The Origin Of Consciousness

 The Origin Of Consciousness

Consciousness requires memory.  

Without memory, there is no consciousness.

Consciousness is the remembering of learning.

Remembering, recalling, is not perfect.  Thus we have imagination.

Acting "unconsciously" is, perhaps, simply not remembering what one has done.

A corollary is that one can act rationally without being conscious of that behavior.  One simply does not remember performing that behavior.  

Learning is a process of "coding" something -- a behavior, a song, a picture -- so that it can be recalled, remembered.  "Coding" means developing a stable, relatively permanent, neural pattern that can be remembered.

How does remembering happen?

Consciousness is never "live", in the sense of immediate.  Seeing a bird land on a tree does not happen when the bird actually lands on the tree.  There is always a time lag determined by the action potential of cells.  Also, seeing something "land on a tree" requires decoding of what has been perceived, at what has been perceived may turn out to be a piece of paper blowing in the wind, or a squirrel jumping onto a branch.  A final decoding may then lead to the conclusion that a bird landed on a branch, which is then remembered and becomes the consciousness of the bird landing on the branch.  

The "gorilla amid the ball-passers" experiment might be interpreted as an example of the gorilla not being coded as relevant to the exercise -- counting passes between ball-passers -- and thus not being remembered when a subject is asked to recall the experiment.  The subject did see the gorilla, but the gorilla was not relevant to the task of remembering the number of ball passes -- which itself required focused attention -- and so was not coded and therefore could not be remembered, likewise other non-relevant aspects of the experimental situation.

When I try to reproduce a painting, it takes a while for me to understand what I am looking at.  I may initially see an undefined shape, a blob, which may finally resolve itself into a sheep.  This was the case when I recognized the sheep in the painting "Young Shepherdess" by Jean-Francois Millet, c.1870-1873 at the MFA. This realization only came after looking at the painting while drawing it over a period of about 6 to 8 hours over three days.  During that time I was engaged in reproducing other parts of the painting, and was only aware of the "sheep" as a darkish blob, and drew it as such as I was roughing out the whole picture and filling in details.  The blob did not resolve itself into a sheep until I had spent some time staring at it and adding more detail, and there was a point where I suddenly realized the blob was supposed to represent a sheep.  Even then it took further focused study to see the subtleties of shading, color, and shape that defined that particular sheep.

Another issue of consciousness lies in trying to learn the TaiChi set.  I have no vocabulary to describe the specific moves and no syntax to make a string of moves into a "sentence", and no logic that strings the "sentences" together in a specific order.  There is no secondary structure like a musical score to help with remembering.  This seems to be the definition of rote learning; and rote learning seems to connote actions performed without being conscious of the meaning of the actions.