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Foundations of Consciousness

The conscious mind is life as we experience it; we see the world, feel our emotions, and think
our thoughts thanks to consciousness. This book provides an easy introduction to the founda-
tions of consciousness; how can subjective consciousness be measured scientifically? What
happens to the conscious mind and self when the brain gets injured? How does conscious-
ness, our subjective self or soul, arise from the activities of the brain?
Addressing the philosophical and historical roots of the problems alongside current
scientific approaches to consciousness in psychology and neuroscience, Foundations of
Consciousness examines key questions as well as delving deeper to look at altered and higher
states of consciousness. Using student-friendly pedagogy throughout, the book discusses
some of the most difficult to explain phenomena of consciousness, including dreaming,
hypnosis, out-of-body experiences, and mystical experiences.
Foundations of Consciousness provides an essential introduction to the scientific and
philosophical approaches to consciousness for students in psychology, neuroscience, cogni-
tive science, and philosophy. It will also appeal to those interested in the nature of the human
soul, giving an insight into the motivation behind scientist’s and philosopher’s attempts to
understand our place as conscious beings in the physical world.

Antti Revonsuo is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Skövde,

Sweden, and Professor of Psychology at the University of Turku, Finland. He has been
conducting research on consciousness and the philosophical mind-brain problem since the
early 1990s, focusing on dreaming and consciousness and on the neural correlates of visual
consciousness. He has published two books on consciousness, Inner Presence: Consciousness
as a Biological Phenomenon (MIT Press, 2006) and Consciousness, The Science of
Subjectivity (Psychology Press, 2010). Revonsuo is also known for his evolutionary-
psychological theory of dreaming, the threat-simulation theory.
Foundations of Consciousness

Antti Revonsuo
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
 2018 Antti Revonsuo
The right of Antti Revonsuo to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Revonsuo, Antti, author.
Title: Foundations of consciousness / Antti Revonsuo.
Description: New York : Routledge, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017007651| ISBN 9780415594660
(hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780415594677 (pbk. : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781315115092 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Consciousness.
Classification: LCC BF311 .R3954 2017 | DDC 153—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007651

ISBN: 978-0-415-59466-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-59467-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-11509-2 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
Contents

List of figures viii

Preface: consciousness – the dark energy of the brain? ix
Acknowledgments xi

1 Psychology and the scientific study of consciousness 1

Psychology focuses on the study of psychological reality 1
Early psychology as the science of the conscious mind 2
20th-century psychology as the science of behavior, cognition,
and the unconscious 2
Psychology without consciousness: the baby was thrown out
with the bathwater 3
21st-century psychology welcomes consciousness back 4
Three modern philosophical problems: “what is it like”, “the Explanatory
Gap”, and “the Hard Problem” 4
Some research problems in the science of consciousness 6

2 What is consciousness? 11
The concept of consciousness 11
Phenomenal consciousness 12
The structure of phenomenal consciousness 14
Reflective consciousness: the thinking conscious mind 15
Self-awareness 16
Summary: three core concepts of consciousness 19
The state of being conscious and the particular contents of consciousness 20
Consciousness and behavior: zombies and inverse zombies 21
Confusing concepts 23
Landmark study: consciousness in the vegetative state 27

3 The philosophy of consciousness 28

Philosophy probes the fundamental questions about consciousness 28
The fundamental nature of consciousness 29
Dualism: the ghost in the machine 30
vi Contents
Monistic materialism (physicalism) 33
Reductive materialism 33
Emergent materialism 36
Idealism 37
Neutral monism 38
Functionalism 40
The philosophical core of the mind–body problem 42
The Hard Problem and the Explanatory Gap 44
Have we reached the limits of science? 45
Landmark study: what is it like to be a bat? 47

4 The history of consciousness in psychological science 48

Introduction 49
Before the Golden Age: a science of consciousness shall never be 49
Prelude to consciousness science: the scientific measurement
of consciousness 50
Wilhelm Wundt: the founding father of experimental psychology 51
The atoms of consciousness: Titchener and Structuralism 52
The dynamic stream and the holistic field of consciousness 54
The rise and fall of the First Golden Age 55
Why psychology should NOT be the science of consciousness 56
Cognitive science: a science of the mind, devoid of consciousness 58
Towards the new Golden Age of consciousness science 59

5 Methods for the scientific study of consciousness 61

How to measure consciousness scientifically 62
Subjective verbal reports: dream research 63
Problems with descriptive introspection 64
Content analysis of verbal reports 68
Experience sampling methods 69
Thinking out loud 69
Retrospective questionnaires 70
Experimental methods to study consciousness in the laboratory 71

6 Neuropsychology and consciousness 77

Introduction 77
Neuropsychology and the unity of visual consciousness 78
Dissociations and consciousness 81
Deficits of self-awareness 86

7 The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) 94

Introduction 95
Methods in NCC research 95
NCCs of consciousness as a state 97
 Contents vii
Vegetative state and other global disorders of consciousness 98
NCCs of visual consciousness 99

8 Dreaming 107
A brief history of dreaming and consciousness 107
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations 110
Sleep paralysis 110
Sleep mentation vs. dreaming 111
The contents of dreaming 112
Why do we dream? 115
Lucid dreaming 117
Bad dreams and nightmares 119
Night terrors 119
Sleepwalking and nocturnal wandering 120
REM sleep behavior disorder and dreamwalking 120
Landmark study: induction of self-awareness in dreams through
frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity 124

9 Hypnosis 125
What is hypnosis? 125
Brief history of hypnosis 126
Hypnotic induction and different types of suggestion 127
Hypnotic suggestibility 128
Is hypnosis an altered state of consciousness? 129
What happens to consciousness under hypnosis? 130
Theoretical studies vs. clinical applications of hypnosis 132

10 Higher states of consciousness 134

Introduction 134
Meditation 135
Optimal experience and flow 136
Runner’s High 138
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) 138
Near-death experiences (NDEs) 142
Mystical experiences 147
Enlightenment: the highest state of consciousness? 148
Landmark study: increased global functional connectivity
correlates with LSD-induced ego dissolution 153

Afterword 154
Glossary 157
Index 167
Figures

2.1 Consciousness “on” 13

2.2 Consciousness “off” 13
2.3 Primary consciousness 14
2.4 Reflective consciousness 15
2.5 Self-awareness 17
2.6 Zombie 22
3.1 Interactionist dualism 30
3.2 Reductive materialism 34
3.3 Emergent materialism 36
3.4 Functionalism 40
4.1 Behaviorism 58
6.1 Localization of damage in neglect 81
6.2 Neuropsychological tests that reveal neglect 82
6.3 V1 and blindsight 83
6.4 The Burning House experiment 85
6.5 (a) Visual perception in the split-brain 89
6.5 (b) Visual perception in the split-brain 89
7.1 Binocular rivalry 100
8.1 The continuum of consciousness in sleep 111
10.1 Out-of-body experience 139
Preface
Consciousness – the dark energy of the brain?

