These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
What Is Consciousness? What is consciousness? What
is it to be aware? The more we think, the less we can define it. How does it happen? How does something in
the brain (it is in the brain, isn't it?) lead to our emotions, feelings and
thoughts? And why does it happen? Why were humans (and presumably, to some
extent, many other animals) endowed with consciousness, with the ability to
know that they exist, that they live, that other people live, that they are
part of this universe and that they will die? Why do we need to
"think" at all? Why doesn’t our inner life
mirror faithfully, one to one, our external life? When we experience sensations
related to interactions of our body with the world, our emotional life can be
said to mirror the environment. But when we think, sometimes we think things
that never happen and will never happen. How can consciousness be so decoupled
from the environment if brain processes are tightly coupled to it? Is
consciousness a form of self-maintenance the same way that the autonomic system
is a form of self-maintenance of the body regardless of what happens in the
environment? Are other animals conscious? One of Darwin's youngest friends, the Canadian biologist George Romanes, already argued that most animals are conscious, although to a lesser degree than humans. Paradoxes and weird
properties of consciousness abound. Why can't i be aware of my
entire being? We only have partial introspection. We have no idea what so many organs are doing in our body. Consciousness is limited to
my head. Do I need hands and feet in order to be conscious? Is consciousness
only determined by what is in the head, or is it affected also by every part of
the body? Am I still the same person if they cut my legs? What if they
transplant my heart? We can only be conscious of
one thing at a time. There are many things that we are not conscious of. How do
we select which thing we want to be conscious of? Why can I only feel my own
consciousness and not other people's consciousness? Why can't I feel other people's
feelings? Why can't anybody else feel my feelings? Conscious states are
fundamentally different from anything else in nature because they are
"subjective" and “opaque” (i can’t feel yours). They are not equally
accessible to all observers. Consciousness is a whole,
unlike the body which is made of parts, unlike everything else which can be
decomposed into more and more elementary units. Conscious states cannot be
reduced to constituent parts. How did consciousness come
to exist in the first place? Did it evolve from non-conscious properties? In
that case, why? What purpose does it serve? Could I be conscious of
things that I am not conscious of? Am I in control of my consciousness? Is this
conscious thought of mine only one of the many possible conscious thoughts that
I could have now, or is it the only conscious thought that I could possibly
have now? Is consciousness in control of me? This question is crucial to
understanding whether there is a locus of consciousness in the brain, or
whether consciousness is simply a side-effect of processes that occur in the
brain. The most frustrating
property of consciousness is probably its opacity: we cannot know who and what
is conscious. How widespread is consciousness? Who else is conscious besides
me? Are other people conscious the same way i am? Are some people more
conscious and others less conscious? Are some animals also conscious? Are all
animals conscious? Are plants conscious? Can non-living matter also be
conscious? Is everything conscious? Can things inside conscious
things be conscious? Are planets and galaxies conscious? Are arms and legs
conscious? What is the self? The self
seems to represent a sense of unity, of spatial and temporal unity:
"my" self groups all the feelings related to my body, and it also
groups all those feelings that occurred in the past. My body changed over the
years, and my brain too. All the cells of the body change within seven years.
Therefore my “mind” must have changed too.
But the self somehow bestows unity on that continuously changing
entity. If we consider that our bodies
are ultimately made of elementary particles, and that the average lifetime of
most elementary particles is a fraction of a second, we can say that our bodies
are continuously rebuilt every second. The matter of our bodies changes all the
time. The only thing that is preserved is the pattern of matter. And even that
pattern changes slowly as we age. Not even the pattern is preserved accurately.
What makes us think that we are still the same person? How can I still be
myself? Laws that protect animals
are not clear about "what" makes an animal worthy of protecting:
killing a neighborhood cat because I don't like it is generally considered
offensive, but killing a spider because I don't like it is absolutely normal.
One can own a dog and file a suit against somebody who killed it, but one
cannot own an ant and file a suit against somebody who stepped over it. Why
slaughtering cows by the millions is a lawful practice and killing a pigeon in
a square is a crime? The US physicist Erich Harth focused on the following
properties of consciousness:
"selectivity” (only a few neural processes are conscious);
"exclusivity" (only one perception at the time can be conscious);
"chaining" (one conscious thought leads to another one");
"unitarity" (the sense of self). These properties of
consciousness (partiality, sequentiality, irreducibility, unity, opacity, etc)
set consciousness apart from any other natural phenomenon. And make it
difficult, if not impossible, to study it with the traditional tools of the
physical sciences. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Consciousness: the Factory of Illusions" | Back to the index of all chapters |