After reading Daniel Dennett’s greatest book, Consciousness Explained, I conceived the idea of knitting as a metaphor for consciousness. Consciousness can happen in multiple degrees, from a lack of acknowledgement or control to intense experiences that can override any other experience in our brains. We learn some things permanently, notice others with errors in memory or perception, and retain certain experiences indefinitely. There’s no clear boundary for our level of consciousness, as we lack precise measures of neural activity. The complexity of this activity, reflected in how many experience drafts or threads are knit together, might define our degree of consciousness.
Many readers might feel that Dennett didn’t explicitly define consciousness in the book, as he focused on arguing against any central meaner, dictator or decision-maker in the brain. The areas Dennett left combined with the strong metaphors, and medical cases that he mentioned, can help us understand consciousness. I can see it as a knitting process.
One meaningless warning I often received as a child was to “be careful”, or “beware of…”. How can I be aware of something just by being told to do so? If I couldn’t instinctively focus on a danger or a threat, then how could language instructions program me to do so? Dennett discusses enjoying our experiences, and how exposure improves our understanding of different degrees of the same experience such as wine tasting. Timothy Wilson, in his book about the adaptive unconscious, the alternative scientific idea of the psychoanalytic unconscious, explains how the unconscious processes work and learn, and how they differ from conscious ones in terms of accuracy. Dennett suggests no clear border between the two.
Many things we learn consciously become unconscious later, such as driving cars, sports skills, eating, or dressing. Even dreams can become more “conscious” with practice as in lucid dreaming, where we remember, experience, and even control our dreams. Without the Cartesian Theatre that Dennett refuted, we seem to lack a unified idea of consciousness. However, Dennett’s explanation of consciousness of time suggests specific elements, like memory, usually make our experience conscious. He shows how our consciousness of time doesn’t match real-time; rather, we become conscious of time when an event, like a clapperboard in filmmaking, marks it.
Being conscious, then, in the absence of any central device or organ for consciousness, involves multiple processes in different brain areas. Multiple drafts, or threads of our experiences are continuous, multiple, and they never stop at any moment while we rarely become “conscious” of them. We define the moment of consciousness by specific features like remembering something exceptional with the experience, or connecting it to a specific meaning, or associating it with other sensory inputs such as voice or smell. Consciousness is when these threads are knitted together.
I might remember my mother’s or my driving instructor’s warnings if I watched a video of a similar scenario involving an accident. Adding fear to the warning adds more threads, connecting more of our multiple drafts. Experiencing danger makes me conscious, not the instructions. Similarly, learning a skill involves knitting more threads until the skill is learned. Focusing or trying to remember involves strategies to engage more threads, to knit something, to make us conscious, or I more conscious. There seem to be degrees of consciousness.
There must be some threshold of complexity in our experience to make it conscious. Neural activity’s complexity may not necessarily depend on the number of threads. You may be conscious of something if you try to make it the focus of your meditation, or if you understand it well while reading it. This is the basic threshold. But what about remembering the experience for the days, or experiences dominate your thinking for days? How many drafts/threads are involved here? We don’t call this consciousness, but on the scale of the neural activity’s complexity, it has more consciousness, if we may say so.
Traumatic experiences not only demand an extensive amount of our brain activity at the moment but also alter brain activity permanently. They are so impactful that we can’t be conscious of all their aspects initially. Our experience is overridden by the activity of the threat system (fear, disgust, anxiety ..etc.).
Some of our brain activities can never be conscious experiences. For example, we can measure our heart rate and sense it’s higher than usual but we can’t control it, or be aware of the circuit causing it, though we might know some indirect causes. There is also a neural activity that we can only be conscious of if it knits with other threads/drafts. That applies to vision, even though we can only process small amounts of the threads that are being initiated by the vision all the time. We can’t say there’s a conscious mind, and we might only call the unconscious mind those processes we can never be conscious of like stomach activities. However, among the threads that we can be conscious of, there’s no border between what we can and cannot be conscious of. Instead, there’s an emerging complexity continuously motivating this knitting process giving us what we know as consciousness.
Dennett described mechanisms of collaboration between the demons, the different initiators of our experiences and thoughts in the mind. Resembling a pandemonium-like model where these initiators work. It can be an evolutionary process giving control to some or creating the illusion of consciousness by prioritizing one demon over the other parallel processes temporarily. For me, consciousness is about volume and complexity.
Consciousness, is a state of mind measurable by a continuous neural activity across multiple areas in the brain, reflecting threads of our experience. It’s integrated with our bodies and surroundings, and it was initially evolved over millions of years to produce the knitting-like process between experience threads based on environmental stimuli and bodily sensations.
As with any evolutionary process, consciousness, the knitting experience threads have many errors and weaknesses. It wasn’t designed to do what we think it should be doing. Changes in the environmental or bodily sensations can shift the process into different modes, some of which are considered mental health issues today. Our environments, including the people around us, can lead this process to extremes, resulting in different world experiences. For the process it’s not just change in the neural network weights leading to different outcomes; for us, it could mean major depression, anxiety, or even madness.