Attention, awareness, consciousness

Phenomena
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These three topics—consciousness, awareness, and attention— are related to acquisition and study of subjective data. (Pace quibbles that all data are perceptions and that perceptions are intrinsically subjective.) To start this topic off, I will try to justify the distinctions that I make between them. I will follow up by reviewing a recent publication by Tim Carey.

In brief, this is my current sense of these three terms:

  • Attention, in its most obvious, observable, and sometimes quantifiable sense, is the directing of sensory organs to specific parts or aspects of the environment so that higher-level perceptual input functions receive input required for control. Less obvious is the directing of attention within the universe of constructed perceptions at higher levels: from one sensory modality to another; within the universe of perception for a given modality (i.e. foveal vs. one place or another in peripheral vision, one place or another in auditory space, tactile, kinesthetic, proprioceptive, etc.); among remembered and imagined perceptions (the distinction is dubious); among abstract objects in conceptual space; and probably more. Means for the former are obvious: the directing of sensory organs toward some source of perceptual input vs. others. Means for shifting attention internally are entirely obscure and so far PCT has no account for it.

If the system commanding inputs ‘knows’ where those inputs come from, it might send location-relationship references to motor systems that direct sensory organs. If it does not, it might control sequences of locations by such means, ‘questing’ for inputs.

It is possible to direct attention to one or another configuration in peripheral vision without redirecting the eyes. It is possible to direct attention to one or another source of sound in the auditory field, distinguished spatially or distinguished in the auditory spectrum, without moving the head or in any way redirecting the ears. It is possible to direct attention to one or another transition, configuration, sensation, or intensity in the somatic hierarchy to which we ordinarily do not attend and of which we are usually unaware. It is possible to attend to one or another feature of a sequence, plan, principle, or systems concept in a space of such non-environmental objects. About all of these, there are unanswered, investigable questions as to the nature of attention beyond its fundamental sense of the directing of sensory organs toward commanded perceptual input.

  • Awareness is a consequence of attention. To use a currently accepted dormitive principle, attention ‘increases the salience’ of a perception. Perceptions which are not attended to are subliminal: below the limen or threshold of awareness.
  • Consciousness encompasses subliminal and supraliminal (attended) perceptions. Since Freud’s ground-breaking case studies a century ago, disclosing the existence and importance of subconscious motivations, subliminal perceptions in the aggregate are called “the subconscious”.

Many phenomena await PCT comprehension and research, such as hypnosis, subconscious motivations (subliminal control of perceptions that may be subliminal or may even be in awareness), modes of persuasion and influence by disturbing subliminal control, etc.

Now, some relevant excerpts from the CSGnet archive, which can be followed up by going to the CSGnet Archive category and searching on subject headings, date tags, etc. that occur in these excerpts.

Bill Powers (2003.12.03.0829 MST)

I proposed a meaning for consciousness: the combination of awareness with
perceptions in the hierarchy.

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This is an extremely interesting topic and language can complicate understanding. Two points jump out as problematic to Me 1) "Awareness as a consequence of attention, at first pass is simply incorrect, and 2) "implicit in PCT is consciousness always flows down is very problematic from approaching Psychology from a PCT perspective given the Reticular Activating System(RAS) in our brain stems.

I think part of our confusion stems from the fact that consciousness plays a role in both Awareness and Attention. It becomes problematic to define consciousness using any form of “Awareness” as part of the definition. A way to think about consciousness, and this notion came from a quick Google response, is being awake. Other ways to think about this condition in the common language are “fully conscious”, wide awake, present, some will insist on aware and fully aware, and I am sure there could be other ways to operationally define the concept of consciousness.

Now if we look at “Awareness” there are atleast two ways to commonly approach it. One, and this is the one when used with consciousness is Subjective Awareness. This is when the subject’s full metacognitive processes are engaged. Subject aware of time and place. Subject aware of role as both a subject and object while interacting with the environmental context. Subject fully aware with their historical memories. Subject actively engaged in shared experiences. An objective Awareness is when some previously unnoticed object in the surroundings stimulates a response. If that object triggers the Fight or Flight response, one can find them self running in a direction opposite of “The precieved threat” before processing what even happened. One might say Flight occurred before an " Awareness" of what happened, or identified what caused the flight. Some might refer to it as paying “attention” to what is happening in the environment. There is the point of “objective awareness”, after we become “aware”, we decide the level of attention we wish to pay.

