What does it really mean to be conscious of something?
Dr. Baruch Eitam, a visiting cognitive scientist in UBC’s department of psychology, explores this question in a new book Rich Experience and Sparse Awareness: Sensing More Than We Know.
In the book, Dr. Eitam and co-author Ariel Meir Berlinger, a graduate student in his lab, challenge the common assumption that what we notice is the same as what we experience.
The book is part of the Elements of Perception series by Cambridge University Press, which is edited by Dr. James Enns, a professor in UBC’s department of psychology.
Elements is a series of books that close the gap between traditional textbooks and the way human perception is actually studied by today’s top researchers.
In a Q&A, Dr. Eitam explains a key idea from the book: our minds work on two levels—a relatively rich sensory experience and a more limited version our minds’ label—and how this relates to how we understand consciousness and everyday experience.
What’s the big idea behind your book—what do you want readers to take away about how our minds work?
Scientists and the rest of us treat consciousness as one big, mysterious thing. But ask how a cognitive or neuroscientist knows whether you were conscious of something, and the answer is humbling: they ask you. Building on many others, our key idea is that this conflates two things and by doing so masks a key distinction. First comes raw sensory experience: the redness of a rose, what philosophers call qualia — not yet the knowledge that the rose is red, or that this is a rose. Then a subset of that experience gets enriched with what you know and what’s currently relevant, becoming awareness — a world of labelled things, like a sweet, happy labrador. We feel that labelled world is our natural, only waking state. The surprise: the rich, raw experience underneath it is the more basic layer — and possibly the evolutionarily older one.
In the book, you argue that we take in more than we’re actually aware of. Can you give a simple example from everyday life that shows this?
Picture a hiker cresting a ridge. A vast valley, patches of forest, and rolling hills open up. Ask her what she saw and she’ll say: a valley, a forest, hills — a handful of labelled things. But her visual experience in that instant held far more: every shade of green, the exact scatter of the trees, textures she never named. These labels are themselves a product of awareness. The overflowing scene is experience. And here’s the catch: the picture now in your mind’s eye is itself the sparse, labelled version. A great author can activate experience through your knowledge — but that’s knowledge-dependent and hence idiosyncratic to you. A great image depends on it less, and the physical world least of all. The experience it generates is both more consistent across people and far richer.
Why does this difference between what we experience and what we notice matter?
First, for the science: if we’ve been measuring consciousness by asking people what they noticed, we may have been measuring only one of its two layers all along. But it matters more than that. Conscious experience is the one thing given to us directly — everything else we know, we know through it. And our distinction reverses the usual order: raw phenomenal experience is the basic, generic representation of the world, while cognition — the knowledge that labels it — is the later, idiosyncratic overlay that meshes with it to form awareness. If experience is the primitive layer, it may be shared far more widely than we assume — perhaps even by very simple nervous systems. This is also what many contemplative traditions reach for: Suzuki’s “beginner’s mind,” a return to the uncategorized, richer experience beneath the labels.
