Here is the question, do you think its reasonable to think that consciousness also has a storage and that it too is passed on during reproduction? And thus be under the influence of evolution over millions of years too. #foodforthought — Dendu

Because Science knows so little about the actual mechanisms of Consciousness, any and all speculations are still on the table. Your speculation is a good one that could be proven true or false some day.

Greetings, I am new here.

So I have a hunch that many animals on earth are conscious to some degree, it got me pondering how different it would feel to be one of those animals. In comparison to being a human I imagine quite different. Often consciousness is considered to be complete and independent, where the brains of the individual beings differ and that is what creates differences in subjective experience?

I was drawing an analogy to computer protocols of sending and receiving data. When data is sent from one program to another, it usually adheres to a specific protocol, and the receiving program would use that protocol to deal with what it has received in a correct fashion. I was wondering if the brain and 'consciousness' also have a similar problem and I started to think how it would solve it. The human body's shape and form is stored within its dna. Now that same dna defines the brain too, so input data from the external world enters the brain of the experiencer and it must be uploaded to the 'consciousness'. This is where I believe a 'protocol' as described above is required for each individual creature. And that the sender program(the dna) must use similar protocol as the receiver program ( consciousness dna?). Here is the question, do you think its reasonable to think that consciousness also has a storage and that it too is passed on during reproduction? And thus be under the influence of evolution over millions of years too. #foodforthought

Welcome and thanks for starting this topic!

I think it's important to differentiate consciousness and brain a bit more. It's true that brains and consciousness are related but the relationship is more complicated than 1 to 1. This important to understand so the send-receive analogy's inapplicability to consciousness makes sense.

Consciousness is something like an emergent property that results from some specific set of coordinated neural activities. Not all parts of the brain are involved in generating consciousness. You can take out an entire cerebellum or even an entire half of the brain and still have conscious experiences. Even more relevant, it's the connections between brain elements that are most important in the generation of consciousness and (my guess) the sense of individuality (individuality means sense of one's particularity, awareness and perception as a distinct self). Most of these connections are not the result of hard wiring or genetic determination, they result from a constructive process, through learning and environmental interaction.

So while there is a general framework of organization encoded by genetic material -- how proteins are arranged to form cells, how cells should interact and arrange themselves to form neural tissue; there is a large, consciousness determining portion that is left 'undifferentiated' and further 'differentiates' or organizes via learning. This portion - which includes memories, self concept, etc. can't be passed on since it isn't encoded. What can pass on is some sort of general organization framework for neural elements and neurons which allows for basic perceptual abilities, learning, and self differentiation to take place.

Else things would get really weird because children would or should have the same 'consciousness' or 'parts of consciousness' as their parents; they should share a sense of first person consciousness or have some collective sense of consciousness but that doesn't happen.. it's particular and exclusive to a given individual.

Greetings, I am new here.

So I have a hunch that many animals on earth are conscious to some degree, it got me pondering how different it would feel to be one of those animals. In comparison to being a human I imagine quite different. Often consciousness is considered to be complete and independent, where the brains of the individual beings differ and that is what creates differences in subjective experience?

I was drawing an analogy to computer protocols of sending and receiving data. When data is sent from one program to another, it usually adheres to a specific protocol, and the receiving program would use that protocol to deal with what it has received in a correct fashion. I was wondering if the brain and 'consciousness' also have a similar problem and I started to think how it would solve it. The human body's shape and form is stored within its dna. Now that same dna defines the brain too, so input data from the external world enters the brain of the experiencer and it must be uploaded to the 'consciousness'. This is where I believe a 'protocol' as described above is required for each individual creature. And that the sender program(the dna) must use similar protocol as the receiver program ( consciousness dna?). Here is the question, do you think its reasonable to think that consciousness also has a storage and that it too is passed on during reproduction? And thus be under the influence of evolution over millions of years too. #foodforthought