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What is Consciousness

The word “Consciousness” can mean many different things to different people, in different contexts.

What does “Consciousness” mean to me?

I use consciousness specifically to refer to the parts of a system that produce these phenomena:

  • awareness of thought - the fact that the system can observe its own ‘thought’ and has ‘meta thought’ (can think about its own thoughts)
  • experience of experiencing - the system has that subtle, hard to explain, human sensation of there being something in our heads that observes all of this. In contrast to a mechanical or electronic machine, for which we have no scientific rational reason to believe it experiences anything.

But Consciousness is just an illusion …. and other theories

There are a number of theories on what human consciousness is, and what produces it. Like many, I fall into a particular camp and I don’t find any of the other theories convincing.

Some alternative theories of consciousness:

  • It’s an illusion
    • Our detailed mental model makes us think it exists in a palpable way, in the same way that our mental model of our body makes us think our missing limb still exists (Phantom limb syndrome).
  • It’s emergent
  • It’s a mystical spiritual entity that’s somehow linked to our corporal brain.
  • The “Hard problem of consciousness” is not a hard problem

Some of the issues I have with the various theories:

  • Appeal to complexity.
    • Basically just putting ones hands up and saying, “I don’t know, it’s too hard, presumably it just happens once it’s complex enough”.
  • Not recognising the significance of the “experience of experiencing”
  • Scope and ability of the attached spiritual entity is too limited by the capability of the biological brain. eg: effects of brain damage, sleep.
  • The lack of an explained mechanism for creating the phenomenon of “experience of experiencing”.

Experience of Experience (EOE)

Experience of Experience (EOE) is more than just the fact that senses are received as inputs and used in further processing. We observe our own experiences as if there is a “little me” watching passively as the senses and thoughts flow past. It has little to do with the specific qualities of those experiences (often referred to as ‘qualia’ in philosophical discussions). Rather, it has more to do with the fact that there are experiences at all.

This is very different to how we presume that, in an electronic circuit, electrons just flow through gates, causing data states to change, and in turn causing control flows to change. We presume that, even in the event of button presses and other input signals being “actioned”, there is still nothing that “experiences” those interactions.

It is hard to define exactly what EOE is. And thus it is hard to reach general consensus. For the purposes of all discussions within this site, it is interpreted as discussed above, with the recognised limitation that the description is necessarily quite vague.

See Also

  • [[A Theory of the Human Mind]]