The experience of awareness Although I have indicated in a general sense how I structure my understanding of my consciousness and how it relates to what I call external reality and the artificial simplified internal reality manufactured by the central nervous system to deal with the pressures and dangers of surviving in the real world, it’s important to comprehend the fundamental nature of the total creature I call myself.
The entirety is quite complex. My inherited DNA deals with living cells and as I developed from a single cell the various varieties of different kinds of cells were produced to manufacture a cooperative community that could deal with basic necessities to process food for structure and nourishment and produce the nervous system to relate to outside demands on survival. The brain is intimately connected to all parts of the body and has automatic functional relationships with everything. It has established patterns out of its genetic inheritance which generally is below the level of consciousness although signals, such as hunger, thirst, pain etc. do prompt the consciousness to react. Beyond this the body welcomes very large numbers of non-human cells which have been domesticated to aid in basic functions known as the microbiome which also can influence the emotional and other basic reactions of the central nervous system. Although all parts contribute their necessary functions to the whole, people in general accept the false premise that the consciousness is the central controlling focus of the totality whereas it is just one small aspect of brain function which is designed to operate within the immensely simple model of the outer world . This does not denigrate its importance, which is great, but places it properly in its relationship to the whole.
Since the advent of the computer which deals with many of the same problems as the living brain, the similarity has led to speculations as to how similar the digital machine is to a thinking brain. Experts in the field have even proposed that a human mind might eventually be transposed into a computer so that it could continue to live within the machine far beyond the life of a normal human. As fascinating as this concept might be it seems to me that it neglects very basic differences between a computer as it is now constructed and a living animal such as ourselves.
I am quite old and my wife died some time ago and almost all of my friends and relatives also have ceased to exist. But all of these people still exist in my memories. And these memories are quite different from the kind of data storage one places in a computer. As an artist and a designer I deal, to a large degree, in various kinds of patterns. And it seems to me that the brain in general seems devoted to pattern recognition, construction, and association. But these patterns are not just visual, they contain input from all the body sense mechanisms plus associations from emotions and past experience. And beyond that there are patterns dealing with time and procedures. The sense patterns are abstracts of reality in color, shape, motion, etc. and the can associate across senses such associating numbers with colors, sounds and other ways to form very complex memories.
The fundamental difference between computer data and living memories is that, in life, each pattern and pattern template is a living cell function and possesses a self- coherence which remains active as a living thing continuously below the level of consciousness. This living data therefore is more like a zoo than a library. In effect, my wife still is quite alive within my brain structure and when I dream of her all the characteristics that I have acquired of her when she was alive reacts with me in my dreams, which is radically different from the way computer data is obtained and stored. And not just people, but all brain data is dynamic and makes associations and changes below my level of consciousness. Thus, a brain is quite different from a computer as they are now constructed. I have no idea as to whether data can be made to come alive in this manner within computer technology. It probably would entail all data to contain active algorithms in rather special ways that probably would make the computer unpredictable in the same way that people are unpredictable and most likely would be an unsatisfactory tool.