Musings on Consciousness
“Place your hand on your heart,” my father said…
When I was something like six or seven (or maybe five?) years old (my gauging of time as a child is about as accurate as my freedom was limited, which is to say that running around barefoot at all hours without restraint or oversight does not lend itself to precision in time or dates), my father gave me a lesson in existentialism:
“Place your hand on your heart,” he said. “Are you above your hand or below your hand? Now, place it on top of your head. Are you above or below?”
I have since wondered, not infrequently, why I feel so attached to whatever is behind my eyes. Why we all feel this way. On a recent 6-mile run, I mused and organized some of the thoughts that have since bungled around in my brain.
My hypothesis is that the secret to the hard problem of consciousness lies somewhere between the mix of memory and experience. Because we can stack up memories, and because we can experience through our senses in real time, we have a feeling of time being behind, at, and in front of us. This is consciousness.
And why does it feel so inextricably related to our physical minds, located almost literally in the brain? I think of it as though consciousness is centered around experience, and the nexus of experience is the brain.
Imagine a child creating art with a spiral paint spinner using blue paint on yellow paper. The more paint the child adds onto the spinner, the more paint will hit the paper, but not completely indiscriminately. The paint will hit in somewhat unique patterns, but, invariably, it will add more and more layers near the center of the spiral, and there will be little to no paint at the outside edges of the paper. There will be thick layers of blue, areas of green where the yellow shows through, and areas of pristine yellow where no paint has reached.
This is not unlike our own consciousness: each and every experience we have is tied inextricably to our brains. We cannot experience anything without it reaching our nexus. On the other hand, not every experience requires, say, our hands (no pun intended). We may look out a window and see a sunrise whilst our hands are perfectly still. Thus, we might liken our hands to the green areas on the paper. They are us, but we can lose them and still have the nexus of our experience.
You might also think of it as a rubber-band ball. The more bands are added, the more the thing is clearly a ball, and yet, it is also just a set of bands. You can even remove many of the bands and the ball still remains.
The paint and the rubber bands are the building blocks of consciousness: experience and memory. The more the experiences overlap — blue upon blue upon blue — the more the consciousness is located where the overlaps lie. Because I both experience and remember my own hands, for instance, my hands are the rubber band on the outside of the ball, but my brain is the center, without which, there is no more ball.
And why is there a boundary at my body and not all the other things I experience? We, as individuals, experience and have active memories in the same brain (our own) over and over and over. Whereas, we only experience a joint memory with another person tangentially at best, and rarely (relatively speaking) at that. This is why I am not also you and you are not also me. The fewer the overlaps, the stronger the boundary between one consciousness and another. When I pass by a beautiful spring, I experience it for a fleeting moment, but I do not carry it with me and keep it in active memory. Thus, it is not even the green on the paper. It is the yellow of the paper itself.
This is also why we do not identify fully with our dreaming selves. We may experience our dreams, true. Indeed, they are inextricably tied to our bodies, which we constantly experience. But we do not also have active and ongoing memories of those dreams (generally speaking). This is why I am my waking self but not completely tied, conceptually, to my dreaming self.
Incidentally, I wonder if there is an inverse relationship to our ever-stacking memories and imagination. It seems the fewer memories one has (after a certain base threshold of mental ability, of course), the more room there is for wonder and creativity — there’s so much paper to fill in, so much room for design. But the more our lives are filled with stacks of memories, the fewer unknowns we believe there are, and so the less creatively we can think.
What are your thoughts on consciousness? Why the boundary between what you feel is you and what isn’t? Why the boundary between parts of yourself that you can lose and still be you?
If you liked or learned from this story, please consider clicking the 👏 👏 👏, highlighting, sharing with anyone who’d enjoy it, and following my page. Thanks for reading!
