One cannot but wonder how such a mysterious and multifaceted thing as consciousness in people and animals could be studied to the extent that contemporary science can explain almost all phenomena in the universe, including the appearance and evolution of life. Self-awareness is the knowledge or recognition of the workings of one’s mind and feelings- the penultimate to being human. Here, we will strive to describe as many layers as possible of the phenomenon that is generally known as consciousness.
In this concern, we are going to examine in this article on an interesting area of focus, consciousness. What exactly is consciousness? This is among the burning questions that have posed a challenge to philosophers, scientists, and thinkers throughout history. Therefore can be described as the ability to be alert and aware of the external environment at any given time. It entails the operations of taking in information, acknowledging or feeling its existence, and acting on the information. However, it is discovered that those who pay close attention to it rub its surface only to immerse in crystal-clear water, thus, getting a more profound perspective of its essence, which remains an enigma to elites even to this day.
As such, consciousness can be described as a topic that encompasses numerous definitions and has been of interest to philosophers, scientists, and other thinkers for many centuries. Concisely, consciousness could be defined as a person’s capacity to be fully informed about the environment and personally experienced events. Consciousness can be characterized as the recognition of one’s presence in the world, and the capability to perceive or contemplate upon the world and everything in it.
Consciousness, in this particular case, implies the capacity to be conscious, to be alive, and to have cognitive perception. That is what makes or enables humans to reason, experience emotions, and react to the environment. It can be defined as the “inner lamp” that enlightens the human mind to understand the reality surrounding them.
Thus, despite all the extremely important progress in neuroscience and psychology, the very existence and nature of consciousness is still a mystery. This probing question arises from the theoretical-empirical knowledge about how the brain works and how it produces consciousness from neural activities. What links thinking and neuroanatomy? These are some of the questions that have not received easy answers to this day, and anyone, from a scientist to a philosopher would be stumped.
Of the many puzzling and contentious issues related to consciousness which is, Self-awareness is quite interesting. This power of self-observation, referring to thoughts to their object – self, is a characteristic hardly seen in any other organism. They however pose deep and complex issues to do with the subject and the ontology of the real.
Subjectivity is the single most important, unique, and bewildering fact of being alive for it defines and guides the human consciousness of the world. It is what enables one to see beauty, to feel love, and to reason and meditate on the creation of the Universe. If did not exist, people could not reveal the content of their lives and feel the full spectrum of opportunities.
In addition, consciousness affects concepts of ethics, morality, and even existence deeply. It creates certain queries related to freedom of will, the presence of the soul in human beings, and reality of the life after death. These are issues that have challenged human beings for decades or even centuries and the answers, if they exist at all, are not easily identifiable.
Consciousness
Since the earliest times society’s wise men have sought to understand what can be called the enigma of life or, in other words, the issue of consciousness.. Starting from Descartes’ argument cogito ergo sum and continuing through Kant’s attempts to determine the transcendental preconditions of conscious experience, philosophy constituted the research of consciousness from the methodological viewpoint of metaphysics and theory of knowledge.
Dualism and monism are other functions that many scholars tend to think through taking into consideration the philosophy of consciousness. While dualists think that the mind is independent of the physical body, monists think that the mind is an outcome of the brain functions. Even to this date, this ageless conflict plays a role in shaping the way people approach physical and mental relations or, more so, the ways one apprehends experience.
The Science of Consciousness In the process of its development in the course of the recent several decades, an immense number of new findings have been made by theorists of neuropsychology as well as by theorists of psychology in connection with the priorities of the tendencies of consciousness mechanisms. By using some of the relatively modern scientific approaches that entail influencing, taking pictures of the brain, and mapping, there is hope that researchers are slowly beginning to unravel how the neurons of the civilized human brain give consciousness via sophisticated neurological activities.
Research has shown that there are particular areas in the brain and networks that are related to self-awareness and they include the following; the Frontal cortex, the Thalamus, and the DMN.
Apart from science and philosophy, spirituality and the search for truth consciousness are equally fascinating to many people. Meditation, yoga, and Eskimo shamanism all provide a snapshot of what it is to be in another state of subconscious mind consciousness and indeed seem to provide a rational understanding of the phenomena.
