ON CONSCIOUSNESS

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On Consciousness

Human Situation:
History of man's evolution reveals, that at a certain point of his evolution, when man transcended nature and ended his passive role of being a creature, he had emancipated himself from the bindings of nature; first by an erect posture and second by the growth of his brain. The birth of man may have lasted for hundreds of thousands of years, but what matters, a patently new species to be identified as a human being arose transcending nature, recognizing life "aware of itself." Self-awareness, reason and imagination, disrupted man's harmony with nature which characterized his prehuman existence. On being aware of himself, man realized the limitations of his existence; his powerlessness on being a finite being. In his death he visualized his own end. But until today he is never free from the dichotomy of his existence. He cannot rid himself of his mind, even if he wants to; he cannot rid himself of his body as long as he is alive—rather his mind and body create in him a strong urge to be alive, and to live an infinite life. He cannot go back to the prehuman state of his harmony with nature because he now views himself as a "special species." He must proceed to develop his reason until he becomes the sovereign of nature and a master of himself. But an awareness of his biological relation with the rest of animals poses a challenge to his "conscious self." To assure himself that he is no more like an animal, he is tempted to demonstrate his merits of a "special species" through his unique physical advantage and exceptional intellectual eminence.
The irony of man is that he is out of nature's field, but is still in it. He is partly divine, partly animal; spiritually infinite but physically finite. Thus, the necessity to find ever-new solution for the contradiction in his existence, to find ever-higher forms of unity with nature, his fellowmen and himself, is the source of his psychic force that motivates man of all his passions, affects, and anxieties. Inasmuch as his satisfaction of his instinctual needs is not sufficient to make him happy, it becomes difficult for him to be a sane human being. Human dynamism lies in the uniqueness of man's situation that the understanding of his psyche must be based on the analysis of his needs stemming from the conditions of his existence. It has taken man hundreds of thousands of years to take first step into human life. He went through a narcissistic phase of magic of omnipotent orientation, through totemism, nature worship, until he arrived at the dawn of being aware of himself and the formation of his conscience of brotherly love.
Being Aware of Himself:
Man, being torn away from nature, being now endowed with reason and imagination, needed to form a concept of himself. He yearned to feel and say: "I am I." Thus, becoming self conscious, man grew to be a human. Undoubtedly, the animation of "self-consciousness" is unique only to the humans, which gives an ineffable awareness of the self, that each one of us can think about the fact "I think, therefore I am." Human being's intellectual awareness inspired him to find out how the brain developed and displayed a force known as "consciousness" that can directly influence the world. But the study of the origin of man—as a continuum of Darwin's theory of evolution—through fossils scarcely reveals the evolution of the human brain. Since brain is not a fossilized substance, its evolutionary journey, even by the researches of modern neurobiology, is hard to ascertain. However, modern researchers of neuroscience with the help of Brain Imaging Technology (BIT), are revealing functions and performances of different parts of human brain. But the most intriguing evolution and performance of the brain is its ineffable and nonphysical function, "the charismatic human consciousness."
Whereas the scientists are busy discovering how the brain is intimately involved in consciousness, there are thinkers who with the help of scientific and psychological evaluations, have distinguished between different levels of consciousness. Differentiating human and animal consciousness, it is established that the animals have "simple-consciousness" which, we can say, is the awareness that most animals have of their bodies and the environment around them. The animal is constricted to its intrinsically managed consciousness without trespassing the limits of its perceptive, sensory, and brain's capacities. Generally the animal "is lived" through biological laws of nature; it is part of nature and does not transcend it. It has no conscience of a moral nature, and no awareness of itself and its existence. It has no reason, if by reason we mean the ability to penetrate the surface and grasp the essence behind it. Though it may have an idea of what is useful and what is harmful, it has no concept of truth and falsehood. Animals have no inwardness and their simple-consciousness is whatever they look outward. Some animals have the ability to learn whatever a man teaches them; they have no inwardness to be imaginative.
