Consciousness

From The Maze Where Realities Converge - the psychedelic encyclopedia of reality from The Ultimate Comment

Any discussion of consciousness must begin with the assumption that it exists. When we talk about "consciousness", we mean the phenomenon affording subjective individuals access to reality, which may be the same phenomenon that constitutes these subjective individuals.

Consciousness is almost certainly invisible. By most definitions consciousness refers to the inner experiences of human beings, in the same field as perceptions and beliefs. Consciousness may thus be impossible to measure, and scientific explanations of consciousness may be instantly doomed. The current scientific model of the universe is insufficient to describe consciousness, as it assumes that all reality is physical.

Consciousness is like the needle of a record player.

Proofs of the existence of consciousness

Everybody knows consciousness exists. Why? Because it's so fucking obvious. However, it has become inexplicably popular in recent decades to deny that consciousness exists. Arguments for something so self-evident would normally not be necessary, but in order to buck the trend of physicalism, a few will be offered here.

• Consciousness is said not to exist because it is not tangible. It is said that only things that you can see and touch and trip over are real. But this model falls apart without the existence of consciousness, because it makes perception the benchmark of reality, and for perception to exist, there must be something perceiving as well as something being perceived.
• Frank Jackson's 'Blind Mary' thought experiment - Mary is born blind. She goes to college to study science, and learns all about electromagnetic waves, neurophysiology, the visual cortex, and everything pertaining to light and colour. Though she has never seen light or colour in her life, she knows everything that science can tell her about the material causes of light and colour. It is hard to deny that there is still something she definitely does not know, namely what colours actually look like. If she then had an operation to restore her sight, she would discover a property of light that had nothing to do with the physical. The quality of what a colour looks like exists only in the realm of consciousness, not physical reality.

See Also

Brain
Methods of altering consciousness
Eight circuit model of consciousness