Consciousness Documentary

The following is a transcript from the documentary "What is Consciousness? What is Its Purpose?" found here.

What is Consciousness?

In neuroscience and psychology, the concepts of love and fear are more than just emotions. They relate to how the deepest unconscious regions of our brain operate. How the reptilian brain only craves what it lacks and is unaware of what it takes for granted. And how what we believe we lack ends up defining what we love.

By gaining insight into the realms of our unconscious mind and the reality that it emerges from, we are presented with a choice. "The most important decision that we make, is whether we believe we live in a friendly or a hostile universe."

While this quote from Albert Einstein sounds relatable, one can wonder why a man of his profound intelligence would specifically claim this is the most important decision we make.

This documentary answers that question.

Tens of thousands of papers are published each year in the field of neuroscience alone. Our knowledge and understanding of the inner workings of our mind and of our universe is expanding at an astounding rate.

If you seek rational answers to fundamental questions about consciousness, this documentary could change your life.

The human brain is by far the most sophisticated phenomenon that we have been able to observe to date in our universe. And after decades of neuroscience, we still have endless questions about this mysterious structure that holds as many neurons as there may be stars in our galaxy. Yet we do not have to veer far into hypotheticals or resort to superstition to answer some of our deepest existential questions.

One of the most baffling observations has been that some experiments seem to reveal two distinct personalities or streams of consciousness present in our brain, one in each hemisphere. And only one of these two can talk. Under the right conditions, neurologists have even been able to ask questions to each hemisphere separately. Resulting in cases where a person would say he is not religious when asked in conversation. While when this person sees the question in writing, the mute hemisphere responds by writing down its own answer. In some cases disagreeing with the other hemisphere.

Many more experiments that reveal similar results indicate that this is more than a random oddity or hallucination, but instead some legitimate form of split or double consciousness taking place in our brain. Fortunately, this strange disagreement between both hemispheres only occurs when the connection between them is broken. As long as they are connected they try to cooperate and create the perception that we are a singular individual.

So where exactly are we located inside the brain?

If science can pinpoint those parts of the brain that are largely responsible for language, mathematics, specific primal emotions and so forth, what does it say about the parts of the brain that make up the core of what we are? Not only have scientists, despite their best efforts, not been able to locate such a region in the brain. But all evidence even points towards this core not existing.

It has become more and more clear that in this miniature universe of the brain, roughly a 100 billion neurons all act by themselves and communicate with each other as if the brain is an astonishingly complex vehicle without a driver. A computer without a CPU.

In our quest for finding some sort of core of what we are, we could look even deeper and zoom in on the basic building blocks of what our brain is made of. But if we peer into the individual molecules that make up our neurons, our findings become even more counter-intuitive. Not only will we not find any mysterious trace of a soul, we will also not bump into any kind of marble-like structures that high school physics taught us are the tiny particles that everything else is made of.

You might have heard that roughly 99.9% of all solid matter is nothing but empty space. This is true. But zooming into the .1% that should consist of the stuff everything is made of only results in showing us a different kind of emptiness. The electrons, the quarks, all the fundamental particles are not solid objects. Thinking of them as somehow tiny spheres is a convenient simplification, but this does not represent the fascinating reality of this strange quantum void.

The only things that exist here are waves. Waves that behave similar to vibrations of sound or ripples in water. But rather than oscillations of matter, the peaks and valleys of these quantum waves are not made of anything tangible, they are waves of probabilities. Their peaks reveal the areas where there is a high probability of detecting the energy of what we may call an electron. Their valleys indicate that the chances there are much lower.

As bizarre as it may sound that all the building blocks of our universe seem to behave according to chance rather than being intuitively predictable, this is not just a theory. It is a simple fact that can be tested and observed with nothing more than a laser pointer and a comb to replicate part of the famous double-slit experiment. The counter-intuitiveness of this discovery has been the root of popular misinterpretations and metaphysical confusion where it's been described as particles being aware and knowing that they're being observed or the universe being influenced by the power of our thinking.

The truth is at least equally fascinating. The real principle at work is that if we can not know where a particle is, it exists only as a probability wave that tells us where the particle is more or less likely to be found. And only when we take action to measure where the particle could be, the wave will suddenly cease to exist and the particle reveals itself. The particle has no defined location until we make the measurement. This is why we say that light, for example, is both a wave and a particle.

This quantum weirdness does not just apply to light, it applies to all the particles that everything is made of. It also applies to molecules. If we fire super-tiny rocks instead of photons, they will behave like waves when we're not measuring them.

We intuitively believe our universe consists of solid stuff. But in reality, all of it, from the neurons in our brain to the galaxy we are a part of, is the result of probability waves and particles that pop in and out of existence.

