Consciousness explained

Why does human awareness seem so weird

After watching a ted video on consciousness and a video on machine learning (links below), a couple ideas formed.

I liked the last two possibilities from the ted video “How do you explain consciousness?” By defining consciousness as an awareness of the environment, any information system is aware.

Take something as simple as a sun flower which turns its gaze towards the sun. The flower is reacting to its environment. Because of the simplicity of the mechanics involved in plant awareness, we are tempted to say they have no consciousness. But this isn’t the case if we define consciousness as any information system. Plants have awareness of its environment, albeit a very low awareness.

Why then does our consciousness seem so different and mysterious? It clearly is not a straight forward mechanism.

The “not being straight forward” aspect of our consciousness is precisely why it seems so mysterious. Most of our information is far removed from the environment. Each neuron is receiving data from its neighbors, not from an outside source. So we have an echo chamber of data swashing back and forth between our ears. The inspiration for this data is from the environment, picked up through our eyes, our skin etc. But the original data has been translated, processed and is far removed from the source. And so the mechanism isn't straightforward which makes it seem mysterious.

Another reason human awareness seems mysterious is that we are able to reflect on its existence. Most of the data we receive we are able to utilize and re-purpose. When we see food we know we can eat it, or when we see danger we are frightened and motivated to fight or flee. But when we perceive our own awareness we simply do not know what to do with it. “What is this?” We ask. The fact is we are not supposed to do anything with it and that is why it seems odd. It exists so we can handle our environment. We cannot handle our consciousness with our consciousness. There’s nothing there to handle. There’s nothing to do with it, except perhaps understand it and replicate it in a machine. It exists to handle our environment. It does not exist to handle itself.

In summary:

1) consciousness/awareness is simply the ability to react to information from the environment.
2) Human awareness seems weird because it is not a straight forward mechanism like we see in plants or other simple devices.
3) Human awareness is weirder than non human awareness because we have the ability to reflect on it which is a meaningless exercise.