Ur kapitel 2:

The Properties of Consciousness

Our species is known as homo sapiens sapiens, meaning man which is aware of being aware. According to this definition our ancestors, as well as our contemporary primate cousins, and other more distant mammal relatives along with the rest of the animal kingdom, were and are aware, yet lack the insight of being aware. Perhaps they cannot imagine any other alternative than being aware, perhaps they are incapable of questioning the meaning of this awareness, or perhaps they merely do not recognise awareness any more than the average human questions being aware of our own awareness. Or perhaps they do, but we do not realise it.

Whatever the case, humans are aware of being aware, which is both the origin of many of our troubles as well as the key to all our potential growth. This awareness, however, is completely dependent on input. Without something to make sense of, there would per definition be nothing to make sense of. Thus, human senses are a necessity for human consciousness. By human senses I refer not only the basic five senses, but also to the sense of balance and all the other less well-known sensory systems our biological organism provides, along with any "paranormal" senses we might possess.

Senses and Self

We rarely award our senses with their proper credit. After all, they will inevitably shape both our view of the world and our view of our selves. Human beings have a strong orientation towards vision as their primary source of information. Our hearing and our sense of smell do not accumulate nearly as much information as our sight. Though speech is our most obvious way of communicating our more complicated messages, we spend much of our time observing subtle cues in those we talk with, especially if they are new acquaintances. Posture, movement, the use eyes and hands, their positioning in relation to us and hundreds of other clues add information to what is being said. In fact, much of the time it is not what is being said as much as how it is being said, that convinces us of a person's objectives or sincerity or competence or whatever else that person is attempting to convey, or that we are attempting to deduce. Of course, the closer in proximity two people are, the more tactile qualities may appear, and tone of voice can also convey more than actual words. The more advanced our communication becomes, the more varied our sensory demonstrations and interpretations will become. Between old and close friends discussions will probably focus on what is actually being said, but in most other cases communication rarely serves the soul purpose of conveying an idea, and our eyes will do much of the interpretation. Take any situation of courtship, between two people in a bar or between a political candidate and the voting public, or any situation of conflict, between two boxers before a fight or a couple in heated discussion, and the physical cues are obvious. In humanity's earlier days, before speech and language evolved to the level it is sometimes conducted at today, this form of communication was probably as apparent as it is today in the animal kingdom.

This does not mean that blind people are reduced to a fraction of the input of those with full ocular capacity, merely that blind people perceive the world slightly differently from the sighted. For a blind person, the visual aspects of life are not likely to take top priority, probably shaping consciousness in a slightly different and, as one sighted is prone to imagine, a less superficial way. It seems unlikely that much of the superficial racism that has become part of human consciousness would have evolved if we were unable to get hung up on pigmentation. As long as we perceive the world visually, visual cues are going to take up a dominant portion of our consciousness. This need not be a problem in itself, but as we humans are often prone to creating value-systems based on differences rather than similarities in order to make 'sense' of the world, we often create 'ideas' that have no actual counterpart in nature or reality. As Kant pointed out we know nothing of the world as it is, we can merely have knowledge only of our own perceptions or of the world as we 'know' it.

Taking this line of reasoning to a different species, the shift in perception of the world becomes even more apparent. Dolphins, for instance, have excellent vision but also the use of sonar to "feel" the shape of objects at a distance. I imagine that if we humans also could feel the three dimensional shape of each other, rather than using our ocular capacity to view others in a two-dimensional way, we might be more interested in each other's content and less prone to ignore each other due to visually perceived form.

The point of this perhaps slightly diffuse line of reasoning is that the way we perceive the world will invariably have an effect on our consciousness. The importance of this point will become apparent in later chapters, as the implications of consciousness become more fundamental to nature itself than has been previously supposed in materialist circles.

Storing, Making and Using Sense

Input alone does not constitute consciousness, we also need a system to sort and store this input in the form of memory. Memory comes in two basic forms, long-term and short-term. Long-term memory enables us to remember things that happened or existed a long time ago, short-term memory what happened a few seconds ago. Without the possibility to store and retrieve sensory information, consciousness would be all but impossible.

For the development of consciousness, learning must be possible. Exactly what the "learning process" is no one can say, but it clearly has to do with assimilating information from long and short-term memory and constructing these in meaningful ways. How this construction takes place and what makes information meaningful is also something we really can't say all that much about. In the name of simplicity we will tie up the different aspects of information construction together in the term "cognition" or, broader still, "thinking". Again it should be pointed out that this is not a book about consciousness per se, merely one attempting to prove that what we recognise as our individual consciousness survives our individual deaths.

The development of consciousness also requires options, the ability to define and express self through a variety of different actions. Humans have options like no other animals on earth. We can use our hands to create everything from the most simple to the unbelievably complex, allowing us to store information outside of our own brains, painted on cave walls, printed in books and burned into computer discs.

Perhaps our sonar-wielding cetacean relatives the dolphins have the same or even greater mental potential than humans, but the aspects of their physical surroundings do not require that they develop that potential as humans have, for better or worse. Or perhaps they have developed their potential far beyond us, but in ways we have not yet understood. In any case, it is the ability to control events that gives rise to a sense of self, which we presume in one way or another to be the seat from which consciousness operates. Or at least the seat from which we analyse the input we experience and the thoughts we think. The meaning and purpose of options as the spiritual aspects of consciousness will also become clearer towards the end of this book.

So consciousness needs some kind of input (at least to begin with), a storage and retrieval system for said input and a cognitive process to make sense of it all. To develop its own potential the options and the incentives to do so are also required. The basic indication of consciousness would thus be the display of independent thought, or the use of memory in combination with independent thought. As we look into consciousness at the cellular level the meaning of this will also become more apparent.

A further aspect of consciousness is communication, though this can be a very tricky indication of consciousness. No one would deny the fact that one person whistling to catch the attention of another was engaging in an act of consciousness, whereas a microwave oven ringing a bell when the timer clicks off is indeed communicating information, but not consciously. Neither was the defeating of Kasparov by the chess-playing computer Deep Blue on May 11, 1997, a conscious act on behalf of the computer, at least not to the best of our knowledge. Computers operate after a given set of laws, have no real freedom of choice, which humans do, or at least presume we do. This is as noted before the point from which the two contradicting views originate and diverge. One says that the concept of self along with the supposed free will is actually an illusion, the other that self and free will are ultimately spiritual, and as such at least as real as the material world.

As we are arguing for the second point in this book, there are several obstacles we will need to clear along our path, but before getting on with our search there is one fairly recent and highly significant discovery about human consciousness worth mentioning. It would seem that whatever the nature of consciousness may be, it is perpetually removed from that which it deals with by half a second. Awareness, it would seem, is history.

 

 

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