I don't have the qualifications or sufficient knowledge to get into this to any depth but some suggestions as to what might be relevant regarding human consciousness, and rather obviously more to do with function and natural philosophy. I find the argument that consciousness exists in everything and has always existed rather lame, and tend to see it as more just another development through evolution even if it is one of the more difficult issues to unravel.
1. This article doesn't necessarily explain consciousness explicitly but does seem to coincide with my thoughts about the evolution of consciousness, and probably gets closer to the issue, that is, that evolution played a major role in its development and involved complexity issues:
A New Theory Explains How Consciousness Evolved
Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has been the grand unifying theory of biology. Yet one of our most important biological traits, consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution. Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it? The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions. The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence. If the theory is right — and that has yet to be determined — then consciousness evolved gradually over the past half billion years and is present in a range of vertebrate species.
And from Attention schema theory - Wikipedia:
The AST can be summarized in three broad points. First, the brain is an information-processing device. Second, it has a capacity to focus its processing resources more on some signals than on others. That focus may be on select, incoming sensory signals, or it may be on internal information such as specific, recalled memories. That ability to process select information in a focused manner is sometimes called attention. Third, the brain not only uses the process of attention, but it also builds a set of information, or a representation, descriptive of attention. That representation, or internal model, is the attention schema.
2. So perhaps consciousness developed from the inability to monitor the myriad activity involved in the actual workings of the brain/nervous system, and evolved so as to monitor and make sense of the most important or crucial aspects - priorities probably being (for humans) our sensory inputs, how we feel as to our physical and mental well-being, making sense of our experiences, or keeping track of our motivations and drives, etc. We know that much of our consciousness is actually unconscious (or subconscious), since we know that much is going on in our heads (and our bodies) besides our conscious thinking and feeling, but having a limited ability to monitor it all perhaps results in what is our awareness of consciousness. So perhaps consciousness is just the limited processes we experience - sensory input, memories (retrieving and making of such), processing of such (thinking or feeling), together with all the rest of the activities that make up what we experience as consciousness, and much else going on is only available when it becomes more a priority or when we use methods to observe such (as when examining the subconscious).
3. Consciousness might then be just a construct (map or model) of the priority experiences that is relatively easy for the mind to grasp rather than all the various events contributing to such - in essence then, something like AST. And just as language tends towards a construct of reality, so then consciousness itself might similarly be a construct simply to cope with the necessities of dealing with vast amounts of information. I think this article is useful at this stage:
Most Popular Theories of Consciousness Are Worse Than Wrong
4. Our reality is really a model, construct, or map of such in our minds - our world view, our beliefs, how we perceive ourselves and/or others, etc. - and one reason for seeing consciousness similarly is that it is quite difficult to change any particular perspective (gained over time) since we tend to crave stability and are usually averse to changes that might upset what we might see as our being or essence. This is apart from the resistance we often feel towards changing beliefs anyway. Hence the difficulties in overcoming many personality or mental health issues often seen - change perhaps seen more as threat (to existence of the person, which is mostly a construct too). And one can see why such is so when our construct of our self has taken so long to form and might require much work to undo what has already been built.
5. Also (if any have experienced this they might recognise such) it can be quite frightening when one's apparent perceptions are shaken by new evidence (or experiences) that tends to indicate our beliefs do not correspond so much with reality (especially concerning ourselves perhaps). This often feels like a jolt to one's being, integrity, or sense of self. This perhaps explains why so many having religious beliefs are not so amenable to accepting something which goes against their belief system - and perhaps is so for those without such beliefs too. Many go through life seeing death and destruction all around, vicious criminals at every turn, injustice as the norm, etc., whilst others will see the opposite and these factors very much as not being the norm. Many apparently will distrust science simply because much conflicts with their religiously held beliefs. Whichever view is held, it can be difficult to persuade any to change their beliefs (or system of beliefs) since often they will be selective as to what information they process in order to maintain the status quo.
6. I've never taken any illegal recreational drugs so can't comment much on what they might do to one's brain but the evidence suggests that some can cause harm, with this possibly coming from damage to any perceptions of oneself - or the shaking of the tree that is our model of reality. But what they might do to our consciousness I'll leave to others - given that the claim often made is that many do expand one's consciousness.
