Consciousness

• seCtIon tWo: tHe BRAIn
  Koch, 2004), who argue that consciousness is built up only when stable coalitions
  form; from Engel and Singer (above); and from Metzinger, who argues that ‘Con-
  sciousness is what binds things together into a comprehensive, simultaneous
  whole’, and that only if the senses are unified can you experience a world (2009,
  p. 26).
  Zeki’s suggestion is not a form of panpsychism (the view that everything is con-
  scious), because he does not claim that all neural processing is conscious. This
  means that, unlike Dennett, he must still distinguish between conscious and
  unconscious processes. He speculates that neural activity remains implicit as long
  as it requires further processing; when processing is complete, it becomes explicit
  or conscious. Discussing blindsight (Chapter 8) and other kinds of brain damage,
  he describes people who report being conscious of aspects of early motion pro-
  cessing that would be implicit in other people, leading him to propose that ‘cells
  whose activity is only implicit can, in the right circumstances, become explicit. Put
  more boldly, cells can have double duties, rendering the incoming signals explicit
  or not, depending on the activity at the next node’ (2001, p. 66).
  In Zeki’s (2007) scheme, micro-consciousnesses are bound into macro-con-
  sciousnesses which correspond to Block’s phenomenal consciousness. Unified
  consciousness corresponds to Block’s access consciousness and comes about
  only through language and the awareness of a perceiving self. This is very much
  a ‘consciousness at the top’ model as discussed in Chapter  5, but one with the
  idiosyncrasy of including other consciousnesses ‘lower down’. These multiple
  consciousnesses constitute a hierarchy ‘with what Kant called the “synthetic, tran-
  scendental” unified consciousness (that of myself as the perceiving person) sitting
  at the apex’ (Zeki, 2003, p. 214). Elsewhere, however, Zeki remarks that ‘the term
  microconsciousness may itself be a misnomer, because it implicitly supposes that
  there is a higher unified and singular conscious entity, beyond all the microcon-
  sciousnesses’ (Zeki and Bartels, 1999, p. 238).
  One way of interpreting Zeki’s micro-consciousnesses is that whether bound
  or not, they are all conscious, implying a head full of disconnected phenome-
  nal experiences along with a unified world perceived by a constructed self. This
  would avoid the problem of explaining the difference between conscious and
  unconscious processes. But this cannot be what he means, for he says that ‘once
  a macro-consciousness is formed from two or more micro-consciousnesses, the
  constituent micro-consciousnesses cease to exist’ (2007, p. 584), and we become
  aware of the composite instead – though by paying attention to the constituents
  rather than the composite we can reverse this effect. The tricky point for his the-
  ory is the point in space or time at which information that was previously ‘implicit’
  is ‘rendered explicit’ or ‘acquires a conscious correlate’. This transition remains,
  as in every other theory that comes up against it, unexplained and essentially
  mysterious.

MULTISENSORY INTEGRATION

The theories considered so far have concentrated on vision, perhaps because

vision is the predominant sense in humans, and also because the visual system is

much better understood than other parts of the brain. But binding has to occur

between the senses as well as within them. This is no trivial matter, not least

IS THIS EXPERIENCE
UNIFIED?