The world we live in is a mysterious place. Science explores the mysteries of the universe
and tries to solve them by using the best available evidence. Eventually, science transforms
mysteries into theories and explanations that make sense of the world.
Although science has taken huge steps forward, many profound questions still remain.
A list of the top 25 questions for 21st-century science was published by the prestigious
journal Science in 2005. The number one enigma is: What is the universe made of? That is
not for psychological science to solve, but the second question on the list is fundamental for
psychology: What is consciousness and how is it related to the brain?
This book deals with the mystery of consciousness. We will make an expedition across
psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience as they try to transform the mystery of conscious-
ness into theories and explanations through systematic inquiry and scientific research.
Our conscious mind consists of the subjective experiences – thoughts, emotions, sen-
sations, and perceptions – that we undergo every moment throughout our lives. From our
first-person perspective, our own conscious mind is the most fundamental fact of our lives.
Back in the 17th century, the philosopher René Descartes famously showed that we can be
more certain of the existence of our own consciousness than of any other thing in the world;
indeed, we can be absolutely certain about it. Cogito, ergo sum – I experience conscious men-
tal states, therefore I am, and therefore, those states must be something that exists. As long
as there are any conscious thoughts or experiences going on for me at all, I can be absolutely
certain that those thoughts and experiences exist; that they (and me, the conscious subject
experiencing them) must be something rather than nothing.
Yet, although we know directly and with absolute certainty that our own consciousness
exists, not even the best scientific instruments can observe consciousness or read out its
private contents. Take the fanciest brain scanners in the world to capture the most detailed
images of the conscious human brain inside our heads, where the conscious mental states
seem to be going on somehow. Still you cannot find anything there inside the brain that
would look remotely like the subjective stream of a vivid conscious mental life, full of sensa-
tions, percepts, thoughts, and emotions, flowing in the brain. All we can say is that particular
patterns of brain activity inside our skulls occur simultaneously with particular subjective
experiences in the conscious mind. But we do not understand how those activities in the brain
relate to our subjective mental life.
Our subjective mental life or consciousness is akin to an invisible ghost living somewhere
inside the biological machinery of the brain. Like the dreams we have in the night, we feel
our conscious existence in the world as a private experience, but our lives as conscious beings
cannot as such be captured by recording our brainwaves or by scanning our brain activity.
Nor can any adventurous scientist explore our consciousness by extracting experiences from
x Preface
the brain or by personally entering someone’s consciousness like an explorer searching for
Terra Incognita, the unknown lands. That kind of exploration is possible only in fantasy and
science fiction. In the Star Trek series, Mr. Spock uses a method called “Vulcan Mind-Meld”,
which allows the direct sharing of consciousness between two minds. In the Harry Potter sto-
ries, Professor Dumbledore extracts long-gone past experiences from the Pensieve, a magical
depository of memories. Professor Dumbledore allows Harry to live through someone else’s
life by getting “inside” the stored conscious memories, as if they were stored video clips of
subjective lives lived. But this is just fantasy. In the real world, it would be a great scientific
breakthrough indeed if another person’s consciousness could be entered like a virtual reality.
Unfortunately, psychologists or neuroscientists have not (yet) invented a scientific version of
the Vulcan Mind-Meld, or the magical Pensieve: Outsiders still cannot see, feel, or directly
share our experiences. Many philosophers believe such inventions will forever be beyond the
reach of science.
The two biggest scientific mysteries in the 21st century, the nature of the physical uni-
verse and the nature of consciousness, are somewhat alike. According to our best current
scientific theories, the physical universe is for the most part made of unknown invisible sub-
stances called “dark matter” and “dark energy”. None of our physical research instruments
can currently detect them. We do not know what they are made of. Their existence is only
indirectly revealed to our scientific instruments through the surprising behavior of stars and
galaxies. Yet, if the scientists’ calculations are correct, the invisible, mysterious dark, stuff
makes up by far most of the physical matter and energy in the universe!
In a similar vein, the fundamental nature of mind – the “stuff” that our conscious mental
life is made of – remains a mystery for science. There is a dark secret in the heart of psychol-
ogy as well. Consciousness is akin to a mysterious “dark energy” of brain activity. We know
with absolute certainty that consciousness exists, yet science knows not what it really is.
Although consciousness is an enigmatic phenomenon, this is not to say that it could not or
should not be a part of science. Dark matter and dark energy are legitimate, mainstream, hot
topics in some of the most highly developed “hard” sciences such as physics, astronomy, and
cosmology. Consciousness, the dark energy of the brain, has recently become an equally hot
topic in the mainstream sciences of the mind and brain. To understand who we are and what
our place in the universe is, science needs to tell us what the human conscious mind is, where
precisely it is located if it is somewhere in the brain, how it is produced by brain activity, and
how to measure it with scientific instruments.
The mystery of consciousness can be explored and will most likely be solved by psycho-
logical science, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy in collaboration. This little book
will tell you how far we have made progress in this continuing journey to understand the
fundamental nature of the conscious mind.
Acknowledgments

During the writing of this book I have been financially supported by the School of Bioscience,
University of Skövde, Sweden, the Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Finland,
and by the Academy of Finland, which is most gratefully acknowledged.
1 Psychology and the scientific study of
consciousness

Chapter outline

•• Psychology literally means the study of psyche or soul.

•• Psychological science originally defined itself as the science of the conscious
mind.
•• During most of the 20th century, psychology did not accept consciousness as
a legitimate topic of scientific research.
•• Currently, consciousness is one of the hottest research topics of 21st-century
psychological science.
•• Consciousness is studied by psychological science in collaboration with
philosophy and cognitive neuroscience.
•• Although consciousness involves many philosophical problems, it can now be
studied by empirical psychology and neuroscience.

Psychology focuses on the study of psychological reality

The overall goal of science is to describe and explain how the world works. “The world”, of
course, is a rather complex thing to study. Therefore, different branches of science are spe-
cialized in the study of the different levels of complexity in the world. Some phenomena, like
atoms, X-rays, black holes, and Higgs bosons, reside at the purely physical levels of organi-
zation, studied by physics, astronomy, and cosmology. Other, more complex phenomena,
such as DNA molecules, flu viruses, lotus flowers, dragonflies, and squirrels reside at the
chemical or biological levels, studied by chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and neuroscience.
If the world, and science along with it, is organized according to the different levels
of complexity, where does the conscious human mind, and the psychological science
that studies it, fit in? What is the psychological reality like and how might it be studied
scientifically? This question has been surprisingly hard to answer. Throughout its his-
tory, psychology has struggled to define itself and the reality it studies, and one of the
major problems here has been whether consciousness can be taken seriously as a topic in
psychological science.
Literally, “psychology” means the study of the soul (from Greek psyche, soul). Modern
psychological science could hardly define itself by referring to something as spiritual and
elusive as the “soul”. Thus, during its history, spanning the last 150 years, the science of
2 Psychology and the study of consciousness
psychology has fervently tried to get rid of the religious and philosophical baggage that the
notion of the psyche, our mind as a spirit-like “soul”, was originally burdened with.
Therefore, in the history of scientific psychology, the concept of “soul” was quickly
replaced by the concept of “consciousness”. This move seemed to work well, at least for a
while. The notion of consciousness preserves our intuitive idea that psychological science
studies the very same human mind that each of us intimately knows and feels from the inside.
Psychological science studies our subjective psychological reality or the subjective stream of
mental life. We call that reality “consciousness” rather than “soul”.
From the internal perspective, our conscious mind appears to us as a sentient being inside
our head who looks at the world through our eyes, has perceptual experiences, feels the
human body and its movements and its emotional states from the inside, and controls its
behaviors with a free will. In the conscious mind, we experience our pains and pleasures,
the happiness of our lives as well as the painful sufferings; our bodily needs such as hunger,
thirst and sexual desire; our fears, loves and other emotional states. We also have thoughts
ceaselessly running through our conscious mind in silent internal speech, sometimes accom-
panied by mental images. Even when we are asleep, the conscious mind is not totally absent,
but we experience private adventures in imaginative and sometimes bizarre dream-worlds.
The human conscious mind consists of a ceaseless stream of subjective experiences.
Subjective experiences, in all their endless forms most beautiful, represent one of the most
fundamental topics of psychological science.

