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Monitoring consciousness

The idea of monitoring consciousness is that a system is conscious when it has a central system that monitors and coordinates the processes of the whole system. Lycan (1997) puts it this way :
Consciousness is the functioning of internal attention mechanisms directed upon lower-order psychological states and events. ... Attention mechanisms are devices that have the job of relaying and/or coordinating information about ongoing psychological events and processes.
Under such a theory, a mental state such as pain need not be a conscious state. It becomes a conscious mental state when one is directly attending to it.

Some objections

Consider a sewage system like the following one :

Such a system would have lots of monitoring processes, perhaps even an indicator light that shows whether the whole system is functioning normally or not. Similarly, all modern computers have processes that monitor the programs and threads of computations going on. Would all such systems be conscious?

One might argue that monitoring consciousness requires attention to mental states, and that the sewage system does not. But is the difference really important?

If genuine mental states are required, one might also argue that there are presumably many monitoring processes going on in the brain. But we have only one consciousness and not multiple conscious systems.

Possible replies

  1. Monitoring consciousness is not the same as self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is one form of monitoring consciousness, but that requires being able to think about oneself.
  2. Consciousness is not an all-or-nothing matter - it comes in degree. Our brains might well have more than one conscious systems, and computers also have some degree of consciousness, but the kind of monitoring is a lot less sophisticated than the kind of monitoring that humans have that constitutes our consciousness.

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