I feel like the intensity of conscious experience varies greatly in my personal life. I feel less conscious when I’m doing my routines, when I’m surfing on the internet, when I’m having fun or playing an immersive game, when I’m otherwise in a flow state, or when I’m daydreaming. I feel more conscious when I meditate, when I’m in a self-referencing feedback loop, when I’m focusing on the immediate surroundings, when I’m trying to think about the fundamental nature of reality, when I’m very sad, when something feels painful or really unpleasant, when I feel like someone else is focusing on me, when I’m trying to control my behavior, when I’m trying to control my impulses and when I’m trying to do something that doesn’t come naturally.
I’m not sure if we’re talking about the same conscious experience so I try to describe it in other words. When I’m talking about the intensity of consciousness, I talking about heightened awareness and how the “raw” experience seems more real and time seems to go slower.
Anyway, my point is that if consciousness varies so much in my own life, I think it’s reasonable to think it could also vary greatly between people too. This doesn’t mean that more conscious people are in any way “better”. It’s possible to see from my list that aside from few exceptions, this particular form of consciousness is mostly connected with negative experiences. Considering that flow state and routines are less consciousness inducing activities, too much of this kind of consciousness seems to be detrimental to productivity and instrumental rationality. Unless you’re an artist or a philosopher.
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.
I feel like the intensity of conscious experience varies greatly in my personal life. I feel less conscious when I’m doing my routines, when I’m surfing on the internet, when I’m having fun or playing an immersive game, when I’m otherwise in a flow state, or when I’m daydreaming. I feel more conscious when I meditate, when I’m in a self-referencing feedback loop, when I’m focusing on the immediate surroundings, when I’m trying to think about the fundamental nature of reality, when I’m very sad, when something feels painful or really unpleasant, when I feel like someone else is focusing on me, when I’m trying to control my behavior, when I’m trying to control my impulses and when I’m trying to do something that doesn’t come naturally.
I’m not sure if we’re talking about the same conscious experience so I try to describe it in other words. When I’m talking about the intensity of consciousness, I talking about heightened awareness and how the “raw” experience seems more real and time seems to go slower.
Anyway, my point is that if consciousness varies so much in my own life, I think it’s reasonable to think it could also vary greatly between people too. This doesn’t mean that more conscious people are in any way “better”. It’s possible to see from my list that aside from few exceptions, this particular form of consciousness is mostly connected with negative experiences. Considering that flow state and routines are less consciousness inducing activities, too much of this kind of consciousness seems to be detrimental to productivity and instrumental rationality. Unless you’re an artist or a philosopher.
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.