Consciousness

As we grow into a culture our consciousness emerges between age four and six. Some of us might even remember how suddenly everything changed for a moment or two and later occurring more and more frequently until it was established in our minds. In my case the first such change happened in late summer - a month before my fifth birthday. In a game of hide and seek with other children, I hid myself well and moments of solace suddenly produced a change in a perspective in my mind that startled me in a form of question - What am I doing here?

Throughout history, the extensive use of the mirror was always related to the emergence of consciousness. The mirror enables us to look at the image of ours from the "outside" thus facilitating a mental change of perspective.

The change in perspective in my mind was giving an impression of looking at a "picture of myself and my surroundings" as me being "outside" of it. I would suggest that this internal change of the perspective - that also gives rise to our sense of being "objective" - is at the core of the phenomenon we call consciousness. The "picture" we look at from such perspective is surprisingly sketchy in its appearance. This might be hard to notice when complemented by the richness of the world of our transient now, but it becomes obvious when we close our eyes.

The half a second delay of our conscious experiences made many speculations on nature of consciousness, our cognitive processes etc. practically irrelevant. Now, almost 30 years after the discovery many still find it hard to accept and the questions like - Do we have a free will? - still dominate many discussions.

The "picture" we see is composed of sketchy images of our brain of a half a second before, i.e. there is a half a second difference between our transient now and the "picture". Benjamin Libet investigated the phenomenon of consciousness extensively and many followed. Their findings about consciousness found that all our non-reflexive actions require 0.8 seconds of preparations. (Brain activity called "readiness potential" seems to be a major part of these preparations.) However, we become conscious of these preparations only 0.3 seconds (or less) before the action is carried out. The established "mechanism" of Backward Referral of Subjective Experience gives our consciousness an illusion of initiating an action. It is however important to notice that, our consciousness can abort an action (or a thought). Although our consciousness does not initiate an action - it can "veto" all the actions that do not lead towards a predetermined action (thought) and thus impose a choice - free will.

I had an honour of training a young and very intelligent lady to drive. It took me three months to make her stop thinking and start driving. When she started to act without thinking (and conscious interferences), the natural process of accumulation of experiences took over and she passed the test with flying colours.

As an illustration of how even a minor change in our familiar situation impacts our actions (thoughts), I would suggest to the reader the simple experiment of changing the hand that wears a time-piece.

"Vetoing" actions (thoughts) results in a halting, insecure performance (very much like actors' rehearsals) until a desired action (thought) emerges. In this, our imagination, feelings, emotions, sense of beauty and humour (that are also to a large extent formed as we grew into a culture) play important roles. In the familiar situations of our daily life already established actions (thoughts) occur practically on their own. In unfamiliar situations however, an occurrence of desired actions (thoughts) requires hard work not only from our consciousness but the whole of our being. (For further explorations on how we "train" ourselves I would suggest the extremely rich source of experiences - the performing art of acting. In this Bella Merlin's "Beyond Stanislavski" would be an excellent start.)

The capacity of our consciousness is very small. The estimates range between 5 or 7 to around 40 "items" (sketchy images or symbols) per second depending on the type of measurement applied. But this, in combination with the half a second delay, is its power - to further steady our thought enabling us to focus at what is important and to acquire a new knowledge/skill much quicker.

As to what was in our minds before emergence of consciousness, a theory of bicameral mind was suggested by Julian Jaynes. According to this theory, when people found themselves in an unfamiliar situation, they would stop and wait until a divine voice "tells them what to do".

Consciousness, as our mental phenomenon, seems to be a relatively recent "invention" of our minds. There is a number of quite convincing arguments on consciousness emerging between three and four thousand years ago, disappearing between the eighth and the twelfth century, and then reemerging in the renaissance. I would suggest that some aspects of consciousness may have appeared even earlier with early civilisations. The question would then be how stable were those early emergences. I would also suggest that our consciousness as an emergent phenomenon is still relatively unstable (as regressions towards bicameral mind suggest) and that other forms of it might evolve in relatively near future.

Consciousness, as we know it nowadays, also has shortcomings - some of which could be a cause for alarm. The change of perspective that brings us "outside" of the "picture" results in an implicit "framing of the picture" and this in turn often results in the following illusions:

These illusions, although in some aspects helpful (like the "thought experiment" for example), might be also very misleading. Especially young minds are easy to indoctrinate and lull into such concepts as "absolute truth" or "material world" (we are of course outside of it and if anything happens to it - we are "safe").

These illusions I consider to be "weaknesses" of our consciousness that will hopefully disappear as our consciousness evolves further. As it is now, we should be aware that this mental change of perspective results in an inanimate picture with no life in it. Such a picture always requires our intervention (from outside of the picture) for a change within the picture. (Quite similar to some of our dreams when we observe the inanimate dream-scene from outside and then find ourselves within it with dream starting to unfold.)