Early psychology as the science of the conscious mind

In the 19th century, the first psychological scientists figured out that subjective experiences
such as simple color sensations can be systematically measured. The participants in psycho-
logical laboratory experiments were presented with different kinds of carefully controlled
physical stimuli (colors, tones, weights). They reported the subjective experiences elicited
by those stimuli. To do so, they used a method called introspection. In introspection, a per-
son looks into their own mind and, consequently, carefully describes the contents of their
consciousness. The subjective contents of consciousness and their relation to objective stim-
ulation of the senses thereby became measurable.
Introspection, as it was used in psychological laboratory experiments, was taken to be the
core method for data collection in the science of psychology. Otherwise, psychology was
regarded as no different from the other laboratory sciences, such as physiology. But only in
psychology was it absolutely necessary to use introspection to obtain any information at all
about the happenings inside the test subject’s conscious mind.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, psychology defined itself as the science of the
conscious mind and mostly focused on systematically charting, by introspective methods,
very simple types of conscious experiences such as sensations of color and sound, and their
relation to different types of physical stimulation.

20th-century psychology as the science of behavior, cognition, and

the unconscious
But there was a nagging problem that contaminated introspective psychology. No one else from
the outside can see or confirm what the subjects in an introspective experiment really experi-
ence, or whether their reports are accurate accounts of the conscious events inside their minds.
The conscious mind is completely hidden from public and objective scientific observations.
 Psychology and the study of consciousness 3
Any method that allows only one privileged person (the test subject, the participant in
the study) to observe and describe a phenomenon cannot be truly scientific. This was the
devastating argument put forward by behaviorism, the influential school of thought that
took over scientific psychology in the early 20th Century. Subsequently, “consciousness”
was declared to be a taboo subject in academic psychology. Behaviorists judged it to be an
equally unscientific concept as the earlier metaphysical notion of “soul” – they believed that
“consciousness” was merely the old notion of “soul” smuggled back into scientific psychology
in a clever disguise!
Furthermore, around the same time in early 20th century, psychiatry and clinical psy-
chology also lost interest in the study of consciousness. Instead, they focused on the newly
discovered idea of the deeply unconscious mind. In 1900, Sigmund Freud argued that the
deeply unconscious psychical layers constitute the most fundamental reality of the human
mind. The deeply unconscious mind is utterly unknown to our conscious mind and it cannot
be reached by introspection.
This is how the behaviorist assault and the Freudian attack against consciousness led
to the complete rejection of consciousness from psychological science. For most of the
20th century, psychology flatly rejected consciousness. Instead, academic psychology
redefined itself as the science of behavior, and later on in the 1970s and 1980s, also as
the science of cognition and (mental) information processing. Clinical psychology and
psychiatry defined themselves as the study of the unconscious mind and its manifestations
in mental illness. For nearly 100 years, psychology ignored or downright denied the existence
of consciousness.

Psychology without consciousness: the baby was thrown out with the
bathwater
But a psychology ignoring and denying consciousness was doomed to fail.
Consciousness is an essential feature of our minds. It is the home of our personal psy-
chological existence in this world. Without consciousness, there is nobody home: no
subject inside you; no one living, feeling, and experiencing your life. According to most of
the 20th-century psychology, your life as a person consists of robotic external behaviors,
computer-like information processing in your brain, and deeply unconscious primitive
angers, fears, and desires, or totally non-conscious neural activities in the brain, outside
your control.
It is hard to recognize ourselves in that kind of unconscious, soulless, mechanistic image
of what it is to live a human life. Without my consciousness, my life as lived and me as a
person would not exist as a sentient being at all because in that case, throughout my whole
life I would not feel anything whatsoever. Perhaps there would be an empty, humanlike
body, looking like me, wandering around without purpose but mimicking human actions –
a zombie-like, mindless creature going through the motions of my life, but not feeling or
experiencing anything at all. But that kind of mindless zombie should not be of any interest
to psychology, as they have no internal mental life whatsoever.
Consciousness is the soul of psychological science, in both the good and the bad. If psy-
chology denies or ignores it and throws it away, nothing resembling our personal mental lives
remains. Conversely, if the science of the mind welcomes consciousness in as a significant
topic worthy of serious study, the field will be forced to face enormously difficult philo-
sophical and scientific problems, similar to the ones that were originally connected with the
esoteric notion of the soul.
4 Psychology and the study of consciousness
21st-century psychology welcomes consciousness back
Consciousness was bound to return sooner or later – and so it did! Within a few years
around the turn of the millennium, consciousness made a sudden comeback to mainstream
scientific psychology. Recently, consciousness has become one of the hottest topics in the
scientific psychology of the 21st century, and one of the most cross-disciplinary topics, too.
Philosophy and neuroscience closely interact with psychology to solve the mystery of con-
sciousness. Consciousness is now widely accepted by academic psychology as the central
core of our psychological reality and, therefore, a necessary part of psychological science.
These days, exciting new findings concerning consciousness are regularly reported in the
top scientific journals.
Yet, at the same time, the ancient philosophical problems concerning the fundamental
nature of consciousness, as well as its relation to the brain and the body, remain unan-
swered. In the study of consciousness, frontline sciences such as cognitive neuroscience
and functional brain imaging have to face philosophical questions that no one has been able
to solve so far.
This is where we stand now: Welcome to studying the mystery of consciousness! The
science of consciousness is a multidisciplinary field. Therefore, this book necessarily covers
not only the psychology of consciousness, but also touches on the philosophy and the neuro-
science of consciousness. These three fields, psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience, are
currently in seamless interaction in the scientific study of consciousness.
In the rest of this chapter, we will briefly look at some of the most fascinating questions
about consciousness that 21st-century philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists are
currently dealing with. In the rest of the book, we will go through these questions system-
atically and explore potential answers to them. Even if some deep mysteries might remain
unsolved, there is also a lot that we already do understand about consciousness.

