Secondary consciousness

Secondary consciousness is an individual's accessibility to their history and plans. The ability allows its possessors to go beyond the limits of the remembered present of primary consciousness. Primary consciousness can be defined as simple awareness that includes perception and emotion. As such, it is ascribed to most animals. By contrast, secondary consciousness depends on and includes such features as self-reflective awareness, abstract thinking, volition and metacognition. The term was coined by Gerald Edelman.

Since Descartes's proposal of dualism, it became a general consensus that the mind had become a matter of philosophy and that science was not able to penetrate the issue of consciousness- that consciousness was outside of space and time. However, over the last 20 years, many scholars have begun to move toward a science of consciousness. Such notable neuroscientists that have led the move to neural correlates of the self and of consciousness are Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman. Damasio has demonstrated that emotions and their biological foundation play a critical role in high level cognition, and Edelman has created a framework for analyzing consciousness through a scientific outlook. The current problem consciousness researchers face involves explaining how and why consciousness arises from neural computation. In his research on this problem, Edelman has developed a theory of consciousness, in which he has coined the terms primary consciousness and secondary consciousness. Despite being an often criticized theory, Edelman’s theory of consciousness is regarded as the most neurobiologically sound and accurate description of consciousness to date. The author puts forward the belief that consciousness is a particular kind of brain process; linked and integrated, yet complex and differentiated.

Edelman argues that the evolutionary emergence of consciousness depended on the natural selection of neural systems that gave rise to consciousness, but not on selection for consciousness itself. He is noted for his theory of neuronal group selection, also known as Neural Darwinism, which displays the belief that consciousness is the product of natural selection. He believes consciousness is not something separate from the real world, thus the attempt to eliminate Descartes’ "dualism" as a possible consideration. He also rejects theories based on the notion that the brain is a computer or an instructional system. Instead, he suggests that the brain is a selectional system, one in which large numbers of variant circuits are generated epigenetically. He claims the potential connectivity in the neural net "far exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe"

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