In this little description the (RAS) allowed the “perceived threat” to pass through and immediately activate the Fight or Flight response. After the activation of response there is an “awarness” that something triggered the response and often attention is shifted to the area where the threat originated.

The challenge is trying to understand how the Levels interacted to facilitate these interrelated relationships, and for me personally at this point is understanding the “flow down” concept when the RAS seems to indicate the reverse is what happens.

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Yes. Many of our usages presuppose archaic understandings. The recognition of subconscious motivations (and therefore consciousness of which we are not aware) is only a century old, after all. By working to comprehend these issues within the PCT model, with an understanding of brain anatomy and functioning, we can domesticate our terminology. We may hope to improve our understanding and devise testable proposals.

Are you saying we are aware of all of these perceptions at once, all of these several kinds of perceptions? I can be aware of any of them at any given time, those that I attend to, but not all at once.

Let’s reframe “metacognitive process” in the PCT model. Here’s a definition:

Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one’s thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one’s understanding and performance. Metacognition includes a critical awareness of a) one’s thinking and learning and b) oneself as a thinker and learner.
— Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching

This involves control systems above the Sequence level, what we conventionally call the Program level and (questioning that labeling) what I think of as the planning level, imaginatively trying different sequences and sequence combinations until a way is found to bring a desired perception under control. The reference to ‘understanding’ is vague. It could implicate ‘monitoring’ and ‘assessing’ from the (proposed) Principle and Systems Concept levels.

Some aspects of brain anatomy and function are important here.

You mention the reticular activation system. The ascending reticular activation system (ARAS) is a primitive part of the brain, at the top of the brainstem but with ramifications into every area of the brain, which readies the neurochemical environments of neurons for their more efficient processing. Broadly speaking, its functioning seems to range from “something’s happening, process sensory input” to “nothing much is going on, relax and let autonomic functions be fully in charge”.

You invoke the fight-flight-freeze-fawn categorization which the limbic systems in the brain impose very quickly on perceptual input. (Less often noted, this survival-value categorization includes recognition of opportunities as well as threats, sukha as well as dukha.) Via the somatic branch of the hierarchy, they immediately prepare the body to control perceptions through the behavioral branch. It seems to me likely that high gain is a function of these preparations. Desired perceptions and reference values are determined above the level at which these two branches diverge.

Limbic systems construct perceptions more quickly than cortical systems do (higher levels in the hierarchy being slower), but both kinds of brain function are conscious. Limbic consciousness is subliminal: the somatic consequences are accessible to awareness, sensations and intensities in the somatic hiararchy, but at least in my experience (and in what I see reported) the very rapid threat/opportunity assessment process is inherently subliminal. In ordinary living most humans do not attend to those somatic consequences. (Systematic attention to them is foundational to Hinayana vipassana meditation practices.)

In B:CP (1965) and LCS II we see Bill’s proposal about emotions as perceptions constructed at higher (cortical) levels. Emotions are the brain’s opinions about the somatic preparations controlled by those primitive survival mechanisms. The ‘emotional tone’ thus attributed to an environmental situation or process apparently influences which memories and therefore reference values are more strongly evoked than others.

It might help to look at Rick’s ‘downward arrow’ in terms of its origin. As Bill says, nothing is ‘flowing’ down. It just says that whatever perception you are ‘looking’ at, your point of view is from a level above it. This sets up an obvious infinite regress paradox. Language affords a standpoint beside rather than above the observed perception. (When subjects view emotionally disturbing images, traffic between the amygdala and cortex proliferates, but when they begin talking about what they are feeling this feedback diminishes.) I suspect that some of the “going up a level” in MoL is actually stepping sideways into another point of view; and that it doesn’t matter which, so long as you reach a point of view which encompasses both (or all) of the motivations that are giving rise to conflict.

(Digression: There are also proposals that category perceptions are not constructed by a level of the hierarchy but rather by functions which are in some way ‘beside’ the entirety of the hierarchy and able to categorize at any level. Bill introduced the category level consistent with prevalent conceptions about the relationship of language to the symbolic calculi of algebra, logic, etc. which I have discussed elsewhere as misconceptions.)

