This sense captures only one of a number of meanings that have come to characterize consciousness in contemporary times. Modern psychological views of consciousness originate in William James classic work, Principles of Psychology (1890).  Most of the qualities he ascribes are easily discovered through introspection—a somewhat undifferentiated view of consciousness relative to more contemporary accounts.  They are presented below:
 

1. Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness.
2. Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing.
3. Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous.
4. It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself.
5. It is interested in some parts of these objects to theexclusion of others and welcomes or rejects—chooses from among them, in a word—all the while.

One of the problems with contemporary accounts is that consciousness is defined in terms of a number of different activities of the mind.  Philosophical, information theoretic, and neuroscientific approaches often use consciousness to mean different things.  Simply note the difference between using "conscious" to mean awake (not comatose), to be aware (I was conscious of a really strange smell in the room), some existential state (I suddenly became conscious of the meaning of my life and my place in the universe).  Pinker (1998), has identified these different usages in How the Mind Works and also the relative success of scientific explanations for these usages.  He suggest at least three ways in which the term consciousness is used:

1.    Self-Knowledge

• The sense of self as an entity.  Not only am I seeing red, I am aware the it's me, Dr. Fred who is seeing red.  Here consciousness is defined as building an internal representation of the world that includes the self.  This is the sense in which the term is most frequently used academically by cognitive scientists.
• When defined in this way, cognitive science provides a fairly good account of the nature of consciousness in terms of an internal representation of the self including self-monitoring.  Further, this account is easily modeled in computer programs that can examine, report on, and modify themselves on the basis of available information.

 

• This definition of consciousness relates to the ability to verbalize sensory experience, the contents of memory and thinking.  Roughly equivalent to what we call awareness or what cognitive scientists call short term memory
• There are clearly two pools of information that the nervous system uses to process information—that which is immediately available to the systems that underlie verbal reports, rational thought, and decision making—and that which is not.  Some information in the latter is never available such as autonomic nervous system functions and the calculations that the nervous system uses in processing (e.g., the use of information about retinal disparity in providing the experience of visual depth).  Other information not immediately available can move into awareness and visa versa—one's knowledge data base and long term memory are examples of the latter.
• Any information processor must be given limited access because information has costs as well as benefits (space or storage capacity, time, resources).
• There are four very obvious features to access consciousness:
1. We are aware of a rich field of sensation and further, the contents of this awareness are at an intermediate level of integration—we are unaware of the lower level processing that's going on.  Objects come to us already integrated as meaningful entities with some perceptual constancy (the piece of coal in the sun, snowball indoors example).  What we perceive is a highly processed product—a scene in vision, a melody in audition, meaningful words in language, not patches of light or sequences of sound pitch.
2. A second feature is attention—there are limitations on the amount of information that we can process at any given time.  Attention is like a spotlight that brings certain information into consciousness.  Interestingly, since the brain is a parallel processing device, processing can and does occur outside of awareness.  Many of the skilled tasks you now perform automatically, without "thinking," originally required very focussed attention.  (Driving a car, keyboarding, riding a bike to name a few.)
3. Thirdly, the contents of access consciousness are emotionally colored.  This fact is evidence of the functional evolution of mind—it evolved for some purpose.  Motivation and emotion is the motor moving the organism to some end.  The mind and consciousness did not come into being because they were neat things to have, but rather because they contributed to the survival and consequently the procreation of the organism.
4. Finally, access consciousness features an executive function that makes decisions and choices—something we experience as the self, the will, the "I."  The executive demonstrates intention (in the philosophical sense) in directing the body, the senses, the mind, etc.

 

• This sense of consciousness is the one used most by philosophers and theologians—phenomenal awareness, subjective experience—the sense of being in the world. The sense of "I am."
• It is this sense of consciousness that cognitive science, or any science, has difficulty explaining.  But does it require an explanation?
• Pinker (1998), in the section of the assigned reading on consciousness, suggests (particularly in the questions he poses in that section) that sentience is an emergent property of the information processing system.
• He cites the work of Dennett and other functionalists who believe that once we have isolated the computational and neurological correlates of access consciousness, there is nothing left to explain.  In this context, sentience is viewed as an "epiphonomenon"—a side effect of information processing systems coming together to produce access consciousness.  While giving an account of sentience may be an interesting philosophical exercise, it neither adds to nor detracts from our understanding of how the mind works

Trying to answer the questions he poses in the section on sentience is a valuable exercise and will serve to sharpen your own understanding and views of these issues.  Good luck!!

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