I know this topic was probably brought up before, but what are your views on it. Do you believe the consciousness is a mere set of memories we retain for our lifetime until our brain dies or something much more?

This is the primordial philosophical question.

I prefer to state it as follows:

Are we the form, or are we the thing that is taking form.

The former is the secular atheistic hypothesis, the latter is the spiritual view.

You ask:


Well, what would experience these memories?

Whatever consciousness is, it cannot merely be a set memories. There is information in the memory of your computer. Does that mean that your computer is conscious?

There must be something else that can experience those memories.

In other words, it wouldn't be the memories that would constitute consciousness, but rather it would be the brain as a whole that somehow experienced this informational content.

Looking at a computer, it couldn't even be something like a CPU or Central Processing Unit. At least not akin to one that is actually used in a computer. The CPU only "sees" a few bits of information at a time and never has the chance to even recognize what an entire program might actually be doing on a macro scale (speaking in terms of macro information complexity here).

So the only form that could be consciousness would be the entire computer, CPU, RAM, memory, programming instruction, I/O and the whole shebang.

This is what secular atheists try to imagine. The entire human nervous system taken as a whole becomes conscious of the big picture. However, that's a rather abstract concept and still doesn't truly suggest precisely what it is that it having this experience.

If the whole conglomeration is nothing more than a complex form of consciously innate waves or particles, then at what point does consciousness arise, and precisely what is it that is having this experience?

How much complexity is required for consciousness? And is self-awareness even required? If self-awareness isn't a requirement of consciousness then who's to say that plants, or even material that we consider to be inanimate, wouldn't also be a form of consciousness that is simply not self-aware.

However, once we go there, then all matter become conscious from that perspective, and the very stuff that the universe is made of is itself consciousness.

This is basically the line of thinking that the Eastern Mystics used to arrive at their philosophical conclusion that all is consciousness.

In other words, going back to the way I like to state this primordial question, "All are the thing that is taking form".

In other words it's the Eastern Mystical view that we are the thing that is taking form rather than merely a product of the form itself. We are the primordial consciousness that is this universe. We are it, and it is us. The Eastern Mystics say in Sanskrit "Tat T'vam Asi", "You are that".

The secular atheists are happy with believing that we are a produce of the form and we not innately the thing that is taking form.

I personally have more problems with the secular atheist's view than with the Eastern Mystic view. Therefore I lean toward the Eastern Mystic view as being more likely. However, ultimately I confess to being intellectually agnostic (i.e. without absolute knowledge to the true answer to this primordial question).

I like Dan Dennet's take on consciousness.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness.html

Simple.

(b)Something much more.

i don't 'believe' anything.

jrboogie, how do you stand on your own existence?

my existance is not a belief. it's an experience.

Prior to the philosophers of existentialism and the study of phenomenology, there was a philosophical acceptance of the dual nature of mind and body. So ingrained was this dichotomy that it continued into the sciences and can still be a point of difference for many. The existentialists, Sartre, Heidegger, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and others began to change that way of thinking.

JR will be happy to know that he is probably an existentialist thinker because phenomenology, among other things, has to do with phenomena and the ‘conscious experience’ that the individual experiences. In other words consciousness is not a thing that is permanent and separate from the being, it constantly emerges as the individual in motion is constantly aware and updating consciousness through first hand experience.

I tend to side with existentialism because I don’t believe there is a duality of nature between mind and body, they are one and they function as one and the sole purpose of that function is survival for the continuance of the species.

The separation of mind and body allows for the grandest of mystic beliefs and much of this dichotomy continues even today as a source of contention between the religious communities and science. Not all existenalists are atheists, but existenalism helped to open the door of acceptance for many athiestic thinkers.

Today we are currently in the midst of a changing medical model becasue technology has improved our scientific understanding of the body to such a great extent that we have seen the diminishing effects of mysticism in how the body functions.

Exactly.