Is Consciousness just another process?
Some decades back, an overwhelming question in the world of life-science was, “What is the relation between mind and brain” or “How does soul interface with body”. This question has also haunted me for years but the answer seemed superficial as most suggested that consciousness was a mental process involving both attention to external stimuli and short term memory. Recently, I happened to read an article on the subject by Noble Laureate Francis Crick, who helped determine the structure of DNA and fellow biophysicist Christof Koch, which explained how consciousness could be better understood.
The article dwells at length on the following ideas-
Mind’s most mysterious aspect is consciousness or awareness, which can take many forms, from the basic senses of pain and pleasure to higher feelings of self-consciousness. All these aspects of the mind can be explained in a more materialistic way as the behavior of a large set of interacting neurons electro-chemically with each other. Thus, consciousness is not a thing but a process that occurs in the intricately folded sheets of nerve tissues containing billions of neurons and several axons.
Now, the question is how to explain mental events as being caused by electrical firing of large set of neurons? Some scientists say, this cannot be solved by existing science but possibly be done through Quantum Mechanics. If man has been able to work out complex instrumentation and logic systems while designing robots, going a step higher, and understanding our emotions, isn’t too far.
Experiments on monkeys have shown a rough correlation of ‘visual awareness’ with the activation of neurons in the visual neocortex of the monkey’s brain. Since visual awareness is only a sub-set of the whole consciousness, it is believed that once we master the secret of ‘visual awareness’, we will be close to understanding this central mystery of human life: How the physical events occurring in our brains while we think and act relate to our subjective sensations – that is, how the brain relates to the mind.
Do you agree consciousness is just another process in your brain? Or do you think mind will never understand itself so our scientists are wasting their time and energy to seek an answer?
Adey, If you equate soul with consciousness, how would you explain a comatose or an unconscious person's consciousness? The soul makes him tick inside but the person has no consciousness or awareness.
To me soul is not exactly consciousness. I could say soul is just a state of existence..living or dead, or the inertia of being in rest or in motion. But then, how would people explain the state of existence of a virus which is considered neither living nor dead?
You can't have a consciousness if you don't have a concept of time! And this is too sophisticated for an animal, I'd say.
Molten, simply put it is just that one can't deny s/he is conscious. Because it's the feeling of being alive and having experience. The world exists in our consciousness. But where the heck is consciousness? Is it inside our brain or the body? In fact the best scientists have not been able to 'locate' consciousness.
“How does soul interface with body”.
Well as the 'soul'has never been identified, tracked, measured or even fully explained as a concept.....I would argue that it is what we call concsiousness.
The subject is huge, with many new insights over the last 10 years. You are your brain and one of it's functions, amongst many, is conciousness. eg breathing is not concsious.
The human race, as far as we know, is the animal with the highest developed area of consiousness but research is discovering a sliding scale of this area in other animals we share the planet with.
All life forms are related and it will be possible at some point to track the evolutionary development of consiouness over geological time.
flexi, I get your point but this is exactly what the scientists are trying to conceive as to what and how emotions like these are created when a bunch of neurons get activated on getting a stimulus. The feeling of joy and sadness is also electrochemical. Inside the brain all information is stored in quantitative terms..chemical in nature. That is what the neuroscientists say.
Pardon me from digressing but other physical phenomena like movement, beating of the heart or even having an erection is chemical in nature...I could explain them all but lets do it some other time.
a fish would know the origin of ocean even though born there and can't live without it ?
Same way scientists wont be able to know that unknown till they accept the fact that there is something unknown.
KR, everything that makes us human..insight, intuition, creativity, imagination, love, compassion, kindness, peace of mind, conscious choice making etc. etc. do not appear to be understood in tangible or quantitative terms anytime soon IMO.
flexicode, You rightly quoted Sir Arthur Eddington saying "Something unknown is doing we don't know what".
Let's also remember this domain of 'something unknown' and 'don't know what' is gradually shrinking as scientists are demythologising concepts through experimental evidences.
Isn't it possible, one day words like soul, mind and consciousness would be fully understood in tangible or quantitative terms?
Does not that statement have a substance of religion.
Most of the people like him seems inwardly religious to me.
Something to ponder on endlessly, I thought. There are certain mysteries in science to which only one expression can be applied, in the words of the great scientist Sir Arthur Eddington "Something unknown is doing we don't know what".
If you look at the word roots, stealth: scire in Latin means 'to know'. Con is a prefix for 'together'. In the Latin version it would mean 'all-you-know-together'.
whilst it maybe defined as yet another process determined by our brain functioning, pretty much means our entire "wakeful" and "sane" life does it not?All of our lives' various day to day actions and tasks, be it eating and drinking,commuting,interaction with others,work,past time activities, etc are all dependent on us being fully conscious of what we are doing.
And we human beings are always held accountable by God/law/society etc for what we do in our conscious state.
How often do we find criminals/wrong doers trying to excuse their actions by the fact that they did not know what they were doing!
And since all of our living depends so much on it, the studying deeper into this awesome phenomenon can never be a waste of time. In fact it's always fascinating to read of such findings.
what is consciousness? would its meaning differ based on different scenarios?
Questions like the one you have asked and numerous similar others have always fascinated man since time immemorial. If we truly ponder over life's mysteriously enigmatic existence, we will have a never-ending list of those questions to which there will be no convincing answer. But before you ask these questions, just ask this one to yourself, "Who am I?" If you are truly able to find a convincing answer for this question, then you will be able to find the answers for all the others you have asked.
Brain, Mind, Consciousness.....its NOTHING!!! because EVERYTHING IS NOTHING!!!. You try to zoom IN and OUT of human life and you will reach the farthest end beyond the DNA, on one side and much more farther than the galaxies on the other side. So reaching the extremes, what do you think we are?...NOTHING!!! Then WHO AM I???!!! :)
I think, KR, and I am not claiming to know the truth, that our consciousness is determined by our experience. And it changes in the course of a lifetime which seems to be an indication for the influence of experience. Although, I also claim that I haven't changed as far as I can remember. There is obviously an uninterrupted connection to myself throughout the years. Sometimes I say, man, that's exactly how you felt when you were twelve. But it doesn't bother me as much as it did then. If we say animals have no consciousness, we mean that they have no concept of time, past, present, and future. And therefore they do not accumulate experience to build up a consciousness. But, man, this is a topic for a hundred years. I don't think QL will be online that long.
LP, I understand what you have said about how learnt information is stored and recalled. Can we say that consciousness or awareness is the sum total of all past learnings or experiences and sensations we are presently acquiring through our five sense organs?
Consciousness is an electro-chemical process, but the 'mind' is acquired. We "learn" what chemical impulses in our brain "mean". We store the learned information and recall it when the chemical impulse is repeated. But: everything we experience becomes "meaning", and that is why the same electro-chemical impulses can mean different things for different persons. Compare this with the unconscious processes like motoric, breathing, etc., and you might be able to understand what I mean to say.
One needs many lives to understand all this, I am talking from the spiritual angle.
In one line / breath I would say : Imagine a pool ...
Brain is the surface , mind is the depth and conciousness is the measure of depth ..