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Life is an enigma in itself.
We cannot yet define what it is that kindles the spark of life when a cluster of multiplying cell begin to do lively things neither do we know what happens when life bids goodbye forever!
We have been learning the differences between living and non living since our first biology classes at school, and this was a mundane question at that time, the answer to which was meant to be learnt by heart and reproduced at the examinations as best as we could. Now after all these years of learning and thinking, it comes back to us, still begging for an answer.
Another question that also befuddles us is what brings consciousness into living beings.
Consciousness itself is difficult to define.
However, we think that awareness of ourselves and of the outside world is the hallmark of consciousness.
There is a separate debate raging about whether animals other than human beings are also conscious. The famous French philosopher Rene Descartes said only human beings are conscious because he said animals cannot ‘think’. With the enormous strides in technology, we now even have computers that can do much of what the human brain can do, and much more. However, they cannot replace the human mind yet.
Consciousness, in essence, relates to the processing of information. This can be done by computers as well but that capacity to process information alone does not make them conscious.
It is postulated that Consciousness is an ‘emergence’ phenomenon, in that it is something more than the capacity to process information only. When an entity is something more than the sum of its parts, it is called an ‘emergence phenomena’. Just like waves are an emergence phenomenon because they are more than the molecules of water itself.
It is thought that it is the pattern of arrangement of the information that confers consciousness.
The question though remains :
‘What is it that gives the capacity to arrange information in a particular way to enable consciousness?’
Neuroscientists are trying to find out what unique feature of the human brain may be responsible for consciousness. Guilio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT), proposed in 2004 and updated in 2014 is one of the leading theories of consciousness at the moment.
Put simply it says that it is the vast power of integrating small differentiated bits of information that is unique to humans and that is what gives rise to what we call consciousness. Just as when we see a movie we see the living picture but do not see the many frames which it is made of, the non-conscious computer can only see the many frames but not the living picture.
Research has begun to pinpoint areas of the brain which may be responsible for this integration and the CLAUSTRUM, located deep inside the brain may be the area responsible for ‘combining disparate brain activity into a seamless package of thoughts, sensations and emotions.
It takes us a step closer to answering a problem that has confounded scientists and Philosophers for millenia-namely :
‘What is consciousness?’
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