The seemingly ephemeral issues of the origin of the physical universe and the past and future of human history all seem to pale in comparison with the sheer herculean task of explaining the mysteries of human consciousness. For all the progress made in understanding the material nature of the world and the laws that underlie it, little has been discovered on the phenomenon of consciousness.

The consciousness problem is a kind of cosmic joke; most scientific problems are difficult to assess because of the practical intangibly of the subjects in question: we wonder about the composition of foreign galaxies, the possible presence of life and the subatomic nature of the world because we have no ways of directly observing them. Consciousness is precisely the opposite problem: all that we experience is a result of consciousness, thus running scientific experiments on it is impossible as it would apparently imply comparing a conscious with a non-conscious state, while the later is by definition impossible to experience. It's a variable that could not practically be held constant or allowed to fluctuate.

This shouldn't immediately make the interested put up their hands in surrender to the difficulty of the problem; it simply necessitates a change in direction. Science has managed to understand intimately the chemical composition of foreign stars and their cosmic origin without having left the solar system; often all that is required to find the answer to a problem is ridding one's self of fixedness on one particular path to a solution.

Consciousness as a Machine in the Machine

What is known about consciousness is that it is a product of the physical brain. Early and religious thinkers often placed spiritual answers to the problem of consciousness, namingly the very intuitive concept of "the soul." It stimulates the desire of humans to perceive living things, especially humans as apart from the natural system, with a taste of the magically non-physical. Nonetheless, these kinds of theorizations run into rocky roads with a more critical approach. It would be difficult to explain , if consciousness is a spiritual phenomenon, how for example psychotropic substances, physical in nature, can temporary modify the allegedly spiritual nature of this soul and apparently self-perception.

People can also sustain physical injuries or illness that apparently alter consciousness, Alzheimer's disease among others. I doubt that anyone would be willing to say that the iron rod that penetrated the frontal lobe of Phineas Gage was accompanied by a higher Platonic form of an iron rod penetrating his spiritual soul, thus changing his consciousness and behavior. It would be nonsensical to describe Gage's change in behavior in terms of spirituality; his higher decision-making processes were clearly maimed by a physical aberration. It is from examples like these that scientists can comfortably say that the brain is not a useless chunk of matter subservient to a spiritual side, rather it is the base of all human action and perception.

Speaking about consciousness is often so difficult because it's so mysterious that it encourages vague and silly spiritualisms and sophisms from the more superficial parties involved. Because it is so inexplicable, people, like they do, naturally jump to the most ridiculous yet appealing solutions despite a lack of reasoning. Consciousness has been subject to the same public defiling as the word "quantum" has; endless amounts of self-help and New Age philosophies are built on it precisely because scientists don't seem to know enough on the issue to correct those kinds of writers.

The Evolution of Consciousness

Looking at the Darwinian interpretation of the mind (which may as well be the only), consciousness can only exist as a biological phenomenon for one of two reasons. Firstly it could have simply been directly selected for; somehow it conferred a reproductive advantage to people/animals with such an ability. The other possibility is that it is an unintended consequence of the evolutionary necessities of a complex brain; that is, like perhaps the ability to interpret music, it was not selected for in itself, but other faculties that lead to it were. This would mean that certain modules useful for other activities were evolutionarily selected, and it happens that consciousness inadvertently springs as an inevitable result of these higher faculties.

Both of these ideas are worthy of investigation, but at first glace the hypothesis of direct selection seems more probable to me as, quite simply even if we don't understand its precise mechanisms, we should understand that consciousness is an evolutionarily useful tool. It seems that consciousness is a mental module used for reflexive analysis, id est a part of the brain that judges the behavior of the rest of the brain and overrides it when necessary. This kind of consciousness module is a way to not only second guess the lower portions of the brain, but itself. Consciousness is recursive in that not only is it aware of some of the other functions of the brain, but it is tied into and aware of itself. A module of consciousness would essentially have to have an "output value" that wraps around and plugs into itself. Greater than that, it would have to have the ability to dictate from above to stop its own analysis and proceed on a decision.

Additionally, it may be that consciousness is a semi-recent mental innovation. Although it may be that many other, perhaps nearly all animals have a certain realization of consciousness, consciousness is most prominently linked with the highest mental faculties of the human brain. Speech, abstract reasoning, advanced memory and other abilities take up most of the attention of consciousness, and we may be led to think that consciousness as we conceive of it is a development not too long preceding these developments.

Limits on Self-Awareness

Consciousness of course seems to abide by limitations. We might think that it would be better to be able to process consciously all of what we call now "unconscious" or "subconscious" thoughts, but for whatever reason we cannot. Now if a human were fully conscious, that would seem to imply that he would be equally knowledgeable of every bit of information stored away in his brain, from all his life's memories to all of Roman history he knew, to every bit of every other language he had ever heard. He would be instantly aware of everything any and all people had ever said, every detail of every piece of visual input he had ever received and even the explicit workings of his lower more carnal and sexual brain.

