Guest Post by David Stephen
The theories of consciousness that cannot be used to functionally explain mental health problems are simply inaccurate, regardless of how fanciful they appear. There are some who say the hard problem of consciousness isn’t testable, but would not have said so if their theory could set up a test for it.
The scientific and philosophical approaches to consciousness are cool for abstractions, debates, questions and guided tests, if there is no bigger problem of mental health that continues to confound solutions in this digital era.
Brain Science, are Consciousness Theories Falsified by Mental Health?
There are often views that mental health is political, social, economic, and so on, when it is obvious that solving all economic or political problems would not eradicate anxiety, depression, and so on. There are those who say mental health has nothing to do with the brain to a wide audience, using an opportunity that could have been useful towards progress to mislead others.
The resources in the field of consciousness would have set mental health on a better course, if healthy or ill-healthy consciousness is themed in theories, rather than consciousness as unsolvable, so there is no failure in pursuing anything disconnected under the narrative of seeking c.
Consciousness is simply a quantity that having it means being alive. The quantity is graded as prioritized and pre-prioritized, determining reaches. These grades exceed attention, awareness, conscious or unconscious, automatic or control.
The quantity goes to locations to acquire properties. It is the property acquired that determines what is experienced. Experience is memory and feelings. Then reaction follows.
That is what consciousness is, the quantity, what it becomes, where it goes, and its outcome. It fits in to being and knowing, or what it feels like to be something, or say a bat.
The reason to have consciousness is to have a quantity of existence that can go through those. It is the properties it uses to define whatever is coming in to the brain from within [the body] or from the environment that enables the being to interact. The quantity is present in coma, under general anesthesia, sleep and so on, though what it becomes and where it goes is different from when awake and about.
It is not important to have a theory of consciousness that is accepted or that this is it because being unsolved is the prestige. But what is important is how does the brain work to define mental health or ill-health at any moment?
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There is a recent paper, Consciousness as a Memory System, with a new theory of consciousness and an amazing literature review on existing theories and the history of the subject.
They noted that, “We argue that consciousness originally developed as part of the episodic memory system—quite likely the part needed to accomplish that flexible recombining of information. We posit further that consciousness was subsequently co-opted to produce other functions that are not directly relevant to memory per se, such as problem-solving, abstract thinking, and language.”
All the existing and accepted labels of memory are not the functional basis of memory, regardless of how many studies seem to validate them. They are labels for specific experiences, never constant or account for how mental health invalidates them.
Working memory or short-term memory is only accurate if the information is neutral. If a two-word or three-word bad news is delivered to someone in the same dimension of working memory, it will no longer be working, it will be lingering memory.
Episodic memory of past events, episodes or experiences are weak when it is the episode remembered of an event that is causing trouble, but the other thing that should indicate otherwise was not recalled.
This means that property of one was acquired and the other was not, for peace or ease. The memory does not function by such episodes.
Semantic memory has to be neutral to actually be seman...
