The evolving human consciousness

thebenbenstone said:

If there is a universal source ‘consciousness’ that monitors human development & helps humanity in the progression of various subjects, for example ‘science, religion & languages’ there must have been a pathway of evolving tools that have been developed and are ‘in use already, readily available, cost effective & is used globally’

That tool must be the written & spoken language that I am using now. i will give you an example.

If you take the word ‘earth’ & wrapped it around our planet, joined the letters ‘h’ & ‘e. we would spell the word ‘heart’.

Again if we take the word ‘heart’ & break it down into 2 components, the word ‘he’ meaning ‘a male (or in reference to a male) & the word ‘art’ meaning in its most basic interpretation ‘someone who specializes in any given field’ in this case ‘creativity or creation’ bearing in mind I am still using the original word ‘earth’.

I can’t help but identify with a male presence ‘for example a creative heavenly father’

This is merely my observation. Your thoughts are very welcome

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I suspect you'd have a lot of fun with the Bible Code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_code

Supposedly historical events have been encoded into the Torah.
As I wrote in Slate two years ago (see “Cracking God’s Code“), the paper’s hypothesis, if correct, would all but prove both the existence of God and the divinity of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible).
The Torah Codes, Cracked

RestlessSoul said:

Does science have a definition of consciousness on which all who study it can agree?

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Consciousness has been defined and described specifically to one area of the brain.

whttps://www.newscientist.com/definition/consciousness/

Surprisingly, though, the human cerebellum – a sort of mini brain hanging off the back of your cortex – contains about three-quarters of the neurons in your brain but seems to have almost nothing to do with consciousness. One reason we know this is because some people are born without a functioning cerebellum, and while they experience some problems, a lack of consciousness is not one of them.

There are, however, some bundles of neurons that do appear to be vital for consciousness. If damage occurs to specific parts of the thalamus, or to a particular region of the brain stem, the result can be permanent unconsciousness. But are these brain regions actually central to generating conscious experiences, or are they more like a power socket that simply allows whatever is plugged into it to work?

Work involving brain imaging techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) paints a more complex picture. Several decades ago, neuroscientists including Francis Crick and Christof Koch began to search for what they called the neural correlates of consciousness: particular patterns of brain activity that relate to given conscious states – the experience of a painful toothache, for example.

As studies like this have progressed it has become clearer that consciousness depends on specific ways that different parts of the brain – particularly the cortex – communicate with one another. For example, by injecting a pulse of energy into the brain using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and using electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor the response, a team of neuroscientists led by Giulio Tononi and Marcello Massimini found that the electrical echo generated by the energy pulse will bounce all around a conscious brain, but stays very localised in an unconscious brain. In other words, the conscious brain is much more connected.

Do experiments like this bring us closer to understanding what consciousness is? Some might argue not. In the 1990s, the philosopher David Chalmers made an influential contribution to the consciousness debate by distinguishing between what he termed the easy problem, or problems, and the hard problem of consciousness.

The easy problems involve understanding how the brain and body gives rise to functions like perception, cognition, learning and behaviour. These problems are called easy not because they are trivial, but because there seems no reason why they can’t be solved in terms of physical mechanisms – albeit potentially very complex ones.

The hard problem of consciousness​

The hard problem is the enigma of why and how any of this should be accompanied by conscious experience at all: why do we each have an inner universe?

To address this hard problem, we need theories of consciousness that can bridge the gap from the world of physical processes to the world of conscious experiences: that can take us from correlation towards explanation.

There are now many theories of consciousness out there in the field of cognitive neuroscience: higher-order theories, global workspace theories, and integrated information theories, theories that – in their strongest form – imply that consciousness is spread widely throughout universe, and that even an electron may be conscious. There are even illusionist theories which attempt to persuade us that consciousness doesn’t really exist – at least not in the way we normally think about it.

The theory I’ve been developing is a version of predictive processing theory. When I see a chair in front of me, it’s not that the eyes are transparent windows out onto the world and my brain just reads out “chair”. Instead there are noisy sensory signals impacting my retina and my brain has to use its prior expectations about what might be out there in order to interpret this ambiguous sensory data.

In a little more detail, the idea is that the brain is constantly calibrating its perceptual predictions using data from the senses. Predictive processing theory has it that perception involves two counterflowing streams of signals. There is an “inside-out” or “top down” stream that conveys predictions about the causes of sensory inputs.

Second question next post.

RestlessSoul said:

And at what point in human evolution do you think consciousness might have emerged?

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There are of course, unanswered question, but the following gives a good perspective of the scientific view of the evolution of consciousness, My view is relatively simple. We observe primitive forms of consciousness with the first animals with a complex nervous systems.

