On the Nature of Consciousness

On the Nature of Consciousness Radha Krishna.K rkavulru@gmail.com We Humans have conquered the concept of Communication long ago. It all started with the gestures and symbols. Inscription tools and rock graving were invented for conveying different ideas. Communication in the form of speech was invented nearly 5, 00,000 years ago. Symbols were invented a lot later. But every communication which has happened on this universe has one thing in common. All the communication was about the senses related to some or the other person. We will clearly understand this fact once we know what the senses are and what an Experience is. SENSES: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) Touch See Smell Hear Taste Experience Out of all these the fundamental sense is the 6th Sense, the Thinking sense. Thinking is a master control of all the other senses. If we observe the sensing system of humans scientifically, we see that there is a place from where the controls are sent and are processed. Then there is another system for carrying the signals of sensing, and another system for physically implementing the sensing signals. Here the sense organs like Skin, Eyes, Nose, Ears, and Tongue act as a hardware to do the work which is told by the central processing unit –The Brain. The Interface between the Hardware and the CPU is the nervous system which carries the signals. So all our senses are a bunch of electrical signals carrying some particular information from the hardware organs to cpu brain. These signals are processed in our brains using different methods for different signals. The Processing itself is another different kind of sensing. We know that some information is being processed. The verb KNOW is asso iated to differe t ki d of se se tha the other se ses. This is the th sense, the most superior of all and the master of the puppets. This 6th sense helps us to Experience things. This is what makes us conscious. If we do not have this sense all the other senses become futile. This is what makes us Conscious, and pushes us to know why it exists at all. The Processing in your brain makes you aware that there are some surroundings to your system, by sensing all the 5 signals. This is exactly what consciousness is. The field of making a Humanoid (human resembling robot) is an extremely interesting one. You get to understand the working of the life completely. Can we find some analogous quantity pertaining to consciousness in humanoid then? Yes absolutely. The Processor of the Humanoid is the place the commands are generated and sent to various parts of humanoid. They perform the actions and return the reply(if any) to the processor for further processing, but observe that we need a time stamp for all these processing. We must have track of the time in some or the other form for sending signals and receiving. For this purpose the processor of the humanoid contains a chip which measures time. This is the most essential part for making a dynamic and autonomous system. This processor senses the time in discrete samples. There is a chip which contains a crystal which will vibrate at a particular frequency when a current is passed through it. All the vibrations are counted and some specific number of vibrations constitutes a clock cycle. I said that these time samples are discrete e ause e a ’t easure ti e i ter al hi h is less than one time period of the crystal. Now once we have the clock cycle, the Humanoid system can be basically realised as follows. for(time=0:inf) { input=takeinput(hardware_components); ouput=computeoutput(input); } For people who couldn’t understand the above thing, see this. In the clock cycle range of (0,infinity) Take input from the hardware components Process the input and send some output. This process is what brings in the life to a Humanoid. This Loop is what makes him do the process for which he was designed. An effective Machine learning algorithm can teach him stuff that we do, with capable hardware and software he might just become us. So, now we must understand that the clear and compact analogy of the consciousness is the life loop. If we arrange visual hardware, the humanoid will be conscious of the visible surroundings. If we arrange hearing hardware, the humanoid will be conscious of the sound. Adding all the 5 senses will lead to a physical system which is conscious of its physical surroundings, but not mentally. Mental consciousness requires software rather than hardware. The algorithm for the consciousness might vary with person to person, because e a ’t o pare the o s ious ess at all. “o e a desig a y syste for the Hu a oid. EXAMPLE:- Incorporate a system which takes in a sentence as an input and tries to understand its meaning.The meaning can be derived with parts of speech where nouns corresponds to different objects, which can be taught to the Humanoid while its initiation. Verbs involve actions of the objects. Adjectives involve change in the object/ comparision etc. Once this system is built we can device some conditions for making the sentence meaning full. Then we must device another system whose input will be a sentence which is meaningless. This system tries to convert it into meaningful sentence. We just made a mini –thinking model. Teaching the Humanoid can be done through many Machine learning algorithms available. So now we can induce a thought into humanoid, why does it exist? Well, this is a very very basic model and might not immediately give correct answers. Our human brain contains millions of neurons whose work is to think all the time. All these neurons have thousands of interconnections, so our consciousness is a brilliant work of the Natural neural networks. It will take a million days to recover the algorithm followed by the brain. This is what consciousness is. The ability to realise and analyse surroundings. CON“CIOU“NE““ IS THE EXPERIENCE OF THE “URROUNDING QUESTION 1: Why are we conscious? ANS: There is no requirement that we must be conscious. We are Conscious because we were meant to be. It’s asi ally the e olutio hi h gifted us ith the gift of mental Consciousness. There are many other systems which are conscious. For example water vaporises at 373 K at standard pressure. This also can be considered as a consciousness. Consciousness in its basic form is experiencing surroundings. Any mass experiences the gravitational field of other mass. This is also a type of consciousness. So the question Why are we Conscious indirectly means why can Humans sense things mentally and the credits go to Evolution. Fore more questions – contact : rkavulru@gmail.com