What is consciousness?

[neutralino]

Seeing as though consciousness is the monthly theme, I feel like I should at least try to learn something about it. So, to being this search, does anyone have an actual definition of consciousness? Of course, it may be something that cannot be defined, and if so I'll withdraw my question but, being a scientist and really a mathematician at heart, I first like a definition of something that I am trying to understand, before looking at properties of that thing.

So, I'm opening up the floor to comments/questions/discussion, and hope someone can help me out with the question What is consciousness?

[RascalPuff]

Seeing as though consciousness is the monthly theme, I feel like I should at least try to learn something about it. So, to being this search, does anyone have an actual definition of consciousness? Of course, it may be something that cannot be defined, and if so I'll withdraw my question but, being a scientist and really a mathematician at heart, I first like a definition of something that I am trying to understand, before looking at properties of that thing.

So, I'm opening up the floor to comments/questions/discussion, and hope someone can help me out with the question What is consciousness?

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Dear neutralino:

Thanks for the cogent question.

Best response I can offer is a formidable cache of information at
http://www.google.com/search?source=...=Consciousness

Convergent focus on one source in particular:
http://consc.net/mindpapers/8/all


Best regards,
- RP

[austintorn@aol.com]

I think, in brief, consciousness is the inner reality in which we locate thoughts, feelings, and objects in time and space in a global way—as opposed to a machine or zombie which just operates.

This inner reality is all we ever see, and it is ever and always inside our heads.

Is there an outer reality? I would guess so, but we never see it directly. The brain projects it back out where it probably is, from the information contained in its radiation. However, we would swear that unlucid night dreams have “stuff” that is really there, too.

I suppose the brain does most of its analysis subconsciously, the impending result presented to consciousness, alarmingly to some, after most, if not all, of the analysis is done. Perhaps this result is fed back in to see if a veto comes back, at least for those who don’t act instantly on their thoughts and count to ten.

So, let’s say, of all of your whole self and memories and capacity, a thought surfaces on the mind that you are happy. Consciousness observes this thought, as an audience watches a play, and so you say “I am happy”, the ‘I’ being the subject, consciousness, of the object on display: the experience of happiness.

Some think that consciousness can only be a subject, never an object, and so is the same for (the normal) everyone.

Consciousness is, to me, is the sea in which we “see”, not that which we “see”, but, of course, there’s no where else for it to be seen.

Note that no amount of physical facts about wavelengths or such can hint of, say, what the color “red” looks like in our inner reality. Therein lies the gap.

Explaining consciousness is one of the last frontiers for which we have no clue for (the gap).

Is it like a sixth sense of the brain perceiving itself? Or is the universe made of it? Or from it?

[Drifter]

HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

By G. de Purucker

[From WIND OF THE SPIRIT, pages 159-61.]

One of the most interesting things in the human constitution is
what we call the consciousness, and it is a curious paradox that
it is just about consciousness that the least is known.
Everybody talks about it; everybody says consciousness,
consciousness, and consciousness; but when you ask a man: What do
you mean by those words, he begins to hem and to haw. Shall we
say it is awareness? Yes, that is one of the functions of
consciousness. The only thing we can say is that it is, and we
all know what it is.

It does not need to be described. As soon as you begin to try to
define it, you tangle yourself up in words, and you actually lose
all intuition, all feel of what it is. Your consciousness goes
as it were from your central consciousness into the low small
consciousness of words. We all know of men who so entangle
themselves in explanations that they forget about what they are
talking, their consciousness just will not fit into details and
words. They have lost grip of the main thing.

Now human consciousness is unitary and integral, that is to say
there are not two, three, or more kinds of consciousness in the
human constitution. But it is a unitary consciousness that comes
down into our brain minds or into our ordinary consciousness from
the spirit of us, the divine center where the truth abides in
fullness. This human center of us cannot transmit this celestial
visitant fully because this human part of us is beclouded, heavy,
and thick with the sheaths of the lower consciousness. Our
thoughts, feelings, and emotions rise around us like a thick
thundercloud under the sun. But behind the cloud is the one
sunlight. So it is with consciousness.

