Our Consciousness

How Vast Is Consciousness?

Recent neuroscience recognizes two basic forms of consciousness. It all starts with the divisions we make: "Two broad types of consciousness must be distinguished" based on the neurobiological domain (LeDoux, 2023, 219). Creature consciousness is attributed to all organisms with a nervous system. 

The other form of consciousness, associated with more complex nervous systems, is mental state consciousness. It is "the ability to experience the world and one's relationship to it" (LeDoux, 219).

Recently, another category of consciousness has been added: existential consciousness. (Reber, Baluska and Miller, 2024). Here, consciousness is rooted in cellular intelligence as an expression of a living, self-organizing order.

This view of the cellular basis of cognition offers a promising new perspective on the vastness of consciousness in life. Is it necessary to stop seeing the possibility of consciousness as a form of sentience based on the presence of a nervous system?  READ MORE...

Mind Bending Theories of Reality

ARE there vastly many near-duplicates of you reading vastly many near-duplicates of this article in vastly many parallel universes? Is consciousness a fundamental property of all matter? Could reality be a computer simulation? Reader, I can hear your groans from here in California.

We are inclined to reject ideas like these on the grounds that they sound preposterous. And yet some of the world’s leading scientists and philosophers advocate for them. Why? And how should you, assuming you aren’t an expert, react to these sorts of hypotheses?

When we confront fundamental questions about the nature of reality, things quickly get weird. As a philosopher specializing in metaphysics, I submit that weirdness is inevitable, and that something radically bizarre will turn out to be true.     READ MORE...

About Consciousness

The Philosophical Hard Problem
Some say consciousness is mysterious. But there are two ways to think about this. One is that consciousness is mysterious in the way that the idea of a soul that survives death is, and the other is in the way that the mechanism of evolutionary inheritance was before DNA was discovered.


Today, the mystery of consciousness is often discussed in terms of a special quality—the way it feels to be consciousness. This phenomenal feeling is to be what makes red seem red, and fear feel fearful. Unconscious states come with no such feelings. Philosopher Thomas Nagel refers to these feelings as “qualia," and David Chalmers, another philosopher, has argued that qualia constitute the “hard problem” of consciousness.     READ MORE...

Consciousness

Even among non-neuroscientists, determining the origin and purpose of consciousness is widely known as “the hard problem.” Since its coinage by philosopher David Chalmers thirty years ago, that label has worked its way into a variety of contexts; about a decade ago, Tom Stoppard even used it for the title of a play. Unsurprisingly, it’s also referenced in the episode of Big Think’s Dispatches from the Well above, which presents discussions of the nature of consciousness with neuroscientist Christof Koch, Vedanta Society of New York minister Swami Sarvapriyananda, technology entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, Santa Fe Institute Davis Professor of Complexity Melanie Mitchell, and mathematical physicist Roger Penrose.

Koch describes consciousness as “what you see, it’s what you hear, it’s the pains you have, the love you have, the fear, the passion.” It is, in other words, “the experience of anything,” and for all their sophistication, our modern inquiries into it descend from René Descartes’ proposition, “Cogito, ergo sum.” Sarvapriyananda, too, makes reference to Descartes in explaining his own conception of consciousness as “the light of lights,” by which “everything here is lit up.”  READ MORE...

Consciousness

A study reveals that experienced meditators are able to voluntarily modulate their state of consciousness during meditation. In other words, they have the unusual ability, without the use of drugs, to induce a momentary void of consciousness during cessations through large-scale modulation of brain activity.

In what situations can a human being lose consciousness? An anesthetization, brain concussion, intoxication, epilepsy, seizure, or other fainting/syncopal episode caused by a lack of blood flow to the brain can cause total loss of consciousness. But can unconsciousness be induced without the use of drugs?  READ MORE...

Krebs and Consciousness

IF WE need to perceive the character of life, we have now to consider the circulation of power and matter. So argues biochemist and author Nick Lane in his new e book Transformer. Quoting the poem Like Most Revelations by Richard Howard, he writes that “it’s the motion that creates the shape”.

Lane’s concentrate on power and the important dynamism of life has been an vital thread operating via his analysis. Some of the inventive of immediately’s biologists, his work ranges from the evolution of intercourse and the rise of planetary oxygen to the origin of complicated cells and the primary life on Earth.

In his final e book, The Very important Query, he argued that many of those seemingly disparate mysteries may very well be defined by life’s reliance on electrically charged particles to energy itself.

Transformer isn’t any much less bold. Its focus is a biochemical course of referred to as the Krebs cycle: a whirlwind of chemistry that spins round in all our cells many instances a second. It’s named for biochemist Hans Krebs, who described many particulars of the way it works.