Three modern philosophical problems: “what is it like”, “the

Explanatory Gap”, and “the Hard Problem”
The philosopher Thomas Nagel (1974) paved the way toward the modern study of conscious-
ness with his famous argument showing that the problem of consciousness had remained
unsolved and was mostly ignored by philosophers and scientists. In the 1970s he argued
that even if we knew absolutely everything about the brain and behavior from the objective,
scientific, or third-person perspective, this knowledge would not include any description
or explanation of consciousness. Consciousness is a fundamentally subjective phenomenon,
and thus experienced only from the first-person perspective. Science cannot tell us what it
is like to be the conscious subject whose brain and behavior may nonetheless be fully and
completely described with the concepts and theories of science.
Another famous philosophical problem of consciousness, the Explanatory Gap, was
originally formulated by the philosopher Joseph Levine in 1983. This argument shows why
consciousness cannot simply be reduced to brain activities in the same manner as physical
phenomena can be reduced to their simpler components. Indeed, in the case of water, we can
fully explain its behavior under various circumstances – how it freezes, how it flows, how
it reacts with other substances – by describing the behavior of H2O molecules at the micro-
scopic level. It makes sense to say that liquid water flows because then the H2O molecules
can freely roll around each other, whereas frozen water is solid, because then the molecules
are tightly bound to each other.
 Psychology and the study of consciousness 5
By contrast, when we consider the relationship between consciousness and the brain, an
Explanatory Gap that cannot be bridged remains. Conscious experiences feel like something,
they have subjective qualities, such as the hurtfulness of pain, or the redness of the color red,
the fear and terror experienced during a bad nightmare, or the rich aroma of red wine. Now,
even if we could describe all the microscopic neural activities underlying these qualitative
conscious experiences, there is a looming gap between consciousness and the brain: How,
precisely, does any aspect of objective neural activity (such as bioelectrical waves inside
brain tissue) manage to explain the experienced hurtfulness, the redness, the horror, or the
aroma? There seems to be no intelligible relationship between hurtfulness and neural sign-
aling, or redness and neurotransmitter activity, or the rich aroma experienced after a sip of
Pinot Noir and the neural signals fired by neurons and spreading across the brain.
Furthermore, the qualitative differences between different experiences are gigantic:
Consider the difference between an excruciating pain in your tooth and the taste of a sweet,
aromatic wine in your mouth. Or the difference between two types of nocturnal dreams:
a nightmare where you run for your life from ferocious beasts and a sweet dream where
you finally manage to hug and kiss your secret crush. Yet, the neural activities connected to
these experiences are not all that much different in quality. In one case, one bunch of neurons
deep inside the brain over here keeps firing more actively; in another case, another bunch
of neurons fires like crazy over there. How could those kinds of objective biological events
truly explain the categorical difference between fearing for your life (as in the nightmare)
and feeling in love (as in the sweet dream)? Neurons, the brain cells and their networks, in
different parts of the brain are not all that different from each other. They all fire neural
impulses and release neurotransmitters. Why should some neural firings result in the visions
of ugly monsters and the feeling of mortal fear, whereas others result in visions of the beauti-
ful face of a loved one and the feelings of blissful infatuation? Those two types of feelings
could hardly be any further from each other as conscious experiences. The neural activities
underlying those experiences should be worlds apart as well.
An explanation of consciousness should be such that, once we have a full description
of what happens at the neural level inside the brain, the subjective qualities we experience
follow from it with logical necessity, just like the behavior of liquid water or solid ice fol-
lows necessarily from the properties of the underlying molecules. But so far, we have no
idea how to arrive at such an explanation. When neural activities bring about consciousness,
this seems to be unlike water molecules freezing and bringing about solid ice. Brain activity
transforming to consciousness is more akin to a miraculous event where water suddenly turns
into wine! Scientists simply have no idea, short of a miracle, how that kind of a surprising
transformation from neuronal activities to conscious experiences could happen. This is why
there is a deep Explanatory Gap between consciousness and brain.
The third closely related philosophical question was formulated by the philosopher
David Chalmers in the 1990s. He admits that there are many relatively easy problems in
explaining the relationships between the mind and the brain: how single neurons process
information, how learning and memory are based on changes in the brain, how vision
guides action, and so on. But then there is the Hard Problem: Why and how does con-
sciousness arise out of neural or cognitive (or any physical) activities at all? We have
no idea how or why any type of neural activity or cognitive processing could (or should)
produce any types of conscious experiences.
The Explanatory Gap and the Hard Problem are serious challenges to the standard
materialistic, scientific world-view. It seems that there is one undeniable, conspicuous
phenomenon, our own consciousness, whose subjective, qualitative nature is incompatible
6 Psychology and the study of consciousness
with the objective scientific world-view and with the objective methods by which science
is carried out. No wonder then that understanding consciousness is ranked at the very top
among all the scientific questions of our time. In the question of explaining consciousness no
less than the entire world-view of science is at stake!

Some research problems in the science of consciousness

Consciousness may at first seem difficult to study scientifically or experimentally at all.
Perhaps it sounds like an abstract philosophical problem that is best pondered in the philoso-
pher’s proverbial armchair over a glass of wine during the dark hours of the night. But the
phenomena of consciousness are not all that intangible; they are with us all of the time in our
everyday lives. Even though we might not notice them as we go about our everyday lives, the
questions that the science of consciousness tries to solve in fact fly in our faces all the time.
Let us consider a few examples that you may have come across in your own life, too.

How do we see? How does visual information processing in our eyes and in the
brain turn into vivid, colorful visual experiences in consciousness?
When you open your eyes, you automatically see a colorful, well-organized world all around
you. Did you ever wonder how exactly you seeing the world really happens? We know that
there is no beam of vision shooting out from our eyes to touch the objects out there. Rather,
light is reflected from the objects of the world, it enters your eyes, activates your retina and
optic nerve, and then the information is processed all over your visual cortex in the brain.
But how and at which stage do you come to see or visually experience the world around you?
How does your eye or brain produce the redness of red? One way to answer that question is
to say that it happens when the visual information reaches your consciousness. Where and
how that happens is one of the core questions in the science of consciousness. Psychology,
together with neuroscience and philosophy, tries to find the answer to this question by study-
ing the brain mechanisms of visual consciousness with modern brain scanning instruments.
This research aims to reveal what exactly happens in the brain at the same time as the visual
information enters consciousness.
If you have been inclined to believe that surely scientists must have already long ago
figured out precisely how vision works and how seeing happens, I regret to disappoint you,
but you have been rather too optimistic. At present, no scientist can explain how exactly
we come to have conscious visual experiences or how the brain generates visual con-
sciousness. That kind of knowledge would imply crossing the Explanatory Gap between
consciousness and the brain. Scientists surely know a lot about the neural activities going
on in the visual system, but nobody has the faintest idea where and how that activity turns
into seeing.

How do all the streams of different types of sensory information processed by our
senses and by the brain come to be unified into a single “picture” or a
3-D simulation of the perceptual world?
This question is known as the problem of the unity of consciousness, or as the binding
problem. Every time you see, hear, touch, smell, or taste something, you have a subjec-
tive experience in your consciousness. Sensations and perceptions form a large part of
 Psychology and the study of consciousness 7
your consciousness. Furthermore, you also experience emotions, feelings, thoughts, and
mental images as contents of your consciousness. All these various contents together make
up your personal psychological reality, the one unified consciousness through which you
experience your life. How all the different streams of information are bound together and
unified in the brain to form a single world of experience enjoyed by a single unified con-
sciousness is another mystery for the science of consciousness. There is no “center of
consciousness” in the brain where all the information is gathered to be unified there. Yet,
in our experience all the contents, as well as we ourselves, seem to form one seamless
unity of consciousness, one world of experience, and one conscious self, placed inside the
unified perceptual world. You yourself are the person standing in the center of that unified
world – the world as we see it from our own perspective.

