So what exactly is consciousness?
This is what Wikipedia has to say...
Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.It has been defined variously in terms of sentience, awareness, qualia, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of self hood or soul, the fact that there is something "that it is like" to "have" or "be" it, and the executive control system of the mind. In contemporary philosophy its definition is often hinted at via the logical possibility of its absence, the philosophical zombie, which is defined as a being whose behavior and function are identical to one's own yet there is "no-one in there" experiencing it. source
Not a very clear definition right? I mean and I quote >consciousness is the state or quality of awareness or of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.
But what about consciousness about knowing that others also feel from within just like you feel for yourself? Or how about plants if they feel too? Or animals they do feel but are they conscious too and then once again the million dollar question, what about AI? There is already a lot of discussion going on about AI. I mean in the future, if some piece of code and hardware supporting the functionality of such code would be able to generate more codes that will enhance it's functionality and later on if such codes can detect it's own flaws and fix them would it be considered as consciousness? Freaky stuff I know. There has to be some sort of Universal explanation to this.
I have been doing my "research" on "qualia" for a while now and I firmly believe that's where consciousness begins. At least in living beings. In order to have consciousness we have to have some stimuli such as an object so that our 5 senses can interpret it all. I don't know about the sixth sense but I do understand that humans and animals are capable of interpreting beyond what they feel for example we can't see in the dark but with the help of let's say night vision we can actually see in the dark. I consider this capability as sixth sense. so When we can see in the dark with the help of something, of course I said "see" and this should be considered as one of the 5 senses but we actually can't "see" in the dark, does this mean night vision + sight = sixth sense? Think about it.
So in my world consciousness doesn't end when you stop perceiving or look away. Also consciousness do exist in non living things too because you get conscious with them. I know this doesn't make any sense but think about it, this way. When you see an apple first of all, if an apple is dead or alive? Like if we see trees as "living" beings an apple detached from it's branch is dead or alive? Secondly, we see an apple that means we are aware/conscious about it but if we didn't look at that apple were we still conscious about it? Yes we were as we know apple exists but were we conscious about that particular apple? No! We only got conscious about that particular apple only when we looked at it.
Back to the square one, what is consciousness? Brain is capable of containing consciousness everybody knows about this but then once again what contains the mind if at all something can contain it? I will continue from this point onwards in the next post. Follow me @kissofearth.
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Have a good day folks!