Mystery Of The Elements That Make Up Human Consciousness

A widely studied topic is consciousness. A significant part of the debate arises from the fact that there is no one definition. Consciousness can be characterized as something that vanishes when we fall into a dreamless sleep and appears when we wake up (Gamez, 2014). Yet this isn't the only interpretation of consciousness and due to this reason examining consciousness is complicated. Despite this, there has been some agreement on elements that make up consciousness.

Two of these components are qualia, how we see something (qualitative experience) and subjectivity, something that an individual experience that cannot be studied objectively (Searle, 2013). Many approaches have been developed to study the complicated nature of consciousness and in this essay, we will be looking at two traditional approaches early psychophysics and structuralism and neural correlates of consciousness and information integration theory which are a modern approach.

The earliest approach to understanding consciousness was the early psychophysics by Fechner (1801–1887). Historians described this methodology as monistic and Fechner described it as a study looking at the association between the stimulant and sensation or experience (Hawkins, 2011). This approach tries to understand the subjectivity of consciousness and tries to use the first-person ontology but cannot be considered very successful. Fechner developed this theory based on Weber (1846) who developed Weber's law which suggests that people only look at the ratio of difference rather than the absolute difference (Giovanelli, 2017).

The advantage of Weber's law is that it has been proved even in animal studies especially on monkeys (Nieder and Miller, 2003). A further merit is the ‘just noticeable difference’ which epitomizes a significant truth about how the nervous system encodes data (Read, 2015). Murray (1993) suggests that while Fechner approved Weber's Law, it still failed at extremely high or low intensities. Moreover, the author question if sensation strength measurements are associated with the stimulus and other cognitive factors.

Structuralism, a traditional approach, was created by Wundt, which attempts to recognize the essential 'structures' of consciousness and uses introspection to comprehend and distinguish these structures (Lundin, 2010). This approach better captures the subjectivity element of consciousness due to the use of introspection that psychophysics failed to capture. Introspection is the task of asking participants to express what they are experiencing while carrying out a mental task (Bitbol & Petitmengin, 2016). This approach was valued as it utilises introspective data which looks at the first-person phenomenon of consciousness (subjectivity) (Weger & Wagemann, 2015).

Most researches would concur that the idea of consciousness isn’t just specific psychological function but a subjective experience we have that cannot be easily understood through a third person account (Overgaard, 2015) and is the only approach to understand the qualitative part of consciousness (Weger & Wagemann, 2015). Conversely, it has been criticised that data from introspection is very subjective and cannot be confirmed which raises a question of validity and reliability (Costall, 2006). Moreover, Freud suggested that the majority of our psychological working occurs unconsciously (Feyaerts & Vanheule, 2017). If so, using introspection won't help comprehend consciousness as the participants won’t attend to this process (Block, 2011) and hence will encounter problems when expressing verbally.

Furthermore, the verbal report relies upon language and consequently cannot be applied to other species, young children, people with language impairment (Seth et al., 2008) and patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) (Harrison et al 2013). In addition, Gestalt psychology disagreed with structuralism theory arguing that the consciousness cannot be studied by breaking it into smaller elements while that regardless of the orientation of something the perception stays the same (Rock & Palmer, 1990). Dehaene and Naccache (2001) propose that these introspective data should be recorded alongside other psychophysiological methods as this is still valuable and the primary source of information.

The improvement of technologies led to the development of Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC) which is a neuroscientific approach and considered a materialist view. NCC is said to be the lowest amount of neural mechanisms required for a conscious experience (Koch et al., 2016). Neuroimaging and no report paradigms were applied to comprehend this theory. The benefit of using neuroimaging is that it will assist us with recognizing consciousness when there is no behaviour (Harrison et al, 2013). Monti et al., (2010) discovered proof of consciousness in patients with DOC using fMRI. Correspondingly, a study found the best way to identify loss consciousness is by looking at high-amplitude slow waves in EEG (Murphy et al., 2011).

In contrast, Gosseries et al (2014) propose that there are other stimuli that can cause an automatic activation in the brain making it hard to confine which activation is caused because of consciousness. A study looking at speech perception in anaesthetic patients showed support for this (Davis et al., 2007). Besides, NCC doesn't clarify how qualia are present and mention only what parts of the brain are active when being occupied with a specific task (Overgaard, 2017) consequently not answering the hard problem of consciousness.

Finally, it is contended that no report paradigm, a verbal report can, in fact, have an impact on the neural events taking place making the experiment more unreliable than without this (Overgaard and Fazekas, 2016). This has shown to direct attention towards metacognitive activities over what they are experiencing (Aru et al., 2012). Finally, NCC tries to capture qualia using the no-report paradigm, but still hasn’t been able to completely comprehend it due to its subjective nature and cannot be objectively observed easily (Kanai & Tsuchiya, 2012) but this is better captured in IIT.