The Self-Conscious Human: The Map of Consciousness

📖 What’s This Paper About?

This paper explores the intricate relationship between consciousness and the brain, presenting a comprehensive framework for understanding consciousness. Professor Shlomo Kaniel introduces a “consciousness map” that outlines the structures, processes, and characteristics that define our psychological functioning, aiming to demystify the mind-brain connection.

Why This Matters

Understanding consciousness is crucial for developing self-control, ethical self-regulation, and empathy toward others. By providing a clear framework and common language for describing the components of consciousness, this work enables better communication among researchers and practitioners while empowering individuals to better understand themselves.

• Prevents cognitive biases and enhances problem-solving abilities
• Facilitates creativity and innovation in new directions
• Improves our ability to understand others through better self-understanding

Top 5 Takeaways

2. The Need for Common Language

One of the greatest challenges in consciousness research is the lack of standardized terminology. The author emphasizes the importance of creating a clear “map” with consistent language to facilitate understanding across disciplines.

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The Bigger Picture

This work bridges multiple disciplines—from neuroscience to psychology to philosophy—providing a unified framework for understanding human consciousness. By creating a common language and comprehensive map of consciousness structures, the author enables both researchers and individuals to better navigate the complex terrain of the mind. This approach has significant implications for mental health, education, and interpersonal relationships.

Final Thought

As we continue to unravel the mysteries of consciousness, frameworks like Professor Kaniel’s map provide essential navigational tools for what remains one of humanity’s greatest intellectual adventures.

THE SELF-CONSCIOUS HUMAN – THE MAP OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Professor Shlomo Kaniel

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Professor Emeritus, School of Education, Bar-Ilan University

Keywords: consciousness, self-awareness, mind-brain relationship, cognitive processes, self-regulation, empathy

Introduction

The book you have before you focuses on consciousness (Mind) as the partner of the brain (Brain and Mind) from the perspective of the self. Consciousness is our “psychological brain” that contains all the contents of our psyche: our aspirations, desires, fears, and pains. The uniqueness of the book lies in its “map” with clear language through which one can understand the structures and processes operating in consciousness, such as the selective attention system, working memory, memory storage, and self-awareness. Several important characteristics are also described, such as the degree of control, level of arousal, degree of connection to reality, and more.

For over fifty years, I have engaged with consciousness from three different angles as a researcher, diagnostician, therapist, and lecturer. This accumulated experience gives me the confidence to approach this wondrous subject. The scientific exploration of consciousness is one of the most exciting, challenging, and intriguing adventures that humanity has ever undertaken. There is a paradoxical element in consciousness research, as researchers with human consciousness and brains attempt to understand “the consciousness and brain of the self.” They try to learn about the brain based on extreme conditions, disruptions, illnesses, or distresses of the mind and brain. But even with all the discoveries and in light of all the findings, whose reliability varies, we face more mysteries than answers, and it’s difficult to understand what actually happens in this soft, grayish matter full of folds.

Aims of the Book

This book was written so that readers could gain greater expertise about themselves and thereby achieve self-control and self-discipline with moral oversight. Understanding consciousness with its subsystems prevents biases in thinking, helps solve problems, and even stimulates creativity in new directions.

To become proficient in consciousness (mind), clear language is needed within an information processing paradigm. Experts from many fields use the term Mind in different ways without precisely explaining what they mean. Often it’s difficult to know “what the poet intended,” so that in the same text, one can find different terms depending on the context, and sometimes a single term is chosen, while apologizing for the lack of precision (Monitz, 2016). In the social sciences, there is no language academy that clearly determines the “kosher and non-kosher” terms and the formal definition of each concept. Every researcher brings their own concepts, and often there is considerable overlap between different terms with the same meaning. In the absence of agreement on the meaning of the term mind, confusion arises between professionals, greatly hindering scientific progress and applications in diagnosis and treatment in the fields of psychology.

The lack of agreement around the concept of mind also exists in its “satellite” concepts such as awareness, consciousness, recognition, and subconscious. Therefore, the most significant difficulty in writing the book was to be “master” and decide on the language and concepts related to consciousness. In Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” Humpty Dumpty tells Alice: “When I use a word, its meaning is exactly what I choose it to be, no less and no more.” “The question is,” replied Alice, “whether you can impose so many different meanings on words?” “The question is,” answered Humpty Dumpty, “who is the master here, that’s all.”

