Consciousness is a lone ruler of the world

There are three things necessary to apply in answering this question, namely: The courage for authentic and critical thinking when approaching the answer. The boldness to describe the evident reality when answering. The humbleness to answer the question honestly “We do not know yet what the consciousness is. Point.” Religion does not know it or Spiritual systems do not know it and Science does not know it, that is simply the reality. I hope I do not need giving the arguments. We do not know also some other basic things as what the thinking faculty is, what the self and self-awareness are.

Consciousness" refers to several related phenomena, which is why people have such a difficult time agreeing about what it is. Here are some specific phenomena that fall under the larger umbrella of consciousness and also "the mind": Awake state -- What is different about someone who is awake vs. someone who is in dreamless sleep? In both cases, the brain is highly active and functioning, but in only one case is the individual able to interact with the world and report experiences. Dreams and other altered states of consciousness may lie somewhere between these two extremes. Other variants of non-awakeness include general anesthesia and "persistent vegetative state" (related to coma).

What is going on when you are aware of something vs. when you aren't? In binocular rivalry, two conflicting images are shown to each eye. The information about both images enters the brain, but only one image is seen at a time. Which image is seen changes periodically and spontaneously. There are other examples of information being processed "subliminally" without being perceived "consciously". In stage magic, what is perceived is different from what is actually happening. What is the difference between sensory signals entering the brain, and something being perceived "consciously"?

Consciousness is private, subjective and experienced from a particular point of view: yours. What accounts for this point of view, for the unique "interiority" that gives the feeling that you exist inside your head somewhere? Is your version of the color red unique to you or the same for everyone? If a machine was conscious, would it have a first-person "experience"? As philosophers would say, is there something that it's like to be a computer?

Consciousness feels "whole", indivisible, and irreducible. There is the sense that the world is experienced instantaneously in complete, integrated, and meaningful detail. Hundreds of scientific experiments show that this unity is an illusion (change blindness, attentional filtering, attentional blink, visual illusions, timing errors, split brain patients, mental disorders, various neurological syndromes, ...). But the illusion is so powerful it takes a real force of will to be skeptical of it. When consciousness becomes fragmented, as with dissociative drugs, brain damage, split-brain surgery, or divided attention, has consciousness been degraded?

One unique aspect of the human experience is the sense that we exist -- that there is an "I" in there somewhere, looking out onto the world. Why do all our experiences come from our body and not someone else's? Does our uniqueness as an individual come from a "soul" that is somehow attached to the brain, or is it a construct generated by the brain? If someone wakes up with amnesia, or has dementia or dissociative disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder), has their conscious self ceased to exist, even though they seem conscious?

Also uniquely human is our ability to "introspect" onto what is going on in our own mind. Descartes famously said "I think therefore I am." One complaint about the idea of consciousness in a computer is that a computer seems incapable of answering the question "what is it like to be you?". If you can't reflect on your own inner life, are you still conscious?

In modern society, an important distinction is made between voluntary action (doing something"intentionally") and involuntary action (accidental behavior). To do something "consciously" is to do it with forethought and purpose. In Tourette's Syndrome, people make intentional-seeming actions involuntarily. This ties into the tricky question of "free will" as well as the legal concept of mental competency and the insanity defense. "He was not in conscious control of his actions" the defense might say.

People who work in AI often believe in “Strong AI”: the belief that the brain is just a computer made of meat, and thus that a computer that computed the same thoughts would have equal claim to having a “mind”. However this can seem difficult to reconcile philosophically with the fact that the thought in our own brains gives us subjective conscious experience. One theory of consciousness that seems compatible with Strong AI is the following: “Consciousness is thought” and “Thought and physical objects are dual and equally real interpretations of the same reality”.

This is a hard concept to wrap one's head around, so I'm going to step back and then build back up to this. The idea that consciousness is closely related to thought is a very old idea, but was historically limited by our lack of understanding of “thought”. Descartes said “I think therefore I am” back in 1637. However until recently the concept of “thought” has seemed far too fuzzy to use as the basis for a scientific definition of consciousness. The result was that scientists typically stayed away from the subject of consciousness, seeing it as something hard to discuss with any rigor.

We are now getting closer to understanding what thought is. Until recently, the kind of thought we were able to implement with computers was so different from the kind of thought we experienced ourselves that it was hard to imagine that they were in any way related. However progress by groups like DeepMind has led to artificial intelligence that feels increasingly like human thought, including AlphaGo, and DeepDream. We are still a long way from completely understanding human-level thought, but we are starting to get a sense of what such a model might “smell” like. Moreover, research on human thought is hinting that future mathematical models of the brain might have a similar “smell”.

The biggest flaw in previous thinking about consciousness may have been the assumption that consciousness was a binary property that some objects had and others didn’t. People asked questions like “Are animals conscious?”, “Can computers be conscious?”, or “Are Chinese Rooms conscious?”. This is like asking “Can transistors think?”, or “Do neurons think?”. In mathematical models of computation, thought is not a binary property that some objects have and others don’t, but a phenomenon that emerges from the interaction of many physical objects - whether they be neurons, transistors, or computers networked across the internet.

A closely related flaw may have been assuming that consciousness was divided into a discrete set of conscious entities. Part of the reason why people wanted to know what objects “were conscious” was because there was an assumption that consciousness consisted of a discrete set of conscious individuals. However this is not consistent with computational models of thought - which is not cleanly divided into discrete “thinkers”. If human thought is consistent with computational models of thought then the only reason you think of yourself as being the same person as your former self, but a different person to me is because you have a more effective information path to your former self than you do to me.

“Unconscious” thought may just be thought that is not easily accessible to you. The standard criticism of the “consciousness = thought” model has been that it’s clear that a significant amount of human thought is “unconscious”. However, if human thought is similar to computational thought then the thoughts you consider “unconscious” are merely inaccessible to you in the same way that my “conscious” thought is inaccessible to you. The effect is analogous to a computer system that accesses another system using an API that doesn’t doesn’t reveal its inner thought processes.

Thought and physics may be equally real interpretations of the same universe. In mathematics there is the concept of a “Fourier transform”, which is a function that can take a time-ordered sequence of numbers (e.g. the air pressure at some moment in time) and express the same information in terms of frequencies (e.g. musical notes). Neither the frequency interpretation nor the time interpretation is any more “real” - each is a phenomenon that can be fully described in terms of the other. It’s possible that the relationship between thought and physics is similar - in which case one way to think about research in AI is that we are gradually discovering the nature of the mathematical function that maps between the domain of thought and the domain of physics.

aybe we aren’t just “in” the universe, but we “are” the universe - If all thought is conscious, and thought is a complete model of the universe, and consciousness is a single undivided thing, then maybe our collective conscious experience isn’t just a puzzling artifact of the universe, but that it literally “is” the universe. I make no claims that this theory of consciousness is true, but I do think it’s interesting, and it seems consistent with the idea that the brain is just a computer made of meat. Cheers!