On the basis of these considerations, and taking into account space limits, I do not claim to check an exhaustive list of criterial properties of human consciousness, but rather, to illustrate the consequences of the hypothesis using a few representative examples: seriality and limited capacity; objectivity; the intimate relation between consciousness and memory; and the sense of conscious agency.
The serial character of human conscious experience is a highly salient and, from the point of view of many neurophysiologists, an almost mysterious feature. While the brain which is supposed to be the seat of mind works as a parallel distributed network with virtually unlimited resources, conscious events are consecutive, happen one at a moment, and their momentary capacity is strongly limited.
Theories regarding consciousness as a particular case of brain information processing must, therefore, suggest a specific mechanism creating serial processing from parallel. This compromises the aesthetics of the corresponding theories, because in addition to the multiple brain mechanisms generating conscious contents one more mechanism is postulated to make these contents run in a row.
The difficulties disappear, however, we assume that consciousness has been emerged from behavior and is itself a covert behavior. As already said, human consciousness can be afforded only in specific, particularly complex situations. But any kind of complex behavior is a series of organism-environment interactions. A cat do not hunt and wash, or eat and play, at the same time.
Likewise, we cannot simultaneously turn left and turn right, notwithstanding all parallel distributed processing in our brain. An example of locomotion, which is largely unconscious, illustrates the limits of parallel behavior. With automatization of a motor skill organisms acquire the ability to perform some motor acts simultaneously.
This process plays a particular role in actively communicating animals such as primates. After extensive experience the muscles of face and tongue become independent of peripheral coordinations, and we can walk and talk at the same time. But as soon as the situation gets more complex, this ability to perform two behavioral acts in parallel is lost. It is difficult and even dangerous to actively communicate while descending an unfamiliar stair in complete darkness.
Complex behaviors are serial by nature. In those exceptional cases in which they can run in parallel, the states of consciousness can be parallel, too: whales sleep with one half of the body.
However distributed are processes in the cortex, in order to reach muscles the cortical activity must pass through the site where all impulses from the forebrain to the motor periphery converge. Locked-in syndrome discussed in the section Objections above is most frequently a result of a stroke in this area. The serial character of human consciousness is closely related to another specific feature, the intolerance of contradiction.
Parallel distributed processing in brain networks has nothing against contradiction; different neuronal assemblies can simultaneously process different aspects of information, perhaps incompatible with each other. Both Freudian and cognitive unconscious Shevrin and Dickman, ; Kihlstrom, are highly tolerant against contradiction. This fact strongly contradicts sorry for word play to the negative affect we get as soon as we notice a contradiction between two contents of our consciousness.
Again, the paradox disappears when we realize that consciousness is not a processing but a behavior. Mostly, ambiguous behavior is either physically impossible e. Why should consciousness be different? This term is used in two interrelated meanings. First, it means that we live in the world which appears to contain distinct and relatively stable entities called objects.
To my knowledge these features are either taken for granted i. The former view is not tenable: our being in the world is not a cold and impersonal observation. The latter view is partially true. Operations with signs standing for something different increase the distance between us and the world. Symbolic systems are powerful tools we use to deconstruct the complex world into separate things.
However, in order to use words as tools, we first must use tools. Language can support but not create the objective world. Only tools can do this because they are material components of the same world. Tools put themselves between us and our needs projected into the world see Tools above. They expand the space relating the organism to its immediate Lebenswelt so much that they transform it into the space separating the organism from its environment.
They enforce me to deal with relationships between different elements of the world, and between different features of these elements, rather than to be ever egocentrically busy by the relationships between the world and myself. They decentralize world. More than one million years ago, the early Homo already employed higher-order tools Ambrose, ; Carbonell et al.
Long before Copernicus stopped the sun rotating around the Earth, tool usage stopped the world to rotate around each animal's needs.
In the extent the needs retire into the background, so the related emotions. We can now be engaged into the world of entities which do not immediately concern us. Symbolic games add a new quality to this objectivity.
The two sets of recursive loops the symbolic and the instrumental mutually interact, further enhancing detachment and disengagement. When the recursivity of tools added with the recursivity of signs conditionally referred to the tools, the distance between the organism and the world becomes a gap. Then even these latter are substituted by the relationships between arbitrary symbols standing for objects and their relations.
The higher is the order of tool use, the stronger am I bracketed out of the chain of events. The transformation of the fluent energy of the world into the static order of stable objects finally attains the degree at which I am myself almost similar to other things. The living human organism, which is primarily a node of struggling, suffering, enjoying, wanting energies, becomes almost just another object of cold cognition among many objects.
