Consciousness – GnosticChristianity.com

“Thomas Nagel is not crazy,” an Oct. 23, 2012, Prospect Magazine article written by Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson, raises many provocative questions.

…what if science is fundamentally incapable of explaining our own existence as thinking things? What if it proves impossible to fit human beings neatly into the world of subatomic particles and laws of motion that science describes? The philosopher Thomas Nagel thinks the materialist scientific worldview cannot explain consciousness. Is he right?

I invite you to read on here. Your feedback and additional ideas on consciousness are welcome here.

Featured Video: Antonio Damasio: The quest to understand consciousness from TEDtalksDirector on YouTube. “Every morning we wake up and regain consciousness — that is a marvelous fact — but what exactly is it that we regain? Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio uses this simple question to give us a glimpse into how our brains create our sense of self.”

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One need not be a philosopher to ponder the meaning or purpose of consciousness. There are many paths that will bring a person to such a point.

My unprofessional opinion goes like this:

It is possible that evolutionarily speaking, the greater volume of sensory data that is available, the greater a need to interpret that data. As we stack bigger/better processing on top of the data it is not difficult to see that having a manager process, a supervisor to make more of the data than simply processing it to usable data. Seeing your food does not require the abilities we have with sight… as an example.

That we are able to think and plan in abstract ways and without being in the environment that we are thinking about only gives us further advantage not only against the environment but against other mammals like us.

Consciousness, as in humans and mammals, is more probably an emergent phenomena. Recent acceptance of consciousness in animals attests to these thoughts.

The problem that I see is that we are attempting to see how consciousness works (thus being able to better guess why it exists) from within consciousness. This is ripe for all manner of errors, for we do not easily separate emotion from thought, nor sensory data from experience. We say we feel tired, not that we are out of energy. We say that a sunset is beautiful not that it is a colorful event that happens every 24 hours or so. The very language that we use to describe consciousness is rife with bias.

I don’t think we’ll understand why there is consciousness until we understand what it is. My bet is that it is our ability to empathize and think abstractly turned inward on the machinery that implements those functions. From thinking about what is that round red fruit on that bush to what am I is not difficult to understand. That is to say that the very processes that made us more competitive and adaptable necessarily lead to consciousness. What was useful to evolution became a preoccupation for the mind that was capable of such thought processes.

The ability to think about the fruit and in abstract ways is evolutionarily useful. They tell you that others can see you better than you can see yourself, an adage which tells us that our own perceptions of ‘us’ is not as accurate as our perceptions of others. The processes we use to think (consciousness) are separate from the processes we use to analyze sensory data for it is the additional sensory data that makes our perceptions of others different than our perceptions of ourselves.

We are meat machines with a flawed self analysis process. Consciousness is probably the experience of being a part of that processes, seeing it from the controller process’ point of view. I’ve been looking for research or stories about those who have physiological problems which suppress a sense of self. Does anyone have links? There is lots of self help sites that come up, but not serious research.