What happens to consciousness when we act in the “zombie mode”? Do we need

consciousness to guide our behaviors at all?
When you carry out some routine activity, such as driving to work or taking a shower or lis-
tening to a boring lecture, have you ever suddenly “woken up” and realized you had no idea
what was going on during the last few minutes? You cannot recall anything about it, yet time
has passed and, obviously, you have been going through the routines in some sort of “zombie
mode”. But your attention must have been elsewhere (or perhaps nowhere). Were you con-
scious at all during those moments? Did you experience anything about your surroundings
and actions? To answer “no” implies that paying attention to some information is a necessary
requirement for that information to enter consciousness. The relationship between attention
and consciousness is yet another hot topic in the science of consciousness. Some researchers
argue that attention is necessary for consciousness. If they are right, then you were not con-
scious at all when acting in the zombie mode. By contrast, others believe that there is a basic
form of conscious experience without attention. But in the absence of attention, the experi-
ences leave no memories behind them, and thus we cannot recall the unattended experiences
after they are gone. If this is right, then you are conscious when in the zombie mode, but later
totally amnesic about the experiences.

Who is conscious anyway? And how do we know?

Did you ever step on an ant, smash a mosquito, hook an angleworm, or land a struggling fish
with a hook and line, and find yourself wondering if the poor creature feels anything, or per-
haps even suffers intolerably? If you did, you were in fact wondering whether those animals
have a primitive consciousness, a simple psychological reality in which they have elemen-
tary experiences such as pain and pleasure, fear and joy. But how could we ever know for
sure? That is another mysterious feature of consciousness: It is extremely difficult, perhaps
even impossible, to detect consciousness objectively. No matter how carefully we study the
physiology or anatomy of ants, mosquitoes, worms, or fish, we cannot conclusively rule out
either the possibility that they do have a simple consciousness where they feel and experi-
ence things, or the opposite possibility that they don’t have any consciousness whatsoever;
that they are mere biological robots or zombies that feel absolutely nothing. The science of
consciousness aims to develop theories of animal consciousness that would tell us where to
draw the line between non-conscious biological robots and truly conscious creatures that feel
their own existence.
8 Psychology and the study of consciousness

Box 1.1 Who is conscious and how can we know?

The problem of other minds is the challenge of explaining how we can know that some-
one else has subjective experiences. Although we infer the subjective experiences in
others on the basis of their behavior, we cannot be certain. This includes the problem
of animal sentience, or knowing whether animals are conscious, or in other words,
whether it feels like anything at all to be an animal. Another similar question is about
machine consciousness: Do computers or robots feel their existence in some way; are
they sentient, conscious beings or mere non-conscious mechanical zombies?

What happens to consciousness if the brain is injured?

The brain can be injured in countless different ways. Many types of brain injuries also affect
consciousness – in fact, the deficits of consciousness that occur after brain injury constitute
one of the main lines of evidence in the science of consciousness. This evidence can tell
us how consciousness itself hangs together and how it may break apart when the brain is
unable to function normally. It may also reveal which brain areas are involved in producing
which different subjective ingredients of consciousness, if only specific features of con-
sciousness disappear after brain injury. Some very severe brain injuries can make a patient
completely unconscious, or at least totally unresponsive to any stimulation or communica-
tion. Such patients are in a coma or in the vegetative state. The crucial question is, how do
we know if some of the patients remain somehow internally conscious? Perhaps they still
experience something inside, in their subjective psychological reality, or perhaps even hear
and see and think but just never respond behaviorally to anything. In fact, recent experi-
ments have given good reasons to suspect that some of the patients diagnosed as deeply
unconscious are not in fact totally unconscious after all. The brain activity patterns of some
of these patients show that the patient can hear and understand commands and questions,
and can produce meaningful responses to them through brain activity, but not through any
external behavioral responses.

What happens to consciousness during sleep?

Everyone sleeps every night, and almost everyone also has dreams every night (although
we might not recall them afterwards). But do we understand what happens to consciousness
during sleep? Are dreams conscious phenomena, or are we in an unconscious state when we
are dreaming in the night? When we fall asleep, we surely lose awareness of the external
world and of our true situation. We do not perceive, know or remember that we are actually
lying in our beds and sleeping. But sleep is not a totally unconscious state, either; it is often
accompanied by altered states of consciousness (ASCs). Dreaming is the major ASC hap-
pening during sleep. Research results show that the subjective experiences we have during
dreaming are not drastically different from the experiences we have during wakefulness. In
their overall form, dreams are like virtual realities, or immersive hallucinations that simu-
late the perceptual world. We find ourselves fully immersed in the dream world, interacting
with its hallucinatory objects, observing its events, and communicating with its (imaginary)
inhabitants. As a subjective experience, how does the dream world differ from the waking
 Psychology and the study of consciousness 9
world? How and why does the brain bring this simulated world about regularly, every night,
as if our brain was programmed to dream? These questions come up at the intersection
between dream research and the science of consciousness.

Is hypnosis an altered state?

Other altered states of consciousness pose equally fascinating problems. You have probably
seen on TV or on the Internet how people are hypnotized and how they seem to go into a
weird state called “hypnotic trance”. In this state they look peculiar, with an empty gaze, and
they seem to be under the control of the hypnotist. But what does the science of conscious-
ness know about hypnosis? In fact, the biggest question concerning hypnosis is whether or
not there is any altered state of consciousness involved in hypnosis. Most people do not go
into any measurably different brain state in hypnosis, and it has been seriously questioned
whether anybody ever really does. But some people certainly act and look extremely weird
when hypnotized; whether they are in a true ASC or merely faking can only be resolved by
careful empirical studies of their brain and behavior, as well as by a convincing theory of
ASCs and a clear definition of what in general counts as an ASC and what does not.

Can science explain mystical experiences?

Some ASCs go entirely beyond our everyday experiences. They pose a true challenge to the
science of consciousness because it is not entirely clear if current science can explain them
at all. Therefore, the study of consciousness has to address questions about the fundamental
nature of our minds and our selves. What happens to my stream of experiences, my subjec-
tive psychological reality, in death? Does it simply vanish for good when the brain stops
functioning, or could I continue to have some kind of experience after my body and my brain
are dead? Could “I” as a subject or a center of consciousness still exist? Profound as this
question is, it can also be studied scientifically. Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and Near-
death experiences (NDEs) (see Chapter 10) have been reported by many people, and such
reports have been systematically collected by scientists. At first glance these experiences
seem to suggest that our center of consciousness could, under some circumstances, leave the
physical body and continue to have experiences outside of it. New scientific evidence con-
cerning OBEs produced in the laboratory however shows that OBEs may be nothing more
than dreamlike hallucinations brought about by unusual information processing or abnormal
activity in particular regions of the brain.
NDEs are mystical experiences reported by people who have been very close to death. In
a typical case, a patient who suffers from cardiac arrest seems deeply unconscious for several
minutes. During this time the patient’s heart is not beating and the brain is not getting any
fresh blood or oxygen, which causes a deeply unconscious, coma-like state as well as the
disappearance of electrical brain activity. If the resuscitation is successful and the patient
survives and returns to consciousness, the patient may later describe a vivid, profound, mys-
tical experience that happened during the unconscious period. In these experiences the pain
typically disappears and the patients feel good, then they see their unconscious body and the
doctors around it as if from a bird’s eye view, then they enter into a dark space or tunnel,
hear sounds or music and see people or some kind of spiritual beings, and finally see a bright
white light and feel emotional bliss. Then suddenly the patients are back in their bodies and
the heart has started to work again.
10 Psychology and the study of consciousness
If the science of consciousness one fine day reveals what consciousness is and how exactly
it is related to the brain, then we should be able to explain what happens to consciousness –
what happens to us as psychological beings, even in the strangest of mystical experiences such
as NDEs. So far there is not enough data, but at least scientists are now seriously working on
these open questions.

