OPERATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS                            1. Introduction                   This book is about consciousness. There will be no preamble reviewing the literature and providing lots of references. There will be no talk of neurones or synapses. Neuroscience has undoubtedly made great strides, but this book is about the functional properties of a mind. It is not about how these functions are implemented physically. It is not concerned with where inside a brain these things might happen. It’s about what it takes to make a brain conscious.                   Many discussions on this topic begin by telling us that consciousness is ‘a state of mind’. Here is an example -                   ‘Not only do we distinguish between conscious and unconscious creatures; we also distinguish between mental states that are conscious and those which are not. I’ll call this property state consciousness.’ (Rosenthal 2002).                   At first sight, a statement like that, does not seem to be contentious. It looks like a straight-forward fact and a firm foundation on which a precise argument can be constructed. That impression is misleading. Those words ‘state of mind’, could be taken several ways, but they seem to imply that consciousness is a static thing, devoid of internal mechanism. I will challenge that view and put forward an alternative. I will argue that consciousness is a procedure, an information processing system. Although the procedure is quite complicated, it is just a conventional algorithm operating on conventional stores of information. I am sorry if that upsets anyone. I know that there are many, who like things to be mysterious, particularly things about our minds. The last thing they want to hear, is that consciousness, the very essence of our own sense of identity, has a prosaic physical explanation.                   When I talk about these things, with friends and colleagues, whose familiarity with computers is usually confined to a desktop publishing system or a stock control program, the response I often get is that artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness have to be impossible because -                   ‘A computer cannot do anything which its programmer has not told it how to do’.                   That statement is both true and untrue. Its truth depends upon what you mean by ‘telling it what to do’. A computer can be programmed to learn. And if it goes on to learn something, which is unknown to its programmer, it would then be able to do something the programmer could not do and could not have told it how to do.                   Another common reaction is to express surprise that inanimate things like electric currents, transistor junctions, and for that matter, cog-wheels and pulley belts, could ever be conscious. That expression of surprise, arises from an assumption that a system cannot have a given property, unless some or all of its components have that property. I call that ‘the magic juice theory’. To demonstrate its falsity, we need only think about ‘the power of flight’ and that mechanism we call ‘an aeroplane’. Do any of the individual component parts of an aeroplane have the magic juice which we call ‘the power of flight’? A similar fallacy caused some to be sceptical about the possibility of building ships of iron instead of wood. Iron, as we all know, does not have the kind of magic juice which might be called ‘the ability to float’.                   Shortly, I will describe the mechanism of an artificial brain or, if you prefer, a ‘mind-mechanism’. It is a hypothetical machine. The reason it is hypothetical, and not a real one, is because I lack the resources which would be needed to implement it. Implementation would require something like the resources of a global company, the governmental backing of an organisation like NASA or the international co-operation of an institution like CERN. So my artificial system must remain hypothetical, for the time being at least.                   The form of consciousness which I will be talking about is a procedure. It is not a property in the conventional sense, and it is not a thing. It is what the brain-mechanism does. To emphasise the procedural nature of the beast, I will call it ‘Operational Consciousness’. That is also a dodge. By calling it that I hope to avoid premature objections. Those who are inclined to believe in some ethereal non-physical form of consciousness, often called ‘phenomenal consciousness’ or even ‘epi-phenomenal consciousness’ can go along with my discussion until I have completed the description of what operational consciousness is, and how it works. It is only then that horns will be locked, as we consider the possibility that operational consciousness subsumes the totality of what we call ‘consciousness’.                   Operational consciousness has several modes of operation. By changing mode, that is, by redirecting its activities from one type of information, to another (or by switching it off altogether) the brain-mechanism (as a whole) will be able to enact all the various forms of consciousness. These include being totally unconscious, being preoccupied (and therefore unaware of its immediate environment) or being embarrassingly self-conscious. The explanation I offer will even encompass dreams, and that inner kind of dream-consciousness which ends when the brain-mechanism wakes up. So the diversity of the various conditions which we describe as ‘conscious’, is not an embarrassment. It is a strength. Operational consciousness embraces and elucidates all of them. It even explains why intuition concerning the existence of epi-phenomenal consciousness, is such a prevalent misconception.                   And that explanation will take us to the crux of the matter. If operational consciousness deals with all of the observable characteristics of a conscious brain, what, exactly, is there left to be explained? Why do we need to suppose that there is any other kind of consciousness?                   Copyright © Hugh Noble 2005