Should we use the term to indicate subjective consciousness, the oriented vigilance of a subject, or something else again? In medicine, for example, it can only be used in certain precise conditions: there must be an adequate state of wakefulness, an appropriate functioning of memory and attention, a good capability for discernment and decision-making, and correct temporal and spatial orientation. Another approach to consciousness takes account of the ability to have qualitative experiences (qualia), or again of a moral dimension. In everyday speech it is not uncommon to hear expressions like “I have a clear conscience”, “the voice of conscience”, “you’ve got a strong environmental conscience”, “the character’s conscience”, “your conscience is troubling you”, and so on. Similarly, in religious experience the term conscience alludes to a secret, intimate space, an inner recess where human beings find themselves alone before the transcendent. As in the context of qualitative experience, here too consciousness is an interior sphere that cannot be traced back to any roots. One further approach identifies consciousness with the mind, so that any intentional mental state is “conscious”: a thought, a desire, a belief, a hope, a memory and so on. Strictly memory cannot automatically be attributed to consciousness, even though in the absence of consciousness memory would be fragmented in innumerable discrete experiences, without duration, brief instants of existence, as happens to patients affected by serious memory impairment. And so we could go on, but it is enough to recall a study by Miller (1950), still highly relevant even over half a century on, which listed no less than 17 definitions of consciousness in the scientific sphere alone.

The question remains: can a single word give expression to all these levels of meaning?

In science in general it is common for words to have dozens of different meanings in different contexts - take coherence, cell, wave, species, etc. Even within a sub discipline such words can have three or four technical meanings. The problem arises when philosophers come along and want words to mean the same thing in all propositions, despite the fact that good philosophers have pointed out that it does not work like that. 

The bottom line is that you have to make clear what scope of meaning you are wanting to convey by carefully constructing context in sentences. As long as one does that one can use consciousness in six different ways - or even 17.

I would just point out to Mauro that 'conscience' is a quite different word that covers another range of meanings relating to sense of responsibility.

The duty of science is to strictly define the purpose of its research, and inevitably restrict the semantic arc. Jonathan, in my opinion consciousness and awareness are very different phenomena. Not distinguishing one from another is expose oneself to additional philosophical and religious ambiguities, and this would dramatically delay the clarification of our problem. If we keep it that way, we will never clarify the causal relationships between DNA, the neuron, consciousness and free will. Moreover, being aware is not the same thing as having consciousness. To be conscious, the double helix is needed. On the contrary, to be aware, you need to experience the world.

first, having a stable data point is important. the dictionary is that. This gives us meaning reference.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consciousness

And thus for any word, there can be subtly agreed-to meanings. Consciousness if the noun form of conscious, the adjective (descriptor). It mainly means "aware" and a kind of awareness as opposed to complete unawareness, as in the antonym "unconscious" or "unconsciousness". 

Thus, if we look at an elevated state of being, spiritually, consciousness is still the accurate English word, where in Zen or ancient East, because "enlightenment" really is just being completely aware, rather than asleep or states similar to sleep where a person is either completely unaware or simply having a relationship only with the qualia of the mind.. in an extreme case... schizophrenia with inner voices they don't realize are their own or worse, images of others.

The challenge I see for neuroscience is the noun form trying to identify an object called "consciousness". It must be pointed to, measures, weights, touched, to be real. Maybe just a holdover of Descartes Dualism? Take "love" and reduce it from qualia (an untrusted science phenomenon) and reduce it to measurable mass, and we may be left with a chemical reaction to oxytocin release from a stimulus... and possible one detectable area of the brain.

Again, keeping with the meaning of awareness and a measure for how aware a person may be, from completely unconscious asleep, to varying level of awareness, may give us more accurate language. Possibly Emotional Quotient is an example on the way to measures of consciousness?

I'd say the subjective nature of qualia, which is highly important to the subject, but not higly measureable to the researcher continues the challenge. Descartes Dualism keeps and either/or model. Maybe you will find a bridge in your work and introduce the world to something new it can wrestle with?

Dear Erol,

I don't see Descartes distinction between indivisible dynamic units qua souls and divisible dynamic patterns called matter as the issue really. Descartes's distinction proved to be more or less right but just not portioned out correctly. Leibniz resolved that by saying that the difference was simply that between individuals and aggregates.