The difficulty of being master of words caused me considerable delay in writing, and the raw material “sat on the shelf” for a long time. I started and abandoned several times because I didn’t have effective words for the complicated concepts. I consoled myself with the story about Socrates who had an argument with his student Antisthenes. Before the student and the teacher stood a horse, and they tried to define it. Socrates asked him: “What makes a horse a horse? Is it because of its length?” “Of course not,” answered the student, “because there are also other things that are as long as a horse and horses that are shorter than this horse.” The dialogue continues regarding the horse’s color, four legs, tail, and more. The conclusion they reached was that none of the characteristics was sufficient to define a horse. At this point, Socrates determined that the horse is a horse because of its “horseness.” Antisthenes the student answered ironically that he sees no “horseness” apart from the fact that this is a horse that he sees. Socrates replied, “You don’t see ‘horseness’ because you’re looking at the horse with the eyes of a horse.”

In my search for an appropriate word, I even turned to an expert in sign language for the deaf and hard of hearing (Tzvia Bornstein) and asked her to show me the signs for brain and consciousness. It turns out that the sign for brain is a hand on the front part of the head, and the sign for consciousness is a hand on the back part of the head (subconscious) making a motion like wind. Of course, sign language didn’t solve my problem, and I continued to search for words in Hebrew that would translate the concept of Mind, but without success.

The Hebrew Language Academy didn’t resolve this issue either and didn’t establish a standard term, suggesting to me the word “consciousness” as the closest translation. I had already used the word “consciousness” in previous books, and it is familiar to informed readers from reading elsewhere. This is despite the fact that in certain cases, consciousness is referred to in slightly different contexts, such as the totality of conscious experiences (Conscience), or recognition and mental experience in a specific spiritual domain (Consciousness). Consciousness is the most basic property of the psyche, and typically attributes such as conscious experience, qualia, personal experience, self-awareness, subjectivity, comprehension and sensation, and the ability to understand the relationships between personal identity and the environment (from Wikipedia) are ascribed to it.

After choosing the word “consciousness” as a translation for “mind,” I decided to characterize and explain the concepts rather than define them. Definition is a more complicated action than characterization in that it is supposed to be more precise and binding. The definition determines the essence and main characteristics of the concept by deciding what is included in it and what is not (from the word “fence”), and typically definitions are presented by senior researchers or in dictionaries. Due to this complexity, there is a multiplicity of definitions proposed by senior researchers or linguists. Aristotle, for example, determined that definition is the beginning of science and its end, meaning one begins with a provisional definition (characterizations) and ends with a precise definition.

Here, then, is a characterization of the word consciousness: a concept that contains all the psychological components of a person without exception. Just as with the word computer or smartphone, we’re referring to all components including hardware, software, and more. Consciousness is “the psychological brain of the person” in the sense of the opposite of a physiological brain (Brain). There is therefore a physiological brain that is the focus of specialization for brain researchers from the field of neurology and medicine, and there is a psychological brain that is the focus of specialization for psychologists, social workers, and education and social professionals.

Consciousness is a complex system that is difficult for us to grasp in its complexity. The complexity is reminiscent of the Nirvana Sutra, which includes the famous parable of the blind men who felt an elephant. Each described the elephant differently: the one who touched the elephant’s ear said it was an umbrella, the one who touched its head said it was a stone, the one who touched its leg said it was a tree, and so on (Hoffman, 2007, p. 234). Similarly, we observe people in general and their consciousness in particular through several small windows and receive different perspectives that create “scientific pluralism.” That is, a multiplicity of approaches and sources of information that requires us to be tolerant and not insist on “our window.” The condition for connecting pieces of information into a complete picture is the agreement on a single language within a shared paradigm. For the paradigm and theory that a person holds determines what their eyes see. All this comes from an understanding that there is a close reciprocal connection between language, thinking, and reality, with each shaping the other in a circular manner.

