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Where do you feel your consciousness to be?

rickolasnice

rickolasnice

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Apr 19, 2007
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As in.. Where do you feel like your consciousness lies within yourself?

This was a post my friend made on facebook the other day.. I'll share my thoughts about the question / answer after a few replies ;)
 
First I would say that perhaps I don't even have consciousness yet, not in the truest sense.. that I'm more on automatic pilot. But that's another topic entirely.

Taking it as a given that I do have it then I would say my consciousness is not in 3D space, that instead it is giving rise to this visual-spatial 3D experience itself.. so in essence beyond all space and time. Everywhere and Nowhere.
 
thats kind of the line of thought of self-inquiry, who am I?

i kinda reckon all the energy i'm made up of (and everything else) is consciousness, not that i am actually aware of that, but i can see the truth in it

but i do feel my heart directing a lot of my actions and motives
 
It feels to me like it's a point right between my eyes, but I don't think that it actually makes sense to ascribe location to consciousness.

ebola
 
All throughout my body. I'm not even being funny. Yoga, meditation, dissociatives and psychedelics, and medical education have given me an enhanced awareness of my peripheral touch, vibratory, and proprioceptive sensory modalities.

I once read an essay, written in Chinese by a Chinese author for a Chinese audience, which was a quick and dirty guide to understanding how Westerners think. Most intriguing to me was the point that Westerners have a propensity to isolate phenomena (including people), and to examine and treat them as though they were in a vacuum, completely cut off from the surrounding environment. I can't help but chuckle, a tad scornfully, at all the efforts expended by Philosophers of Mind and Neuroscientists (a blurry boundary these days), to localize human consciousness to some small point or discrete anatomical structure. This strikes me as the extreme fringe of this Western psychological need to isolate and reduce phenomena.

I cannot for the life of me understand the practical value of searching for a "seat of consciousness", even if there is one to be found (which I doubt). Are the seekers of this modern-day Holy Grail anticipating some sort of medical or psychological application? Are there any great humanitarian gains or palliation of The Human Condition that are anticipated if a SoC is found? Are prospective developers of artificial intelligence or robotics underwriting this research, hoping for commercial-industrial applications?

Or is the motivation for finding a SoC purely psychological or ideological? Is it essentially looking for a new frontier, kind of like SETI and the search for intelligent life, with the full force of human hope but no clear idea what the frontier, if any, will look like? I also get the motivation of chipping away at a great mystery which may just be unsolvable -- I've wiled away countless hours examining high-res photos of Mars looking for evidence of something unnatural that humans didn't put there, and webpages about the Voynich Manuscript. Is that what most Philosophers of Mind are doing, in a different venue? I for one feel awed and pleasantly humbled, not frustrated or threatened, by great mysteries that resist all attempts to solve them. Though I respect and sympathize with all the blood sweat and tears, and ingenious verbal arguments, that have gone into the debates about consciousness, I find nothing unsettling about the idea that sentient self-awareness will never reduce to anything simpler.

I've dabbled a bit in Philosophy of Mind -- certainly not enough to hold my own in a debate even with people who've only taken an intro-level university course in the subject, but enough to know that it's not my intellectual borderland of choice. I'm not the greatest between-the-lines reader, but almost every time I read anything on this subject, I pick up a strongly Naturalist* ideological agenda. This makes me wonder how much modern day Philosophy of Mind is motivated by a disdain for supernatural beliefs, and a quest for a piece of evidence that would once and for all banish all notions that anyone's sentient existence right now is anything but a reproducible physical phenomenon. Again, maybe this is me reading too much into it, but I'm just putting it out there.

* By naturalism, I'm referring to what most laymen would call atheism, materialism, and/or reductionism. I footnoted this to avoid this thread derailing into off-topic and unhelpful semantic arguments.
 
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not per se "consciousness," but Heidegger (the most important 20th century continental philosopher), spoke of

Da-Sein

Being-There

The "thereness" of our "Being" has a specific (pre)ontological meaning. The "there" is not even a spatial "there" (a point located in three-dimensional Euclidean space), but the "there" of our Being, which is coincindentally the being-thereness of the beings in the world.

Sorry for the Heidegger lingo.... but just look at your computer. You can see two things a) the computer, b) the existence of the computer, its beingness, its essence, etc... This is the so-called ontological difference between Being/beings for Heidegger. For Heidegger, Da-sein is always standing-open (ex-stasis) to Being, i.e. by relating to the being of beings. Example: a stone doesn't see the yellowness of the sun, human beings do.

The place of "consciousness" (Heidegger will reject this word) is the "place" where mind-world, cognizing-cognizeable, subject-object, inside-outside, etc. are mutually interacting. For him these dichotomies, however don't exist. The place of Da-Sein is this "between-place" of mind-world, cognizing-cognizeable, subject-object, inside-outside, etc.

Check for example

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25311-heidegger-s-topology-being-place-world/

http://www.amazon.com/Heideggers-Topology-Being-Place-World/dp/026263368X
 
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Consciousness reveals itself within the question....
Also, are we not representations of consciousness? Universe, brain... body/mind/organism... We are that? No? :)
 
My consciousness is wherever I'm focusing my intention and awareness. I don't "feel" consciousness unless an emotion is arising.
 
Seems like it's somewhere inside my skull.

I think consciousness is just brain activity, so that makes sense to me.
 