Chapter summary

The science of consciousness studies our subjective mental lives from simple
everyday color sensations that enter consciousness to complex, globally unified,
and even altered and mystical, experiences that only occur under special circum-
stances. Although the variety of conscious phenomena studied is broad, similar
questions can be asked about all of them: What kind of information processing is
going on when a particular type of experience occurs in consciousness? What kind
of brain activity is involved and where in the brain is it localized? What kind of theo-
ries of the brain and consciousness should we use to describe and explain these
phenomena? What are the best experiments and the best data collection meth-
ods that would tell us more about the subjective contents of consciousness on the
one hand, and more about the objective processes in the brain and behavior on
the other? It is the bold mission of the future science of consciousness to provide the
answers to these questions.

Suggestions for discussion topics

•• Try and define the word “consciousness” or the state of “being conscious” in
your own words. What do these words and ideas mean to you? Ask someone
else to do the same: Can you agree about the meaning of these words?
•• What did you know about consciousness and psychology before picking up
this book?
•• Can you recall having a zombie moment recently? Have you noticed when,
how often, and under what circumstances they take place?
•• What are the strangest altered states of consciousness that you have expe-
rienced (weird dreams; being hypnotized; meditating or having mystical
experiences; having high fever and hallucinating; and so on?) Do you think
that there could be a scientific explanation for these experiences?

Reference
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450.
2 What is consciousness?

Chapter outline

•• “Consciousness” is a concept difficult to define clearly.

•• “Consciousness” includes several different terms and each needs to be defined
separately.
•• This chapter presents the most important concepts of consciousness and
explains how they are defined in the current science of consciousness.
•• The three most important concepts are called phenomenal consciousness,
reflective (or access) consciousness, and self-awareness.
•• Consciousness as a general state of a person should be distinguished of the
particular contents of consciousness.
•• Consciousness is independent of externally observable behavior.
•• Zombies and inverse zombies refer to cases where consciousness and behav-
ior occur independently of each other.
•• Some related concepts, such as “wakefulness” and “attention”, are often con-
fused with consciousness, but they should be clearly distinguished from it.

The concept of consciousness

One of the paradoxes in the science of consciousness is this: Everybody knows from
personal experience what consciousness is and admits that it is crucially important. Most
people would probably prefer to lose an arm, a leg, or an eye rather than permanently lose
their consciousness. Yet the phenomenon and the concept of “consciousness” seems almost
impossible to define in a way that is sufficiently clear and unambiguous for science.
“Consciousness” is a vague term that has many different and partly overlapping meanings
in everyday language. In everyday communication different people mean different things
with the same word. By contrast, scientists need a crystal-clear, unambiguous vocabulary to
describe the objects of their study accurately and to communicate with each other without
misunderstandings. Obviously, physics would not make much sense if every physicist were
to define the concepts of “energy”, “atom”, or “gravity” in their own idiosyncratic way and
were to disagree with every other physicist as to what these concepts refer to.
Unfortunately, that kind of conceptual chaos often happens in psychology. When modern
research on consciousness started out in the 1990s, the scientists and philosophers involved
12 What is consciousness?
had no shared idea of what “consciousness” actually meant or how it should be defined.
Fortunately, the field has made significant progress since then. The scientific vocabulary
describing consciousness has developed recently to the extent that most consciousness
scientists now agree about the basic phenomena that will have to be clearly described and
separated from each other in the science of consciousness.
To avoid a conceptual chaos, we cannot call several different phenomena just by the handy
everyday term “consciousness”. Instead we must carefully distinguish different senses of
“consciousness” from each other by using different, clearly defined words for them. Thus,
when you enter the science of consciousness, you have to put aside your intuitive ideas about
what the word “consciousness” means. As a student of this topic, you need to learn the vocab-
ulary that consciousness scientists currently use. So, please prepare to learn a new language!

Box 2.1 Being conscious, being aware, being awake: What is the
difference?

The terms “consciousness”, “awareness”, and “wakefulness” are easily confused (and
often used in a confusing fashion). To be clear, awareness is often used in connection
with an external stimulus (i.e., being aware of something, for instance of the presence
of a perceptual object such as a gadfly attacking you – you can see it and hear it buzz,
and if unlucky, feel its bite suddenly somewhere in your body). Wakefulness should
not be identified with consciousness, because when we sleep and have dreams, we have
subjective experiences (phenomenal consciousness) without being awake! Although
there are different types of consciousness, the term fundamentally refers to subjective
experiences, the stream of our subjective lives.

Phenomenal consciousness
Phenomenal consciousness is the most fundamental kind of consciousness. All the other
types of consciousness are dependent on phenomenal consciousness. Without phenomenal
consciousness, there would be no conscious mind at all.
The most famous definition of phenomenal consciousness goes along the following lines:
For a creature to have phenomenal consciousness – for it to exist as a conscious being –
means that there is something it is like to be that creature, something that existence and life
are like for the creature.
Conversely, to lack phenomenal consciousness totally or to exist as a mere non-conscious
mechanism or object means that there is nothing it is like to be that entity. Existence or life
do not feel like anything for such an entity. A non-conscious creature or object does not feel
or sense its own existence in any way. It does not have a conscious mind.
Phenomenal consciousness consists of experiences that are felt by the subject.
Experiences that are felt come in many different varieties, but they all feel like something
to the subject who undergoes them. What exactly an experience feels like is determined
by the quality of that experience. Philosophers call the qualities of experience by the
term “qualia”.
The qualities of experience are all around us, we swim in an ocean of different quali-
ties. Each different color that you see around you involves a different quality of experience.
Your experience of the red traffic light has a characteristic quality of “redness” by which it
 What is consciousness? 13

Consciousness as a state enables all different Unconsciousness as a state disables all

kinds of subjective experiences. It can be subjective experiences. The unconscious state
metaphorically depicted as a state where can be metaphorically depicted as a state where
the internal phenomenal lights of the mind the internal phenomenal lights are “off” and
are “on”. consciousness is temporarily absent.

