TITLE:
May Conscious Mind Give a “Scientific Definition” of Consciousness?
AUTHORS:
Bignetti Enrico
KEYWORDS:
The Hard Problem of Consciousness, The Conflict of Interest, Conscious and Unconscious Mind, Free Will, The Bignetti Model
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Philosophy,
Vol.9 No.4,
October
15,
2019
ABSTRACT: The mind when posing the question “what is consciousness?” (i.e. “The
Hard Problem of Consciousness”, THPOC) will
encounter an unsurmountable conflict of interest. The hope that by
investigating the “neural correlates to consciousness” (NCCs) one might come to
a “scientific (conceptual)” definition of consciousness is then
paradoxical. In fact, the investigation of NCCs might unveil only “operational”
(functional) properties of the mind. Nevertheless, the pieces of information deriving from these investigations seem to be striking. To this respect, there is a growing
evidence of a dual-state activity in mind, corresponding to the activities of a
conscious (explicit) mind (C) and an unconscious
(implicit) mind (U), respectively; moreover, C and U do not share any conceptual connection with psychoanalytic Conscious and Unconscious. In detail, C is
the domain where thoughts (as well as images and music) can be managed; instead, U exhibits a biophysical/biochemical
activity. In order to communicate with each
other, a transduction of one language into the other must reciprocally occur;
it is notable that the investigation of NCCs leads to the conclusion that it is
right that transduction process accounts for the unsurmountable question about
THPOC. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the dual state activity in mind stands
on a probabilistic-deterministic mechanism; this functional property of the
mind is incompatible with the existence of free-will (FW) but not with C’s FW
illusion. In summary in the current literature, there is a unique cognitive
model that is compatible with all these evidences, i.e. “The Bignetti Model” (TBM).