The why of the phenomenal aspect of consciousness: Its main functions and the mechanisms underpinning it

Mental causation: an evolutionary perspective

The relationship between consciousness and individual agency is examined from a bottom-up evolutionary perspective, an approach somewhat different from other ways of dealing with the issue, but one relevant to the question of animal consciousness. Two ways are identified that would decouple the two, allowing consciousness of a limited kind to exist without agency: (1) reflex pathways that incorporate conscious sensations as an intrinsic component (InCs), and (2) reflexes that are consciously conditioned and dependent on synaptic plasticity but not memory (CCRs). Whether InCs and CCRs exist as more than hypothetical constructs is not clear, and InCs are in any case limited to theories where consciousness depends directly on EM field-based effects. Consciousness with agency, as we experience it, then belongs in a third category that allows for deliberate choice of alternative actions (DCs), where the key difference between this and CCR-level pathways is that DCs require access to explicit memory systems whereas CCRs do not. CCRs are nevertheless useful from a heuristic standpoint as a conceptual model for how conscious inputs could act to refine routine behaviors while allowing evolution to optimize phenomenal experience (i.e., qualia) in the absence of individual agency, a somewhat counterintuitive result. However, so long as CCRs are not a required precondition for the evolution of memory-dependent DC-level processes, the later could have evolved first. If so, the adaptive benefit of consciousness when it first evolved may be linked as much to the role it plays in encoding memories as to any other function. The possibility that CCRs are more than a theoretical construct, and have played a role in the evolution of consciousness, argues against theories of consciousness focussed exclusively on higher-order functions as the appropriate way to deal with consciousness as it first evolved, as it develops in the early postnatal period of life, or with the conscious experiences of animals other than ourselves. An evolutionary perspective also resolves the problem of free will, that it is best treated as a property of a species rather than the individuals belonging to that species whereas, in contrast, agency is an attribute of individuals.

The self and conscious experience

The primary determinant of the self (S) is the conscious experience (CE) we have of it. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that empirical research on S mainly resorts to the CE (or lack of CE) that subjects have of their S. What comes as a surprise is that empirical research on S does not tackle the problem of how CE contributes to building S. Empirical research investigates how S either biases the cognitive processing of stimuli or is altered through a wide range of means (meditation, hypnosis, etc.). In either case, even for different reasons, considerations of how CE contributes to building S are left unspecified in empirical research. This article analyzes these reasons and proposes a theoretical model of how CE contributes to building S. According to the proposed model, the phenomenal aspect of consciousness is produced by the modulation-engendered by attentional activity-of the energy level of the neural substrate (that is, the organ of attention) that underpins attentional activity. The phenomenal aspect of consciousness supplies the agent with a sense of S and informs the agent on how its S is affected by the agent's own operations. The phenomenal aspect of consciousness performs its functions through its five main dimensions: qualitative, quantitative, hedonic, temporal, and spatial. Each dimension of the phenomenal aspect of consciousness can be explained by a specific aspect of the modulation of the energy level of the organ of attention. Among other advantages, the model explains the various forms of S as outcomes resulting from the operations of a single mechanism and provides a unifying framework for empirical research on the neural underpinnings of S.

Towards a hybrid approach to unveil the Chimaira of neurosciences: philosophy, aperiodic activity and the neural correlates of consciousness

Contemporary theories of consciousness, although very efficient in postulating testable hypotheses, seem to either neglect its relational aspect or to have a profound difficulty in operationalizing this aspect in a measurable manner. We further argue that the analysis of periodic brain activity is inadequate to reveal consciousness's subjective facet. This creates an important epistemic gap in the quest for the neural correlates of consciousness. We suggest a possible solution to bridge this gap, by analysing aperiodic brain activity. We further argue for the imperative need to inform neuroscientific theories of consciousness with relevant philosophical endeavours, in an effort to define, and therefore operationalise, consciousness thoroughly.

Consciousness and its hard problems: separating the ontological from the evolutionary

Few of the many theories devised to account for consciousness are explicit about the role they ascribe to evolution, and a significant fraction, by their silence on the subject, treat evolutionary processes as being, in effect, irrelevant. This is a problem for biological realists trying to assess the applicability of competing theories of consciousness to taxa other than our own, and across evolutionary time. Here, as an aid to investigating such questions, a consciousness "machine" is employed as conceptual device for thinking about the different ways ontology and evolution contribute to the emergence of a consciousness composed of distinguishable contents. A key issue is the nature of the evolutionary innovations required for any kind of consciousness to exist, specifically whether this is due to the underappreciated properties of electromagnetic (EM) field effects, as in neurophysical theories, or, for theories where there is no such requirement, including computational and some higher-order theories (here, as a class, algorithmic theories), neural connectivity and the pattern of information flow that connectivity encodes are considered a sufficient explanation for consciousness. In addition, for consciousness to evolve in a non-random way, there must be a link between emerging consciousness and behavior. For the neurophysical case, an EM field-based scenario shows that distinct contents can be produced in the absence of an ability to consciously control action, i.e., without agency. This begs the question of how agency is acquired, which from this analysis would appear to be less of an evolutionary question than a developmental one. Recasting the problem in developmental terms highlights the importance of real-time feedback mechanisms for transferring agency from evolution to the individual, the implication being, for a significant subset of theories, that agency requires a learning process repeated once in each generation. For that subset of theories the question of how an evolved consciousness can exist will then have two components, of accounting for conscious experience as a phenomenon on the one hand, and agency on the other. This reduces one large problem to two, simplifying the task of investigation and providing what may prove an easier route toward their solution.