I promised Viv I would write about consciousness and our origins. It relates to material in my book “To Fly Without Wings” and the new, expanded edition, now published.

Well, is consciousness a medical topic? Unconsciousness certainly is! So why not consciousness?

It’s one of the hardest topics to speak to, in all creation. Like a knife that cannot cut itself, consciousness may not be able to explain itself. Self-awareness is something we all have in common. But if you think about it for just a few moments, you’ll realize we don’t even know that we have that in common. I’m self aware. But how do I know you’re self aware?

I don’t; and that, to philosophers, is called the “zombie problem”. How do we truly determine if another individual is conscious and sentient in the sense we ourselves feel it? If you come up with a quick answer, you haven’t understood the question properly!

Consciousness does not reveal itself in behavior: behavior is just activity, sometimes patterned, sometimes not. A flag blowing in the wind exhibits “behavior” in the ordinary sense. We communicate; but an unconscious automaton can communicate (like a telepone answering machine). We have self-regulated activity that looks determined. None of these signs indicate consciousness is present. Robots, for example, show self-regulated, determined movement and activity AND they can communicate. But robots are not conscous; not the ones we have at present, anyway.

Even tougher than the “zombie” problem of consciousness it what’s called the “hard problem” of consciousness. Simply put, it’s the question: What does consciousness mean or what is consciousness, exactly? In more detail, the problem might be phrased: why does awareness of sensory information exist at all?

Now me, true to my enquiring style, would rather ask a different question: not “What is conscousness?” but “What is conscious?” In other words: what is aware?

From my own perspective I’m not a zombie and I know I am aware and I am aware of being aware. I’m here! It’s a bit deeper on down than Descartes’ cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). I could be a computer and “think” but not know I was here.

But how did I get here? Don’t just say God put me here because I’ll just answer back: OK, where did God come from? The question I want answering is how did consciousness arise in me? What is awareness coupled with self awareness, exactly? It’s just the same problem, in the same degree, as “How can a knife cut itself”.

Almost always, boffins miss the point completely and answer this with some comment about perceptions. If it was just about perception, it would I suppose be simple. We perceive, therefore we are aware.

That’s wrong. We can perceive without any awareness. A thermostat perceives (temperature) without knowing it’s perceiving. A fish perceives other fish in the water*. A zombie perceives without knowing it’s perceiving. Now do you see why philosophers use the zombie concept for thought experiments? A hypothetical zombie means a functioning entity that perceives but does not know it’s there, doing the perceiving.

Then it’s back to the hard question: what does it really mean, to be awake, to be aware, to be aware of being aware?

The psychologists are helpless at this. All they study is perceptions, not consciousness at all. Daniel Dennet’s arrogantly titled book Consciousness Explained actually explains nothing at all. It doesn’t even address my question of what is it that is aware? He just writes about perceptions, as if perceiving things makes you conscious! (if that was the case, an x-ray machine is conscious, because it perceives things! An MRI scan actually perceives a complex, moving 3-D world, just like we do. But it still isn’t self-aware).

Next time I’m going to tackle a definition of consciousness, in the form of spirit, that is based in (or reflects) our everyday understanding of physics and reality. Wish me luck!

* If fish should be aware and speak to God, that would invalidate this sentence, but not the rest of the argument.