What is Consiousness? Where does it come from?

Question

The only thing that every single person on the planet shares and has in common is that we are all Consious. So what is it exactly and where did it come from? Was it a chemical reaction in our brains that triggered it? Was it a divine gift from God? Or is God really just the single consiouness that we all share?

It's not just part of being human, because every living thing has some level of consiousness. A dog is consious of being hungry...It is not exclusive to humanity, but to life.

Answer 1

This is a serious question, and you'll have to do some real reading out of cyberspace to begin to get a grip on it. In a way, it's the most fundamental starting-point for religious reflection.

If "matter" is purely insentient and unconscious, there is no way that any architecture of matter, no matter how complex, could produce consciousness. This is the "hard nut" of the mind-body problem. Most materialists end up, if they're consistent, by denying the reality of conscious experience (pretty nutty, eh? talk about devotion to a priori assumptions!). If they're not consistent, they might just deny the causal efficacy of consciousness, but even that makes no sense, since their act of asserting it contradicts what they're asserting. (Imagine someone writing, "Matter influences consciousness, but consciousness doesn't influence matter." Self-contradictory, n'est ce-pas, since they are writing that sentence because they decided to do so?)

So materialism is out as a possible account of consciousness. That leaves dualism, which conceives of a radical divide between "mind-stuff" and "matter-stuff." But then how on earth could these radically different stuffs be interacting? No dualist can really explain that, so they tend to resort to divine intervention.

I suppose there is also the possibility of idealism, which says that there is really only mind-stuff, and the matter-stuff is illusory. But I've had my consciousness way too altered by material phenomena like pain, drugs, and sex to be able to buy that.

So what other option is there? The so-called "pan-experientialist" option. This says that basically, "matter" as such is *not devoid of consciousness.* The smallest "bits" of matter are not merely exterior; they also have interiority, albeit of a vanishingly minute and simple kind. In the increasingly complex arrangements of these tiny "bits," they grow in their capacity for richness of experience. From the indeterminacy of fundamental particles, to organic molecules, to primitive life, to awareness, to conscious reflection. And this gradation is exactly what we see in the history of the increasing complexity of life on earth.

Basically what this theory says is that we're not quite so clear about what "matter" is as we'd like to believe.

Read David Ray Griffin's "Unsnarling the World Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem." It's hard, but very worthwhile if you really want to understand the issues involved. Good luck!

Answer 2

I'll try and keep this to a shortened version.
My belief is that the whole of the universe is one big heap of energy. Some of that energy bonds to other bits of energy with varying "strengh" of bonds. On a high level, this causes some energy to manifest as solid matter, some as gases, some as light photons, some as electomagnetic fields and then there's that little understood area of quantum things.
The energy can reach a state of balance, but most appears to be unbalanced, thus causing one bit of energy to react with other bits of energy, influencing the patterns of each other. This is happening from a miniscule scale up to universal scale, depends where you want to focus your attention. Our consciousness, thoughts, memories are all patterns of energy that have been shaped through interaction with other energies around us. Some people may say "ah, but how do you explain all these people all with the same characteristics, all able to walk and talk and communicate. Something that complex can't just come down to patterns of energy". I say why not? Just because our minds have trouble comprehending such things doesn't mean it's impossible. People have trouble comprehending that the universe is infinite in all directions, because of limited energy space of our minds just doesn't know how do deal with that pattern. If a baby was born and just kept alive by feeding without any outside influences to show it how to walk, talk, read or write etc. then it wouldn't grow up to be able to do those things. It's only when the energy patterns from outside it's own "being" interact with its energy that its energy starts to take on the same patterns. It's not taking the energy away from the source. The teacher doesn't lose the ability to spell because they have taught the child to spell.

There's so much more can be said about this... but I'm sure you get where I'm coming from.

Answer 3

Good question. There's a whole group of philosophers and scientists who give this a lot of thought. (By the way, some of them call it "the hard question.") There's even a "Journal of Consciousness Studies" and a "Center for CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES" at Arizona U.
The consensus, to the degree that there is one, doesn't concern itself with spiritual matters or supernatural causes. The theories vary, to name a few, from consciousness as an "epiphenomenon" of cerebral function, to quantum mechanical explanations.

There is even one theory that simply (or not so simply) sees the problem as "potentially intractable." The argument here is that there may exist limitations as to what kind of phenomenon the human mind can actually understand, or come to grips with.

Answer 4

Many believe we are all a part of the single consciousness. This would explain why we are all actually joined in some form of humanity. Finding that combination will bring about a raising of the collective consciousness to a spiritual level.

Answer 5

god is just an abstraction formed by a mental construct, ie just in your mind but no external correlate

however, the origin and nature of consciousness is one of the big as of yet unanswered scientific questions

Answer 6

No one can answer that difinitively, but I can tell you what I think. I think we are simply the universe trying to know itself.

Nearly everyone (myself included) suffers from some form of Cartesian duality. (The idea that the part of me I call "I" is something separate and apart from the rest of the universe.) But we can no more divorce ourselves from the universe than we can divorce ourselves from our own lungs. Everything is connected and you and I are a part of it too.

Any answer that includes you, includes everything else, and any answer that includes everything, includes you too.

Answer 7

We survive because of it. And we continue to successfully reproduce it.
Where does your arm come from? It's part of being a human.

Answer 8

Consciousness is awareness, you know the truth, but circumstances make you lie..