My simple theory of consciousness, not everything...please critique....

sorry for how big this post is, but ive been studying neuroscience, philosophy and psychology for five years and college and i think im settling on a certain viewpoint, i need to discuss this with bright people, and ive seen many here in these forums....my first three paragraphs are things i wrote in other threads about my take on the subjective consciousness theory, and then i look at some facts about us and then try to come to a conclusion on our purpose. the key point i make these is how we seem to be two parts, consciousnss/receiver of info/decision maker and a body that allows our consciousness to have a direct physical impact on the world by being able to interact with it, there must be a reason we were given a body and not just a conscious mind......and i think about how the machines we create, right now we have their body structures figured out, but we are trying to get them to be able to learn and essentially assume a perspective and take in data allowing it to become unique, the body is a very very robotic thing, based on the same electrical principles as the wiring in robots and in your houses, could we be somebodys robots sent to explore and create feedback......?based on emotions that inspire us to fight for what we/our consciousness believes in...i know its a long post, but please try to read it in its entirety, im really looking for any feedback.....

ok so we all have the same physical mechanisms, we all have the same brains, when we are born there is nothing unique inside each of us that differentiates us and forms a unique conscious self. It is only due to the fact that the data coming into each of our brains is unique. What i mean is no one inhabits the same time and space on earth or in the universe as you, so even a genetic copy can only stand next to you, or behind you, they cannot literally inhabit the same space and thus take in the same data(data being everything that comes into your sensory organs and such)...therefore there will be two points of existence, two perspectives and therefore two distinct consciousness's, this is how you can expand this to all of us, which generally share a majority of our dna and have the same brain/bodily structures/processes.

So that is how we form a unique consciousness from the same mechanisms, the definition of our consciousness is subjective, if we were all of reality would we be conscious?, maybe at best it would be one biiiig consciousness, but there wouldn’t be billions of consciousness’s like there are now, there need to be distinctions between each observer and the world In relation to them, differing perspective and observational points .

This subjective definition works great for me, because I see a human urge to create objectivity, anything that is BORN naturally has a SUBJECTIVE experience of the world, because they were not around before, wont be after, it only experiences a piece of time, this unique piece is expressed as a unique mind. It is like having a tunnel vision, If your vision was big enough to encompass all of reality, that is what you would be, how would you see and regulate the inner workings, inside your frame of reference, and actually I think that is why live is seen at all levels, we cant consciously interact with viruses and bacteria, but we have things inside us that interact with them, who knows if they are conscious but still, they are there to deal with them, because we really cant, and when I say we I mean this mind that is pieced together by my brain and the unique data set I have acquired.


I think the main goal to answering all our questions is understanding what we are, if we look at our purpose then I think we can break ourselves down into two parts, the consciousness and the body, the consciousness is the thing that enables you to receive information, by separating you from the rest of the world and establishing a unique self(through the subjectivity discussed above…..) then we need to take what we learned and regulate and have an impact on the world, why else would we have a physical body, because to be purely mind and conscious, without a physical body, would seem to make more sense because then we are not limited by our bodies, their death and so forth……it must be to be able to receive information and build concepts and then be able to actually physically impact the world, we have a foot in two worlds for a reason……..a lot of people are saying we are spiritual things stuck in a physical world blabal, why would what made us do that to us? Why cant we be spiritual things based on unique physical reality???


And in terms of purpose we must all serve one purpose, I think it might be to gather data and help regulate the world, as the many things inside our bodies do……we all have the same brains, same bodies, we differ only by the data/environment that is placed in, I just watched the tupac shakur video and he had a very unique perspective, on whats going on in the hood, this is a perfect example, we are each like reporters for the news, talking to each other, telling each other what we have experienced…. i believe this is made in order to regulate life, take something like mistreatment of animals, once we see it, process it, we can take action to stop it, we all come from the same thing, we are the same thing, it is this one thing talking to itself, reporting on what it is experiencing in its assigned area of data............

