What is consciousness?

In my previous article, I referred to mental constructs that I named "symbols" but I never explained what exactly I meant. I also referred to something that comprised of these entities, the "symbolic representation of the world humans have in their minds".

Well, a symbol is nothing more than what the word implies in its literal meaning: it's a formalistic representation of something. Since we are on the topic of the human mind, these symbols are thoughts. Obviously, the entities symbols represent may or may not have a tangible form. In practice, this formalism is not very strict. In other words, the outline is more important than the sharpness of the mental picture, especially when the definition of the symbol is done intuitively, using patterns and not with other symbols.

These symbols may have attributes and be subject to editing. They may even interact with other symbols. Thus, an object-oriented view of the world is created from these symbols. This symbolic representation of the world humans have in their minds I call consciousness.

Technically, the human brain works by storing data distributed to neurons. What data each neuron holds doesn't mean much on its own, but when the brain is fed with a stimulus, it is able to recreate relevant information by putting together data from a specific path on the neural network. Consciousness is like a virtual machine. It is based on the functions I described above, but implements a radically different way to represent the world. It uses relational memory and machine learning to create an object/symbol-oriented system.

Even if this is a good model to describe consciousness, it still needs to be noted that it is in no way absolute. Neither do all human functions go through consciousness nor is this network of symbols implemented as well as I imply. Where I'm getting to is that the fact that consciousness is not fully compatible with the human mental faculties nor does it cover them fully, means that there is a gap between it and the rest of the brain's functions.

I think this is the reason why there is this perceived distance between mind and body. In any case, the tools consciousness provides enable humans to build a variety of object-oriented systems, which may or may not have anything to do with the real world. For instance, mathematics is a logic system which is comprised from entities with relations, all which have nothing to do with senses. Also, it is really interesting to study the way in which consciousness is related and interacts with the "lower" level functions. Using mathematics as an example once more, one may notice that while a problem's solution is a sequence of logical steps, most of the time the solution is not calculated algorithmically-symbolically but intuitively.

To sum up, consciousness is defined as a system of mental symbols which is founded on the human brain but functions with a completely different logic. In computers, there are logic programming and object-oriented languages whose code ends up being compiled to machine language, which is always procedural. I think that a similar process takes place inside the human brain, which compiles the symbols of human consciousness into data which can be stored on biological neurons.

What is definition?

Greetings, dear readers. From this blog, I will try to give definitions to various terms. It is sound, then, I think, to begin by defining what a definition is. Now, we encounter one of the hardest problems with this procedure: circularity. Since in order to define a term, which is a symbol, we will have to use other symbols, don't we have to define these as well? Likewise, shouldn't we then define the symbols we used to define the symbols we used to define the original term? This goes on ad infinitum.

So, we are forced to either stop defining or to end up doing circles, without an end in sight. Things aren't exactly like that, however. Now, I am imprinting my thoughts on a language, which is a symbolic means of communication. I am imprinting them and then publishing the results, fully expecting that when someone reads up to this point, he will have at least a partial understanding of my original thoughts. Is it senseless to expect that much? The answer to this question seems to be an obvious "no" but why exactly is that?

Humans have the ability to identify symbols in a non-symbolic way: with patterns. Our brains, which are neural networks, can learn to identify a stimulus if it is repeated enough times. Consequently, when a person is reading these words here, his mind understands and composes them, up to a point, producing an imprint of the original idea that existed in my mind. A neural network can execute this learning procedure to identify something -a symbol in this case- but because of the way it works, it is not capable of doing so with absolute accuracy. Now, the way we will get around circularity as well as what is the point in defining things start to become apparent.

A definition is a symbolic description of a term. A good definition needs to be absolute and formalistic. Why? Because that's what is missing from the way the human brain interprets symbols. If the learning procedure of the human brain was capable of identifying and processing symbols with absolute accuracy, then the need for symbolic definitions would cease to exist.

All in all, definitions are part of the symbolic representation of the world humans have in their minds. The role of these symbols is to enhance the human mental power by covering for the built-in weaknesses of the inner workings of their brains. To be more specific, definitions are that system that connects all those symbols. For this reason, I believe that studying and extensively using definitions is beneficial to humans.