embodied consciousness · stream of consciousness · extra marginal consciousness · field theory of consciousness · fringe consciousness · cosmic consciousness · non ordinary consciousness
Consciousness occupies an exceptionally contested position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as the primary object of investigation and the very instrument through which investigation proceeds. Damasio establishes the most architecturally developed position, distinguishing core consciousness — pulsed, present-bound, foundational — from extended consciousness, which underwrites autobiographical selfhood, deliberation, and the full sweep of personal identity. He insists, against epiphenomenalist dismissals, that consciousness performs genuine biological work in homeostatic regulation and environmental adaptation. Jaynes radically narrows the domain, arguing that most cognition — reasoning, speech production, creative illumination — transpires entirely outside consciousness, leaving it a comparatively thin overlay on far more extensive nonconscious processing. James, mediated through McGilchrist and Stein, contributes the founding metaphor of the stream and the concept of the field, both of which resist the atomism of earlier faculty psychology. McGilchrist presses furthest into ontological territory, contending that matter itself cannot be rendered independent of consciousness and that the stream metaphor mirrors the structure of reality as such. Thompson and Gallagher situate consciousness in the living body rather than the brain alone, emphasizing its temporal, anticipatory, and intersubjective architecture. Taken together, these voices stage an enduring argument about whether consciousness is substrate, emergent product, evolutionary tool, or something more primordial than any of these characterisations allow.
In the library
31 substantive passages
consciousness is not a monolith, at least not in humans: it can be separated into simple and complex kinds… The simplest kind, which I call core consciousness, provides the organism with a sense of self about one moment—now—and about one place—here.
Damasio's foundational distinction between core and extended consciousness anchors his neuroscientific account of how selfhood and temporal awareness are constructed by the brain.
Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999thesis
consciousness also conforms to the fundamental properties William James outlined for it: It is selective; it is continuous; it pertains to objects other than itself; it is personal.
Damasio aligns his neurobiological account with James's classical phenomenology, grounding consciousness in the relational act of a self knowing an object.
Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999thesis
the actual unit is more probably the total mental state, the entire wave of consciousness or field of objects present to the thought at any time… it is impossible to outline this wave, this field, with any definiteness.
James displaces the discrete idea as the unit of mental life, proposing instead the continuous, indefinitely bounded field of consciousness that resists atomistic analysis.
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis
James saw the entire universe as a seamless flow… And he saw consciousness as having the same structure… 'A river or a stream is the metaphor by which it is most naturally described.'
McGilchrist frames James's stream-of-consciousness as not merely a psychological metaphor but as a structural correspondence between awareness and the nature of reality itself.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
James saw the entire universe as a seamless flow… And he saw consciousness as having the same structure… 'A river or a stream is the metaphor by which it is most naturally described.'
McGilchrist reiterates James's stream metaphor to argue that the structure of consciousness mirrors the seamless, non-jointed character of reality as a whole.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
the actual process of thinking, so usually thought to be the very life of consciousness, is not conscious at all and that only its preparation, its materials, and its end result are consciously perceived.
Jaynes radically limits the scope of consciousness, arguing that the core operations of reasoning and speech occur entirely outside it, leaving consciousness a thin frame around nonconscious process.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis
Mind-space I regard as the primary feature of consciousness. It is the space which you preoptively are 'introspecting on' or 'seeing' at this very moment.
Jaynes identifies the subjective interior 'mind-space' as the defining feature of consciousness, constituted by metaphor and analogy with bodily spatial experience.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis
Consciousness is the rite of passage which allows an organism… to become a minded organism, the kind of organism in which responses are shaped by a mental concern over the organism's own life.
Damasio assigns consciousness an evolutionary function, framing it as the mechanism by which biological self-regulation acquires a mental dimension capable of individual forethought.
Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999thesis
no-one has the slightest idea of a mechanism by which consciousness could emerge from unconscious matter; in any case matter evanesces as we look at it more closely and turns out to be every bit as inscrutable as consciousness itself.
