Abstract
This is the first in a series of instalments aiming at a minimal model explanation for conscious experience, taking the phenomenal character of “pure consciousness” or “pure awareness” in meditation as its entry point. It develops the concept of “minimal phenomenal experience” (MPE) as a candidate for the simplest form of consciousness, substantiating it by extracting six semantic constraints from the existing literature and using sixteen phenomenological case-studies to incrementally flesh out the new working concept. One empirical hypothesis is that the phenomenological prototype of “pure awareness”, to which all such reports refer, really is the content of a predictive model, namely, a Bayesian representation of tonic alertness. On a more abstract conceptual level, it can be described as a model of an unpartitioned epistemic space.
Highlights
1.1 From minimal phenomenal selfhood” (MPS) to minimal phenomenal experience” (MPE)In 2009, Olaf Blanke and Thomas Metzinger asked two questions: What are the minimally sufficient conditions for the appearance of a phenomenal self, that is, the fundamental conscious experience of being someone? What are necessary conditions for self-consciousness in any type of system (Blanke & Metzinger, 2009, p. 7)? One of their findings was that bodily agency is a causally enabling but not a constitutive condition for phenomenal selfhood (Blanke & Metzinger, 2009, p. 13)
Can a conscious system be exclusively aware of awareness itself? If yes, would there be a specific form of phenomenal character that is instantiated during such episodes? And if there really exists something like the simplest form of conscious experience – what are the minimally sufficient conditions for MPE to occur in neurotypical humans, and what would be necessary conditions for the experience of consciousness as such to appear in any type of system
Membership in the family of phenomenal states will be graded, and quantitative assessments of prototypicality may help us understand why some phenomenological exemplars capture the intuitive “essence” of consciousness better than others. Please note how this implies a radical departure from essentialist intuitions as might seem to be automatically implied by the two questions about necessary and sufficient questions in section 1.1: It may not be possible to isolate the simplest form of conscious experience in terms of one unique minimum of dimensionality for the relevant state-space, and for a given system multiple low-dimensional states may be possible or even co-exist
Summary
In 2009, Olaf Blanke and Thomas Metzinger asked two questions: What are the minimally sufficient conditions for the appearance of a phenomenal self, that is, the fundamental conscious experience of being someone? What are necessary conditions for self-consciousness in any type of system (Blanke & Metzinger, 2009, p. 7)? One of their findings was that bodily agency is a causally enabling but not a constitutive condition for phenomenal selfhood (Blanke & Metzinger, 2009, p. 13). In 2009, Olaf Blanke and Thomas Metzinger asked two questions: What are the minimally sufficient conditions for the appearance of a phenomenal self, that is, the fundamental conscious experience of being someone? This paper begins to develop a related strategy for “minimal phenomenal experience” (MPE; this term was originally introduced in Windt, 2015b). It will take as a new entry point not full-body illusions, but the specific phenomenology of “pure consciousness” in meditation. If there really exists something like the simplest form of conscious experience – what are the minimally sufficient conditions for MPE to occur in neurotypical humans, and what would be necessary conditions for the experience of consciousness as such to appear in any type of system?1 Can a conscious system be exclusively aware of awareness itself? If yes, would there be a specific form of phenomenal character that is instantiated during such episodes? And if there really exists something like the simplest form of conscious experience – what are the minimally sufficient conditions for MPE to occur in neurotypical humans, and what would be necessary conditions for the experience of consciousness as such to appear in any type of system?1
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