Stream of Consciousness

 Stream of Consciousness

by Craig Willms

Have you ever had to listen to somebody running a personal monologue, never pausing to reflect on anything they said while in effect saying nothing at all. It can be annoying, right, but it's also instructive. It's a demonstration of how our minds work. A stream of consciousness is exactly what our inner voice is doing much of the time. Granted our streaming inner thoughts are often incoherent words out of sequence, bouncing from one thing to the next without reaching conclusions. We talk to ourselves to work things out, to think. Whether we need to think within the confines of language or not we do assign words to our thoughts, thus, our inner-voice, our inner-dialogue. It begs the question who or what is this voice inside our heads? 

One of the funniest things about the cat and dog videos we watch on the Internet is when words are assigned as the inner voice of the animal as we watch their antics. Obviously, the words represent the thoughts we'd like to suppose they are thinking. Of course, animals don't use language like we do - that's what makes it funny. We know animals exist on instinct, but thoughtful reasoning is clearly present. We can watch them figure things out, there is obvious intelligence there. Our pets think. While they are not thinking in words there is self-awareness and possibly a conscious inner life not unlike our own. It only makes the hard problem of consciousness that much more mysterious.

What is the hard problem of consciousness? In scientific terms reductive explanations are available in principle for all other natural phenomena, but not for consciousness. This is the hard problem; it cannot be functionally analyzed. In practical terms the lack of explanation for what consciousness is leads us to consider that either we eliminate consciousness by denying that it even exists, or we add consciousness to our ontology as an unreduced feature of reality, like gravity, electromagnetism or the photon. I don't think we can just deny the existence of consciousness, the evidence that it is something real seems overwhelming. If we can't deny the existence of consciousness, we are left with only the mystery, and then we have to accept that we may never know or we are incapable of knowing. 

Setting aside the hard problem of consciousness and just accepting that consciousness exists, there are still questions that defy easy answers. So here we jump from the frying pan straight into the fire. Throughout history we've assigned personal morals, right and wrong as a function of our conscience. While conscience and consciousness are not the same thing, they fall under the same rubric. They both describe a functioning inner life that is seemingly independent of our physical properties. When someone does something egregious, something underhanded, or just mean we'd say, "have you no conscience". Or we say something like "in all good conscience I just couldn't do that to him". As if doing something like that would be a sin against not only the person but the cosmos itself. Here our conscious awareness is directed both inwardly and outwardly. By exclaiming what we couldn't do to another we're protecting not only the other person but ourselves and the universe itself. 

The moral aspect is only part of it. There are also the analytical awareness aspect and the call-to-action piece. All three are tied into the decision-making process. In any situation the mind analyzes, then decides if action is needed and finally applies a moral code, however superficial it may be, to the action or inaction. All this in a fraction of a fraction of a second, all due to the marvelous biological computer known as the brain. A brain that is only fully functioning when we are conscious. Could consciousness be a series of 'IF' 'THEN' and finally 'WHY' statements? Where humans have a vastly larger capacity in the 'WHY' database than our fellow earth-mates.

Ok, if we are merely code running on a biological machine then who wrote the code? Where did it come from? This gets into a raft of first cause arguments and down the rabbit hole we go. Is it possible the code just wrote itself? We just don't know...

Most people think, if they think about it at all, that consciousness is something over and above our physical being and not merely an illusion as the physicalists claim. Whereas the secular scientific community tells us that physicalism – the position that only physical things exist – is the most basic principle. They contend that consciousness emerges from the physical brain and only appears to offer us an inner life. Take the brain out and consciousness disappears. Is that necessarily so? That's like saying destroy the TV or the radio and the broadcast disappears. Is consciousness like a broadcast? Not necessarily, but that's the point, we don't really know what it is. The nature of consciousness is a question as old as humanity itself, and despite our massive leap in scientific knowledge it is still unanswered.

Science will go on without care toward the hard questions of consciousness. And those who ponder the true nature of consciousness will contend with one of humankind's greatest mysteries. Whether it's an illusory mechanism within the brain or something more we benefit from the chance at introspection and the ability to mentally wrestle with our own thoughts.