The Quest to Define Consciousness
By: Savanna Cohen
Tags: Neuroscience, Language, Brain, Consciousness, Science

The quest to define consciousness has plagued the human race for centuries— no person has completely succeeded in capturing the elusiveness of its metaphysical nature. This failure is primarily the result of the lack of adequate means by which one could attempt to measure consciousness. Human beings have no language, linguistic or mathematical, that could define consciousness precisely nor accurately; moreover, our current ways of defining it are based off of human consciousness rather than the conscious experience of all sentient beings.

The human species has conjured many different languages, yet we still lack the correct order of words to define the phenomena of consciousness. In 1994, David Chalmers, a cognitive scientist, published a paper that explained that consciousness is a “hard problem” which can never be defined or solved. Despite this, there have been many attempts to define consciousness as illustrated “[in] the article Metanalysis of definitions of consciousness, [the] writer I. Baruss shares that there are at least 29 varying definitions of consciousness” (Bancroft 1998) — for any of these definitions to be sufficient, they need to be both precise and accurate. The definition needs to be precise enough to comment on the measuring devices of consciousness as well as accurate enough to comment on the quality of the knowledge of consciousness; currently, there have been no definitions that fit these requirements. Consciousness possesses no physical existence and it cannot be measured quantitatively; therefore, consciousness cannot be analysed or observed. However, philosophers argue that although consciousness cannot be observed, it does not mean that it does not exist; and since it can exist, it can be defined. Whether it exists or not is a separate question to whether we can have knowledge over its existence — “once.. the term “consciousness” is fixed in its phenomenology, the investigation of its nature can begin” (Velmans 2001) but, until then, human beings lack the language to define consciousness in precise or accurate methods.

In order to attempt to define consciousness, in exact and universal terms, one must be able to define it based on all sentient beings’ conscious experience. Sentient beings such as ants, elephants, chimpanzees and dolphins exhibit consciousness (Griffin 2004) and yet these beings experience reality in different ways than human beings do. Although some may argue that all sentient beings, including humans, exist in the same reality, hence, they must all experience the same form of consciousness, Anil Seth, a neuroscientist, has proven that the reality that human beings experience is generated, using statistics, by the brain instead of being absorbed. The experience of reality of other sentient beings is unknown as it cannot be measured or determined for human beings cannot communicate with these species; moreover, consciousness is a state that is “viewable only from a first-person perspective” (Velmans 2009), therefore human beings are unable to analyse any form of reality and consciousness that is different from their own, as it would only be perceivable in a third-person perspective. The human race has access to and knowledge of its own experience of reality and consciousness, thus, if the human race could define consciousness, it could only define it based on the experience of its own species— the hypothesized definition would not be true for all conscious beings.

The quest to define consciousness has proven ineffective as of this century. The human race has not manifested quantitative, linguistic or mathematical means to define consciousness as it does not have precise or accurate languages to do so. If the human species were able to grasp a universal definition of consciousness, their methods would likely be based solely on human experience of consciousness which would, in turn, disregard the conscious experience for all other sentient beings. As of today, the true elusive nature of consciousness cannot be defined.