What is consciousness?

Question

Is it considered energy. An allusion of the brain. What is being awake.

forum · Answer

Black then white are all I see in my infancy... red and yellow then came to be... reaching out to me... makes me see...

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Consciousness is simply the experiencer experiencing experience.
Consciousness is what we are at our most basic self.
The brain is not consciousness anymore than your computer is you.
You don't think with your brain just like you don't feel with your heart.
The brain is nothing more than a transponder.  You, consciousness, are at the controls of that transponder.
Being "awake" carries with it tremendous philosophical meaning.  Being "awake" means that you are lucid, that you understand that you are awareness/consciousness experiencing a sort of waking dream in the physical universe, that you are connected with all things in that there is only one Consciousness or Universal Mind.
Here's one for you: The physical universe is contained INSIDE your awareness, not the other way around.
Now put that in your pipe and smoke it.
- The Eternal Satyr

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"Is it considered energy?"
Some really weird philosophers might tell you that.
"An illusion of the brain?"
Most neuroscientists would tell you that, including this aspiring one.
"What is being awake?"
This question has been plaguing science (and philosophy for that matter) for thousands of years, and we're not even close to answering it.
In neuroscience we have this big monkey on our back called "The Hard Problem of Consciousness". The problem rests in many forms:
1. We honestly have no working definition of consciousness to begin with.
2. It *seems* to be an emergent property of many different parts of the brain itself, yet we can't really demonstrate this in any typically scientific convention. We cannot (yet) replicate brains in any substantive sense.
3. No matter how great our robots and computers become, they never actually mimic that undefined thing called consciousness. We can't seem to endow our computers with any sort of will.
4. Quantum physics really ***** up the whole picture. We have this huge gaping hole in our understanding of the brain. We're fairly proficient in the extreme microscale (i.e. we know the basic unit, the neuron and the synapse, we know how they directly function, we can manipulate their ion concentrations to force them to undergo an action potential, and we can completely quantify them). We also have made great inroads to the brain on the larger scale (typically the domain of psychologists). We can study emotions, desires, learning, language, vision, gustatory sensation, audible sensation, etc. The really hard part of the hard problem of consciousness is that we can't seem to fill in the middle. We can't explain how we get from a huge bag of random neuron cells that fire electrochemically to what we essentially call the human experience.
It's almost like ripping open the back of your television set and among all those wires, circuit boards, screws, and plugs trying to find where your favorite television star is. After all, you clearly see him when the TV is operable and you're watching the screen, so he must be *inside* there somewhere, right?
Alex: Lateralus is too old of a Tool song for most here to recognize ;-)

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No, it is not energy. And `allusionÂ´ already suggests consciousness.
It is something we cannot really define in terms available to us. Consciousness is self-awareness, yes, but what does that mean?

forum · Answer

an alert state of mind in which you are fully aware of yourself and your surroundings

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