Search Results

This chapter argues that brain systems must meet several 'hard' requirements to qualify as conscious, while other requirements are 'soft' in that they are important for sustaining normal, daily-life awareness but not strictly necessary for having the most basic form of conscious experience. The hard requirements include, first, the ability to interpret (or reconstruct) sensory inputs as having particular qualities or content, within a rich repertoire of modalities or (sub)modalities, such as visual motion, shape, depth and color. Second, this process of attributing sensory “feel” or meaning to inputs occurs in a dynamic or stable state, depending on the constancy of variables governing the sensory flux. Projection of interpreted sensory inputs into an external, perspectival space (vision) or body map (somatosensation) is seen as a relatively basic process, but patient studies indicate that core consciousness does not strictly depend on this ability, as applies as well to normal requirements on the grouping of similar features and binding of different submodalities into objects. Also the “unity” of consciousness and self-awareness are not classified as an essential feature but rather as a constantly maintained “illusion” of the healthy brain empowered by proper multimodal and motor alignment.

This chapter discusses ways in which the problem of phenomenal unity can be analyzed on the representationalist level of description. Having characterized phenomenal unity as a kind of holism in the previous chapter, the aim is now to determine how collections of (phenomenal) representations can be holistic and how this holism can make a phenomenal difference. The chapter is structured as follows. First, relevant features of the representationalist level of description are explained. This is followed by a discussion of how the experienced self can be analyzed in terms of a global self-representation, which constitutes a phenomenal point of view (an experienced first-person perspective). Then the question of how the existence of a hierarchy of experienced wholes can be justified on purely theoretical grounds is explored, by asking how a hierarchy of representation increases the efficiency of the system. Finally, it is suggested that measures of (dynamical) complexity, like causal density and integrated information, could be used to operationalize the notion of representational holism.