4) What The Bejeezus is Consciousness About?
Not only what is consciousness, but why have we got it and does any other animal have a similar sense of consciousness to us? The human brain, and other higher animal’s brains for that matter, are disgustingly complicated. But they’re not complicated like a computer (although that metaphor is often used for the sake of simplicity), brains are complicated in a different way.
Brain areas speak to each other, but they also effect other more distant parts of the brain. Each section works independently but is infinitely tuned by the other bits and bobs that are sat around it. Information is constantly jazzed into the brain through all of our senses – touch, taste, vision, smell and hearing obviously, but also equilibrioception (sense of balance), kinesthetic (the sense of where all of your body parts are at any one time), thermoception (temperature) and on and on.
All this maddening detail hits our brain every nanosecond of our waking day. But instead of getting a jumbled mass of confusing data you get a simple easy to understand “feeling”. Imagine you are sitting cross-legged in a warm field with your eyes closed. You don’t feel like your brain is shouting:
YOUR RIGHT LEG IS LYING AT AN ANGLE AND CROSSING OVER THE LEFT LEG, CURRENTLY WE CAN ONLY SEE THE INSIDE OF YOUR EYELIDS, THE FLOOR IS STABLE, YOU ARE AT A COMFORTABLE TEMPERATURE BUT IF THIS WIND CONTINUES YOU MAY DROP A COUPLE OF DEGREES, YOU CAN SMELL VARIOUS PLANT SPORES AND THE BISCUIT FACTORY IN THE NEXT VALLEY. YOUR HEART RATE IS DROPPING.
Your brain is getting all of that info, and more, but you just feel like you’re sat in a field, and you like it. How the frig does it manage that?
