Did our brain evolve the ability to pick up on consciousness

Hello!

So, I was doing some reading about NDEs and just the brain and consciousness in general and it got me thinking..

Is it possible that consciousness was already present in the universe and our bodies evolved to 'receive' the frequency or signal of the consciousness?

We have evolved to pick up on all sorts of energy around us (light and sound) and process the information in our brains to create a whole experience so, isn't it reasonable to think that consciousness could be just another force in the universe which our brain evolved to pick up on. Then our brain is there to process the information and divvy it up into memories, thoughts and imagination.. basically, the mind.

I think this could explain all of the talk about esp and affecting DNA with thoughts and words. It is a physical thing much like electromagnetism or gravity.

I know that the brain being a receiver is not a new idea but I was trying to think of a practical, physical reason why and/or how our brain came to pick up on the signal.

Here are some links talking about sending and receiving powers of the brain.

www.spiritofra.com...
paranormalandlifeafterdeath.blogspot.com...

I know these aren't the most reputable sites but I don't expect to find much concrete evidence for this stuff.

I have been wondering about this for a while. However, I am wondering if its actually the reverse of your view (no offence intended) I am thinking on the lines that mankind possibly before we started the process of farming lived totally attuned to the planet by a symbiotic relationship. These people were treating the planet as a part of them, hence the nature of their rituals. This was a voluntary and conscious relationship.

They also involved the 'underworld' of death within this both by celebrating the annual right of passage of nature and reflected also was man's own journey through life. Not only were they conscious of the planet within the cosmos as well but they were also conscious of the shamanic journey and the spirituality that was involved within this experience.

What is interesting about this is that every thing possible has been done to redirect man's attention away from this kind of conscienceness. The planet became personalised and went from being a Mother to a lone single domineering God. People were persecuted if they did not toe the religious line in the West. Any suggestion against this dogma met with burning etc. Any suggestion of people trying to reach another level of consciousness often ends with the individuals being ridiculed and mocked. Where I see an unreasonable level of official mockery I tend to get interested because there is usually a concerted campaign going on, which whether it sets out to or not, stops the seeking of a higher state of consciousness.

Today with people latched onto the digital age and its virtual reality components which run many people's lives, if I am right, we can safely say that human consciousness is becoming so far removed from the original relationship mankind enjoyed attuned with the earth that our 'consciouness may never, unless catastrophe sends us back to the cave, be regained.

Imagine if the truth was that human awareness (consciousness) was simply the most effective survival tool that the brain (to this date) has been able to develop (for corporeal things living on this planet, of course), and that some of us are simply "putting a smile on the dog" of consciousness and mistakenly elevating it to deific levels and/or granting primordial status to it. Yes, that probably seems crazy to even suggest such a thing, but if you really examine what consciousness is - human corporeal consciousness, that is, since that's the consciousness that the corporeal (alive) human being experiences, regardless of the claim - you can't help realizing how overtly utilitarian it actually is, and how applicable it is when used to gain an advantage in the business of raw survival.

In essence, consciousness is the capacity to place oneself accurately within an ongoing event trajectory in real-time, which is akin to having a real-time, on-scene monitoring system as one directs a military campaign from the General's Tent. The advantages are obvious, and the disadvantage of being without such a system is even more obvious. For that corporeal creature that has no capacity to elevate itself from the battlefield, while deep into the thick of hand-to-hand combat, this capacity to see the theater of combat from both perspectives - as well as the strategic perspective that allows it to adjust ts ebb and flow of effort in service of a longer and more profound victory (the capacity to accurately "see" itself within a given event trajectory in real time) - is something it can't even imagine to exist; let alone mimic. When you put consciousness in that arena, it's easier to see it for what it was when it initially emerged; a survival development of a brain that had simply achieved the level of data configuration sophistication allowing that capacity to exist in service of the corporeal whole the brain exists to serve.

Once that tipping point was crossed, and the brain was capable of simple event trajectory placement, the difference between that and pondering the future, the past, the significance of the present within the ongoing causal chain of events, and where (or how) the brain and its own awareness fits (or doesn't fit) within that ongoing event chain, has been a difference in degree of sophistication. The real transcendence was the shift from a default "now" to a more robust and dynamic "when?" for the brain and its survival efforts.

This doesn't take the magic out of life, but it might help explain a lot that doesn't add up about it.

reply to post by xxblackoctoberxx

A star for the content and presentation of your post.

