Abstract
Human Consciousness: Integration and Complexity. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to developing models of consciousness that integrate both psychological and neurophysiological data in the field of conscious experience. It begins by introducing the model of Edelman, which postulates two kinds of consciousnes: "Primary consciousness", common to several animal species, allows us to create a "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 of language as a symbolic memory. The neurological outfit postulated for these types of consciousness is described succintly and some questions arising when considering the relationship between the two are dealt with, specially between language and primary consciousness. Taking Edelman's model as a starting point, some key aspects of human consciousness are commented upon, such as its powerful ability to build spatial as well as temporal models of reality and the process of decision making, with their presumed neurophysiological substrates. Finally, the recent hypothesis of the "dynamic core" (by Tononi and Edelman) is presented. It tries to explain consciousness in terms of integration and differentiation in the nervous system, a hypothesis which seems, at the neurophysiological level, to be a ble to account for the phenomenological complexity of the functions that ha ve been previously specified.
