This opens a neurophilosophical can of worms, but the split brain experiments are just the tip of the iceberg, the wedge that opens a crack into the window of consciousness. What constitutes consciousness is an enormous historical and philosophical problem. In many ways this issue is as unresolved today as it was hundreds of years ago.
It seems that you are implying, in the above quote, that while we don’t know what constitutes consciousness, we — paradoxically — know how it operates and is structured. It seems to me that the paradox should be studied first — i.e. our belief that we can know how something operates and is structured without knowing what it is — before any attempt is made to develop theory built on top of that paradoxical position.
The inability to verbalize a thought or feeling that is represented and actionable elsewhere in the brain of these subjects seemingly indicates that consciousness is not required to perform a task. A valid criticism is that this is an interruption of signals to the language centers, not necessarily consciousness.
I would suggest that such a criticism is warranted. What basis — in fact — is there, other than preexisting beliefs about consciousness, to base your first observation in the quote above that “seemingly indicates that consciousness is not required to perform a task?” But I think you already know, since you go on:
However, there’s an implicit assumption that our sense of consciousness is perceived internally through language.
Yes, and it is that which seems to be called out as incorrect by your findings, and not the need for, nor role of, “consciousness,” which after all is just an abstract concept in the absence of any knowledge about what that aspect of ourselves actually is.
This raises the difficult question of what constitutes consciousness? Can there be consciousness without language?
Well, you could actually ask that of people who spend their lives meditating in order to quiet their minds, i.e. to attenuate, or temporarily stop, thoughts. Apparently, they operate consciously without intervening inner speech happening (it’s apparent to me, at least). In fact, I think the answer is fairly testable — so much so, that it is a wonder that no one has bothered to do so in order to answer the above question, rather than just pose it.
We are used to interpreting consciousness with language, but can we say communicating through a drawn image is an indication of consciousness?
It would seem that math falls into this category of dubious indicators of consciousness as well, for that matter. It’s not language, its formalized drawing with very stringent rules for how the pictures go together. For example:
Should math be considered a sign of consciousness, or just an interesting complexity of autogenous biological operations as well?
Alternatively, is the ability to draw a picture based on a visual cue something that can happen unconsciously, without the need for consciousness?
I would like to suggest that even a visual cue that results in a coherent drawing (coherent with the cue) is evidence that the drawer is conscious of the cue, even if their language center is deafferentiated from communication with the brain hemisphere that sees the cue.
Perhaps even language perception and vocalization happen primarily at an unconscious level despite our sense that it is intimately tied to consciousness.
Given what you say in this article, wouldn’t the “unconscious level” be either an unnecessary fabrication, or evidence that our imagined abstraction called “consciousness” is other than we so far conceive it to be?
Since the very posing of an “unconscious level” is mere whimsy in the absence of sure knowledge of what we mean by “conscious,” does the statement in the quote above have any real meaning at all?
Personally, I think you are actually on to something there because it is logically impossible for us to have a thought before thinking it — which is necessarily the case if the process of thinking is dependent upon our consciousness of it, i.e. if we are creating our own thoughts with our consciousness (whatever that may be).
But your suggestion leaves open the question of how what has so far been impossible to nail-down at a conscious level, where at least what was being done in the process of thinking was knowable, could become suddenly clear as to how it works when we cannot be conscious of it at all. It seems to be another paradoxical position that needs to be investigated first.
Much of this challenge is caught up in the cyclical and self-referential nature of trying to use our self-aware consciousness to evaluate our own consciousness.
Yes, that is a very difficult thing to do correctly. It’s called meditation when it is done with an eye to accomplishing rational results to the above cyclical and self-referential evaluation, i.e. to know the true nature of mind — what “consciousness” is actually referring to.
But I feel it important to point out as well that most of our most important concepts are cyclical and self-referential, like time and space, for example. And yet we can still make our way through our daily lives without a problem. Even people who are ignorant of the paradoxes, and cyclical and self-referential nature of our current conceptual knowledge can do so.