Ultimately, we conclude that the neurobiological structure of the vertebrate central nervous system is evolutionarily ancient and highly conserved across species and that the basic neurophysiologic mechanisms supporting consciousness in humans are found at the earliest points of vertebrate brain evolution. Thus, in agreement with Darwin's insight and the recent “Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals,” a review of modern scientific data suggests that the differences between species in terms of the ability to experience the world is one of degree and not kind.

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Evolutionary biology forms a cornerstone of the life sciences and thus the neurosciences, yet the emergence of consciousness during the timeline of evolution remains opaque. As the theory of evolution began to eclipse both religious explanations and Enlightenment doctrines regarding the singularity of human consciousness, it became clear that consciousness must have a point of emergence during evolution and that point likely occurred before Homo sapiens. “How,” Darwin questioned, “does consciousness commence?” His post-Beagle research on this question evidently caused him violent headaches. One such headache can be expressed as the 20th century philosophical distinction of phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness (Block, 2007). Phenomenal consciousness relates solely to subjective experience, whereas access consciousness includes (among other processes) the ability to report such experiences verbally (other distinctions related to consciousness can be found in Table 3.1). Thus, the scientist looking for objective indices of subjective events is primarily limited to humans manifesting access consciousness, an obstacle in studying the evolution of consciousness antecedent to our species. We could, however, take solace in the dictum that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and search for clues in developing humans. Unfortunately, Haeckel's theory of recapitulation is not scientifically sound and, even if applicable in this case, we would still be constrained by the high probability that babies develop phenomenal consciousness before access consciousness. To overcome the limitations in identifying the birth of consciousness, we need a reproducible experimental model in which (i) consciousness emerges from unconsciousness at a discrete and measurable point, (ii) phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness are closely juxtaposed or collapsed, and (iii) assessment of neural structure and function is possible. In this chapter, we consider top-down and bottom-up approaches to consciousness, nonhuman consciousness, and the emergence of consciousness from general anesthesia as a model for the evolution of subjectivity.

RestlessSoul said:

Does science have a definition of consciousness on which all who study it can agree?

And at what point in human evolution do you think consciousness might have emerged?

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Mate, really, just Google it, there's heaps of stuff about science and consciousness and the possible point of evolution.

I think you are asking these questions because you don't know of any other source that explains consciousness?

Science is the answer

RestlessSoul said:

Does science have a definition of consciousness on which all who study it can agree?

And at what point in human evolution do you think consciousness might have emerged?

Click to expand...

I thought I would add that all higher animals have been found to dream in their sleep clear evidence of consciousness,

I started this thread originally to share some of my experiences throughout this life I have lived so far, and to give those with ‘faith and those people with an understanding of a ‘afterlife’ a bit more credibility. To those who do not understand the nature of God, I will try to help you understand in my basic layman’s style writings, how I myself have not come to have ‘faith in God’ through prayer or organized orthodox religion’, but arrived to an understanding of God by identifying a creative force and a ‘stair step process’ gained through afterlives towards hidden dimensional veils we refer to as the heavens. I have no ties to any religion, but acknowledge the presence of ‘God’.

It is hard for atheists to understand what believers may be going through the ‘mind processes’ especially if atheists themselves have embarked on a completely different path. You must also understand that believers & people of faith are at different levels of comprehension. My faith is simply the belief in something greater than myself & my own spiritual identity. Our conscience in a moral sense is the inherent ability to understand what is right and what is wrong. We all evaluate our own moral understanding which is shaped by our own political, cultural, religious, & social identities. A conscience is the ability of a healthy human to perceive what is right or wrong, just or unjust, good, bad & evil. The more we align ourselves with ‘higher moral concepts’ it is said that our conscience is the degree of integrity & honesty that we ‘self-monitoring humans - self-governing humans’ finally determine by the quality of our own actions. Our conscience and consciousness are a system of information collected and stored that helps governs our experiences and decision making.

‘Consciousness’ is the function of the reasoning mind that receives and processes information, crystalizes this information, stores or rejects this information, Consciousness is the state of awareness that gives the mind the ability to intuitively reason, use imagination, process emotion and memory, with the help of the five senses. Therefore, the more information one is able to gather and process, the more acutely ‘aware’ and conscious a person becomes in regards to their internal and external worlds. The process of ‘freewill thought’ is usually governed and formed by our personal interactions with other persons within our lives that we meet on a daily basis. My freewill is therefore governed by socially acceptable practices that have been ingrained within my conscience, the ‘by product’ is having the illusion that I have freewill but live within the boundary and confinements of existing within these invisible walls being the temple that rest upon my shoulder.