These words attention, awareness, awake, consciousness, conscious, unconscious, etc. are slippery with ambiguity and vagueness. A common usage of ‘conscious’ is synonymous with ‘awake’, vs. ‘unconscious’. Another usage of ‘conscious’ implies volition, and is sometimes even synonymous with ‘intentional’. ‘Awareness’ as I have used and will use the term includes subliminal awareness, which is sometimes referred to as ‘subconscious’ or even oxymoronically as ‘unconscious awareness’. I hope we can avoid such entanglements.

Please unpack that objection a bit.

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Hi Bruce

RM: What, prey tell, is “Rick’s downward arrow”?

Best, Rick

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Hi Bruce,
I aggree that this is a sensible differentiation:

  1. “Attention” is process or act which is intended to certain perception(s) and which causes…
  2. …a state of “awareness” of or about this or these perception(s).

But your definition of “consciousness” is not so clear:

If both attended and not-attended perceptions belong to consciousness then what does not belong to it?

Will that become later? Looking forward.

Eetu

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“Awareness as a consequence of attention”

My initial objection was based on the logical implication if something is a consequence it must follow from some action X. However, you can not consciously pay attention to something you are not aware of. That was my first pass. However, it is true if you are attending to something, it is possible to gain awareness of something you were not aware of prior to attending.

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In your reading you overlooked Rick Marken (960502.1100) quoted in the first post of this topic.

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A useful principle that I learned from an undergrad symbolic logic course: no matter how impeccable the logic, if one premise is false the conclusions are indeterminate. Might be true, might be false, nobody knows.

A corollary is an important principle in the application of logic in the practice of science: if your logic is valid but leads to paradox or absurdity, reconsider your assumptions. (Something that folks with identities, reputations, and careers invested may decline to do, e.g. the majority of behaviorists a.k.a. ‘scientific psychologists’, cognitive psychologists, and my fellow student Noam Chomsky and his co-religionists.)

Attempts to define consciousness as an emergent phenomenon lead to paradox and absurdity. That is why those who attempt this call their endeavor “The Hard Problem”. Specifically, I hold that consciousness cannot be defined in terms of awareness or attention.

I now assume that consciousness is a primitive fact. This is consistent with proposals by a number of theoretical physicists and with millennia of systematic investigations into the nature of mind (which, however, being miscategorized as ‘religion’ have no credibility within certain approaches to science).

This entails a distinction between perceptions that you are unconscious of and those that you are conscious of. The distinction here is between subliminal control and control with awareness. You can’t attend to something without being aware of it. Can you be aware of something without attending to it? Yes. Peripheral vs. foveal vision is an example. Attention is foveal, but awareness includes the peripheral. A like gradation applies to all sensory modalities and to control of abstract concepts: some are on stage, a larger set are in the wings, and it is even possible to recruit likely-looking passers-by in the streets outside (associative memory).

To attend to a perception is to bring it under control, or rather, it is to bring its ‘foveal’ relation to the perceptual input functions for it under control down through the hierarchy. (We control the eastern location of sunrise without controlling the orientation of the physical earth to the physical sun.)

If your nervous system constructs that perception, eo ipso you are conscious of it. That perception may be in awareness or subliminal (‘subconscious’). The vast majority of your perceptions are subliminal, and the control systems that recognize and control those perceptions subliminally are what constitute your ‘subconscious mind’. I don’t know about you, but I find that this formulation demystifies ‘The Subconscious’. For Jung’s extension, cf. collective control.

I am glad to see that you recognize that we can attend to something with or without awareness. The phrase ‘pay attention’ entails awareness. “I should have paid attention to that hunch” refers to subliminal control that was not focalized.

Subliminal control entails attending to the controlled variable without awareness. Hence: it is possible to gain awareness of control that you were previously unaware of. Awareness of control can include not only awareness of a CV but also awareness of the processes of controlling it as well. And of course it is possible to become aware of disturbances as such and of the sources of disturbances, though that is not ordinarily the case.

Awareness is limited to the universe of perceptions. Within that, awareness may be limited to imagined perceptions. For example, one can become aware of the reference level for a CV as observed and perhaps measured in the environment, but one can become aware of the reference signal in one’s brain only as an imagined perception. This will probably remain true even when advances in neuroscience permit identifying and monitoring signals within a single control loop in the brain, since (as we currently understand it) the reference signal is some kind of aggregate, summation, or average of firing rates in a plurality of bundled nerves.

