Individual Consciousness – the ability to experience and remember pain and pleasure

We know almost nothing about what causes consciousness or how it works. But we are intimately acquainted with what it means to be an individual that’s conscious. There are two questions at the heart of what it means to be individually conscious: Who am I, and what’s important to me? I’m going to try to answer both, and I think the answers will give us a good way to define consciousness, a way that most people can agree on. Even though no one knows what actually causes consciousness, we can say that it must have some features or effects for it to count as the kind of consciousness we know as humans.

It’s been said that an organism is conscious “if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like for the organism” and these two questions will help us get at the heart of what that means. Because for an organism to feel like it’s something it must have a feeling of identity of “who I am”. And what it’s like doesn’t matter if nothing matters, if nothing is important. For an organism to be able to experience what it’s like to be itself it needs to be capable of identity and meaning.

What’s important in answering the question “Who am I?” is that the answer should always be the same, day after day and year after year. Despite the changes a person experiences in their life, we want the answer to that question to be the same throughout it all. And to do that we have to first abandon the idea that we’re defined by our bodies. My body has changed dramatically since I was born, and it will continue to change until I die. At the molecular level, in fact, almost every molecule in my body will be replaced every year. Or think of what happens when a person has a limb or an organ removed—we still call them the same person despite the dramatic change. People can even have large parts of their brain damaged or removed, but we still think of them as the same person. Our bodies and even our brains can change, but what can’t change is our consciousness. That’s what makes each of us who we are.

Imagine a pill that would remove your ability to have conscious experiences. Somehow your body and brain would still work perfectly fine. You’d still be able to live and act the same. You just wouldn’t have any conscious experience. It’d be like going to sleep and sleepwalking in a very lifelike and convincing way through the rest of your life until you died. What would it take to convince you to take that pill? To me, that sounds like suicide. It’d be like dying and being replaced by an imposter, and so I don’t think there’s any reward or amount of money I’d accept to make that change. And that’s because our conscious self is our real self. Our bodies and even parts of our brain can change, and we’re still the same person. But if our consciousness is damaged or destroyed, we stop being us.

How do I know that my consciousness stays with me through my life? It’s because I can make a comparison, between what I’m experiencing now and what I remember. I can recall what my experiences were like yesterday, last year, and a moment ago, and I can compare those experiences to right now. I can make that comparison, and everything feels the same to me—every moment is linked to the one before it and forms a chain of continuity that creates a constant identity. I’m always the same person because I can always remember being me. If I suddenly lost all my memories from before this moment, how could I be sure I was still the same person? I don’t think there’d be any way. And so that’s the first requirement for consciousness: to be able to remember.

If we’re talking about the kind of consciousness that we know as humans, it has to include the ability to form and recall memories. Imagine that someday in the future someone invents a consciousness detector that finds the presence of the physical causes of consciousness. And with that detector we might discover that rocks, ants, or computers have the same kind of physical things going on inside them that create consciousness in us. But if those rocks, ants, and computers aren’t able to recall their experiences, then we wouldn’t want to call them conscious, at least not in the same way we are. We’d have to come up with another name for something that can experience, but not remember. And conversely, if we discover some animal, machine, or alien that doesn’t share our neurological causes of consciousness, but they can still have some of the same kinds of experiences we do and can remember them, then that should count towards them being considered conscious. We assume that anything that’s conscious has to have it caused in the same way as our consciousness, but we can’t be sure about that, and so this definition is going to rely on capabilities, not causes.

Determining who I am is dependent on having memories. But there’s more to having an identity than just remembering. Everything isn’t equally important to us. We don’t remember most of our experiences because they don’t matter. What makes the things we do remember different? To answer this, let’s first start with another comparison and another hypothetical invention. If we were able to connect our consciousnesses together and compare them side by side, what experiences are we sure would be the same, if any? Surprisingly, there’s very little that we can be sure we experience in exactly the same way. When we look at a blue sky, can we be sure that we are both experiencing the same exact shade of blue? We both use the same word to describe that color, and we’ve both experienced (and can remember) experiencing blue the same way our whole lives, but there’s no way, without our hypothetical machine, to compare with someone else and check what they’re actually experiencing. It could be that you see everything “normally” and I see everything in perfectly inverted colors compared to you, and there’d be no way for us to figure that out. That’s true for almost everything we experience: sounds, smells, and temperature, for example. If I’d been born experiencing everything “backwards,” I’d think that was normal because I can’t compare my experiences directly to anyone else’s. And so, we have to conclude that the particular way each of us is experiencing all these sensations doesn’t matter to whether we’re conscious or not. Everyone’s experiences could all be different, and we’d all still be conscious. Furthermore, someone who’s blind or deaf isn’t less conscious than anyone else. Almost none of the senses we rely on are critical to being conscious.

Except for pain and pleasure—those senses matter. The experience of feeling good or bad, whether it’s a physical sensation or a mental one, is different than every other kind of experience. Those experiences we can compare very easily. If I burn my fingertip and you get pricked in the finger we both feel pain, and we can agree that we couldn’t get pain confused with a good or pleasurable experience. Everything else could be reversed, but these experiences have a definite direction and value and we can compare and agree that for both of us pain goes in one direction (one we want to avoid) and pleasure goes in the opposite (one we head towards). This kind of feedback gives direction and meaning to our lives, so while we could imagine someone still being conscious without being able to experience sight or sound or almost any other sense, could they be conscious without the ability to feel pain and pleasure? Again, if we’re talking about the kind of consciousness that we know as humans, I don’t think so. A rock or a computer might experience hot and cold or touch or smell, but if it doesn’t have the ability to feel good or bad at all, about anything, then it’s just not conscious in the way we are.

We assume consciousness isn’t just limited to humans. We’re convinced that some other animals must be conscious in a way that’s similar to us because of the way they behave and react. And it’s these two characteristics that we recognize in other people and in other animals: the ability to feel pain and pleasure, and the ability to remember those kinds of feedback experiences. And if we ever discover aliens who are completely different than us in every physical way but share those two critical characteristics with us, then we’ll want to call them conscious, too. No matter how their brain works or what they are made of, if they can somehow have the experiences of pain and pleasure and remember those experiences, then we’ll recognize them as being conscious.

Ultimately, the quality that we call consciousness, however it’s created in us or anything else, gives each of us a feeling of identity through memory and gives meaning to our lives through the things we feel good and bad about. No matter what happens in the future with discoveries about ourselves or anything else, and no matter what technology we invent, I think we’ll want to define consciousness—wherever we find it—by these two qualities. In the next article, we’ll look at how meaning is built up from these feedback experiences, and then we’ll tackle the differences between learning and memory.