Consciousness
What Is Consciousness
Consciousness arises from a feedback loop between our senses and our memories that generates images, dialog, and feelings in a never-ending internal feed. It can be thought of as our memories stimulating our senses to produce echoes of the original stimuli that imprinted them. We literally hear ourselves think.
Our subjective experience is the mix of inputs from all of our senses, mixed with the words, images, emotions, and other associations being triggered by our memory. Consciousness is like a projection screen that has all five senses projected onto it from two separate projectors. One projector has a powerful bulb and plays Cinéma vérité, while the other projector has a weak bulb and plays French New Wave and Fellini movies. Psychedelics significantly increase the wattage of the second projector.
We are that screen. Experiencing the universe as we experience ourselves. Existing only in the present moment, just as the universe does.
Our consciousness uses our memories and training to process new data from our external senses and create output to our motor neurons that determine how we interact with the universe. This can be idle processing like daydreaming, or active processing like weighing pros and cons to make an important decision. In both cases the feedback loop is used to simulate new responses to stimuli and evaluate the expected outcome.
As the diagram shows, there are multiple feedback loops involved, connecting short term and long term memory, memory and consciousness, and memory and motor neurons to facilitate training. But for simplicity we'll just refer to all of it as "processing".
The states of consciousness we experience depend on the interaction of these three steps in the stimulus/response cycle.
Input (senses, stimulus) -> Processing (memory/thought loop) -> Output (muscles, response).
While this is a simplified model, it can be very helpful for those without extensive education in psychology to understand the relationship between the physical brain and our subjective experiences.
Desirable States of Consciousness
When considering the feedback loop that gives rise to conscious thought, it is helpful to examine the states of consciousness that circumvent the feedback loop and why we find them desirable.
Mindfulness
When we are mindful and living in the moment, we are able to turn off the feedback loop and simply experience the new sights, sounds, and sensations that are coming to us externally. It's all input without processing or output.
The practice of mindfulness also refers to intentionality and presence when performing any activity, which focuses the thought process on the task at hand ahead of time to maximize effectiveness and enjoyment in the moment. In this case processing is happening in advance so it doesn't need to be done in real time. This also helps in achieving flow.
Mindfulness is desirable because it allows us to maximize our natural emotional responses to the present situation without being distracted by irrelevant or intrusive thoughts.
Flow
Similar to mindfulness, flow states are when we bypass the feedback loop and connect stimulus and response directly through well-worn neural pathways created by repetitive training. It's direct Input to Output without processing.
When performing simple flow tasks like driving and exercising, it is possible to engage the Input and Output via the flow state, while simultaneously Processing completely unrelated thoughts.
Flow is desirable because it puts our hard-earned training to work, and when you find that groove it feels really good. There are obvious evolutionary advantages to being really good at stuff. And if you've already developed optimal neural pathways there is no advantage to considering alternatives in the moment, which is all you get when you start thinking about what you are doing.
Deep Thought & Dreaming
Shutting off the Input and Output to concentrate exclusively on the feedback loop of conscious thought enables you to test alternative neural pathways in a safe environment before you connect them to an Output that could result in consequences.
Or you can simply let the random connections between neurons take your train of thought wherever it wants to go--also known as daydreaming. This stimulates creative thought and forms novel neural pathways that can help us see things in new ways or solve problems we're not even focused on. Dreaming at night serves a similar purpose, one so important that our brains make it mandatory.
Generative AI, Newsfeeds and Modern Consciousness
Generative AI operates very similar to the human stream of consciousness. While AI works by simply consuming huge amounts of data and predicting the most likely word to come next based on a prompt, human language is also a stream of words generated by a probability model trained by every experience that person has ever had.
Due to the similarities our minds have with AI, there are likewise similar shortcomings. Spend too much time on the wrong parts of the Internet and you cannot help but grow more racist, sexist, and hateful, as we saw over and over with early chatbots trained on social media. Therefore it is as essential that we curate the information that we feed our minds with as it is to apply critical thinking to that information.
Since we lack the time and resources to critically evaluate all of the information we take in, and modern media platforms offer an infinite stream of information both questionable and reputable sources, it is important to actively avoid exposure to misinformation, especially when confirmation bias is involved.
Our stream of consciousness can also be compared to a newsfeed, and the more we use newsfeeds to shape our minds the more similar they become. Just like our newsfeed, our consciousness is a stream of memories, images, thoughts of loved ones, political ideologies, religious dogmas, gossip, music, jokes, work, hobbies and sex. The thoughts we have on these subjects will always be a reflection the information we have given our minds through experience and media.
Free Will
See free will for a discussion of whether or not we have free will and the implications for our ethical and legal frameworks.
Spoiler: we don't, but we must pretend we do.
Can Thinking Exist Without Doing?
A more interesting question than the hard problem of consciousness is the question of whether consciousness can exist without the "Output" side of the stimulus/response cycle. If there is no action being taken on the information being processed, is it still possible for the feedback loop between the Input and Processing stages to generate consciousness?
Imagine a brain in a jar, attached to a camera and microphone that provide it with the ability to "sense" its environment. Other senses like taste, touch, and smell are more difficult to replicate without a physical body, but it's not relevant to the hypothetical. A brain without a body would have no motivation. The brain is a decision making machine designed to make a body do survival stuff. If the brain had lived a life inside of a body before being enjarred, then conscious would have already developed. Could a baby's brain become self-aware without developing inside a body? How would reinforcement work in a neural network that has no way for external stimuli to trigger it?
The brain cannot self-organize without the body. There can be no "free will" without the ability for the neural pathway to lead to some action.
The jarred brain's experience would be completely passive. It would have no need to think because there would be no action ever to take. Even if it started out fully formed (which would require a body), it would eventually devolve into a state of pure "zen" where it simply takes in its environment without any thought or emotion. Its "consciousness" would be like that of a video recorder. It can either do that or hold on to its survival instincts and exist in a state of pure hell.
While the majority of literature on the subject focuses on the hard problem of consciousness rather than this particular aspect (and the latest fad of using Panpsychism to "solve" it), there are some that address this issue in part. [2] [3]
Panpsychism
Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe. It is often closely associated with the philosophy of pantheism as well as a lot of theories that apply quantum woo to the hard problem of consciousness.
While panpsychism is mostly harmless as far as theories of reality go, it is also unlikely that there is innate consciousness in inanimate matter. Rather, consciousness is an emergent property of neural networks that have the necessary feedback loop to reproduce sensations from memory and exist beyond the present moment. Otherwise they are simple reactive machines that have no thoughts, no inner monologue, no memories beyond conditioning.