What is the consciousness or awareness of self? Is it something in the physical properties and functions of the brain, or does it exist apart from the physical brain? Is it the mind or the soul? What of life's experiences. They certainly live outside the physical brain, but they impact the brain, and their memories are stored in the brain. But they are not functions of the physical brain.
There is no evidence of the existence of what is commonly referred to as the mind or the soul. Nothing like the mind or soul is on a cloud separate from the brain.
Some scholars are flirting with the notion that experiences may be part of human consciousness since they are empirically real and separate from the brain. Just what that means gets fuzzy. Does it follow logically, or is it a non-sequitur? Having an experience is probably a part of self-awareness, but when stored in the brain, it is part of the brain's memory, and the experience itself is destroyed.
It seems prudent to test carefully any theory that takes any brain function away from the physics of the brain. Consciousness is part of the brain's function. Self-awareness can exist without being part of an experience to create it. However, experience is a function of self-awareness. So, is the experience integral to the self-awareness function in the brain? What, if any, significance is there to the fact that there are experiences outside the physics of the brain that are not a part of self-awareness.
One truth appears axiomatic: consciousness dies with the brain, and we return to our state before birth. Whether or not experience is part of the physics of the brain, it is not integral to consciousness and does not survive death. At this stage of our understanding, the only certainty is that the brain causes self-awareness, possibly including experiences unrelated to brain function.
"...experiences unrelated to brain function?" That cannot be when we are alive, alert and in a conscious state of being. Our brain pushes us to go forward, to live experiences that we choose (brain function) and react or respond to, either negatively or positively. The brain IS our life-experiences, inseparable in a conscious state; therefore, consciousness, the brain and experiences are one and the same, notwithstanding, there are other numerous, to the inth degree, functions of the brain, a la, sight, hearing, speech, touch, to name a miserly few.
ReplyDeleteWhen in a dream-state we are separated from consciousness (the subconscious) having experiences never experienced before, experiences in a mirage, a fog, truly surreal, some delightful, others not. Upon waking we almost always forget those dreams because we were separated from reality--the conscious state of mind. There's the conundrum--being disconnected from a conscious state while dreaming, how is it when we do remember a dream or two? Solved--that's the part of the brain called memory, and when we remember the dreams we are in a conscious state of mind. So, we've come full circle with that exception--the brain can trick us, too.
Your comment is spot on. I took a comment about there being something more to self-awareness than the physics of the brain. Not so. We know very little about brain function. That should be the next frontier of science. We need as complete an understanding as we can muster. We currently are in the dark ages of how the brain works.
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