

Consciousness remains one of the great mysteries in our lives. It is fundamental to us because all that we describe and all that we experience relate to our sense of consciousness. We can't live without experience. We can't experience without a sense of consciousness. And yet, despite this, we still do not have in the modern age a great description of what consciousness is.

As a neurologist, I have studied aspects of consciousness at the clinical level, and my work in critical care neurology is largely a reflection of a career in solving problems involving consciousness. What I find puzzling as the neurologist is that so much focus of what I do in my work is to solve problems regarding a concept that we as a society have not accurately described and defined. Like other words that are ill defined, consciousness is subject to the fallacy of reification [1]. The fallacy of reification occurs when someone treats an abstract concept idea or hypothetical construct as if it were a real, physical and actual thing. Reification can mislead reasoning because it distorts the responsibility of accurately representing the phenomena you're trying to describe to another imagined entity, and it also encourages faulty inferences where we treat abstractions as literal things and we might assign them characteristics that they cannot logically possess.

So, if in the modern age we do not have a well-defined description of consciousness and yet we want to improve our understanding of it, we need to go back to our philosophical roots. We need to go back to our historical identification of this phenomenon.

Early Symbolic Representations of Consciousness

Our earliest descriptions of consciousness come from prehistoric times. In southwestern France, a famous painting, commonly referred to as "The Shaft Scene' or "The Scene of a Dead Man" (French: la scène du puits), from about 18,000 years ago in the upper paleolithic, Magdalenian period, and was identified from the Lascaux caves [2]. The painting is commonly referred to the scene of a dead man. This paleolithic art depicts a human figure along with a wounded and disemboweled bison, a bird on a stick and a rhinoceros. The man is drawn with outstretched arms, birdlike features and an erection, lying seemingly dead or unconscious. Several scholars have interpreted the scene as a hunting accident, a shamanic trance or a bird vision. The sleep researcher, Michel Jouvet, interpreted this finding as a dreamer and his interpretation of the image was that the hunter or man was in a specific phase of sleep which he dubbed paradoxical because it does not look like sleep [3]. During this specific period of sleep the brain is almost as active as it is in wakefulness where eyes are moving fast in different directions. In the modern time we refer to this as rapid eye movement sleep. In males, this phase is invariably accompanied by a strong erection, even when these dreams are not consisting of sexual content. The bird in the image has been referred to as a symbolic representation of a shaman spirit, a soul leaving the body, or a marker of flight and transcendence.

There are other artistic depictions in ancient times that show us how we have thought of consciousness in the prescientific era. A conventional depiction of the great god, Osiris, shows him lying in his back, penises erect while Isis the owl hovers over his body, taking his sperm to engender Horus. In the Upanishads, sacred Hindu texts, the Soul is depicted as a dove that flies away at death and may come back as a spirit. With the advent of Christianity centuries later, the Holy Spirit has been depicted as white winged birds and white wings appear on visiting angels. There are depictions of the Egyptian Phoenix and the Finnish Sielulintu, which represent soul birds that deliver a psyche to newborn babies and take it away from dying, flying spirits. These appear as universal metaphors for the subconscious mind.

Behind these allegories of birds stands an intuition we have: the content of our mind is radically different from that which appears on our bodies. We know that we dream. While we lay still our thoughts wander into remote realms of imagination concept formation and our memory.

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

in book seven of the Republic, Plato provides his famous Allegory of The Cave, which represents one of philosophy's most powerful metaphors for human perception knowledge and consciousness [4]. In this story there are prisoners in a cave chained inside a dark layer from birth, unable to turn their heads. They face only a wall. Behind them is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners people walk carrying objects. The prisoners see only the shadow of these objects cast upon The Cave wall. To the prisoners, these shadows are only the reality they know. They give names to the shadows and build their understanding of what exists in the world around that which way they perceive.

However, this is their only perception of reality that they know. If one prisoner becomes freed and turns toward the fire and outside the world, he experiences pain and disorientation but eventually perceives the true form of things under the light of the sun. If enlightened, the prisoner can return to the cave to explain this higher reality to the other prisoners. He may experience resistance from them or even be attacked by them as they prefer the comfort of familiar shadows.

In the Allegory of The Cave, the cave symbolizes the limits of ordinary perception. We often mistake appearances for reality itself.

