Dear Forum,
Thank you for all the feedback. It looks like this is going to be a lively discussion.
dlorde asked, where did I do the research, and did I publish any of it? As I stated in my earlier post, "My knowledge on consciousness stems from many years of research and thinking about it." Actually, all my knowledge regardless of the 'field of study' stems from research and thinking, accomplished in my home office. When I am researching a particular subject, I collect as much data that is available, mostly via the internet these days, but in earlier years I would use libraries, pester university professors with question they often could not answer, and make many phone calls to authors, researchers, and any other sources that potentially had/have useful information. You could call my office a mini university connected to the world.
The collection of data is tricky business. More often than not, data is skewed in favor of prevailing views. Statistical analyses, such as polling or pharmaceutical trials, are excellent examples of routinely skewed data. You have to take data apart separating the facts from the rhetoric. Often, what is missing in the data is more significant than what is offered. The difference between superficial data and definitive data is an arguest task of separating the wheat from the chaff. Opinions are often presented as facts. A good researcher spends a great deal of time deciphering what the real facts are before building a conceptual view. Modern university research is often more concern with fulfilling grant expectations and maintaining reputations than it is getting to the truth of the matter. Another good example of skewed data coming out of universities is in cosmology; the Big Bang concept is portrayed as factual, but there are no actual facts to support it. Most physicists present the concept of the Big Bang as factual, omitting that they have no supportive facts to substantiate it. They use opinions and elusive equations as a supplement or simulation of facts. In academia, invested belief can often be more important than reality, such as religion demonstrates.
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As to your statement and subsequent questions, ((I have read the contents of the web site you linked to, and it seems to be a collection of speculative opinion pieces without reference to any current research or detailed knowledge or the fields involved - would I be right to think the site hasn't been updated for quite some time?)) No, it has not been updated for some time. I am in the middle of rewriting "Protospace" and "Dimensional Symmetry Field Formations," and when done, I will update my website. As to your assertion that my articles are "speculative opinions without detailed knowledge of the fields involved," yes, they are certainly speculative opinions and well outside the box of orthodox conceptions. As to my level of scientific knowledge, that remains to be seen...
My synopsis were only intended to start conversation, they were not intended as research papers. However, I thought the article concerning the neural physics of light and colors was self-proving. Could you be more specific as to what part you believe is naive or lacking in supportive data? I pointblank state that light and colors do not really exist, that they are only a neural illusion; if I have made a factual error, I would very much appreciate you pointing it out to me. My intension in offering that article was to enhance the discussion of consciousness, by demonstrate that our brains create the sensations of light and colors; and if our brains can do that with invisible electromagnetic energy - then it could aid in understands how consciousness constructs memory. I agree that these are not simple concepts; I am sure that you were never exposed to the idea that light and colors do not exist outside our minds, it takes time and thought to digest and comprehend new concepts. I would ask that you re-read, a bit more slowly for comprehension, the article on light and colors, and look for factual errors if they exist, and then post those comments for review. Making connotative suggestions is difficult for me to form a response upon.
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Back on topic "what is consciousness."
Let me define what I mean when I talk about consciousness. Consciousness is the internal awareness of self, the sensory awareness of the environment around us, and our intentional reaction towards environmental stimulus. Consciousness does not include autonomic activities, genes, or the elusive subconscious. Consciousness is just the physical act of awareness and reaction.
When we are born, we have no environmental memory. Even though we are born appearing awake, we are not aware of our self. It appears that we are conscious because we wiggle and cry, but we are not. Our wiggles and cries are autonomic responses caused by the shocking sensations of birth: canal pressure, pain, light, temperature, sounds, and being handled and flung about, activates reflex responses. While all this is occurring, our brain is recording memory, learning to differentiate light from dark, noise from silence, warm from cold, pain from pleasure, and so on. The synaptic grow of a newborn is a hundred times faster than an adult. When a newborn sees a "line" for the first time, it has no preexisting memory, meaning that it has no relationship to anything to give it definition; the experience is stored without connectivity to any definition. When a perpendicular line is experienced, now a relationship to another line can start to formulate a definition. As more lines are experienced in different lengths, widths and angles, the collective definition of lines expands. The same is true for every type of sensory stimulus the newborn experiences whether it is light, sound, or smell etc. In the first 72 hours, a newborn will make more synaptic connections than an adult will in a year.
Babies are born with autonomic memory (genetic instinct) to suckle, swallow, hold their breath, and cry. Everything else - they learn as they go through the experience of life. After a few weeks of sensory experiences, newborns have acquired enough experience to form limited associations and definitions to develop a rudimentary sense of consciousness. As their consciousness grows, they learn to interact with the environment, such as intentionally crying for attention. The more they learn to interact with the environment, the more conscious they become. The key to their consciousness is interactive memory. The more memory (experience) they have - the more interactive awareness/consciousness they develop.
Interactive memory is the essence of intelligence. The more knowledge (memory) you have in any particular subject, the more intelligent/conscious you become in that subject. No matter how you approach the concept of consciousness, every part of consciousness is dependent on memory to function. There is no thought you can have, or intentional action you can perform - that is not memory driven.
If you think about it, what part of your consciousness does not have memory causing it? Seeing a word requires visual memory, recognizing a word requires vocabulary memory, writing the word requires spelling memory, speaking the word requires verbal memory, and combining the word as part of a sentence requires syntax memory. There is nothing in your thoughts that is not memory based; every word, image, or association is absolutely constructed from interactive memory. You cannot write a word without thinking about it and using learned motor memory skills to write it, and you cannot write the word without using learned vocabulary, spelling, and syntax memory. The primary function of consciousness integrates massive amounts of different types of memory into an organized sense of real-time awareness and response. Is there any characteristic of consciousness that is not memory based?
Presently, cognitive scientists do not see memory as the sole cause of consciousness. They do see it as playing an important role, but not causing the phenomena. Ultimately, they will have no choice but to except that memory is the rudimentary cause of consciousness, because there is no identifiable part of consciousness that is not completely dependent on memory to function; it is what it is. Memory is easy to take for granted because you know what you know without effort. If you think about thinking, everything that you think is coming from memory. What would your thoughts be if they had no memory to work with? Memory is a definition of "what it is." Without memory, there is no definition, and without definition, consciousness cannot exist. Consciousness is an interactive sense of what is going on around you. It is a process of intergrading environmental stimulus with memory to form a reaction to the environment at large. No memory/definition, results in no reaction. A non-reactive state is a non-conscious state. Everything conscious about you operates from memory; your walking, talking, thinking, and reading are memory dependent functions.
If I go any further in this post, I will be writing an eBook.
I look forwards to your thoughts and feedback,
Sincerely, Mark Maloney
