AUTHOR=Jonkisz Jakub 

TITLE=Consciousness: individuated information in action

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=6

YEAR=2015

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01035

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01035

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>Within theoretical and empirical enquiries, many different meanings associated with consciousness have appeared, leaving the term itself quite vague. This makes formulating an abstract and unifying version of the concept of consciousness – the main aim of this article –into an urgent theoretical imperative. It is argued that consciousness, characterized as <italic>dually accessible</italic> (cognized from the inside and the outside), <italic>hierarchically referential</italic> (semantically ordered), <italic>bodily determined</italic> (embedded in the working structures of an organism or conscious system), and <italic>useful in action</italic> (pragmatically functional), is a <italic>graded</italic> rather than an <italic>all-or-none</italic> phenomenon. A gradational approach, however, despite its explanatory advantages, can lead to some counterintuitive consequences and theoretical problems. In most such conceptions consciousness is <italic>extended globally</italic> (attached to primitive organisms or artificial systems), but also <italic>locally</italic> (connected to certain lower-level neuronal and bodily processes). For example, according to <italic>information integration theory</italic> (as introduced recently by <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B170">Tononi and Koch</xref>, <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B170">2014</xref>), even such simple artificial systems as <italic>photodiodes</italic> possess miniscule amounts of consciousness. The major challenge for this article, then, is to establish reasonable, empirically justified constraints on how extended the range of a graded consciousness could be. It is argued that conscious systems are limited globally by the ability to individuate information (where <italic>individuated information</italic> is understood as <italic>evolutionarily embedded, socially altered</italic>, and <italic>private</italic>), whereas local limitations should be determined on the basis of a hypothesis about the action-oriented nature of the processes that select states of consciousness. Using these constraints, an abstract concept of consciousness is arrived at, hopefully contributing to a more unified state of play within consciousness studies itself.</p>