What determines consciousness?

Answer 1

Actually we are all aware or conscious when we are awake. There are different levels of sensitivity to our environment or having a numbers sense or good with words. It's what your conscious of as a rule, although you can go into a sort of zone as in sports while on the court. You might be in touch with or activate you motherly instincts with children, an emotional and intellectual state where you are concentrating on only those issues or even a part of the brain where you've stored that type of information. Your biases may come out instead of seeing the whole picture from different viewpoints. Consciousness or what you are conscious of can be determined by habit patterns you've developed or been taught or you can decide to be conscious of your intuitive thoughts or even someone else's sensibilities, their values. You may need more information just to get it clear what you specifically want to know and it may become clear then. We don't know what causes it, but science likes to say it's a product of the brain chemistry. It could even body chemistry interacting with the electromagnetic force of the earth. Lot's of luck with that deep version of your question. Most things, however, don't seem to be caused by something else, but they both work on each other. A word changes the word it modifies and is modified by the word it changes. That's why the idea of the electromagnetic force of the mind interacting with the electromagnetic forces in the environment is not so bad a possibility. Also we act and react with the impressions and images coming from our senses. You could hardly be said to be conscious if there was nothing to be conscious of. I would say consciousness is determined by that which is conscious and what it is conscious of. We have two sides to the brain. The right brain processes the left eye in it's way and the left brain the right eye in it's way and each side sends input to the other side, so we are always seeing things from two points of view. I guess that means the source of the signal determines the signal, and the receiver determines how it is perceived or seen or interpreted, so both play their part. They are both partly determinants. Most things you look at long enough seem to be infinitely complex. This doesn't seem to be any different. You could take the spiritual view that God causes it all, but that's another mystery without end. At least we should never get bored.