Dear Dr. Liqaa Habeb and Professor Anirbid Sircar,

Thank you for your kind answers.

Best regards,

Tatsuo Tabata

Hi dear prof 

Of all the objects in the universe, the human brain and all its processes is the most complex. Attached is an article I hope that it will be useful for you. 

https://www.google.iq/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/21/-sp-why-cant-worlds-greatest-minds-solve-mystery-consciousness#ampshare=https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/21/-sp-why-cant-worlds-greatest-minds-solve-mystery-consciousness

Conciouness, unconscious  and subconscious are various states of human mind.

Dear Dr. Liqaa Habeb and Professor Anirbid Sircar,

Thank you for your kind answers.

Best regards,

Tatsuo Tabata

Here I write an additional explanation for the question. Lee Smolin writes a little more than three pages after the passage I quoted above. Among those lines, the following passage would make clear why the problem of consciousness is mysterious.

"What's most mysterious, of course, is not the content of our consciousness but the fact that we're conscious. Leibniz imagined shrinking himself down and walking around inside someone's brain the way he might walk around inside a mill (these days, we would say "a factory"). In the case of the mill, you could give a complete description of it by describing what a person walking around inside it would see. In the case of a brain, you couldn't."

Dear Dr. Liqaa Habeb,

Reading the Guardian article you mentioned, I have learned that the essential mysteries of the consciousness is now called "the hard problem of consciousness" after David Chalmers and that searching by this phrase on the Internet gives useful articles as mentioned below and more:

David J. Chalmers, "Facing up to the problem of consciousness," Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3):200-19, 1995; http://cogprints.org/316/1/consciousness.html

"Hard problem of consciousness," Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

"The Hard Problem of Consciousness," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy; http://www.iep.utm.edu/hard-con/

John Horgan, "David Chalmers thinks the hard problem is really hard," Scientific American Blogs, April 10, 2017; https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/david-chalmers-thinks-the-hard-problem-is-really-hard/

Thanking you again,

Best regards,

Tatsuo Tabata

Dear Prof. Tatsuo Tabata!

Unfortunately, I do not have a scientific answer to the first question :(.

The answer to the second question is "No". :(

But this link also may be interested:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/The_Human_Brain_Can_Create_Structures_in_Up_to_11_Dimensions?_tpcectx=profile_questions

Dear Prof.Tatsuo Tabata ,

Thank you very much for sharing this amazing question. Really, in my Ph.D. project I was working on how to improve amputee person life with prosthetic components, and the amazing thing that I found in such medical case the mysterious pain, named virtual pain, where an amputee person is feeling and sensing  in a harm pain in his lower leg, but actually he did not have any leg, his leg has been amputated! I asked many principal scientist about interpretation of this case but without any result(s)!, so dear professor this is invitation to participate in a professional interaction related to this strange medical case related to human brain virtual signals and mysteries of consciousness.

Please accept my respect and regards,

Emad

In 1994 David Chalmers published a paper explaining why consciousness is such a challenging phenomenon to understand. Although he wasn’t the first to discuss these challenges, he was the first to categorize them into two types of problems: “easy” problems and the “hard” problem. Easy problems involve the explanation of how the mind integrates information, focuses attention and allows us to report on mental states. Though not a piece of cake, such problems are easy because solving them only requires that we determine the mechanisms that explain these behaviors. Easy problems are physical by nature, falling within the empirical domains of psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience. Given the current trend in science of the mind, we’re confident that one day we will solve these problems.

The hard problem, by contrast, may never be solved. Specifically, the hard problem is determining why or how consciousness occurs given the right arrangement of brain matter. What makes it hard is that we cannot just point to some physical mechanism to solve it, for that would be the solution to the easy problem. Instead, our goal is to explain why certain physical mechanism gives rise to consciousness instead of something else or nothing at all. Consider an analogy from physics: knowing every equation predicting how mass and gravity interact does not tell us why they interact in the way they do. To understand why mass and gravity interact, we must appeal to highly esoteric explanations involving relativity, quantum mechanics or string theory. 

