Consciousness
14 April 2012
There are several fields of science. Chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, more than I can name. It's fun to imagine how things work, or how large the universe is, or how life came into being. But for me, nothing comes close to intriguing me like consciousness does, which would fall under the scope of neuroscience. Specifically, conscious experience.
Consciousness is commonly defined in two ways, as awareness, and as experience. I often hear people say that when you fall asleep, you lose consciousness, meaning you lose awareness of what's happening in the real world. But experience doesn't stop, it continues in the form of a dream. So when I use the terms conscious or consciousness, I'm referring to the experience. This is also referred to as phenomenal consciousness, or P-consciousness.
The first thing that intrigues me is that it doesn't seem to make sense from a scientific point of view. The brain can be doing hundreds or thousands of things at once. It's made up of billions of neurons (I've heard anywhere from 10 to 100 billion, most specific being 86 billion) and trillions of synapses between these neurons. Each neuron is made up of trillions of atoms, which themselves are made up of dozens of particles. Yet, somehow, all of this comes together to form a single conscious experience. This is more popularly known as the binding problem.
Another problem I have is, how does consciousness become part of the body, and why can't it escape? Of course, this is assuming that consciousness is something separate from the brain. But that would make more sense to me, because a person can suffer severe brain damage, yet still function relatively normal. There was one case where a woman lost nearly half her brain, and while the effects were apparent, she still led a normal life. This all leads me to believe that consciousness is something separate from the physical brain. But if that's the case, then how does consciousness become attached to the body, and why does it stay that way until we die?
Physically speaking, what is consciousness made of? (i.e. what is the carrier of conscious experience) The two answers I favor most include electromagnetic fields and quantum explanations. A field could solve the binding problem, but there are other issues I have with this explanation. First of all, how does consciousness originate? It starts with a sperm and an egg. Trillions of molecules (proteins, amino acids, etc.) come together seemingly at random, from the food the mother eats, the air she breathes. Somehow, all of this comes together to create a conscious being.
For me, there's only one answer that solves all the problems above, and that's shared experience. So you may not be the only one experiencing what you are, there may be "others" sharing your conscious experience in your own head. The thing would be, all of these conscious experiences are the same or very similar, but they're unaware of one another. For me, this works because consciousness no longer needs to be large and complex, it can be something small and simple. Oddly enough, there may be evidence to support this.
The other theory I favor relates to quantum mechanics. I don't quite understand what explanations the theories give. My understanding, put simply, is that the brain is also a quantum computer, and consciousness resides in quantum events shared between neurons. The seemingly random outcomes of quantum events are really the product of conscious experience. It's known that consciousness effects the physical world, as can be seen in the double-slit experiment. Plus, my lack of understanding of quantum mechanics leaves me with lots of flexibility to shape a viable explanation, but it also prevents me from drawing any conclusions. See Quantum mind.
Yet another problem that's difficult to solve is how consciousness interacts with the physical world (i.e. access consciousness). We know that it does, because if it didn't, then I couldn't have possibly written this post speaking about conscious experience. How does conscious experience, something (assumedly) nonphysical, have any effect on the real world? While finding the true answer is difficult, finding plausible answers is much easier. Obviously, electromagnetic fields have a profound effect on the physical world. Quantum events do as well, but on a much smaller scale.
The other thing that intrigues me is qualia. Qualia refer to how we experience things, such as the sound of a bee buzzing by your ear, or the pain you feel when that bee stings you. Something that I've thought much about is, how are qualia related? They're all part of conscious experience, but vastly different with seemingly no relation. Some qualia can be grouped together, such as an itch and pain can be grouped together under a sense of feel, or how things feel. But sight and sound are vastly different, and I can't fathom how they're similar in any way.
It took me a while, but I did eventually come up with one attribute that nearly all qualia share, and that's a sense of location. When you see something, you have a sense of where that object is located. When you hear a sound, you have a sense of where that sound is coming from. When a bug crawls up your leg, you have a sense of where on your body that is. Even the sense of taste seems to be located in the mouth, as well as the sense of smell in the nose.
One thing that isn't a mystery to me is how consciousness evolved. I'm not sure what the purpose of consciousness is, but it makes perfect sense that it's somehow beneficial and would have evolved through natural selection. With that said, I think one way consciousness evolved is to separate qualia into distinct categories, such as sight, sound, and feeling. I think there are qualia "in between", but they were separated by evolution to prevent from interfering with each other. So while some qualia may be vastly different, I think they're related somehow in a way we aren't aware of simply because we haven't experienced it.
That's it for now. I've thought a lot about consciousness, but this is all that I could conjure up for now. I may write more entries like this in the future... that is, if I don't get scolded for being ignorant or something.
Consciousness is commonly defined in two ways, as awareness, and as experience. I often hear people say that when you fall asleep, you lose consciousness, meaning you lose awareness of what's happening in the real world. But experience doesn't stop, it continues in the form of a dream. So when I use the terms conscious or consciousness, I'm referring to the experience. This is also referred to as phenomenal consciousness, or P-consciousness.
