What is consciousness
What is consciousness
20131129 Kim Jeonghu
Abstract
I will discuss about Jong’s concept of life and consciousness, then I will suggest the form of consciousness and modified definition of life.
Introduction
In the bioinformatic class, the professor Jong said that the concept of life shown as the switches’ combination. He said, there are three critical factors; energy, information and time. Also, the switches make signals and data as a sum of them. For making signals, the switches are affected by the conditions like pH, pE, temperature, etc.
What is consciousness
Consciousness can be defined by neuron activities and interactions in an organism. It’s possible to change as the reaction and expectation activities based upon its experimental and existential experiences towards environmental stimulation. In addition, Emotions also could be included in the boundary of consciousness because it can be defined as expression of some relationship and sum of conscious activity.
However, this definition can only explain and include lives having brain like animals such as whales, dogs or human beings. That means it’s not a general rule for explicating whole lives’ consciousness. To consider whole life, we need to find basal features of life and change the definition of consciousness.
We can find some features of life as below according to the concept of Jong,
- Life has information and tries to propagate it.
- Life needs energy for surviving and uses or keeps it efficiently.
- Life is adapted or can expect according to time.
The second and third feature can represent the consciousness as a theory. We can develop the idea of them as that there are flows of energy around of life as center according to time, which life can expect and try to control. That means, life tends to keep or gather the energy for surviving and the tendency is activated by many factors including ‘time’. In that point of view, it’s possible to define the consciousness as a tendency related to energy based on the time scale.
Comparing and proving with the professor’s concept.
In that point of view, the previous definition can tally with the professor’s concept which is explanation of switches mechanism, making signals affected by conditions. Also it seems to be possible to explain or illustrate the above definition of consciousness as the signal’s flow or tendency to survive. That can be said as the consciousness isn’t switches, but flows of signals, and that can be applied to every organism.
Weakness of this definition
The definition has some weak point as below.
- It’s hard to explain the other part of consciousness except energy or surviving. For example, some emotional disorders or something like that such as suicidal intent are quite opposite of that definition.
- It’s impossible to demonstrate cases of the non-eukaryotic like bacteria.
- This definition collides with previously existing one; the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings.
To release these weak point, I prepared some clarifications.
A. The meaning of disorder is broken down and it can mean some ‘switch’ isn’t working normally. In that situation, ‘the consciousness’ also may not work properly.
B. Prokaryotic also must have the switches by Jong’s idea, and if there are switches consisting the life, we can apply the definition to them. It’s possible to apply the definition to viruses.
C. The previously existing concept of consciousness is based on the brain, but our one isn’t and if we take first one – the state of being awake and aware of one’s surroundings – as the definition, it’s still possible to explain; if there aren’t some restrictions like brain or other sense organ, bacteria also can recognize surroundings by their own way.
Conclude
I discussed the definition of consciousness and find the weak point. The definition of it can be said that flows through the ‘switches’ which tend to survive (or keep and gather energy) and expect according to time.
