Core of Awareness

The Core of Awareness

The brain is an organ that promotes our survival as biological creatures. It does this by mediating between the inner needs of our bodies and the dangers and delights of the outside world – the location of all the objects that satisfy our inner needs.

The brainstem is the anatomical core of the brain and, in evolutionary terms, its oldest part. Within the brainstem there are a number of nuclei that regulate our vegetative, visceral life. They control heartbeat, respiration, digestion, and the like. The design of these circuits is “hard-wired”, and the basic design is shared by all mammals. These circuits are so crucial to life that if there were to be even minor variations in their structure and connectivity, we would not survive. They have been preserved so long through evolutionary history precisely because they work so well. While this is a fascinating brain regin if you are a neurologist, these circuits have little directly to do with the mind – whose business it is to mediate between such things and the perceptual-motor world outside.

The mind begins where these systems end. Just above these circuits, in the upper part of the brainstem, lies a set of structures that participate in the regulation of visceral as well as mental life, in one particular way. They govern the activational tone (or “state”) of the brain, which we perceive subjectively as the background medium of our conscious awareness – the “page” onto which the ever-changing contents of perception (and thought) are written. This page is never really blank, even during sleep.

The inner source of consciousness reflects the current state of our bodies. To be more precise, it reflects the current state of our inner needs, This infuses the background “tone” of conscious awareness with a particular quality of feeling. The inner surface of consciousness, if its tone were to be conveyed in words (which it is not), would say something like: “I exist, I am alive, and I feel like this.”

I exist, I'm alive and I feel like this. Photo by Elena.

External sources of awareness

The other aspect of “core consciousness” derives from the world around us. The stimuli that inscribe representational “contents” onto the page of consciousness are registered primarily in the posterior part of the forebrain, in a series of structures dedicated to the reception, analysis, and storage of information about the world. The structures combine myriad stimuli arriving from our various sense organs into the recognizable “objects” that constitute the physical world as we know it. A unit of consciousness – a moment of awareness – consists in a coupling of these two things: a momentary state of the core self in relation to its concurrent surround of objects. The essence of consciousness is therefore a relationship: “I feel like this in relation to that.” This relationship reflects the fact that our inner needs can only be satisfied by things that exist beyond ourselves. Our feelings (the inner sources of consciousness) are therefore always defined in relation to the objects of our needs (the outer sources of consciousness).

It does not require a great leap of imagination to see why things are arranged like this. This is what consciousness is for. It tells us how we feel about things. The things in question are basically, things like: “I feel hungry. I want one of those; I feel sexually aroused, perhaps she/he will oblige; I feel scared, I think I'll get out of here.” If consciousness did not require feelings, we would get along fine without it. The reception, analysis, and storage of information – and the programming, regulation and verification of action – do not depend on consciousness. Computers can (and do) perform such functions, and we perform most of them unconsciously most of the time. Conscious awareness, in its essence, then, imparts value.

Flowers near York Council Chambers (1907-1950). The Township of York held council meetings above this branch of the Canadian imperial bank of commerce from 1907 to 1950. A plaque, installed in December 1973, commemorates the 180th anniversary of the founding of the township. Photo by Elena.