"Although I do not see consciousness as the pinnacle of biological evolution, I see it as a turning point in the long history of life. Even when we resort to the simple and standard dictionary definition of consciousness - as an organism's awareness of its own self and surroundings - it is easy to envision how consciousness is likely to have opened the way in human evolution to a new order of creations not possible without it: conscience, religion, social and political organizations, the arts, the sciences, and technology. Perhaps even more compellingly, consciousness is the critical biological function that allows us toknow sorrow or know joy, to know suffering or know pleasure, to sense embarrassment or pride, to grieve for lost love or lost life. Whether individually experienced or observed, pathos is a by-product of consciousness and so is desire. None of those personal states would ever be known to each of us without consciousness. ... Consciousness is, in effect, the key to a life examined, for better and for worse, our beginner's permit into knowing all about the hunger, the thirst, the sex, the tears, the laughter, the kicks, the punches, the flow of images we call thought, the feelings, the words, the stories, the beliefs, the music and the poetry, the happiness and the ecstasy. At its simplest and most basic level, consciousness lets us recognize an irresistible urge to stay alive and develop a concern for the self. At its most complex and elaborate level, consciousness helps us develop a concern for other selves and improve the art of life."
"... consciousness is not a monolith, at least not in humans: it can be separated into simple and complex kinds, and the neurological evidence makes the separation transparent. 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. The scope of core consciousness is the here and now. Core consciousness does not illuminate the future, and the only past it vaguely lets us glimpse is that which occurred in the instant just before. There is no elsewhere, there is no before, there is no after. On the other hand, the complex kind of consciousness, which I call extended consciousness and of which there are many levels and grades, provides the organism with an elaborate sense of self - an identity and a person, you or me, no less - and places that person at a point in individual historical time, richly aware of the lived past and of the anticipated futurem and keenly cognizant of the world beside it."In short, core consciousness is a simple, biological phenonenon; it has one single level of organization; and it is not dependent on conventional memory, working memory, reasoning, or language. On the other hand, extended consciousness is a complex biological phenomenon; it has several levels of organization; and it evolve across the lifetime of the organism. Although I believe extended consciousness is also present in some nonhumans, at simple levels, it only attains its highest reaches in humans. It depends on conventional memory and working memory. When it attains its human peak, it is also enhanced by language.
"The supersense of core consciousness is the first step into the light of knowing and it does not illuminate a whole being. On the other hand, the supersense of extended consciousness eventually brings a full construction of being into light. In extended consciousness, both the past and the anticipated future are sensed along with the here and now in a sweeping vista as far-ranging as that of an epic novel.
"If it is true that core consciousness is the rite of pasage into knowing, it is equally true that the levels of knowing which permit human creativity are those which only extended consciousness allows. When we think of the glory that is consciousness, and when we consider consciousness as distinctively human, we are thinking of extended consciousness at its zenith. And yet, as we shall see, extended consciousness is not an independent variety of consciousness: on the contrary, it is built on the foundation of core consciousness. The fine scalpel of neurological disease reveals that impairments of extended consciousness allow core consciousness to remain unscathed. By contrast, impairment that begin at the level of core consciousness demolish the entire edifice of consciousness: extended consciousness collapses as well. The glory that is consciousness requires the orderly enhancement of both kinds of consciousness. But if we are to elucidate the glorious combination, we are well to begin by understanding the simpler, foundational kind: core consciousness."
"... the two kinds of consciousness correspond to two kinds of self. The sense of self which emerges in core consciousness is the core self, a transient entity, ceaselessly re-created for each and every object with which the brain interacts. Our traditional notion of self, however, is linked to the idea of identity and corresponds to a nontransient collection of unique facts and ways of being which characterize a person. My term for that entity is the autobiographical self. The autobiographical self depends on systematized memories of situations in which core consciousness was involved in the knowing of the most invariant characteristics of an organism's life - who you were born to, where, when, your likes and dislikes, the way you usually react to a problem or a conflict, your name, and so on. I use the term autobiographical memory to denote the organized record of the main aspects of an organism's biography. The two kinds of self are related..."
"The proto-self is an interconnected and temporarily coherent collection of neural patterns which represent the state of the organism, moment by moment, at multiple levels of the brain. We are not conscious of the proto-self."
[Note: I do not agree completely with Damasio's definition of core consciousness, given above. My phenomenologically, system dynamics-based model of core consciousness indicates the operation of two subsystems or levels of organization during core consciousness. Jackendoff (1987) calls these two subsystems or levels the phenomenological mind and the computational mind. Others have called the latter the cognitive mechanism. Damasio's definition of core consciousness includes only the phenomenological mind level of organization in his understanding of core consciousness. This could be justified, because the cognitive mechanism, though it is working during core consciousness, is nonconscious.
Despite this, I think his brilliant book and his various definitions are a great advance in the field of consciousness studies. They give us a good starting point for the next surge in the field's development.]
http://world.std.com/~awolpert/gtr439.html
Arlen Wolpert