The level of human consciousness is even a greater wonder than just inwardness. In human beings, consciousness is so distinct from and discontinuous with matter, it gives them an illusion that it might have been created by a "Higher Consciousness." Since everything we know about the universe tells us, that reality consists only of physical things as atoms and their component particles, busily colliding and combining, even the modern day spiritual man views if consciousness, a non-physical mental phenomenon did exist, how could it cause physical things to happen, such as the feeling of pain to jerk fingers away from the edge of a hot pan. But rational theories, regarding what is consciousness started emerging when man realized that the voices he hears in his head are his own recounts, resulting from his own perceptions, not from gods or spirits. He thus, began to consider that the enigma of consciousness is a challenging puzzle of his life, raising questions: "Is man an evolved animal or a creation of intelligent design? Is consciousness same as soul or we have both? Is soul only an illusion?"
Emergence of Consciousness:
Stepping out of nature the first thing that emerged in human being was cosmic consciousness—a capability that put humans way above rest of the creation. But the main reason of man's concern about the universe even today is an acute awareness of the true life and order of the universe in which a person experiences oneness with the creator, which at an early stage was identified by him as divinity and at a later stage as the "universal energy." Early man's "cosmic consciousness" needed an idealism to be interpreted intellectually, which appeared as religion. For him religion meant something about the present and visible world, where gods or God is a conscious spirit without bodily form. Man viewed that religion is not an abstract idealism, it is concrete and practical. He believed that ideals are not only abstractly justifiable in the "Platonic world of Ideas," but are also, to some extent realizable in the realm of actual existence. Today, modern man's approach is through reason and science or through his own consciousness. For him divinity is a force, principle, or law with no "personal consciousness." Science, in the present age has developed cosmology as a form of secular religion, a faith for the atheists whose preachers are scientists and cosmologists like Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, and many more. But cosmology basically undertakes same issues that religions profess: How the universe came into being? How life began, and still the same old dilemma, what comes next? To answer such difficult questions, focus of the thinkers and scientists is human brain and consciousness.
Today, neurobiology or neuroscience is helping us to understand how our brain works. A study of human brain—in a short and simple way—presented by the National Geographic in a special publication Your Brain: A User's Guide, 100 things You Never Knew, reveals:
In this corrugated mass, a staggeringly complex symphony of electrochemical reactions plays out every second of every day. Much of it does so without a conscious conductor. The brain makes the lungs expand with the inrush of air and the heart pump blood. It houses memories, processes sounds and sights, smells and tastes, and feelings ranging from subtle to the sublime. Beyond the work the brain does automatically comes something far different. Out of the human brain arises consciousness and mind—the unique ability of Homo-sapiens the "thinking man," to be aware of being aware. ... An unconscious part of your brain "wills" an action before you are consciously aware of your will to direct it.
Though we know an astonishing amount about human brain, but the paradox is that the 1.4kg lump of pinkish-beige tissue inside our skull, consisting more than a billion neurons (nerve cells), with many billions of connections that lets us understand ourselves, our universe, and cosmos far beyond our realm, understands so little about itself. However, "We may be able to understand most of the detail of how the mind works," says Psychologist Stephen Pinker, "yet consciousness itself may remain forever beyond our reach." Today, therefore, the hard problem challenging our brain is to solve and define, "what is consciousness?"
Daniel Dennett, a distinguished Arts and Science Professor, in the beginning of his book Consciousness Explained says, "Consciousness stands alone today as a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused." He argues: "Information comes into the senses and is distributed all over the place for different purposes. In all this activity there is no central place in which "I" sit and watch the show as things pass through my consciousness. ... Instead, the many different parts of the brain just get on with their own jobs, communicating with one another whenever necessary with no central control." After speculating and reasoning through 500 pages of his books he concludes, "My explanation of consciousness is far from complete. One might even say that it was just a beginning, but it is a beginning, because it breaks the spell of the enchanted circle of ideas that made explaining consciousness seem impossible." Therefore, until today, we have no agreed definition of consciousness. Even after having a scientific understanding of the detail of human brain and how it works, consciousness itself is still unexplained. But we all know that it is consciousness that makes the difference between our life and death or our overall existence and nonexistence. Since the concept of the evolution of consciousness from brain is of relatively recent finding, we cannot ignore our inquisitive mind's quest to seek the help of cognitive scientists as well as artificial intelligence researchers to uncover the mechanisms of mind and its intelligent systems that leads to our consciousness.