Theosophical seers for many ages and belonging to different
religions and philosophies have classified human consciousness
for purposes of convenient understanding into four divisions.
There are Jagrat, the waking state, Swapna, the sleeping state,
Sushupti, the utter dreamless sleep, the state of death for most
men, and Turiya, the state of the divine, which god-men and the
great seers and sages have told us of, because these last to a
certain extent experience it.

It is all one consciousness. Jagrat is the state in which we all
here are now -- unless there is someone asleep in the audience,
and if he is, he will be in the Swapna state, the sleeping state
in which he is more or less dreaming. Sometimes people are half
dreaming when they are in the Jagrat state. We call it
daydreaming. I do not mean creative dreaming of thought; I mean
just the lazy dreaming where the thought wanders. It is part
Swapna in the Jagrat state. Next is the Sushupti, as we call it,
which in sleep is dreamless. It is the state of most human souls
after death: perfect sweet undreaming consciousness, in which a
thousand days are as a day, and time exists not because the
consciousness is not in these lower realms of time, measured by
clocks, watches, movements of the celestial spheres.
Consciousness there is not in the time-state. Then we have the
highest of this same unitary consciousness, the source of our
consciousness, Turiya. The Buddhists call it the nirvana. The
Hindus call it Mukti or Moksa. We use these terms also for they
are so definitely descriptive. It is the pure consciousness of
the spirit of man, a ray from the divine, or a spark from the
divine.

Now then, here is the deduction, the moral to be drawn from these
facts. All of us have this one state of consciousness
manifesting to most of us in these three terms: physical waking,
sleeping with dreams, dreamless sleep, or the death-state for
most people until they embody themselves. Do you know what this
means? It means that we men are not alert to what is in us and
what we can do. There is the key to the mysteries of initiation.
First learn to be fully awake when you are in the Jagrat state as
we are now, physical awakening. Learn to be fully awake. Next,
learn to carry that state of self-consciousness when you sleep,
so that you will be as self-conscious when you sleep as you are,
or think you are, when you are awake. Third and next, the
highest: learn to be self-consciously awake after death. For it
is one consciousness working through all three states, and every
one of us has it; and every one of us is subject to these three
lower conditions or states of this one unitary consciousness.

Think what this means for our future evolutionary progress. Why
should we not begin now? I remember a story that was told of the
Founder of the Theosophical Society, H P. Blavatsky.

One of her pupils came to her one day and said, "HPB, you know I
am awfully tired; I have been working all day long."

"So sorry," said HPB, "you had better go and rest. By the way,
do you sleep when you sleep, truly sleep? Well, you are doing
better than I do. I am working while I am sleeping."

She had reached that point where she could keep conscious, in
self-conscious awareness, while other men slept; in other words,
she could be self-consciously aware when most people go to sleep.

The third stage, as I have said, is to be self-consciously aware
after death. When you have attained that, then the next is the
state of the god-men, or the men-gods, whom the human race has
known, the Buddhas and Christs, men like Shankaracharya,
Tsongkhapa, and Apollonius. When you reach that stage, you have
to be conscious all the time, waking, sleeping, after death, and
until you return, for you will then have found yourself.

Have you never asked yourself why is it that after dreamless
sleep or dreaming sleep, you awaken the same man? It is so common
and so ordinary that it slips the attention of the average man,
showing that you are not fully aware, not fully awake. But the
genius sees this, and he recognizes that this most common
phenomenon is precisely one that has never been explained by
science, and yet the explanation is with us all the time. We
return because we never have left. We have rebecome our
self-conscious selves again because we were never anything other.
Consciousness is continuity. We have not taught ourselves to be
self-consciously awake when we sleep, self-consciously awake when
we die. But the power is in you. It is yours for the asking.
You remember that Pythagoras called those who were sleeping this
life and death away, the living dead. How long are you going to
stand that for yourselves?

