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Consciousness is the Concomitance of Life

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Abstract

The mystery of consciousness is among the most important questions pondered upon, not only in philosophy but also in the cognitive science, psychology, neurobiology and other sciences. The problem of consciousness has been traditionally dealt by philosophy, but its importance in explaining mental phenomena has made it a subject matter for other sciences that emerged later. Each philosopher and scientist has followed his own method in defining it, and arriving at a universal agreement on its definition has become difficult. In philosophy, ‘consciousness’ does not have a definition in terms of genus and differentia, or the necessary and sufficient conditions. On the one hand, idealists put all their efforts into explaining consciousness as a separate entity, without stepping away from their traditional path, because they believe that thinking, experience, and free will are not the properties of the physical entity. On the other hand, the scientific world puts its efforts into reducing consciousness to electrical and neurochemical processes of the brain because they believes that the brain works like a biologically programmed computer. Our approach to consciousness varies between these two explanations. We would like to address the problem of consciousness at two levels: cosmic and individual. The basic thesis of this paper is: everything that we know is something that we experience and everything that we experience is a form arising within consciousness.

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Notes

  1. Planck, M. (1931). The Observer. London.

  2. Isaacson W. (2007). Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 335.

  3. Sagan, Carl (2006). Conversations with Carl Sagan. Tom Head (Ed.), USA: University Press of Mississippi, p. 47.

  4. Lanza, R. & Berman, B. (2009). Biocentricism. Dallas: Benbella Books, Inc., p. 177.

  5. Ibid. p. 174.

  6. Steven Pinker (1997). How the Mind works: Great Britain, Penguin Books, p. 564.

  7. Churchland, Paul M. (1989). A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.

  8. Erik D. Lumer et al. (1998). Neural Correlates of Perceptual Rivalry in the Human Brain: Science, Vol. 280, Issue. 5371, pp. 1930–1934.

  9. Rick J. Brown & Anthony M. Norcia. (1997). A Method for Investigating Binocular Rivalry in Real-time with the Stead-state VEP: Pergamon, Great Britain, Vol. 37, No. 170, pp. 2401–2408.

  10. Giulio Tononi et al. (1998). Investigating neural correlates of conscious perception by frequency-tagged neuromagnetic responses: Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America, Vol. 95, pp. 3198–3203.

  11. Leopold, D.A. et al. (1996). What is rivalling during binocular rivalry?: Nature, Nature Publishing House, Vol. 380, Issue. 6575, pp. 621–624.

  12. Edelman, G.M. (2004). Wider than the Sky: the Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness. New Haven, CT: Yela University Press, pp. 5.

  13. Laureys, S. (2006). The Boundaries of Consciousness: Neurobiology and Neuropathology. The Netherlands: Elsevier, p. 81.

  14. Feynman, R. (1965). The Character of Physical Law. London, Cambridge: The MIT Press, p. 129.

  15. Newton, I. (1704). Opticks: Or, A treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light. Also Two treatises of the Species and Magnitude of Curvilinear Figures. London. p. 90. https://ia601408.us.archive.org/27/items/opticksortreatis00newt/opticksortreatis00newt.pdf. Accessed on 10th September 2017.

  16. Ibid. p. 118.

  17. Donald D. Hoffman (2008). Society for Mind-Matter Research. Conscious Realism and the Mind–Body Problem: Imprint Academic, Vol. 6 (1), Issue. 1, p. 93.

  18. Whitehead, Alford North. (1927). Science and the modern world. New York: Macmillan Company, pp. 55–57.

  19. Christodoulides, J. (2012) Consciousness and Evolution. UK: Paperback, p. 122.

  20. Donald D. Hoffman (2008). Society for Mind-Matter Research. Conscious Realism and the Mind–Body Problem: Imprint Academic, Vol. 6 (1), Issue. 1, p. 103.

  21. Lambrecht, A. (2002). Observing mechanical dissipation in the quantum vacuum: an experimental challenge.InHartmutFigger; Dieter Meschede; Claus Zimmermann (Eds.), Laser physics at the limits. Berlin/New York: Springer. p. 197.

  22. See, Dittrich W. & H. Gies. (2000). Probing the quantum vacuum: perturbative effective action approach. Berlin: Springer.

  23. See, Nath, R. (2016). Can naturalism explain consciousness: A critique. Artificial Intelligence and Society: Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-016-0671-6.

  24. Gupta, B. (2003). CIT: Consciousness. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, pp. 9–10.

  25. Kumar, S. (2012). Neural Networks. India: Tata McGraw-Hill Education, p. 687.

  26. Churchland, Paul M. (1988). Matter and Consciousness. London: The MIT Press, p. 21.

  27. Gage, Fred H. (2015). Neuroscience: The Study of the Nervous System & Its Functions. Daedalus: Journal of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Winter, pp. 5–9.

  28. See, Nath, R. (2009b). Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence. A Critique of the Mechanistic Theory of Mind. Boca Raton: The Universal Publishers.

  29. Turing, A. M. (1950) Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, 49, 433–460.

  30. Nath, R. (2009a). Machine intelligence, competence and creativity. Artificial Intelligence and Society: Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Communication, Volume 23, Number 3, pp. 454–457.

  31. Walter, John Moore. (1994). A Life of Erwin Schrodinger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 181.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, 400 076, India

    Sunkanna Velpula & Rajakishore Nath

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  1. Sunkanna Velpula
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  2. Rajakishore Nath
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Correspondence to Sunkanna Velpula.

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Velpula, S., Nath, R. Consciousness is the Concomitance of Life. J. Indian Counc. Philos. Res. 36, 167–181 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-018-0165-7

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