The first thing that intrigues me is that it doesn't seem to make sense from a scientific point of view. The brain can be doing hundreds or thousands of things at once. It's made up of billions of neurons (I've heard anywhere from 10 to 100 billion, most specific being 86 billion) and trillions of synapses between these neurons. Each neuron is made up of trillions of atoms, which themselves are made up of dozens of particles. Yet, somehow, all of this comes together to form a single conscious experience. This is more popularly known as the binding problem.
Another problem I have is, how does consciousness become part of the body, and why can't it escape? Of course, this is assuming that consciousness is something separate from the brain. But that would make more sense to me, because a person can suffer severe brain damage, yet still function relatively normal. There was one case where a woman lost nearly half her brain, and while the effects were apparent, she still led a normal life. This all leads me to believe that consciousness is something separate from the physical brain. But if that's the case, then how does consciousness become attached to the body, and why does it stay that way until we die?
Physically speaking, what is consciousness made of? (i.e. what is the carrier of conscious experience) The two answers I favor most include electromagnetic fields and quantum explanations. A field could solve the binding problem, but there are other issues I have with this explanation. First of all, how does consciousness originate? It starts with a sperm and an egg. Trillions of molecules (proteins, amino acids, etc.) come together seemingly at random, from the food the mother eats, the air she breathes. Somehow, all of this comes together to create a conscious being.
For me, there's only one answer that solves all the problems above, and that's shared experience. So you may not be the only one experiencing what you are, there may be "others" sharing your conscious experience in your own head. The thing would be, all of these conscious experiences are the same or very similar, but they're unaware of one another. For me, this works because consciousness no longer needs to be large and complex, it can be something small and simple. Oddly enough, there may be evidence to support this.
The other theory I favor relates to quantum mechanics. I don't quite understand what explanations the theories give. My understanding, put simply, is that the brain is also a quantum computer, and consciousness resides in quantum events shared between neurons. The seemingly random outcomes of quantum events are really the product of conscious experience. It's known that consciousness effects the physical world, as can be seen in the double-slit experiment. Plus, my lack of understanding of quantum mechanics leaves me with lots of flexibility to shape a viable explanation, but it also prevents me from drawing any conclusions. See Quantum mind.
Yet another problem that's difficult to solve is how consciousness interacts with the physical world (i.e. access consciousness). We know that it does, because if it didn't, then I couldn't have possibly written this post speaking about conscious experience. How does conscious experience, something (assumedly) nonphysical, have any effect on the real world? While finding the true answer is difficult, finding plausible answers is much easier. Obviously, electromagnetic fields have a profound effect on the physical world. Quantum events do as well, but on a much smaller scale.
The other thing that intrigues me is qualia. Qualia refer to how we experience things, such as the sound of a bee buzzing by your ear, or the pain you feel when that bee stings you. Something that I've thought much about is, how are qualia related? They're all part of conscious experience, but vastly different with seemingly no relation. Some qualia can be grouped together, such as an itch and pain can be grouped together under a sense of feel, or how things feel. But sight and sound are vastly different, and I can't fathom how they're similar in any way.
It took me a while, but I did eventually come up with one attribute that nearly all qualia share, and that's a sense of location. When you see something, you have a sense of where that object is located. When you hear a sound, you have a sense of where that sound is coming from. When a bug crawls up your leg, you have a sense of where on your body that is. Even the sense of taste seems to be located in the mouth, as well as the sense of smell in the nose.
One thing that isn't a mystery to me is how consciousness evolved. I'm not sure what the purpose of consciousness is, but it makes perfect sense that it's somehow beneficial and would have evolved through natural selection. With that said, I think one way consciousness evolved is to separate qualia into distinct categories, such as sight, sound, and feeling. I think there are qualia "in between", but they were separated by evolution to prevent from interfering with each other. So while some qualia may be vastly different, I think they're related somehow in a way we aren't aware of simply because we haven't experienced it.
That's it for now. I've thought a lot about consciousness, but this is all that I could conjure up for now. I may write more entries like this in the future... that is, if I don't get scolded for being ignorant or something.
1
I've recently read "The User Illusion" by Tor Norretranders. Some of the middle chapters are extremely interesting (the intro is too long and the later chapters have gaps of logic IMO, however). The main thesis is that consciousness is a reductionist model of what we are, a "user illusion" of our own "me". The amount of works and research analysed makes it well worth the read.
I long thought of writing a blog entry about this, but I don't know what to write. It's hard to say of a lot of interesting things about something that leaves you speechless. Though I'd like to point out I don't like the term "consciousness". It sounds too much like "awareness", and awareness is something we can give any robot today. It's not "self-awareness" either; if one can be aware of anything, it's not very mysterious that he can be aware of himself. What's mysterious is the subjective character of experience; or, more precisely, that it's not objective. It can't be defined, because there's no way to define what has no objectivity.
That's why even talking about consciousness makes you look like a madman, because you can't name or define what you're talking about. There's nothing to point at and say "that's consciousness, see?", because all there is is this fundamentally unspeakable character of experience, the fact that it's mine, or that there's an "I" to experience it. For all I know, I'm the only conscious being in existence.