The Mystery of Consciousness
Reflections on some things I can’t get past my skull
I have a question about consciousness….
What is it?
The dictionary defines it as “the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself.” But consciousness is so much more than awareness. It involves an inner experience: sights, sounds, movies, words, ideas, sensations, and complex reasoning.
Often the human brain is compared to a computer. No doubt, there are many similarities. But when I think of consciousness, that is exactly where the comparison points to what I don’t know…what nobody knows.
For example, when I see a sunset on a video on my computer screen I know what it is. Obviously, it’s not a real sunset but even the illusion has a definite substance. It’s made of thousands of tiny pixels of light shown on a glass screen. But when I see a sunset in my mind’s eye, there is no screen. There is no light. There are no pixels.
Yet there is most definitely somewhere, somehow, the image of a sunset.
To illuminate this a little further, I propose the following thought experiment. Imagine that we were able to open up someone’s skull and zero in on their brain activity. Imagine that our technology is good enough to allow us to zero in…