We are constantly changing, these days everyone feels it,,,,,well did anyone ever think its because we live in a time where we are connected...thats why we feel this connectedness...it doesnt have to be some mystical thing that we were always meant to feel or whatever.....it could just be the product of living in an interconnected society, we are expressing the state of our times, we become what we learn, conscious expands, these days we just have more ways to learn, in the past the great individuals who made discoveries and led the way, were usually well learned, they encompassed more of the world within their brain, imagine their consciousness as a ballon that expands, in the past, it reached towns and countries, and those were the learned higher class people first......the day we live in, we can inflate that balloon to the size of the entire earth, our consciousness can expand because we KNOW what is going on, we are told, we are shown whales being killed, we see kids starving, animals getting mistreated, you see it and then you feel the emotion, you are conscious of it, this interconnectdness is not by chance, any maybe not mystical, but just a simple product of the world......and i think i understand where we might be going, because as we develop better processing computers and data systems, consciousness will keep expanding.......

the reason I truly believe all I have stated above is because I looked at myself and thought about what the one thing that is more important than any thought or question about existence….what enables us to even be able to think about an existence and ask questions, like when Descartes said I think therefore, iam…….Why are we even conscious of all this? I don’t see how we are spiritual things that survive after we die, simply because there are more and more brains being born and more consciousness popping up, are more spiritual ethereal things being generated to match up with our growth? I also don’t see any of us an being present at birth, you cannot say you existed, there was no you….if “you” were born in the 1500’s you wouldn’t be who you are now, you could even be born in the same time as someone else, but be different just because you are present in a different space…..these selves we build are by products, we really are just a bunch of brains…….doing work for someone or something, now who or what those things are, or who we were, or who we are connected with, that is one mystical concept that I will think is up to a debate......

Originally posted by subjectivelife


ok so we all have the same physical mechanisms, we all have the same brains, when we are born there is nothing unique inside each of us that differentiates us and forms a unique conscious self. It is only due to the fact that the data coming into each of our brains is unique

This is where you went off the rails IMHO. There are genes. Genetics influences who you are. For example, soon after birth, every baby will flinch away from a snakelike zigzag-movement and focus more intensely something that resembles a human face. This is hardwired into people before they are born; it has nothing to do with "data coming into our brains." In fact, similar instincts are hardwired into every mammal. So any theory that posits a "blank slate" at birth cannot be correct.

reply to post by silent thunder


of course i understand genetics and primitive innate responses, but what i mean is there is no self there yet, you are not a fully conscious being.....what i mean by the same mechanisms and brains is that we each see(on the same orders of) light wavelength, sound frequency, what i mean is this projection that we see in front of us, is similar in each......


with all the possible things we COULD see/hear/sense it is a peculiar that we each see the same general situation


and i actually think genes are a way for life to try to prepare you for anything, thats why there are so many, and most animals share a majority of theirs, like a spectrum of life, one big library, with sections that share most of it, but have some uniqueness to them, also having a gene doesnt always mean you will express it, every brain is programmed to see, but when scientists took a cat from birth to a dark room right away for the first few months of its life, it never developed the ability to see, even when exposed to light, my point is that the brain is the ultimate adaptation machine, lobes associated with hearing can convert over to vision and such things depending on the input it gets....



those hard wired things are included in my brain definition, the thing that requires data and some time, is the consciousness that is built....

reply to post by silent thunder


I've had many people tell me "You are an old soul". That's a creepy thing to say to a 4 year old but it was said regardless. What is instinct? Being in the same situation as you have before?

We don't understand it, well maybe certain people do =)

looking at my same genetic copy of you example shows my point i think, im trying to talk about the fact that you have a unique consciousness perspective, even a genetic replica with the same genes and innate reactions and evreything, will have his own consciousness, you will not feel like you are in both heads at once, in both PERSPECTIVES, the reason i care so much about the formation of this perspective is because i believe it is the only reason we are conscious and talking to each other right now, what would we be if we did not have these distinctions...?

Firstly, out of curiosity, why do we have to have a purpose? Why does there have to be any purpose at all?

