Perhaps, consciousness has purposes {consciousness, purposes}.
categories
Perhaps, without sense qualities, brain can detect only major categories. With sense qualities, brain can detect subtleties needed to recognize complex objects, such as people.
evolution
Perhaps, consciousness performs functions that help organisms get food, defend against predators, or reproduce. If consciousness has survival functions or structures, evolution can adapt it. Evolution, history, random effects, and physical laws affect adaptation, and adaptive traits are not best or perfect [Baars, 1988] [Crick and Koch, 1995] [Johnson-Laird, 1983] [Johnson-Laird, 1988] [Mandler, 2002] [Minsky, 1968] [Minsky, 1985] [Velmans, 1991] [Velmans, 1996]. If awareness and consciousness have no function, evolutionary processes cannot affect them [Cosmides et al., 1992].
needs
Perhaps, consciousness manages drives, desires, moods, and emotions.
self-knowledge
Perhaps, consciousness allows one to know what one will do next.
synapse strength
Perhaps, consciousness strengthens or modifies synapses.
no purpose
Perhaps, consciousness does not cause anything and does not have purposes.
Perhaps, consciousness affects behavior, somatic functions, habits, skills, and reflexes {behavior, consciousness purposes} {consciousness purposes, behavior}.
complex movement
Perhaps, consciousness performs delicate and intricate acts and controls complex and subtle physical movements and forces.
correlation
Perhaps, consciousness correlates body movements and perceptions.
preventing fixed action
Perhaps, only animals with consciousness and will can stop or change fixed action patterns before they begin. Perhaps, consciousness is earlier in the pathway than action and fixed-action triggers.
reflex blocking
Perhaps, consciousness can suppress reflexes and automatic behaviors [Anderson and Green, 2001] [Mitchell et al., 2002].
voluntary movement
Perhaps, consciousness provides frameworks for voluntary movement control.
control
Perhaps, consciousness sends control signals to initiate feedback, feedforward, comparison, and reinforcement. Perhaps, consciousness improves behavior control and complexity, by improving selection among alternative or ambiguous patterns, meanings, or behaviors.
Perhaps, consciousness decides among multiple sense and action modes. Perhaps, consciousness affects decisions, such as whether to fight or flee. Perhaps, consciousness participates in choosing among alternatives or creating new options.
Perhaps, consciousness relates to punishment. People can realize which previous error, event, or choice caused pain, hunger, or frustration.
Perhaps, consciousness relates to reward. People can realize which previous event or choice caused pleasure or success.
Perhaps, consciousness motivates toward goals.
Perhaps, consciousness manages brain information flow and processing {cognition, consciousness purposes} {consciousness purposes, cognition}.
attention
Attention is to input. Perhaps, consciousness marks objects or places. Attending requires muscle and perception coordination. Animals with consciousness can attend to something only if they are already aware. Perhaps, consciousness is selective attention. Sense consciousness uses attention, shape, planning, and goal brain regions [Chalmers, 2000] [Ffytche, 2000] [Kanwisher, 2001] [Lumer, 2000] [Lumer et al., 1998]. Attention can be faster than consciousness. Attention to something else can distract attention to something, before awareness reaches consciousness.
communication
Perhaps, consciousness allows better communication, by resolving alternative meanings, making analogies, setting expectations, using recursions and nesting, commenting on truth, and marking situations as good or bad. Perhaps, consciousness improves self-communication, using grammar and syntax.
Perhaps, consciousness is necessary for thinking in words and sentences and using symbols in grammatical combinations. Perhaps, consciousness is necessary for grammar.
Single symbols do not require language.
Communication allows lying.
People talk to themselves {talking to oneself} without speaking aloud and hear themselves without using ears.
emotion
Perhaps, consciousness provides positive, negative, or neutral feelings about external objects, internal body parts, and external and internal body events. Sensations can relate to emotions. For example, colors are happy and sad, or light and dark.
Affect includes lust, caring, panic, play, fear, anger, and search. It is about arousal, instinct, and drives. Affect does not seem to have cognition. Perhaps, consciousness realizes affect.