Some neurophysiologists have recently attempted to define consciousness in objective terms, arguing that it is a process in which information about multiple individual modalities of sensation and perception is combined into a unified multidimensional representation of the state of the system and its environment, and integrated with information about memories and the needs of the organism, generating emotional reactions and programs of behavior to adjust the organism to its environment. Ayn Rand (1905-1982) is of the view that:
Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists. ... If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. Before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.
William James (1842-1910) the father of modern psychology expounded that our conscious life feels like a continuously flowing stream of sights, sounds, smells, touches, thoughts, emotions, worries, and joys—all of which happen, one after another, to us and thus coined the phrase of "the stream of consciousness." Carl Jung (1875-1961) said, "There are certain events of which we have not consciously taken note; they have remained, so to speak, below the threshold of consciousness. They have happened, but they have been absorbed subliminally." The Latin root of the word "subliminal" translates to be "below threshold." Psychologists employ the term to mean below the threshold of consciousness.
However, many thinkers, philosophers, and scientists have agreed that consciousness is a unique human capability that arises when information is broadcast throughout the brain. But there is no central location in the brain to be defined as the seat of consciousness. This raises an important question: Is consciousness an input loaded into the brain through sensory experiences, perception, memory, intelligence, and processes of objectivity and subjectivity that our cognitive process makes use of it? Yet the question complicates itself: Is consciousness an extra ingredient that we humans have in addition to our abilities of perceiving, thinking, and feeling, or is it an intrinsic and inseparable part of man being a creature that can perceive, think, and feel? If it is an extra ingredient—as many of us think of our soul as an extra entity—then we are naturally inclined to ask, "Why we have it as a telltale signature?" If we have evolved with it, then we want to know how and why only human consciousness has evolved? Moreover, if consciousness is intrinsic and has evolved, then any other creature that evolved to have intelligence, perception, memory, and emotions would also be equipped with the power of consciousness. There is also an opinion that we all have three eyes—one inside the head. The pineal gland in the human brain has the structure of an eye. It has cells that act as light receptors, as the retina does. It has a structure comparable to the vitreous—a gel-like substance between the retina and lens of the eye, like the shape of a lens. Scientists are still learning about the pineal body—well known in Eastern spiritualism and Western philosophy—as the possible seat of consciousness. Modern science is researching to understand the pineal body as a third eye.
Cognitive scientists Stanislaus Dehaene and Bernard Baars, in Scientific American Mind, (May/June 2014, page 27) have suggested: "Memories, sensory perceptions, judgments and other inputs are stored in a type of short-term memory called the Global Workspace, and thus establish the buffer or a cushion of Global Workspace Model. This buffer gives rise to consciousness when the collected information is broadcast throughout the brain to stimulate cognitive process that engaging the motor system, spurs the body to action." Christof Koch, in the same magazine on page 26 expresses:
During the past several decades, two distinct frameworks for explaining what consciousness is and how the brain produces it have emerged, each compelling in its own way. ... One of these—the Integrated Information Theory—uses a mathematical expression to represent conscious experience and then derives predictions about which circuits in the brain are essential to produce these experiences. ... [Second] In contrast, the Global Workspace Model of consciousness moves in the opposite direction. Its starting point is behavioral experiments that manipulate conscious experience of people in a very controlled setting. It then seeks to identify the areas of the brain that underlie these experiences.
Within the perspective of these theories it seems that consciousness is just brain-wide collecting and sharing of information that is in the memory of our neural buffer blackboard.
