THINKING ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS
I am neither a neuroscientist nor an academician, but I have been curious and fascinated by the daily cycle of consciousness and unconsciousness all my adult life.
I have had many questions about this subject without being able to find a satisfactory answer for them. These questions can be listed as follows:
_ What is consciousness, how could it be defined?
_ Why and how do we become unconscious, every night, when we sleep for 6-8 hours, and what is the purpose of this daily cycle?
_ Is consciousness created by the brain, or is it a state of the mind?
_ Are all living creatures, even those without a brain, conscious?
_ Can artificially created AI machine tools be conscious as claimed by some scientists?
When I tried to find answers to these questions, by reading the available books on the subject, I even become more confused. Because, even research scientists themselves do not know the answer, and do not have the methods to study consciousness and unconsciousness cycle at cellular level. They only propose scientific theories, and there are about 29 theories about it. Without getting involved in theoretical discussions, I would like to state my understanding and reasoning about these questions.
When I sleep every night, I become completely unconscious, I don’t feel anything, I am half dead. Only my automatic nervous system directed functioning of my vital organs keep me alive. But as soon as I am awake, I immediately become conscious and sentient. I regain all my senses. I am well rested, and I am aware of everything in my environment, I know who I am, where I am, what time of the day it is, who are the people around me, and how safe I am.
So, it appears to me that purpose of consciousness must be, to become aware of everything in our living environment, so that we can protect ourself and live safely in our environment.
Then we can easily say that consciousness is strictly linked to preservation of life, and it must be maintained in a continuous fashion. To do this, require a lot of mental energy expenditure. That is why it must be followed by unconscious state to rest the brain cells, to recharge their mitochondrial energy batteries, and get rid of waste product of energy metabolism.
The creation of conscious state is the function of the brain. We know this, because we can sedate brain cells with certain medication, and artificially create an unconscious sleep state and revert it at will.
Conscious state is biologically created by our miracle neuro-anatomical organ, our brain’s trillion of neuron cells with collaborations and corporations of multiple parts of our brain. Every neuron cell work like interconnected biological nano computers.
That is why I cannot believe a lifeless, and nonbiological AI machine can ever be conscious. To me this is an illusion created by tech companies. AI in its current form operates on algorithms and data, but lacks human creativity and intelligence.
