CONSCIOUSNESS, SELF, AWARENESS

Ideas by

Clinton O’Dell

When I speak of consciousness, I’m talking about the thoughts that develop in your brain. When I say a person is self aware, I’m talking about the acknowledgment of himself. His thoughts focused on his consciousness and realizing he is developing these thoughts. I’m also talking about his recognizing that he exists. When he looks into a mirror and notices that it is himself he is looking at. All these things together make up varies degrees of self-awareness.

There is no physical soul. No specific area that you can pin point and say, "this is you." Instead, I believe, consciousness is the exchange of information between brain functions.

The distributed nature of brain function contributes to the platform upon which consciousness stands.

When I think about how I think, this is what I find. If I think, "Raise my left arm," nothing happens; yet, if I will my arm to raise, then it does. ‘I’ (the conscious self) have done two things. First I created a thought. I controlled what thoughts ran through my head and noticed that the thoughts were created by me. They were not created by responses to events, so I must have some free will there. Next I created an action. I moved my arm. I noticed that my arm didn’t move when I created the thought command for it to move. I also noticed that I move my arm all the time without first thinking to move my arm. In conclusion ‘I’ (the conscious self) must be made up of at least two parts.

To expand even further, I noticed that I have different types of thoughts. Sometimes I think in pictures, or, to explain more thoroughly, I see my memories. I also think in words. English to be precise. Other thoughts I have are remembering tastes, sounds, and textures. So I’ve come to the conclusion that thought must come through memory. Because I think in different images, sounds (such as language), tastes, and smells, and these senses have been shown to be controlled by different parts of the brain, then my thoughts must also be developed from different parts of the brain. Also different body functions have been shown to be controlled by different parts of the brain.

I can go even a step further. Because English is a spoken language it must be recognized through the part of the brain that interprets sound. Traveling via echoic memory. Because English is also a symbolic language when written, it must be recognized through the part of the brain that interprets images. Traveling via iconic memory. When I read a word, my brain probably matches up the lines in the letters, to a part of iconic memory that recognizes those letters. Echoic memory probably has something written at the same place because when I learned the alphabet I associated it with sounds. Or to be more clear, when someone showed me the letter ‘A’ I heard immediately the word ‘A’. What must happen in the brain to allow these associations is that memory from all parts of the body are written at the same time. Some parts of the body must be more sensitive than others, otherwise we would associate the movement of an arm with a word, along with a sound, etc. In martial arts you develop muscle memory by repeating body movements over and over again while imagining reactions to events. Eventually it makes a lasting impression on the brain and you can react automatically.

To sum up, because all parts of thought and action is controlled by different parts of the brain, and you control all action freely without intervention from outside events and then again recognize this in echoic memory (the sound recognition part of consciousness), then the conscious self (‘I’) must be made up of many parts of the brain. Brain functions exchange information via memory. So, as you can see, memory is actually a very stable base for consciousness.

An explanation of the "self" requires an explanation to my view of personality.

Personality is the way memory is associated with one another and what is planned in future situations that would hopefully bring the body to a more comfortable state. I define comfort as lack of pain/fear. I have a primitive formula for establishing personality and conscious objects.

The equation is ‘past memories’ + ‘current memory stimulation’ = ‘personality and consciousness’

Think about how an object makes assumptions about the future. It takes past experiences and matches them with noticed patterned outcomes. It’s all memory. So where does current memory stimulation come in? A persons current mood, or state of mind, is a result of current happenings and matching patterns of past responses. A person is conscious because he can make predictions based on matching memory patterns to the point where it at least affects his current personality/thought. Some parts of memory travel via echoic memory as I’ve mentioned above. The sounds residing in a part of echoic memory is matched with other parts of memory that give you an understanding of language. This is your consciousness. A part of memory helping make decisions based on recognition. (When I first thought of this I was in total ah..!) Of course self awareness then arrives. You can’t help but notice the pattern, you are making all the decisions! Wow!

Thoughts are both conscious and unconscious processes. Because the brain is always matching memory patterns, and since memory is distributed throughout the brain, and one part of it being echoic memory (where thoughts are comprehended as language) then obviously you can’t have complete control there. Thoughts will just pop in your head as parts of memory are read and distributed.

