There are a multitude of definitions for “consciousness,” most of them lacking. In this article, we discuss the philosophical definitions, as these are the most precise and will allow for the most complex understanding of the topic. As we go along, I’ll point out the key differences between these philosophical definitions and other common usages of “consciousness” that you may encounter.
The two definitions we’ll work with are of phenomenal consciousness and meta-consciousness.
What is phenomenal consciousness?
Thomas Nagel gave us his famous “what it is like” definition of phenomenal consciousness in 1974. As he states in the article, “What is it like to be a bat?”, a thing is conscious if there is “something that it is like” to be that thing. A bat, for instance, has its own perspective on the world, and has experiences that cause it to behave with agency (Nagel, 1974).
In other words, if something has raw subjective experience, it is phenomenally conscious. And a state that is phenomenally conscious is experiential in nature. This includes all the qualities of experience, whether they be perceptual qualities, such as color, scent, flavors, pitch, etc., or endogenous qualities, such as love, fear, excitement, etc. (Block, 1995).
This definition is typically broad enough for philosophers to apply it to all living things, down to paramecia, which behave as if there is something it is like to be them. In other words, any system that displays causal power over its environment, or agency (which at this point in our knowledge is limited to organisms), is phenomenally conscious.
Consider the metaphor of waves in the ocean. The waves will be our metaphor for experiences, including thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Waves are not essential to the ocean, which will be our metaphor for phenomenal consciousness. Waves are patterns of excitation of the ocean. In other words, they are how the ocean behaves. Each wave is dynamic, unique, and can be measured in numerous ways, which make it appear distinct from the ocean. However, if you were to have no waves at all, there would still be the ocean.
Thought exercise – phenomenal consciousness in real life
Try this…ask yourself what is essentially you. Are your perceptions essential to yourself? They can’t be, because they are fleeting and constantly changing. Are your thoughts essential to yourself? Also no, and for the same reason. How about your emotions? Again, the answer is no. Now, imagine removing all of those experiences, your perceptions, your thoughts, and your emotions. What remains? Raw subjectivity, or what it is like to be you (Spira, 2017).
In other words, what remains is that whose excitation is the experiences of perceptions, thoughts, and emotions. Or, put another way, it is that whose behavior is the experiences of perceptions, thoughts, and emotions, just the way that waves are the behavior of the ocean. Each experience, like each wave, is dynamic and can be measured, giving it the appearance of being an independent “thing” from the medium in which it occurs. But it is really the same “thing” as the medium, and it is the medium itself that this exercise seeks to identify.
Note that this medium of experience precedes the subject-object relationship that connects you, the subject, to the objects of your experience. It is within this medium, phenomenal consciousness (what it is like to be you), that those subject-object relationships occur.
What is meta-consciousness?
But what about more complex cognitive abilities that go beyond raw subjective experience? After all, a paramecium’s cognition seems quite a bit simpler than a dog’s, which is in turn simpler than a human’s.
This is where meta-consciousness comes in. You can have an experience without knowing that you are having it. In these cases, our attention is directed elsewhere and, in that moment, we are unable to report on the experience that we are having. But this does not mean that we are not having it. Thus, meta-consciousness is our ability to know that we are having an experience, or to be aware of our consciousness (Schooler, 2002; Chin & Schooler, 2009; Schooler et al, 2011; Winkielman & Schooler, 2009, 2011).
Meta-conscious experiences are a subset of phenomenal experiences. That is, both are experiences that occur in phenomenal consciousness, but when we are meta-conscious of an experience, we direct our attention to a small subset of the total phenomenal experiences that we have at any given time.
Think of a theatre stage, on which is a set that includes a tree at stage-right, a castle center-stage, and a dragon at stage-left. The stage is dark until a spotlight shines on the tree at stage-right. Just because only the tree is illuminated does not mean that the stage does not still have the castle and the dragon. It is just that the light is focused on a subset of the set pieces. All of the pieces are on the stage and do not disappear when the light moves away from them. If the spotlight shifts to illuminate the dragon, the tree is still there, even though attention has moved to another subset of the total set.