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Tim Carey presents an excellent overview of PCT in this 2018 paper.

Timothy A. Carey (2018) Consciousness as control and controlled perception - A perspective. Annals of Behavioral Science 4.2:3. DOI: 10.21767/2471-7975.100034.

On p.5 he turns to the question of consciousness as promised in the title.

The concept of “consciousness” then, and all the things that it incorporates such as “subjectivity” and the “self” including “I”, can be thought of as creations of language and the imagination. This does not mean that consciousness and “I” do not exist but they exist in the same sense that unicorns, mermaids, and dragons exist. Perhaps with consciousness, the map is the territory.

This identifies consciousness with our narrative about ourselves and about what we are aware of. It can include stories about subliminal awareness and control after the consequences of such control have become focalized in awareness.

This narrative makes a distinction between self and other, subject and object. These are also chimaerical fictions of imaginative language.

Bill and others have reported glimpses of what they call an ‘observer’ as a conclusion of an MoL session. (Their motivation for MoL was exploration. Probably people in MoL for resolution of internal conflict get to this state less frequently while their dilemma persists.)

Serious, protracted inquiry into the question who or what is observing presents a quandary. The observer is not observable. The observer seems to observe from a point of view. The point of view is separate from that viewed.

Butt up against that for a while. Talking about it is unconvincing. It must be put to the test of experience.

Without that experience, my conclusion cannot be convincing, but here it is anyway: Consciousness is an underived reality. The duality of subject and object, in which we mistake the fictional subject as consciousness, is a function of perceptual levels in some cases (you observe and control perceptions on level n from level n+1), and a function of self-narrative in other cases.

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Who is the observer. I am the observer. Who am I? I am who I am.

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RM: I couldn’t really follow your copy of the post from CSGNet. I didn’t know who was saying what and I since there was no context for the conversation I couldn’t really tell why anyone was saying what they were saying.

RM: If I was the one who said “Implicit in the method of levels is the idea that the direction of the arrow of consciousness is always “downwards” in the control hierarchy.” then I have no idea why I said it. I don’t know what the “arrow of consciousness” is or why I might have thought that MOL implies that it should point downward. But whatever it is, it doesn’t my current views on consciousness, which are more along the lines of (surprise) Bill Powers ideas as described in this paper.

RM: I like what Bill says in that paper because 1) it is based on the PCT model of behavior and 2) it contains suggestions for empirical tests of his proposals.

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Bruce, I am afraid that here:

you are destroying the concept of concsciousness by reducing it to or identifying it with the concept of perception. One concequence from this is that a thermostat is conscious of the temperature which it is controlling. Do you think it is?

Earlier you wrote:

Two questions about that:

  1. How primitive it is? Has it existed before humans, before life, before the big bang?
  2. Is the “control of perception” an emergent phenomenon or a primitive fact?

Thanks
Eetu

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RM: An excellent point Eetu.

Best, Rick

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Remember that there are two senses of ‘perception’, the subjective experience and a variable in the model which we propose correlates with it, namely, the perceptual signal (a theoretical value or at best a function of concurrent rates of firing in a nerve bundle). Consciousness is firmly on the subjective experience side.

The experience of consciousness of a perception can be supra- or subliminal (above or below the threshold of awareness). Subliminal perceptions can be raised to awareness (how we do that is TBD) and can become foci of attention. Supraliminal perceptions can be focalized in attention or peripheral.

No, I do not claim that a thermostat has a subjective experience correlated with its electrical signal. I suppose that it does not, but I have no way of knowing, any more than I know your subjective experience. On grounds of our history of interactions and collective control, and assuming that our organisms are of a like character, I have stronger grounds for assuming that you have the kinds of subjective experience that I call consciousness in my experience. I assume that the thermostat is unconscious, based on a corresponding lack, and with general agreement from those with whom I interact and engage in collective control.

On the other hand, you may risk identifying consciousness with attention and equating subconsciousness with being unconscious. That sounds reasonable until you consider subliminal control and ‘subconscious’ motivations. If you do not admit that ‘subconscious’ motivations and subliminal control require consciousness, then you’re saying that what is subconscious is actually unconscious. To consider for yourself the distinction between subconscious and unconscious you will have to examine your own experiences of subliminal or subconscious perception and control, or review some case histories empathetically (i.e. correlating them with such experiences of your own).

