Consciousness is the focus of a great deal of contemporary thought and research - in the sciences and philosophy.
We contrast "consciousness" with the subconscious activity of our brains, which we have learned is responsible for filtering what information reaches our consciousness. As Tor Norretranders points out in his book, The User Illusion, of the approximately 10,000,000 bits of information per second available to the human body, conscious capacity is limited to about 40 bits per second.
Free will might be said to be a question of how to use this relatively minute and unconsciously biased conscious capacity to change the unconscious.
In his recent book, Consciousness and the Social Brain, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano presents his theory of consciousness. He calls it the attention schema theory.
In this theory, consciousness is described as our awareness and the direction of our attention.
We don't always separate the two. Often, our attention is directed only towards what our minds are aware of. However, we have the ability to shift our attention.
When we shift our attention, we are increasing the strengths of of some signals in the brain and decreasing the strength of others. A domino effect results in either case. At the quantum level, new probability waves are initiated. At the classical level of experience, new thoughts and actions emerge.
Our attention is the activity of representing our awareness. It is a heightening of a specific set of signals. When we "pay attention" to something, we are devoting more resources to it. We are elevating its allowance of conscious neural bandwidth.
We may say that the sum of our awareness and our attention is our consciousness.
We contrast "consciousness" with the subconscious activity of our brains, which we have learned is responsible for filtering what information reaches our consciousness. As Tor Norretranders points out in his book, The User Illusion, of the approximately 10,000,000 bits of information per second available to the human body, conscious capacity is limited to about 40 bits per second.
Free will might be said to be a question of how to use this relatively minute and unconsciously biased conscious capacity to change the unconscious.
In his recent book, Consciousness and the Social Brain, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano presents his theory of consciousness. He calls it the attention schema theory.
In this theory, consciousness is described as our awareness and the direction of our attention.
We don't always separate the two. Often, our attention is directed only towards what our minds are aware of. However, we have the ability to shift our attention.
When we shift our attention, we are increasing the strengths of of some signals in the brain and decreasing the strength of others. A domino effect results in either case. At the quantum level, new probability waves are initiated. At the classical level of experience, new thoughts and actions emerge.
Our attention is the activity of representing our awareness. It is a heightening of a specific set of signals. When we "pay attention" to something, we are devoting more resources to it. We are elevating its allowance of conscious neural bandwidth.
We may say that the sum of our awareness and our attention is our consciousness.
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