CONSCIOUSNESS; A BRIEF VIEW?

In this vast sea of existence, we humans occupy a tiny place, yet equipped with the most complex tool know to men “Human Brain” illuminated by consciousness we are capable of pondering and probing the deepest mysteries of cosmos. From the dawn of civilizations men has always been fascinated by some of the most intriguing questions; like what is the meaning of all this? What is the origin of universe? Where do we come from? What is the purpose of life? etc. Some of these bemusing questions are still mystifying to us. As species we are curious about the world around us, we seek and chose to wonder about our existence. This curiosity is somehow encoded in our DNA. Now in the modern era of understanding and exploration we have solved many mysteries of universe, yet some still remain baffling and bemusing to us. If you were to summaries two great unsolved problems in all of science today, they would be; Fist from outer space that is the creation of the universe, what happened before Big-Bang? Why was there a bang?  What set off the big bang?  And the second big question would be from inner-space, What is the origin of intelligence and consciousness? As a student of knowledge, I am always fascinated by these questions. I am also puzzled by how exactly the mind works and scientists from different fields have been asking this question from decades. For example in physics in quantum theory, we have this cold question of observer and observe often referred as the “Measurement Problem” but observation requires consciousness and we have noble prize winners like Eugene Wigner, Steven Weinberg who differ on the fundamental question of consciousness. Whenever we talk of consciousness we get a lot of nice sounding words but almost no content. In science when we look at something we try to quantify it, rank it in terms of levels and give it a numerical scale. But when we look at consciousness we realize that there are around 20000 papers written on it by theologians, ministers, psychologists, etc.  Never in the history of science have so many devoted so much to produce so little. My way of approaching this issue is different. In my perspective there are three stages of consciousness:

 1) Consciousness that understands our position in space
2) Consciousness that understands our position with respect to other people like emotions, social hierarchy, politeness, etiquette, etc.
3) Predicting the future.

So I say there are three levels of consciousness.  Now I give a definition of consciousness;  Consciousness is the process of creating multiple feedback loops to create a model of yourself in space with regards to others and in time in order to satisfy certain goals. Alligators, for example, will be at stage one at level one they understand their position in space with regards to their pray.
The back of our brain is the most ancient part of our brain the reptilian brain. Then the central part of the brain develops in Adolescences that is the monkey brain, the brain of social hierarchy that is when children have to learn politeness when they have to learn etiquette in the social hierarchy and control their emotions. Then the last part of the brain to develop is the front part called prefrontal cortex that is the thinking brain that differentiates us from animals. Animals have level one consciousness they understand their position in space, Monkeys have level two consciousness they understand their position with regards to other monkeys but only humans have level three consciousness which is understanding tomorrow the future, we daydream, we scheme, we plan animals don’t do that. It is all instinctual for an animal. Now you might say “earlier you talked about quantifying or scale of consciousness but for that you should have a unit so what is your unit of consciousness? “ well my one unit of measuring consciousness is a thermostat, one feedback loop that allows you to monitor the temperature in the room because it senses its position with regards to temperature. A flower may have 10 or so because it has to monitor temperature, humidity, water, sunlight so on and so far and then by the time you hit a reptile may be 100 different kinds of feedback loops. By the time you go to a mouse may be 1000 of different feedback loops. Then we as humans we are only ones who can see tomorrow. So by this method, we can set up a scale and put consciousness of different beings on that scale and measure the consciousness of any being on the number of feedback loops. For example, a thermostat would have one unit, a flower would have maybe 10 units but think of a crocodile, Crocodile has multiple feedback loops because it has to understand its position in space and then it's pray to understand the behavior of pray. By the time you go to monkeys you see even larger no. of feedback loops, monkeys have to understand emotions, and they have to read the body languages, they have to understand social hierarchy, co-relations, who is your friend, enemy things like that, things that are very very complex are evolved in monkeys. But by the time you reach humans the total no. of feedback loops involved in predicting the future is Enormous. So by this method, we can set up a scale and we can put consciousness of anything on that scale.

©Malik Aaqib