Do We Have Minds of Our Own?
The strange, startling, and competing explanations for human—and possibly nonhuman—consciousness.
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Researcher offers new explanation for consciousness
Consciousness is your awareness of yourself and the world around you. This awareness is subjective and unique to you.
«all our decisions and actions are actually made unconsciously, although we fool ourselves into believing that we consciously made them»
Consciousness is not a thing, but a process of inference
The special trick of consciousness is being able to project action and time into a range of possible futures
Can lucid dreaming help us understand consciousness?
The ability to control our dreams is a skill that more of us are seeking to acquire for sheer pleasure. But if taken seriously, scientists believe it could unlock new secrets of the mind
«It has been hard to get someone to lucid dream in the noisy, constrained environment of an fMRI scanner. But it can be done»
Consciousness begins with feeling, not thinking
Forget ‘I think therefore I am’. In a new theory of embodied consciousness, the neuroscientists Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio propose that feelings are the source of consciousness. Long dismissed…
Consciousness as a Memory System
We suggest that there is confusion between why consciousness developed and what additional functions, through continued evolution, it has co-opted. Consider episodic memory. If we believe that episodic memory evolved solely to accurately represent past events, it seems like a terrible system—prone to forgetting and false memories. However, if we believe that episodic memory developed to flexibly and creatively combine and rearrange memories of prior events in order to plan for the future, then it is quite a good system. We argue that consciousness originally developed as part of the episodic memory system—quite likely the part needed to accomplish that flexible recombining of information. We posit further that consciousness was subsequently co-opted to produce other functions that are not directly relevant to memory per se, such as problem-solving, abstract thinking, and language. We suggest that this theory is compatible with many phenomena, such as the slow speed and the after-the-fact order of consciousness, that cannot be explained well by other theories. We believe that our theory may have profound implications for understanding intentional action and consciousness in general. Moreover, we suggest that episodic memory and its associated memory systems of sensory, working, and semantic memory as a whole ought to be considered together as the conscious memory system in that they, together, give rise to the phenomenon of consciousness. Lastly, we suggest that the cerebral cortex is the part of the brain that makes consciousness possible, and that every cortical region contributes to this conscious memory system.
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