Without agreement on language, we will not succeed in creating a complete picture and will disperse, each to their own way, like those who tried to build the Tower of Babel. Agreed-upon language is therefore doubly important, both from the perspective of a person’s communication with themselves and from the perspective of their communication with others whose world content is different. Between these two focal points of importance, we must proceed cautiously. On one hand, it’s necessary to create clear distinctions for the purpose of self-understanding of processes, and on the other hand, to be attentive to the different meanings of concepts from different writers. I’ve tried as much as possible to simplify the book while also presenting its complexity at a reasonable level so as not to create paralyzing complexity but rather reasonable complexity.

I hope you will reach an understanding of consciousness in a way that will enable self-control with moral oversight.

Driving our “self” is not like driving a car or controlling technological tools. In the previous generation, a six-year-old child could open a watch, and with a little perseverance and patience, understand how the system worked. Today, a six-year-old child operates complex systems of smartphones, computers, multimedia, and virtual reality, and if they open them, they won’t understand anything about them, because many experts utilized complex theoretical knowledge to build complicated devices. The expert thinks about the potential user and adapts the device to them so that it will be user-friendly and easy to operate. Because of this, people can operate complicated devices without being engineers, but in the domain of the “self” (body, psyche, brain, consciousness), we need to be the engineers of ourselves since there is no engineer who can organize consciousness for us so that it will be user-friendly. We must therefore make an effort and become experts – engineers of our own self.

In the spirit of “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” one could say “Understand thy neighbor as thyself.” People who understand themselves have a better ability to step into others’ shoes and understand the other. They have an inner eye that sees, knows what it sees, understands the “self,” and is capable of going beyond itself and understanding others. They will listen to themselves, understand different aspects of their feelings and behaviors, and maintain “open systems” that constantly check themselves. All these are expressions of responsible self-management. Consciousness is the important part of our self, and investing in it will increase understanding and control of ourselves and others, hoping that morality will guide this control. A better understanding of consciousness will help professionals provide treatment and help people understand themselves and transfer the principles to additional domains that the book doesn’t address.

Expected Audience

The field of consciousness encompasses many disciplines across the scientific spectrum: from brain sciences, through philosophy, to social sciences including medicine and law. Therefore, the expected target audience is researchers, therapists, and students in these fields at all stages of studies. This includes students planning to work in education and individual welfare: teacher candidates in colleges and universities, and students pursuing degrees in education, psychology, social work, and criminology. Additionally, since the book is written in the genre of applied science, broader populations interested in this field will also find it engaging.

Note: For the sake of brevity and efficiency, the book is written in the masculine form, and female readers have our apologies.

Book Structure

The book has two sections: In the first section, the components of the consciousness map are explained, containing four chapters. In the first chapter, there is a brief overview of all consciousness components appearing in the diagram, since there are complex interactions between the parts.

After the superficial overview, the second chapter presents an expansion and deepening of the consciousness components that appear in the first chapter. In the third chapter, there is additional deepening on a central component in consciousness that includes the known and the unknown (unconscious). The fourth chapter is dedicated to collective consciousness.

The second section is dedicated to nine characteristics of consciousness, where each chapter explains a different characteristic with some ideas surrounding it to support and deepen the explanation. The fifth chapter is dedicated to the extent to which consciousness is open. The sixth chapter is dedicated to the level of energy required to activate consciousness. The seventh chapter is dedicated to the degree of concentration and staring of consciousness. The eighth chapter is dedicated to the degree of control over consciousness. The ninth chapter deals with the degree of plasticity of consciousness. The tenth chapter is dedicated to the degree of coherence and consistency of content in consciousness. The eleventh chapter deals with the degree of sensitivity, and the twelfth chapter with the degree of speed. The final chapter deals with the degree of connection to reality.

Acknowledgments and Book Dedication

This book is the fruit of many years of experience in diagnosis, treatment, research, and teaching. Naturally, many people from different circles of my life have contributed to it. The first circle to which I owe thanks is my loving and cohesive family that suffered greatly from my absences. Other circles include work colleagues at the university, the many project teams, and last but not least – my students who accepted with understanding and empathy my tormented deliberations and the changes I made in presentations and lectures.

References

This is informational, not medical advice.

Sources

Sources

1. Hoffman, Y. (2007). The sound of one hand: Zen teachings. Mentioned on p. 234.

2. Monitz (2016). [No full citation provided in the original text]