Consciousness as a Brain Process

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Consciousness and brain processes
Argument that consciousness is not a brain process
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

The argument of whether consciousness is one of the processes of the brain has remained a scientific hypothesis to many scholars. This statement has been debated by many philosophers and psychologists who up to now have not come to a concrete conclusion of whether consciousness is a process of the brain or not. Some of them have argued that there are different events and especially the mental ones which are not able to be described by physical sciences (Place 2).

However, despite the long-term debate consciousness has been described as a special type of behavior that encompasses sampling or rather running-back-and forth. In other terms it is described as the tendency to behave or act in a certain way as a result of inner processes of the individual. This debate is what has led to the development of two approaches among the philosophers and psychologists.

One approach is the materialist approach which asserts that consciousness and the brain are one and the same thing, thus the brain is the process of the brain (Place 2). On the other hand is the dualism approach which believes that consciousness is far much more than just a brain process. This paper is therefore an argumentative discussion of the theory that consciousness is a brain process.

Consciousness and brain processes

The best way of dealing with this is to first understand what consciousness is as well as the variety of processes preformed by the brain (Edelman 1). According to biology, consciousness begins with the release of cerebrospinal fluid to other parts of the body.

Therefore the brain happens to be the centre of consciousness. Consciousness is very hard to define because it encompasses a wide range of activities. However, a simple definition of consciousness is that it is the state of being aware or a condition of being of all thought, feeling and will. This is to mean that someone who is conscious is aware of what is happening around them and whatever they are doing.

The opposite of being conscious is unconscious which could be represented by anesthesia, falling asleep or being in a coma (Edelman 1). A major feature of consciousness is its opacity such that you are not able to identify someone who is conscious but only they can. How it evolved and the amount or the level of consciousness are some of the ambiguity of consciousness.

According to neuroscientists Consciousness happens to be created by an external stimulus that triggers the reaction (Edelman 1). For example, when we taste something bitter or sweet, stung by an insect, walk in the park among other daily activities, a series of reactions in response to these activities or incidences are created. The main problem in defining consciousness is the apprehension of how the stimuli affect the brain to be transformed to experience.

The brain is an important organ in the body as it controls almost all neural and cognitive processes of the other body organs and parts. It is responsible for motion, thinking, motivation, attention, preconceptions and knowledge just to mention but a few .Despite the fact that the brain is the locus of almost all the body activities is not a justification that consciousness has to be brain oriented. Yes, the brain is the initiator of the process but there are other external and internal players of the process which are not entirely related to the brain.

Argument that consciousness is not a brain process

By rejecting the hypothesis that consciousness is a brain process would mean that I am dualist as mentioned above. I therefore argue that consciousness is a process independent from the brain (Francois 1). According to neorealist, consciousness has been defined as to be an entity part of the environment, thus separate from the brain. This is to mean that all the experiences and perceptions of consciousness exist outside the brain and independent of whether they are going to be perceived or not perceived.

To justify this fact, take the phenomenon of somebody asked to remember and describe how the grandfather who lives several miles from their home looks like. The image that comes in the mind is vague whereby some feature can be recalled while others are not. This happens because the brain does not have a process with these images such as the eye color, shape of legs among others (Francois 1).

This example justifies that consciousness is not a brain process. If it was a brain process, consciousness could not be having the ability of expressing the different features and perceptions it does such as the shape and colors of objects in the environment. In accordance to this argument, the fact that consciousness has the ability of depicting the environmental features and objects, it is therefore situated somewhere in the environment itself.

Different non-real states of the mind and body such as dreaming, hallucinations, mental images, illusions and memories are independent of whether they are to be experienced or not as they exist outside the brain (Francois 1).

This is because one can sleep a whole night without having a single dream and on other nights, the same person could end up having up to three different dreams. This therefore indicates that sleeping does not guarantee one to dream, but depends on the environmental effects such as watching movies, having heavy meals before sleeping, nagging issues among other factors.

