Hi!This book is subdivided into six parts, each with 3 corresponding chapters. Here is an overview of the components;The Problem (chapters 1, 2, 3)The Brain (chapters 4, 5, 6)Body and World (chapters 7, 8, 9)Evolution (chapters 10, 11, 12)Limits (chapters 13, 14, 15)The Self and Others (chapters 16, 17, 18) Consciousness, or consciousness, is a confusing concept. This book is therefore not made to resolve this confusion - in fact, it will make the probable worse.The majority of this confusion is caused by the fact that there is no fixed sense of explanation for the concept of "consciousness," despite the many attempts made by philosophy and science. Consciousness can be used as a sign of unconsciousness, but also as the concept of understanding science of something. In other words, words fall short for this concept.Moreover, the study of consciousness is a relatively young branch of science and therefore not much is known. This book tries to teach you to take a different look at the world around you. As you read this, you are probably so aware that you are aware of the world around you, but is that so? When are you really aware? What are you currently aware of? Back to top...

In 1974, Thomas Nagel came up with the question, "What is it like to be a bat?" He meant that wondering how a mental state is caused if neurons are not the same as understanding how water is H2O. Our consciousness and our subjectivity stand in the way of that concept.If you compare a stone and a cat, you will quickly say that the stone has no consciousness and the cat does. This is because there are no experiences or forms to a stone. But there is something that makes a cat a cat, a kind of being a cat. So if you say that another organism is a consciousness, you are actually saying that there is a species for that organism.So, Nagel's definition of consciousness is whether you can ask the question, "What is it like ..." There are some snags in this definition, but as long as you are not trying to be smart and take it out of context, you are on the right track.Imagine that you are a bat. Bats are very different from humans - they use echolocation, and their ears are much more important than their eyes. As a human being, it is very difficult to imagine what that is like. Bats don't see depth, can you imagine what that is like?But even if you could turn yourself into a bat and back, even then you wouldn't know what it's like to be a bat, since bats don't speak a language and aren't concerned with philosophical questions.A distinction is therefore made between P consciousness (phenomenal consciousness) and A consciousness (access consciousness). The P consciousness is the function that makes it a being to be something, and the A consciousness is the presence to think and act.You would think that...

If you could look right inside a brain and see everything that was happening there, would you then understand consciousness? That is what this chapter opens with. And yes, some would say yes. Materialists and identity theories would agree that, of you could see and understand everything of the brain, then the problem of consciousness would be solved entirely. However, any of the theorists that believe that consciousness is something extended, something other would disagree. Because after all, the mind, the soul is something that isn’t physical, so how could examining the brain help with understanding it? Noë is one of these people, who says ‘you are not your brain’. We always have tried to look at consciousness as something inside the brain but what if it isn’t there? What if it is somewhere else in the body, or even outside of it? You wouldn’t find it by studying matter and neural connections. This is what is the called the fallacy of neurocentrism – believing that everything happens inside the brain. Then, there are also the mysterians, who seem to believe that there is never a way to understand consciousness and many would also say that we are not meant to understand it. They, too, would thus disagree that examining the brain would help not in the slightest bit when it comes to understanding the consciousness. Some other mysterians also simply believe that at this point in time and technology, we will never understand conscious, but maybe in the future we might. Interesting is that nobody flat out said that the brain has nothing to do with consciousness, they just disagree on what extend it does. The naked eye doesn’t reveal much...

