Discrete Time, Senses and Consciousness
People have pondered upon the topic of consciousness for centuries to find an explanation, description of its limits and reaches. But it has been an avenue of mystery although there has been progress on classification and break down of different types of cognition.
I hope you do not expect me to solve this problem in this article. Rather I would like share an idea, a brain-teaser if you like…
I would like pose an architecture between our senses, making of decisions and actions, building up the foundations to the conscious thought.
Let’s start with the brain-teaser we will dissect later. It is rather simple one.
You are driving your car down the highway, and you would like change lane to right. Then starting by checking your mirror on your left, you ensure there is no car incoming on your left hand side. Then you start your move onto the other lane. You take necessary set of actions to move the car to left, focusing on the road ahead, leaving the sight of the mirror with precondition that lane was empty.
Conscious thought for me, is essentially the part that stands between our senses and our actions; like I mentioned earlier; making of decisions. Thus I would like you to consider following dissection into the experience mentioned above. If you were to be interrupted midway; changing lane, and asked what are you doing. You would probably say, well I am changing to the other lane.
But in that frozen moment, you would not be able to point out if that is a sane action to be made by your senses. You would be acting upon the sensory input that was made earlier, no longer within your field of view. You can easily say, well I know it is empty, I just had checked at it earlier. But you would be basing your reasoning onto a sensory input that you no longer have access to verify. Remember, it is frozen slice of a moment, no head movements!
You could say, if you were frozen in that very moment for an extended period of time, you might lose your sanity. I would like to posit that our senses are our drugs to keep us sane of our decisions, a false stream of input that keeps us sure of our decisions. The moment, the chain is broken, everything would become questionable, and over time our very sanity.
I believe consciousness is the story we tell ourselves in the emptiness between our senses and time we implement our decisions.
