Consciousness / Spirit

Consciousness refers to subjective experience — the fact that there is "something it is like" to be you. When you see red, taste chocolate, feel pain, or hear music, fall in love, there's an inner, felt quality to that experience. Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously framed it (circa 1974): there is something it is like to be a bat, experiencing echolocation from the inside.

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There are three aspects of consciousness which includes the following:

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• Phenomenal consciousness — raw subjective experience (qualia: the redness of a strawberry, the taste of chocolate, the feeling of pain, being in love, etc.,)

• Perceptual consciousness — information from our perceptual mechanisms (eyes, ears, nose, touch, etc. ) that is available to reasoning, reporting, and behavior

• Self-awareness / self-reflection — recognizing oneself as a distinct entity separated from the outside world and with a unique perspective on that outer world. These properties also with the ability to evaluate, analyze and plan define our meta-consciousness which exists in varying degrees within all creatures with brains.

 

If there was no consciousness, there would only be oblivion; no experience, only nothingness. Our consciousness creates a model of reality (i.e. the outside world). Every thought, every feeling and everything we experience in life is judged and evaluated against our internal models.  The representations of these models are not the way reality actual is but, rather, how we perceive our experience to be.  Our projections and our interpretations are usually based on prior experience, habits formed long ago and often in childhood, from societal norms and from conditioning by authority figures early in our lives (parents, teacher, religious figures, politicians, etc.). Many of these were formed before we had developed the ability to judge them as a benefit or a liability. Given the rapid pace of change we all now experience in the world, old and fixed beliefs are not only inappropriate and outdated but can also be destructive as well.

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There are several major theories of consciousness

• Dualism (Descartes): Mind and matter are fundamentally different substances

• Physicalism/Materialism: Consciousness is entirely a product of physical brain electro-chemical processes

• Idealism: Consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality. What ultimately exists is not matter, but mind (or spirit, or ideas). The physical world either depends on minds to exist, or reality is itself built from mental phenomenon.

• Panpsychism: Some form of consciousness (i.e. experience) is a fundamental feature of reality, present even in simple systems like all atoms and molecules.

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In addition there are several theories that attempt to model and define consciousness: 

• Functionalism: Consciousness arises from the pattern of information processing, not the specific substrate

• Global Workspace Theory: Consciousness is information being "broadcast" widely across the brain, making it available to many systems at once

• Integrated Information Theory (IIT): Consciousness corresponds to a system's capacity to integrate information (measured as "phi" Φ)

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All of these topic are addressed in this section. Please see the "consciousness" drop-down menu item on the top of every webpage of this site.