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Consciousness, or Awareness (along with the brain), seems to have the task of producing future, through a focus on learning something, good or bad, such as how to drive a car, or by merely observing, like how to swing a tennis racket. Consciousness is less involved after learning, although still on the watch, as we go somewhat on automatic pilot, but the brain is always employed. Consciousness might just be a higher part of the brain that makes sense of the lower parts. As for what is really “out there”, no one yet knows, whether it be real or virtual, but there it something.

Is Consciousness just an epiphenomenon, a tourist along for the ride, something that is a global workspace for the brain’s results, so they can perhaps feed back in for some final check and balance?

It seems that we are our brains. They are still true to us, for we’ve filled them with knowledge, memories, and associations—all of which results in our thoughts, feelings, and emotions that surface on the mind.

However, we, at the conscious level are not privy to the brain’s analysis—via millions of connected neurons voting or doing whatever they do, for that is subconscious; however, we become aware of the brain’s result a few tenths of a second later, seemingly being the last to know of what the brain came up with.

Sometimes the thoughts are simple, like hunger, and sometimes they are more complex life decisions or at least how to arrange a room of furniture.
Often times, though, thoughts appear out of the blue, unwilled. Technically, thoughts out of the blue must be unwilled since we can’t will what does the willing—the subconscious elections from the brain, and, in fact, might be often quite surprised at surfacing thoughts.

Perhaps some surprise thoughts, like killing someone, get vetoed and squashed instantly, although I’m sure many less obvious cases slip through, getting some of us in some trouble.

But, other than a global workplace, can consciousness affect the physical? Well, no, not if everything originates in the brain. But, then again, no one seems to know what consciousness really is, if it’s more than that brain’s perception of itself. It, along with the TOE, is one of the last frontiers that we can’t even get a handle on, making things like DNA comparison seem easy.

I could right now force myself to get up and take a walk, to show control of the mental over the physical, but doesn’t the action still originate from the brain since it was thinking about how to prove that the mental can cause the physical?

If we turned off our brain, could consciousness come up with an ideas on its own and then tell the brain what to do when our brain was turned back on?