Lane’s thesis is that biochemists have misunderstood the cycle and due to this fact underestimated it. Textbooks, he says, primarily deal with it as a mechanism for acquiring power from meals. However Krebs can also be a chemical manufacturing unit, manufacturing key elements of cells. And cells can run it in numerous methods, so there isn’t a one Krebs cycle. Lane compares it to a furiously busy roundabout, with totally different automobiles always whizzing in from totally different junctions and hurtling out on others.  READ MORE...

Filters of Consciousness

In addition to the basic capacity for sense perception, the Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK) identifies three primary domains of human consciousness. The first is the experiential or primate self, which includes both the capacity for subjective experience and the manner in which perceptions become referenced against motives and emotions that are relevant to one's self. The basic features of this domain of consciousness is shared with other mammals. The second domain is the ego, which refers to the language-based narrating capacity of your interpreter system. It is the “I” that describes, evaluates, and explains the “me” when you are engaged in explicit self-conscious reflection. Finally, your persona refers to the way you project your identity out into the social world to manage impressions and regulate your role and place in the social field.


These domains are specified in UTOK via Justification Systems Theory (JUST)2. In particular, JUST argues that we can understand the evolution of the human ego and persona as arising out of the fact that with propositional language came the problem of having to justify one’s self to others. UTOK proclaims this is a central problem that shapes the structural and functional arrangement of our language-based propositional thought. It also makes very clear predictions regarding the relationship between the domains of consciousness. Specifically, JUST posits that there should be specific kinds of filtering processes that should be present between both the experiential self and the ego and the ego and the persona. These dynamic processes are where we find two of the three filters of consciousness.


According to JUST, the ego must narrate what is happening to the primate experiential self and do so with the task of developing a justifiable narrative of events. This means that there should be filters associated with how the ego construes the experiential self. Specifically, it should work to filter out impulses, images, ideas, and feelings that are unjustifiable. And it should then work to develop justifiable narratives for those experiences, drives, and images that are acknowledged. In addition, powerful thoughts and feelings that the ego cannot control or deny should be experienced as alien and “ego-dystonic.”


Of course, therapists of a psychodynamic orientation have long identified precisely these kinds of processes and dynamic relations between self-consciousness and subconscious processes. Indeed, the idea that the ego sits atop the more animalistic portions of our mental lives and filters out undesirable processes via repression or suppression and then rationalizes those portions to manage our sense of self in the relational world is a basic set of insights from the Freudian tradition. It is because of this set of insights from psychodynamic theory that UTOK labels the filter between the primate-experiential self and the ego the "Freudian Filter." It operates between nonverbal images, drives, and impulses and verbal narration and, at this interface, the primary dynamic this filter is attempting is to translate the experiential self into a justified narrative and also regulate it so that it conforms.  READ MORE...

Consciousness Understood by Dreaming

The ability to control our dreams is a skill that more of us are seeking to acquire for sheer pleasure. But if taken seriously, scientists believe it could unlock new secrets of the mind.

Michelle Carr is frequently plagued by tidal waves in her dreams. What should be a terrifying nightmare, however, can quickly turn into a whimsical adventure – thanks to her ability to control her dreams. She can transform herself into a dolphin and swim into the water. Once, she transformed the wave itself, turning it into a giant snail with a huge shell. “It came right up to me – it was a really beautiful moment.”

There’s a thriving online community of people who are now trying to learn how to lucid dream. (A single subreddit devoted to the phenomenon has more than 400,000 members.) Many are simply looking for entertainment. “It’s just so exciting and unbelievable to be in a lucid dream and to witness your mind creating this completely vivid simulation,” says Carr, who is a sleep researcher at the University of Rochester in New York state. Others hope that exercising skills in their dreams will increase their real-life abilities. “A lot of elite athletes use lucid dreams to practise their sport.”

Sleep researcher Michelle Carr says she can tranform herself into a dolphin during her lucid dreams. 

“It’s just so exciting and unbelievable,” she says. Photograph: TEDX/YouTube

And there are more profound reasons to exploit this sleep state, besides personal improvement. By identifying the brain activity that gives rise to the heightened awareness and sense of agency in lucid dreams, neuroscientists and psychologists hope to answer fundamental questions about the nature of human consciousness, including our apparently unique capacity for self-awareness. “More and more researchers, from many different fields, have started to incorporate lucid dreams in their research,” says Carr.

