What is consciousness?

What is consciousness?

Stop pls.

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come get me bitch and ill fuck your mother, face and all.

A side effect of the way information travels through our brain.

It's tfw you know exactly what's apparently going on.

I would say this belongs in /phi/ but there isn't a philosophy board

Why would you say that?
Sure, the study of consciousness isn't a science in and of itself, but it is something that more or less exists, or at least has a definition, which makes it worth study.

dope

the center of the maze

Spoiler tag that please.

deez nutz

id say thats the short therm memory, the place where creativity finds its niche

The hard problem of consciousness is that we don't have a physical explanation for the subjective phenomena of consciousness. Consciousness is a streaming event while the brain is an organization of discrete and disjointed events(neurochemical reactions). Consciousness is not only a unity but a substantial unity, because we retain our identity even through experiences of unconsciousness(we go to sleep at night and wake up as the same entity the next day). The information structure in the brain is insufficient to properly explain the substantialy unity of consciousness. The events in the brain are more akin to bouncing billiard balls against one another in a chain reaction as they are connected but only in a one-to-one relationship and lack a relationship with the whole in a continuous manner.

There is also the phenomena of the electromagnetic field which hypothetically could connect all of these events. However, we run into a similar problem because the electromagnetic field is quantized as discrete entities, electromagnetic waves. How is one part(current of electromagnetic force) informed of all other parts? It isn't. We run into a conundrum where our current understanding of science can not produce a physical system which adequately explains the phenomena of consciousness.

However, we can use the flaws of the brain(and EMF) argument to produce what we should expect from a physical system that explains consciousness. Consciousness is a self-referential knowing, that is to say, you know that you know. Much like how computers know certain programs or are informed of them, your consciousness is a process that is informed of its own informational processing. This informational processing is integrated harmoniously. Looking at it from a reductionist stand point, a single act of knowing is informed by a conglomeration of knowing, and simultaneously informs a conglomeration of knowing of itself. This process is also physically unified through a substratum.

Investigating this substratum produces a knowable physical system that explains consciousness. Trying to use current known phenomena, we can try to invent a new phenomena which possesses the qualities we are looking for. It could be a super-imposed wave of quantum-waves which are all entangled non-locally (as posited by Karl Pribram) or could be a subtle-energy field which unifies all of the electromagnetic waves into a seamless whole, possessing the integrated informational processing we have come to expect. Finally, we can use another new phenomena, which we will call the soul. The soul would be a monad(simple physical unit) with an abstract nature of awareness much like how electrons have the abstract nature of a negative charge.

When we come to a crossroad of hypothesis's, we often turn to Occam's razor. Normally we try to use old phenomena to explain new phenomena but as the phenomena we are analyzing are all new physical phenomena, occam's razor doesn't help much yet. Then we try to use the most simple and elegant explanation and in my opinion that would be the soul. I think it is a simpler structure (but would require another mental monad to connect it to the brain), and it is certainly the most elegant which fits the greater design of the universe.
What is the purpose of the brain then? The brain could be a manner of empowering the soul with energy.

That is why I believe in the soul.

>Sensors: Online

WHY is consciousness?

It is God

cool

>we retain our identity even through experiences of unconsciousness

>I turned my phone off last night
>I turned it on again this morning, and it acted like the same phone, with all the numbers I usually call and information I usually request

sfw

but I'm not a robot?

The singular consciousness model is the only one that doesn't have any huge holes in it.

You might say "But user, if all consciousness is the same, why can't I read minds?" It's because you don't have perfect knowledge of consciousness. If people had perfect knowledge of it, why would there be so many questions as to what it is? The quality that makes consciousness such a big anomaly is that it acts like a constant. Constants have to be independent of space and time. The multiple consciousness model runs into the solipsism problem and this doesn't.

You could also say that consciousness is false, but nobody actually believes that.

>doesn't have any huge holes in it.

It requires magic to operate.
>inb4 quantum mechancis provides a working theory of consciousness

An extremely complicated system could have physical behaviors we don't know about yet. What a huge leap.

Quantum mechanics provides a working theory of consciousness.

How?

Nigga, quantum mechanics don't provide a working theory for nothing.