Consciousness is still a mystery

The scientific debate around consciousness is livelier than ever: what it is, where it comes from and whether machines can have it. Cognitive neuroscientist Liad Mudrik reviews three books that tackle these thorny questions. The authors — philosopher Daniel Dennett, geneticist Kevin Mitchell and neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux — agree that consciousness gave humans an evolutionary edge. Dennett and LeDoux argue that consciousness can exist only in biological beings, but Mitchell suggests that artificial systems could follow our evolutionary trajectory: embodiment, sensing, acting, with some motivation and learning abilities, and a drop of indeterminacy. Whether this is a good idea, writes Mudrik, is a different question.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, human consciousness is the construal of experience as meaning and the enactment of the self in social relations as meaning. The content of consciousness is the content plane of language, with mental processes projecting meaning and verbal processes projecting wording. Language provided human consciousness and intelligence, not the reverse.