What is Consciousness?

What is Consciousness?

What theories are out there?

This is a fundamental question that all humans face, what is consciousness?

Science still hasn’t figured this out but they have numerous pet theories. Christians will tell you that it’s basically our souls, those things that God created and then sent here to be born to see if we pass his purity test and can go to Heaven or if he will end up needing to damn us to Hell for eternity.

The rules he holds us to have changed over time depending on which part of the Bible you read, but the end result remains the same.

In addition to religions scientists and philosophers have come up with numerous theories over the years to try to explain this phenomena.

Proponents of these various theories include neuroscientists to philosophers, and even physicists.

The theories range from some who claim that the body (brain) and mind (consciousness) are completely separate, to ones who think that the body and environment are both involved in generating what we think of as consciousness. Some theories propose that consciousness developed randomly due to electrical signals in the brain interfering with each other, others propose that it’s due to some sort of quantum effect we still don’t understand, while others propose that any complex enough system such as possibly AI systems could eventually cause the emergence of consciousness. We seem to be getting closer to finding out if that is the case regarding AI, although some question if we did reach what seems like artificial general intelligence, or AGI, if it could in fact just be something that is faking it, perfectly imitating real consciousness…and if that were the case how would we even know?

Some even believe that consciousness is just an illusion that the brain projects, but that real reality is completely different from what we perceive. Those who have experienced a near-death experience or heavy psychedelic trip, strangely similar phenomena, would argue this. Almost all of them unanimously come back from the experience claiming they felt that a veil had been lifted and that the reality we all share seems less vivid than that other reality.