What is Consciousness? Who's asking the question?

a reply to: Navarro

My wayward mind sometimes goes somewhere far off. It seems my distance from myself is far from my life. I want to be closer to me. It scares me that I can see what people are thinking but sometimes I don't know what I am thinking. Some choices in life I have made was when I was seeing what others were thinking hence making a choice on someone else's thought. A bad choice. My inner voice travels in the wilderness. My dreams have taken me to places you could only see in a dream. My desire to love is loving and understanding people who they really are. I never get mad at anything or anyone.

My joy I find is in my dreams. I have learned to control some of my dreams by seeing myself from a distance. But I cannot find where I am at only by sight. Am I messed up. Sure! Being messed up is part of life. I have never made the same mistake more then twice.

Are memories part of conciousness? For example, someone that has a severe case of amnesia where he/she constantly forgets what happened the day before. Is that person still conscious if he/she lives day to day with no recollection of the past.

Deleted my post.

originally posted by: Brometheus
Are memories part of conciousness? For example, someone that has a severe case of amnesia where he/she constantly forgets what happened the day before. Is that person still conscious if he/she lives day to day with no recollection of the past.

From your perspective, you can't even know for certain whether or not I'm conscious. For all you know, I'm just a computer algorithm, or a figment of your imagination. You might exist in a world in which you're the only conscious being, or where some are conscious and some aren't. Would it shock you terribly if Paris Hilton was sooner an automaton the a truly conscious being? It would be regrettable if the only two conscious beings within the universe was you and the ant which you crushed on the sidewalk recently without having ever been aware of its presence.

I see no reason why it shouldn't be possible for a being to be conscious, even if they're only aware of the moment. Even if one can only recall the past second, they still have memory anyhow. Just a far shorter memory than most. If one were entirely lacking memory, I assume they'd be a vegetable and thus never aware. There may be reason in that case to conclude they may lack consciousness in the metaphysical sense, and would certainly lack consciousness in the neurological sense. Or, perhaps they'd be catatonic rather than a comatose vegetable.

originally posted by: Navarro

It's the "chicken or the egg" question converted into metaphysics. I like it. It doesn't explain creation though, but rather makes an assumption about a step within the process.

Think about it. Just like the fleshly heart arises from its own beat, so too the humanly flesh originated from the Word. Human flesh is the chosen vessel for the material manifestation of the Word of God.