There is something odd about Consciousness

It's easy to confuse consciousness with what we are conscious of.

When we see a flower we can note that we are conscious of it, we are aware of it, and it has a presence right there. It doesn't need to be a real flower this picture has the same properties.

But we can do the same for all out sense. Perhaps we have a feeling right now, or if we are sitting a sensation of the weight of our body on the seat, or one that always works a sensation of breathing somewhere. We can do this for 5 senses.

In the West at least we are less aware, but it is noted in the East, that in addition to these senses there is also a whole realm of mental activity that we can be conscious of. We are conscious of dreams, and of thoughts, and of ideas. The common story of the person seeing a coil of rope and mistaking it for a snake. Clearly the person is conscious of one thing--a half seen coil of rope--but this causes an idea of a snake which is another thing. If we think about it there is no way a coil of rope can ever be a snake, but what happens is it triggers our mind to make up the idea of a snake. The point here is not a Platonic style analysis of how perception occurs, but just a noting that we are conscious of all this stuff going on.

Now this raises a problem for theorist of Consciousness. Often consciousness is seen as a product of the brain. But things like sight and hearing and thought are products of the brain. Consciousness is quite different, it is like the back drop to all this activity.

This is the odd thing about consciousness. It seems to have a VIP ticket and access to all areas of our brain and mind. We are conscious of hearing and sight and thought as though they belonged to the same stage.

Kant calls this unity the Transcendental Unity of Apperception. That our mind seems unified by consciousness is a powerful metaphor for the idea of a Self. Sight and Sound and Feeling and Thought all stand side by side because "I" am at the centre like a commander looking at them all from a central position.

But this metaphor does not work. What we see is call seeing. There is not a second seeing that we call consciousness. When we see that flower that is seeing. The consciousness is something else. That is how we can be conscious of seeing and hearing and thinking. While we say "I see" in English when we understand something this is a metaphor for the mind penetrating something and forming it clearly. Realising it is a rope we say "I see now" it is a rope. This is not a clear physical seeing, but a clear mental activity. The seeing occurs in these faculties. The Consciousness is not itself seeing!

Now Consciousness is described a dull and bright. When the mind is pure and illuminated we have a bright consciousness. But this is another metaphor. We can do this with our eyes closed and no light being around at all.

Consciousness is not separated into senses like the senses and has no associated sense organs like eyes or brain.

Daniel Dennett in "Conscious Explained" goes to lengths to describe experiments that show that what subjects describe of their conscious experience does not match what brain scans show up. The classic example is the order of events. They may say they did one thing before another, but measuring equipment shows it was the other way around. Dennett uses this to show that what we think is going on is not what is actually going on. And from this he deduces that what we are conscious of is a model of the world that the brain constructs. All that deduction is fine. But it does not draw consciousness into the brain.

Another view is epiphenomenalism where consciousness is seen to be like an audience member looking in on the world flowing past on a film screen. But this makes a huge mistake of thinking of consciousness as "another thing" separate from what we sense. It is not a 7th sense that sees all the other senses. Seeing and feeling and thinking is done by the senses. Consciousness is not a sense.

So this is the odd thing about consciousness it is like the canvas on which all the other things happen. This is how it gets into all the places of our minds at the same time. While the physical processes that give rise to sense are a complex mess of processing all this mess and the conclusions all occur within consciousness. With the person seeing the rope in half light as a snake, the unfolding of the vision and the thoughts and the decision to grab a stick and hit it, and then seeing it again and reprocessing this and deciding its an odd snake and perhaps not a snake and then perhaps as the sun comes up and there is more light seeing it as a rope and seeing the fear subside and thoughts of calm coming about: all this unfolds within consciousness. Even all the thoughts and actions that constitute the person unfold within consciousness. It is not that a person is conscious: the consciousness is of a person!

Now this is incredible really and really quite hard to explain. I made the huge mistake in my journey here of thinking that consciousness must be a product of the brain like sight and thought. That is some way "I had consciousness" where the self is materially based in bodies and brains. I believed that I had some actual foundational existence and that somehow gave rise to consciousness. While I was perfectly capable of relativising this and seeing "all things" as belonging to the Absolute, it is so habitual in the West at least that I always left some part of myself outside to act as the anchor and the foundation for my constructions. From this seed of self I could then say it was conscious. Yet consciousness is greater even than the self.

The self is not conscious. There is only consciousness of self. And this ability of consciousness to access all areas even beyond our self is what is truly extraordinary.

Now this gets much deeper. When we fall asleep and the eyes and the brain switch off their usual functioning so we get odd other features like dreams, what happens to the consciousness?

Well we can be unconscious. But I wonder actually whether it is just the brain shutting down that we can unconsciousness. and the consciousness is quite apart from this.

I met a boy once who was blind in that they could not see anything. Yet somehow the brain was still processing information from the eyes so they had a seemingly miraculous knowledge of things in the room. If ever we needed greater proof that seeing and thinking were separate senses. So it was like their sight was asleep but their brain was awake. I don't think the boys consciousness was effected in any way. He was talking and being awake like anyone else, just able to describe that for his vision there was none. He was conscious so to speak of being blind. What was odd is that we explored deeper into his mind and he described a force that was trying to take him over. He became scared and when it took him over his eyes rolled to the top and he passed out. I forcefully spoke to him and woke him up again to speak about mundane things and he recovered his brain activity. I have no idea what that was, a kind of epilepsy perhaps, and I did not investigate how that effected his consciousness. But there is at least the possibility here to see sense and brain function as being different from consciousness.

I have tentatively taken the view in this blog that consciousness is a product of brain function like sense and mental activity. But I wonder now whether there is any foundation for this at all.