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Seeing how Consciousness seems to be misunderstood , I thought I would go into it in a thread of its own. My approach in this thread will be different , I think we first have to start from the top , from some conception of what Consciousness is , from what our own introspection is. We have to be sure of that, before we can enter the nervous system and talk about its neurology. We must therefore try to make a new beginning by stating what Consciousness is. We have already seen that this is no easy matter, and that the history of the subject is an enormous confusion of metaphor with designation. In any such situation , where something is so resistant to even the beginnings of clarity, it is wisdom to begin by determining " What something is Not."
So I will begin by examining what Consciousness is not. And even that will be a surprise!
I'm afraid for most that's as deep as it's going to get around here. And I really don't have the time to get into it myself.
Good Luck.
Well said. This forum has been a bit of a disappointment when it comes to deep self-thought. I honestly expected more from the religion/philosophy folks; I was wrong.
At any rate, I will try to give my two pennies on this topic. IMO, consciousness is both "the creator" and "the observer" of existence. Concepts such as "time" and "physicality" are all illusions created by this thing we call consciousness (which explains why many folks can see future events before they happen; "time" and "place" are both illusions).
Since we are all beings of consciousness, it is nearly impossible for us to study and fully know "who/what we are". It would be like trying to look at your own face without the help of a mirror or image-capturing device.
An experience I'd like to share; it might help explain my conclusions...
About 9 years ago, I used to be one of those "my atoms and molecules are who I owe my consciousness to" type of folks. Then I had a VERY vivid dream of my first born son. The baby was in the 10 pound range with a head full of black hair at birth. The strange thing about it though is that I was not a father yet at the time of the dream. Heck, my wife didn't even know she was pregnant. I told her about my dream and she laughed. I also described the baby that I saw to her (and she laughed even harder). I'm not sure what was funnier to her; the part about a head full of hair or the fact that I saw a 10 pound life form come out of her small body. 8 1/2 months later, a male baby that looked EXACTLY like the baby I saw in my dream was born (it was roughly 3 weeks after the dream that we found out my wife was indeed pregnant).
I've had other dreams like this one (usually about dead relatives that I did not yet know were dead). It seems (after talking with some of my closest friends about these controversial issues) that I am far from being alone when it comes to these sort of things.
Such instances served as a bit of a "consciouness awakening" for me. I truly believed that my consciousness came from atoms; but how can this be when I am seeing future events and talking with dead relatives (that I did not know were dead until the next morning after the dream)? My "atom belief" just did not jive with what I was experiencing. Clearly, there was just more to the puzzle than I was willing to admit.
Today, I still consider myself to be an atheist, but my mind is certainly more open than it was before. I no longer laugh at folks who claim to have out of body experiences. I no longer laugh at folks who claim to have psychic abilities (IMO, we all have those abilities; some are just more aware of them than others). It's these such issues that makes consciousness such a difficult concept to understand and explain.
As a result, just love and live; understanding is irrelevant.
As you can see, the definitions of Consciousness are comming in already. Let me begin by stating this shocking memo: In being conscious of consciousness, we feel it is the most self evident thing imaginable. We feel it is the defining attribute of all our waking states, our moods and affections, our memories, our thoughts, attentions, and volitions. We feel comfortably certain that consciousness is the basics of concepts, of learning and reasoning, of thought and judgement, and we think all this is located somewhere in the head;
On critical examination, all of these statements are false!
These are the costume that consciousness has been masquerading in for centuries! They are the misconceptions that have prevented a solution to the problem of the orgin of Consciousness. Lets look at what consciousness is not.
To begin with, there are several uses of the word consciousness which we can discard as incorrect. We have for example the phrase" To loose consciousness" after receiving a blow on the head. But if this were correct, we would then have no word for those somnambulistic states known in the clinical literature where an individual is clearly not conscious and yet is responsive to things in a way in which a knocked-out person is not. Therefore, in the first instance we should say that the person suffering a severe blow on the head loses both consciousness and what I call reactivity, and they are therefore different things.
Whats important about this, is that we can react to things without being conscious of those things! And we do this everyday in our lives. Sitting against a tree, I am always reacting to the tree and to the ground and to my own posture, yet I could unconsciously stand up and begin walking. And take absolutely no conscious thought about it. I am consciously typeing on a keyboard now and conscious of those things I want to say, but I can be totally unconscious of those things around me. A bird may land on my window, and I be totally unconscious of it. In other words, reactivity covers all stimuli my behavior takes account of in any way, while consciousness is something quite different and distinct and a far less ubiquitous phenomenon.
We are conscious of what we are reacting to only from time to time. And whereas reactivity can be defined behaviorally and neurologically, consciousness at the present state of knowledge cannot.
I, for one, know that I do not know what consciousness is. I say that as someone with a Master's degree in psychology and as someone who has had a deep interest in consciousness and thus read some scholarly investigations on consciousness. I want to read more of the current theorists and researchers working on consciousness.
I will say this much. [I am just kind of thinking out loud here. I am not staking out a position that I wish to defend]. I don't think consciousness exists in the absence of attention. Only those things that one is attending to enters into consciousness, and when one is not attending to anything (including one's thoughts) consciousness disappears. Yet, I don't think consciousness is the exact same thing as attentiveness, because I suspect that there are some lower life forms (i.e., flies) whose sensory organs can be focused and attuned to an immediate threat (i.e., their eyes are attending to a predator), yet they experience no mental, conscious awareness of their sensory organs' attention.
I think attention involves temporarily devoting more brain resources to a set of inputs. To borrow an IT analogy, the brain is devoting a greater share of its bandwidth to certain neural inputs. One would think we might be able to measure that through increased bloodflow in a fMRI.
I'm aware that it is now lunchtime, and that I am increasingly aware of my hunger!
Consciousness is when you are sufficiently self-aware to perceive the world operating around you, with events outside of you but that nonetheless affect your life, and to then react to it, plan with it in mind, and, if you are amongst the higher IQ'd lifeforms extant here (whales, dolphins, lions, tigers and bears (oh no!), hominids, ravens and my cat!) to be able to plan your current actions with the future in mind. As well, to be able to conjure up and visualize current and future options!
In other words, you realize there is a future, and that you have a place in it if your chose to insert your "self" into it!
Finally, you accept and observe the existence of others, their different approaches to self-awareness, as well as the memories of past actions and consequences that affected both you and others.
PS & side-note: none of these evolved abilities requires the gracing hand of a God to enable these capabilities, nor are they limited to us hominids, as I noted above. Your average raven is more than self-aware and able to plan ahead! Even years into the future, as some recent research in Seattle, WA St. from the prestigious Univ. Of WA has conclusively proven!
But oddly, none of them are wearing any golden crucifixes!
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I'm aware that it is now lunchtime, and that I am increasingly aware of my hunger!