Going by the analogy used – regarding consciousness as an evolved ‘sense’ similar to our physical ones, which detect certain changes in the local energy environment – it would seem that you regard consciousness as some kind of field analogous to an energy field. Of course, it could not be actual, physical energy, or we would be – ahem – conscious of it. What kind of a field would it be, then, and what do you think might be generating it?

Also, what happens when this field encounters an event? Are such occurrence what our brains detect?

Is that how we ‘become conscious’ of something? By detecting the changes it causes in the field?

If the field is physical, why have we found no physical detectors in our brains or bodies?

If it is metaphysical, do our brains have metaphysical detectors? How could we ever know?

In the end, the viability of your hypothesis depends on constructing an appropriate (and falsifiable) definition of consciousness. This, of course, is famously difficult; it is in fact called the Hard Problem. It seems to me that you are likely to suffer the same misfortune theorists about consciousness always encounter: the thing they seek is wonderfully elusive, and every attempt to corral it within a definition ends up with a perfectly-designed corral enclosing an area immediately adjacent to, but not actually including, consciousness. Still, full marks for trying; we might actually get a decent discussion out of the idea, in between the posts by mystics and dogmatists who already have all the answers.

Originally posted by Astyanax
This, of course, is famously difficult; it is in fact called the Hard Problem. It seems to me that you are likely to suffer the same misfortune theorists about consciousness always encounter: the thing they seek is wonderfully elusive, and every attempt to corral it within a definition ends up with a perfectly-designed corral enclosing an area immediately adjacent to, but not actually including, consciousness. Still, full marks for trying; we might actually get a decent discussion out of the idea, in between the posts by mystics and dogmatists who already have all the answers.

So, given that this "hard problem" is so roundly viewed as being as hard as it's obviously viewed, isn't it possible that people - especially consciousness theorists themselves - have been psychologically affected by the central part consciousness plays in their own lives, promoting it to an inaccurately exalted status, in the same way that religionists and spiritualists have traditionally done? Even secular attempts to define consciousness have generally presented consciousness as being esoteric and beyond the reaches of mundane characterizations. And yet, as I quickly overviewed, there is a reasonable premise that suggests that consciousness is nothing more than the human brain's capacity to place itself within an evolving "now", which involves the ability to realize that breakthrough sense of "self present" as delineated from "self past" and "self future", and with that capacity, the ability to observe "self past" even to the degree of "self present" passing and/or just having passed into "self past" - which is another way of saying "self observed". In short, I think we can agree that the difference between present and past is virtually impossible to quantify, and since our experience of conscious awareness has been proven to be at least a few seconds behind our brains' generation of conscious response, couldn't it be that what we experience as "self present" is actually "self past"? Doesn't this fully explain the "hard problem" of the observed self?

These are all amazingly awesome responses.

First off, to NorEaster,

So, even if our bodies did not evolve to be able to sense consciousness, it can at least be inferred that our awareness of the consciousness was attained through evolution as some sort of benefit to us. It makes complete sense as it is advantageous to be able to think of future events and what others may be thinking.

When I was originally thinking about this I was trying to think of how NDE's where the individual can recount seeing the hospital room from above and hear the conversations and then float out through the roof, could be explained. Which lead to the idea of the consciousness being a force or field as Astyanax put it, which i like much better.

The brain basically would be the processor and memory unit for this consciousness which stores our memories, which are the basis for just about every action we make. Every move we make with our voluntary nervous system is based off of memories of previous, similar situations. Add this to our basic senses and throw in a dash of consciousness and you have a fully functioning human with self awareness.

No brain = Free consciousness, and if you were to put this consciousness into a body, i.e. birth, there would be no memories as those would have been contained within the physical brain. I think when you are just pure consciousness there is only the now and time does not exist.

It's not so much 'self' awareness as it is the conscious you being aware of the machine it is in. Remove the brain and you have a free floating field of conscious energy with the potential to do literally anything.

As for it being a physical thing I am still unsure. As was said, we have found no physical sensors for consciousness in the brain but, they may exist or work in a way that we are yet to understand.

Basically, the way I am seeing it is, consciousness exists whether the human body is there to filter it through the brain and make an experience out of it or not. Just the same as when you die, your brain no longer senses light or sound, but they still exist.

On a side note, Lynda101, I agree about the apparent separation of human from nature. I don't think it was intentional, it was just the way it played out as humans evolved. The need to believe in something bigger was created by the fear of the infinite. If you tell people that when they die they simply become part of nature, it sounds much less satisfying than going to a heaven with pearly gates and all of your loved ones. I believe it is simply because of fear that we have lost our way and our connection to the universe and mother nature.