Roughly one-half of people in developed and developing countries today believe that everything is made of matter; and that somehow under some conditions, macromolecules of matter develop survival needs, this need leads to complex structures of life via evolution with the help from random changes in the hereditary material we have from which nature selects our evolution. The pursuit of survival needs has given us a human condition characterized by:
Materialists see nothing wrong with human nature being this way; it is what it is. If we keep on creating better and better technology and create enough prosperity to satisfy people’s me-centered need for a good car, good food, good house, and good spouse (in the USA, they call it the American dream), if we develop newer and newer ways to provide people with pleasure and entertainment, if we keep people busy with information processing with social media and new generations of cell phones and laptops, everyone will be happy.
Oh yes; there is that pesky little problem of the brain built more negative than positive. But we can handle that with positive psychology, teaching people how to give a positive spin to their experiences and some pretend virtuous behavior. True, virtuous values are not real, they are not needed for survival, but pretending them in human interactions helps maintain social cohesion and civilization.
The other half of humanity in these nations believes in a God-matter dualism; in this view, a nonmaterial God created humans in His image by embodying virtues in the human brain, virtues such as love and goodness. People should live these virtues or else they invite God’s wrath.
Religions have always said that living only for survival needs is an invitation to evil; excessive pursuit of them is sin—moving away from God. In this way, the pursuit of higher needs—the virtues—is what moves us toward God.
Religion is the older of the two worldviews. Indeed, even today, there are a substantial number of people who try to follow these religious virtues—goodness, love, fairness, truth, etc. Some even succeed and seem to be happier.
The flip side is that a large number of religious people, even teachers, fall prey to the base-level human condition built into everyone and get caught.
The current decline of civilization is clear; it could not be a coincidence that the decline started in the nineteen eighties when scientific materialism took hold of science and the takeover continues with no end in sight. A study of history shows also undeniably that overall human beings have experienced steadily increasing civilization at least on average, during the period of the eighteenth through twentieth century when science ruled matter and produced technology and kept a check on religious monopoly on everything but overall religions ruled the minds of people and kept people pursuing a modicum of virtues.
Metaphysically, scientific materialism is a monism—material monism—and is better than the dualism of religion whose metaphysical problem is to explain how God—a being of virtuous ideas—interacts with matter, which is concrete, not idea. How do we, made of matter, embody God’s virtues without any interaction with Him?
It gets supremely interesting when we realize that even materialists agree that today the most important outstanding problem to solve is consciousness, undeniably a fundamental aspect of the human being. What is consciousness? How we think of the subconscious mind will determine what theories we entertain about it, and what aspects of it we believe and try to verify. If we think everything is matter, we have a problem to begin with: inanimate nonliving matter does not seem to be conscious, at least not conscious like us.
Even living matter of early evolution—bacteria and plants—have more in common with inert matter than we human beings as far as the subconscious mind is concerned. Therefore, in everything-is-matter philosophy consciousness has to be an emergent property of complexity—complex conglomerates of matter such as our brains.
At first sight, this emergentist approach may seem reasonable to you. After all, you know that when two gases hydrogen and oxygen combine and make water, new properties of water do emerge. However, you are missing something peculiar about consciousness.
Think. Matter comprises what we call objects of our experience. Experience has another pole—the experiencer or subject; that is, you, or what you call your “I.” “I (subject) see a flower (object).” In this way, materialists are missing something about consciousness via its adherence to everything is matter—objects—philosophy; the subjective aspect of our experience of consciousness.
Not so fast, though. One problem is that you can also look at your “I” and make it into an object; you call it me. Is the “I” real or is it all “me?” Materialists say that I am all me except for a little individuality, the I or my experience has an individual subjective quality to it (called quale) that cannot be explained away. However, the emergence of a subjective quale from a complex aggregate of matter may be possible to demonstrate, claims the optimists of emergentism.
It is undoubtedly true that our brain is associated with our experience of consciousness. The brain comprises a neural network.
Consciousness
In the nineteen fifties, modern computer technology came about along with the concept of artificial intelligence. There was much give and take between models of artificial intelligence and models of the brain.
A simple computer model of the consciousness of the brain would assume a central processing unit (CPU) that controls all its other software programs of neural network. An incoming signal, for example, an optical stimulus will go directly from the eye to the brain’s CPU in the cortex. However, in a recent neuroscience experiment, it was found that an incoming signal is first processed in other sub-organs of the brain. This kind of experiment has shaken up the field of subconscious mind research even for materialists.