Though it is not my specialization, I feel interested in reading the comments on such complex matter that related to brain.

Consciousness is the highest developed property of matter and reaches its epitome in the thinking mind of men in social formations. Hence, any meaningful understanding of “consciousness” can only be gained by materialist dialectical mode of thought that takes into account the whole historical  activity of life and most of all focuses on the post-biological form of evolution that gives rise to social/historical life. In a strict sense the consciousness of man is a work in progress that evolves through the historical evolution of man as a never completed process.  In a crude form, consciousness manifests itself even in the most primitive life-forms and is accentuated through the process of biological evolution. But even in the lower life form, a social (non-biological) relation and interaction is necessary into which life-forms must enter in order to reproducing their existence and continuity.

It is true that the brain and the enormously complex physicochemical processes within it are vital for cognition of any kind and for consciousness. But attempts by reductionism, determinism, mechanism and causality based modern official physics and biology (neuroscience) to reduce the enormous complexity of the brain and consciousness to the mechanical location and the complex physicochemical process of the brain; is like trying to understand the logic of an algorithm by studying the motions of the electrons in the computer hardware circuitry through which the algorithm is worked out!      

Dear Dr. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Kuzin,

Thanks for your kind reply and the link to your interesting question.

Best regards,

Tatsuo

Dear Dr. Emad Kamil Hussein,

Thanks for your interesting reply in which you have found a relationship between your project and the present question. We should be happy if we could get further comments here on our problems from different researchers.

Best regards,

Tatsuo

Dear Dr. Arwa Abdulrasoul Salman,

Thanks for your kind and very understandable, informative answer, which would be useful not only to me but also to many researchers visiting here.

Best regards,

Tatsuo

Dear Dr. Khansaa Hassan Al-Bahadli,

Thanks for your kind reply and interest in this question.

Best regards,

Tatsuo

Dear Dr. Abdul Malek,

Thanks for your kind answer, in which you keenly pointed out the necessary method to understand consciousness.

Best regards,

Tatsuo

Dear Prof. Tatsuo Tabata 

Thank you so much for your kind comment and recommendation to my so simple post, I just want to reflect an actual experiment results and create a link with your impressive question, sir.

Regards, Emad

Here are some passages about the difficulty of the problem of consciousness quoted from the books I have read or am going to read:

Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? & Mind and Matter (Cambridge University Press, combined reprint 1967)

"What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness?" (section "The physical basis of consciousness", p. 99)

"I would summarize my general hypothesis thus: consciousness is associated with the learning of the living substance; its knowing how (Können) is unconscious." (the same section as above, p. 105)

"In this chapter I have tried by simple examples, taken from the humblest of sciences, namely physics, to contrast the two general facts (a) that all scientific knowledge is based on sense perception, and (b) that none the less the scientific views of natural processes formed in this way lack all sensual qualities and therefore cannot account for the latter." (section "The mystery of the sensual qualities", p. 177)

Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989)

"In spite of all this reading, I must emphasize that I had only a very superficial knowledge of my chosen subjects [the borderline between the living and the nonliving, and the workings of the brain]. I certainly had no insight into either of them. What attracted me to them was that each contained a major mystery—the mystery of life and the mystery of consciousness. I wanted to know more exactly what, in scientific terms, those mysteries were. I felt it would be splendid if I finally made some small contribution to their solution, but that seemed too far away to worry about." (p. 18)

"The brain sciences have still a very long way to go, but the fascination of the subject and the importance of the answers will inevitably carry it forward. It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us." (the final page, 163)

Douglas R. Hofstadter, in The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul composed and arranged by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett (Basic Books, 1981)

"[…] After all, some of the most fantastic ideas presented in this book—Wheeler's solitary electron weaving the universe, for example, or Everett's many-world interpretation of quantum mechanics, or Dawkins' suggestion that we are survival machines for our genes—have been proposed in complete seriousness by eminent scientists. Should we take such extravagant ideas seriously? We should certainly try, for how else will we ever learn whether these are the conceptual giant steps we need to escape from the most obscure riddles of the self and consciousness? Coming to understand the mind will probably require new ways of thinking that are at least as outrageous—at first—as Copernicus's shocking suggestion that the Earth goes around the Sun, or Einstein's bizarre claim that space itself could be curved. […]" (p. 458)