Consciousness, in its unexamined state, is bound by these illusions. The painful process of leaving the cave mirrored the difficulty of transcending habitual thought, ego or societal conditioning. Consciousness can expand from surface level awareness to higher understanding. Just said fellow prisoners resisted their newly freed enlightened colleague, human beings often resist challenges to their worldview. Consciousness is not just about seeing truth, but also about overcoming psychological barriers to accepting it.

Consciousness and The Matrix

In the modern day, the most relevant film demonstrating the core concepts of Plato's Allegory of The Cave is the Matrix [5]. In the Matrix, Neo lives in the Matrix. He perceives a world around him and those around him do not observe anything beyond what they can perceive about how the world works. Neo, unlike others, does have some intuition that something just isn't right. He does get the opportunity by taking the red pill to get out of the matrix and be able to see what it is.

Initially, when he first sees the matrix for what it is, he is in denial, representing some of the challenges that prisoners in the cave may have to understanding their confinement. However, as he experiences his initial climb to transcendence, he accepts the world for what it is. As Morpheus describes to Neo however, there are people in the matrix so dependent and bound by it that they will fight for whatever it is that best defends it. This represents the challenge that we all experience fully understanding our world, being able to accept better explanations for the observations we observe, and the challenge that we all have toward compelling others to change their worldview in the presence of conflicting observations.

Thomas Aquinas and the Soul

In Christian text, Thomas Aquinas, provided a detailed theory on the concept of the soul, its faculties, and its relationship to knowledge and awareness [6]. He defined the soul, following Aristotle, as the “substantial form” of the living body. He described that the soul is what makes a body alive. It is not separate from the body in essence, but it is immaterial and subsistent, meaning that it can exist apart from the body after death.

To Thomas Aquinas, humans have a unique kind of soul, the rational soul, which includes powers of intellect and will, in addition to the vegetative (grown and nutrition) and the sensitive (perception and movement) power shared with animals. For Aquinas, consciousness as we think about it is best mapped to the faculty of intellect or understanding. He held that intellect not only knows external things but can reflect on its own acts. This is what we now think of as self-awareness.

Aquinas distinguish between direct knowledge of the self or what we lack in this life and the indirect knowledge of the self or that which we have by reflecting upon our operations. To Aquinas, we don't quote see the soul directly, but we infer its existence by observing our acts and thoughts and will. Human beings are aware of themselves, not as an object among objects, but as subjects who think and will to act. Unlike the separate nature that Plato described in his allegory of a prisoner in the cave, Aquinas viewed the soul and the body together forming one human person. Conscious awareness for him is not something that is floating free but the operation of a spiritual principle, the rational soul, that is united to the body.

Aquinas described that after death, the soul survives and retains intellectual and volitional powers. Consciousness to him was the direct vision of God and is only possible in the afterlife in what Aquinas referred to as beatific vision. In an earthly life, our consciousness is always mediated by sensory experience. It is only in union with God after death that the soul knows its fullness.

Rene Descartes: Dualism and Cogito Ergo Sum

In the 17th century, the French philosopher Rene Descartes described what we did now refer to as dualism: the thesis that the conscious mind is made of non-material substance that eludes the normal laws of physics. Dualism was based upon a logical argument that asserted the impossibility of a machine ever mimicking the freedom of a conscious mind. In his books, Traité de l’Homme (Treatise of Man) and Les Passions de l’Âme (The Passions of the Soul), Descartes presented a mechanistic perspective on the inner operation of the body [7,8]. He referred to it as sophisticated automata that our body and brains literally act as a collection of organs, of musical instruments compared to those found in the churches of his time with massive bellows forcing a spectral fluid called animal spirits into the reservoirs and then a broad variety of pipes whose combinations generate all the rhythms and music of our actions. Descartes had a concept of the hydraulic brain which had no difficulty in moving itself toward an object. To him the inner decision making was located in the pineal gland and leaned in a certain direction, sending spirits flowing, to cause precisely the appropriate movement of the limbs to direct an action. Memory corresponded to the reinforcement of some of these pathways. Descartes also described mechanistic models for sleep which he theorized to be reduced to the pressure of the spirits. When the source of animal spirits was abundant, it circulated throughout every nerve and this pressured machine was ready to respond to any stimulation, providing a model of the wake state. When the pressure weakened, it made the low spirits capable of moving only a few threads and the person would fall asleep.

In Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes set out to find a foundation for knowledge so firm that it could not be doubted [9]. His strategy was radical doubt. He questioned everything he could that could possibly be false or deceptive. He thought that senses can deceive through illusions and dreams. He thought reasoning can fail through logical or mathematical errors. He had a concept of the evil demon hypothesis where the external world could be an illusion. He intended in this writing to strip away all uncertain belief until he reached something that was indubitable. When doubting everything, Descartes realized that even if he doubts, he must exist to doubt. Even if deceived by malicious demons, there must be a thinker being deceived. Even if all perceptions are illusions, the act of thinking still affirms the existence of a subject doing the thinking. Thus, he described 'Cogito Ergo Sum', or 'I think therefore I am'. This was not a logical syllogism so much as it was a direct, self-evident intuition: whenever he engages in thought his own existence as a thinking subject cannot be denied.

'Cogito Ergo Sum' represents the primacy of subjective awareness. Consciousness, the act of thinking doubting or willing, is the first undeniable fact. The existence of the self is more certain than the existence of the external world. Descartes established the subjective standpoint as the starting point for philosophy. This shifted focus from the metaphysical speculation about reality 'out there' to the inner certainty of the conscious experience. Dualism emerges because thought was the one undeniable truth. Descartes concluded that the mind is distinct from the body. This separation of mind and body has shaped centuries of philosophy and neuroscience debates about the nature of consciousness. Descartes did not intend 'Cogito Ergo Sum' as a proof deduced by logic but rather as a self-authenticating truth. Something that is grafted directly by the mind. It's less about proving the 'I' exists as a person or body, and more about proving that the act of consciousness, itself, is undeniable.

Antonio Damasio and Descartes' Error

As science has evolved, there are philosophers and scientists who have criticized Descartes for his concept of dualism. In Antonio Damasio's book, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Damasio critiques cartesian dualism and repositions consciousness [10]. Damasio calls dualism an error of thinking that the mind can be understood without reference to the body, emotions, and biologic regulation. Damasio describes that consciousness is embodied, and it cannot be divorced from the body. Emotions and feelings, which arise from the body's homeostatic regulation, are integral to how we think and make decisions. Without the body signals, rational thought itself breaks down. Damasio referred to studies where emotions proceed and guide reasoning. This conflicts with the idea that consciousness is "pure thought". What Descartes pushed away, the 'body effects and visceral signals', are what anchors consciousness and reality. Damasio described the self as being layered. The proto self represents basic body regulation. The core self represents moment to moment awareness, rooted in emotional and bodily states. And autobiographical self represents the extended consciousness with memory identity and narrative.

To Damasio, Descartes incorrectly placed consciousness in the realm of pure thought, separating it from bodily processes. Damasio focused on that idea consciousness emerges from the interaction of the brain body and environment, not from thought alone.

Conclusion

Our Western history of describing consciousness from the pre-scientific era to the advent of scientific testing has shown us what we can observe about our description of the content of our thoughts. Self-evident truths such as 'Cogito Ergo Sum' challenge us in terms of thinking through the idea of what is real and what is not. Even considering scientific advancements that provide better explanations for how we experience the world, there are core concepts such as the prisoners resisting being freed in Plato's cave that provide powerful allegory for how we experience resistance in our world when we try to help others identify what is true. Clearly, these foundational observations dating back to pre-scientific times carry relevance to this day.

References

1. Goodman, N. (1978). Ways of Worldmaking. Hackett.

2. Dehaene, Stanislas. Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. New York: Viking, 2014.

3. Jouvet, M. (1999). The Paradox of Sleep: The Story of Dreaming. MIT Press.

4. Plato. (1997). Complete Works (ed. J. M. Cooper). Hackett. (Republic, Book VII, 514a–520a.)

5. Irwin, W. (Ed.). (2002). The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Chicago: Open Court.

6. Aquinas, T. (1274/1947). Summa Theologica (trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province). Benziger Bros.

7. Descartes, R. (1664/1972). Treatise of Man (T. S. Hall, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

8. Descartes, R. (1649/1985). Passions of the Soul. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 1–2. Cambridge University Press.

9. Descartes, R. (1641/1996). Meditations on First Philosophy (trans. J. Cottingham). Cambridge University Press.

10. Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Putnam.