2old4this
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I don't have an understanding of consciousness. I only have a vague idea of what it might be and some very strong ideas on what it isn't.
My vague idea is very difficult to express, but I'll try.
First of all, in order to understand my idea at all it helps to understand the concept of "qualia". Qualia are the internal sensations of experience. When I see the colour red, I experience it in a particular way - it has a "red-ness". That sensation is a quale. It may be completely different to your redness quale. however, every time I see red, I have the same quale. Everytime you see red you do too (perhaps different from mine but the same as last time you had experienced it).
Qualia point to the fact that though our sensations have very specific meaning, they are only meaningful internally. If I were somehow able to extract my quale and implant it into your thoughts/experience, it would most probably be meaningless to you (or mean something entirely different).
If you think about this concept for a while in a dark room after a smooth spliff while nibbling halva and listening to some Karunesh on the hi-fi, it seems to take you to this thought: if all of our internal mental states are different from other people's, and if there is truly a distinction between the qualia per se and the physical machinations going on in the brain, then perhaps all of our internal mental states are not "causal" as such (this is where language fails me) but an accidental property that happens to arise. I believe that ANY complex system will similarly be generating an emergent state which from that system's point of view might be termed "experience". Most such systems do not, however, have the means to communcate their experience to other similar systems as we can.
I don't think that there is any fundamental difference between simple "experience" (i.e. the experiencing of something) and "consciousness" (i.e. self-awareness). By that I mean there is no magic point at which an experiencing thing becomes a conscious thing. In my view all experiencing things are conscious but to different degrees. I therefore also believe that there are many entities in the universe (or our own evolutionary or technological future) that are more conscious than we are. They may well ask themsleves whether we are conscious in any meaningful sense.
If internal sensation/experience is an accidental and inevitable byproduct of a complex system then it is easy to see why we have been unable to answer the question "what is consciousness?". We have been looking for answers like "well it's this bunch of neurons here" or "it's an energy field that interacts with the brain" or "it's the thing that arises when a being's model of the world becomes so complete it includes a model of itself". But in fact the best answer we may ever hope to arrive at is that it's simply the overal internal state of the system. It's what it's like to be that system. It's the redness of red.
2old
My vague idea is very difficult to express, but I'll try.
First of all, in order to understand my idea at all it helps to understand the concept of "qualia". Qualia are the internal sensations of experience. When I see the colour red, I experience it in a particular way - it has a "red-ness". That sensation is a quale. It may be completely different to your redness quale. however, every time I see red, I have the same quale. Everytime you see red you do too (perhaps different from mine but the same as last time you had experienced it).
Qualia point to the fact that though our sensations have very specific meaning, they are only meaningful internally. If I were somehow able to extract my quale and implant it into your thoughts/experience, it would most probably be meaningless to you (or mean something entirely different).
If you think about this concept for a while in a dark room after a smooth spliff while nibbling halva and listening to some Karunesh on the hi-fi, it seems to take you to this thought: if all of our internal mental states are different from other people's, and if there is truly a distinction between the qualia per se and the physical machinations going on in the brain, then perhaps all of our internal mental states are not "causal" as such (this is where language fails me) but an accidental property that happens to arise. I believe that ANY complex system will similarly be generating an emergent state which from that system's point of view might be termed "experience". Most such systems do not, however, have the means to communcate their experience to other similar systems as we can.
I don't think that there is any fundamental difference between simple "experience" (i.e. the experiencing of something) and "consciousness" (i.e. self-awareness). By that I mean there is no magic point at which an experiencing thing becomes a conscious thing. In my view all experiencing things are conscious but to different degrees. I therefore also believe that there are many entities in the universe (or our own evolutionary or technological future) that are more conscious than we are. They may well ask themsleves whether we are conscious in any meaningful sense.
If internal sensation/experience is an accidental and inevitable byproduct of a complex system then it is easy to see why we have been unable to answer the question "what is consciousness?". We have been looking for answers like "well it's this bunch of neurons here" or "it's an energy field that interacts with the brain" or "it's the thing that arises when a being's model of the world becomes so complete it includes a model of itself". But in fact the best answer we may ever hope to arrive at is that it's simply the overal internal state of the system. It's what it's like to be that system. It's the redness of red.
2old