The perceptual input functions and control loops of the ARAS and the several functional parts of the limbic system (or paleo-mammalian cortex) operate without awareness but can hardly be said to be unconscious. Autonomic functions, by contrast, are generally not accessible to awareness or attention. You can become aware of your heartbeat, but not of the perceptual variables that are being controlled so as to produce that observable behavioral activity. A person in a coma, in a ‘vegetative state’ maintained by autonomic control systems, is certainly said to be unconscious. As to those who report memories of experiences while in a coma, we are generally dismissive. Memory is a construct, the same sort as imagination. Evident veridicality (remembered persons and conversations, for example) suggests that normally conscious control persists while observationally we see an unconscious patient. Lots of questions.

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The entire exchange with David Piper is in the email thread. It’s easier to follow on Discourse. If you want to know what you said in 1996 the quotation is there and there’s also a link to the post in the CSGnet archive.

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In the 1980 paper which Rick posted

  • Powers, W. T. (1980). A systems approach to consciousness, pp. 217-242 in Richard Davidson (ed.) The psychobiology of consciousness, New York: Plenum. DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4684-3456-9.
    (here’s another link)

Bill identifies consciousness with point of view. Fair enough, as far as it goes, but it does not answer what it is that assumes a point of view.

What is it that can adopt, and abandon, points of view? Where do we find it in this hierarchical model of perception and control of perception?

The answer is that we do not find it there. We do not yet have a model that can reproduce this phenomenon I call point of view. The structure that is involved in any given point of view is the acquired structure of the brain; that much is not hard to fit in. But the brain, once organized, contains all points of view possible to it, even those not currently operative. Moreover, points of view can shift up and down in the hierarchy suggested by this modeo; one may become a configuration-recognizer and may after a while become a relationship-recognizer. Yet there could be no relationships, such as “next to,” if the lower levels were not still faithfully constructing the configurations that are related.
[…]
If these explorations have led me anywhere, it has been to a vivid sense of my ignorance.

He points out that volition (increasing strength of a reference signal), attention, and awareness are certainly closely related. However, they are not identical. And behind them, consciousness is none of these. Consciousness is what assumes and relinquishes one point of view or another, whether or not the perception ‘viewed’ from there be in awareness or subliminal, focal in attention or peripheral. Examine the phenomenon for yourself and see if that is not so.

I have no way of answering (1). I agree with Bill’s proposal about the first emergence of life that “control of perception” is an emergent phenomenon. Once there are control systems there are potential points of view.

Saying that all that is involved is other systems recursively observing prior systems is entirely on the theoretical construct/neural firing rate side, ignoring the perception-as-experience side.

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RM: I think Bill answered that in the Conclusion section:

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RM: “Point of view” is clearly associated here with the reorganizing system (as it is in B:CP) which changes the organization of the control hierarchy. Reorganization is a process that involves awareness (“perception of perceiving”: B:CP, 1973, p199) and volition (“arbitrary actions” injected into the control hierarchy).

BN: He points out that volition (increasing strength of a reference signal), attention, and awareness are certainly closely related. However, they are not identical. And behind them, consciousness is none of these.

RM: Actually, Bill specifically identifies consciousness (in B:CP, 1973. p 200) as “perception (presence of neural currents in a perceptual pathway) and awareness (reception of the reorganizing system of duplicates of those signals…).” And volition involves injecting arbitrary signals into reference signals, not increasing their strength.

BN: Consciousness is what assumes and relinquishes one point of view or another, whether or not the perception ‘viewed’ from there be in awareness or subliminal, focal in attention or peripheral.

RM: This is the PCT view up to the point where you say “whether or not the perception ‘viewed’ from there be in awareness or subliminal, focal in attention or peripheral.” Since, in the PCT view, consciousness is awareness (perception of perceiving), you can’t be conscious (aware) of something that you are unable to perceive or be aware of (because it is subliminal).

RM: By the way, by identifying consciousness as an aspect of the reorganizing system, Bill’s PCT model provides a reasonable basis for assuming that the thermostat has no consciousness: it’s because the thermostat doesn’t reorganize itself when circumstances demand it. This suggests that it’s possible that robots that do reorganize themselves per the PCT model of reorganization – which involves awareness (consciousness) and volition – could be conscious.

