La conciencia humana: integración y complejidad

Human Consciousness: Integration and Complexity. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to developingmodels of consciousness that integrate both psychological and neurophysiological data in thefield of conscious experience. It begins by introducing the model of Edelman, which postulates twokinds of consciousnes: «Primary consciousness», common to several animal species, allows us to createa «scene» of things of the world which is limited to the present moment; and «Higher-order consciousness», existing only in humans, involves the notion of self and the phylogenetic appearance oflanguage as a symbolic memory. The neurological outfit postulated for these types of consciousness isdescribed succintly and some questions arising when considering the relationship between the two aredealt with, specially between language and primary consciousness. Taking Edelman’s model as a startingpoint, some key aspects of human consciousness are commented upon, such as its powerful abilityto build spatial as well as temporal models of reality and the process of decision making, with theirpresumed neurophysiological substrates. Finally, the recent hypothesis of the «dynamic core» (by Tononiand Edelman) is presented. It tries to explain consciousness in terms of integration and differentiationin the nervous system, a hypothesis which seems, at the neurophysiological level, to be able toaccount for the phenomenological complexity of the functions that have been previously specified.