Awareness and wakefulness represent the two main components of consciousness, my awareness is defined by the content of my consciousness. Awareness contains self-awareness which manages and perceives the internal world of thought, self-observation, analyzing, reflection, imagination, conceptual thought, self-programming, daydreaming. Therefore, consciousness contains a spectrum of physiological states which include normality through to modified states induced by ‘drug taking’ or self-training through transcendental meditation. I personally prefer the former simply because ‘why ride the camel when I can take the train’. I have mentioned before that the ‘Age of Aquarius began in the 1960’s, and this is another milestone and historic marker ‘the time of accelerated spiritual awareness’ or the personal understanding of multidimensional fluid concepts of our own personal spiritual identity and collective consciousness. So, I ask the men who think their cousins ate lots of bananas… ‘why take the bus when you can catch a plane’.

The subconscious or ‘stream of conscience’ is continually training your mind to form notional retrievable thought, images, scenarios, collecting information through the senses. Therefore, your conscience is like an ‘app’ working in the back ground you can’t put to sleep which It is continuously self-creating by the unconscious processes of collecting thought which is constantly coming into existence through self-awareness, such as the act of observing an electron, which solidifies that electron by collapsing the wave function. This image of consciousness allows for the coexistence of “multiple, half-formed idea’, all flitting below the threshold of awareness at the same time waiting for the storage, collection & self-observing process to end thus enabling our conveyor belt of thought to create a singular idea. The following is/was an idea of mine…..

SENDAI JAPAN 11TH MARCH 2011 – A magnitude 9.0 earthquake generates a tsunami that kills & injures tens of thousands of people and creates a nuclear meltdown at the Fukashima power plant. The world watched in horror as the tsunami hit the coast of Japan as a result of this magnitude 9.0 earthquake which had its epicentre in the location, we have all come to know as ‘Sendai’. The loss of life was in the vicinity of 19,000+ people, with another 6,000 injured. The 10-meter wave of black water generated by the quake became the 7th biggest tsunami ever recorded, pulverized the ‘north eastern coastal city of Sendai’ the capital of the Miyagi Prefecture.

The words Sendai when spoken slowly can mean & sound like ‘Sin die’. Other than the name ‘Fukashima’ sounding like ‘fool ka she ma’ I would have to ask the conscious mind what relevance does the number ‘9’ mean to everyone or anyone?

To me the upside down ‘9’ from a birds eye view looking down from heaven resembles the number ‘6‘, the number ‘6’ being the mark of ‘man’.

The number ‘9’ is also another symbol for the ‘golden ratio’. You see this global event may not mean or have any relevance to anything or anyone. But again, to me it was another global portent.

Nakosis said:

I suspect you'd have a lot of fun with the Bible Code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_code

Supposedly historical events have been encoded into the Torah.
As I wrote in Slate two years ago (see “Cracking God’s Code“), the paper’s hypothesis, if correct, would all but prove both the existence of God and the divinity of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible).
The Torah Codes, Cracked

Click to expand...

i enjoy reading other peoples thoughts, it helps generate ideas. I can learn from all sources even if i walk away with a fraction of what others write. i have learnt something of value.

thebenbenstone said:

I started this thread originally to share some of my experiences throughout this life I have lived so far, and to give those with ‘faith and those people with an understanding of a ‘afterlife’ a bit more credibility. To those who do not understand the nature of God, I will try to help you understand in my basic layman’s style writings, how I myself have not come to have ‘faith in God’ through prayer or organized orthodox religion’, but arrived to an understanding of God by identifying a creative force and a ‘stair step process’ gained through afterlives towards hidden dimensional veils we refer to as the heavens. I have no ties to any religion, but acknowledge the presence of ‘God’.

Click to expand...

Good for you, but some of the 'evidence' just doesn't stack up as to such for many of us unworthy ones.

thebenbenstone said:

It is hard for atheists to understand what believers may be going through the ‘mind processes’ especially if atheists themselves have embarked on a completely different path.

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Not really. We might just think many are eager to have such beliefs - rather than accepting evidence to the contrary. The path of truth is what I aim for - and not one that might lead me off in several different directions, as the religions have done.

thebenbenstone said:

You must also understand that believers & people of faith are at different levels of comprehension.

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Yes, we see this quite a lot on RF, as to many believing the impossible - many being the YEC crowd and/or literalists.

thebenbenstone said:

My faith is simply the belief in something greater than myself & my own spiritual identity. Our conscience in a moral sense is the inherent ability to understand what is right and what is wrong.

Click to expand...

