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Sample Dissertation

Section 3: How is Consciousness Produced?

Define Consciousness

Now that we have a rough, but workable, definition of the term "consciousness," as everyone understands, the next question arrises: how is consciousness produced? Prior to my revisitation of this topic (the essay that you're reading right now), in the first part, I wrote that consciousness arrose through the electro-chemical processes of the brain. This is a particularly vague description of the processes of the mind. The brain is full of electricity and thousands of different chemicals combining, mixing, changing each other. On a microscopic level, I imagine that it looks like a little laboratory. This can easily be said of most other organs, but their processes are easily understood. How the kidney purifies the blood or how the liver breaks down alcohol or how the lungs take in oxygen -- all of this can easily be understood. As the brain's chemicals mix, meld, and morph, the result is consciousness. There are some aspects of the brain that scientists have generalized an association with. The cerebellum controls balance, movement, and coordination. The hippocampus is responsible for memory. The pituitary gland releases hormones that control growth or mood. The hypothalmus controls the body's temperature. But even these vague associations are generally questioned by some scientists. Some argue that the hippocampus is actually more related to social interaction than just determining what information to remember.

I imagine that one could take away one or two of these components of the brain without overall disrupting consciousness. At most, I imagine that these basic components of the brain are tools used by the consciousness. In a way, one could say that a consciousness with these tools is of higher quality than a consciousness that lacks these basic tools -- but, still that does not eliminate the ability to feel suffering or happiness, a very basic principle of consciousness. With that said, one can justifiably say that the consciousness of a human being -- with a brain that has all of these tools that help understand natural stimulus better and then helps the individual choose the best course of action to this stimulus -- is of a higher quality than that of a "lower" animal, such as a dog or a rodent. I doubt that this can hardly be doubted. Anyone who has any familiarity with domesticated animals understands that cats, for example, are unable to understand language, whereas dogs can easily understand their name being called and seem to respond to the stimulus of reward and punishment (something cats are seemingly unaware of). In such a manner, the quality of consciousness of an adult human being is probably considerably more than a bird in the wild, whose consciousness was developed to evade predators and efficiently hunt bugs. However, this difference, this gap of quality of consciousness, does not mean to imply that one animal is any more or less deserving of justice than any other animal. For we could give an advanced hippocampus or a highly developed hypothalmus to the brains of lower animals, and their responses would near humans. The reason that we value any life form is not because of the tools that its brain has at its disposal, but rather because it is capable of consciousness. The most bitter irony of our era is a man who argues that it is justifiable to kill and eat animals out of pleasure "because mankind is smarter" -- while a group of educated mankind looks on, questioning the statement of the one who kills and eats animals. For, it would seem, that such an individual who makes such a claim, is either without humanity or without intelligence, or both, and that he is probably of lesser value than most animal life living in nature.

I was hardly making an argument for the "superiority" of mankind in any way. For, in fact, if we were ever to customize and create a new consciousness, we would be smart enough to provide it with more tools than we ourselves have: perhaps we could have an entire tissue dedicated to reasoning abilities and logical deductions. Perhaps we could enlarge the part responsible for creating sympathy, that our created consciousness would -- in fact -- be much, much, much less prone to the ravages that have, for far too long, been associated with humans. As creators of this consciousness, we might as well place the virtues of mankind in excelled forms. Perhaps we would dedicate an entire lobe to creative and abstract thought. Perhaps a tissue could be used for the artistic development and other similar thoughts.

I think it was necessary to discern between the quality of consciousness as it occurs either between species, or between individuals. (Yes, it was also necessary to mock the ethics of any person who consumes the flesh of animals and contributes to an entire industry founded on savagery.) When we want to know how the process of consciousness arrises, we inevitably must look to the brain. An uneducated eye would look to the brain and see all of these various tissues, constructed differently and creating different chemicals and generating different amounts of electricity. It would be a tremendous and arduous task for this uneducated eye to be able to discern what part of the brain was the essential key to producing the consciousness -- and what other parts were simply tools to the consciousness, if this observer had even grasped the idea of that. He might very while point to a tissue that is responsible solely for regulating the blood flow to the brain, and say that it is the part which makes us conscious.

