The holy grail of psychology is discovering the key to consciousness. Consciousness is what takes a bunch of external influences and organizes them into a stream of experience around a unified identity; it is how we experience things personally, the birthplace of the “I”. Unfortunately we know next to nothing about it.

We know consciousness does not rely on the majority of the physical body. I can cut off your arm or leg — even gouge out an eye or two. You will have little trouble considering yourself the same person. You can also destroy significant parts of your brain through surgery, seizure, injury or any other means without sacrificing your sense of self. I can call out your name: you will still answer (assuming you are capable of both hearing and responding to my call).

However damaging other parts of the brain — parts that are often physically small — is catastrophic. Without these functioning areas of the brain, you cease to be. Your body may well remain alive — and your mind active — but you no longer experience the world through your body from a first person perspective. The ghost no longer inhabits the shell.

At present, we understanding almost nothing about our high consciousness came to be, how it works, or where it resides.

For their part, philosophers attempt to elaborate on why consciousness is so special. There is a great example around 16 minutes into the September 30th, 2006 episode of the Philosopher’s Zone. Here the speaker contrasts how a camera experiences vision versus you or I.

Both you and the camera start with the same information. You receive the same input of light waves. You are both capable of distinguishing red light from blue, dark from light. But from here we do vastly different things with than information than will a camera.

There are millions of photoelectric diodes inside a camera. They roughly correspond to the many rods and cones in our retina. While the individual diodes are equally capable to our rods and cones, the individual inputs never become part of a unified whole. The camera gathers the data into a serialized summation. Every picture looks like this one. The camera never sees anything more than millions of colors.

We are unique because we experience the image personally. Instead of colors, we see objects. And the objects we see — including how prominently we see them — vary from person to person. If you have recently pierced your nose or want a nose job, you will likely see a very different version (this is why you see your car everywhere after you bought it; why a 65 pound anorexic adult looks in the mirror and sees a horribly fat person).

We take our experiences in the world and live out a personalized version in our own mind. A camera will only see the world at face value.

This entry was posted on 2006-10-3 at 3:57 and is filed under Psychology, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.