[Drifter]

pls forgive the obvious "verbosity" and so called "machine gunning", [no stone unturned, ever curious soul, further, and not put forth in the spirit of being "testy"]

Thanking you kindly in advance.
D.

" Man's two basic types of operational faculties, reason and feeling, are both inherently unreliable, as our history of precarious individual and collective survival attests. Although we ascribe our actions to reason, man in fact operates primarily out of pattern recognition; the logical arrangement of data serves mainly to enhance a pattern recognition system that then becomes "truth". But nothing is ever "true," except under certain circumstances and then only from a particular viewpoint, characteristically unstated.

As a result thoughtful man deduces that all of his problems arise from the difficulty of "knowing." Ultimately, the mind arrives at epistemology, the branch of philosophy that examines the question of how---and to what degree---man really knows anything. Such philosophical discourse may seem either erudite or irrelevant, but the questions they pose are at the very core of human experience. No matter where we start in an examination of human knowledge, we always end up looking at the phenomena of awareness and the nature of human consciousness. And we eventually come to the same realization: Ant further advance in man's condition requires a verifiable basis for knowing, upon which we may place our trust.

The main obstacle to man's development, then, is his lack of self knowledge, about the nature of consciousness itself. If we look within ourselves at the instant-by-instant processes of our minds, we'll soon notice that the mind acts much more rapidly than it would acknowledge. It becomes apparent that the notion that our actions are based on thoughtful decisions is a grand illusion. The decision making process is a function of consciousness itself; the mind makes choices based on millions of pieces of data and their correlations and projections, far beyond conscious comprehension, and with enormous rapidity. This is a global function dominated by energy patterns that the new science of non-linear dynamics terms attractors.

Consciousness automatically chooses what it deems from moment to moment because that ultimately is the only function of which it is capable. The relative weight and merit given to certain data are determined by a predominant attractor pattern operating in the individual or in a collective group of minds. These patterns can be identified, described, and calibrated; out of that information arises a totally new understanding of human behavior, history, and the destiny of mankind. And as we explore the nature of man's problems, it becomes clear that there has never been a reliable experimental yardstick with which to measure and interpret man's motivations and experiences over the course of his history. " [Until now]

[Drifter]

Consciousness: What Is It?

Consciousness is the only thing that we experience directly -- everything else is filtered through the medium of our consciousness. Very often, I suspect, we confuse consciousness as a general category with human consciousness and the workings of the human mind. But consciousness takes in a much wider field of awareness, perception, and inwardness. Looking at the other kingdoms of nature, we know from observation that animals are aware, perceive, and feel. Experiments publicized in the 1960s and '70s in books like The Secret Life of Plants suggest that plants demonstrate awareness, memory, and sensitivity to the thought and feeling of other beings. Today research provides growing experimental evidence for a degree of consciousness even in individual cells, and earlier in the 20th century Chandra Bose conducted experiments which implied a sensitivity in metals.
The point is, how can we presume to limit the scope and expression of consciousness? Because we do not observe or recognize consciousness in a particular being or thing is no reason to deny its presence there. Our perceptions as humans are very restricted, which makes particularly apt the scientific maxim that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. That most of the electromagnetic spectrum is imperceptible to us makes it no less real. That thousands of radio and television waves fill the air around us, carrying sounds and pictures, would seem unbelievable if we did not have proof from our everyday life. Moreover, our scale limits perceptions in both space and time: what is too small, too vast, too slow, or too rapid is invisible to the most sophisticated devices.
In a parallel case, until the 20th century science wrestled with matter-energy dualism. If they are two absolutely disassociated principles, how could they interact? To solve this quandary energy was sometimes considered a byproduct of matter and at other times energy was considered fundamental and matter the byproduct. But Einstein, with his famous E = mc2, ended this dualism, proposing that energy and matter were not essentially distinct, but rather two aspects of a more fundamental principle, which implied that matter could be transformed into energy, and energy into matter.
Today we continue to wrestle with a similar matter-consciousness dualism, and perhaps in time a comparable basic unity will be recognized. This dualistic problem appears in Christian thought because soul and spirit are considered completely immaterial yet able to influence the material body. Mainstream science avoids the problem of how the psyche or consciousness influences the body by holding that there is no mind-body dualism: consciousness is a byproduct of complex organizations of matter, of chemical reactions in the nervous system. However, materialism and idealism are not the only non-dualistic solutions.
If matter and consciousness are two phenomena of one underlying principle, the terms may represent poles of a continuum which runs from beyond the densest substance we can imagine, through physical matter, energy, vitality, emotion, thought, and spiritual consciousness, up through the most divine consciousness or state. We are aware of our body, vitality, feelings, intellect, intuitions, and perhaps also of our spiritual and divine consciousness, though these last two are largely shut out from everyday awareness by our busy feelings and thoughts. As points or ranges on the continuum of substance-consciousness, each level is simultaneously substantial, energic, and conscious. Thus thoughts and feelings, for example, are not abstractions. They are as actual as x-rays or gamma rays -- and as imperceptible to our physical senses, though easily perceived by our psyches.
But back of all being lies the inner root or source of awareness. No matter how far we delve into ourselves, that inmost self always remains beyond. It is each being's fundamental junction-point with underlying cosmic reality, the same in all people, all life forms, everything, be it a subatomic particle, person, planet, or galaxy. In the same way, every manifested existence has a substantial form occupying a particular bandwidth of the matter-consciousness spectrum. This innermost shared consciousness and source of existence is the basis of brotherhood or the oneness of all, the unifying agent and most fundamental substratum of the cosmos. According to mystic traditions the world over, by transcending our unexamined patterns of thought, perception, and awareness, we can in time not only understand but actually experience for ourselves this unity at the root of our being.