Science does not really have objects - this is the myth of the non-scientific view of science. Science only ever deals with dynamic relations. At the fundamental quantum level these are in a sense events - there are no objects. Objects are convenient labels for the aggregates dealt with by the more traditional Newton-based account. So at the fundamental level, where presumably we should look for consciousness, since it cannot really be a property of aggregates, we should be looking for some sort of event or relation. I think that fits nicely with your intuition that we are indeed not looking for an object. Consciousness is attributed to a subject so we need to consider the event as having some sort of protagonist whose consciousness is this event. That is straightforward since in modern physics all fundamental events are relations between world, in the form of universal fields, and modes of excitation - the individual dynamic units. As Leibniz points out, since all we can ever know of is the dynamics, with each indivisible unit of dynamics being in a sense its own 'story of action' then in some sense the consciousness must be the entity, although it seems to remain useful to regard it is a 'property' of the entity if we do  not want too major a dislocation in the way we are familiar with using language.

So the challenge for neuroscience is to identify the right events - the ones whose consciousness is the sort we discuss. I think we will be there in about five years but at present much of neuroscience is ignoring these basic questions.

 Roberta Barni ,

I agree with you that the  word ''consciousness'' is special in being associated with the most banal elementary aspect of life, being awake, being aware and also being associated with the most exalted, highest aspect of life : "enlightenment", ''pure consciousness''.  It is also peculiar word in cognitive science because these sciences as all sciences have to be objective and so make not subjective references and consciousness can only be subjective by definition.  Its very existence denies its objectivisation and thus the project to objectify it.    Scientifically, science is a discourse about what can be publicly observed while consciousness is never observed but is the observing.  Saying I will scientifically define consciousness is an epistemological contradiction.  But in the human language real, consciousness is implicitly assume for all animate being.  Our language is built along this assumption.  When we interact with another (normal) human being we naturally assume the other person having the same type of consciousness that we do.  So we are naturally at home with the idea of other consciousness and naturally see other behaviors as totally compatible with this assumption.  Doubting this assumptions is almost unthinkable while in science nothing can be observed to demonstrate it although all that is observed require it.  Science begins by rejecting any subjective references; should we be surprised that the scientific endavor to discover what is subjective dooms from the start?

It is indeed a very special word meaning to totally different meanings. 

I believe that the reflections that the various interventions have so far caused (and which I hope will continue to cause) are very interesting. Thanks to you all!

Bringing the matter to my field, Ezra Pound said (forgive me, I quote only the sense) that the nature of poetry is precisely to concentrate the maximum degree of meaning using as little space as possible. To better illustrate this, I thought of an author on which production I return often and willingly, Italo Svevo. His greatest novel was titled "Confessions of Zeno" (Zeno is the protagonist) and we could say that the whole structure of the novel is centered, in a certain way, just on the ambiguity of the term 'consciousness' - what meaning of consciousness the author refers to? All of them would fit (Even though the work is clearly aimed at the nascent ironic psychoanalysis, but that's another story).

In short, whether in literature, and the arts, a polysemy can be a trigger mechanism for the sciences the question remains as a problem to solve, a limit, or at least something to narrow down, for literature the same phenomenon often becomes a strong aesthetic-expressive resource.

Even in the most enlightened state of mind I can not separate between realm and consciousness, one is entwined in the other like an image and an object in a mirror. 

Désolé! Mes champs de recherchent gravitent autour de la linguistique française.

I think the real problem is to determine what consciousness is. In my opinion is an original event generated by the interaction of different levels – neural infrastructures, qualitative-subjective experiences and functional units – that are logically interconnected. Why an original bio-physical event rather than an emerging event? Because the latter concept involves a number of ambiguities. In everyday discourse, the term “emergence” indicates the appearance of a new order of things from the interaction of the elements of a system: this phenomenon – present in both elementary and highly complex environments – cannot be inferred from the action of the individual components of the system. High levels of complexity make it difficult (if not impossible) to reduce a phenomenon to its elementary components. It is clear that one must exercise prudence when it comes to announcing the emergence of something new. There is no doubt that studies in physics concerning chaotic phenomena and dynamic systems that deny equilibrium have added to our store of knowledge. However, this does not mean that concepts like emergence or auto-organization have enabled us to make significant progress in our understanding of elementary neurobiological processes. And besides, the statement that consciousness must have emerged from auto-adaptive processes is like saying that an observed event has been mechanically produced by a ‘lower-level’ structure or that deterministic phenomena generate others that are not deterministic. Taken to its extreme consequences, emergence would be a sort of reductionism that is even more radical than its classic counterpart. In fact, whereas in classic reductionism the process of reduction was methodologically limited to nervous functions ordered according to a hierarchy, nowadays the process of reduction is ontologically extended to the whole range of phenomena, from the neuron to consciousness

Dear Mauro,

I am not sure I follow all of your arguments but I think I very much agree about the scepticism over emergence. It has become popular to link emergence to the unexpected dynamic patterns of complex systems. But the fact that you can model these on computers (as for attractors in chaotic systems e.g.) indicates that they are not emergent, not a 'sum more than parts'. They are exactly the sum of the dynamic components. They are unexpected, but not emergent.

