conscious

On Consciousness

(thought experiment: Consciousness as a substrate of the universe)

Am "I" simply an emergent narrative?

What if the reason science cannot seem to find the source of consciousness, is because we are looking in the wrong place. Looking for it within the confines of our skulls. In the neurons and brain tissue. Maybe our way of talking about consciousness is wrong, and also the reason why we are looking for it in the wrong place to begin with. We say things like: I am conscious, or I have a soul. The discourse is to take the robot body, of flesh and bones, first, and try to find the soul in there somewhere, but maybe it is not in there at all.

What if instead consciousness is to be found outside. Like a kind of radiation around us. Like energy or the fabled dark matter. Imagine if consciousness is a part of the universe, that what we, as humans, feel that consciousness is, is simply local ripples in the surrounding conscious substrate. It is not us that feel conscious, but consciousness that feel us. Like water flowing through a river; If nothing disturbs it, it just flows smoothly, and uniformly. If there is a stone in the water however, ripples are created. Local pockets of change that can be observed. What if that is exactly what our brains or bodies do, disturb the surrounding substrate. It is not that we are conscious, but rather that consciousness 'sees' us, or is disturbed by the walking, talking, lumps of sensory inputs that are us. There are no conscious agents, only local disturbances in the surrounding consciousness. You could say that consciousness is emergent, but not emerging from nothing, rather emerging in something.

Our bodies and brains, thoughts and feelings; completely deterministic, self programmed learning machines, that disturb the world.

Is a stone and a tree then conscious? In a way they could be, but the framing of the question is probably wrong. People are not conscious, consciousness is aware of people, or disturbed by people. A kind of confined awareness of a set of senses and memories. In the same way a tree and a stone might create ripples in the flowing tide of consciousness. The difference is that the inputs they are able to get and submit from the surrounding world is limited (in the case of a tree) and only creates ripples that are very small, or maybe non existent (in the case of a stone).

If it was true, then what we would need to figure out is what creates the ripples. Is it our brains? the collection of input we get from the world? The neuron activity? The activities of our cells? Some kind of quantum mechanical effect that we still don't understand? If what creates the ripples is neuron activities, then you might need to have a brain to create a consciousness disturbance. But it could as well be the activity of living cells that is the source. If so, then a tree is indeed creating ripple in the conscious substrate. Then consciousness is "observing" the tree, just with a very limited amount of sense input, and maybe without an organ to make sense of the input.

This theory would help examine a lot of philosophical questions, in a new way. When is a child conscious? In this framing, it itself isn't. But from the moment the first neuron fires, it is starting to disturb the consciousness. Or if it is indeed the cells themselves that creates the conscious disturbance, then the consciousness could be said not to emerge, but be subtracted from that of the mother and father, and simply merged into a new being. A new tiny stone in the flowing river, that creates its own ripples. If it is not neurons, but cells themselves that creates ripples, then the consciousness is always there. In the sperm and the egg. And then it is just a question of how much input the local consciousness obtains from the world. The fetus is still blind and deaf, but the ripples are getting larger and larger every day, as the tiny human evolves, and provides more and more sensory input to the system that consciousness can observe.

In this experiment, then who are "we"? Or; the ever eternal question; "Who am I?". Are we the observation, or are we the robot? Again, the question might be wrong. There is no we, no I. The I is somewhere in between the observation and the robot. An illusion created by the observation itself, or maybe more accurately, a narrative that the observation believes to be true. In this local pocket of consciousness, there seems to be an I. Maybe the brain creates stories from our experiences, and consciousness observes these. The stories are us. They (we) feel real, because they (we) are not fictions, but documentaries, built on our experiences and memories. Emergent narratives. Maybe this is the answer to the question of whether the tree is conscious. Yes, it is, but without memories and narratives, it cannot have an I. Cannot observe an I.