In our culture, the objectivity of the world is further strengthened and enhanced by the stance of natural science Galilei, In contrast, qualities, i. Hickman, Interpretation of the relationships between us and various aspects of our environment in terms of the relationships among these aspects became a criterion of scientific truth. Both are products of using tools, separating the organism from the world. The relationship between embodiment, memory, and consciousness are discussed in a parallel paper Kotchoubey, in press and can only briefly be concerned here.
It has even been proposed that the freedom to operate in time, i. The close correspondence between kinds of memory and kinds of consciousness was first demonstrated by Tulving a , b. Also, he showed on the basis of neuropsychological observations that memory is a bi-directional function, i.
In accordance with this idea, the present model of consciousness is hardly compatible with the classical view that memory is about the past. This view is based on the computer metaphor implying strong separation between storing and processing, which does not exist in biological organisms. From an evolutionary viewpoint, memory was selected not to store the past but to use the past in order to optimize the present behavior and to organize future adaptation. This is equally true for short-time memory STM as an obvious derivate from working memory , which is immediate future planning e.
Atkinson and Shiffrin even identified the actual content of consciousness with the content of STM. When we are prompted to remember something, we build hypotheses, check them up and adjust them according to the actual situation to other components of knowledge Bartlett, as well as to social conditions Loftus, ; Gabbert et al.
In other words, our behavior toward the past does not differ from that toward the present or future. Most so-called errors of memory are not malfunctions, they indicate the flexibility and adaptability of our behavior in the time domain Erdelyi, Remembering is neither a faithful recapitulation of past events nor a construction of a reality-independent mental world, but interaction and adaptation Suddendorf and Busby, In the VR of human consciousness an overt action with its real consequences is delayed until the virtual action is virtually rewarded or punished.
Therefore, the time dimension, which originally was a flow of events, is now split into several axes. First, the flow of behavioral events is held, as long as no events happen. The freedom of moving backwards is of vital importance; otherwise, erroneous actions with their negative consequences would be as uncorrectable as they are in real life. Third, although overt behavior is delayed, other processes physiological activity at the cellular, tissue and organ levels, as well as automatic actions go on.
The split time makes human consciousness particularly interesting and dramatic. The combination of the resting external time with the free travel in the virtual time provides us with the ability to quickly actualize in the sense: make actual, efficient in our behavior any remote or possible consequence.
And what is after the event which will happen after Y? This recursive process renders us to know that the day after tomorrow will be followed by the day after the day after tomorrow, and so on up to the day of our death. But, then, what happens after my death? I want to stress, however, that the ability to realize one's whole life and death and to ask what will follow it is not a product of a particular cultural development, but belongs to the most universal properties of human consciousness and immediately results from the basic structure of anticipatory behavior in the virtual space of symbolic games.
The question, why complex human and animal behavior is necessarily free, has been discussed in many details elsewhere Kotchoubey, , In this text, I shall only concern one particular aspect of this general problem, namely the strong feeling of agency, of personal control of one's actions.
This issue clearly demonstrates the advantage of the present model of human consciousness over the prevailing cognitive models. These latter assume that the brain first has to make representations of outer objects, and then, this cognitive activity is complemented by actions to deal with these objects.
Thus a cat's brain first makes a decision that she will jump for a mouse, and then, she needs an additional decision making that she rather than another cat, or a fox, or a raven will jump for the mouse. Such problems do not emerge altogether when we remember that the object of adaptive behavioral control are not our motor actions the output but a particular state of affairs the input Marken, ; Jordan, Humans think in teleological terms Csibra and Gergely, not because such thinking can be useful but because actions cannot be described in terms other than their outcomes Hommel et al.
Actions are voluntary if the input patterns they generate can be covertly tested within the virtual space of consciousness. This definition has important corollaries. It does not require that we are aware of any details of the actions we nevertheless perceive as conscious.
The logical impossibility of such awareness was demonstrated by Levy No behavior can be carried out without taking some aspects of the environment into account. The basis of agency is the simple fact that predators, as a rule, do not attack their own body. What makes this agency the fact of our conscious awareness is the choice. Most lay people simply identify freedom with choice e.