On the other hand condensed matter physics presents us with what I consider true emergence in the form of the appearance of new dynamic modes with spontaneous breakage of symmetry. When water freezes to ice conservation of energy appears to be violated. The calculations based on thermal energy of molecules does not add up. New dynamic components with energy content have to be postulated. These are phonons. They are not emergent properties of anything, but emergent entities. There is now a a very good theoretical system for explaining when and where they will arise. 

So if we equate fundamental dynamic entities with 'actions' or 'events' rather than 'particles', as physics indicates we should then wherever there are certain patterns of order in brains that break symmetries we should find new biophysical events that genuinely emerge 'from nowhere' or at least from a symmetry breakage. It seems reasonable to suggest that consciousness is the dynamic relation in any one such event, as considered from the perspective of the mode of excitation rather than the universe it interacts with.

I am not sure what point you are making about reductionism. I am personally not convinced that reduction is a concept of great interest here but I may have missed your point.

We're so far from having a useful concept of consciousness that Elizabeth Irvine can write that consciousness is not acceptable as a scientific notion.  I recommend her book on this highly.  

Dear Jonathan, I think that the matter concerns both the substance and the method .In my opinion 1) consciousness is the expression of specific infrastructure (the brainstem reticular formation, the basic set of somatic-sensing structures and so on); 2) it can only be studied through direct observation of neuronal activity and its functions. Then there is the awareness, which is a very different scientific phenomenon and concerns eminently our relational life. My fear is that if we continue not to distinguish things and defend our old vocabulary will slow the growth of knowledge. I am afraid that, at this rate, we will come to the comparison with advanced forms of artificial consciousness without having understood much of ourselves and maybe they will look to us as we look at the fossils of the African savannah.

It is time to re-open a big discussion on this issue, well beyond the confines of the classical disciplines. Don´t you think?

Agree with the spirit of your comment, Mauro. However, at least in UK English consciousness and awareness are considered pretty equivalent. We may need new terms but my impression is that rather than creating neologisms scientists often do better with old terms but carefully constructed sentence context. I prefer myself not to talk too much abut consciousness because it implies two things - a basic mode of phenomenally or manifestness and then a level of complexity of content that may include sense of time and space etc. The solution to the basis of the first may have little to do with the solution to the basis of the second.

Dear James,

I am not sure that what Elizabeth Irvine writes need other us. A notion is useful in science if at least a few people have some interesting questions to ask about it. A lot of people seem to think consciousness is somehow outside science but I think that reflects a lack of understanding of what underpins science, rather as Arthur Eddington pointed out.

For ages philosophers and scientists have obstinately clung to the notion of the unitarity and the constancy of consciousness throughout time. Today, a large quantity of evidence shows that it is in fact a many-sided process which simultaneously contains different contents within itself, each element of which has its own intentionality. This internal plurality requires a clarification of both the system that unifies the different contents, as well as of the biophysical-molecular mechanisms at the origin of the multiple representational contents of unified experience. The model that derives from it has two possible variations: in the first one, consciousness is generated by a single central nervous system, in which information is represented and then carried into consciousness; in the second, consciousness emerges from the co-activation of contents programmed by structures spread out in the brain that, in a unitary process, simultaneously process countless pieces of information.

Dear Mauro,

If things are like this, what is the interface and the relationship between the brain and the activity of consciousness? In other words, in what way do the contents of experience – which contribute in multiple ways to instantaneous experience – reach cerebral integration?

Dear Roberta,

your question captures a crucial point: that of the difference between a plural model and a unified model of consciousness. In fact, if conscious experience is the result of the work of the central nervous system, where informational content must be represented in order to be brought to consciousness; or of a process of unitary consciousness-creation on which the brain simultaneously acts by processing a great quantity of different information, then consciousness is a monodromic phenomenon, which takes place only in the brain. On the contrary, activities with different elements, each one generated by cerebral mechanisms spread out in the brain, produce a plural phenomenology of consciousness. Here, the contents are separate from each other and are exposed to intra-sensory and intersensory influences that, having a reciprocal impact on each other, co-determine the contents of consciousness. In a plural model, in which the mechanisms of consciousness are multiple and localized, these interactions are perfectly constant. Ramachandran (2004) has insisted on the concrete plausibility of a model which integrates visual, auditory, tactile, proprioceptive and other types of experiences. These individual spheres, which are relatively independent, can be altered or marginalized without influencing each other.