7. The nature of Flow experiences might be another area of interest here, where perhaps the mind closes down our conscious awareness to leave more resources for the task at hand, and where any consciousness might interfere with such. In such experiences, there is little awareness of what one is doing apart from knowing that it is usually the best that one could do in the circumstances - which I did experience once whilst rock-climbing, where hands and feet seemed to automatically be positioned without the slightest hesitation or thought given to such.
8. Another piece of evidence for our consciousness being limited is how we can often solve problems whilst asleep. I have experienced this too - mine being a technical problem whilst at college, so presumably enough of my brain was working on it to solve it during sleep. And it would make sense here in that whilst asleep perhaps more resources were available. I certainly couldn't solve it whilst awake even after spending several hours at it, and neither could the rest of the class apparently since I was the only one who did actually solve the problem.
9. The issues that have occurred with free will - coming from measuring brain signaling before action taking - might not be such an issue if consciousness involved a lot more processing to bring some things to awareness, and hence where there would always be a delay between some events. And it wouldn't be remarkable presumably to find that consciousness does involve some resources and time, given that our instinctive reactions often are faster than anything we do by conscious volition.
10. And from all the previous, it seems likely that in fact there are different levels of consciousness (as per some psychological models or as described by various religious beliefs) which simply came from evolution, and where perhaps the notion of a viewer and the viewed might apply but where such instead comes from interactions between the layers - whatever these might be. Such might give the impression of 'our self' as viewer to what passes through our consciousness (subjective theatre of experience), when it might be just the highest level giving such an impression.
11. To arrive at any theory of consciousness surely it is best to follow the trail back through evolution to see how it might have evolved in our more primitive ancestors (even if very difficult to do), and where limitations, as suggested, possibly occurred simply because of the nature of complexity and what is possible biologically and neurologically. So consciousness became such as exists for us humans now because our brains became so complex, with language probably adding the last and even more complex layer of consciousness.
12. In much earlier times perhaps (and presumably) some creatures would be conscious of many more processes within their brains and nervous systems. And this process of evolution - where some gains were made (capacity) but with some sacrifices (monitoring of such pruned) - seems eminently reasonable, to me at least. And of course this then suggests that non-human animals will likely have some form of consciousness, not as evolved as humans and differing in degree, which again accords with reality. It would be difficult to explain away much of animal behaviour if we were to assume that they were not conscious (or minimally so), especially those quite close to us in evolutionary terms, but what level of consciousness do they actually possess?
1. This article doesn't necessarily explain consciousness explicitly but does seem to coincide with my thoughts about the evolution of consciousness, and probably gets closer to the issue, that is, that evolution played a major role in its development and involved complexity issues:
A New Theory Explains How Consciousness Evolved
Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has been the grand unifying theory of biology. Yet one of our most important biological traits, consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution. Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it? The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions. The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence. If the theory is right — and that has yet to be determined — then consciousness evolved gradually over the past half billion years and is present in a range of vertebrate species.
And from Attention schema theory - Wikipedia:
The AST can be summarized in three broad points. First, the brain is an information-processing device. Second, it has a capacity to focus its processing resources more on some signals than on others. That focus may be on select, incoming sensory signals, or it may be on internal information such as specific, recalled memories. That ability to process select information in a focused manner is sometimes called attention. Third, the brain not only uses the process of attention, but it also builds a set of information, or a representation, descriptive of attention. That representation, or internal model, is the attention schema.
2. So perhaps consciousness developed from the inability to monitor the myriad activity involved in the actual workings of the brain/nervous system, and evolved so as to monitor and make sense of the most important or crucial aspects - priorities probably being (for humans) our sensory inputs, how we feel as to our physical and mental well-being, making sense of our experiences, or keeping track of our motivations and drives, etc. We know that much of our consciousness is actually unconscious (or subconscious), since we know that much is going on in our heads (and our bodies) besides our conscious thinking and feeling, but having a limited ability to monitor it all perhaps results in what is our awareness of consciousness. So perhaps consciousness is just the limited processes we experience - sensory input, memories (retrieving and making of such), processing of such (thinking or feeling), together with all the rest of the activities that make up what we experience as consciousness, and much else going on is only available when it becomes more a priority or when we use methods to observe such (as when examining the subconscious).