McGilchrist challenges materialist emergence theories by arguing that matter is no more ontologically transparent than consciousness, undermining the very basis for grounding mind in matter.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
It is not just brains, but the tiniest particles of matter, we discover, that cannot be considered independent of consciousness.
McGilchrist extends the argument from quantum physics to assert that consciousness is implicated in the constitution of matter at every scale, not merely at the level of brain function.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Consciousness is valuable because it introduces a new means of achieving homeostasis… devices of consciousness handle the problem of how an individual organism may cope with environmental challenges not predicted in its basic design.
Damasio argues that consciousness earns its biological keep by extending homeostatic regulation into unpredicted environmental domains that subcortical systems cannot address.
Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999thesis
conscious states of mind contain an obligate aspect of feeling—they feel like something to us… conscious states of mind are possible only when we are awake.
Damasio stipulates that feeling is not incidental but constitutive of conscious states, and that wakefulness is their necessary, though not fully sufficient, condition.
Damasio, Antonio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010thesis
hemispheres can sustain the activity of two separate spheres of consciousness following commissurotomy… each surgically disconnected hemisphere… experience its own private sensations, percepts, thoughts, and memories.
McGilchrist draws on commissurotomy evidence to argue that consciousness is not singular but can be divided into two independently sustained spheres following disconnection of the cerebral hemispheres.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
Consciousness is not the same as inwardness, although there can be no inwardness without consciousness… The polarity between the 'objective' and 'subjective' points of view is a creation of the left hemisphere's analytic disposition.
McGilchrist distinguishes consciousness from inwardness while asserting that the objective/subjective polarity is an artefact of left-hemisphere analysis rather than a feature of consciousness itself.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
We are constantly reacting to things without being conscious of them at the time. Sitting against a tree, I am always reacting to the tree and to the ground and to my own posture… quite unconsciously stand up from the ground to do so.
Jaynes establishes that reactivity and consciousness are distinct capacities, demonstrating through ordinary phenomenology that most moment-to-moment environmental response proceeds without conscious involvement.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
The ego is a point or a dot that dips into the stream and can separate itself from the stream of consciousness and become aware of it as something other than itself. Consciousness is not fully under the ego's control even if it gains distance from it sufficient to observe and study its flow.
Stein articulates the Jungian distinction between the ego and the wider stream of consciousness, emphasizing that consciousness operates extensively beyond the ego's governance.
Stein, Murray, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting
the lower notches of the consciousness scale are by no means human alone. In all probability they are present in numerous nonhuman species that have brains complex enough to construct them.
Damasio argues for a graded, cross-species continuum of consciousness rather than a binary human/animal divide, anchoring the capacity in degrees of neurological complexity.
Damasio, Antonio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010supporting
Conscious deliberation, under the guidance of a robust self built on an organized autobiography and a defined identity, is a major consequence of consciousness, precisely the kind of achievement that gives the lie to the notion that consciousness is a useless epiphenomenon.
Damasio rebuts epiphenomenalism by demonstrating that conscious deliberation is both causally efficacious and dependent on autobiographical self-structure for its full operation.
Damasio, Antonio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010supporting
There is, in the physicist Wolfgang Pauli's terminology, 'a psyche long before there is consciousness.'… explicit cognitive activity as not the apogee, nor even the norm, of consciousness, but as a somewhat regrettable lapse.
McGilchrist, drawing on Pauli and Schiller, argues that psychic life precedes and exceeds reflective consciousness, which represents an exceptional and somewhat disruptive departure from more integrated habitual existence.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
There is, in the physicist Wolfgang Pauli's terminology, 'a psyche long before there is consciousness.'… explicit cognitive activity as not the apogee, nor even the norm, of consciousness, but as a somewhat regrettable lapse.