This hardly requires a religious or even spiritual belief in my view.

thebenbenstone said:

We all evaluate our own moral understanding which is shaped by our own political, cultural, religious, & social identities. A conscience is the ability of a healthy human to perceive what is right or wrong, just or unjust, good, bad & evil.

Click to expand...

Fine apart from the 'evil' bit. So why include it?

thebenbenstone said:

The more we align ourselves with ‘higher moral concepts’ it is said that our conscience is the degree of integrity & honesty that we ‘self-monitoring humans - self-governing humans’ finally determine by the quality of our own actions. Our conscience and consciousness are a system of information collected and stored that helps governs our experiences and decision making.

Click to expand...

So why a need for religions, or even a God belief?

thebenbenstone said:

‘Consciousness’ is the function of the reasoning mind that receives and processes information, crystalizes this information, stores or rejects this information, Consciousness is the state of awareness that gives the mind the ability to intuitively reason, use imagination, process emotion and memory, with the help of the five senses. Therefore, the more information one is able to gather and process, the more acutely ‘aware’ and conscious a person becomes in regards to their internal and external worlds. The process of ‘freewill thought’ is usually governed and formed by our personal interactions with other persons within our lives that we meet on a daily basis. My freewill is therefore governed by socially acceptable practices that have been ingrained within my conscience, the ‘by product’ is having the illusion that I have freewill but live within the boundary and confinements of existing within these invisible walls being the temple that rest upon my shoulder.

Awareness and wakefulness represent the two main components of consciousness, my awareness is defined by the content of my consciousness. Awareness contains self-awareness which manages and perceives the internal world of thought, self-observation, analyzing, reflection, imagination, conceptual thought, self-programming, daydreaming. Therefore, consciousness contains a spectrum of physiological states which include normality through to modified states induced by ‘drug taking’ or self-training through transcendental meditation. I personally prefer the former simply because ‘why ride the camel when I can take the train’. I have mentioned before that the ‘Age of Aquarius began in the 1960’s, and this is another milestone and historic marker ‘the time of accelerated spiritual awareness’ or the personal understanding of multidimensional fluid concepts of our own personal spiritual identity and collective consciousness. So, I ask the men who think their cousins ate lots of bananas… ‘why take the bus when you can catch a plane’.

Click to expand...

Says enough for me, if you can't accept the evidence as to human origins - why would I bother?

thebenbenstone said:

The subconscious or ‘stream of conscience’ is continually training your mind to form notional retrievable thought, images, scenarios, collecting information through the senses. Therefore, your conscience is like an ‘app’ working in the back ground you can’t put to sleep which It is continuously self-creating by the unconscious processes of collecting thought which is constantly coming into existence through self-awareness, such as the act of observing an electron, which solidifies that electron by collapsing the wave function. This image of consciousness allows for the coexistence of “multiple, half-formed idea’, all flitting below the threshold of awareness at the same time waiting for the storage, collection & self-observing process to end thus enabling our conveyor belt of thought to create a singular idea. The following is/was an idea of mine…..

SENDAI JAPAN 11TH MARCH 2011 – A magnitude 9.0 earthquake generates a tsunami that kills & injures tens of thousands of people and creates a nuclear meltdown at the Fukashima power plant. The world watched in horror as the tsunami hit the coast of Japan as a result of this magnitude 9.0 earthquake which had its epicentre in the location, we have all come to know as ‘Sendai’. The loss of life was in the vicinity of 19,000+ people, with another 6,000 injured. The 10-meter wave of black water generated by the quake became the 7th biggest tsunami ever recorded, pulverized the ‘north eastern coastal city of Sendai’ the capital of the Miyagi Prefecture.

The words Sendai when spoken slowly can mean & sound like ‘Sin die’. Other than the name ‘Fukashima’ sounding like ‘fool ka she ma’ I would have to ask the conscious mind what relevance does the number ‘9’ mean to everyone or anyone?

To me the upside down ‘9’ resembles the number ‘6‘, the number ‘6’ being the mark of ‘man’.

The number ‘9’ is also another symbol for the ‘golden ratio’. You see this global event may not mean or have any relevance to anything or anyone. But again, to me it was another global portent.

Click to expand...

And the mind often produces garbage - is that what you mean?

thebenbenstone said:

I started this thread originally to share some of my experiences throughout this life I have lived so far, and to give those with ‘faith and those people with an understanding of a ‘afterlife’ a bit more credibility. To those who do not understand the nature of God, I will try to help you understand in my basic layman’s style writings, how I myself have not come to have ‘faith in God’ through prayer or organized orthodox religion’, but arrived to an understanding of God by identifying a creative force and a ‘stair step process’ gained through afterlives towards hidden dimensional veils we refer to as the heavens. I have no ties to any religion, but acknowledge the presence of ‘God’.