This interest in lucid dreaming has been growing in fits and starts for more than a century. Despite his fascination with the interaction between the conscious and subconscious minds, Sigmund Freud barely mentioned lucid dreams in his writings. Instead, it was an English aristocrat and writer, Mary Arnold-Forster, who provided one of the earliest and most detailed descriptions in the English language in her book Studies in Dreams.  TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS, CLICK HERE...

Consciousness

Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time. 

The brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, consisting of almost 100 billion cells – known as neurons – each connected to 10,000 others, yielding some ten trillion nerve connections.

We have made a great deal of progress in understanding brain activity, and how it contributes to human behaviour. But what no one has so far managed to explain is how all of this results in feelings, emotions and experiences. 

How does the passing around of electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an experience of red?

There is growing suspicion that conventional scientific methods will never be able answer these questions. Luckily, there is an alternative approach that may ultimately be able to crack the mystery.

For much of the 20th century, there was a great taboo against querying the mysterious inner world of consciousness – it was not taken to be a fitting topic for “serious science”. Things have changed a lot, and there is now broad agreement that the problem of consciousness is a serious scientific issue. 

But many consciousness researchers underestimate the depth of the challenge, believing that we just need to continue examining the physical structures of the brain to work out how they produce consciousness.  READ MORE...

Metaphysical Mysteries

In my 20s, I had a friend who was brilliant, charming, Ivy-educated and rich, heir to a family fortune. I’ll call him Gallagher. He could do anything he wanted. He experimented, dabbling in neuroscience, law, philosophy and other fields. 

But he was so critical, so picky, that he never settled on a career. Nothing was good enough for him. He never found love for the same reason. He also disparaged his friends’ choices, so much so that he alienated us. He ended up bitter and alone. At least that’s my guess. I haven’t spoken to Gallagher in decades.

There is such a thing as being too picky, especially when it comes to things like work, love and nourishment (even the pickiest eater has to eat something). That’s the lesson I gleaned from Gallagher. But when it comes to answers to big mysteries, most of us aren’t picky enough. 

We settle on answers for bad reasons, for example, because our parents, priests or professors believe it. We think we need to believe something, but actually we don’t. We can, and should, decide that no answers are good enough. We should be agnostics.

Some people confuse agnosticism (not knowing) with apathy (not caring). Take Francis Collins, a geneticist who directs the National Institutes of Health. He is a devout Christian, who believes that Jesus performed miracles, died for our sins and rose from the dead. In his 2006 bestseller The Language of God, 

Collins calls agnosticism a “cop-out.” When I interviewed him, I told him I am an agnostic and objected to “cop-out.”  READ MORE

What We Are

“We’ve barely begun to understand our place in the cosmos. As we continue to look out from our planet and contemplate the nature of reality, we should remember that there is a mystery right here where we stand.”



“Meditate often on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe,” the aging Marcus Aurelius instructed.

“Any live mind today is of the very same stuff as Plato’s & Euripides,” the young Virginia Woolf meditated in her diary two millennia later. “It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind.”

Two years earlier, in the first year of the twentieth century and the final year of his life, the uncommonly minded Canadian psychiatrist Maurice Bucke had formalized this notion in his visionary, controversial book Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, which influenced generations of thinkers ranging from Albert Einstein to Abraham Maslow to Steve Jobs.

Bucke himself had been greatly influenced by, then befriended and in turn influenced, Walt Whitman — a poet enraptured by how science illuminates the interconnectedness of life, who contemplated the strangest and most paradoxical byproduct of consciousness “lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal”: our sense of self.

Science was young then — it still is — and the world was old, and the mind was old, its dwelling-place practically unchanged since the cranium of early Homo sapiens began accommodating a brain comparable to our own some three hundred thousand years ago. 

With neuroscience yet to be born, it fell on the poets and the philosophers to meditate on the complexities of consciousness — the sole valve between reality and our experience, made of the same matter as the stars. Today, neuroscience remains a young and insecure science, as crude as Galilean astronomy — and as revolutionary in the revelations it has already contoured, yet to be shaded in with the nuances of understanding that might, just might, one day illuminate the fundaments of consciousness.  READ MORE

Underpinnings of Consciousness

Consciousness is arguably the most important scientific topic there is. Without consciousness, there would after all be no science. 

But while we all know what it is like to be conscious – meaning that we have personal awareness and respond to the world around us – it has turned out to be near impossible to explain exactly how it arises from the hardware of the brain. 

This is dubbed the “hard” problem of consciousness.

Solving the hard problem is a matter of great scientific curiosity. But so far, we haven’t even solved the “easy” problems of explaining which brain systems give rise to conscious experiences in general – in humans or other animals.

