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What
is Consciousness?
If you ask philosophers what consciousness is they can go on
for hours. Really though consciousness is quite
simple. Consciousness is merely the ability of an entity to
distinguish itself from its environment. In other words consciousness
is simply awareness. The more
advanced the organism the more advanced the level of consciousness.
Like life, consciousness cannot magically arise from nothing. Most
scientists would laugh if you said simple life like bacteria were
aware. But they are. If bacteria and other life forms were not aware
they would not be able to eat as they could not distinguish themselves
from food.
Maybe consciousness is not as
magical as we tend to think it is. All we as humans do is receive
sensory input, process it and
display specific adaptive responses. If humans have consciousness but
our
bacterial-like ancestors did not, that means consciousness magically
arose out of thin air at a certain point in the evolutionary process.
As physics tells us we are just massively complex systems of pure
energy. Matter
is just energy bound into systems. So unless you invoke some kind of
magic this energy must have a
conscious-like property. Energy must be aware in a sense
because awareness cannot just magically arise at a certain point of
organizational complexity. The Universe then is conscious.
The
interesting thing here is that responding to environmental and internal
cues is sensing. In order to sense that something is external to
yourself or internal to yourself you need to be self-aware.
Self-awareness is consciousness. Cells can sense yet they have nothing
we'd call sense organs. Cells are just made of proteins. How can
proteins sense? Proteins are molecules and molecules are made of atoms.
Cells then are just a mass of atoms bound up by natural forces into a
complex system. Properties cannot magically arise out of thin air.
Either they need to be inherent in the building blocks of the system or
the property is in fact an illusion resulting from our own perceptual
limitations. So can atoms sense and be conscious or is sensing and
consciousness an illusion? Either way the undeniable conclusion is that
the building blocks of everything can sense and is conscious.
Conscious
energy is energy that is aware of its self. It is self aware. When this
energy is bound up into a complex system or pattern in which different
parts of the system communicate amongst themselves that energy is now
aware of itself within a system. There is no magical emergence taking
place here. The capacity for self awareness is a property of this
energy. Provided it is getting information about the system, the energy
is aware of the system it is part of. When the system is broken down
the energy is no longer aware of the old system because it no longer
exists. Nothing tangible is destroyed a pattern is merely rearranged.
Awareness is a property of the energy not the system. We as humans are
actually not aware, it is the energy we are made of that is aware of
our human system.
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