An Explanation For Consciousness

An explanation is needed for the existence of consciousness. But first, I wish to define it as I understand it.

Consciousness is awareness of or within the universe.

It exists on a spectrum and has degrees of severity. If you can see, hear, taste, smell, touch, (awareness of the universe) and/or think (awareness within the universe), this is consciousness. It is an experience that is observed or felt by a subject - ie you, the experiencer, rather than just a total experiential void and lack of existence. All contents of consciousness emerge using at least one of those channels. And they all get there, to your consciousness, by riding your neuronal network.

Restated, consciousness is the composite of any configuration of these senses and at any level of clarity. If I'm an insect, I have about 200,000 neurons to process all five senses. If I'm a human, I have the neuronal capacity of about 430,000 bugs, working together to bring consciousness online. The senses are enhanced, elevated, compared to a bug's, but both are conscious. Both sense the world.

Cutting to the chase, I think something like the neuron is the building block of consciousness, sufficient to have an input and output, or signal-reception and response. The experience is infinitesimal, but it's non zero. Like a penny compared to the wealth of Bill Gates.

Google reveals the human eye has 100 million neurons. If they can all collectively give rise to human vision, which is part of consciousness, what could one neuron do? Very close to, but not nothing. They clearly each perform some function, deliver some information. Divide human sight by 100 million and that is the effect of one neuron, the root essence of consciousness.

Only one single firing neuron probably has the experience of consciousness as rich as one neuron could bring. On one end, it senses the world in some capacity. And on the other end, it triggers a consequential response of commensurate size. But its role is singular, and the perception probably feels something like humans do the micro (nano, pico, femto?) second before we die. Nearly everything offline. A vastly muted sensation is still an understatement. But when summed up into the tens of billions…

Consider the blind spot in the eyes. [Experiment SOP] As an experiment, you could open a new word document, zoom in to maximize the white background, type a single period and increase its font size to about 300. By now there's a big black dot on the middle of the screen, at the left margin. Cover your right eye. With the cursor at the right of the period, start hitting the space bar, and visually follow the cursor. About half way through, with your eye focused at the cursor now in the middle of the screen, the large dot at the left margin disappears entirely. [/Experiment SOP]

We know the optic nerve runs through the retina and so we lack cones and rods to collect the light there. Thus, absent the neuronal mechanism for responding to light stimulus, we don't have vision. So we know the neurons are responsible for bringing on vision, and thus for bringing online a component of consciousness. It's not panpsychism - there's plenty of matter, we're already conscious, just not of this spot. And it's not Frankenstein - again we already have consciousness; we're simply missing neurons.

Here's additional reasons why the Frankenstein model is a failed explanation for consciousness - the idea of adding one last ingredient to make the whole thing come alive. The idea of a minimum threshold number of information processing cells required for consciousness doesn't make sense. For example the idea that you need 10,000 neurons for the lights to turn on but if you drop down to 9,999 neurons, everything shuts completely down. Each neuron functions to bring another piece of information to the whole system. It has to be a gradient. 10,001 neurons on average would produce a consciousness that would be imperceptibly richer than a brain with 10,000. But accumulate a vast number more or less and the quality of consciousness really changes.

There's nothing inherently special about X neurons that X-1 couldn't approximate, until X=1 (and at that point, the difference there largely feels like a technicality). As you peel away neurons, you peel away the conscious experience. Going from full, rich and vibrant down to dull, simple, narrow until you're ultimately talking about a single pixel of information maybe. Or less. And consciousness probably scales this way generally throughout the brain and across evolution.

Another incorrect model tries to argue that reality is hidden with some user interface to mask its complexity, a la computer desktop icons from the reality of what the computer actually performs, and something like what is hidden are forms of consciousness, which is a fundamental reality about the universe. This too is bogus. There's no universal interface evolved to hide the true reality of nature so as to protect us. There's only crude hardware coming online piece by piece to reveal the universe to us. No, we don't see the universe as it truly is. We see it through a narrow band of electromagnetic radiation called the visible spectrum. The ability to see in the ultraviolet or infrared spectrums, for example, haven't evolved to confer an advantage above seeing in the visible spectra. The option hasn't evolved where we've paid a price for not having it. And similarly our hearing has a limited capacity in hertz. But if we were to see the world distinctly incorrectly within our normal bandwidths, we would pay a price. Not seeing or hearing a predator correctly seems a grave flaw for survival. But that's not some interface layered onto reality. That's just incomplete reality, with some hiccups in the hardware, in our case.

Another explanation, panpsychism, is a nonstarter. Consciousness seems like an evolved function of perception for the purpose of survival. It's a system of relaying information to the brain/receiving end of the neural network to understand the world so as to better pass on those genetics. For inanimate objects like a massive boulder, they neither have evolved sensory systems in place, a neuro processing component to receive the signal, nor a life to protect. There's also no motion of any kind nor really any transfer of signals across it short of getting struck by lightning. There's zero signal processing that could give rise to consciousness.

So what we're left with is a system provided to us through evolution, that scales and is intuitive. And to me, that's satisfying.

I hope this was interesting and elucidating. I'd love to hear your comments and rebuttals. Thanks so much for your time and for making it this far. Cheers everyone.