McGilchrist invokes Pauli's formulation to position reflective consciousness as a late, secondary, and potentially reductive mode relative to the broader psychic substrate it arises from.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
explaining the mechanisms behind an experience and having the experience are entirely different matters… We should not conclude that neurophysiological knowledge is inadequate to explain the phenomenon just because having that neurophysiological knowledge is not equal to the experience of the phenomenon.
Damasio rejects the inference from the explanatory gap — between knowing about consciousness and having it — to the conclusion that neuroscience is in principle unable to account for experience.
Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting
we can be awake and yet be deprived of consciousness. Fortunately, the latter only happens in the neurological conditions I am about to discuss. Wakefulness is best described from watching the transition from sleep to wakefulness.
Damasio distinguishes wakefulness from consciousness proper, using neurological evidence to show that the two can dissociate, clarifying the necessary but not sufficient relationship between them.
Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting
the actual process of reasoning, the dark leap into huge discovery, just as in the simple trivial judgment of weights, has no representation in consciousness. Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.
Jaynes generalises the absence of consciousness from routine cognition to high-level creative and scientific reasoning, arguing that the most significant cognitive leaps occur outside conscious access.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
creature consciousness… contrasts with state consciousness, or… mental state consciousness, which is the ability to be aware that one is experiencing something. Mental state consciousness (awareness) depends on creature consciousness (wakefulness), but having creature consciousness
LeDoux introduces the creature/state consciousness distinction to separate wakefulness from meta-awareness, providing a conceptual framework for understanding how fear and anxiety enter conscious experience.
LeDoux, Joseph, Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety, 2015supporting
the sense of agency with respect to my own thought comes not retrospectively, as if I had to stop to think whether I am really the one who is thinking… it is part of the very structure of consciousness.
Gallagher argues that agency is not a post-hoc attribution but an intrinsic structural feature of conscious experience, built into the temporal fabric of thought itself.
Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
extended consciousness is also compromised in patients who develop major defects of working memory, the most dramatic instances of which occur after extensive frontal lobe damage involving the external aspect of both cerebral
Damasio uses neurological lesion data to demonstrate that extended consciousness depends critically on working memory and frontal lobe integrity, grounding the distinction between core and extended forms in clinical evidence.
Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting
How often in our frustrations with trying to solve the mysteries of mind do we comfort our questions with anatomy, real or fancied, and think of a thought as a particular neuron or a mood as a particular neurotransmitter!
Jaynes critiques the reductive anatomical reflex in consciousness studies, cautioning against collapsing the mystery of mind into localized neural correlates.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
Partial impairments of emotion are not associated with abolition of core consciousness. For instance, the patients with ventromedial frontal lobe lesions… only lose secondary emotions.
Damasio clarifies the dissociability of emotional impairment from core consciousness, refining the relationship between affect and the foundational layer of conscious experience through lesion evidence.
Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999aside
what we see is the kind of meandering 'stream of consciousness' that so fascinates some writers… a ceaseless course through past and future, among hopes, plans, remembrances, anxieties, and desires.
Easwaran invokes the stream-of-consciousness metaphor from within a Vedantic framework, mapping the undirected flow of thought onto the concept of samskaras as a field of psychic forces.
what we see is the kind of meandering 'stream of consciousness' that so fascinates some writers… a ceaseless course through past and future, among hopes, plans, remembrances, anxieties, and desires.
Easwaran's Vedantic reading recasts the stream-of-consciousness metaphor as a description of the chitta field, aligning Western psychological terminology with the Indian concept of mental impressions.
Easwaran, Eknath, Essence of the Upanishads: A Key to Indian Spiritualityaside
Self-awareness is known to emerge in the second year… understood to derive from maturational events in the central nervous system… Objective self-awareness has been defined as 'the awareness of oneself as an object of observation'
Schore situates the emergence of self-awareness within a neurobiological developmental sequence, linking the onset of objective self-consciousness to frontal lobe maturation in the second year of life.
Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994aside