3. Science AMA Series: I’m David Linden, a Professor of Neuroscience at The Johns...

Science AMA Series: I’m David Linden, a Professor of Neuroscience at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the author of three books about brain function written for a general audience, most recently ‘Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart and Mind.' AMA!

The philosopher Ned Block introduced a distinction that might be somewhat helpful - between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness - where access consciousness is the availability of representations of features of internal and external environment for (functionally describable) processes (higher order processing, action-guidance, verbalization etc), while phenomenal consciousness refers to the essential characteristic of consciousness that it undeniably 'feels like' something to have it.

It seems to me that neuroscience can (and does) contribute significantly to finding out how access consciousness (the functional aspect of consciousness) works.

But in general, the fact that in our physical world, there is such a thing as phenomenal consciousness at all - that there are properties of being a certain kind of system that are fundamentally and essentially only accessible "from within" - that for (at least) some kinds of systems, there is something it "is like" to be them - that certainly deserves attention, and ought to be of interest to anyone interested in the mind at all.

We don't just want to talk about consciousness in order to make ethical points - we want to talk about the differences between conscious and unconscious processing of information, about phenomenal consciousness, and about the relation between phenomenal and access-consciousness.

While the latter issues require the tools of the epistemology, philosophy of science, and analytical metaphysics as well as the empirical data and the theories of neural information-processing and control, the former have rightfully held the attention of many empirical scientists in the cognitive, neuro- and behavioral sciences.

The somewhat older, but still very good book "Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness" by B.Baars, W.Banks & J. Newman is full of studies investigating access consciousness (and sometimes touching upon the issue of phenomenal consciousness), showing how 'consciousness' may be of relevance to the neuro & cognitive sciences.

More recently, G. Tononi has advanced his 'Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness', which has both empirical and philosophical dimensions, by arguing for the the metaphysical assumption that phenomenal consciousness is what happens when systems integrate information about themselves and their environment in their behavior-control, and going into theoretical detail on the latter to make provide a solid footing of 'information integration' in our empirical knowledge about biological systems.

Of course - many people (including in the neuro- and cognitive sciences) like to talk about 'consciousness' while lacking any sort of idea of what the concept entails, what the conceptual, epistemic and metaphysical problems are etc... and you're absolutely right that we ought to be quite cautious in using the term, but...

(TL;DR:) I think we cannot neglect the need to address the issues of consciousness, and it seems we can also be more optimistic about the relevance of the concept to the neuro- and cognitive sciences.

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