Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Amsterdam Brain & Cognition (ABC) Center, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
J Neuropsychol. 2021 Mar;15(1):1-19. doi: 10.1111/jnp.12234. Epub 2021 Feb 1.
In common sense experience based on introspection, consciousness is singular. There is only one 'me' and that is the one that is conscious. This means that 'singularity' is a defining aspect of 'consciousness'. However, the three main theories of consciousness, Integrated Information, Global Workspace and Recurrent Processing theory, are generally not very clear on this issue. These theories have traditionally relied heavily on neuropsychological observations and have interpreted various disorders, such as anosognosia, neglect and split-brain as impairments in conscious awareness without any reference to 'the singularity'. In this review, we will re-examine the theoretical implications of these impairments in conscious awareness and propose a new way how to conceptualize consciousness of singularity. We will argue that the subjective feeling of singularity can coexist with several disunified conscious experiences. Singularity awareness may only come into existence due to environmental response constraints. That is, perceptual, language, memory, attentional and motor processes may largely proceed unintegrated in parallel, whereas a sense of unity only arises when organisms need to respond coherently constrained by the affordances of the environment. Next, we examine from this perspective psychiatric disorders and psycho-active drugs. Finally, we present a first attempt to test this hypothesis with a resting state imaging experiment in a split-brain patient. The results suggest that there is substantial coherence of activation across the two hemispheres. These data show that a complete lesioning of the corpus callosum does not, in general, alter the resting state networks of the brain. Thus, we propose that we have separate systems in the brain that generate distributed conscious. The sense of singularity, the experience of a 'Me-ness', emerges in the interaction between the world and response-planning systems, and this leads to coherent activation in the different functional networks across the cortex.
在基于内省的常识经验中，意识是单一的。只有一个“我”，而那个“我”就是有意识的。这意味着“单一性”是“意识”的一个决定性特征。然而，意识的三个主要理论，即综合信息理论、全局工作空间理论和递归处理理论，通常在这个问题上不是很清楚。这些理论传统上严重依赖神经心理学观察，并将各种障碍（如否认症、忽视症和裂脑症）解释为意识意识障碍，而没有任何关于“单一性”的参考。在这篇综述中，我们将重新审视这些意识障碍的理论含义，并提出一种新的方法来概念化单一性意识。我们将认为，单一性的主观感觉可以与几种不统一的意识体验共存。单一性意识可能只有在环境反应约束下才会出现。也就是说，感知、语言、记忆、注意力和运动过程可能在很大程度上是不统一的并行进行的，而只有当生物体需要根据环境的提供物进行一致地响应时，才会产生统一感。接下来，我们从这个角度审视精神障碍和精神活性药物。最后，我们提出了第一个尝试，通过对裂脑患者进行静息状态成像实验来检验这个假设。结果表明，两个半球之间存在大量的激活一致性。这些数据表明，胼胝体的完全损伤通常不会改变大脑的静息状态网络。因此，我们提出我们的大脑中有单独的系统产生分布式意识。单一性的感觉，即“我”的感觉，出现在世界和反应规划系统之间的相互作用中，这导致了大脑不同功能网络之间的一致激活。