What tissue, to the understanding of our present and current scientific community, in the brain, is responsible for producing consciousness? I cannot say, as we do not know or understand what it is that produces this sense of feeling. I imagine that, just like every other major discovery, it will not be philosophy to discover, but for science to discover and philosophy to guide. But, before entirely passing off this question, of what part of the brain produces our awareness, allow me to suggest some unfounded and purely theoretical conjecture. I suppose when an individual spends such a great amount of time on a topic, but they are limited by the technology or understanding of their day, they begin to pose hypothetical arguments for one view or another. In Origin of the Species, for example, Charles Darwin didn't understand why certain attributes were inherited or why certain attributes were not. The principles of inheritance and variation, of retaining as well as digressing from parents' traits, were the essential foundation of his derivative theory, or what we today call Evolution. He proposed some ideas on the topic of why certain traits survive or don't, but essentially admitted that he did not know. It would be at least one century after the publication of Origin of the Species before any scientist would venture to propose a sound theory of inheritance and variation. In the 1950's, Francis Crick and James Watson would discover the double helix formation of DNA, which would give us such a great understanding of inheritance and variation.

The studies and observations of Charles Darwin created the theory of Evolution, though he was ignorant of certain processes of it. Today, we have uncovered some of those processes. While we may today understand DNA and how it carries certain inheritances and certain variations, and the inevitability of mutations, there are still many secrets of genes that we do not know. This has never stopped the adament scientists of Frick and Watson to uncover the DNA molecule. The scientists the preceded Charles Darwin, for example, lacked the vibrant scientific community that allowed Darwin to educate himself so much and to see what other scientists were doing. These scientists who preceded Darwin, such scientists as Galileo and Copernicus, all who were regarded as the greatest deceivers and enemies of Christendom -- their scientific observations, of the very basic laws of physics could not explain the origin of animal life on the planet, nor could they explain the laws of inheritance and varation or the formation of genetic material, nor could they offer a definitive view of the world on an atomic level. But, it would be the something that further scientists would base their theories on. If the theory of gravity or the understanding of astronomical bodies had never been understood, I imagine that Darwin, Huxley, and other thinkers of evolution would be set back dramatically. And, without the theories proposed by Darwin, I imagine that Frick and Watson would probably be endeavoring to understand the origin of life on this planet than lifting the veil over DNA structure. Our scientists today are paving the way towards the understanding of the future. Today, it is true, that there is not all that much understanding about the concepts of the Big Bang, or the Red Shift, or other theories on the origin of the universe. Even where such comprehension exists, there are still thousands and thousands of questions. With a bit of a hope, and a bit of reason, I imagine that such questions will find their answers.

I am not saying that science is faultless. I am not saying that I am definitely expecting to find answers to all of the questions that have plagued the mind of man since our existence. The only thing I am saying, is that these questions will probably be taken as far as humanly possible with our coming discoveries and the natural observers that shall bring them to us.

With all this said, allow me to create some conjecture as to from what conditions consciousness arrises from. I imagine that the sense of feeling is produced by the proper chemicals and the right amount of electricity. Yes, yes, this is all currently understood as truth. But, I imagine that these chemicals would form certain parts, and that consciousness is produced by the rubbing together of these two distinct parts. As they rub together, a very gentle electric current is produced, perhaps enough to produce and sustain a consciousness. There is almost no doubt, either among neurologists or among physicists, that to sustain a consciousness, there must be exchanges of heat and electricity and chemicals within the brain. Maybe, once we discover what produces a consciousness, we might see that a computer program is very capable of doing more than just imitating a consciousness.