All this weirdness led Einstein to famously say: "Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?". But no matter how weird it is, quantum theory and all experimental evidence reveals that our universe is inherently probabilistic and things within it can not be predicted with 100% certainty.

This doesn't mean that science cannot make accurate estimates as to what is more or less likely. The mathematics and statistics of quantum physics reveal that the seemingly random oscillations that make up our reality are still profoundly consistent patterns. Many of our modern technologies, such as solar panels or microprocessors, would not have been possible if we had not deciphered much of the intricate and unique behavior of quantum mechanics.

But if no specific region of the brain, nor the neurons, nor the building blocks that our neurons consist of can account for the phenomenon of our consciousness, what is the current scientific assessment as to what brings it about?

Over the years, there have been many theories, some of which have since been debunked with modern understandings of neuroscience, others are considered too far-fetched and exotic to be of merit without hard evidence. But there is one general school of thought that most scientists consider to be likely. An idea that is not only logically sound and fits our observations, but that can transform how we think about life. Even though its implications are thus far rarely discussed and explored.

Why Are We Conscious?

This documentary marks the first time all these logical conclusions are brought together to bring into focus what science can really tell us about some of our deepest existential questions. If we look at evolution, it's not so hard to roughly imagine how life started here on earth. 4 billion years ago, a unique series of coincidental probabilities occurred that led to the existence of very simple biological cells that could replicate. These were the first forms of life. And as they replicated, subtle differences between the old cells and the new cells would crop up, mutations would take place. We see it in the genetics of offspring with every lifeform known to us and we can trace it back in the remains and fossils not just of animals and plants, but sometimes even of bacteria of as far as 3.5 billion years ago. Microscopic crystals and fossils provide us a glimpse of life on earth before the first plants or even algae emerged.

Over billions of years of replicating and mutating, these biological mechanisms found more and more sophisticated ways of growing and spreading. The tiniest initial differences such as offspring with a coincidental protein molecule that is sensitive to sunlight would end up with eventually more beneficial mutations over many generations.

4 billion years is a very long time. Enough for extremely sophisticated results such as the human eye to emerge from origins as simplistic as a single light-sensitive protein molecule. As a result, even our most advanced technologies are often still no match for some of the mechanisms that have taken evolution aeons to engineer. But when we begin to contemplate early animal life, and observe its beautiful legacy all around us, wherein we constantly recognize parts of our primal selves, it is tempting to wonder why in the process of evolution there emerged this phenomenon of consciousness that has bewildered and confounded philosophers and mystics since the dawn of humanity's tribal structures.

To approach this scientifically, we can not allow consciousness' elusive nature to be a reason for giving up on trying to understand it. Because if consciousness is not a magical exception and is rather a direct or indirect consequence of evolution, just like every other the scientific conclusion is straight-forward: just like every other feature of the human brain and body, experience or consciousness is a tool that evolution has engineered for us through billions of years of mutations. Conscious forms of life showed a richer capacity for learning and course-correcting.

Evolution favored this development and nurtured it to a point where we became sentient, self-aware and capable of interpreting our own evolutionary drives and our purpose in ways that can even go against our own survival if we so choose.

"You" Do Not Exist

So how would science then describe the mechanism of consciousness? Surprisingly, most scientists do theorize that consciousness is not simply inside our brain.

Consciousness is generally considered to be an emergent phenomenon of the brain. Meaning that consciousness happens when enough activity takes place in the brain in a way in a way that can be compared to how music emerges from a record player. The music is not anywhere to be found inside the record player. Intuitively, we tend to say the music is on the record, but even there we really only find a circular vinyl disk with peculiar grooves, it does not produce any sound or music at all. It is only when the mechanisms of the record player are activated in a certain way that that all its activity produces an emergent phenomenon that we call music.

Consciousness is somewhat similar. We can't physically locate it at one point or in one area. And if we zoom in on the grey matter of our brain, we find as much evidence for consciousness as we find tiny marbles inside a molecule. None at all. Yet when billions of neurons fire and communicate with each other, the combination of this enormous amount of activity creates the phenomenon of consciousness.

But it would seem that this is far from a complete summary of what brings it about. Because there is an inevitable consequence that complicates things to an incredible degree. The more this emergent feature evolved in ways that allow it to course-correct and significantly reprogram the brain, the more it became a feedback loop of incredible complexity. When we point a webcam at a screen that displays its input we see a seemingly infinite pattern, the brain does something similar with the activity from its billions of firing neurons, resulting in an unimaginable depth of iterations and permutations that gives rise to what we call consciousness or experience.