The problem with consciousness is determining what it is. Is consciousness a word, a name, an idea, knowledge, a state, mass, a property, an entity or otherwise? Two significant definitions of consciousness should aid in determining what it is, Firstly, consciousness is the awake state of the brain-body. Secondly, consciousness is the brain-body’s knowledge and awareness of its existence in internal and external reality. A state and knowledge and awareness do aid in disclosing the nature of consciousness as expected. The principle that existence can only be material or immaterial always applies. The definitions are not material; state, knowledge and awareness or not material. Consciousness, then, can only be the last possibility–immaterial, but the existence of the immaterial is doubtful. With the elimination of the material and immaterial, the only conclusion to reach is that the concept of consciousness has no existence in reality–consciousness is an illusion!! The brain-body’s sensibility, mentality and ability to act in reality is what can be called consciousness. Consciousness, then is just a mere hyped word.
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…it’s all’a those things and then some!
If you give dust and ashes and silicon stone the ability to reconstitute a shape and get energy quantumly…
…don’t get bent out of shape when the stones cry out in a way you cannot silence.
You can’t denature the store of nature.
I guess I’m saying stuff weird today.
Consciousness is what is reading this sentence.
As well as the eyes and brain.
No. You are conscious of your eyes and brain. Your eyes and brain are not conscious of you.
And who are you? are you the I that represents the brain-body?
I meant to say who am I? Am I the I that represents the brain-body?
That’s a profound question. Self inquiry is a path to enlightenment. Literally, you represent the body and the brain. That is, they are objects of your consciousness. They are not you. Likewise your thoughts appear as objects of consciousness. You are conscious of them. Are they conscious of you?
No, I think not.
So what you’re saying is there’s a difference between the person and the experience?
What do you think consciousness is? Conscious equals awake. I just drop the left side of the equation. No one says what consciousness is because no one else knows, but I say what it is based on two sound definitions. Let me say this: I care more about truth than I do about my philosophical views–I want them to be true. I no longer believe my post, The Significance of I.
“…it’s all’a those things and then some!”
I’m with Mags on this.
Consciousness is multi dimensional.
It is many things at once.
“the only conclusion to reach is that the concept of consciousness has no existence in reality–consciousness is an illusion!”
Who are you to say all consciousness is an illusion?
Consciousness means something.
Don’t strip it of its meaning.
Be careful what you criticise and what you tear down.
Consciousness is what it’s like to be anything. Infinite, eternal— It is the uncaused cause and substratum of everything. It is synonymous with being itself. It is the sine qua non of existence. Perfectly simple it cannot be defined in terms of anything.
Now you’re talking a little bit what i am thinking.
Consciousness is precious gold though.
An undeserved gift from God.
By God’s grace we have the lips to speak. And a consciousness to learn and grow, to help us guide our hand in all that we do. We have the hands to harvest and sculpt.
We feed and refine our consciousness with virtues, music, friendship, love, study. It’s what we’re meant to do. We’re meant to grow in quality and in quantity. Consciousness starts out as a seedling. What it is, is an unraveling cascading effect. Consciousness can become good or bad. This we can know. Mastering mental progress and mental growth is a theme for a successful meaningful lifetime.
There is a veritable line sometimes thick, sometimes thin between what consciousness and unconsciousness entails, so that either can cause doubt as to which is which, or which causes which.
At any rate meanings escape, as soon as becoming aware of certain precautions, to the contrary.
This is why reverse psychology works for the most part. People would like to think autonomously as original. As possible
Very elegantly stated. Thanks for expressing it.
One should be careful; philosophy can be dangerous. The founder of psychoanalysis often used the term consciousness. He called the system that monitors the outside world the perceptual conscious system. He even said that the ego was conscious. So I will heed your warning and be more careful and remember how strongly a belief in consciousness affects the personality of some.
Consciousness is responding-to, a type of action. Not all actions are conscious or examples of consciousness, but all consciousnesses and moments of consciousness are instances of actions-occurring. For example, photons go into my eye, chemically interact with molecules there, causing pulses of energy to zip along neurons going from my eyes into my brain, those pulses of energy cause changes in certain regions of my brain and I “see something”. What is the “seeing something”? It is just those changes that caused it to occur.
The reason consciousness is so confounding to understand is because its so utterly simple and obvious we can’t even see it and, even having it described to us, it would be abhorrent to accept this truth. But it is true. Consciousness is simply whatever processes are occurring inside and outside the physical body and neurology specificailly, such that cause/impact that consciousness to be/experience what it is being/experiencing. Consciousness isnt a thing, it is the end result of certain types of processes and that end result is always an action of some kind. A change. But a change in what? In our physical movement of our body, a change in what we sense or perceive, or a change in how we feel or what we are thinking. Buddhists and other mystics can somewhat break through the veil of consciousness because they force themselves to assume a state of not-changing, which is antithetical to consciousness because consciousness itself IS change.
Hope this makes sense. If not I can try to explain it in a better way perhaps. But really this is so easy and so simple that most people simply cannot grasp it.