Consciousness: individuated information in action.

Consciousness is a graded, not all-or-none, phenomenon that can be characterized as dually accessible (from inside and outside), hierarchically referential, bodily determined, and useful in action. A gradational approach risks extending consciousness too broadly—for instance, information integration theory attributes miniscule consciousness even to simple artificial systems like photodiodes. The article argues for empirically justified constraints: globally, conscious systems are limited by the ability to individuate information (evolutionarily embedded, socially altered, and private); locally, limitations follow an action-oriented hypothesis about how states of consciousness are selected. This yields an abstract concept of consciousness that aims to unify the field.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Within theoretical and empirical enquiries, many different meanings associated with consciousness have appeared, leaving the term itself quite vague. This makes formulating an abstract and unifying version of the concept of consciousness - the main aim of this article -into an urgent theoretical imperative. It is argued that consciousness, characterized as dually accessible (cognized from the inside and the outside), hierarchically referential (semantically ordered), bodily determined (embedded in the working structures of an organism or conscious system), and useful in action (pragmatically functional), is a graded rather than an all-or-none phenomenon. A gradational approach, however, despite its explanatory advantages, can lead to some counterintuitive consequences and theoretical problems. In most such conceptions consciousness is extended globally (attached to primitive organisms or artificial systems), but also locally (connected to certain lower-level neuronal and bodily processes). For example, according to information integration theory (as introduced recently by Tononi and Koch, 2014), even such simple artificial systems as photodiodes possess miniscule amounts of consciousness. The major challenge for this article, then, is to establish reasonable, empirically justified constraints on how extended the range of a graded consciousness could be. It is argued that conscious systems are limited globally by the ability to individuate information (where individuated information is understood as evolutionarily embedded, socially altered, and private), whereas local limitations should be determined on the basis of a hypothesis about the action-oriented nature of the processes that select states of consciousness. Using these constraints, an abstract concept of consciousness is arrived at, hopefully contributing to a more unified state of play within consciousness studies itself.