Figure 2.1 Consciousness “on”. Figure 2.2 Consciousness “off”.

is the type of phenomenal color experience it is. The cloudless bright sky, as consciously
perceived, has the different phenomenal color quality: the characteristic blue quality that we
all know intimately. Although visual qualities dominate in our consciousness, there are quali-
ties also in other sensory modalities: the way your clothes feel against your skin, the way the
keyboard or the touchscreen feels at your fingertips, the way the excitement, anger, joy, or
love feels in your body and mind, the way the music from the earphones sounds to you, the
way the candy or the fruit tastes in your mouth, the way the perfume or the grass or the spring
flowers smell in the air. The list could go on and on. Our phenomenal consciousness is sim-
ply teeming with qualities of experience every second of our lives. As subjects, we swim in a
sea of qualities that flows within the stream of our consciousness. The qualities occurring at
a particular moment, taken together, determine what it feels like to be the conscious subject
at that moment.
Phenomenal consciousness is tied to the present moment, it lives in the here and now.
Through time, different qualities of experience come and they go, our stream of phenomenal
experience changes all the time, but, unless we are knocked out, there are always some quali-
ties of experience present for us in our phenomenal consciousness.
Phenomenally conscious beings are sentient beings. They can feel or sense their own
existence and there is something it is like to be them. They undergo qualitative feelings and
experiences that are directly felt by them. The phenomenally conscious mind is defined by
the presence of felt experiential qualities for the subject. To put it in a nutshell: The phenom-
enally conscious mind is a feeling mind.
14 What is consciousness?
The structure of phenomenal consciousness
As a whole, phenomenal consciousness is like a wide perceptual sphere or bubble in the
center of which the experiencing subject is located. Wherever you look, wherever you turn
your attention, you will discover some kind of qualities of phenomenal consciousness there:
colors, sounds, emotions, pains, itches, smells, and so on.
Phenomenal consciousness presents itself for us as a coherent world of felt perceptual and
emotional experience. The qualities we experience are organized to form the world as we see
and hear it all around us, and our body-image as we feel it from the inside and as we see it
when we look at our own body.
But not everything inside the sphere of phenomenal consciousness is experienced with
equal clarity and intensity. Rather, the sphere is divided into a center of consciousness, the
region where our attention is focused, and the phenomenal background (also called periph-
eral consciousness), a more vague tapestry with less clear and less intense experiences
outside the center of consciousness.
When you play tennis (or some other speedy ball game) the rapidly moving yellow ball is
constantly in the center of your perceptual consciousness, as well as your opponent’s move-
ments when he or she is hitting the ball. Also the way your own racket feels in your hand is in
the center when you yourself hit the ball, and you can immediately feel whether your strike
feels right or somehow flawed.
When you focus your attention on the ball, the way your shoes or your shirt feel on you is
in the phenomenal background. Perhaps you are vaguely experiencing them, but those experi-
ences are fleeting and weak at best. But if something exceptional happens, for example sharp
pebbles suddenly enter your shoes and cause pain when you run to the net to reach that drop
shot, then your attention immediately turns to the qualities of experience in your feet and shoes.

The sphere of primary (phenomenal) consciousness is divided into the center of consciousness,
surrounded by peripheral consciousness (or the phenomenal background). In the center, defined by
the spotlight of attention, contents have been selected into detailed processing. Consequently, they are
experienced vividly and clearly. By contrast, the contents in the periphery are experienced only vaguely.
In the figure, the small spider is selected into the center of consciousness and experienced vividly and
clearly, whereas the tree remains in the periphery, experienced only vaguely.

Figure 2.3 Primary consciousness

 What is consciousness? 15
The center of consciousness is defined by the spotlight of your attention: What you
focus on, what you really pay attention to, occupies the center stage in your phenomenal
consciousness.

Reflective consciousness: the thinking conscious mind

When the spotlight of attention is centered on a particular quality of experience in phenom-
enal consciousness, for example the yellow tennis ball or the pain in your foot, then those
experiences become available to a more complex form of consciousness called reflective
consciousness. In our everyday language, we would probably call this part of the conscious
mind simply “thinking”.
In reflective consciousness we carry out thought operations or other cognitive processes
about the experiences we have selected to attend to. We evaluate, classify, judge, recognize,
name, and label our experiences in reflective consciousness. When you look at the tennis ball
hitting the court close to the borderline, your reflective consciousness automatically passes
the judgment “it was IN!” or “that was OUT!” Perhaps you hear the words in your mind,
perhaps you automatically shout them out, too. Your reflective consciousness has classified
and named the way you perceived the ball in relation to the court, according to the rules of the
game. Perhaps the same inner voice goes on and counts the points, perhaps you start talking
to yourself, trying to encourage yourself or plan your next serve or change your game strat-
egy, to pay more attention to where your opponent is located on the court. By using reflective
consciousness we can guide our attention, so that we can voluntarily control the direction
of the spotlight of attention and thereby control which information, of all that is available in
phenomenal consciousness, ends up in the center of consciousness.
In current consciousness research, reflective consciousness has also been called access
consciousness (Block, 1995; Dehaene, 2014). This term emphasizes the fact that information
selected into the center of consciousness thereby gains wide access to multiple functions in
our mind. The information reaching reflective consciousness has access to long-term mem-
ory (we can memorize it, or compare it to our earlier experiences retrieved from memory),
to language (we can name and comment our experiences to ourselves in inner speech), to

The contents in the center of consciousness (or in the spotlight of attention) are rapidly subjected to
higher cognitive processing where the contents can be thought about, named, evaluated, verbally
reported, or acted upon. Reflective consciousness operates with concepts and language, formulating
thoughts about our experiences in silent inner speech. In this case, the reflective thoughts try to
evaluate, name, and classify the creature that has been consciously perceived, to figure out how
dangerous it may be.

Figure 2.4 Reflective consciousness

16 What is consciousness?
evaluation (we can consider if something we experience is good or bad for us), to future plan-
ning, to verbal commentary and to voluntary action, just to name a few of the many cognitive
functions that reflective consciousness gives access to.
In cognitive psychology, the cognitive functions related to reflective (or access) con-
sciousness are more formally called voluntary attention or top-down attention, and working
memory. But those cognitive concepts do not usually mention the conscious aspect of those
functions at all. Therefore, they are not entirely sufficient in the science of consciousness
where we are specifically interested in the fact that subjective experiences are involved: you
hear the inner voice; you experience your own thoughts and imagine in your “mind’s eye”
your future goals; and you make conscious voluntary decisions, guiding your attention and
your actions. The subjective experiences are what make the cognitive functions conscious
and part of reflective consciousness. Old-fashioned cognitive psychology often ignored con-
sciousness and described humans as some sort of mechanical biological computers that just
“process information”, without any regard to whether that information is subjectively expe-
rienced in consciousness or not. Consciousness science reminds us that human cognitive
functions often involve subjective experiences in the conscious human mind. Unlike what
computers do when they process information, human cognition does not take place in the
darkness of the brain without any felt qualities.
Reflective consciousness allows us to describe the contents of our phenomenal conscious-
ness in words and thereby to communicate to others what we are experiencing. When we
report our experiences to others or just describe them in words, we engage in introspection.
Introspection is defined as looking into our own minds, discovering some experiences there,
and then labelling and verbally describing those experiences.
Introspection was the method of early laboratory psychology in the late 19th century, but
it was later criticized as an unreliable as a scientific method. Nevertheless, self-reports are
still widely used in psychological science to collect data about the perceptual and emotional
experiences and the conscious thoughts that people have.
When used properly, self-report methods in psychology are no worse than other, more objec-
tive methods – because all scientific measurements have their own problems. No scientific
method – microscope, telescope, particle accelerator, brain imaging, or introspection –
reaches reality directly or accurately as reality is in itself. Scientific instruments in general
provide us with only limited and noisy pictures of the reality beyond our senses. Introspective
methods provide us with a less-than-perfect, but still sufficiently clear picture of the contents
of consciousness.

