Well, maybe it’s not only your consciousness that varies, but also / more so your memory of it.
When you undergo a gastroscopy and get your light dose propofol, it often happens that you’ll actually be conscious during the experience, enough so to try to wiggle free, to focus on the people around you. Quite harrowing, really. Luckily, afterwards you won’t have a memory of that.
When you consider your past degree of consciousness, you see things through the prism of your memory, which might well act as a Fourier filter-analogue. It’s not exactly vital to reliably save to memory minutiae of your routine tasks, or your conscious experience thereof, so it doesn’t always happen. Whyever would it?
(Obligatory “lack of consciousness is the mind-killer”.)
That is the kind of argument that is a bit difficult to argue against in any way because you’re always going to use your memory to assess the past degree of consciousness, but it also the kind of argument that doesn’t by itself explain why your prior should be higher for the claim “consciousness stays at the same level at all times” versus “consciousness varies throughout your daily life”. But I agree, that does happen. Your perception of past mental states is also going to be influenced by your bias and what kind of theoretical framework you have in mind.
Maybe you could set up alarms at random intervals and when alarm goes off you write down your perceived level of consciousness? Is this unreliable too? Maybe it’s impossible to compare your immediate phenomenal experience to anything, even if it happened a second before because “experience” and “memory of an experience” are always of entirely different kind of substance. Even if you used fMRI scan on a participant who estimated her level of conscious intensity to be “high” and then used that scan to compare people’s mental states, that initial estimate had to come from comparing her immediate mental state to her memories of other mental states—and like you said those memories can be unreliable.
So either you trust your memories of phenomenal experience on some level, or you accept that there’s no way to study this problem.
Well, maybe it’s not only your consciousness that varies, but also / more so your memory of it.
When you undergo a gastroscopy and get your light dose propofol, it often happens that you’ll actually be conscious during the experience, enough so to try to wiggle free, to focus on the people around you. Quite harrowing, really. Luckily, afterwards you won’t have a memory of that.
When you consider your past degree of consciousness, you see things through the prism of your memory, which might well act as a Fourier filter-analogue. It’s not exactly vital to reliably save to memory minutiae of your routine tasks, or your conscious experience thereof, so it doesn’t always happen. Whyever would it?
(Obligatory “lack of consciousness is the mind-killer”.)
That is the kind of argument that is a bit difficult to argue against in any way because you’re always going to use your memory to assess the past degree of consciousness, but it also the kind of argument that doesn’t by itself explain why your prior should be higher for the claim “consciousness stays at the same level at all times” versus “consciousness varies throughout your daily life”. But I agree, that does happen. Your perception of past mental states is also going to be influenced by your bias and what kind of theoretical framework you have in mind.
Maybe you could set up alarms at random intervals and when alarm goes off you write down your perceived level of consciousness? Is this unreliable too? Maybe it’s impossible to compare your immediate phenomenal experience to anything, even if it happened a second before because “experience” and “memory of an experience” are always of entirely different kind of substance. Even if you used fMRI scan on a participant who estimated her level of conscious intensity to be “high” and then used that scan to compare people’s mental states, that initial estimate had to come from comparing her immediate mental state to her memories of other mental states—and like you said those memories can be unreliable.
So either you trust your memories of phenomenal experience on some level, or you accept that there’s no way to study this problem.