RM: Moreover, the PCT model of consciousness explains why consciousness might have evolved; it evolved as part of a meta control system that reorganizes existing control systems whose existing organization no longer works in the circumstances in which the system finds itself. So consciousness is not just an epi-phenomenon that is “along for the ride”; it has functional significance and probably arose very early in the evolution of living systems. So all living systems that can reorganize probably have it. It is probably not unique to humans although the “quality” of that consciousness would be limited by the nature of the perceptual variables the system can control. An organism that can’t perceive in terms of principles, for examples, can’t be conscious of another organism (or their own) ethical stance on some matter.

BN: Examine the phenomenon for yourself and see if that is not so.

RM: If the phenomenon you are referring to is “point of view” as described by Powers, then I have indeed examined it myself, though it takes some practice. I am now able to move my awareness of what I am perceiving to different points of view. I think it takes practice because we are not used to moving our awareness to different points of view; we just move our consciousness of different “things” as we go through our day. We don’t think of those “things” – such as the distance to the car in front, the color of the car, whether it’s following the rules of the road – as representing different perceptual points of view; that is, we don’t think of looking at the world in terms of relationships, sensations, programs, as in the case of the car in front.

RM: But what I really like about Bill’s view of consciousness is that it’s testable, at least in principle. In the Conclusion of the “Systems approach to consciousness” paper Bill describes some ideas about testing this model of consciousness. It would be nice if we could get some students to follow up on those.

Best, Rick

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I’m on the boat coming home from Sarah getting a broken wrist put back together at Mass General yesterday, so this may not be my best organized post ever.

You Identify consciousness with awareness of perception(s) experienced within the scope of attention, and you deny the possibility of consciousness that is outside the scope of attention. In this conception, it is not only the case that awareness and attention facilitate reorganization, but also that reorganization without attention and awareness is not possible.

Awareness and attention are phenomena of subjective experience for which we have no model. Reorganization is a little-understood process of a ‘reorganization system’ posited in parallel to the HPCT model, to which certain subjective experiences are attributed.

If this is satisfying to you, you should stick with it as long as you can.

We should not inhibit investigation of phenomena which might contradict or extend these proposals.

In that thread that I quoted from CSGnet you had a clever suggestion for testing your ‘arrow of consciousness’ notion, which I take to be no more than the observation that the point of view is from a level above the perception being observed. This is often true. However, language and narrative enables a point of view ‘beside’ the perceptual hierarchy, as probably does categorizing. The limbic system or paleomammalian cortex provides a parallel point of view on environmental inputs of which we can become aware only indirectly as higher cortical functions create and control perceptions combining inputs from there and from body sensations as well from those same environmental inputs.

No, this is the phenomenon I am referring to.

Every attempt to observe consciousness is from a point of view at which consciousness is located but which you are not observing.

Consciousness is a phenomenon of subjective experience. Just as we have no place in the model for the subjective experiences that we find and propose are correlated with perceptual signals, we have no place in the model for consciousness and awareness. Punting to another set of control loops is no answer. To say that consciousness is a function of yet other control systems looking at the systems which are controlling the perceptions of which we are conscious does not answer what consciousness is or how it inhabits those posited secondary systems but does not inhabit the primary ones.

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RM: I follow Bill in identifying consciousness as “perception (presence of neural currents in a perceptual pathway) and awareness (reception of the reorganizing system of duplicates of those signals…).” (B:CP, 1973. p 200). There is nothing in that definition that says anything about attention (whatever that is; note that “perception” and “awareness” are both defined in terms of variables in the PCT model). So I don’t deny “the possibility of consciousness that is outside the scope of attention” because attention has nothing to do with the PCT definition of consciousness.

RM: Perhaps what you mean by “attention” is where awareness is currently focused; PCT does recognize that awareness moves from one set of perceptions to another. If that’s true then, indeed, the PCT definition of consciousness implies that we are not conscious of the perceptions that we are not currently aware of. Which seems to correspond to my subjective experience; while I am aware of typing this missive I am unaware of lots of other perceptions (such as the birds chirping outside) though those perceptions are always there and I became aware (and, thus, conscious) of them when I was typing about my lack of awareness of them.

