How does consciousness come about?

Answer 1

wow
now there's a question.....

meditators experience consciousness in varying expressions, yet it is always there....
it stays with us, I believe, always....

and so, perhaps our personal parusha came about through the desire of God to know itself
as an emanation of that original source, the Brahma, the All of being where all things exist as possibility, forever, and always have....

interesting, that is represented by white light.....sort of like that white room in the Matrix....lol

Answer 2

An attempt to define or understand consciousness in terms of conventional knowledge would an attempt to ask your self the question - what am I. This might be almost impossible to understand what consciousness when consciousness is all to understand; the proper knowledge of human mind is also knowledge of human soul, that of its spiritual origins which is beyond the words, beyond open sharing, transcendental and essential.

Consciousness might be a mystery to a thinking mind but it sure is a realisation that if there is consciousness then it must have a purpose, and if consciousness is to see, to know, and to be aware off things than there is a place previously unknown where it is that it is originally from where it is not.

In my view, consciousness is an expression of a reality in one dimension into another, a manifestation of divine reality into physical. Then conscious knowledge is the knowledge of this link and consciousness is lodged between these two dimensions, one superior or ethereal and the other physical and real. Consciousness in this sense is an interface between two levels in existence that human beings are endowed with to be human at the first place. It is like the surface of a lake upon which when gentle breezes, or harsh winds, blow they create ripples and waves. The spontaneous emergence of thoughts in the mind, therefore, is a continual dialogue between an upper world and a world below the surface of the mind.

That human life has a purpose than can be consciously realised, where human mind is in fact an expression of extraordinary in a world that gradually we find ordinary, and therefore often the only thing in view. In our thoughts we can delves deep in search to find their origin and since we attempt to look at the same things where our thoughts emerge from, we cannot see all well, the reality or the origin of our own mind.

Answer 3

Answering that question is a long ways off, but Daniel Dennett wrote an interesting book called "Consciousness Explained" a few years ago. Of course it wasn't explained or he would be a Nobel Prize-winning household name by now, on a par with Einstein.

One approach to how collections of individually unaware atoms can possibly achieve "consciousness" no matter how complexly they're arranged is to think of it as an emergent phenomenon that can't be predicted from basic principles. If you think about it, the same can be said of life itself: how does nonliving matter become "alive?"

Going from nonliving to living isn't that much of a mystery any more, however. "Life" is defined as the ability of a system to reproduce itself, essentially, so it's really just a matter of figuring out the details with no need to resort to anything supernatural (as if that would explain it anyway).

One of Dennett's premises about consciousness is that it's a process that doesn't happen all at once and in fact isn't always there. People drive back and forth to work every day pretty much unconscious of the road at the same time as they think about other things with their fully (we hope) conscious minds.

There is still the huge mystery about the actual experience of things called "qualia" - the redness of red, for example, or the sense of self. How this comes about from mere collections of atoms is at least as confounding as the problem of why anything exists at all. I can't imagine how it could ever be fully explained, frankly, but it certainly won't be by resorting to religion - which is only another way of saying "I give up!"

Dennett has another book out now called "Breaking the Spell," about how religion came to be and what can be done about it, since powerful weapons in the hands of fundamentalists now put the very survival of civilization and even life on earth into question.

PS: Is this the Philosophy section or the Mysticism one? Most of these answers are nothing more than idle speculation about 'souls' and 'spiritualism', neither of which have the slightest basis in reality. Because science hasn't figured out yet how consciousness happens does *not* mean it must be supernatural; that's the old and thoroughly fallacious "god of the gaps" argument.

I have to say the level of discussion on this question at least has been extremely sophomoric. Keep trying, kids.

Answer 4

I agree with the other poster consciousness is just there, but not in a continual "self" or "ego" as we are taught to believe. More like a continual string of infinitesimal small moments of "awareness".

Answer 5

Lies. Do you think you are conscious right now? I don't, you are mechanically asking a question. What is this "consciousness" that they talked about? How do you separate yourself from "consciousness" and look at it?

Answer 6

Living and appreciating the moment you are in. Awareness of interbeing and connecting to everything around you with the knowledge that you are interrelated. Check out anything by Thich Naht Hanh, a zen practitioner and prolific author. A great place to start is his book Understanding our Mind.

Answer 7

Part of the brain is the mind which processes sensory data (awareness) in light of past experiance (memory). Consciousness is an individual including its own existance in its awareness. Self-consciousness is a mind including its own conscious processes within its own consciousness.

Answer 8

There are too many good answers here to try and top, so I wont. Consciousness is "The Source". It's what connects us to our "Creator" whomever or whatever that creator (energy) is. It starts with IT and continues. It is what we bring back to The Source.

Answer 9

Most aren't conscious, for those who wallow in a auto-pilot comatose state of consciousness for them it comes about through events which shock them, these only occur in intervals however.

Consciousness itself can be practiced though; through breath, food, and impressions, impressions being the ascending octave of thought-essence evolving through the positive/negative centers of the mind, and these centers bringing about a balanced force or third force, which is enlarging the mind beyond the organic/carnal/natural level.

Consciousness in truth starts with observation, gaining greater consciousness starts with self, often times it is necessary to observe others first. breath and food we do mechanically by our nature of being organisms that our body unconsciously will perform and seek out these task, but in doing observing breath and learning how to breath proper it stimulates awareness of ones self at that level, and breath is key to relieving fixed thought patterns within the vessel. The impressions takes conscious effort in order to become conscious, and by evolving in this sense you will naturally come into the gnosis, or consciousness of the higher soul, from which knowledge and interaction with true knowing is provided. Then you are gaining serious conscious, from which all power is there to prove all things.

Answer 10

Consciousness (defined as awareness) is a neurobiological process. No need to resort to the notion of souls or emergentism. Personally, I like the idea of supervenience but it too is problematic and fails to explain or satisfactorily account for consciousness.

Answer 11

good one kid..this I have been askin but no body has ever given a satisfactory answer.
you cant put conciousness down to electrical impulses in the brain because this does not compute.no mater what science teaches us...In effect what are thoughts made of...umm..good question, the only thing I can tell you about conciousness is that you must be concious or you wouldnt be askin this question..wish I knew, and if anyone tells you that they know tell them to bugger off.