How does consciousness work?

Question

How is it that billions of individual cells are able to create spontaneous thoughts out of no where (ex: think)? Able to be self aware? Able to act randomly and un-scripted unlike machines?

Answer 1

this answer has not been found, though the question might not be so clear. It's not totally clear that we have a solid definition of what consciousness is, in order that we find how it works.

More importantly here, brains don't act as machines. The difference between a brain and a computer is not that brains have lots of cells - they are fundamentally different. Cells are plastic (they're activity and function change over time), they interact in a continuous way (that means they're constantly working off of each other, and as such fall into the mathematical category of dynamic systems), they work in a hierarchical way (one cell is not equivalent to another cell, in the way that one computer bit is equivalent to another), and they use gradients (though much research over the past 50 years has focused on the binary responses of neurons, action potentials, modern work looks at continuously changing signals).

The truth is, how consciousness works is not a clear question and does not have a clear answer. But when one understands the math behind it (specifically that of dynamic systems) it really isn't a surprise that consciousness works.

Maybe, for more information:

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Cons...

or (a book from the leading living researcher in the field):

http://www.questforconsciousness.com/

Answer 2

Finally a great question in the biology section that deals with theoretical thought instead of people getting homework solutions.

The answer is unknown. My professor told me that this is the nobel prize answer.

So far there are two theories:

1.) the idea of holism. The individual brain sections (includes cortex, sub-cortex and brain stem) work together, which have multiple functions. Like the temporal lobe, deals with memory, emotions, visual analysis via the ventral stream, auditory information, and recognition.

As you can see from one lobe that it deals with a nice amount of functions. The same can be said about the parietal and frontal, not really the occipital lobe. But all of these regions work together to make your conscious life.

2.) The idea of individualism (from freud): deals with single region deals with single function. Like broca's and wernicke's areas.

As you can see any model of the brain could be correct and that of which makes the conscious self.

Maybe a good place to start to study this idea is hallucinations. These are random spontaneous messages sent out for no reason and that comes together to make a voice or visual scene.

Anyway, good luck.

Answer 3

Neurologist Alan B. Grindal discusses the essence, operation, and pathology of human consciousness.

Answer 4

it took a year of psychology for me figure out the answer to that question. I dont have a year to answer your question, so this is why google was invented.