I recently read about a discussion among materialist consciousness researchers commenting about the panpsychism model of the subconscious mind—everything in the world, living and nonliving—is conscious. This sounds like almost the complete opposite of the metaphysics of scientific materialism. Instead of everything being made of matter, panpsychism seems to be saying everything is made of consciousness as well. But of course, panpsychism is pure philosophy; there is no scientific evidence suggesting it.
So, are we machines (albeit a theory of consciousness may elude us for a while) or are we conscious to begin with? Besides panpsychism, there is another very old, quite well-known non-dual perspective for thinking about consciousness–the subconscious mind is primary, is the ground of being—that is finding support from quantum physics. Quantum physics is the physics of possibilities, possibilities for consciousness to choose from. The choice defines the I/subject of the experience: I choose, therefore I am.
This view, albeit backed by quantum physics, the scientific materialists resist tooth and nail. Mostly, they do it by labeling it as Eastern mysticism. If you are a “Westerner” born and brought up in the West, you should get the idea. You are familiar with the East-West divide: East is East, West is West, and the twain shall never meet. This was propagated during the heyday of the British empire to justify the domination of a people with highly sophisticated notions about consciousness that challenged the developing materialist science—those notions were mystical, mysterious, and obscure ideas, not real, not to be trusted.
My work over the last thirty years shows that indeed Consciousness is the ground of all being and quantum science proves that beyond any doubt. Neuroscience data suggests that indeed, the brain works in two modalities: 1) a conditioned machine-like local modality involving a few brain areas and 2) a nonlocal creative modality in which many brain areas become involved in a coherent synchronized nonlocal movement. Nonlocality—signalless instant communication at a distance—is a definitive sign of quantum movement.
Excessive intellectualism, information processing, and the glorification of step-by-step logic have shaped an incomplete worldview that works as an explanatory principle for only the mechanical part of the human but leaves most of the human potentialities out of our reach. This has created a situation where we are disconnected from feelings and intuitions that bring us motivations for change among many other things. Let us look at the world as it is, not as it should be (mechanical) following an idea (scientific materialism).
I am talking about a worldview change. That’s the very first step. The most important step. I invite you to dig deep and feel a sense of awe in your way when you realize what quantum science is talking about. What happens when you change your worldview from the primacy of matter where you are just a robot with experience to a worldview based on the primacy of consciousness where you can play a participatory role?
Consciousness in the domain of psychology is complex and deep in many ways as well. First of all, it is important to define roughly the term ‘consciousness’ in psychology. It is often defined as the scale of wakefulness that goes from complete wakefulness up to different forms of lethargy. Since consciousness has been defined as a complex and still unexplained phenomenon, psychologists have tried to investigate how it develops, how it works, and how it can be changed. As a result of this inquiry, more information on the relationship between consciousness and attention, perception, memory, and the self has been obtained.
What does consciousness mean? In its simplest terms, consciousness can therefore be described as awareness and ability to appreciate or acknowledge what is going on around the individual and within the individual. It is the organ of the mind in man through which he thinks, feels, and knows that he exists.
What does self-consciousness mean? Second, Self-consciousness is the individual’s understanding of him or her as being a person. It is the ability to counter-observe and give an account of one’s thinking, emotive, and behavioral processes such that one experiences oneself as the origin and agency of thoughts and feelings.
Consciousness of Self refers to an individual’s awareness of himself, involving recognizing self-identity, self-awareness, knowing one’s role or function in society, individual character, and perceiving and acknowledging one’s existence and presence.
The consciousness of self is an ingredient that involves a perception of oneself and may be considered very subjective. There is identification of one’s self as an individual self, with an identity, and with an awareness of one’s existence at a particular period.
Hence, what consciousness is could be answered through the work of Antonio Damasio and more so the feeling of what happens. As for the role of feelings in creating and the link between feelings originating in bodily changes and consciousness – Damasio describes it. His work connects with the issue of explaining how the brain develops a map of the body in attempting to define the essence of consciousness.
What does self-consciousness mean? It concerns an individual’s capacity to think of themselves individually and independently of other people. However, there is still a more introspective aspect of consciousness that enables one to deliberate or think over a certain action to be taken, over a certain decision, and feelings to be taken or exhibited.
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By Amit Goswami, PhD, a retired physicist from the University of Oregon, USA. For more insights and educational resources, visit Facebook, Cqaedu.
