Here we go. Nobody can work much time without making clear the subject of his work. However, I’m not going to offer yet either a definition of consciousness, either an explanation of its properties, either an account for its presence. The final aim of my entire blog is to approach this questions and try to sketch an answer, a point far to be accomplished. Here I am simply trying to clarify what I am talking about when I use the word “consciousness”, and why it is a tricky issue.

With the term “consciousness” I mean subjective experience, that set of first person feels also called “phenomenology” or “qualia”.

I think that most of the people would agree with the way I figure consciousness to myself. It is “that”, the feel, the sensation, the interior presence, the personal way to perceive the world. A trivial reduction of this inner sensations to something like attention will be seen like a theft by almost anyone. So, let’s put aside for now all the academic simplifications that substitute consciousness with wakefulness, responsivity, awareness, sense of self, and so on. Let’s stick to the core of the issue: there is something that it is like to be ourselves (Nagel, 1974).

Historical dualists were definitely right in focusing the attention on the subjective side of consciousness: the mere acknowledgment of consciousness depends on first person identification, and without it we would not be here debating about its nature.

However, before going ahead we should be sure to comprehend each other. We all agree that we have subjective experiences, and that we are speaking of them when we talk about consciousness. But how can we be sure to mean the same thing? Can we be in error in judging our subjectivity? May we live differently the same experiences? May conscious quality seem in a way but be in another? Actually yes. We constantly contradict ourselves about consciousness characteristics. There is no way that, in a large group of people, anyone will agree on the strength of the same painful stimulation, will be able to distinguish two similar kinds of red, or will notice the same details of a visual scene. How can we find out who is consciously feeling pain, who holds two different phenomenologies of red and who has different conscious versions of visual content?

Presence and quality of subjectivity depend on so many factors that, as individuals, we can’t trust our intuitions, even if they are the primary source of data.

Think of a common joke. You put some bad wine into the bottle of a fine one and offer it to a friend. If he gets influenced by the expectations and appreciates it, can you tell what is his effective experience of the wine? Is he deceiving himself altering the bad qualia or are the qualia actually good? Is there a real difference between this two situations and, if so, can we really find it out? Indeed, when the target of the wine joke is yourself, you can’t necessary be sure of the nature of your experience, which may seem fuzzy and retroactively adjust itself.

Another example about the inconsistency of subjectivity is the apparent sharpness of peripheral visual field. We intuitively feel like to see a full resolution picture of what is in front of our eyes, but this is not true. Indeed the parafoveal vision is blurry and heavy desaturated at the point the we can’t distinguish the color of single pencils if a little group of them is put into the visual field periphery – Try it out! Then, how can our experience be sharp if the perceptual information about visual objects is poor? Are we deceiving ourselves altering the bad qualia or are the qualia actually good? Again, there is a real difference between these possibilities?

There are A LOT of situations like these, in which our phenomenology seems confused – or confusing.

The subjective experience that each person feel in the situations I have exposed can’t be denied. But there are many legitimate doubts about boundaries and proprieties of this experience, doubts that can’t be solved appealing only on introspection or folk psychology. A science of phenomenology is needed, a discipline that can employ empiric standards to find out relevant distinctions and bring light on interiority issues – utilizing large samples, check groups and statistics. The Cognitive Approach could let us to find out if we are really conscious of the refrigerator buzz in the background (Block, 1995) or a sort of illusion of presence appear when we first notice it. How? Making use of behavioral data and functional models of awareness.

In conclusion, without a rigorous third person investigation we can only point a finger at the set of phenomenons we call consciousness, but neither define or explain it. The pointing, a sort of a naive observation, has its relevance in noticing the existence and peculiarity of subjectivity, but leave it unintelligible. However, it is not unintelligible in a mystic way, as if consciousness holds a mystery that can’t be solved by human means; it is unintelligible because hypercomplex, unstable, and influenced by so many brain events at so many levels that even the mental subject can deceive himself about the content or presence of his phenomenology.

We all know what we mean by saying that we are conscious of something, but, in some relevant sense, we don’t. Let’s find it out!

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