3. Consciousness might then be just a construct (map or model) of the priority experiences that is relatively easy for the mind to grasp rather than all the various events contributing to such - in essence then, something like AST. And just as language tends towards a construct of reality, so then consciousness itself might similarly be a construct simply to cope with the necessities of dealing with vast amounts of information. I think this article is useful at this stage:
Most Popular Theories of Consciousness Are Worse Than Wrong
4. Our reality is really a model, construct, or map of such in our minds - our world view, our beliefs, how we perceive ourselves and/or others, etc. - and one reason for seeing consciousness similarly is that it is quite difficult to change any particular perspective (gained over time) since we tend to crave stability and are usually averse to changes that might upset what we might see as our being or essence. This is apart from the resistance we often feel towards changing beliefs anyway. Hence the difficulties in overcoming many personality or mental health issues often seen - change perhaps seen more as threat (to existence of the person, which is mostly a construct too). And one can see why such is so when our construct of our self has taken so long to form and might require much work to undo what has already been built.
5. Also (if any have experienced this they might recognise such) it can be quite frightening when one's apparent perceptions are shaken by new evidence (or experiences) that tends to indicate our beliefs do not correspond so much with reality (especially concerning ourselves perhaps). This often feels like a jolt to one's being, integrity, or sense of self. This perhaps explains why so many having religious beliefs are not so amenable to accepting something which goes against their belief system - and perhaps is so for those without such beliefs too. Many go through life seeing death and destruction all around, vicious criminals at every turn, injustice as the norm, etc., whilst others will see the opposite and these factors very much as not being the norm. Many apparently will distrust science simply because much conflicts with their religiously held beliefs. Whichever view is held, it can be difficult to persuade any to change their beliefs (or system of beliefs) since often they will be selective as to what information they process in order to maintain the status quo.
6. I've never taken any illegal recreational drugs so can't comment much on what they might do to one's brain but the evidence suggests that some can cause harm, with this possibly coming from damage to any perceptions of oneself - or the shaking of the tree that is our model of reality. But what they might do to our consciousness I'll leave to others - given that the claim often made is that many do expand one's consciousness.
7. The nature of Flow experiences might be another area of interest here, where perhaps the mind closes down our conscious awareness to leave more resources for the task at hand, and where any consciousness might interfere with such. In such experiences, there is little awareness of what one is doing apart from knowing that it is usually the best that one could do in the circumstances - which I did experience once whilst rock-climbing, where hands and feet seemed to automatically be positioned without the slightest hesitation or thought given to such.
8. Another piece of evidence for our consciousness being limited is how we can often solve problems whilst asleep. I have experienced this too - mine being a technical problem whilst at college, so presumably enough of my brain was working on it to solve it during sleep. And it would make sense here in that whilst asleep perhaps more resources were available. I certainly couldn't solve it whilst awake even after spending several hours at it, and neither could the rest of the class apparently since I was the only one who did actually solve the problem.
9. The issues that have occurred with free will - coming from measuring brain signaling before action taking - might not be such an issue if consciousness involved a lot more processing to bring some things to awareness, and hence where there would always be a delay between some events. And it wouldn't be remarkable presumably to find that consciousness does involve some resources and time, given that our instinctive reactions often are faster than anything we do by conscious volition.
10. And from all the previous, it seems likely that in fact there are different levels of consciousness (as per some psychological models or as described by various religious beliefs) which simply came from evolution, and where perhaps the notion of a viewer and the viewed might apply but where such instead comes from interactions between the layers - whatever these might be. Such might give the impression of 'our self' as viewer to what passes through our consciousness (subjective theatre of experience), when it might be just the highest level giving such an impression.
11. To arrive at any theory of consciousness surely it is best to follow the trail back through evolution to see how it might have evolved in our more primitive ancestors (even if very difficult to do), and where limitations, as suggested, possibly occurred simply because of the nature of complexity and what is possible biologically and neurologically. So consciousness became such as exists for us humans now because our brains became so complex, with language probably adding the last and even more complex layer of consciousness.
12. In much earlier times perhaps (and presumably) some creatures would be conscious of many more processes within their brains and nervous systems. And this process of evolution - where some gains were made (capacity) but with some sacrifices (monitoring of such pruned) - seems eminently reasonable, to me at least. And of course this then suggests that non-human animals will likely have some form of consciousness, not as evolved as humans and differing in degree, which again accords with reality. It would be difficult to explain away much of animal behaviour if we were to assume that they were not conscious (or minimally so), especially those quite close to us in evolutionary terms, but what level of consciousness do they actually possess?
And of course, that which was only once imagined can sometimes become reality. I just don't see the need for terms like "Realm" and "Metephysical" as if we were talking about a separate place or location.