Self-awareness
A special variety of reflective consciousness comes into play when the experience involves
thinking about our own self, the person who has the experiences. When self-aware, we not
only undergo experiences, we not only have a stream of subjective consciousness; we also
become aware of the owner of those experiences: These are my experiences and the me who
owns them is a person or a self. This self is embodied; it has a body where its consciousness
lives, and it has an identity, the self is someone with a name and a past and a future.
Self-awareness thus involves access to an internal album or collection of “selfies” from
the past and the imagined future, telling us along a timeline who we were and are and will be;
where in our lives we are coming from and where we are planning or hoping to go in the future.
Imagine that you pass by a mirror and see a reflection there. You look closer, and you
discover a horrible, big, red pimple right in the middle of . . . well, on somebody’s face, or in
the image of someone’s face in the mirror. But the red pimple seems to be out there, outside
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CLEVELAND
clever
client
climate
climatic
Climatically
climax
climb
climbed
clime
Clinch
cling
clinging
clique
cliques
clock
clog
clos
close
Closed
closely
closer
closes
closest
closet
closing
clot
cloth
clothe
clothed
clothes
Clothing
clouded
clouds
cloven
Club
Clubs
clue
clumsy
clung
clustered
clusters
Cnossos
Co
coach
coadjutor
Coahnila
COAL
coalfield
coalfields
coaling
coalition
coals
COAMO
coarse
Coast
Coastguard
coasting
Coasts
coastwise
coat
coated
coats
Cobham
Coblenz
Cobra
Coburg
coccidium
Cockburn
cocked
cockpit
Cockran
cocoa
cocoanuts
cod
Code
codes
codfish
codification
Codlin
Codman
coeducational
coerce
coerced
coercion
coercive
coeval
coffee
coffer
coffers
coffin
coffins
cognisance
cognisant
cognizable
cognizance
coherence
coherent
coherer
cohesion
coil
coils
Coin
coinage
coincided
coincident
Coincidentally
coinciding
coined
coins
Coit
Coke
cold
coldly
Coleman
COLENSO
Coler
Colesberg
Colima
collapse
collapsed
collar
collars
collate
collateral
colleague
colleagues
collect
collected
collecting
collection
Collections
collective
collectively
collectivist
collector
collectors
collects
COLLEGE
COLLEGES
collegiate
collier
colliers
Collins
Collis
collision
collisions
Colloquially
Cologan
Colomb
Colombari
COLOMBIA
Colombian
Colombo
Colon
Colonel
colonelcy
colonels
colonial
colonials
Colonies
colonisation
colonists
colonization
colonize
colonizing
colonnade
Colony
color
COLORADO
Colorados
colored
colors
colossal
colossi
Colossus
colour
coloured
colourless
colours
cols
Colt
Columbia
Columbian
COLUMBUS
column
columns
Colón
Com
Comanches
combat
combatant
combatants
combated
combating
combative
combats
combed
combination
combinations
Combine
combined
combines
combing
combining
combustible
combustion
Come
comer
comers
comes
comfort
comfortable
comfortably
comforting
comforts
coming
comity
Command
commandant
Commandants
commanded
commandeer
commandeered
Commandeering
Commander
commanders
Commanding
COMMANDO
commandos
commands
comme
commemorate
commemorated
commemorates
commence
commenced
commencement
commences
Commencing
commend
commendable
commendation
commended
commending
commensurate
comment
commented
Commenting
comments
COMMERCE
Commercial
Commerciale
commercialism
Commercially
Commerford
commettant
comminuted
commissariat
commissaries
Commissary
Commission
COMMISSIONED
commissioner
commissioners
Commissions
commit
committal
committed
committee
committees
committing
commodities
commodity
Commodore
Common
Commoners
commonly
Commons
commonwealth
commonwealths
commotion
communal
communes
communicate
communicated
communicates
communicating
communication
Communications
communicative
communion
communions
communique
communities
community
commutation
commuted
comp
compact
compacted
compactly
Compagnie
companies
companion
companions
company
comparable
comparative
comparatively
Compare
Compared
compares
comparing
Comparison
comparisons
compartments
compass
compassed
Compassionate
compatible
compatriots
compel
Compelled
compelling
compels
compendium
compensate
compensates
compensating
COMPENSATION
compensations
Compensatory
compete
competed
competence
competency
competent
competing
Competition
competitive
competitively
competitor
competitors
compilation
compile
compiled
compilers
complacency
complacent
complain
complainant
complained
complaining
complaint
Complaints
complement
COMPLETE
completed
completely
completeness
completes
completing
completion
complex
complexities
complexity
compliance
complicate
complicated
complication
complications
complicity
complied
complies
complimenting
Compliments
comply
complying
component
comport
comports
compos
compose
composed
composer
composing
composite
composition
compound
compounded
compounds
comprehend
comprehended
comprehending
comprehension
comprehensive
compressed
compression
compressor
comprise
comprised
comprises
comprising
Compromis
compromise
compromised
compromises
compromising
Comptroller
compulsion
COMPULSORY
compunction
computation
computed
comrade
comrades
Comte
Comus
Concas
conceal
concealed
concealing
concealment
conceals
concede
conceded
concedes
conceding
conceit
conceivable
conceivably
conceive
conceived
Conceiving
concentrate
concentrated
concentrating
concentration
concentrations
concentric
Concepcion
conception
Conceptions
concern
concerned
Concerning
concerns
Concert
concerted
concerts
Concession
concessionaire
concessionary
concessions
conciliate
conciliated
conciliating
Conciliation
conciliators
conciliatory
concisely
conclude
concluded
concludes
concluding
Conclusion
conclusions
conclusive
conclusively
concocted
concomitant
Concord
Concordat
concourse
concrete
concubine
concupiscence
concur
concurred
concurrence
concurrent
concurrently
concurring
concurs
condamnant
condemn
condemnable
condemnation
condemnatory
condemned
condemning
condemns
condensation
condenser
condensers
condescension
condign
condition
conditional
conditionally
conditioned
conditions
CONDOMINIUM
conduce
conduces
conducive
conduct
conducted
conducting
conductive
conductivity
conductor
conductors
conducts
conduits
Condé
confederacies
CONFEDERATE
Confederated
Confederation
confer
Conference
conferences
conferred
conferring
confers
confess
confessed
confessedly
confesses
confessing
Confession
confessions
confessor
confessors
confide
confided
Confidence
Confident
confidential
confidentially
confidently
Confiding
configuration
confine
confined
confinement
confines
confining
confirm
Confirmation
confirmatory
confirmed
confirming
confirms
confiscated
conflagration
conflict
Conflicting
conflicts
confluence
conform
conformable
conformably
conformation
conformed
conformer
conforming
conformity
conformément
confounded
confounding
confront
confronted
confronts
Confucianism
Confucius
confuse
confused
confusing
confusion