How would you define consciousness? Is dreaming a form of consciousness? What happens when you pass out?
Consciousness (like in "aware of himself") is a subjective perception that is normally easily accessible subjectively, by introspection. However, the mechanics of consciousness are hardly understood and the consciousness state is hard to evaluate from outside in non-fully awake mind states. Is there a consciousness while being drugged? Is there a consciousness in catatonic people? Where is the consciousness boundary between being awake and asleep?
The following reflections aims to give some clues about the nature of consciousness.
One interesting thing about the consciousness is that we are aware of not being consciousness a while ago. This is an important clue suggesting that consciousness is not only a temporary perception, but also produces a persistent state that can be later evaluated.
Another interesting fact is that consciousness is often perceived like a yes-or-no state, while there are still some shades in between. Once consciousness is gone, it tends to stay gone for an extensive period of time (minutes). There are rare cases when consciousness goes on and off very rapidly. This suggests that consciousness is a state of "flux" that happens in a feedback loop between two systems. This would explain why consciousness goes away completely when it goes below a certain level.
Lack of consciousness is consistent with the lack of awareness about the body. Could we consider the consciousness only a way to be aware of our body? Well, we seem also aware of what are we thinking, how can that be explained? Actually, when we are thinking we are most often producing words and sentences that are slightly moving the vocal cords. Hearing yourself thinking can be attributed to this information about the body. What about thinking without words? Well, such "thinking" is usually related to imagining images, sounds, etc. They can also be considered as information received about some buffers of the body sensors, buffers where we can somehow also write information by imagination.
It seems that consciousness happens after around 0.5 seconds after the brain took a decision - some clever experiments proved it. This is a lot more than the minimum interval that the brain can perceive - that is around 1/16 seconds. That 1/16 interval makes the vibrations to be discrete under 16Hz and to be perceived as sound for higher frequencies.
My hypothesis is that there is a multiplier for consciousness, like consciousness happens after couple of fundamental brain ticks. As 7 ticks of 1/16 is 7/16 seconds, this is very close to 0.5 seconds for the perception delay. Why 7? There is a "magical constant 7" on how many things we can keep in the brain's short term memory. Maybe we can perceive only one thing at the time, while we can cycle between around 7 states on each consciousness cycle.
Anyway, even if the above is not true, experiments shows that consciousness happens as an "aposteriory" perception about the state of our brain process, then it is conceivable that it is a process similar with receiving information about the body. This just needs to have a feedback loop that offers some of the brain state as an input to the brain itself.
Consciousness seems like an asynchronous process that provides after-the-fact, in the brain, aggregated data about body and brain.
P.S. I am still thinking about this. I just decided to publish a lot of not-really-finished work that I kept untouched, in the draft state, for a long while.
Dear reader, please leave a message if you exist! ;) Also, please share this article if you find it interesting. Thank you.
Consciousness (like in "aware of himself") is a subjective perception that is normally easily accessible subjectively, by introspection. However, the mechanics of consciousness are hardly understood and the consciousness state is hard to evaluate from outside in non-fully awake mind states. Is there a consciousness while being drugged? Is there a consciousness in catatonic people? Where is the consciousness boundary between being awake and asleep?
The following reflections aims to give some clues about the nature of consciousness.
One interesting thing about the consciousness is that we are aware of not being consciousness a while ago. This is an important clue suggesting that consciousness is not only a temporary perception, but also produces a persistent state that can be later evaluated.
Another interesting fact is that consciousness is often perceived like a yes-or-no state, while there are still some shades in between. Once consciousness is gone, it tends to stay gone for an extensive period of time (minutes). There are rare cases when consciousness goes on and off very rapidly. This suggests that consciousness is a state of "flux" that happens in a feedback loop between two systems. This would explain why consciousness goes away completely when it goes below a certain level.
Lack of consciousness is consistent with the lack of awareness about the body. Could we consider the consciousness only a way to be aware of our body? Well, we seem also aware of what are we thinking, how can that be explained? Actually, when we are thinking we are most often producing words and sentences that are slightly moving the vocal cords. Hearing yourself thinking can be attributed to this information about the body. What about thinking without words? Well, such "thinking" is usually related to imagining images, sounds, etc. They can also be considered as information received about some buffers of the body sensors, buffers where we can somehow also write information by imagination.
It seems that consciousness happens after around 0.5 seconds after the brain took a decision - some clever experiments proved it. This is a lot more than the minimum interval that the brain can perceive - that is around 1/16 seconds. That 1/16 interval makes the vibrations to be discrete under 16Hz and to be perceived as sound for higher frequencies.
My hypothesis is that there is a multiplier for consciousness, like consciousness happens after couple of fundamental brain ticks. As 7 ticks of 1/16 is 7/16 seconds, this is very close to 0.5 seconds for the perception delay. Why 7? There is a "magical constant 7" on how many things we can keep in the brain's short term memory. Maybe we can perceive only one thing at the time, while we can cycle between around 7 states on each consciousness cycle.
Anyway, even if the above is not true, experiments shows that consciousness happens as an "aposteriory" perception about the state of our brain process, then it is conceivable that it is a process similar with receiving information about the body. This just needs to have a feedback loop that offers some of the brain state as an input to the brain itself.
Consciousness seems like an asynchronous process that provides after-the-fact, in the brain, aggregated data about body and brain.
P.S. I am still thinking about this. I just decided to publish a lot of not-really-finished work that I kept untouched, in the draft state, for a long while.
Dear reader, please leave a message if you exist! ;) Also, please share this article if you find it interesting. Thank you.
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