I have considered some rather pessimistic and cynical views of the nature of consciousness and how it arrises. When we look to the fact that our consciousness is, in fact, unlike anything else in this universe (save for other consciousnesses), in that it doesn't resemble other familiar objects, a curious thought comes to our mind. Perhaps being conscious is, in fact, not something special. Perhaps it is simply the nature of being. Yes, as organisms with brains, we have memories, we have thoughts, we have abstract philosophical abilities -- all of these processes are produced by the machinery that is the tissue of our brains. When the machinery in a manufacturing plant produces heat and toxins in the air, is there any reason to think that it produces a sense of feeling? Well, certainly not, at least with our current understanding, but the same hypothetical question may be asked of our own sense of feeling. At most, this would mean that we have a lack of value judgment. It would mean, essentially, that we viewed our authentic brain processes as something higher than they were. Perhaps this is my own fault. But, it should be defined, that when I say an animal is conscious compared to a piece of driftwood, it is using the same manner of logic and observation as saying that a piece of driftwood is organic compared to a stone. A consciousness may justly be defined as the collective processes of the brain, primarily those dedicated to thought. However, we must also recognize that a computer is only capable of imitating a consciousness, with pain and pleasure variables, whereas a human being is actually capable of being conscious. Maybe it would be most scientific to admit that, though we know there is a difference in the sense of feeling in both of these entities, but we do not know precisely why.

One of the problems with this science of understanding the consciousness, is that it is undertaken by individuals who are conscious -- primarily, by a race of beings whom regard themselves as the prime example of this sense of feeling, and more ignorant members of this race considering themselves the only example of this sense of feeling. We know very well that individual humans, when judging themselves, oftentimes are either too harsh or too lenient, too glorifying or too modest. I'm not going to try and explain or understand why this is here, though I suspect it may have to do so much with how others view us than our own objective view of ourself. Perhaps we would be terrified to find out that this consciousness we have is something that is not special. But, no matter what we discover consciousness to be, it doesn't change what it really is. A fossil of a sea shell is beautiful, but if we discover how it was made, by the million years of heat and pressure, it does not instantly turn it to becoming ugly. I, as an individual, am extremely satisfied with this sense of feeling to which I am endowed -- and no future discovery will disrupt this satisfaction.

Finally, before closing this section, I think I should answer some of the questions I brought up from "A Philosophical Dissertation on Consciousness," the first one, written in November of 2002. The essential question that I brought up in that first dissertation was, "If the parts that produce consciousness are exchanged with equal parts, how does this effect the produced consciousness?" Allow me to break this down a bit easier. A factory produces heat, however, if equal parts are exchanged, such as a gear for a gear, etc., does it produce the same heat? It will probably produce an amount of heat proportional to what it was previously producing, yes, but there is a difference between what is being produced. You can have heat over here and heat over there. They can be equal in every attribute and characteristic, but they are still separate, different forms of heat. In like reasoning, what happens to consciousness, when the molecules of the brain change, morph, or anything else that would change the physical composition of the brain? This was the essential question of the first dissertation -- and I feel it that this second dissertation would be incomplete without answering this question.

I think that my initial analogy of consciousness to a factory that produces heat was, well, inaccurate. That is the very tricky part about analogies: they cannot be used to prove something, but only to help things be demonstrated with more clarity. I do not believe that one could very accurately say that consciousness is a product of the brain. Rather, consciousness is simply the term used to describe the collective processes of the brain. An example of the fault would be saying, "Heat is a product of fire," when in fact, heat (in the case of fire) is a part of the fire. Well, allow me to draw another example. Let's say that the nature of a plant is that it is green, at least, that is one of its attributes. If one of the parts of the plant is replaced with another green part, one might ask: "How is the nature of its greenness effected?" Well, it's not effected. It's a different plant, but the idea of the color green is simply something that we can see as an attribute. It is an abstract idea that we apply to things that fit its description. So, too, is consciousness: it is an attribute, not a thing. We describe something as conscious based on the attributes of it. However, I think that the question I originally asked, whether the nature changed, is perhaps irrelevant. But, then again, I just possibly am wrong.

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For Life,

Punkerslut

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Punkerslut (or Andy Carloff) has been writing essays and poetry on social issues which have caught his attention for several years. His website www.punkerslut.com provides a complete list of all of these writings. His life experience includes homelessness, squating in New Orleans and LA, dropping out of high school, getting expelled from college for "subversive activities," and a myriad of other revolutionary actions.

Written by: Punkerslut