Human brain by the firing of more than a billion neurons and billions of interconnections produces extraordinary potentialities of imagination, perception, learning, memory, reasoning, language, conscious, sub-conscious, unconscious, and many other subjective as well as objective expositions. It is intimately involved in consciousness so much that the changes in the brain also cause changes in consciousness. Information comes to the brain through the senses, but there is nothing centralized in it. By contrast, says Susan Blackmore in her work Consciousness:
Human consciousness seems to be unified. This 'unity of consciousness' is often described in three distinct ways—and the natural way of thinking about consciousness, in terms of a theater or a stream of experiences, implies all three. First, it implies that at any particular time, there is a unity to those things I am experiencing now; that is, some things are in my consciousness while many others are not. Those inside are called the 'contents of consciousness' and form the current experiences in the stream or the show on the stage of the theater. Second, consciousness seems unified over time in that there seems to be a continuity from one moment to the next, or even across a whole lifetime of conscious experiences. Third, these conscious contents are experienced by the same 'me.' In other words, there is a single experiencer as well as the stream of experiences. ... In all these cases every one of our brain's cells with their billions of connections, are active—some firing faster and some slower. Yet most of this activity never makes it into the 'stream of consciousness' or the 'theater of our mind.' So we call it unconscious or subconscious, or we put it down to the outer limits of consciousness.
Human consciousness is an 'Ineffable Qualia' — ineffable meaning, too great, powerful, and incapable to describe; qualia meaning, a property as it is experienced as distinct from any source it might have in a physical object. "Qualia" which is the plural form of the singular quale, are those aspects of a conscious experience in virtue of which there is something it is like to have the experience (for example, the smell of a rose or the way pain feels). They are commonly held to be directly accessible only from the first person point of view of the conscious subject, and also often held to be intrinsic in the sense of not being analyzable into more basic elements or relations. It is true that the animals can experience smell and pain, but their consciousness, being only external or objective, falls in the category of being simply conscious of that experience. But human consciousness is a complete whole package of the working of his each and every mental state involving Qualia—that works [w]holistically as a sum of conscious, sub-conscious, unconscious, memory, intention, imagination, and keep on counting all the functions of the brain. Human consciousness is the mother of "I" where each individual is different in his identity and intellectual representation, intention, and much more. An animal species in mental capacity is all same—as dogs are all dogs and cats are all cats—but human beings are different from each other where every individual is an "I"— where his own specific consciousness is a seal of his own distinctiveness just as his own finger print is a mark of his identity.
If consciousness is intrinsic to our brain process, then it makes no sense to ask most of the questions about it. In that case it must have evolved in any creature that evolved to have intelligence, perception, memory, and emotions. But the problem is that human consciousness itself is an "ineffable qualia." Though neuroscience as well as general sciences believe that there is nothing extra that exists apart from the processes and abilities of the human beings, we still need to explain, why we seem to be having ineffable-nonphysical conscious experiences? Since the passage from the physics of brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is not only unthinkable but also unexplainable; it is here that the idea of consciousness as an illusion or a nonphysical substance named "soul," comes in. According to Mark Goldblatt, the human soul, if it exists in an immaterial form, must be the "me-ness" of me, the sense of first personhood on which the rest of my conscious experiences hang. He further argues:
The soul, in other words, is not your consciousness—unless you are a materialist. If you are not a materialist, however, then the soul is what's underneath your consciousness, the platform upon which your consciousness is constructed. Consciousness is the thing that emerges from sense data, memory and language have material components; they are rooted in the workings of the brain. The stuff of consciousness is definitely brain based. So if the soul is indeed immaterial, it must be more basic than consciousness.
This means that soul and consciousness are two different entities. But in the brain there must be a place where everything comes together and "consciousness happens." So far, the neuroscientists have not discovered any center in the brain which is capable of corresponding to the emergence of a unified consciousness. All we know that information coming into the senses is distributed all over the brain for different purposes. There is no central place in which "I" can sit, watch and display things passing through "I's" consciousness.