It is hard for atheists to understand what believers may be going through the ‘mind processes’ especially if atheists themselves have embarked on a completely different path. You must also understand that believers & people of faith are at different levels of comprehension. My faith is simply the belief in something greater than myself & my own spiritual identity. Our conscience in a moral sense is the inherent ability to understand what is right and what is wrong. We all evaluate our own moral understanding which is shaped by our own political, cultural, religious, & social identities. A conscience is the ability of a healthy human to perceive what is right or wrong, just or unjust, good, bad & evil. The more we align ourselves with ‘higher moral concepts’ it is said that our conscience is the degree of integrity & honesty that we ‘self-monitoring humans - self-governing humans’ finally determine by the quality of our own actions. Our conscience and consciousness are a system of information collected and stored that helps governs our experiences and decision making.

Click to expand...

It is not a good idea to generalize about what atheists experience and think as opposed to your experiences and thoughts,

thebenbenstone said:

‘Consciousness’ is the function of the reasoning mind that receives and processes information, crystalizes this information, stores or rejects this information, Consciousness is the state of awareness that gives the mind the ability to intuitively reason, use imagination, process emotion and memory, with the help of the five senses. Therefore, the more information one is able to gather and process, the more acutely ‘aware’ and conscious a person becomes in regards to their internal and external worlds. The process of ‘freewill thought’ is usually governed and formed by our personal interactions with other persons within our lives that we meet on a daily basis. My freewill is therefore governed by socially acceptable practices that have been ingrained within my conscience, the ‘by product’ is having the illusion that I have freewill but live within the boundary and confinements of existing within these invisible walls being the temple that rest upon my shoulder.

Awareness and wakefulness represent the two main components of consciousness, my awareness is defined by the content of my consciousness. Awareness contains self-awareness which manages and perceives the internal world of thought, self-observation, analyzing, reflection, imagination, conceptual thought, self-programming, daydreaming. Therefore, consciousness contains a spectrum of physiological states which include normality through to modified states induced by ‘drug taking’ or self-training through transcendental meditation. I personally prefer the former simply because ‘why ride the camel when I can take the train’. I have mentioned before that the ‘Age of Aquarius began in the 1960’s, and this is another milestone and historic marker ‘the time of accelerated spiritual awareness’ or the personal understanding of multidimensional fluid concepts of our own personal spiritual identity and collective consciousness. So, I ask the men who think their cousins ate lots of bananas… ‘why take the bus when you can catch a plane’.

The subconscious or ‘stream of conscience’ is continually training your mind to form notional retrievable thought, images, scenarios, collecting information through the senses. Therefore, your conscience is like an ‘app’ working in the back ground you can’t put to sleep which It is continuously self-creating by the unconscious processes of collecting thought which is constantly coming into existence through self-awareness, such as the act of observing an electron, which solidifies that electron by collapsing the wave function. This image of consciousness allows for the coexistence of “multiple, half-formed idea’, all flitting below the threshold of awareness at the same time waiting for the storage, collection & self-observing process to end thus enabling our conveyor belt of thought to create a singular idea. The following is/was an idea of mine…..

Click to expand...

Some interesting comment on consciousness, buta bit muddled. I am not a fan of astrology and the Age of Aquarius.

thebenbenstone said:

SENDAI JAPAN 11TH MARCH 2011 – A magnitude 9.0 earthquake generates a tsunami that kills & injures tens of thousands of people and creates a nuclear meltdown at the Fukashima power plant. The world watched in horror as the tsunami hit the coast of Japan as a result of this magnitude 9.0 earthquake which had its epicentre in the location, we have all come to know as ‘Sendai’. The loss of life was in the vicinity of 19,000+ people, with another 6,000 injured. The 10-meter wave of black water generated by the quake became the 7th biggest tsunami ever recorded, pulverized the ‘north eastern coastal city of Sendai’ the capital of the Miyagi Prefecture.

The words Sendai when spoken slowly can mean & sound like ‘Sin die’. Other than the name ‘Fukashima’ sounding like ‘fool ka she ma’ I would have to ask the conscious mind what relevance does the number ‘9’ mean to everyone or anyone?

To me the upside down ‘9’ resembles the number ‘6‘, the number ‘6’ being the mark of ‘man’.

The number ‘9’ is also another symbol for the ‘golden ratio’. You see this global event may not mean or have any relevance to anything or anyone. But again, to me it was another global portent.

Click to expand...

I do not get the relationships here to the physical events of the earthquake or the tsunamis and the subject. Yes the number nine has spiritual significance to some religions such as the Baha'i Faith,