How to Begin to Overcome the Ambiguity Present in Differentiation between Contents and Levels of Consciousness?

Abstract

Recently, a welcome trend has emerged – in addition to the traditional studies on contents and states of consciousness, levels of consciousness have become a matter of research. However, there are some conceptual and methodological difficulties with this research – the labels used for empirical measurement of levels are ambiguous and underspecified while the research on neural correlates of consciousness has not been well linked to psychophysical approaches to studying the levels of consciousness. This article suggests a perspective on how to advance the psychophysics of measuring the levels by precisely specifying level-specific contents and how to relate the distinction between contents and levels to the distinction between the underlying brain mechanisms necessary for processing contents and regulating the level of consciousness.

In and Out of Consciousness: How Does Conscious Processing (D)evolve Over Time?

“…These microgenetically developing attributes or characteristics include subjective clarity, subjective contrast, subjective fragmentariness/exhaustiveness, coarseness/detail, subjective stability, etc. (Bachmann, 2000 , 2012 ). In other words, conscious experience of the content pertaining to the same intentional object changes considerably over time (See also Hegdé, 2008 ; Breitmeyer, 2014 ; Pitts et al, 2014 ).…”

“…How to experimentally measure subjective content (a) at y max , (b) at any optional stage of microgenesis (e.g., y = 0.4, y = 0.7)? In fact, there are many qualities of subjective evaluation unfolding in response to stimulation or task cue (e.g., Kalmus and Bachmann, 1980 ; Bachmann, 1980 , 2012 ). The most recent successfully used subjective scales include the perceptual awareness scale (PAS) capitalizing on subjective clarity ratings by subjects as well as other methods (review: Timmermans and Cleeremans, 2015 ).…”

General and specific consciousness: a first-order representationalist approach

“…This distinction between general and specific consciousness corresponds roughly to the existing distinction between the “level” and the “content” of consciousness (Hohwy, 2009; Overgaard and Overgaard, 2010; Bachmann, 2012). However, since we are using the term “content” in the technical way defined above, we will continue to use the general/specific terminology instead.…”

On the brain-imaging markers of neural correlates of consciousness

“…(of course, cross-modal and synaesthetic qualities can be also considered). Universal panmodal attributes of the consciousness contents are regulated by the brain systems responsible for the levels of consciousness (Bachmann, 2012 ). A recent fine example of how recording contrastive NCC by MEG can indicate differences in universal subjective evaluations is published by Andersen et al ( 2015 ).…”