Examples of meta-consciousness
Empirical examples that you are familiar with in your own life include the following:
- You listen to a podcast about AI/ML on a road trip. Upon arriving at your destination, you realize you don’t remember anything that happened on the drive. You had focused your attention on the experiences of hearing the podcast and of your thoughts about that podcast, thus dissociating from your experiences of driving. This does not mean that you did not have experiences of driving – clearly you did, or you could not have arrived safely. But you were not meta-conscious of the driving experiences, because your attention’s spotlight was focused on another subset of your phenomenal experiences.
- You don’t normally notice that you are breathing unless someone else (me, in this case) calls your attention to it. You are always experiencing your breathing, but you are not always meta-conscious of that experience.
- More complicated are recent arguments that we are never truly unconscious. Rather, recent data suggests that during periods of “unconsciousness,” we are not meta-conscious enough to form memories of certain conscious experiences that we have while asleep, under anesthesia, or undergoing an impairment of brain activity. I’ll get into these examples in depth later, but for now, consider that we don’t always remember the dreams we have at night. Empirical evidence shows we are indeed dreaming in such cases, but that we are not always meta-conscious of those dreams. You can only form a memory of an experience, which involves reporting the experience to yourself, if you are meta-conscious of that experience.
The conceptual divide – philosophy and neuroscience
It is meta-consciousness to which clinicians and neuroscientists usually refer when they say, “consciousness.” In that setting, there is often no distinction between meta- and phenomenal consciousness. That is because the limits of medical technology have traditionally caused a dependency on a patient’s ability to report their experiences in order for clinicians to know that the patient is having them. As mentioned above, you can only report a conscious experience if you are meta-conscious of that experience. Thus, there has been significant practical reason for the clinical setting to overlook the sub-division into phenomenal and meta-consciousness, in contrast to the ways philosophers and psychologists define the terms in academic settings.
No Report Paradigms and meta-consciousness
There is, today, an attempt to circumvent these limitations in a clinical setting with No Report Paradigms, which rely on eye-movement, neuro-imaging, and physiological measures as indicators of consciousness to eliminate the dependence on the patient’s responsiveness (Duman, Ehmann, Gonsalves, Gültekin, Van den Berckt, van Leeuwen, 2022). For now, the clinical use of “consciousness” remains unchanged.
In the meantime, there results a frustrating conceptual confusion when philosophers, psychologists, and other medical scientists cross paths in discussions about consciousness. That is why, whenever I discuss consciousness, I choose the more academic definitions that offer greater precision of meaning.
Conclusion
To recap, you are always having phenomenal experiences, which are the excitation of the medium of raw subjectivity, phenomenal consciousness, such that there is something that it is like to be you. Further, in your normal waking state, you are always meta-conscious of a subset of those phenomenal experiences, such that you could report on that subset to yourself and/or to others.
Bibliography
- Nagel, T. (1974). “What is it like to be a bat?” Philosophical Review, 83: 435–456.
- Block, N. (1995). On a confusion about the function of consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18: 227-287.
- Spira, R. (2017). The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter. Sahaja.
- Schooler, J. (2002). Re-representing consciousness: dissociations between experience and meta-consciousness. Trends Cogn. Sci. 6., 339–344.
- Chin, J. & Schooler, J. (2010). Meta-Awareness. Encyclopedia of Consciousness. 33-41. 10.1016/B978-012373873-8.00051-7.
- Winkielman, P., & Schooler, J. W. (2009). Unconscious, conscious, and metaconscious in social cognition. In F. Strack & J. Förster (Eds.), Social cognition: The basis of human interaction (pp. 49–69). Psychology Press.
- Winkielman, P. & Schooler, J. (2011). Splitting consciousness: Unconscious, conscious, and metaconscious processes in social cognition. European Review of Social Psychology. 22. 1-35. 10.1080/10463283.2011.576580.
- Duman, I.; Ehmann, I. S.; Gonsalves, A. R.; Gültekin, Z.; Van den Berckt, J.; van Leeuwen, C. (2022). The No-Report Paradigm: A Revolution in Consciousness Research? Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 10.3389/fnhum.2022.861517.
