Don't believe the human eye
In sunlight or in shade
The puppet show of sight and sense
Is the Devil's Masquerade
- Principia Discordia
I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment,
And for that very reason it is called Supreme Enlightenment.
– Gotama Buddha.
Recognizing consciousness for what it is is hard, for why wouldn't it be? No one has ever solved it. Intellectuals to this day argue about not only what consciousness is, but even over the probabilistic timelines in our primordial primate past when the first simian recognized that 'This is mine, my territory, my space, my ego, MINE!'
We often do not stop at random and walk up to the closest bug and stare deeply into its five complex eyes that consist of hundreds of lenses and ask ourselves, 'Mr. Bug, do you willfully choose to point those lenses around? Or do you simply react to physical motion in an automatic realm of robothood?'
Self-recognition seems to be commonly one of the necessary and sufficient conditions (more on these another time) often used in the philosophical treatments that have been trying to establish a specialized jargon that all scientists and fellow academics can agree upon using. The debate of what words to use when defining consciousness is central to what I believe consciousness to actually be.
So, therefore it goes that since I believe consciousness to be something, it must then be a tangible thing. Something measureable and predictable, containing some form of manipulability, and all the other verbal categories that you may associate with this. Nagal's discourse,What it is like to be a bat?, had a diamond bullet that needs mentioning in this discussion of consciousness. Consciousness contains a wide range of intrinsic features that have been termed, Qualia, which is the way that external and internal sensations look and feel to you. The concept of qualia causes strange loops of thought to occur where it may be possible that what you hold in your mind to be the color "Red" may in fact not be the same shade of "Red" as anyone else's, and yet you continue to function as a sane individual.
Consciousness within the neurological field seems to take on a materialistic biological role as the sum of all the physical sensations that one perceives through experience. Those sensations are converted into chemical bonds and electrical signals that then voyage across the complex neurological circuits of the nervous system to reach the specially evolved areas of the cortex where the brain takes the stimulus information to be processed by the attention and memory systems that then allows for the selective construction and preservation of experience to be considered Real and Immediate, and all of this happens in milliseconds.
My brain then must have made up reality entirely on its own? Since transferring my ideas and thoughts to others is limited to language, I never really know whether others know really what I'm talking about. William James put it elegantly when he said; "The breach from one mind to another is perhaps the greatest breach in nature". Which isn't that bad of a thing mind you. The good thing about attempting to define consciousness is that it isn't just about thought. Consciousness involves emotion, feeling, and empathy. I once heard that, 'We are not thinking beings with emotion, we are emotional beings that think'.
Emotion is another one of those necessary and sufficient conditions that resonate within the consciousness jargon pool. Emotion has been the main drive behind the prehistoric attempts in the study of consciousness, Gods, and demons, in an attempt to understand what it is and who they are. Shamans, Mystics, Monks, and Priests have willfully caused themselves harm and ecstasy through such acts as; fasting, Asana yoga, sensory deprivation and social isolation, the Kabbalah, pranayama, Tantric yoga, and other various masochistic practices in order to remove their egos and dismantle their realities with the goal of taking control over their own nervous systems and reprogramming their individual reality tunnels to match their cultural and ideological schema of things.
Oddly enough, I have a sense that the various occult systems from within the anthropological and theological record hold a stronger connection with the cognitive and computation theories of consciousness than the biological. This reasoning of mine comes from the concepts that these occult systems are simply other techniques of physiological and neurological experiments attempting to multiply and accelerate the development and evolution of our own consciousness. Israel Regardie described Magick as "a mnemonic system of psychology to train the Will and Imagination".
This strong connection between the mystical view of consciousness and the cognitive systems view of consciousness comes from their ability to incorporate the theories and concepts of quantum state-vectors and the non-locality principle into their definitions and theories of consciousness. Einstein showed us how the material universe is made up of smaller elements inside the larger. Quantum Consciousness, as Roger Penrose describes it, is the thought that the mental universe can be whatever we shape it to be. It's the larger inside the smaller. This line of thought then allows for a view of panpsychism to be applied, which is the claim that everything, including nonliving systems, has some degree of consciousness. Pansychism is favored amongst Strong AI theorists and can surprisingly be viewed in more traditional religions compared to the more popular book religions.
All this being said, I shall end with the words of two pioneers, and a music video, on the conscious thought about consciousness. Since my own musing obviously require more meditations and less aphorisms.
"The trick is to concentrate on the reality projected through the printed page. Every sentence is a signal from another world, a nervous system different from yours with which you can interface synergistically"
– Robert Anton Wilson
"The influence of the senses have in men overpowered the thought to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look solid, real and insurmountable … Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the power of the mind. Man is capable of abolishing them both."
– Ralph Waldo Emerson.
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