Consciousness

Wiki says ‘Consciousness is the state of awareness or the quality, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.’

Philosophers, spiritualists and, more latterly, pseudo-scientists (the clinical type) and scientists have been trying to unravel the mystery of consciousness to little avail.

I recently viewed a ‘banned’ TED video of this character named Graham Hancock who is an advocate of certain consciousness altering drugs.

His view is that we are all better people (in the collective) if we carefully experience certain altered states of consciousness through the use of drugs.

He notes that modern Western society has a serious issue with mind-altering substances because we are fixated on the rational here-and-now and, by implication, control and power structures that rely on people being in this rational here-and-now state.

One of his most interesting statements was a question he posed as to whether the brain was like an electric motor and consciousness was the electricity running around inside of it. In this model, he says, when the brain stops so does the electricity.

The other model that he proposed is that consciousness is like a TV signal that the brain picks up and that even when the brain stops the TV signal may still be out there in the ether.

I hate hypothetical either/or’s because usually real life is a bit messier than that. So I smell a rat.

Which led me to wonder as to how consciousness developed in the first place.

My guess is that as animals (including us humans) started socialising there was an evolutionary benefit to observing and understanding how others in the pack were feeling.

Later on as the human neocortex developed this observation of others may have extended to us elucidating what others in the pack were thinking.

So the initial benefit of consciousness might have not been self-awarenesss but other-awareness, which would be beneficial in any social pack activity.

However, we may have started using our own rational processes to process the incoming other-consciousness data to produce higher order predictive models of others as to their likely behaviour.

My proposition is that other-consciousness developed firstly through being aware of others and eventually this led to a heightened self-consciousness as we started used rational predictions to modify our own behaviours through both feelings and thoughts to even further optimise the outcomes from social behaviour.

This would explain the effect of mind altering drugs and their effect on consciousness. Let me explain;

The key impact of mind altering drugs and even dreaming during sleep is to drag one into the self and in the process to cut off much of the outside world including that data associated with other-consciousness. That is, the other-consciousness associated with the awareness of others is mostly removed during sleep and whilst taking mind-altering drugs, and replaced with memories and internal constructions.

Using classical scientific methodology, a limiting case of this proposition would be a human being that has never had any external stimulus of any sort. I would suggest that self awareness (self-consciousness) would never develop simply because its primary purposes is to process and utilise the ‘other awareness’ data (other-consciousness).

So in this context this is what I can say about various of the usual chestnuts on the subject:

1. Having a holiday from other-consciousness (i.e. dreaming during sleep or drugs or whatever) must be an important part of the program because dreaming is built into our make-up. Running dummy scenarios in our dreams may just be our method to calibrate our models. Running drug altered models may have real benefits by randomly showing us radically alternative solutions that we wouldn’t otherwise arrive at.

2. When we die our ability to pick up the signals of other-consciousness is lost. Logically our ability to process this data (the self-consciousness) would also be lost and indeed it would be also quite redundant without the key data to process. The so-called TV signals of all those still alive might be still floating around and the memory of us may live on in others but I doubt very much that our particular version of the program is floating around in anything but fragments of our impact on others.

3. Noting that everyone on the planet is connected through the so-called six degrees of connectivity and that with 7.5 billion people on the planet we are therefore also connected to just about every molecule on the surface of the earth, it’s not hard to imagine that all of our incoming other-consciousness data incorporates an awareness of the whole thing. When our collective physical existence starts presenting a threat to the ecosystem and some yellow canary people start feeling these emotions, this must ripple through all of our self-consciousnesses to some degree or another. This may make us feel ill and therefore, for those more ‘open’ and inclined to ponder the issues more deeply, a desire to process this other-consciousness data in some dream or drug induced sessions.