Consciousness: Awareness, Wakefulness, & Philosophical Perspectives - Essay Sample

Introduction

Consciousness i s defined as the state by which an individual is aware of his/her feelings, environment, sensations or thoughts. It is the quality or state of awareness of the external object or anything that exist within oneself. For an individual to experience consciousness, he/she has to be both aware and wake. Philosophers who existed since the time of Descartes and that of Locke focused on comprehending on the nature of consciousness as well as pinning down the essential properties of consciousness (Bayne, Hohwy & Owen, 2016). The significance of studying consciousness is that it helps scientists in the shedding of light on the inner workings of neuroscience and psychology. These scientists can examine the connection between neural activity as well as stated perception. This paper argues that the levels-based context for the conceptualizing global states of consciousness is indefensible and that it develops a multidimensional account of the universal states in its place.

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The concept of a conscious level usually plays a very crucial role in the science of consciousness, nevertheless there has been very little theoretical analysis of the concept hence it is left unexplained. According to the standard conception of the levels of consciousness, these levels of consciousness are usually identified with changes in the degree of consciousness of a creature although the concept is usually problematic theoretically and it fails to do justice to the complex nature of the levels. The global states of consciousness are a multidimensional phenomenon which helps in capturing the behavioral and cognitive dimensions of consciousness like the ways that conscious contents are usually gated and their functional roles.

The concept of consciousness levels is a crucial construct in the science of consciousness. The term is not only employed in the description of global states of consciousness which are usually associated with sleep, post-comatose disorders, anesthesia as well as the epileptic absence seizures, it also plays an influential role in methodological and theoretical contexts. Nevertheless, there is no clarity on a level of consciousness precisely is supposed to be. Research shows that consciousness is of two aspects the local states as well as the global states. The local states of consciousness may include the affective experiences, the perceptual experiences of different kinds, occurrent thoughts, imagery experiences as well as the bodily sensations. Science of consciousness refers to the local states as conscious contents mainly because they are usually differentiated from each other depending on the features and objects which they represent.

On the other hand, global states of consciousness are not usually differentiated from each other depending on features or objects which are represented in experience but instead, they are usually differentiated from each other on the grounds of psychology, cognition as well as behaviors. An example is the global stated that is associated with alert wakefulness is usually differentiated from the global states that are usually related to post-comatose conditions such as the minimally conscious state and the vegetative state and these states are usually differentiated from those states which are related to light-to-moderate degrees of hypnosis, sedation, dreaming and epileptic absence seizures.

Levels of consciousness generally were derived from the disorders of consciousness in clinical literature whereby it was introduced concerning the disorders of consciousness which occurs mostly following a coma such as the vegetative state. In 2002, when the minimally conscious state was introduced enabled clinicians to operate with a classification of global states of consciousness which were and are still being taken to be scalable along a single measurement. These dimensions show that the minimally conscious state patients usually have a higher level of consciousness in comparison to the vegetative state patients while the emerged from minimally conscious state patients are usually at a higher level of consciousness in comparison to minimally conscious state patients.

Most theorists use the term levels in the relationship of consciousness in non-human animals and infants whereby they suggest that there are low levels of consciousness in infant and animal consciousness. The levels of analysis usually problematize such claims despite there being conscious capacities and contents which non-human animals and infants fail to share with humans. Also, non-human animals and infants may be having conscious capacities and contents that adult human beings do not have. This can be seen by the fact that dogs can detect odors which adult humans cannot detect while the young children usually experience sensory integration that is less than human adults making them better in the exploitation of information in the individual sensory modalities.

It is for this reason that the restrictions in behavioral or cognitive and content capacities which is captured through appeal to the concept of a global state of consciousness should be understood in connection to the ordinary capacities of the organism. Hence a mouse that is not able to report its perceptual experiences does not have an abnormal global state of consciousness while a human being who is not able to report her perceptual experiences because she is undergoing a lack of seizure does.

Therefore, infants and the non-human animals can have non-standard global states of consciousness for reasons similar to those that adult human beings can however there is no clear reason for supposing that the global state of consciousness that the non-human animals and infants had during the wake and alert is different from those of neurotypical adult humans. People grant that most of the global states of consciousness can order readily and roughly also that appeals to the concept of a level of consciousness has a particular utility in the clinical contexts.

