Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Maastricht University Maastricht, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2014 Mar 17;5:223. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00223. eCollection 2014.
Consciousness tends to be viewed either as subjective experience of sensations and feelings, or as perception and internal representation of objects. This paper argues that neither view sufficiently acknowledges that consciousness may refer to the brain's most adaptive property: its capacity to produce states of objectivity. It is proposed that this capacity relies on multiple sensorimotor networks for internally representing objects and their properties in terms of expectancies, as well as on motivational and motor mechanisms involved in exploration, play, and care for vulnerable living and non-living objects. States of objectivity are associated with a very special phenomenal aspect; the experience that subjective aspects are absent and one is "just looking" at the world as it really is and can be. However, these states are normally closely preceded and followed by (and tend to be combined or fused with) sensations and feelings which are caused by activation of sensory and motivational mechanisms. A capacity for objectivity may have evolved in different species and can be conceived as a common basis for other elusive psychological properties such as intelligence, conscience, and esthetic experience; all three linked to crucial behaviors in human evolution such as tool making, cooperation, and art. The brain's pervasive tendency to objectify may be responsible for wrongly equating consciousness with feelings and wrongly opposing it to well-learned or habitual ("unconscious") patterns of perception and behavior.
意识倾向于被视为感觉和情感的主观体验，或者是对物体的感知和内部表现。本文认为，这两种观点都没有充分认识到意识可能指的是大脑最适应的特性：它产生客观性状态的能力。本文提出，这种能力依赖于多个感觉运动网络，以便根据期望来内部表示物体及其属性，以及依赖于参与探索、游戏和关心脆弱的生物和非生物物体的动机和运动机制。客观性状态与一种非常特殊的现象方面有关；即主观方面不存在的体验，以及一个人“只是在观察”世界本来的样子和可以观察到的样子。然而，这些状态通常紧随感觉和情感而来，并且（往往与感觉和情感结合或融合在一起），这些感觉和情感是由感觉和动机机制的激活引起的。客观性的能力可能在不同的物种中进化而来，可以被视为其他难以捉摸的心理特性的共同基础，如智力、良心和审美体验；所有这三个都与人类进化中的关键行为有关，如制造工具、合作和艺术。大脑普遍存在的客观化倾向可能导致错误地将意识等同于感觉，以及错误地将其与经过良好学习或习惯性的（“无意识”）感知和行为模式相对立。
