Consciousness Can Be Defined By 3 Words
Well Not Entirely But The Core Of Conscious Is Just 1 Word
Consider that hundreds and hundreds of books have been written about consciousness. Generally writers and others refer to consciousness as some sort of unknowable mystery, magic, beyond our ability to understand.
Philosophers, psychologists, spiritualists, and even some scientists have tackled this question, even as it usually is too mushy for science to address.
And then some sages of the past have declared consciousness to be beyond that which is generated in human brains. They seem to allege that there is some sort of universal quality, pervasive background, systemic effect, maybe like an ether, in everything, everywhere. This then would not be generated by brains, whatever it could be.
For example, there is that medical doc from India who has written more than 100 books that often included metaphysical ideas, and apparently he is a proponent of the historical concept of consciousness to be something other than is generated in brains.
Well, well, humanity is an excitable species.
Here's my definition. Consciousness is monitoring. It is the evolved and sophisticated version of monitoring. It is generated in brains.
We can quickly add credibility to this claim by considering the origin of consciousness. Very very long ago, simple beings, maybe not much more complex than one-celled life forms, needed to develop functional monitoring as part of their tools to survive.
So they did. In earthlife, up and down the phylogenetic scale, when organisms needed new functionality they generally developed it, however long it took. And those species who didn't, did not survive.
From simple life forms to more and more complex life forms, what began as simple monitoring grew steadily in complexity and sophistication, until the pre-humans arose, then the humans, and at each stage of this very long evolutionary journey the brains were becoming more complex and more capable, as needs required.
And the more and more capable brains were evolving more and more sophisticated monitoring. We call it consciousness.
Today our consciousness is impressive. Our brains can now keep up with many sensory inputs and external activities while also running many complex lines of internal thought. But oversimplified, it all still is monitoring.
I too could write hundreds of books about consciousness. I'd write "consciousness is monitoring" and repeat these 3 words to fill up a page, then repeat this page to fill up a book, and then do the same to fill up any number of books.
This sometimes is what humans do when we are confused. We write more and more and more and more.
And, we all do get confused at times. But now one of us does know what consciousness is.
Here, in order to try to be fair and balanced, I'll try to guess at what some "other views" might be about the contents of this post.
Maybe one of the other views would be that consciousness cannot possibly be as simple as declared herein? Because, they might say, we don't yet understand very well how brains work and since the somewhat unknown brain functions are generating consciousness then we can't really understand what consciousness is?
Maybe another view would declare that there needs to be scientific proof for an assertion that consciousness is built up from the original simple monitoring of the early simple organisms, during the long evolutionary chain?
And then I know a jackass person who might say something along these goofy lines "I have to see it to believe it, so show me where "consciousness" is stamped on one side of whatever and then "monitoring" is stamped on the other side and then I will believe it. Uh oh.
And maybe some modern day adherents of the historical sages would say that there is no proof that systemic, beyond-brains consciousness does not exist?
In some later posts of this THENK newsletter I will try to address the main "other views" versus those that I have presented in this post.
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