Nevertheless, the concept of a level of consciousness is not employed anymore as a merely informal device however it has become a significant conceptual construct in the science of consciousness. The fact that the concept of a level of consciousness has no strong basis means that there is no clarity on to whether the highly sophisticated attempts of measuring the level of consciousness or developing theories related to it will be successful. Describing the global states as levels of consciousness means that consciousness is categorized in degrees and changes in the global state of consciousness a creature may be represented as changes occurring along a single dimension of analysis.

The concept of consciousness degrees is of uncertain coherence mainly because a creature is usually said to be conscious only if it has a subjective point of view according to the standard conception of consciousness. Having a subjective point of view means that the creature is not gradable hence consciousness does not come in degrees. An individual may be conscious of many properties and objects than other individuals although being conscious of more does not mean to be more conscious.

This means that an individual who has sight can be conscious more than a blind individual however they are not more conscious than how the blind individual is. One may respond to the prior by signifying that the concept of a level of consciousness has to be understood as of the degree within which the local contents are conscious. In my view such a strategy doe, not workout better than the standard treatment of levels. It is controversial is the consciousness contents could be graded in degree of consciousness and also equating the level of consciousness of a creature with the clarity of most of its conscious contents always fail to capture the concept of a conscious level as it is usually understood actually although at best brings in a novel construct into the debate.

Some theorist argues that the concept of a conscious level should be understood based on the degree at which the local contents are conscious. This proposal implies that there are those contents which are highly conscious while there are others that enjoy only low levels of consciousness. This, therefore, means that the conscious level of a creature is usually equated based on how conscious most of its conscious contents are. The first main problem with this proposal is that it is provocative whether the contents can be graded in such a way and therefore by the use of the vague or degraded perception this proposal is no true since consciousness is not graded.

Whenever the subjects report the intermediate levels of awareness, this means that they are expressing doubt on whether or not they saw the incentive and interpretations such as these are highly reasonable based on the epistemic terms within which the different response categories are described. Another problem with the proposal is that the subject's reports the amount of data that they have concerning the stimulus. An example is that they may understand the difference between an experience and a clear experience which is almost clear based on the difference between having a coarse-grained perception of the stimulus and having a fine-grained perception of it.

This is a clear contrast even though it has nothing to do with consciousness degree. There is a good reason for doubting whether every global state could be allocated a determinate ordering comparative to each other. Considering the connection between the global conscious state that is allied with the rapid eye movement sleep as well as that which is usually associated with the light levels of sedation. The level-based analysis holds that one of the states has to be higher than that of the other but there is no reason of granting such a claim and maybe states could be compared to each other only concerning particular dimensions of analysis.

The global state which is associated with rapid eye movement sleep could be higher than that which is related to sedation on some scopes of analysis whereby the opposite too could be the case on other scopes of analysis. Based on the above research study, in my opinion, I would say that consciousness is not measurable in degrees hence there are no levels of consciousness. The reason is that people tend to show consciousness differently on different circumstances and research shows that there is no set scale by which consciousness can be measured although it can be viewed on different dimensions such as content-related dimensions and functional dimensions.

Though the global states of consciousness are different from the local content-involving states, there is the likelihood that some of the dimensions based on which global states may be modeled include the relations to the conscious contents. Specifically, global states are different from each other based on how they usually gate conscious content. In functional dimensions, consciousness is allied to different forms of behavioral and cognitive control. In the usual waking awareness, the consciousness contents are usually available to guide diverse behavioral and cognitive processes such as those involved in attentional control, verbal report, executive reasoning, intentional agency, memory consolidation as well as reasoning. The primary idea is that global states could be thought of as regions in multidimensional state space.

The state-space dimensions remain unknown although according to me, one-dimension tracts the gating of contents, as well as another dimension, tracks the practical capabilities that are related to consciousness. As the consciousness of science matures, it requires constructs increasingly to guide theorizing and research. The primary aim of these paper was...