Choice is the result of the fact that virtually performed actions can differ from the actions overtly performed. If there is no this difference, i. But when this difference exists, it proves that in the same situation at least two different actions were possible, and therefore, we had freedom of choice Figure 3. In hindsight, we regard an action as voluntary if we did, or could, estimate possible consequences of several alternatives and selected one whose virtual results were the best 1.
Figure 3. A specific relation of human beings to time and a strong feeling of agency authorship of one's actions are regarded by philosophers from Augustinus to Heidegger as fundamental features of human consciousness.
The scheme shows that these features can be deduced from the model of human consciousness developed in this article. A necessary but not sufficient mechanism of this choice is inhibition of overt behavior.
Therefore, the view that associates volition with the ability to exert inhibitory control of otherwise involuntary actions veto: Libet, deserves attention. Human conscious activity strongly correlates with activation of those brain structures whose main function is inhibition. These structures are specifically active during particularly complex forms of human behavior. However, inhibitory control is a precondition of volition but not volition itself. If I have to repair my car, I must stop it first; but stopping is not repair.
The decisive point is not veto but choice. A good theory does not only shed light at its object, but also at the other views on the same object. As a famous example, the relativity theory not just explains the mechanisms of the Universe; it is also successful in the explanation of why other respectable theories e. Likewise, from the point of view presented here the origins of several alternative theories of consciousness can be apprehended.
Of course, this highly interesting task cannot be pursued in full in this paper; we cannot discuss all existent theories of consciousness in their relationship with the current model. Rather, I shall restrict the review to the approaches apparently similar to the present one. The proposed theory is most similar to embodiment theories of consciousness, simply because it is one of them.
Beyond the general agreement at these four points, different embodiment theories of mind and consciousness build a very broad spectrum varying in their account on the exact role and mechanisms of realization of each point, as well as interactions between them.
The hard discussions running in the last decades within the embodiment camp would, however, lead us far beyond our present topic; they are addressed, e.
To be sure, the present approach shares these four E-points. Particularly, anticipatory regulations we have begun with, are closely related to the principles of embeddedness and enactiveness; and the critical role of tools in my approach fully corresponds to the principle of extendedness. However, to my best knowledge no embodiment theory has up to date been devoted to the issue of the origin and the biological basis of specifically human awareness.
Rather, several representatives of this approach attacked the hard problem of the origin of elementary forms of sentience or perceptual experience e. How successful these attacks have been, should be discussed elsewhere. From my point of view, the sensorimotor theory Hurley, ; Noe, has not convincingly responded to arguments raised by it critics e.
If we assume that simple robots do not have conscious experience, the fact that the proposed embodied and enacted mechanisms of perception can be modeled in robots already refutes the idea that these mechanisms can explain consciousness. The sensorimotor theory is, of course, only one of the embodiment-grounded attempts to explain the emergence of consciousness.
Nevertheless, they have not yet given any systematic account of the transition from the alleged simple sentience to human consciousness, which is the theme of the present paper. Part 2 above exposed the idea that human consciousness is a secure space where behavioral actions are virtually performed, and their consequences are virtually apprehended.
In general, this idea is not new but goes back to the British associationism of the eighteenth century Hesslow, About 40 years ago, Ingvar ; also Ingvar and Philipsson, practically formulated the concept of consciousness as anticipatory simulations; unfortunately, he justified his conclusions by brain imaging data which appear to be of questionable quality today, not surprising given the enormous progress of brain imaging techniques since then.
The same idea of covert behavior underlies the concept of efference copy von Holst and Mittelstaedt, , as well as some control-theoretical models that regard themselves as alternatives to the efference copy theory e.
Particularly interesting from the present viewpoint are the data that virtual performance of actions includes anticipation of action results with simultaneous inhibition of the overt execution of these actions Hesslow, Behavior, originally realized in large feedforward loops including bodily periphery and the environment, can subsequently be reduced to the loops within the brain.
Notwithstanding the clear similarity between my VR metaphor and all these old and recent views, there are substantial differences as well. The present approach is, in contrast, based on the presumption of the control theory that behavior is control of input rather than control of output and cannot, therefore, be regarded as a set of commands sent to muscles.
The very sense of a virtual behavior is obtaining its virtual consequences. But notwithstanding these rather minor differences between all these approaches regarded above in a cavalry manner and the present one, there is a very big difference in the kind of explanation. The primary interest of simulation theorists is a how -explanations. They ask, how, i.
