The Principle of Consciousness
Where is consciousness and what is it?
Is it a brain pattern that is always there?
What if every time you wake up, your brain is just creating a new instance of your consciousness? Perhaps your memories, your behavior, your personality are merely whispers of your mind; but you — you are just today’s version of yourself; nothing more, nothing less.
If someone died for half an hour and then was resuscitated, would their consciousness be restored, or would their brain generate a new consciousness that thinks it is the same as the previous one because it has the same memories?
I can’t even say which kind of answer I’d prefer to be true.
Every time I go to sleep, I’m plagued by cruel doubts that go beyond my imagination. And what happens in the span of time between falling asleep and waking up? Every night, when the moon rises to the heavens, we march with conviction into the darkness, without even knowing the truth behind the mechanism that maintains the spaces between our heartbeats or keeps our lungs in sync during this noble and long silence to which we submit ourselves.
Are we truly the same person when we wake up? Or at dawn are we a mere carbon copy of the thinking creature that lay down the previous night? A strange piece of artificial memory, a life embedded in the fragile design of the final thoughts of a sleeping soul? It’s no wonder that all our ambitions, aspirations, and hopes are pursued until the very last moment.
I have always believed in these things. I saw the fall of night as a beautiful, cozy embrace of dear death; yet temporary, with a return ticket to life. Dreaming was the best part, a sliding whisper — like the beating of gray wings or the trembling legs of a moth after a short and fruitless life spent pursuing an invisible and magnanimous goal.
Consciousness is not in the brain. This idea is a product of the importance we give to this organ. Perhaps this is entirely ideological because we are paying attention to the analysis of information and not to its synthesis.
It’s the same as saying that feelings are in the brain. This is such a widespread common notion that it’s even difficult to oppose it. It’s senseless to point to the heart as responsible, despite the fact that we represent it with the heart. This occurs due to the fact that information is perceived through the eyes, ears, etc.; after being processed by the brain, signals are sent to release certain chemicals, and then your heart starts beating harder.
But at which stage is the feeling actually felt? Isn’t it when your heart starts pounding wildly? And of course, upon noticing this, you trigger several other brain processes.
I think that’s why several other cultures say we think with the heart, because for them thoughts are connected with the observations of your body’s responses, not a merely abstract thought. It’s not that the heart is independent of the brain, but emotions are felt through the released chemicals.
You are able to name what you perceive even if you don’t know the chemical language your body speaks within itself. This is just one example concerning emotion, although we should be aware of how biased it is to think that consciousness resides in the brain. It’s strange, this belief that consciousness is more akin to rationalizations than anything else, and that the core of what you are is everything you think and not your body.
Philosophers erroneously claim consciousness as their domain (solely due to the still-unknown nature of its study as a science) and it is deplorable and almost analogous to the God of the Gaps arguments of Christian apologists. We have no evidence whatsoever to suggest that consciousness is anything beyond a natural product of material interactions within the human skull. That’s all. It’s just physical. Belief, on the other hand, is almost always just a wish, a way of thinking for philosophers.
We assume that consciousness is our “understanding.” And then we exclude what is not part of our own “understanding.” And what does it mean to understand something? Instead of thinking about organs, if you’ll allow me, let’s think about verbs.
Would consciousness be something about understanding, perceiving, thinking, rationalizing, feeling, relating, meaning? Which is closest to the concept of consciousness? What I mean is that the current ideology will always favor one over another, and we are too quick to judge consciousness as a process that appears to encompass only the act of thinking, an electrical reaction within our skulls.
As we identify with these reactions, we think they are what composes us, and we believe the rest of the body is disposable, merely attached to us. Believing that we have bodies rather than being them is strange.
It just depends on how you define yourself, and that definition depends on the importance you give to certain things. An athlete who loses a leg changes what they are in a much more dramatic way than a nerdy programmer, because for the athlete, their legs say much more about who they are.
And that’s why when we lose an arm, we still feel like ourselves. We don’t identify with our body that much. On the other hand, when we think of our mind as a continuous line, believing it is the same as when we were children and it remains the same today, since losing it or admitting a change would be losing ourselves.
My point is that we are never the same thing, no matter what happens. I wouldn’t feel so different if I lost a pinky toe. So instead of having this notion of ourselves or of consciousness being a “thing” that remains within you, perhaps we should pay attention to the continuous transformation we undergo.
