Patrick House – image from Attention Fwd -> But how did this gelatinous, gross substance, come to develop awareness of self? And just what is consciousness, anyway? We are who and what we are, and saying so, thinking so, makes us conscious, at the very least. Somehow, within that biological organ, there is a thing we refer to as consciousness. But consider the human brain, with billions of neurons, and a nearly infinite possible range of interactions among them. Fairly simple and straightforward once one knows how it works. Does it have a borderline around it? How wide is that line? Does it have a background color? How about a foreground color? Can it display images, text, both? Where does it get its information, keyboard entry, internal calculation? and on and on and on. Under what conditions did one appear? Physical dimensions, like width and height. When I was still a programmer it was necessary to understand the many characteristics of, and rules about using, the objects that we would place on the screen in an application. It is not drawn from a recycled tap of special kinds of cells or dredged from the vein of free will. …consciousness is not something passed on or recycled–like single molecules of water, which are retained as they move about the earth as ice, water, or dew–from one living creature to the next…instead consciousness should be grown from “scratch” with only a few well-timed molecular parts from plans laid out. The brain…is a thrift-store bin of evolutionary hacks Russian-dolled into a watery, salty piñata we call a head.
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