Dimebag writes:
I guess those are the three questions I have to start about consciousness:
1. How is consciousness produced by the various parts of the brain.
2. What consciousness is, its nature, how it can be defined.
3. Why is consciousness required by our brain, when similar outcomes could be achieved (apparently) through a non conscious process.
Interesting topic!
First of all, I think it would be a bit more logical to start with question 2. After all, you need a definition first of what it is you want to discuss.
Consciousness is often described as being an emergent property of the activity of the brain, much like motion is the emergent property of the workings of an automobile. You can find bits of technology inside a car - like gears and pistons - but you can't find bits of motion anywhere inside it. Likewise, you can dissect a brain to find neurons and other biological structures inside it, but you won't find bits of consciousness there. In short, consciousness is not a thing, it's a process.
How consciousness is produced in the brain is still for the large part uncharted territory, although science is making inroads at promising speed. My own thoughts on the subject are based on the idea that even very basic living creatures need internal models of their environment and other creatures in it, in order to interact with them. The more sophisticated the models become, the more intricate the possibilities of interaction become. At a certain level of sophistication, a creature may not only have models of other creatures in its surroundings, but also of itself. The creature has to monitor all its models in order to keep an overall assessment of its situation in the world up to date. As it does so, it also monitors itself, and might even monitor itself monitoring itself, perhaps going several levels deep in this respect. I think this is where a subjective experience of self emerges.
As for the question why consciousness is required by the brain, I doubt whether that's actually true. Admittedly, it can be argued that being conscious might confer an evolutionary advantage to a creature, but many animals can hardly be called conscious, and even in humans experiments by Benjamin Libet have shown that many processes in our brain take place without our consciousness being the instigator, even though we are convinced it is.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.
™ Version 4.2
