Friday, December 21, 2007

 

consciousness

Daniel Dennett and Consciousness

It is extremely difficult to explain consciousness; anyway you may want to have a look at YOUTUBE and watch all six parts of his lecture on consciousness. I do not want to quote his ideas here, it is better you see his lecture for yourselves.

I just only believe that Dan Dennett is making here the same mistake as thinking of a HARD PROBLEM where there is none. In order to get a kind of feel for what consciousness may be we really need to understand how our own brain may mislead us by its innate “biologic coding mechanics” but also that this system has been evolving during last about 4.5 billion years, and that this system can remember many information about something we cannot remember as it happened million years ago, but anyway we behave accordingly to this information because this information has been stored in DNA and DNA is the navigation for constructing some individual organism including human individual including his/her brain. I write here “his/her” brain deliberately because female and male brains differ.

On the other side some parts of our brain are not only in human brains but in brains of animals. Some emotions that we have are common to many animals. So consciousness does not have to be necessarily only something humans experience, most probably some animals experience that too. Quite recently there was a report about bird reacting in the same way as chimpanzees do when they are marked with a colored point on their forehead. The bird was marked on its chest and wanted to get rid of the colored point and was happy when it succeeded.

So what is really consciousness? The way how our brain informs us about our state based upon all information brain has gathered by itself and also by all the information it got inherited through DNA from previous generations.

Brain delivers perfect job, even when you do not know it. Have you noticed that you never fall off your bed? It happens only sometimes and only when the person is usually heavily drunk. Brain is working even when you sleep, in the moment when you have no consciousness at all. So consciousness is only a part of the brain job.

Some people believe that consciousness is only something humans have. The reason for this is that if this were true then humans could maintain that humans are better than the rest of all animals. It is only a way of thinking that marks hierarchy between different groups, one group are humans, and all the other groups are all the animals, either in different groups or put together into a non-human group.

Consciousness can be only explained on principles of brain functions, seen as today’s level of brain abilities that have evolved over billions of years, starting with first chemical that stored some information and passed that information over to the next generation. The storing and processing of information might bring us to understanding what consciousness really is.

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