What is a conscious observer?

Consciousness or ‘awareness’ is something we, as people, possess.
We talk about it; we have a vague understanding of what it is;
through it we experience many emotions, happiness, sorrow,
jealousy, love, etc; we develop concepts like free will and purpose
which really have no meaning without it; we can even refer to its
absence, e.g. to ‘unconscious’ decisions, etc; but we do not have any way of defining it. It cannot be expressed in terms of other
things or even be likened to other properties. It is something unique
and totally different from anything else.
To discuss it, we should therefore begin with what we know. Or,
rather, I should begin with what Z know.
I am conscious. This fact I can express in an alternative way by
saying that I have a conscious mind, or that my consciousness
exists, However expressed, and regardless of the fact that we do not
really know precisely what the statements mean, the truth they
convey cannot be denied, Even if I wish to deny reality to
everything else, which, as we saw in 0 1.2, is logically possible even
if rather pointless, I cannot deny the reality of my own thoughts.
As a natural extrapolation of my experience, it is reasonable that
I should assume that you, my readers, are conscious, and then to
extend this to all other people. Already, however, there are those
who would question this. A Princeton University psychologist,
Janes, has written a book in which he claims that consciousness is
a comparatively recent feature of the human race. (The book is
called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind [ Harmondsworth: Penguin 19801 . Though I am
fairly convinced that I do not believe the claim, it is expertly, and
interestingly, argued.)
Having agreed that we possess consciousness, do we know what
it is? It is a private ‘space’ in which each of us rules alone, and into
which we can introduce whatever we desire of real things, i.e. those
we believe exist elsewhere, or abstract things which are purely our
creation. But does such a vague description allow us to say where
else it might exist, who, or what, might possess it? People? Yes, by
extension of ourselves. But dogs? worms? amoebae?
I hope my readers will allow me a personal note here. I
remember, as a schoolboy, sitting by a riverside listening to a
skylark. I think I should have been revising for examinations but,
instead, I doodled some verses of poetry. Though I can just about
remember them, they are inferior to the precedent I was following,
so I will not expose them to public view. I mention them because
in the first verse I asked whether the bird was singing because it was
happy, in the second I wondered whether it was instead singing in
response to feelings of sadness, but then I wondered whether it was
neither, whether in fact the skylark was capable of feeling either
happy or sad or whether it possessed any awareness of anything:

‘Is’t only nature’s law that makes thee want to sing?’ I was asking
myself, perhaps for the first time, the question about consciousness
that I have asked many times since. I still do not know the answer,
and I have no idea how to go about finding it.
The nature of the problem here can be demonstrated by the
following thought experiment (which could, with a little expense,
even be a real experiment). Suppose we devised a series of tests for
consciousness. A conscious being would, for example, be expected
to show pleasure in some suitable way when it was praised, it would
back away from any object that hit it, or otherwise showed
threatening behaviour, it would seek ‘food’, i.e. whatever it
required to sustain its activity, when needed, and would express the
need urgently if the search proved unsuccessful. The list could easily
be extended. Whatever property of this type we included, however,
it is easy to see that we could design a computer-robot to make all
the correct responses. Such a machine would pass our tests for
consciousness. I believe, though I am not sure why, that it would
nevertheless not be conscious. Somehow ‘physical’ systems, even
when designed to have the attributes of consciousness, do not seem
to us to be conscious. Thus, although it is easy to simulate the
effects of consciousness, we should avoid making the mistake of
believing that in so doing we have created consciousness.
Conversely, it would be possible, by careful analysis of what
happens in the human brain, to correlate the various feelings like
joy, sadness, anger, etc, which we associate with consciousness,
with particular chemical or physical processes in the body, the
release of various hormones, and such like. But surely joy is not a
chemical compound, or a particular pattern of electrical currents,
Or is it? Or is it just caused by particular physical processes
occurring in the right place?Alternatively, is the truth nearer to the
statement that the thoughts of the conscious mind cause the
appropriate currents to flow? Are the emotions, or their material
effects, primary?
Certainly conscious thoughts appear to have physical effects. I
have just made a conscious decision to write these particular words
in my word processor. The fact that you are reading them is
evidence that my thoughts had real effect in the physical world. In
one sense, of course, this could be an illusion (whatever that might
mean in this context). The process of my writing these words could
be entirely a consequence of all the particles that make up my hand, brain, etc, moving inexorably according to the laws of motion.
Somewhere along the series of events in my body that leads to the
typing, particular things happen that make me think I am
‘deciding’ what to write. But what is cause, and what merely effect?
The problems we are discussing here are more than simply a
question of the language that we use to describe things. There are
of course ‘language’ issues. For example, we could describe a
pocket calculator as a machine that ‘allows particular currents to
flow’, or, alternatively, as a machine that ‘does arithmetic’. These
are different sets of words describing the same thing. Our concern
is more with the question of whether the calcualator knows that it
is doing anything at all. That real issues are involved can be seen
from the fact that our behaviour to some extent depends on how
we answer these questions. Part of the reason for the concern we
sometimes (too rarely) feel for people, animals, . . . is that we
believe these creatures are conscious.
It is outside the range of this particular book, and beyond the
ability of its author, to take this discussion any further. Much has
been written on the subject. In this sense it is rather like the interpretation
problem of quantum theory. I have the impression that
the two topics are similar in another sense-very little is understood
of either!
We close this section by offering three possible ‘answers’ to the
question of what makes an object conscious.