About Consciousness – and free will to consciously …

Below an attempt to find a way to describe

How I use the concept conscious as well as not conscious thinking/behaviors/expressions/… .

1. When considering not conscious processes we need to try to elaborate this some more. What do we usually refer to? Fist, what do we refers to when we use the word/concept a conscious state As with many other words also in science we use them and assume that others understand what we say without really make clear what we refers to or defined the words.

2. Perhaps we can approach this question from a “signs of conscious states” by first discuss “a minimally conscious state
   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071686/
   ..” In recent decades, modern medical technology and resuscitation techniques have produced new neurologic syndromes of severe, and usually irreversible, cognitive and motor disabilities. The three most significant and most common of these syndromes are brain death, vegetative state, and locked-in state” …

“Because of these and other controversial issues, a multi-disciplinary group of physicians developed a consensus-based definition of this new syndrome and medical criteria for its diagnosis (the Aspen Work Group).4 Previously described as the minimally responsive state, this new syndrome in which the patient emerges from the vegetative state to have some degree of cognitive function is more accurately labeled the minimally conscious state (MCS)” …

“The Aspen Work Group defines MCS as “a condition of severely altered consciousness in which minimal, but definite, behavioral evidence of self or environmental awareness is demonstrated.” Before rendering a diagnosis of MCS, the patient must demonstrate on physical examination one or more of four types of behaviors on a reproducible or sustained basis. These neurologic behavioral characteristics at the bedside are shown in the Box. The most important and the one usually first seen when a patient emerges from a vegetative state into MCS is sustained visual pursuit” …

Follows simple commands;

1. Gives yes or no responses verbally or with gestures,
2. Verbalizes intelligibly,
   1. Demonstrates other purposeful behavior, including nonreflexive movements or affective gestures that occur in direct relationship to relevant environmental stimuli, eg:
      1. appropriate smiling or
      2. crying in response to specific emotional stimuli vocalization or
      3. gesturing in direct response to linguistic content of questions directed reaching for objects that demonstrates a clear relationship between object location and direction of reach modification of touch or
      4. grasp to accommodate the size and shapes of objects pursuit eye movements or
      5. sustained vision fixation upon a external visual stimulus.
      6. *At least one is required for diagnosis

3. The above MCS highlight the complexity with distinguish between conscious and not conscious states if we simply discuss it out of a simple old (mammalian and reptilian) and new (human) brain.
4. The MCS is related to neurologic syndromes of severe, and usually irreversible, cognitive and motor disabilities and we are discussing human representing no neurological syndrome trying to conceptualize a point of departure for our work on psychophysiological behavioral medicine interventions based on the reconsolidation conceptualization we have very modest use of the MCS considerations as discussed above
5. A conclusion of the above discussion is that we need to express a working definition of how we use the words conscious and not conscious! I cannot be trying to do a consensus one but a for us working one, in tune with Hobbe´s “a man that seeketh precise truth had need to remember what every name he uses stands for, and to place it accordingly, or else he will find himself entangled in his words, as a bird in lime twigs, the more he struggles the more belimed.” (L, 36). Below I describe a working solution which probably will be updated during our work!
6. There are very many concepts which we use also in sciences without we explain how we defined the concepts – given we even think about it! Like Locus of control, focus of attention, meta perspective etc.. Here I will make it easy while adding will to conscious, that is, to distinguish between what we with conscious will can influence to modify precognitive traumatic memories and what can be done via consciously use mindbiofeedback strategies to influence autonomic nervous systems (which we cannot direct control but via strategies while observing effects of strategies in psychophysiological in parameters measuring dynamic autonomic nervous system, e.g. skin temperature which measure 1/100 C of changes in sympathetic nervous system. Perhaps the parameter we understand most of how it function and which patients easily understand, which in turn is important for their motivation to do their tasks – do the biofeedback training. In short, the above discussion motivated the use of MindBiofeedback Autogenic Training (see …..)
7. NB I will not discuss here free will as e.g. Wegner does – http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/wegner/ – even if I will certainly to this as soon as possible while I think this is related to the existing discussions but as I here will discuss our brain evolution and the importance to consider old brain spatial and new brain verbal language iÍ will this philosophical and real world issue for now!

Examples on definitions
 A – https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/co nsciousness
Definition of consciousness

1. the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself
2. the state or fact of being conscious of an external object, state, or fact – awareness; especially: concern for some social or political cause * the organization aims to raise the political consciousness of teenagers.
3. the state of being characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, and thought: mind*
4. the totality of conscious states of an individual
5. the normal state of conscious life regained consciousness
6. the upper level of mental life of which the person is aware as contrasted with unconscious processes

* Mind “the element or complex of elements in an individual that feels, perceives, thinks, wills, and especially reasons

B – https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201303/what-is-consciousness
“If someone asked you to explain consciousness, could you do it? Very, very smart people have spent their entire careers trying to understand the answer to that question. It is surprising that something we all experience is so hard to explain. The difficulty comes in describing the “what it’s likeness” that characterizes consciousness. There’s something it’s like to experience the color red, to taste chocolate, to feel happy or sad. Philosophers call this phenomenology. Unlike other worldly stuff, it isn’t something we can point to or hold in our hand. It’s not something we’ve been able to calculate. And we’ve yet to find a rigorous method of measuring it.

In 1994 David Chalmers published a paper explaining why consciousness is such a challenging phenomenon to understand. Although he wasn’t the first to discuss these challenges, he was the first to categorize them into two types of problems: “easy” problems and the “hard” problem.

Easy problems involve the explanation of how the mind integrates information, focuses attention and allows us to report on mental states. Though not a piece of cake, such problems are easy because solving them only requires that we determine the mechanisms that explain these behaviors. Easy problems are physical by nature, falling within the empirical domains of psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience. Given the current trend in science of the mind, we’re confident that one day we will solve these problems.

The hard problem, by contrast, may never be solved. Specifically, the hard problem is determining why or how consciousness occurs given the right arrangement of brain matter. What makes it hard is that we cannot just point to some physical mechanism to solve it, for that would be the solution to the easy problem. Instead, our goal is to explain why certain physical mechanism gives rise to consciousness instead of something else or nothing at all. Consider an analogy from physics: knowing every equation predicting how mass and gravity interact does not tell us why they interact in the way they do. To understand why mass and gravity interact, we must appeal to highly esoteric explanations involving relativity, quantum mechanics or string theory.

But while theoretical physicists have produced some pretty specific models that are ready to be tested with the likes of the Large Hadron Collider, consciousness lacks the sort of general consensus that would allow us to move on and test our theories. And for good reason—the hard problem is tricky.

C – even more complex! So perhaps we approach the conscious – not conscious distinction with
1. Humans characterize of functions related to its brains evolution – that is evolution of species until man where our brain is aggraded during the evolution, mainly the reptilian, mammalian and lastly the human brain development. This means that humans and its brain functioning is influenced by its developmental history which again influence on the presence, which may vary between and within individuals over situations and time. How gene expressions are turn on and off related to individuals encounters with their environment is not well understood. We can thus assume that basic internalizations have important influence on a particular individuals’ basic personality characteristics, e.g. growing up in an extremist environment may have quite different consequences than an environment of love, care and emphatic behaviors. It may also have consequences on basic characteristics as meta thinking, …

To be in a conscious state and with my free will ….

 

More is to come ….