If there is one thing that has not been questioned yet, it is that our consciousness is one thing and certainly not made up out of many parts.From an outsiders point of view, this seems like a rather illogical assumption. The brain for instance, is made of many parts and processes, all running and functioning simultaneously, without ever having to come together. The same goes for the body. So why not for the consciousness?It is proven that different processes in the brain and body work at different speeds and cues. This means there isn’t a focal point where they all start or finish. Seeing as we cannot find on specific place the consciousness is housed or located, it would almost make sense to consider that the consciousness might be made of many parts as well.However, if you stop looking from a biological point of view, you might see where this conscious unity is coming from. After all, you only experience one ‘me’, and the only point your consciousness can ever find itself in is the present. We only see one world around us, not different parts of sound and vision and touch. Thus, a question arises; How can such unity, experienced right now, arise from such diversity of non-instantaneous processing?When stating it like that, dualism will look like a very nice, promising option. Dualism, after all, states that there is one, coherent mind that governs consciousness and is completely separate from those neuro-biological processes in the body. There, problem solved. Many philosophers, such as Descartes and Poppers, chose this solution. As did Benjamin Libet, who proposed to take a part of a...

The ‘power of the unconscious’ is a common phrase reflecting the popular notion that our minds are divided in two, conscious and the unconscious. We are either urged to unleash our unconscious potential or listen to what bubbles up in us, but we also learned to overrule our animal instincts and emotions with reason thanks to our conscious mind.We link the conscious and the unconscious to mind and body: we often think as the conscious processes as mental ones (I’ve given it much thought) and the unconscious processes as embodied (I have a gut feeling)The division of the mind can be traced back to ancient Egypt about sleep and dream and early Hindu texts. Plato also gave the soul three parts: Reason, Spirit, Appetite, all with their own goals and abilities.Gradually this shifted from parts of mind to mechanisms and distinct types of processing within one brain. This can be traced back to Helm-Holtz’s idea of ‘unconscious inference’, to William James’s distinction between associative and true reasoning. Most theories suggest that one process is fast, automatic, inflexible, effortless and dependent on context, while the other is slow, effortful, controlled, flexible, requires working memory and independent of context. This has been rediscovered and reinvented time after time, the distinction is common because it is valid.The question is this – what could the difference between conscious and unconscious processes be?For this we will consider first perception, then action and finally how perception and action and conscious and unconscious may converge in the phenomena of intuition and creativity....

Humans are animals, so questions about consciousness of the human can also be related to the rest of the animal kingdom. This chapter will introduce the basic of evolutionary theory as a foundation on which to ask about the evolution of consciousness in different species.What is mindless design?When we see obvious signs of design, we readily infer a designer. This, in essence, is the argument of design by reverend William Paley in 1802. He supposed that he found either a stone or a watch. For the stone he concluded it had always been there, but for the watch he concluded it must have a maker. Every bit and piece constructed to fulfil its purpose. He could not see how these complex pieces could have come together by accident, nor the effect of natural forces. He thought it self-evident that ‘there can’t be design without designer; contrivance without contriver; order, without choice’.With animals and their specific and complex designs of anatomy and behaviour, it must indicate there is a designer, in which this argument become evidence for the existence of god.Paley’s ideas were wrong. Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins said there are more than just two options – accident and or conscious design. There is a third, that was not able to be explained in Paley’s time, but was clear by Darwin’s theory of natural selection and evolution. Evolution means gradual change and living things might, in general sense, change. The fossil world suggested gradual change in living forms and this demanded explanation. What was missing was the mechanism of how evolution works. Darwin came with the answer, natural selection. Over a longer period of time, creatures...

Is there something special about human beings that enables us to think, see, hear, feel, and fall in love? Something that gives us a desire to be good, a love of beauty, and a longing for something beyond? Or are all these capacities just the products of a complicated mechanism inside our bodies? In other words, am I just a machine? And could the machines what we create then also one day do all those things and more? In other words, could there be machine consciousness (MC) or artificial consciousness (AC)? If there could, we may have some kind of moral responsibility for our creations. We may also find that their existence changes our views of our own consciousness. Ever since the Ancient Greeks, the idea that we are machines has existed. In the seventeenth century, Descartes argued that the human body was a mechanism but that no mechanism alone was capable of speech and rational thought – for that, res cogitans or thinking-stuff was needed.Among those who rejected his dualism was Gottfried von Leibniz who came up with his famous allegory of the mill. Imagine a machine whose construction enabled it to think, feel, and perceive. Imagine, then, that the machine were enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that we could go inside it, like entering a windmill. Inside we would find only pieces working upon one another and never anything to explain the perception. From this he concluded that to explain perception, we must look to a simple...