[ Another way of looking at it, could be through the lens of awareness. We have awareness. It is a fundamental part of our brain, like a muscle. Awareness is mostly directed at our senses and thoughts. But we can direct our awareness at consciousness instead. This seems to be what much of meditation is all about. Mindfulness is being aware of your surroundings and selves, but it can also be one level deeper. Being aware of our own consciousness. Listening to your consciousness, and nothing else. In this sense, awareness is what makes us able to "communicate" with consciousness? Maybe even what allows us to have a degree of free will? That we can listen to consciousness, and use what we hear to change the processes of the programs we are running. ]

What does it mean to die then? Our bodies die and wither away, and therefore stop making ripples. From that there are two scenarios. One possibility is that with no sense input, there is simply no local pocket of disturbed consciousness. The memories are wiped, so there is no I. The ripples slowly dissipate, and "we" are simply gone. The flow of the river goes on, like we were never there. Somehow this makes sense. It is how we observe the world. Like it was before we were born. The other possibility is that consciousness itself is somehow conscious and has memory, in which case we might live on, as a part of a whole, of something greater. This seems more far-fetched. It does however open up a world of spiritual and religious possibilities. The eternal life. It means that The consciousness that felt you when you lived, is still there, and will always be there. It has observed your entire life, your thoughts and feelings, your experiences. It knows you because, in a sense, it is you.

If we suppose this theory of consciousness is true, then what about God? Lets take a leap of faith. God sees all that we do, he is almighty. He knows us, and listens. If the soul is the story we came up with to explain the feeling of consciousness. Could God then be the story we came up with to explain the feeling that consciousness is not in us, but around us? God is the river, and we disturb his flow... God is consciousness, and the soul is the local disturbance that we each make? Maybe the evolution of life can be explained as God's way of trying to get more input from the world. Life is the lens that god uses to see the world. Maybe the consciousness around us has an innate desire to feel and connect with the world, and life is the interface through which it does so?

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Other thoughts:

“God is dead.” This is when we stop observing, when we stop being conscious of our own lives.

Life is interfaces used by consciousness to perceive the world.

Try reading the bible through the lens of God being synonymous with consciousness.

Some philosophers and spiritualists, who have some of these same ideas, get to the conclusion that this means that we are all One. All connected and part of something bigger. That because of this, everything is about love and oneness. To me that is a bit of a stretch. This only works if consciousness is itself conscious, and has a memory. If it doesn't, the idea breaks apart. Just because we are all in the same swimming pool, doesn't mean we are one and connected. Just because we are breathing the same air, does not make us one. Just because we disturb the same substrate of energy, does not make us one?

--- Notes: ---

This reasoning creates problems:

What makes this hard to write/talk about is this notion of "my body", "my mind", "my thoughts". What is the "my"? Is the "my", the consciousness or the robot? It seems to be to be neither. The "my" is the protagonist of the story that the brain generates. The difference between a dog and a human is that the dog does not have the needed programing to create stories about itself. Therefore it does not have the capacity to understand a concept like "my thoughts". It can only "think" what it thinks. So too with humans actually. We can create stories, that are a meta layer on top of our thoughts. But we can still only think what we think. Both dogs and humans might be just as conscious, only the humans can enrich the consciousness with the meta data needed to feel the "my". If this is so, then how?

Consciousness could also be a construction of the narratives our thoughts make. A lot of work on meditation seems to contradict this however.

I think we mistake awareness for consciousness. When we talk about being conscious, for example in mindfulness meditation, we often mean being aware. Aware of the beauty of our surroundings for example. But this is not consciousness, it is simply observing the stories our thoughts create. Beauty is a narrative. Consciousness seems to run in the background. We cannot interface with it directly, but we can switch our awareness to focus on it, and "feel" it. We also mistake what we call subconsciousness for being a part of consciousness. I believe that the subconscious is simply a multi threaded process running in the background of our brains. Enabling us to not get overloaded with decisions. The subconscious machine is a closed box. You can't see into it, but you can decide to take a process out of it, and run it manually. But you need consciousness to be able to make the choice to do so?

If we can meditate and exercise our ability to be conscious, then consciousness needs to live in our own bodies. It needs to be like a muscle. Except if what we really exercise is not consciousness, but our awareness. That we can use our awareness to somehow connect with consciousness.

Consciousness clings to us like a magnet.