3. Okay, but define consciousness

Okay, but define consciousness

Your awareness of thought? What is thinking?

This is from a recent post of mine

it seems from what you have written that you believe mind is an emergent property of matter

The cortex represents our external world by using certain of our sensory modalities to create sensory fields in localized populations of neurons in the cortex. There is also a cortical representation/map of our homunculus or physical body and thus our body is also a sensory modality. The parts of our body most important for 'guiding our actions' take up the most space on this map. These sensory fields overlap and interact. Our 'voicebox' in the throat, and the language it produces, also has an area in the cortex, the speech center (primarily Broca's and Wernicke's areas).

As the sensory/receptive fields are created from moment to moment in the cortex, they overlap and interact with our speech center. This produces thoughts or words in response to the environmental stimulus currently being processed by our cortex. This is the 'mind' that we perceive of as our thoughts. This is how the images, sounds, smells, memories etc that arise in our thoughts are generated. Our thoughts are arising spontaneously, through random desynchronization, as well as being stimulated by the other sensory modalities. Our thoughts evoke and influence a response from the hippocampus, which produces an emotional response that will direct our thoughts in a certain direction. Our brain stimulates itself. Having 2 hemispheres increases our ability to interact with our thoughts, and facilitates thinking. This is our mind, and is not our consciousness/awareness.

No one has done this kind of work before, showing this type of consistent control of one mental process.....selective attention—as it happens spontaneously and unconsciously. These findings are significant because they open the door to building a fuller picture of the unconscious mind. We know that the experiences we have arise as a combination of constantly interacting networks. Now we have shown this interaction as it happens naturalistically as well as the way it controls experiences." https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-12-consciousness-bereaved-people-thoughts.html

Mind is an emergent property of the organization of our brain. Consciousness/awareness I would view as an emergent property of biological matter. And at one level it could be argued that all matter is biological, if not directly then indirectly by providing the scaffolding, elements, and chemicals that support life and its emergent awareness.

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