Approaching the issue of consciousness in a scientific perspective, it would be argued that consciousness is far much more as a result of a physical organ such as the brain but rather as a result of evolution of many years of effects of the chemistry of organics. However, the contradicting question is what comes before the other, is the perception as a result of the brain-process or does the perception or experience lead to the brain process(Craighead and Nemeroff 355).

For example, looking at the case sun rays hitting the eyes to cause the perception of much light into the pupil, does the perception of light cause the brain to sense much light or is the perception as a result of a brain process which causes an individual to sense the sun rays.

The correlation between the brain process and consciousness is what leads us to making a concrete judgment on whether consciousness is a brain process. Take for instance, the act of being pricked by a needle on the foot, this phenomenological experience is nowhere related to the neural excitations in the brain. This experience is continuous and of the same kind while neural activities that come in hand with the pain are heterogeneous.

The scientists who have working hard to create human beings have not been able to create a real human being because of the unique characteristic of consciousness that has been difficult to install in their miniatures.

Intelligent computers and robots that have been developed have brains similar to the human brains but cannot act as real human beings because they lack the ability to be conscious. For example, once beaten a human being will respond and feel the pain but a robot will not react if beaten in the same way. This is therefore a justification that consciousness is not a brain process but an independent process.

The most interesting thing is the fact even after many years as human beings have not been able to describe ourselves in terms of our consciousness despite having innovated very complicated things.

The mystery of our consciousness is something that is difficult to explain as all the other existing things are deemed to be illusions. Even the neurologists who claim that consciousness is one of the processes of the brain do not explain in detail how the experience of consciousness results from the electrochemical activities of the brain (Zelazo et al, 203).

According to them, it is just a hypothesis that ought to be accepted or rejected once proved. For example, neurologists have failed to explicate what it is to sense something through taste, smell or sight (Weiskrantz and Davies 267). A famous philosopher named Tye argues that the mental states are representations that are symbolic and of the same kind as opposed to the neural phenomenal states that are heterogeneous.

He further continues to ascertain that consciousness is not as a result of neural action but rather a phenomenon in the representations. Tye believes that sensations that arise as a result of consciousness have modules in the body that cause their reactions. This further justifies the fact that consciousness is an independent process from the brain.

Conclusion

From the discussion above it can be clearly depicted the issue of understanding the consciousness of human beings has been a puzzle for many years. For a long time psychologists, philosophers, neurologists and all the famous scholars have been working hard to establish the puzzle behind consciousness (Weiskrantz and Davies 285). Most of them came up with their explanations and conclusions which have not been proved yet hence classified as assumptions or rather hypotheses.

Either side of the story requires justification whereby those who are for the fact that consciousness is one of the many processes of the brain have to justify how the brain works to achieve consciousness. Most of the people who are for the statement are referred to as the materialists who claim that there is a close relation between the brain and consciousness. On the other hand those who negate the statement are the dualists who argue that consciousness is a phenomenon more than the brain functions and processes.

Some have gone further to argue that the confusing thins in the statement is consciousness a brain process is the grammatical explanation of the article is which could be used as a definite article or as a composition article (Francois 1). However, there is no much justification on this argument, thus the debate is left in the hands of neurologists, psychologists and philosophers.

In my opinion, based on the above discussion as well as the research done up to this moment, I can conclude that consciousness is a mystery that has to be unveiled. It is therefore a process more than the brain can handle as evidenced by the fact that objects with brains similar to that of the human being have been developed but lack consciousness (Place 2).

Works Cited

Craighead, Edward and Nemeroff, Charles. The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science. John Wiley and Sons, 2002.

Edelman, Gerald. Naturalizing consciousness: A theoretical framework. 2003. Web.

Francois, Tonneau. Consciousness outside the Head. 2004. Web.

Place, U.T. Is Consciousness a Brain Process? 1954. Web.

Weiskrantz, Lawrence and Davies, Martin. Frontiers of Consciousness. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Zelazo, David. Moscovitch, Morris. And Thompson, Evan. The Cambridge handbook of Consciousness. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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