So. Who am I? I am an octogenarian, I have a BS in engineering and one in mathematics, a master degree in psychology and am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Otherwise a pretty average guy. For the purpose of this conversation I would like to go to the most basic form of communication and try to communicate an image, actually a still image. I think in pictures, you may think in some other medium but I hope the meaning remains the same.
Everyone who is reading this has one, a consciousness! As a metaphor, Mr or Mrs reader, in all likelihood, also own a car. There is a small fraction of those who own a car that have the slightest clue how an automobile works. That doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with your effective use of your car. But, at least with a car, you can get in it, put gas in it (or plug it in) and even kick the tires. That is exactly what I’m proposing here. Lets kick the tires of our conscienceless? We don’t need to know how all the neurons work or what the rest of the world thinks about our consciousness to be able to experience our own in it’s basic form.
To do this we must look at what we know. I say that because we have read the thoughts of the great philosophers and of the industrial giants and everyone in between as they discuss their own impressions and definitions of consciousness. I have found it difficult to get an intimate feeling of consciousness from someone else describing theirs. If we level the playing field, Elon Musk may be at a disadvantage when compared Socrates’ ability to think. Since we all have one, why can’t we simply examine our own? In the following pages, that is exactly what I would like to do!
I am over 80 years of age and have practiced my own brand of mediation for many years which is no more than simply being still and most importantly being in the moment. This is easiest for me at night before sleep. As simple as that sounds, it is a most profound experience for me. In that moment, I have an imaginary place that I can visualize. In that place there is no trace of anything but a vague enclosure and nothing else except a simple awareness.. No sound, no lurking visual cues but there is a awareness of self. The presents of knowledge that I can think (thank you Mr Descartes). It occurred to me, many years ago, that since my body parts are mine and a part of me that I should be able to somehow poke them? Well I was wrong, I have the ability to move them but I do not have a specific sense of their existence unless of course they are in distress at which time their presents is made known in the form of pain. I have memory banks filled with three quarters of a century of memories, which I could access at will but not a clue where they are or specifically how to find them. I have concluded that “that isolated place” is my consciousness!
This experience is my basis for what is to follow! The neuroscientists have worked hard to find the complex matter and processes that allow this to happen but they aren’t quite there yet. Since the beginning of man’s history, there have been spiritual leaders that are certain that it is through divine intervention that we are given this ability. My own experience is that it is a natural state of being, even if it is difficult to attain and/or sustain.
We can start from where we are today. How did we get here? By asking that age old question about our behavior being rooted in nature or nurture? I believe firmly that it is, for the most part, nurture. I am certainly not an expert but I did do some work in graduate school on attachment theory. We begin to learn in the womb and continue to learn continuously through our life but the rate of our learning is quite rapid through our formative years and slow as we get older. I personally do not believe that this process is in any way spiritual. We have access to billions of neurons that allow us to store information and much more. Some of that information is factual and some of it is contextual. Feelings are contextual. For example, my experience as a child in a small steel mill town in Ohio was of a child who lived in a house with a coal furnace and that being cold was a very bad experience and I hate to be cold. On the other hand, I know of someone who had a repeated bad experience of being in a confined space that was hot on dusty bumpy roads, as a consequence, being hot is bad. The consequence of those experiences is, he loves Seattle and I love LA/Palm Springs. And so it is that our formative experiences create the milieu that dictates our preferences. And this is the quiet dark place our consciousness resides.
The range of experiences that humans subject their children to vary between the opulence of kings to the war torn villages of Ukraine. Of course most of us are somewhere in the middle. Each person has experiences that would create a completely different response to any given stimulus but I believe that that place of consciousness is the same for everyone. It is from unseen and undefined places that our reactions to the events of our lives are dealt with. When we are in that place of consciousness, each of us are the same but as soon a an event occurs all of our conditioning from birth kicks in. Each of us with our own history that dictate a unique response. A special case of when we are in that place and the world presents us with an event, out of that quiet dark background come a “feeling”! As a consequence of that “feeling” we may fall in love, enter into road rage, become embarrassed… etc. There is no logical process that is connected to that feeling. It is like Pavlov’s dog, I believe that because our consciousness is devoid of and separate from those experiences and has developed over time to make us the unique person that we are. To put it into some perspective, when I was a child, in the late 1940’s, there was no TV, all cars were stick shift, everything that wasn’t ironed was wrinkled and you were lucky if there was just one cartoon at the end of a movie. My point is that our state of knowledge has progressed but we still are in our infancy in our quest for knowledge. Something as basic as gravity and our very own consciousness remains a mystery.
We are just beginning to understand deep learning AI. The factual knowledge that we feed into these massive computers, accumulates over time and appears to have a form of critical mass, formed by that accumulation of knowledge. At some critical mass, connections are made that feed back and alter the entire process. At that point the entire process takes on new attributes that do not necessarily follow logically. It may be reasonable to ask if the iterative process gives rise to what we call “feelings”?
If Dr. Smarterthanme MD, Phd explained precisely what consciousness is, would that change your experience? I think not! My objective is to understand, at a personal level, who/what I am and in doing so, allow me to better deal with my own existence and possible generate empathy for others. It is time to go inside and take a look!
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Touches on something I have been considering lately. Have been trying to focus on my consciousness more. Kind of like trying to see who am beyond just the daily comings and goings and experiences of life. While those things are happening to me where is my essence in all of that commotion. It is giving me new clarity in the experience of my emotions. My consciousness is influenced but not the same as my experiences and emotions.