BN: In this conception, it is not only the case that awareness and attention facilitate reorganization, but also that reorganization without attention and awareness is not possible.

RM: I believe the PCT view of this is that reorganization is constantly going on outside of awareness. Becoming aware of one’s own controlling from the point of view of the perceptions that are the means of controlling another perception increases the rate at which reorganization occurs. This is consistent with the observation that when you do this with a perception that you are skilled at controlling – for example, if you become conscious of what your fingers are doing when you play a Bach two-part invention – the controlling can deteriorate considerably.

BN: Awareness and attention are phenomena of subjective experience for which we have no model. Reorganization is a little-understood process of a ‘reorganization system’ posited in parallel to the HPCT model, to which certain subjective experiences are attributed.

RM: Behavior is also a phenomenon of subjective experience but we do have a model of it. I agree that we don’t have a complete model of awareness or reorganization. But we do have the beginnings of a model which we could make more complete with the relevant research. In my PCT Methods book I describe some of the research that has already been done on reorganization and suggest possible directions for further research .

BN: If this is satisfying to you, you should stick with it as long as you can.

RM: I want to have a good understanding of how control works – by testing and improving the hierarchical control model – before doing a lot of research on reorganization/consciousness. But I’m certainly not satisfied with the current state of our understanding of anything about perceptual control.

BN: We should not inhibit investigation of phenomena which might contradict or extend these proposals.

RM: Of course not. But I think we should start by trying to understand these phenomena in terms of the PCT model.

RM: Bill describes some ideas about testing this model of consciousness.
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BN: In that thread that I quoted from CSGnet you had a clever suggestion for testing your ‘arrow of consciousness’ notion

RM: Yes, I saw that but I wonder whether it is really undoable. The idea was to create a conflict that is either above or below the perceptual level of a person’s current point of view. I think PCT might predict that it should be more difficult to resolve the conflict if it’s below rather than above the current point of view. But it’s very hard to put people into conflict, let alone know whether the conflict you put them in is above or below their current point of view. I do have a demo where I put a cooperative participant into a conflict. But creating conflicts at different levels would be a real challenge. I think we should start with simpler studies of reorganization and consciousness like those described by Bill in the “Systems approach to consciousness” paper.

BN: Consciousness is a phenomenon of subjective experience. Just as we have no place in the model for the subjective experiences that we find and propose are correlated with perceptual signals, we have no place in the model for consciousness and awareness.

RM: I think the PCT model is all about subjective experience because it says that our behavior is organized around the control of perceptual variables. From the modeler’s perspective these subjective experiences are neural firing rates that are analogs of the aspects of the environment constructed by the perceptual functions of the controller; from the behaving system’s perspective these subjective experiences are the varying states of the qualia that are the way neural firing rates are experienced by the perceiving system. Consciousness involves perceiving (via awareness) these perceptions (neural currents). We know what these qualia “look like” to human controllers because we are humans also. But we don’t know why they look that way; that’s called the “hard problem” of consciousness but I don’t think it is a consciousness problem from the perspective of PCT. In PCT, the perceptions that are the objects of awareness are “neural currents in a perceptual pathway”; how those neural currents are experienced as qualia by the controlling system is not a question the PCT model of consciousness is trying to solve. I personally solve it for myself by just saying that that’s the way neural currents are experienced by a system that is those neurons and those currents.

BN: To say that consciousness is a function of yet other control systems looking at the systems which are controlling the perceptions of which we are conscious does not answer what consciousness is or how it inhabits those posited secondary systems but does not inhabit the primary ones.

RM: I think it does answer what consciousness is: it is “perception (presence of neural currents in a perceptual pathway) and awareness (reception of the reorganizing system of duplicates of those signals…).” So consciousness (from a PCT perspective) is perception (awareness) of perception (perceptual signals). I presume that it inhabits both the perceptual and awareness systems as brain processes – I would assume neural currents for both perception and awareness – which is why we can so effectively turn either or both of them off with chemicals called anesthetics.

Best, Rick

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Just to verify what you are saying:

  • Consciousness is everywhere neural currents are present in a perceptual pathway and copies of such signals are in the reorganizing system.

So in your view we are conscious only when control is sufficiently defective to invoke reorganization.

Does that mean when control is good we are unconscious?