The Unanswered Questions of Consciousness

Welcome back to another edition of The Plastic Human! This week we're diving deeper into consciousness and coming up with more questions than answers.

When we examine Consciousness the question is yet to be answered:

Why and how all of the intricate parts of the electro-chemical and bio-chemical organization come together to create one conscious experience?

The experience of ‘me’, or of ‘you’, and how ‘we’ experience our personal and subjective ‘I’. The popular Descartes statement, “I think, therefore I am", is a statement that we can intellectually understand but are still not able to scientifically understand how we think about who we are. 

• Where do we store all of that data, and where does it all go?
• Is there some biologically equivalent ‘cloud’ that we haven’t identified?
• And if so, where do we find it?

The field of AI has not been able to produce consciousness, even though they can fire and wire electrical impulses to do basic and some similar things to the human brain. Some would suggest the obvious answer is that it doesn’t have the right combination of ingredients to re-produce the recipe. Even if we were to gather up all of the ingredients and try to re-create it outside of the human body, how would we know that our concoction is ‘experiencing’ anything? The ability to behave like something is ‘self-aware’ and actually being ‘self-aware’ are two very different things.

This begs the question, "How do we measure ‘self-awareness’?"

Another theory states that the more complicated a structure becomes, the more conscious it is. If that were so, when non-life forms are made to create complex structures...why doesn’t it create emotions along with it? 

Some other findings are also confusing things further, as peculiar results have shown that consciousness is affected by various areas and parts of the body. This tells us that the mystery of consciousness is not centralized only in the brain.

These are all reasons why Neuroscience is having so much difficulty. Although they can detect what parts of the brain lights up when a feeling is felt, or when a particular experience is had, or a thought is generated or a memory produced, it still can’t go much further than that. Those are its limits. The questions still remain:

How do all of the connections, present the conscious experience of ‘being’ human? Of ‘being’ self-aware, and of having an experience of ‘being’ angry?

How do all of the neuro and bio-chemicals collectively create an experience of love? Empathy? Compassion? Depression?

 Some clues are coming out from the field of quantum-consciousness. The idea is that quantum-mechanical phenomena, such as entanglement, superposition and the Holonomic Brain Theory, could play a role in the brain’s function and have more of a basis for explaining how consciousness works.

However, I will tread lightly here as some Scientists have declared that Quantum-Science is being misrepresented and put into what is called quantum mysticism and assigned to pseudo-science which claims supernatural characteristics to various quantum experiences.

Next week, we will begin to dive into some of these theories from the quantum realm so stay tuned! If you have any insights into any of the questions above...drop them below.