[leskey]

Hi, all.

Could consciousness be defined as, "an abstract perception of probability?"

[austintorn@aol.com]

Indeed, Lesky, consciousness is the arena in which scenarios of consequences collapse into a thought or an action based on probabilities that the brain has "wired".

Sometimes it comes in a flash and sometimes there is no best answer. Other times we are just witnessing the drama as a spectator of ourselves or of a scene.

[leskey]

Hi, Austin.

Some would argue that the secarios (pertaining to self) are not a pre-requisite of consciousness. The thought is an abstract, perception precedes action and the probabilities are as multifarious as they are valid, hence my definition.

[Drifter]

In man five ‘powers’ exist, which are the agents of perception---that is to say, through these five powers, man perceives material things.
These are;
sight, which perceives visible forms;
hearing, which perceives audible sounds;
smell, which perceives odors;
taste, which perceives foods; and
feeling, which is all parts of the body and perceives tangible things.
These five powers perceive outward existences.

Man has also ‘spiritual ‘powers’: These are;
imagination, which conceives things;
thought, which reflects upon realities;
comprehension, which comprehends realities;
memory, which retains whatever man imagines, thinks and comprehends.

The intermediary between the five outward powers and the inward powers is the ‘sense’ which they posses in common---that is to say, the sense which acts between the outer and the inner powers, conveys to the inward powers whatever the outward powers discern.
It is termed the ‘common faculty’, because it communicates between the outward and the inward powers and thus is common to the outward and inward powers.

For instance, sight is one of the outer powers; it sees and perceives this flower, and conveys this perception to the inner power—the common faculty---which transmits this perception to the power of imagination, which in turn conceives and forms this image and transmits it to the power of thought; the power of thought reflects and, having grasp the thought, conveys it to the power of comprehension; the power of comprehension, when it has comprehended it, delivers the image of the object perceived to the power of memory, and the memory keeps it in repository.

The outward powers are five: the power of sight, of hearing, of smell, of taste and of feeling.
The inner powers are five; the common faculty, and the powers of imagination, thought, comprehension and memory.

‘Common sense’ as defined by Abdul l baha.

Hi, Austin.

Some would argue that the secarios (pertaining to self) are not a pre-requisite of consciousness. The thought is an abstract, perception precedes action and the probabilities are as multifarious as they are valid, hence my definition.