My point, to the contrary, is a why -explanation: why virtual behavior is realized thus and not differently. For example, without the phylogenetic roots in playing behavior, simulated activity could not possess its astonishing freedom to initiate any virtual action in any circumstances, to interrupt or terminate at any deliberate point and to re-start at any moment. The components of communication and tool usage also have profound effects on the nature of human consciousness, as we shall see in the next session.
Thus consciousness is regarded as the product of cognitive activity converted into a form of language to be shared with others. Indeed, what else is specific for human in contrast to the animal consciousness if not the fact that it is based on social cooperation and language-mediated communication? Crudely, many socio-linguistic theories may be classified into pre-structuralist e. The first stress the process of internalization in which social interpersonal processes are transformed into internal cognitive intrapersonal processes.
Consciousness, from this point of view, is the pattern of social relations for example, a child-parent interaction transported into the head. The second class of theories contends that consciousness is based upon hidden cultural and linguistic stereotypes e. The third view insists on the virtually absolute relativity of the structure and content of conscious human behavior and in contrast to structuralism its historical and ideological interpenetration. This view, however, leaves unclear wherefrom the structures or the rules of the game take their stability and causal power if they are not filled by the content of a language-independent world.
Post-structuralists capitalized on this inconsequence and proposed a radical solution for the above problem: if consciousness does not have any meaningful content besides the rules and structures of the game, then, it does not have any rules and structures either Derrida, Thus even the notion of symbolic game became much too restrictive since it may imply that there is something the symbols stand for—but in fact, they stand for nothing.
For itself i. Not only, therefore, everything is merely a sequence of signs, but these signs do not signify anything: the classical opposition between the signifying and the signified de Saussure, is thus annulled. Hence, consciousness is not a game, as previous socio-linguistic theories regarded it, but rather a free play Derrida, whose rules may appear and disappear like clouds in a windy day. From the early socio-linguistic point of view, consciousness is its own manifestation in systems of signs.
From the later socio-linguistic point of view, consciousness is just these systems of signs and nothing more. One can say that these views evolved from the theories of socio-linguistic foundation of consciousness, peaking in the linguistic determinism in Wittgenstein and Whorf , to the theories of the unlimited freedom of consciousness in its historic and linguistic realization. This freedom, from their and my point of view, largely roots in the freedom of the sign, which, in its development from index to symbol, abandoned its causal link to its reference.
Importantly, the notion of language as a symbolic game is not limited by syntax. Rather, it is the very meaning of the words which is determined by their location within the network of tacit verbal rules. Because many very influential linguistic theories originally accrued in philology and cultural anthropology, they may appear to concern only particular forms of consciousness expressed, e.
This is not true. They left their trace even in strongly biological approaches to cognition and consciousness e. From the present point of view, socio-linguistic theories correctly emphasize communication and play as important sources of human consciousness.
However, all these views, traditional and contemporary, philosophically or biologically oriented, completely miss the instrumental nature of human behavior. Many of them talk about tools; e. But besides this, our consciousness is based on simply tools, which are not words, not theories, just tools. Using them, we either attain our goal if we correctly grasp the objective relation between elements of the environment and their properties , or not if our conceptions are wrong. Thus the results of tool usage continuously test the validity of our symbolic games.
If their concepts of sticks and boxes were true, they reached the banana, but when they were false, they remained hungry. It is true that, e. But in addition, the building has to withstand gravity, wind and possibly earthquakes. But it is also important to remember that our ancestors failed to reach bananas using a bundle of straw, simply because the bundle was not hard. The theory of common working space CWS: Baars, , is probably the most elaborated psychological theory of consciousness in the last 30 years.
The theory regards the mind as a coordinated activity of numerous highly specialized cognitive modules Fodor, , whose work is largely automatic. When some of these specialists meet a processing task for which no preprogrammed solution is available, they build a CWS to make this task as well as all proposed solutions open for every other module.
This can be compared with a large audience in which many small groups work each with its own problem, but there is also a possibility to broadcast a problem for the whole audience. Consciousness is this broadcasting; there is a competition for access to it, because the space is only one, and the tasks are many. Therefore, the most interesting processes determining the content of our consciousness are not those which happen in consciousness but those which decide what specialized module s should get access to it.
The CWS theory not only provides an explanation for very many characteristic properties of consciousness, but it is also quite compatible with other interesting theories e. The metaphor of consciousness behind the CWS model is that of a theater Baars, The CWS can be regarded as an open scene accessible for all cognitive modules.
