“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.”

Brainstorming

In this evanescently chill wintertime, my brain froze to think about where all my thoughts stem from. How does my three-pound brain experience a millennium of pain, or simply put-sensations? How am I constantly bugged with the thought of biting my nails? How am I active while I sleep?

Sometimes, it seems essentially inconceivable how the water of the material processes could give rise to the wine of consciousness. Indeed, it is so popular an enigma that it has a name-the (in)famous mind-body problem. But when folks refer to the existence of the “mind”, what do they generally mean? Is it some sort of toy our brain plays with or is it something that toys around with our brain?

Even though it is common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life- all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments, and even what each of us regards as his own intimate private self-is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain.

                                                 – V.S Ramachandran

Apparently, in common parlance, the mind often refers to “the seat of human consciousness, the thinking-feeling ‘I’ that seems to be an agentic causal force that is somehow related but is also seemingly separable from our body.”

(Extracted from Gregg Henriques, Theory of Knowledge)

The mind, thus, is a metaphysical entity that resides in the brain to express its thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and imagination through physical responses.

The Emergence of Mind

When we think about our conscious experiences of the world, we are aware of vivid colors, sounds, and feelings. These seem to occur in a world of three spatial dimensions evolving through time. When we look at a typical brain, we see an unbelievably intricate web of networks energized by electrical and chemical processes. These networks often have incredibly large numbers of components. Given such different levels of description, it has been difficult to comprehend how a brain can give rise to a mind.

Classical philosophers, such as Aristotle, really thought in terms of the soul, more than what we call out in terms of the mind. And, so, what we call the mind is a form of a subset of what these philosophers, thus, referred to as the soul. They saw the “soul” as what makes the living body alive but also the physiological features, which is a more sensible and comprehensive view of the human being. But this poses a more integrated theory that doesn’t starkly distinguish the mind from the brain.

So, let us turn our faces to the computational theory of the mind which was a huge breakthrough because it allows for the first time, to conceptually separate the mind from the brain-body. How? This theory of mind posits that the nervous system is an information processing system, that works by translating the changes in the body and the environment (nurture & nature) into a language of neural impulses that represent the basic “animal-environment relationship”.

Now, we can conceive “the mind” as the flow of information through the nervous system and this flow of nervous can be conceptually separated from the biophysical matter that makes up the nervous system…

To see how we can consider the separation of the information from the actual nervous system itself, we shall think of a book. The book’s physical dimensions can now be considered as roughly akin to the brain. Then think about the contents of this book, i.e., the story of the book or the purport of the same. In computational theory, that is akin to the mind.

Hmm, so, the mind, then, is the information epitomized in and processed by the nervous system.  But that isn’t the “it” of our knowledge of the mind, it’s like a pandora box filled with million different possibilities in the present and the plausibility of the future.

The Realm of Consciousness

In the above-given text, you must have witnessed a term that is ubiquitously mentioned and partly understood by many, i.e., Consciousness.

Antonio Damasio, in his book- “Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious”, ponders upon the question-How did we develop minds with the mental maps-a constant stream of images and memories-mechanisms that exist symbiotically with the feelings and sensations in our body that we then, crucially relate to ourselves and associate with a sense of personhood? In subtle words, he seeks to find answers to- What really is “Consciousness”?

Consciousness, I would say, is a very slippery notion, often touched upon but finding researchers falling off the edge of its true understanding. It, thus, also becomes a very crucial thing to understand what consciousness is not.

“Consciousness is not just what happens in our minds; it’s about what happens in our bodies, and what happens when our minds interpret our bodies and feelings and reflect their processes back to us.”

Now, imagine, for example, birds. When they look out at this world, they have a sense of feeling that they are alive. If they are in pain, they can do something about it. If they feel the pangs of hunger & thirst, they can satisfy that. Thus, it is this basic feeling that there is life ticking away inside of you- a life termed as “Consciousness”. Now, in the heart of this life is subjectivity, this sense of perceiving self and the world around, that is, thus really the heart of Consciousness.     

While the fast-pacing world wonders whether sentient robots are in offing, some scientists continue to grapple with an ancient mystery: Are plants conscious?

This question proposes to explain the whereabouts of non-consciousness. Some studies state that mimosa plants (Mimosa pudica) and peas (Pisum sativum) display learning behaviors that amount to having consciousness but it is argued that plants do not have a structurally complex brain or any similar organ which is the pre-requisite of any form of consciousness. In fact, plants are perfectly able to carry out their physiological functions by means of genetic and epigenetic adaptations, without any need to invoke consciousness. Hence, this discussion distinctly emphasizes the importance of the brain-body—the substrate—to the experience of consciousness. 

So, in conclusion, it remains fundamentally mysterious how consciousness happens but, the description of consciousness fairly terms it as a “subjective experience” or a “qualitative feeling” that is associated with those perceptions, together with the deeper processes of reflection, communication & thought.

Reviewer: Pragya Rathore || Illustration: Dr. Shampa Ghosh || Editor: Dr. Jitendra Kumar Sinha