Our Sense Of Consciousness By Katherine Lightwood

Our Sense Of Consciousness

By Katherine Lightwood

A while ago sitting lazily in my institute, I was watching clips of a movie called 'Still Alice' which had one of my favorite actress Kristan Stewart in the lead role. The movie was about a professor of linguistics played by Julianne Moore who was diagnosed by early onset of Alzheimer's disease.

I didn't even watch the whole movie, but only those few scenes were captivating enough to bewitch me completely. The movie stuck me in a very deep way, I was stuck in a deep train of thought. My biggest question after watching those movie scenes was,

'At what point we start to lose ourselves or we lose our identity? '. 

I don't know, it may sound very bizarre if I ask that to anyone, but try to bear with me. At what point we feel that we are ourselves? Our consciousness creates our source of existence. If it is lost and we fail to recognize our own existence, then there is no difference between a cadaver and a living. 

How does consciousness happen? Somehow, within our brains the combined activity of many billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine is generating a conscious experience. And not just any conscious experience, your own conscious experience, right here and right now. Have you ever wondered how does this happen...? Answering this question is so important because consciousness for each of us is all there is. Without it, there is no world, there is no self, there is nothing at all.

When we suffer, we suffer consciously, whether it's through mental illness or pain. And if, we can experience joy or suffering, what about other animals? Are they be conscious too? Do they have a sense of self? And as computers get faster and smarter, there may come a point, maybe not too far away when our android phone develops a sense of existence.

Consciousness has less to do with pure intelligence and more to do with our nature as living and breathing organisms. Consciousness and intelligence are very different things. You don't have to be smart to suffer but you probably do have to be alive.

I want to tell you about some conscious experiences of the world around us, and of ourselves within it. And these are the kind of controlled hallucinations, that happens with, through and because of our living bodies. Now, you might have heard that we know nothing about how brain and body give rise to consciousness. some say it's beyond the reach of science altogether. But in fact, the last 25 years have seen an explosion of scientific work in this area.

I would like you to think about consciousness in the way that we come to think about life. At one time, people thought of the property of being alive could not be explained by physics and chemistry that life has to be more than just mechanisms. But people no longer think that. As biologists got on with the job of explaining the properties of living organisms in terms of physics and chemistry, things like metabolism, reproduction, homeostasis started to get more relevant. The basic mysteries of what life is started to fade away. And now people did not propose, anymore 'magical solutions' like 'force of life' and other mystic powers. So, as with life, so with consciousness.

Till then it's time for me to sign out from Digital Decatron. To see more posts from our colleagues, please visit our main page and don't forget to follow us on Facebook. Make sure to visit our institute's page to see more creative courses and awesome stuff.