Are we ready to become aware of ourselves?
I have been fascinated with the material world for as long as I can remember. It isn’t true that young children take the world for granted ; some at least do ponder on the origins of things and their destinies. But there was one thing that I did for long take for granted – my consciousness ; in fact, when I was very young, I did not even think of consciousness.
But what is consciousness? It is one of those things that is not revealed to us through the senses. Rather it is our consciousness that informs us that we have senses.
We have a difficulty in describing what consciousness is without using metaphors. For example, some psychologists have described it as a screen on which our world is projected. But a screen is a material thing, while consciousness is not ; and so it is a potentially misleading linguistic device, for people have a habit of treating metaphors as if they were literal descriptions.
So consciousness is not a material thing, not detectable by the senses. And what, therefore, is its proper classification? It must surely be spiritual ; i.e., a known real thing which is not detectable by the senses. And it is a thing which has the thoughts of psychologists tied in knots as they ponder it.
We are in the habit of asking, “Where does a thing come from?” We are fascinated by origins. But where does consciousness come from? The current orthodoxy in psychology says that it is an ’emergent property’ of the brain. According to this hypothesis, the complexity of the brain somehow causes consciousness to arise from it. But still nobody knows how this occurs and nobody is any wiser as to what consciousness is.
But then the idea arises, “Why should it be matter that gives rise to consciousness?” For isn’t it at least equally likely that it is consciousness that gives rise to matter?
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