This is of huge clinical importance. Disorders of consciousness are a common consequence of severe brain injury and include comas and vegetative states. And we all experience temporary loss of awareness when under anaesthesia during an operation.

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, we have now shown that conscious brain activity seems to be linked to the brain’s “pleasure chemical”, dopamine.  READ MORE

Quantum Physics and Consciousness

One of the most important open questions in science is how our consciousness is established. 

In the 1990s, long before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his prediction of black holes, physicist Roger Penrose teamed up with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to propose an ambitious answer.

They claimed that the brain’s neuronal system forms an intricate network and that the consciousness this produces should obey the rules of quantum mechanics – the theory that determines how tiny particles like electrons move around. 

This, they argue, could explain the mysterious complexity of human consciousness.

Penrose and Hameroff were met with incredulity. Quantum mechanical laws are usually only found to apply at very low temperatures. 

Quantum computers, for example, currently operate at around -272°C. At higher temperatures, classical mechanics takes over. Since our body works at room temperature, you would expect it to be governed by the classical laws of physics. 

For this reason, the quantum consciousness theory has been dismissed outright by many scientists – though others are persuaded supporters.

Instead of entering into this debate, I decided to join forces with colleagues from China, led by Professor Xian-Min Jin at Shanghai Jiaotong University, to test some of the principles underpinning the quantum theory of consciousness.  READ MORE

Brains and Consciousness

PLANET EARTH

MIND
Brains Might Sync As People Interact — and That Could Upend Consciousness Research
When we cooperate on certain tasks, our brainwaves might synchronize. This finding could upend the current understanding of consciousness.
By Conor FeehlyJul 26, 2021 7:00 PM


(Credit: Katya Kovarzh/Shutterstock


People synchronize in various ways when we interact with one another. We subconsciously match our footsteps when we walk. During conversations, we mirror each other's postures and gestures.

To that end, studies have shown that people synchronize heart rates and breathing when watching emotional films together. The same happens when romantic partners share a bed. Some scientists think we do this to build trust and perceive people as similar to ourselves, which encourages us to behave compassionately.

Surprisingly, people synchronize their neural rhythms, too. Researchers like Tom Froese, a cognitive scientist from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, think that these findings could upend our current models of consciousness.  READ MORE

Without Sense of Self

In the context of meditation practice, meditators can experience a state of “pure awareness” or “pure consciousness”, in which they perceive consciousness itself. This state can be experienced in various ways, but evidently incorporates specific sensations as well as non-specific accompanying perceptions, feelings, and thoughts.

These are just some of the findings of the most extensive survey of meditators ever conducted on the experience of pure consciousness.

The findings of the survey recently have been published in PLOS ONE. The study was conducted by Professor Thomas Metzinger from the Department of Philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and Dr. Alex Gamma from the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Zurich.

They designed an online questionnaire comprising more than a hundred questions and asked thousands of meditators worldwide to answer it.

“The goal of our research was not to learn more about meditation. We are interested in human consciousness,” said Metzinger. “Our working hypothesis was that pure consciousness is the simplest form of conscious experience. And our goal was to develop a minimal model explanation of human consciousness experience on the basis of this hypothesis.”  READ MORE

Consciousness and Quantum Physics

One of the most important open questions in science is how our consciousness is established. In the 1990s, long before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his prediction of black holes, physicist Roger Penrose teamed up with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to propose an ambitious answer.

They claimed that the brain's neuronal system forms an intricate network and that the consciousness this produces should obey the rules of quantum mechanics – the theory that determines how tiny particles like electrons move around. This, they argue, could explain the mysterious complexity of human consciousness.

Penrose and Hameroff were met with incredulity. Quantum mechanical laws are usually only found to apply at very low temperatures. Quantum computers, for example, currently operate at around -272°C. At higher temperatures, classical mechanics takes over.

Since our body works at room temperature, you would expect it to be governed by the classical laws of physics. For this reason, the quantum consciousness theory has been dismissed outright by many scientists – though others are persuaded supporters.  READ MORE

Explaining Consciousness

If physics explains all the phenomena in the universe, and if consciousness is part of the universe, then is seems that physics can explain consciousness.

Of course, this assumes that consciousness isn’t separate from the material reality that physics explains – which runs counter to René Descartes’s dualist view of mind and matter. Some have no problem with that. 

They include Daniel Dennett at Tufts University in Massachusetts and Michael Graziano at Princeton University, who argue that our intuitive sense that consciousness needs an explanation that goes beyond objective descriptions of the physical world is misplaced. 

