So what exactly is consciousness?
Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.It has been defined variously in terms of sentience, awareness, qualia, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of self hood or soul, the fact that there is something "that it is like" to "have" or "be" it, and the executive control system of the mind. In contemporary philosophy its definition is often hinted at via the logical possibility of its absence, the philosophical zombie, which is defined as a being whose behavior and function are identical to one's own yet there is "no-one in there" experiencing it. source
But what about consciousness about knowing that others also feel from within just like you feel for yourself? Or how about plants if they feel too? Or animals they do feel but are they conscious too and then once again the million dollar question, what about AI? There is already a lot of discussion going on about AI. I mean in the future, if some piece of code and hardware supporting the functionality of such code would be able to generate more codes that will enhance it's functionality and later on if such codes can detect it's own flaws and fix them would it be considered as consciousness? Freaky stuff I know. There has to be some sort of Universal explanation to this.
I have been doing my "research" on "qualia" for a while now and I firmly believe that's where consciousness begins. At least in living beings. In order to have consciousness we have to have some stimuli such as an object so that our 5 senses can interpret it all. I don't know about the sixth sense but I do understand that humans and animals are capable of interpreting beyond what they feel for example we can't see in the dark but with the help of let's say night vision we can actually see in the dark. I consider this capability as sixth sense. so When we can see in the dark with the help of something, of course I said "see" and this should be considered as one of the 5 senses but we actually can't "see" in the dark, does this mean night vision + sight = sixth sense? Think about it.
Back to the square one, what is consciousness? Brain is capable of containing consciousness everybody knows about this but then once again what contains the mind if at all something can contain it? I will continue from this point onwards in the next post. Follow me @kissofearth.