Time is like a river that flows, but that river is me!
Jorge Luis Borge (1899 – 1986)
In contrast to (most) animals, humans have the ability to be aware of themselves, the time of the past, the present and the future.
“Everything we do and everything we don’t do is connected to a dimension in time. We live in time, we share time. We are its product, and its creator.”
Same goes for our perceptions and thoughts, which is what our consciousness exists of. But is that ‘time’ where in or where true we live is something like a continuous river or simply a overload of impressions following each other separately, just like many loose segments make one chain?
One thing is clear, we experience our consciousness as a continuous stream not in separate pieces. It’s feels like we glide from one though to another without interruption, although the content of our thoughts is changing all the time.
Henri Bergson formulated it into something like this: We take pictures from the passing reality and stick them together. It’s like in a movie: numerous pictures following each other quickly. We experience those movies as real life because we self split time and reality like a camera and paste them together to make it appear as a continuous film.
Consciousness isn’t a thing it’s a process!
It’s the result off a immense amount off interactions and mechanisms between different functions in your brain.
One definition says that consciousness is the perception of what goes on in your mind. And the mind is the hard-to-define entity where intelligence, making decisions, perceptions, consciousness and I- awareness come together. And like all brooks, streams and rivers end into sea, perception, consciousness, thoughts, pictures, sounds and feelings flows in or through our mind.
We are the director of our own movie, but in the same time we are it’s lead actor!
Normally we experience our world like a movie that’s going by, but sometimes the projector is malfunctioning. People with migraine or users of LSD can experience reality in a very different way. For them this movie plays much too slow or sometimes way too fast. We can see this, too. If you for exemple, look closely at a car passing you by; it’s like his wheels spinning backwards for some time, and then in a blink they got normal again. Or look at the spinning of a ventilator; after a while it will seem to be standing still, some blades have gotten bigger, some have gotten darker, and then suddenly it turns back to normal again. This phenomenon is caused because of a shortage of synchronization between the frequency of the pictures and that, for instance, of the spinning wheels.
Researchers made a big progress in understanding the physical structure of the brain and some of the electrical processes going on in there. With your consciousness you are aware of your existing; a quality lacking by animals and computers. It’s a mystery how and why consciousness originates out of physical processes in our brains. What it means for the human race to have a consciousness is the only big question in the science of nature that we currently not even have the question for, let stand an answer. One reason for this is that scholars use there brains to try to understand the brains. And olny studying the physiology of the brains may not be enough. Nevertheless every human being experience his consciousness.
Our vivid recollction about things from the past arend just simple facts like as bits in a computer. We can think about our experiences, learn from it and used them in the future. We can imagine different future scenarios en evaluate the possible effects on our life’s. We have the ability to analyze, create, to appreciate things and to coddle. We can have a nice conversation about the past, to-day and the future. We have ethical value in things like behavior so we can use that to make decisions in our own advantage. We can feel attracted to the beauty of things like moral and art. In our minds we can create ideas and refine them and calculate how others will react to it as we put it in action.
Another thing is that we have the ability to stand still to our own future. A professor Richard Dawkins admitted that humans have unique abilities’ that separate us from animals. He added to this: “Advantage on short term is the only thing that counts in evolution, advantage on long term never counted”.
There is nothing that could evolve which would be bad for the short-time concern of the individual. Personally I believe that our consciousness isn’t just a coincident, an insignificant detail or a by-product of evolution. It’s rather the creation of a loving, almighty God!
Tags: Psychology, consciousness, sience, Jorge Luis Borge, Henri Bergson, Richard Dawkins
February 25, 2008 at 5:44 pm |
Your article starts with ‘in contrast to animals…’. I don’t know if it’s a an obsolete quote, but It is today widely accepted amongst the scientific community that a lot of animals are conscious of themselves. (while some others are not). Not rectifying this highly deteriorates the credibility of the whole article, which is, beside this, very good.
February 25, 2008 at 7:29 pm |
Thanks for your words on my article GeeFlat.
Your right on the fact that there are animals that have, at least some form of consciousness. But there is a significant difference between us human beings and animals.
Philosopher Robert Brandom noticed this first saying: there is a difference between having goals and being able to attribute goals. In other words, there can be unconscious goals. Animals have only unconscious goals, while we, besides having such goals, also have some conscious goals (and we are also able to asign goals to others).
If you for instance would play a hide-and-seek game with your dog, you find a very interesting fact. At first, it seems that the dog understands the game, he understands that it has to find you and it is able to adopt this purpose. His behavior is indeed goal-driven, it has the goal of finding you. However, when you play again and again, you can notice a curious fact: when the dog starts searching for you he always first goes to the same place where you have hidden in the previous game. In other words, the dog does not understand that you yourself have the goal of hiding from it. It thinks that if it has found you there in the previous game you are probably there again. It adopts the goal of finding you, it does not act like a robot with a predetermined behavior, but nonetheless it assumes you are such a robot!
The standard test of detecting consciousness is the mirror test: if an animal manages to recognize itself in the mirror, it means it has a certain awareness of itself. Insofar, the consciousness animals are: humans, chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, dolphins and orcas (killer whales).
Using the things said above one can understand why some animals manage to recognize themselves in the mirror while others don’t. One does not recognize himself in the mirror because one recognizes the behavioral similarities between oneself and one’s reflected image – this is virtually impossible to do because one cannot really observe oneself (we have a very improper perspective). One recognizes oneself in the mirror because one ascribes goals to the person in the mirror and ascribes goals to oneself, and then one can realize that the image has the same goals as oneself – therefore it is the same person.
So ‘consciousness’ is the ability to attribute goals (either to oneself or to others). Whether one has such an ability can be detected via empirical means such as the hide-and-seek game.
J.