Consciousness is always awareness-after-the-fact

Waves: Mexican, Water and BrainOne of the interesting properties of waves (at least in some circumstances) is that they travel through a medium in a direction perpendicular to the direction of the movement of any component of the medium. A tsunami wave can travel through across the ocean at 500 miles per hour, but no one water molecule is actually travelling horizontally at that speed.Consider, if you will, a stadium full of people performing a Mexican wave. The wave may travel all the way around the stadium in seconds... has any one person run round the stadium? What, then, has "travelled around the stadium"?If a tsunami is started by a volcano dumping a landslide into the ocean and then at some point 8 minutes later (and 400 miles away), a village is destroyed, what has travelled over the ocean? Hint: the answer is not "water molecules".Now, it turns out that liquid water molecules are always doing a random dance, as a result of their temperature. It turns out that I may be able to find a single water molecule that is travelling downwards whilst most of its near neighbours are travelling upwards (to facilitate a wave passing through). If I zoom in and study the actions of a single water molecule, I discover precisely nothing about what's going on... this is because what's going on is an emmergent property that requires lots of water molecules.Consider this... I will zoom in on a water molecule somewhere in the universe. There, we've zoomed right in. Can you see it? Can you visualise that water molecule? It's made up of one Oxygen atom in the centre and two Hydrogen atoms attached to that Oxygen atom. Now, you may have as much information as you would like to gather about this molecule, about this complex system. What I want to know is: is this water molecule part of a gas (hot water vapour), a liquid or a solid (cold ice)?I hope that the gentle reader will understand my purpose: when we are studying macroscopic properties that are emergent, and dependent on multiple components, we must not "zoom in" too far, for fear of losing track of the really important story. You need lots of water molecules to produce a "wave"... likewise, you need lots of neurons to produce a "thought".I am suggesting, in a way, that consciousness does have some "magic" quality to it. Not, of course, in a non-materialistic way (that would be a mistake that as a rational atheist I would be ashamed to make)... I mean in the same way as a wave is "magic"... in the same way that there is something going on beyond the obvious movement of water molecules in a wave. The water is the medium and nothing about the wave involves material other than the medium... but the wave is an emergent property of the medium of the sea. Call this "magic", if you like. I call it that because I can't think of a better term to describe that ethereal quality of something which seems to be on a level one up from the mundane facts of the brutal mechanics of water molecules moving or neurons firing.Now, since I am soundly rejecting the idea of "perceiving tissue", what do I have left? I know all about neurons and I accept that their action is, in one sense, all that's going on. Like the water molecules in the sea, that's all you've got... but there can be some "magic" energetic or informational transference. I like the term "brainwave".So, how can I put any time distance between "perceiving" and "perceiving tissue"? Remember that I don't accept the idea of "perceiving tissue" but I'm still prepared to try to answer the spirit of the question. I must do so on a higher level than that of neurons firing, though.Let me ask you this by way of analogy: Does the wave move before the water molecules move, or do the water molecules move first, and the wave happens second? I think that I know the answer I'll get to that question: they are, in fact, simultaneous. Okay, I see your point... but... HOW or WHY did the wave start? When, exactly, did the wave start? AND, is consciousness something more than a single wave?I like the idea of a brain as an ocean. We can see gusts of wind conspiring to make small ripples that become waves; this is the sort of thing that I like to imagine going on when one is in a contemplative state. Then again, we can see a landslide causing a tsunami, and this I see like an alarm clock forcing consciousness from an otherwise peaceful ocean.BUT the analogy fails to understand the feedback loops that exist in a human brain. The human brain can respond to sensory input, but crucially it can also respond to fluctuations in its own state. This, I suppose, is the essence of thought and, ultimately, of self-consciousness (the awareness of ones own thoughts).Either way, we have an input causing a wave. Something you see could make you think... where did that stimulus start? Light hit the retina, signals travelled up the optic nerve, basic processing was performed, the pattern so created was offered to the rest of the brain to see if there was some memory or some pattern that fit enough to cause attention... if so, some parts of the brain would fire up (like waves rippling from a stone being dropped in a pool) and your brain would start processing information about something that your eyes had seen... perhaps the eyes would be told to "go back and have another look" in a saccade that lasts less than a fifth of a second, your eyes would return to gather more information and (like arm shooting away from fire as the very first signal gets to your brain) your self-awareness (consciousness) would not yet be aware, although the message "something interesting is going on" will be set in motion. The mistake that I think many people (including Con) make is thinking that somehow, the idea reaches some decision centre, some "perceiving tissue", some homunculus. This is false and drives us (unnecessarily) into the waiting arms of Cartesian Dualism.SO, that's talking about responding to external stimuli... what about internal stimuli? I might find that I have 5 minutes spare and sit down to check in on the progress of the day; "is there something important I've forgotten? What are my priorities?"... this process is one in which the brain will calm down and thus be increasingly sensitive to any parts of the brain that wish to "put their hand up" and say "listen to me: what about the cat food!?"... no immediate external influence brought the idea "catfood" unbidden to my head... sitting down for five minutes, I may not have literally set eyes on a cat (even subconsciously, although this may have happened, my point is it doesn't need to have). I suggest that there was a part of the brain that was essentially thinking about cats (on a very slow backburner) all the while... also, that this part of the brain has been trained to speak up in silence... inner silence can be as much of a trigger to thought as inner turmoil... so, silence in the brain causes some part that was as yet silent to fire up... was it a conscious choice to fire up that part of the brain and think of cats? No, how could it be!? How could your conscious mind "decide" to think about cats, had the notion of cats not occurred already?Thoughts come, unbidden, into our conscious awareness... a process of thought, of waves travelling through neurons, must be in place before we become consciously aware that we are thinking of cats.This is the key difference between my point of view and cons: Con sees thoughts as being neurons firing. I see thoughts as being like waves travelling through neurons.I cannot conceive of any conscious entity in any reality in which this rule could be broken: one becomes aware of one's own thoughts after those thoughts have their birth. Whilst a single neuron firing could represent the birth of a thought (or may just dwindle into insignificance), it does not represent that thought. The thought is more than a single neuron firing (there is no "perceiving tissue"); the thought is a wave... by the time you are conscious of that thought, it's existence (as a WAVE) is already a reality. When did the wave start? Were you conscious of that start? No way!It's very like asking "is the tide coming in or going out"... you cannot put your finger on it... or like looking at one column of water rising and falling to facilitate the passing of a wave, where you cannot tell from a linear column of water in which direction any waves must be passing through. Indeed, two waves could pass through one column in such a way that the column didn't move at all! Studying one part at too high a zoom resolution makes you miss the important action (like the water molecule we envisaged earlier that may be gas, liquid or solid).Consciousness is HARD to understand. But one should not make the mistake of thinking that it is the simple product of a firing neuron... neurons do fire, but we need to step up to the level of understanding the traversal of meaning through brain waves to understand consciousness, and we musn't focus on one neuron firing in order to see what's going on... in the same way, water molecules in the sea do rise and fall, but we need to step up to the level of understanding the traversal of energy through waves to understand tsunamis, and we musn't focus on one water molecule rising or falling to see what's going on.For now, I rest my case. I promise to return to specific rebuttals in a future round, but I wanted to spend some time making my position clearer first.