In everyday life, we discriminate ‘real’ from ‘imagined’ all the time without noticing the skill involved. That is, we distinguish our own thoughts from what we assume to be a public reality independent of those thoughts – a skill called reality monitoring or reality discrimination. Experiments in which people are asked to see or hear some stimuli, and to imagine others, show that many different features can be used for the purpose of discrimination, including how stable, detailed, or vivid the experiences are, and whether they can be voluntarily controlled. One study presented participants with either complete or incomplete well-known word pairs and tested how well they remembered which words were actually presented and which needed completing imaginatively: visual presentation resulted in better reality monitoring than auditory presentation, and speaking the words out loud worked better than internally verbalising (‘thinking’ about) them.Distinguishing memories of events that really happened from events we have only imagined is particularly difficult, and its failure results in false memories – that is, convincing ‘memories’ of events that never actually happened. These can be created when we tell the same story many times, with slight variations, and then remember the last version we told. The latest version retroactively interferes with the original memory. False memories can also be created when a family story keeps being told or a photograph from childhood convinces you that you can remember that day on the beach. And they can have...

Who is reading this book? Who is conscious of the writing on the page, the attempt to understand and answer the question, or the sounds of revelry in the next room? Questions about the nature of consciousness are intimately bound up with those about the nature of self because it seems as though there must be someone having the experience: that there cannot be experiences without an experiencer. Our experiencing self seems to be at the centre of everything we are aware of at a given time, and to be continuous from one moment to the next. In other words, it seems to have both unity and continuity. In everyday language, we talk constantly about our ‘self’. It seems that we not only think of this self as a single thing but give it all sorts of attributes and capabilities. In ordinary usage, the self is the subject of our experiences, who carries out actions and makes decisions, a unique personality, and the source of desires, opinions, hopes, and fears. This self is ‘me’; it is the reason why anything matters in ‘my’ life. But where or what is this ‘me’? Are you ready to question everything you know boys and girls?One way of escaping the problem might be to declare that I am my whole body, and there is no need for a self as well. This would be fine, except that most people don’t feel that way. We feel like something more than just the body. That this apparently natural way of thinking about ourselves is problematic has been recognised for millennia. In the sixth century BC, the Buddha challenged contemporary thinking with his doctrine of anatta. This is often, perhaps inaccurately, translated as ‘no-self’, when really he was rejecting...

IntroductionSiddharta Gautama, after 7 days of fasting under a pipal tree, became enlightened, he “woke up”. His message for the world was not to look in others, like himself, for truth, but to see it within oneself. He said “work out your own salvation with diligence”. This was where the Buddhism, as we know it, really came to life. Siddharta, later known as Buddha, proposed four truths:Dukkha: Everything is impermanent, so with life inherently comes suffering.Samsara: We’re trapped in a cycle of being and becoming, because we cling to things we like and reject those we don’tNirvana: Recognizing Samsara, and letting go of it, ends sufferingThe way: Buddha’s recommendation, an eightfold path to right understanding, thought, speech, action etc.Despite warning of tradition, Buddhism became a religion, first Theravada Buddhism in southern India, Ceylon and Burma, then Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet, Chan Buddhism in China, Zen Buddhism in Japan, and now Western Buddhism… in the west, obviously. So, this final chapter of the book discusses the following: Can we change our consciousness? Buddhism is one discipline in which spiritual and scientific learning are among the most interweaved. Buddhism also finds a place in psychology more than any other religion. Since 1987, Dalai Lama has been engaging with western scientists, in 2005 held a speech at the biggest annual neuroscience congress. ...