Eyes Open, Mind Shut

June 5th, 2007 Fred McVittie Posted in Consciousness, Illumination, Laureys, Steven, Metaphor, Neuroscience |

Recent neurological studies of hospital patients who are in the Persistant Vegetative State (PVS), either as a result of brain injury or oxygen deprivation, has provided interesting information related to the study of consciousness (Laurys, 2007). In PVS and related states the patients are often apparently ‘awake’, with eyes open, yet do not show any signs of a conscious awareness of their surroundings. In other words, while there seems to be an ‘awareness’ present, this awareness does not have any contents; the consciousness of these people is illuminated but its light is not falling on anything, it is simply an empty light. This finding gives support to theories which propose a distinction between consciousness and the contents of that consciousness, contradicting models of the mind which propose that to be conscious is to be conscious of something. If these neurological studies are confirmed, then consciousness begins to acquire scientifically supported structure. It consists of at least two components, consciousness, which is the undirected metaphorical light, and what we might call awareness, which is the sense of that light falling on the objects of the world, or on the objects of thought. We might consider how these two components relate to various states of being when they are combined in different ways.