How is consciousness a non-physical entity?

Tagged:

So, on my blog I’ve divided consciousness up into 8 different functions, or 7 depending on how you look at it. You should go read that if you want to get a fuller picture of what I’m trying to say. The functions of intellect, wisdom, ego, identity, perception, awareness and responsiveness all work together to form the building blocks of consciousness.

If you think carefully about this you’ll see just how divorced all that is from the actual physical world. Sure, it’s being facilitated by the brain, but all of these things are functions that follow their own rules. They admit input from the outside world, but their output follows their own rules. The brain talks to itself far more than it talks to the outside world.

I tried to get through this without using the computer program metaphor but it looks like I’m bound to fail. So if you look at the electrical signals of a running computer signal, going into and out of the processor, you’ll only have the vaguest idea of what it’s actually doing. To find out what the computer’s actually doing, you have to look in a totally different place than the actual computer. You have to read the source code of the running program, and even that may not be sufficient to help you understand the actual functioning.

In a similar way, looking at your brain waves only gives a vague idea of what you’re actually thinking. It can’t determine anything on that above list of consciousness functions.

We have a word to describe things like this, abstract. Abstract ideas are non-physical, they don’t exist in any particular place. It’s perfectly fine to say that consciousness exists, but not on the physical plane.

Another thing that’s notable about that list is what’s not on it, emotion. Emotion is a brain function, not a function of consciousness. It feeds into consciousness but it’s really only part of the awareness function. You can look at the above list and the flow between them as how meaning is made in the brain. Emotion doesn’t have any meaning on its own, it has to be made aware of and tied to specific knowledge or ego or identity traits before we can make sense of it. Emotion is a lower brain function, not a higher one, and it’s the higher ones that make up what we call consciousness. It can overrule higher brain functions, and that’s a more deterministic process than regular thought, but it doesn’t happen a whole whole lot.

The higher you go in brain function, the further and further removed from the physical world you get.