The Consciousness Question: a Social Neuroscientific Approach

The topic of consciousness has never departed from the discussion of the philosophy of the mind. However, with the development of the neurosciences and the flooding of general neuroscientific discoverines, philosophical debates about the nature of consciousness have taken a turn towards physicalism.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cites several researchers concerned with the consciousness question, most notable among whom are Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers, and Paul & Patricia Churchland. The first of these philosophers clings to the inexplicable nature of consciousness, claiming that the experience is solely subjective and therefore forever elusive to the constraints of objective scientific understanding. Chalmers, on the other hand, offers a bit more room for interpretation in his conceptual version of consciousness. He describes consciouisness as any brain process, but that this brain process with inevitably leave open an 'explanatory gap' that differentiates the brain processes from the conscious experiences themselves. For example, a brain process might include read a line of text and interpreting that line of text as our brain is programmed to do; however, the feeling we experience when we read that text -- the intangible emotion or sensation that defines that text, and makes that special at an individual level -- that feeling cannot be allotted solely to neural processes.

Lastly, the Churchlands develop a strictly neuroscientific approach to consciousness, which is based upon the recurrent connections between thalamic nuclei and the cortex. They assert that the selective features that comprise the 'core' of the human conscious experience are the result of thalamacortical recurrency. Patricia Churchland specifically references philosophical implications of a variety of neurological deficits to evince the concept of a 'unity of self' -- a tenet of human consciousness. She uses deficits such as blindsight -- a deficit in which patients are unable to see items in specific regions of their visual fields -- to prove this unity of self, by demonstrating that individuals with blindsight still perform far better than chance in forced guess trials about stimuli in blindsight regions.

However, I'd like to offer a slightly different perspective on human consciousness. After having read several articles on neuroscience, social neuroscience, and philosophy of the mind, I would like to posit the notion that a distinct measure of human consciousness is defined by social interactions. Much of the philosophies I've encountered that discuss the consciousness question neglect to account for the undeniable role of social interactions in our neural processes. My version of human consciousness fuses the physicalism of the Churchlands with an attempted response to Chalmers' 'explanatory gap.' This explanatory gap, in my view, is accounted for by the random, intangible, and unpredictable social experiences and lessons each individual has accumulated throughout his or her life. Using the same example I cited above--in which you read a line of text as your brain is programmed to read it, yet you interpret it and feel a certain way about it--I propose that this intangible sensation is the result of a learned behavioral and neural response that each of us has gained through various interpersonal or personal experiences.