Science
In reply to the discussion: What is so mysterious about human consciousness? [View all]GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Consciousness is not memory or the process of storing experiences in memory - after all, computers have lots of memory, but no consciousness. IMO consciousness is the experience of being aware. I'm a subjectivist on this subject.
As Speck Tater has said, consciousness is not its contents. It's not formed from patterns of memory or even sensations. It's not even the experience of thoughts or sensations - it's the experience of the awareness of experiencing sensations, thoughts or feelings. The sensations, thoughts and feelings themselves are contained within consciousness. In other words those are the "things" that consciousness is conscious of.
I like the television metaphor for consciousness. In it, the television set is the brain, and the programs shown on the screen are our sensations, thoughts and feelings. Neither of these is consciousness - that role is played in the metaphor by the person watching the TV. Neither the program nor the watcher is an emergent property of the television, and the watcher isn't an emergent property of either the TV set or the TV program.
Now, when the TV is turned off (the brain dies) the program is no longer displayed on the screen and the watcher has nothing to watch. Does the watcher disappear as a result? We have no way of knowing one way or the other. To assume the watcher vanishes when the TV is turned off is just as much of an assumption as assuming it remains.
I spent 57 years of my life with the scientific view that consciousness or "mind" was an emergent property of our neurology. Five years ago I learned to meditate and my entire understanding of consciousness changed within days to what I described above.
I think that meditation training is the only tool we've yet developed that allows us to approach consciousness itself. The way science has tried to approach it so far has gotten as far as describing neural mechanisms and the contents of consciousness, but has not approached consciousness itself.
Virtually all meditators understand this description of consciousness, but I have yet to meet a non-meditator who does. Most non-meditators seem to understand consciousness simply as an emergent property of brain. I don't think science is generally framing the questions about consciousness correctly yet - though scientists who meditate may be getting a bit closer.