GReaperEx t1_je97o5b wrote on March 30, 2023 at 10:09 AM

Good question.

A somewhat correct but useless answer is that it arises from the complexity of the brain. We have no idea how though.

The philosophical answer is that consciousness arises when the outer is separated from the inner (outer being the world, inner being you) and at the same time when the outer in reflected in the inner (for example, when the brain creates a model of reality inside it). That contradiction between what you think is real and what is actually real, along with the separation of the ego from the whole, is consciousness.

Unknown_Talker9273 OP t1_je982fw wrote on March 30, 2023 at 10:14 AM

Actually a pretty good explanation. Thank you. Even my head understands it :D

SifTheAbyss t1_je9ctea wrote on March 30, 2023 at 11:12 AM

Another way to rephrase the above answer is, "we simply don't know for real", and that upens up another pretty relevant topic nowadays:

IF it's just somehow the complexity of the brain, how far simpler before it stops being true, or how complex can we make a machine before it becomes conscious?

Person012345 t1_je9gac4 wrote on March 30, 2023 at 11:49 AM

The true, short answer that ELI5 won't actually let you give is "nobody knows".

Consciousness is a mystery, we don't even know what it actually is let alone how it works. It's one of the areas that is still open to a multitude of spiritual interpretations. And if it is merely an emergent phenomena of bio-electric interactions between brain cells, which is what one might be tempted to think scientifically, then I think this leads to a big question of what other interactions could also give rise to some form of consciousness (albeit an experience that we may not even recognise as consciousness yet).

And to what degree do the electrical interactions in computers give rise to a form of consciousness? Again, it may not be a human-level, free-will having, life-enjoying experience, but when you look at very simple creatures driven mostly by instinct and not decision making, I think it's silly to suggest they aren't conscious, yet I also think their experience of their conscious existence is probably extremely dissimilar to our own. Go several steps down that rung and maybe you get to computers and I wonder where the concept of "consciousness" ceases to exist, if indeed it ever does at all.

Does it apply to gravitational interactions? Nuclear interactions? Does any of this even really matter?

Farnsworthson t1_jea25jw wrote on March 30, 2023 at 2:45 PM

>we don't even know what it actually is let alone how it works

That's the core issue. Until you define what conciousness actually IS (and by "define" I mean in scientific terms that could in principle be used to make testable predictions, not in untestable philosophical generalities and ambiguities), it's redundant to attempt an explanation; you're just playing with words and hoping that nobody notices. Personally, I feel it's strongly connected to (in a complex organism may even be equivalent to) a complexity of brain function that allows it to observe and consider what and how it is "thinking" - to include at an adequate level its own "thought processes" as input data, in other words. That seems to me to be pretty much where the existence of a sense of "self" has to start. But that's just my two penn'orth.

("Brain", "organism" etc. here being simple shorthand - I'm quite comfortable with the prospect of, say, a non-organic mechanism having conciousness. Again - until you define what that IS, you most definitely can't exclude possibilities based on what feels suspiciously like pure anthropomorphic prejudice. Oh - and given the number of rather capable AIs suddenly out there - we could probably do with something approaching a definiton quite urgently. Just saying...)

(I have a similar definitional issue with "free will". Define it (in purely scientific, non-"spiritual" terms) - show me what it might actually mean scientifically for a mechanism or organism to have "free will" - and we can start talking sensibly about it.)

BaronMusclethorpe t1_jea2iib wrote on March 30, 2023 at 2:48 PM

The top part of the response is the most accurate. Work in the medical field long enough and you see what happens to "conciousness" when parts of the brain are impaired, begin to break down, malfunction, or were simply lacking to begin with.

It's all an illusion, a rich tapestry woven by the brain, and in the grand scheme of things it doesn't take much to strip us of it.

djamp42 t1_je9bliw wrote on March 30, 2023 at 10:58 AM

>That contradiction between what you think is real and what is actually real

This one sentence explains me perfectly.

urmomaisjabbathehutt t1_je9fden wrote on March 30, 2023 at 11:40 AM

Wasn't a time when people belived that life arised from a misterios life force imbued into inaninanimate matmatter ?

then modern biology was born dispelldispelling that notion with the realization that life is an emergent result of chemical processess and that complex life is a composite of simpler units

we were asking the wrong question, looking at the wrong perspective, now we know it doest mke sense there never was a misterious magic life force

sinsaint t1_je9fdo3 wrote on March 30, 2023 at 11:40 AM

Another way to think about it is that your consciousness is like an operating system of a computer. It handles a lot of things, most things the user would be aware of, but there's a lot more computation going on than just in the operating system.

For instance, there is a certain kind of blindness where the eyes are functional, but the consciousness sees black. When told to look at pictures of people, subjects were able to guess how trustworthy someone appeared to like 70% accuracy, iirc, implying that some of the brain was still able to process the image, even if the conscious mind didn't know why.