Consciousness

While our five senses illustrate a tangible world around us, deeper in our mind we are living in a vast realm that goes beyond the objective world. This realm may not be palpable but we are very certain about its existence. It is the essence of our awareness.  Here we are going to explore this realm that enfolds within our psyche.

By using the word consciousness ⁽¹⁾ I intend to go beyond the usual definition of the word as the cognition of an organism about itself and its environment. To me consciousness is the essence of our being. It is more than just a background for mind activities. Classical science cannot explain many fundamental properties of living things such as self replication, self repair, adaptation and so on. However modern science offers promising clues. Quantum Mechanics takes consciousness beyond just a tool for cognition. According to the Einstein’s Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, The observer is participator in forming the objective reality. The concept will be further developed in this chapter, The Holonomic Brain, Quantum Mechanical Mind and Brain Lateralization theory chapters.

 

Plato believed in duality and he described mind as a separate entity from body. Later on, Rene Descartes and his followers further developed this view. Aristotle and later on, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in contrast, rejected duality. During the past centuries Aristotle's belief that mind is a product of brain function, has been more popular among scientific community. Mainly, because Aristotle's version was seen as more objective and yields itself to experimental scrutiny. However, it seems that recent findings and new theories are favoring a new approach. Santiago Theory of Cognition sees the consciousness as a process and body as the structure.

Francisco Di Biase and Mário Sérgio F. Rocha from International Holistic University, Brasília claim;

 

Roger W. Sperry the Nobel Prize winner in physiology in his Nobel lecture remarks,

 

Cognitive introspective psychology and related cognitive science can no longer be ignored experimentally, or written off as "a science of epiphenomena", nor either as something that must, in principle, reduce eventually to neurophysiology. The events of inner experience, as emergent properties of brain processes, become themselves explanatory causal constructs in their own right, interacting at their own level with their own laws and dynamics. The whole world of inner experience (the world of the humanities) long rejected by 20th century scientific materialism, thus becomes recognized and included within the domain of science.⁸³

According to above psyche has to be considered a fundamental and irreducible portion of reality. However, the relation of psyche with the body and objective reality has been a matter of debate and scrutiny in philosophy and natural sciences for centuries.