Anyway, we do not all have the same physical makeup, we are all different and experience different things at different times, that is what affords us a unique consciousness. Taking your identical genetic copy example the same rule applies. Uniqueness is inevitable because they do not inhabit the same space and will therefore experience things differently. Were they to inhabit the same space, however, then there would only be one of them with a unique conscience.

Cheers

Originally posted by subjectivelife

And in terms of purpose we must all serve one purpose, I think it might be to gather data and help regulate the world, as the many things inside our bodies do……

the purpose of life is to stay alive....

reply to post by myselfaswell


hmm im pretty sure thats the point i made in the post lol, did you read all of it ?

reply to post by Versa


but death is a part of life, how could the purpose be to stay alive, wouldnt we be given something that didnt age and die like our bodies do....? there must be a reason we have bodies which we use to physically manipulate and impact the reality around us, after our consciousness decides to do so......

Hello!

Nice speculation on the mind/body. You are pretty much in line with my opinion concerning our existence. What i would like to bring in as an analogy is a computer game. Take crysis for example. There you can go in online matches, you can be a spectator and watch when others play and chat with them, or you can join the actual game that is going on.

Liken this to being alive/dead. When spectating, you can fly around freely, fly through walls and be instantly in the place you wish. When participating in the game, you will spawn (be born) somewhere, you run around in the world trying to interact and win the game. While spectating you are not permitted to talk to those in game since you could ruin it by telling the players something they should not know.

When a player dies, he can talk to the other ones dead and the spectators. HE can choose to go spectate or to go in line for reincarnation.

There is no right or wrong in the game. There might be terrorist and special operations teams. There might be red and blue team. But when you play the game, you are always fighting the enemy - being bad or good is only a matter of perspective.

Originally posted by subjectivelife
reply to post by Versa

 

but death is a part of life, how could the purpose be to stay alive

no death is the end of life and we do our best to stay alive as long as we can (well most of us)....

Originally posted by subjectivelife
wouldnt we be given something that didnt age and die like our bodies do....?

By whom?

but why do we seem like explorers? if it was just to stay alive wouldnt we not die? what i mean by death is a part of life, is that death naturally happens, it is not something we can fight...... theres a reason we have a body that expires and dies, i dont want to get caught up in this too much though, this is simple, i think there are other more important points, purpose is difficult to discuss anyway, what about the attempt to explain our arising consciousness

Originally posted by subjectivelife death naturally happens, it is not something we can fight......

not true, we fight death every day just by continuing to breathe and eating and so on.

im pretty sure you know what i meant, that we will eventually die.....stop focusing on a sentence see the thought as a whole, there is a lot of logic to it, everything must have a reason, there must be a reason that we die, there is a reason we dont have just a purely non physical conscious mind, theres a reason a finite body is attached to it, in order to interact with the world

Of course there is a "reason" for everything, but define reason. There are 'levels' to everything; are we talking about high level reason where a conscious mind has made the decision? or low level reason where atom A hit atom B causing atom C to float into sector 5. For low level reason, it is all around us. Nothing 'just happens' without a particular cause. If you were capable of observing the states of all matter and energy in this universe at once, and had perfect knowledge of the dynamics (physics) of that matter and energy, you could determine the precise reason for everything being what it is...from why we have a yellow star, to why Bob Saget gets made fun of so much. If you download a physics program like Phun, you can experiment with this idea. If you take a steel ball and drop it onto the ground from 5 feet up, then left the area, someone else could come by, measure the heat beneath the steel ball, and utilize mathematics to formulate a convergence point of that energy. Since energy does not spontaneously appear (only under special circumstances, and even that has physics governing it!), the individual can logically propose that the energy came from the steel ball...and because again, spontaneous emission is highly unlikely, utilizing Occam's Razor, the individual can reasonably propose (assuming no further evidence is available) that the ball gained its energy from a gravitational impact. Under this assumption, they can again utilize math to calculate the initial height of the ball. In doing this, they figured out the 'cause' of the event/state of the system. You must remember though that NOTHING can be determined with 100% certainty....see Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle for some information on this phenomenon. Because of this, you can only assign certain probabilities of 'correctness' to your logical assumptions. Once the probability reaches a certain height, say 99%, we call it 'correct' for the sake of assigning a simple binary value to the result (yes/no is a binary system, just like 1 and 0). I personally do not assign a concise 'correct' or 'true' value to something unless it has reached at least 99% probability.