^Yes, but is it brain activity that generates or receives? :)

I think consciousness feels like it is located just above the eyes, in the centre of the skull. But that seems to be an illusion based on our visual organs location. Certainly, with the eyes closed, the sense of consciousness starts to feel less like it is stationary and located only within a certain physical space, and more like a fluctuating field surrounding the body and broadly confined to a local geophysical discrete area. But that is likely another illusion based on our closed-eyes-brain's increasing reliance on hearing to orient oneself. Hearing is a sense that seems to have less defined boundaries, with a vast gradated axis of loud/soft/far/close, different and more subtle then the spectrum of light. Perhaps consciousness emerging from this sense in turn feels more transient and less defined, more ethereal, field-like... I imagine that continued negation of each sense would alter the apparent seat of consciousness until it has contracted (or expanded) almost infinitely. Something is still left after all that- but who knows what?
 
I don't hold strong beliefs on anything particularly, but I used to like this idea which I felt to be quite true whilst under the influence of a certain psychedelic fungus:

Consciousness is distributed throughout the universe. My brain is a receiver of the signal known as consciousness, analogous to a radio receiver. Becoming aware, therefore is analogous to 'tuning in'. We are the eyes of the universe, the most highly developed sensory organ of it, brought into creation by it in order to experience itself.
 
willow11 said:
^Yes, but is it brain activity that generates or receives? :)
Click to expand...

Receives. You're brain uses A LOT of energy.. I can't see it using much if it were a simply receiving..

I think consciousness feels like it is located just above the eyes, in the centre of the skull. But that seems to be an illusion based on our visual organs location.
Click to expand...

Ahhh you beat me to it! ;)
 
MDAO said:
I cannot for the life of me understand the practical value of searching for a "seat of consciousness", even if there is one to be found (which I doubt).
Click to expand...

Well, knowledge of the physiological processes that produce consciousness would eliminate a great deal of uncertainty about anaesthetic effects, degree of awareness held by coma patients, etc. But at the end of the day, whether philosophy of mind matters doesn't matter; it's interesting, and that's really all that's necessary.

Is it essentially looking for a new frontier, kind of like SETI and the search for intelligent life, with the full force of human hope but no clear idea what the frontier, if any, will look like?
Click to expand...

This is at the very least how many researchers and philosophers would style what they're doing. To what degree they're successful is a wider point of debate.

By naturalism, I'm referring to what most laymen would call atheism, materialism, and/or reductionism. I footnoted this to avoid this thread derailing into off-topic and unhelpful semantic arguments.
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Most philosophical naturalists are stridently anti-reductionist, and most wield a concept of materiality that is a bit different from the lay-conception. They however have a clear anti-supernatural agenda. This isn't to say that philosophical naturalists actually hold enough in common for the term to be particularly meaningful. . .but philosophical naturalists usually fight against the idea of a pristine realm of logical necessity, set apart from empirical contingencies, put forth by logical positivists, rather than conceptions of the supernatural put forth by adherents of religious faith.

ebola
 
I 'feel' like it's Everywhere and Nowhere.

However, in a scientific setting, you use instruments to measure reactions. A big part of the Method is how you are conducting the experiment. If the variables don't match between experiments, you never really have a scientific finding. In the same way, life is the experiment and consciousness is the main instrument used in the experiment. The variables are never the same in this particular experiment, though, which often leads to confusion in our natural proclivity to ordered understanding. Furthermore, to make any kind finding, you have to be able to understand and explain the instrument just as well as the subject. We can't do that.

I think the best answer, for me, is "I don't know"
 
If you define consciousness as a state in which you are fully aware of your existence and the existence of other entities (that includes concrete and abstract objects/ideas and living things), it has no physical location. But it is due to our relatively advanced nervous system. Just like emotions, you can feel love for example but does it have a physical location? No.
In this case, humans are partially conscious.

It's hard to define consciousness though. The more I try to think about it, the more confusing it gets.

One could also define consciousness as simply knowing that you exist. In that case, humans could be the only conscious being on earth, we won't know for sure until we find a way to accurately communicate with other earthly beings.

Anyway, consciousness has no physical location.
 
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flyhighk said:
If you define consciousness as a state in which you are fully aware of your existence and the existence of other entities (that includes concrete and abstract objects/ideas and living things), it has no physical location. But it is due to our relatively advanced nervous system. Just like emotions, you can feel love for example but does it have a physical location? No.
In this case, humans are partially conscious.

It's hard to define consciousness though. The more I try to think about it, the more confusing it gets.

One could also define consciousness as simply knowing that you exist. In that case, humans could be the only conscious being on earth, we won't know for sure until we find a way to accurately communicate with other earthly beings.

Anyway, consciousness has no physical location.
Click to expand...

I heard a pretty interesting definition the other day, from some documentary I can't remember - It went something like 'Being Conscious' - 'Having the capability in some form to sense both inner and outer worlds, with the express purpose of surviving'

This actually opens up consciousness to encompass pretty much EVERYTHING. On a micro level, we're just an accumulation of billions of cells which each in their own right conform to the above explanation of consciousness. On the Macro; Animals, plants, even our planets biosphere - Planets, stars, galaxies. On the Micro; The living organisms which encompass the cellular and genetic information that is the basis for all of their macro-cosmic brethren. I like it.

I think saying definitively that "Consciousness has no physical location" is as big a leap as saying it does, though.
 
Sometimes when I think about it I feel like it's in my head, then I feel it in my 'heart', then I realize it's all around me.

My very simple answer.
 
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