Consciousness is a mirage produced by sophisticated neural mechanisms in the brain, they contend, so we need no new physics to explain it. Rather, we need a better understanding of how the brain creates models: of the world, of a self in the world and of a self subjectively experiencing the world.

Other non-dualists don’t outright deny that consciousness may have unusual properties that need explaining. If they are correct, then quantum mechanics may offer an explanation.

Quantum systems can exist in a superposition of all possible states simultaneously, and classical reality emerges when this superposition collapses into a single state. One idea is that this happens when the mass of a quantum system … Read more:

Our Consciousness

When I see red, it’s the most religious experience. Seeing red just results from photons of a certain frequency hitting the retina of my eye, which cascades electrical and biochemical pulses through my brain, in the same way a PC runs. But nothing happening in my eye or brain actually is the red colour I experience, nor are the photons or pulses. This is seemingly outside this world. Some say my brain is just fooling me, but I don’t accept that as I actually experience the red. But then, how can something out of this world be in our world? Andrew Kaye, 52, London.

What’s going on in your head right now? Presumably you’re having a visual experience of these words in front of you. Maybe you can hear the sound of traffic in the distance or a baby crying in the flat next door. Perhaps you’re feeling a bit tired and distracted, struggling to focus on the words on the page. Or maybe you’re feeling elated at the prospect of an enlightening read. Take a moment to attend to what it’s like to be you right now. This is what’s going on inside your head.

Or is it? There’s another, quite different story. According to neuroscience, the contents of your head are comprised of 86 billion neurons, each one linked to 10,000 others, yielding trillions of connections.

A neuron communicates with its neighbour by converting an electrical signal into a chemical signal (a neurotransmitter), which then passes across the gap in between the neurons (a synapse) to bind to a receptor in the neighbouring neuron, before being converted back into an electrical signal. From these basic building blocks, huge networks of electro-chemical communication are built up.  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...

Omnipresent Consciousness

What is common between the delectable taste of a favorite food, the sharp sting of an infected tooth, the fullness after a heavy meal, the slow passage of time while waiting, the willing of a deliberate act, and the mixture of vitality, tinged with anxiety, just before a competitive event?

All are distinct experiences. What cuts across each is that all are subjective states, and all are consciously felt. Accounting for the nature of consciousness appears elusive, with many claiming that it cannot be defined at all, yet defining it is actually straightforward. Here goes: Consciousness is experience.

That’s it. Consciousness is any experience, from the most mundane to the most exalted. Some distinguish awareness from consciousness; I don’t find this distinction helpful and so I use these two words interchangeably. 

I also do not distinguish between feeling and experience, although in everyday use feeling is usually reserved for strong emotions, such as feeling angry or in love. As I use it, any feeling is an experience. Collectively taken, then, consciousness is lived reality. It is the feeling of life itself.

But who else, besides myself, has experiences? Because you are so similar to me, I abduce that you do. The same logic applies to other people. Apart from the occasional solitary solipsist this is uncontroversial. 

But how widespread is consciousness in the cosmos at large? How far consciousness extends its dominion within the tree of life becomes more difficult to abduce as species become more alien to us.  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...

Our Brains and a Conscious Universe

As humans, we know we are conscious because we experience and feel things. Yet scientists and great thinkers are unable to explain what consciousness is and they are equally baffled about where it comes from.

"Consciousness — or better, conscious experience — is obviously a part of reality," said Johannes Kleiner, a mathematician and theoretical physicist at the Munich Center For Mathematical Philosophy, Germany. "We're all having it but without understanding how it relates to the known physics, our understanding of the universe is incomplete."

With that in mind, Kleiner is hoping math will enable him to precisely define consciousness. Working with colleague Sean Tull, a mathematician at the University of Oxford, U.K., the pair are being driven, to some degree, by a philosophical point of view called panpsychism.

This claims consciousness is inherent in even the tiniest pieces of matter — an idea that suggests the fundamental building blocks of reality have conscious experience. Crucially, it implies consciousness could be found throughout the universe.

If the researchers can answer how our brains give rise to subjective experience, there's a chance their mathematical model could extend to inanimate matter too, they said.

"A mathematical theory can be applied to many different systems, not just brains," Kleiner told All About Space via email. "If you develop a mathematical model of consciousness based on data obtained from brains, you can apply the model to other systems, for example, computers or thermostats, to see what it says about their conscious experience too."

Some prominent minds lend weight to the view of panpsychism, not least renowned Oxford physicist Sir Roger Penrose, who was among the first academics to propose we go beyond neuroscience when looking at consciousness.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...