How Human Consciousness And The Self Emerges: A Theory of Consciousness
by Eric E. Cane
Here’s a link to the podcast of the author reading the article: https://radiopublic.com/eric-e-cane-GAVPJn/s1!15f94#t=10
The following is the current result of my decades long personal research on the emergence and processing of human consciousness. This isn’t only from my intuition, but what I have also derived from deep personal experience, observation and reflection as well as empirical evidence and known, peer-reviewed scientific research.
This is my opinion based on my work to date.
To quickly sum it up: Consciousness emerges from a persistent and dynamic self-referencing system creating a feedback mechanism that helps define an individual within the bounds of their physical person, but also their potential.
Existence, life, brings with it an amalgam of movement. This is the data that drives changes in perspective. Without movement, there is no detection in change from one state to the next. No data by which our sensory vehicle is specifically tuned to perceive.
Our self-referencing system is a mechanism by which we orient our awareness of self in relationship to everything — and everyone — else. This is done through our sensory system which continuously reads the environment regardless of whether or not we are paying attention to the stream of data coming to us.
And this data doesn’t stop. We are from birth to death continually receiving the messages of the universe, so to speak. Our nerves receive changes in environmental stimuli and respond by sending these changes in our nerve perception as a difference in the electrical signal. This then travels through the nervous system and is read into our brains where it is interpreted.
Our persistence of memory allows us to hold a reference of not only the nerve transmission but also the associated surrounding nerve information that tells which part of the body felt the change in time and where this body part is in relation to other sensory data that defines the rest of our self-presence in our environment. Basically, it confirms our physical location in this slurry of dynamic movement.
The modifications in the persistent memory become a change in perception.
Essentially, reading our own movement and that from our environment becomes the mechanism of changes in our perception. Our specific perception is unique, as we are fed all this information from our own sensory system into a unique mechanism of experience that no other person has.
Our self-referencing and persistent updating memory system defines each individual within the location of their own sensory system relative to their self and their environment.
This self-referencing system defines our locale: our individual perception of ourselves separate from that which we cannot use the sensory system of or that which is not a part of us.
Meaning, I can feel the sun on my skin, as you can on your own. But I do not have a direct connection to how warm that sun may feel to your nerves while you wear the clothes you wear standing in your specific place on earth and what you are smelling and seeing at the time. I cannot intimately understand how it updates the information in your brain from your past experiences with having felt the sun on your skin since you were first aware of it as a child.
That is part of the persistent memory only you hold in relation to your own sensory experience.
As with our vision system, which reads the changes in one state to the next, our brain does the same. Meaning, as opposed to a high-end camera system, we don’t record every frame of our perception. We hold a memory, a visual, of what is before us, but the brain itself processes only the changes from one frame to the next. This method is similar to what a speedy camera system does to record to a slow data card. Only the changes are read in greater detail while persistent and relatively unchanging information is afforded less detail.
This is efficient. It reduces the amount of processing our brains have to do. If this didn’t happen, we wouldn’t be able to process a fast ball thrown at us quickly enough to be able to catch it. There simply wouldn’t be enough time for all the data the brain would have to process from one immense data-filled frame to the next. Instead, it uses a reduced set of information, that which is changing, and then applies a fuzzy logic interpretation of where the ball is and where it is going to be over time.
Again, it is efficient.
This also has to occur in the brain processing our dynamically self-referencing state. Our ability to process self-awareness. The ability to form a separate identity from other individuals.
Quite simply, without the same sort of efficiency demonstrated by our vision system, we would be overloaded by the stimuli of our sensory system and not be easily able to distance ourselves from that which is constantly bombarding us. Our “personality” and ability to function would suffer.
This happens to some degree in people with Autism. Having personal experience with this, it can be distracting or overwhelming, like having a firehose of sensory data coming into our brains at times. Unlike a thin water stream of data that people who are not on the spectrum receive.
The source information of the universe itself is continually being fed into our sensory system. All the time. Our sensory vehicle, our biochemical stimuli-receiving mechanism, does not rest in its tasks of interpreting changes unless damaged or the data is somehow otherwise denied.
Simply, this continuity of interpretation is inferred from the movement of our eyes, our heads turning our ears, our limbs and body changing position, but also the external stimuli moving about us.
All of this together squarely places us in the center of our interpretation. Our inference of self generated from a system of systems that continually updates our perception of self through a perceptual localization.
Essentially, the persistence and continuity of changes in perception brings rise, emergence, of the self-aware being.
Animals are able to perceive this continuity of change as well. But what they don’t have is a persistence of imagination. An ability to hold and progress or modify visualizations in their minds.
They have instinctual (genetic) inferences that motivate them to their actions. Humans have this as well, but above that, we have the ability to imagine from the continuity of our existence. To extend ourselves into our imagination and create pathways, iterations, bold leaps and permutations of that which is absorbed in physical continuity through our senses.
It is our ability to persistently hold onto imagined references that also allows us to localize apart from our physical persistence. This is the self-aware state of an inherently individual natural being.
Creativity and the ability to use that creativity as part of our localization sets us apart from animals and each other — as we all extend into creative exploration from our own unique field of reference or perception.
