A Different Understanding of Consciousness - Philosophy, Sociology & Psychology

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Ped
Interested In Your Brain

Registered: 08/30/99
Posts: 5,494
Loc: Canada
Last seen: 7 years, 4 months

A Different Understanding of Consciousness

1
#6848091 - 04/29/07 02:28 AM (16 years, 11 months ago)

Some of the ideas here are borrowed from the mind of Alan Watts and other like-minded philosophers.

Conventionally, our understanding of consciousness is self-relative. We know ourselves to be conscious beings, and we derive our understanding of what it means to be conscious from our experience of consciousness. To some extent, we also look to animals for an appropriate definition of consciousness. Generally speaking, our inquiry stops at these objects of reference.

Consciousness is typically understood as a phenomenon which can be identified by observing a number of other phenomenon. On the most basic level, something which responds to it's environment in an organized fashion is said to be conscious. We call this awareness. Somewhat more advanced is the ability to evaluate input before choosing a course of action. We call this foresight. Most sophisticated of all is the ability to question one's own origins, and to ascribe some justification or purpose to one's own existence. We call this sentience. Any phenomenon which exhibits this behavior is generally understood as "alive" and undergoing the experience of consciousness.

There is debate over whether or not plants are deserving of the title "conscious beings". There is some evidence that suggests plants respond well to highly articulated sounds, such as words or music. We reason that since you and I appreciate music, and we are conscious beings, then it follows that plants which respond well to music must be, on some level, conscious beings. Light, like sound, is a form of energy, and we can readily observe that plants will carry out some very sophisticated actions in pursuit of it. Does this mean that plants possess consciousness?

I would say yes. Does their behavior indicate consciousness of the same sophistication as human beings? Certainly not. I cannot have a conversation with my plants, and I'm fairly certain that they are rather ignorant to my moods. However, simply because something is not as sophisticated as a human being does not mean that they do not share some of the same characteristics as a human being.

I contend that any phenomenon which responds to other phenomenon demonstrates consciousness, and that the sophistication of this consciousness is directly proportionate to the complexity of their interaction. For example, if you strike a rock, you hear a sound. Without personifying the rock, we can say that the rock is responding to energetic input with energetic output, and that this resonance is a very rudimentary form of consciousness. Since all phenomena are constantly involved in interactions with other phenomena, it follows that all phenomena are conscious, in varying degrees of sophistication. This would seem to imply that consciousness is not something exclusive to highly complex phenomena such as the human brain, and that in fact it is a characteristic of reality itself, in the same category as energy, gravitation, matter, and so forth.

I would further contend that "complexity" and "sophistication" are subjective terms, to be correctly understood within the context of time. The brain is an amalgamation of comparably simple phenomenon which occurs over a very short period of time in universal terms. This is the only criteria by which we have concluded that the brain is a complex, sophisticated phenomenon. Should a brain's less sophisticated characteristics develop over a very long period of time, say, a millenia, we would compare it to a kind of fungus or bacteria; it would be very unremarkable.

The universe itself is an extraordinarily complex interaction of phenomena which has occurred over an almost incomprehensible period of time. If we were somehow able to experience the totality of time elapsed since the beginnings of the universe, I think we would discover that it is a burgeoning, surging expression of consciousness. The universe is, itself, a conscious entity, alive, just like you and I. It is not, as popular thinking seems to understand, a random collection of essentially lifeless objects and aimless phenomenon. The ramifications of this, if true, are unbelievably enormous.

This idea is not a novel one, nor is it unpopular. There is, however, very little reasoning to lend the idea an amount of substance. I have attempted to present some of that reasoning with this post. Thanks for reading!

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