The similarity between the theater metaphor and the VR metaphor is obvious. Both presume a scenery, a show, thus pointing to one of the key components of the present hypothesis, i. Both theater and VR are spaces where things are played. But in this play, we should not play down the differences between the two metaphors. A theater presumes many spectators, who rather passively observe the actors' activity, whereas a VR is concentrated around a single participant, who is actively engaged in this reality.
Furthermore, arbitrariness is much stronger in the theater than in the VR. Millions of people admire opera theater in which they witness how personages express their emotions by continuous singing, which would appear strange and silly in real life. Also interestingly, the theater metaphor does not warrant the uniqueness of consciousness.
Many cities have several theaters, and some people can visit two or three on an evening. Nevertheless, the most established version of the CWS theory assumed that there exists only one common space for each brain and each body, Shanahan, Many concrete predictions of the CWS theory result from the assumption of the strong competition between modules striving for the access to the only possibility to broadcast.
Later on Baars suggested that there can be multiple CWSs working in parallel. Baars and Dennett devoted a lot of intriguing pages to the issue of how this unity can be created by the distributed brain.
Neuroscientists Singer, ; Treisman, ; Tallon-Baudry, regard this question as the main question of the neurophysiological underpinnings of consciousness. Thus we are surprised that we have only one state of consciousness at one time, despite millions of parallel functioning neuronal circuits in our brain. However, we are not surprised when a big animal e. We don't regard this unity as a miracle and don't postulate a specific mechanism of binding these cells into a single organism. Complex behavior is realized in the form of muscular synergies Bernstein, ; Gelfand et al.
These synergies are motor equivalents of the CWS. The unity of consciousness is the unity of behavior. This does not mean that the unity is unproblematic, but the analogy with motor control indicates the correct name for the problem. With the development of a motor skill, the synergy becomes more and more local until it is limited to those muscles only, whose participation is indispensable.
Of course, when we talk about muscles we also mean the whole nervous apparatus these muscles are connected with. Therefore, as far as the unity of the CWS is the unity of complex behavior, there is no contradiction between the CWS theory and the present one. Accordingly, the control of new, unskilled actions is frequently conscious. There, he attacked them with a knife, killing his mother-in-law and severely injuring his father-in-law.
Only then did police discover that he had indeed assaulted his in-laws. Parks claimed that he could not remember anything about the crime. He said that he remembered going to sleep in his bed, then awakening in the police station with bloody hands, but nothing in between. His defence was that he had been asleep during the entire incident and was not aware of his actions Martin, Not surprisingly, no one believed this explanation at first.
However, further investigation established that he did have a long history of sleepwalking, he had no motive for the crime, and despite repeated attempts to trip him up in numerous interviews, he was completely consistent in his story, which also fit the timeline of events.
The specialists eventually concluded that sleepwalking, probably precipitated by stress and anxiety over his financial troubles, was the most likely explanation of his aberrant behaviour. They also agreed that such a combination of stressors was unlikely to happen again, so he was not likely to undergo another such violent episode and was probably not a hazard to others. Given this combination of evidence, the jury acquitted Parks of murder and assault charges.
He walked out of the courtroom a free man Wilson, Consciousness is defined as our subjective awareness of ourselves and our environment Koch, The experience of consciousness is fundamental to human nature. We all know what it means to be conscious, and we assume although we can never be sure that other human beings experience their consciousness similarly to how we experience ours.
Nobody is watching you. Nobody is thinking about you. Very few people even care about you. Why such a seemingly harsh pronouncement? In other words, we want to believe that we are unique and special and just plain fascinating enough to others for them to want to talk about us. Making yourself interesting is time consuming and truly exhausting.
It also prevents you from doing much more meaningful things like connecting with people who care about you, engaging activities you enjoy, or perhaps even making the world a better place. Most people are just trying to get through their daily lives with a modicum of meaning, fulfillment, and joy.
As such, they are focused predominantly on meeting their own needs. They have neither the time nor the energy to devote to people that have little effect on them, such as you. Plus, somewhat ironically, the only concern most people have for you is their own misguided self-consciousness about what you are thinking about them! How successful were you? How did you communicate changes to the people in the team? Tell me about a time when you felt it would benefit the situation to disregard structure or formal processes to achieve a better outcome.
What were the circumstances? How did it turn out? Give me an example of a time when you recognized an opportunity for process improvement in your department or group. What did you do? Tell me about a time you knew you were right, but still had to follow directions or guidelines. Tell me about a time when you had to step away from traditional methods to solve a difficult or complex problem.
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