A thoughts is also stored in memory since self awareness is the recognition of the pattern that you are making all the decisions. Of course the brain can read that part of memory and its associations, and be so complex that there isn’t just one course of action, or there are to many associations to be distributed and processed at the same time. It’s like trying to pass 64 bits each via a 4 bit bus between 7 circuits at the same time. Since different functions of the brain are constantly processing, new information is constantly needing to be passed to other functions. A particular brain’s function can’t possibly hold all its data along with the new information that it’s constantly collecting so it needs a way to decide what information is passed and what information is forgotten or not brought to the surface of conscious thought (passed to other functions). It would likely do this through some sort of logic gate.

Logic gates are made up of memory counters and programmed responses. Also, emotion most likely plays a roll in its make up. Each function of the brain has logic gates that pass information to other parts of the brain. Also, brain functions that work together have logic gates connecting other brain functions that work together. That again could produce an even higher hierarchy of brain functions controlled via another series of logic gates. This continues until all functions and emergent functions (two or more functions combined to create another function) of the brain are connected.

How logic gates work.

Every time a part of memory is referenced it is noted (hence counted). Study shows that when someone uses a part of memory new connections are made to it. That does two things.

1)Makes it more likely to be referenced again.

2)Contributes to the decision of what information is passed.

Many parts of the mind (and body) act reflexively. The above about consciousness helps explain why. These connections are what physically associates memories to other memories. The collection of memories with the most connections are compared with learned logic (programmed responses). Learned logic is logic that is taught or programmed in the genes (born reflexes). As you grew up your mother taught you things-that’s not nice, share, keep clean, lover your neighbor, sex is bad, worship God, etc…

And then finally there is the emotional part. I’m still not sure how emotion fits in but I know that it does, because people do make decisions based on their emotions. Perhaps the chemicals cause shorts in the comparisons. Or maybe it speeds up the decision making process so you don’t have the usual amount of comparison time. Or maybe it adds associations related to the emotion to the decision making process. Or maybe it’s a combination of these things.

Because thoughts are distributed throughout the brain between functions traveling via memory, and since part of that memory is echoic memory (where you comprehend as language), and because consciousness is the memories traveling between functions, and because awareness is the recognition of your thoughts you will be both ware and conscious of thoughts being formed. See above about consciousness and self awareness.

Free will.

When you recognize your programming and then alter your own programming you create control. The motive force that tells you to change the programming is desire. Desire comes from emotion. The changing of your programming complexes things then re-complexes things as you continue to change them based on your desire to do so that came from an emotional urge that in all creates the emergent property of free will.

Another explanation of free will.

‘You’ or ‘I’ is thought. Thought comes from neurons, but it is the way neurons work together that create thought. It is not enough to just have neurons. That’s like saying all life is just molecules, when actually it’s the way molecules interact that result in life. To change your thinking you must have some desire to do so. What would give someone a desire to change anything or not change anything? One may say to not do so may be illogical, but why do we care whether it’s logical or not? So we may survive? Why do we care if we survive? It’s programmed in our genes? Are we sure? If so, how does that work chemically? So emotion gives us desire. Now that we have a desire to change the programming, how do we do it? So far I can see how all this is just responses and doesn’t require any interference from a non-responsive source. Choice…What do we choose to change? That can be responses to what is desired given from emotion linked with associated thought that is assumed to bring a desired output. Then we carry out the decided action. When we change a situation we take control of that situation. When we change our programming we take control of that programming. Even if we are using the programming to change the programming we are still taking control. Now that we have control along with desire (whether or not the desire comes from genes or emotion) we make a free choice what to choose next because we ‘recognize’ that we have control and we have desire.

Unconsciousness cognition.

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote Wed, 08 Sep. 1999 to newsgroup extropians@extropy.com with the subject "Re: We are our genes."

"It takes a huge amount of low-level stuff to support our high-level thoughts. There are no hidden-level thoughts. There’s no ‘unconsciousness’ capable of independent cognition. There are very few conditions under which a true unconscious desire is more adaptive than a true conscious one-I think these situations are too few, and too inconsistent, to create a selection pressure for suppressing cognition. There are many times when self-deception is adaptive, but that is not actually unconsciousness; that is refusing to admit emotions which result in inconsistent actions and internal beliefs about those actions; both are still conscious. The discipline of self-awareness occurs first by learning to admit the things lurking in the corners of your mind; second by studying the evolutionary origin of our conscious motives; not, at any point, by bringing unconscious cognition into consciousness."