This would make for quite a superman, but it would probably also make for a distinctly uneconomical and burdened brain with a rapacious appetite for energy. If we ponder this in the physical nature of the brain, it would require a "consciousness module" or whatever parts of the brain would generate it to be directly connected with basically every other part of the brain that processes information, stores memory or anything else. The wiring of such a brain would be so heavy that it could essentially never be selected for due to the energy required (in addition it's hard to imagine such circuitry evolving without gradual heightening integration of consciousness.)

Of course on a simpler layer, one could say that consciousness is preferable limited;if it indeed is a module for self-analysis, economy and generalization are the objectives. It may also be useful to "suppress" information from consciousness that would otherwise spill over into anti-social or self-harming behaviors. If our all-conscious superman saw a friend fall from a tree or get in a car accident and die, he would have to remain conscious of that event intimately in all his future decision-making. Indeed if he had only thought of such an unfortunate event, he would still be continuously conscious of it for eternity. If all-conscious man had heard a rumor that his wife was with another man, he would eternally experience those negative emotions and distrust his wife even if it would do him no good to.

So really consciousness may be an evolutionary adaptation, but its limits have evolutionary incentives as well. Theoretically "full" consciousness would be an energy burden that may in fact damage decision-making.

Explaining Consciousness

Consciousness is certainly far more than the ability to recognize one's self in a mirror or something trivial like that. It shouldn't be too difficult to draft up a machine that can do just that and mechanically wipe off whatever crumbs on its carapace a scientist may place there. That does not mean that there is a cosmic theater in the machine viewing the world in any way as humans experience.

Consciousness is more than self-awareness; it is also awareness of self-awareness and a conceptual distinction between the agency of the system and the agency of the outside world. Science has come to be governed, and quite justifiably by a kind of epistemological naturalism, but it may be that the reason that humans look at their behavior in such implicitly "spiritual" terms is that consciousness compels us to look at ourselves distinct from seemingly unconscious "natural" systems. Consciousness has to deceive itself into thinking that its behaviors are cut from different cloth than the those of the rest of the brain; this way it can make conscious, but limited generalizations as to apt behavior that contradict the action taken otherwise to create the self-analysis that constitutes to good of consciousness. Of course it generally is cut from different cloth as its decisions are obviously tabulated distinctly as they are capable of contradicting the rest of the mind.

I think on another level, consciousness is not just a recent development in animal evolution, present only in humans, other apes, and conjugately intelligent animals. In a way, consciousness, even if simpler than the kind we experience, is a prerequisite for other mental abilities that are common among the animal kingdom. Imagine the capacity to store and recall memories; it seems that consciousness is the vehicle by which recalled memories are analyzed, and it would be basically impossible to imagine the use of recalling memories by an consciousness being (or better said system). Indeed the idea of "recalling" essentially implies the presence of a consciousness.

Then again it may be that some faculties are interfaced with both the conscious and non-conscious brain. Patients who exhibit blindsight are incredibly interesting because in practical terms they can see, but are simply not conscious of their sight. In this way they are blind to everything that doesn't pass through the eyes unconsciously. It may be then that there are faculties of sight that evolved before consciousness operating independent of its existence. These faculties were furbished by new visual capabilities realized after the arise of consciousness that interface with the module of consciousness. Blindsight then would be an impairment of the advanced, more recently evolved elements of perception with the underlying, primitive ones remaining in tact.

On Physical Structure

Let's suppose that there is indeed a "module" for consciousness. This module doesn't even have to be localized, but only that it is a certain module that is contains all information which is currently being realized in awareness. It would probably be that there are various levels of subconscious modules "below" it, that is, there are some areas from which consciousness borrows frequently that contain important information, such as recently relevant facts or behaviors that are on short call.

I don't remember Avogadro's Constant. Not only is it not in my consciousness, but I can not recall it with my typical mind-racking. If I look it up, I see that it's the quite familiar value of 6.0221415 × 10²³. There was a point when this number faded from the land of mental recallability to the terra incognita of vague recognition. Of course, it could have faded even deeper; there are some facts that when reminded of I still wouldn't be able to recall ever (apparently unsuccessfully) learning.

The deeper these memories or facts are stored, the more difficult they are to bring to consciousness. It may be that the neural connections most important to the brain must be somehow "closer" or more intimately linked with the mechanism of consciousness, but when significant enough stimuli are presented, often in ensembles of cues, deep information can be brought to consciousness. This would lead us to think that either consciousness or specific information stored can move in relation to each other depending on the necessity of the connection. Neural pathways can decay, but also be refurbished.

The Even More Awkward Talk

One of my memories of childhood was me asking my parents whether or nor animals had consciousness. It was a futile task, not only because I didn't know the word for consciousness, but because consciousness is essentially a concept defined by itself. Looking the word up in a dictionary, you'll see it defined in other words, but not other concepts; it is a true, blue tautology. My parents of course didn't satiate my appetite for knowledge at all. They were religious, so they assured me that animals did not have souls, but obviously that wasn't my intention. Of course it was mostly due to my absolute disability to explain the concept, basing my questions on primitive assumptions. "So is it possible for someone to be, like, born a deer?" I asked in vain.