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clear at least what is not meant. The antonym of "conscious" is "uncon–
scious." Unfortunately, there exist two different explications of "uncon–
scious," which are at least partly responsible for the conceptual
confusion that has brought on the philosophers. The more commonly
understood explication refers to the global absence in a person of
awareness, sensation, and cognition. This is the meaning of "uncon–
scious" that is of interest to anesthesiologists who have some under–
standing of the phenomenon in terms of the neurobiology of the brain
stem gateway to the cerebrum. But it is the less commonly understood
meaning of "unconscious," which refers to a selective absence of aware–
ness of some particular sensation, memory, or emotion in an otherwise
fully conscious person, that interests psychobiologists. They want to
understand something more subtle about mental states than being "con–
scious" in the sense of being wide awake rather than totally out.
It's a pity that Sigmund Freud used the ambiguous term "unconscious"
in his description of the selective absence of awareness (or "repression")
of remembered experiences, whose role in personality formation was one
of his main psychoanalytic propositions. He would have been better
served by another antonym of "conscious," namely "subconscious,"
whose explication is restricted to the subset of mental processes of which
an otherwise fully conscious person is unaware. In my following attempt
to clarify the status of the consciousness problem I will use the terms
"subconscious" and "unaware" as the antonym of "conscious."
One of the few indisputably true statements that can be made is that
consciousness is a phenomenon that is associated with our brain.
It
seems likely that the principal biological function of consciousness is the
interpretation of the information gathered by our sensory organs and
the construction of an integrated, global panorama of the ensemble of
those interpretations.
A leading contemporary investigator of consciousness, the neuropsy–
chologist Antonio Damasio of the University of Iowa, has formulated a
more subtle explication of consciousness in terms of the psychologically
central concept of the self. On the basis of his studies of the cognitive
deficits of brain-damaged subjects, Damasio has divided the phenomenon
of consciousness into three (phenomenologically) distinct sub-categories,
which he designates as proto-self, core self, and autobiographical self.
The proto-self is a gathering place at which the input from the sen–
sory organs first enters the brain and whence it is conducted to succes–
sively higher brain centers for the abstraction of sensory percepts. The
mental processes of the proto-self are subconscious and, strictly speak–
ing, not a part of consciousness. But they are a necessary prelude to it.