Anyway....the reason we die? Simple evolutionary biology. Our DNA cannot 'improve' itself as we live. Because of this....a bacterium that never dies would live a billion years without ANY evolution occurring within itself. However, by reproducing/fissioning, it can pass down superior genes and slight modifications to those genes per replication. The weak die off because probability did not grant them with the 'proper' mutations and hereditary alterations, and the strong live on to continue their genes. Each time a new entity is 'born', it will have slightly different DNA than its predecessor. Because it is a 'new' entity though, it can build itself up utilizing that new and hopefully improved DNA. Sure...we can imagine and probably eventually create a biological entity that could spontaneously 'evolve' and grow a third eye....but life has not yet evolved such an ability. A lizard can grow its tail back, and a seahorse can change sex, but those large self alterations are still within the scope of the entity's DNA coding. A sudden evolution in a single cell within the entity would effectively give it different DNA from the surrounding cells....and those cells would then reject the new cell. It would be like putting the wrong blood type into a person during a transfusion. Our cells 'expecting' new DNA types is a complex function that we have not yet developed....it would require a significant amount of logic on our cell's part to distinguish those new cells from a virus or bacterium, and not attack it with anti-bodies as it does with those. And then, what about coordination between the new and old cells? If you suddenly grew a third eye, your brain would be like, "Wtf?" and would not be able to handle that new input. One small change would require fast if not instantaneous change everywhere else....and what is to say all the change would be compatible? You would effectively need a 'central evolving mechanism' to dictate these things, kind of like a biological government. But even so, say you don't need to reproduce since you won't die and can self evolve....but if by chance there are only 1000 of you? What if an asteroid hits that island where you thousand entities are living? The biological strain will have been wiped out....so what is too much and too little? That is naturally determined by slow population growth of the species. The entity keeps on reproducing until the resource system can no longer support the population, and then the species stays as is at its maximum possible population available, and hence with the greatest chance of survival. However, if the entity could not die, the population growth would be so rapid that it would so far exceed the resource ceiling when it reaches it, that it would likely never be able to recover and would end up killing the entire species. It would be as if we suddenly decided to genocide all the food we eat; however, because we are mortal, our population increase is slower and therefore we can adapt to the changes ahead before it is too late.
There are many more reasons....evolution is an EXTREMELY complex topic, far worse in my opinion than trying to describe the nature of the sun.

Non - physical conscious mind? Even if we had a 'purely conscious mind', there would need to be some 'medium' governing the causality of our existence. It is, again, simply a matter of levels. Even a supposed 'soul' would be 'physical' in some sense. If you try to claim no medium and no scientific causality governing the existence of such an entity, then your search for the truth ends there, because you can go no further. When you say "that is it", you shut all your doors for knowledge. More appropriate questions would need to be more specific. If you could not 'interact' with the world, then you could not grow. Without interaction, without movement, there is no time. Life would never come to be without interaction. And if you claim 'just no interaction with this world', then what world? What other world do you propose, and why do you propose it? Unless you have concrete reasons, then you are no better than a mad man who claims there is a giant teacup in orbit around Sirius A. Every facet of this world, your reality, and this universe is finite. Try to name one thing that is not finite, with objective proof for it. And, if nothing is infinite, then how could an infinite number of possibilities exist? If you can claim anything, then anything is possible any number of times....that is an infinity, and infinities do not exist, therefore you cannot arbitrarily and subjectively claim whatever you want for that makes you capable of proposing infinities, which do not exist, hence invalidating your system of capricious whims.

(Note, spell/grammar checking my entire post would take an exceedingly long time, which I unfortunately do not have time for. So I apologize for any errors)