Fundamental emotions are propensities to move toward, or away from, something and so are like instincts. Emotions cause attractions or repulsions. Emotions cause behavior, such as attention, "freezing", flight, fighting, and/or embracing.
imagination
Perhaps, consciousness forms and evaluates concepts, images, and actions, without actually using or performing them.
learning
Perhaps, consciousness connects features over space to make patterns or time to make sequences.
memory
Perhaps, consciousness organizes memory and recall. Perhaps, consciousness is a compression and decompression mechanism, allowing efficient memory storage and retrieval in systems with multisensory data. Perhaps, consciousness organizes memory sequences, to assign rewards and punishments, and manages registers.
perception
Perhaps, consciousness affects perception to generate spatial-field sensations. Sensors can move and change processing to gather useful data and detect complex patterns. Sense-cell arrangements can move or change in anticipation of, and/or in reaction to, perceptions. Mammals use voluntary muscles to explore object to learn more and to locate objects relative to other objects. For example, animals turn body or head to gather more information from ambient signals. Tasting and smelling can actively use tongue and nose.
Perhaps, complex movement and energy detection require consciousness.
Consciousness makes general, specific, and autobiographical images. Vision can remember and scan images. People use viewer-centered coordinates in imagery. Brain cannot readily manipulate images. Images can be in sequence. Eye position is cue to access next image in sequence. Subjects do not image themselves at three-dimensional-scene center.
Perhaps, consciousness fills gaps and integrates regions, to make images consistent and complete.
Perhaps, consciousness combines information from different senses and manages sense interactions. Multisensory convergence can have excitation-excitation (amplification), excitation-inhibition (inhibition and disinhibition patterns), inhibition-excitation (rare), or inhibition-inhibition (rare).
Perhaps, detecting novelty requires consciousness.
Perhaps, consciousness allows image to stay in mind longer, so all scene parts can interact. Attention, serial inspection, planning, and decision-making processes can complete.
Perception can find only scalar intensity values. Perhaps, consciousness allows vector and tensor values, using space or time over which to differentiate.
planning
Perhaps, consciousness participates in setting goals and making plans. Perhaps, though self seems to have goals, brain has competing homeostatic processes, drives, desires, and immediate dangers whose totality results in goals.
will
Perhaps, consciousness controls will, and voluntary actions require sensory space. Though self seems to will actions, people often use voluntary muscles and exert force without being aware, as when people move tables at séances or move ouija boards. People can feel that they control events, but conscious thoughts actually follow actions. Because thought and action happen at similar times, and thought relates to action, people assume that they control action. However, brain actually initiated event earlier in time, so action coordinated with all other actions. If people introspect, they realize that they do not know real causes.
meaning
Perhaps, consciousness aids meaning, because it interprets information using symbol grounding. Meaning is abstract declarative knowledge about relations, and so implies sets and boundaries. Meanings have references, cross-correlations, and associations. Meaning can package things into groups, as when sounds become language. Meaning can compress, categorize, generalize, and discriminate.
Complex syntax can add properties and features that carry meaning. Properties add at higher level, because higher level can include new items and still keep lower level consistent and complete. For example, language keywords can have categories or lengths.
categorization
Perhaps, consciousness aids marking and grouping. Things inside marked boundary form group, and group has name or index. Features, objects, events, patterns, scenes, sequences, frames, and schemas have indexes. Marks and indices also separate figure and ground, or important and not important.
Perhaps, consciousness aids marking and splitting. Markers divide space or time into two regions, with different property values, and so discriminate between them. For example, marks distinguish figure and ground, remember and do not remember, or important and not important.
Perhaps, consciousness compares previous with past situations to find differences, errors, or successes. For example, people can realize that later perception shows that previous perception was incorrect or motion did not have expected effect. People can realize that action was correct or motion was effective.
Perhaps, consciousness relates features. For example, consciousness finds feature ratios or products.
Perhaps, consciousness can recognize individuals, such as face perception and voice tone.
Perhaps, consciousness verifies perceptions, by adding information about interactions to unconscious perception. Added information contributes marginally to better performance, but enough to be adaptive.
social
Perhaps, people require consciousness to distract attention and deceive. For example, primates practice deception by distracting attention, allowing them to steal food or mate [Byrne and Whiten, 1988] [Whiten and Byrne, 1997].
Perhaps, consciousness allows imitation.
Perhaps, consciousness can solve unfamiliar, non-routine problems or solve them more rapidly.
Reporting requires consciousness.
Perhaps, consciousness is for socialization.
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Date Modified: 2022.0225