Another question that need to be mentioned here, "Is mathematics independent of human consciousness?" Stephen Maitzen, a philosopher panelist of the Ask Philosophers argues:
I am strongly inclined to say yes. If there's even one technological civilization elsewhere in our unimaginably vast universe, then that civilization must have discovered enough math to produce technology. But we have no reason at all to think that it's a human civilization, given the very different conditions in which it evolved: if it exists, it belongs to a different species from ours. So: If math depends on human consciousness, then we're the only technological civilization in the universe, which seems very unlikely to me.
There is another argument that before human beings came on the scene, did the earth orbit the sun in an ellipse, with the sun at one focus? Surely it did. Indeed, there's every reason to think that the earth traced an elliptical orbit before any life emerged on it. But "orbiting in an ellipse with the sun at one focus" is a precise mathematical description of the earth's behavior, a description that held true long before consciousness emerged here. This means that mathematics is pre human-consciousness. This also supports the fact, when humans appeared on this planet their consciousness also appeared with them.
Human beings' feelings, their intellectualism and experiences vary widely. For example, running fingers over rough surface, smelling a rose or a skunk, feeling a sharp pain in a part of the body, seeing a color bright purple, being happy or becoming extremely angry, in each of these cases, one is subjected to a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character. There is something for each one to undergo for each state some phenomenology that it has. For such experiences philosophers use the term 'qualia' to refer to the introspectively accessible phenomenal aspects of a human's mental experience. In this broad sense of the term, it is difficult to deny that there are qualia. The status of qualia is hotly debated in philosophy, because it is central to a proper understanding of the nature of consciousness. Qualia are at the very heart of the mind-body problem, because human beings don't share consciousness, they share emotions.
The exponents of Darwin's evolutionary theory, speculate that consciousness might have emerged during the time of our evolution when man became highly social, confronted by many complex relationships, and intrigued by intimate bonding with his fellow beings. One might also argue that since we are conscious, consciousness itself might have evolved independent of biological evolution of man. At the same time, since consciousness is inseparable from human beings' intelligence, perception, thinking, language, and many other evolved abilities, it cannot be an adaptation or infused into the mind by some power beyond man. However, we know that consciousness and unconsciousness often work together with each other. Our memory plays a very important part in processing information which also has a key role in the performance of our consciousness. Francis Crick, a British neuroscientist and DNA researcher, "the mind emerges when working memory, long-term memory, and expectations of the future link up to form thoughts." Gerald Edelman of the Scripps Research Institute, says, "Consciousness arises from the brain's forming relationships between perceptions and prior experiences" (Brain the Complete Mind, page 178).
Researches by neuroscientists have already proved, how our states of mind are defined by electrochemical processing of information along neural pathways. Today is the age of super-computers and we are hearing the voices of artificial intelligence which is going to solve our many hard problems. According to Stuart Hameroff, a Professor at the University of Arizona, "human brain is the perfect quantum computer and the soul [if we have one] or consciousness is simply information stored at the quantum level." Today, many scientists and thinkers from different universities and research institutions are working to develop quantum theory to explain the phenomenon of consciousness. However, our Brain is an indispensable guru in guiding us to understand and solve all the complexities of our mind and body, and problems of our life.

Books and Magazines Cited:
Dennett, Daniel C.: Consciousness Explained.
Blackmore, Susan: Consciousness.
Ferry, Luc: A Brief History of Thought.
Goldblatt, Mark: On Soul, in the Magazine Philosophy Now issue # 82.
Pinker, Steven: The Stuff of Thought.
May/June 2014 issue: Scientific American Mind.
National Geographic: Your Brain 100 Things You Never Knew.
National Geographic: Brain the Complete Mind.
Edelman, Gerald M., and Tononi, Giulio: A Universe of Consciousness.
Revonsuo, Antti and Kamppinen, Matti: Consciousness in Philosophy & Cognitive Neuroscience.