(To be continued for more quotes)

Dear Prof. Tabata,

I would like to add in your list, a quote from a materialist dialectical thinker:

“… however many millions of suns and earths may arise and pass away, however long it may last before the conditions for organic life develop, however innumerable the organic beings that have to arise and pass away before animals with a brain capable of thought are developed from their midst, and for a short span of time find conditions suitable for life, only to be exterminated later without mercy, we have the certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it.” Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature.

Dear Dr. Abdul Malek,

Thanks a lot for your kind addition to the quotes about consciousness. Engels's passage well describes the solid fact of appearance and disappearance of consciousness from the objective and cosmological viewpoint.

Best regards,

Tatsuo Tabata

(Continued from my previous answer)

Here are some passages about the difficulty (or the possible non-difficulty) of the problem of consciousness taken from the books I have read or am going to read:

Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Harvester Press, 1979)

"Question: Will we understand what intelligence and consciousness and free will and 'I' are when we have made an intelligent program?

Speculation: Sort of—it all depends on what you mean by 'understand'. On a gut level, each of us probably has about as good an understanding as is possible of those things, to start with. It is like listening to music. Do you really understand Bach because you have taken him apart? Or did you understand how the speed of light is constant in every inertial reference frame? We can do the math, but no one in the world has a truly relativistic intuition. And probably no one will ever understand the mysteries of intelligence and consciousness in an intuitive way. Each of us can understand people, and that is probably about as close as you can come." (p. 680)

"Looked at this way, Gödel's proof suggests—though by no means does it prove!—that there could be some high-level way of viewing the mind/brain, involving concepts which do not appear on lower levels, and that this level might have explanatory power that does not exist—not even in principle on lower levels. It would mean that some facts could be explained on the high level quite easily, but not on lower levels at all. No matter how long and cumbersome a low-level statement were made, it would not explain the phenomena in question. […]

What might such high-level concepts be? It has been proposed for eons, by various holistically or 'soulistically' inclined scientists and humanists, that consciousness is a phenomenon that escapes explanation in terms of brain-components; so here is a candidate, at least. There is also the ever-puzzling notion of free will. so perhaps these qualities could be 'emergent' in the sense of requiring explanations which cannot be furnished by the physiology alone. But it is important to realize that if we are being guided by Gödel's proof in making such bold hypotheses, we must carry the analogy through thoroughly. In particular, it is vital to recall that G's nontheoremhood does have an explanation—it is not a total mystery! The explanation hinges on understanding not just one level at a time, but the way in which one level mirrors its metalevel, and the consequences of this mirroring. If our analogy is to hold, then, 'emergent' phenomena would become explicable in terms of a relationship between different levels in mental systems." (p. 708–9)

Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Little Brown & Co, 1991)

"My explanation of consciousness is far from complete. One might even say that it was just a beginning , but it is a beginning, because it breaks the spell of the enchanted circle of ideas that made explaining consciousness seem impossible. I haven't replaced a metaphorical theory, the Cartesian Theater, with a nonmetaphorical ('literal, scientific') theory. All I have done, really, is to replace one family of metaphors and images with another, trading in the Theater, the Witness, the Central Meanor, the Figment, for Software, Virtual Machines, Multiple Drafts, a Pandemonium of Homunculi. It's just a war of metaphors, you say — but metaphors are not 'just' metaphors; metaphors are the tools of thought. No one can think about consciousness without them, so it is important to equip yourself with the best set of tools available. Look what we have built with our tools. Could you have imagined it without them? (the last page of the text, p. 455)

Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Simon & Schuster, 1995)

"According to [the linguist Noam] Chomsky, all matters of human puzzlement can be sorted into 'problems,' which can be solved, and 'mysteries,' which cannot. The problem of free will, Chomsky opines, is one such mystery. The problem of consciousness, according to [the philosopher Jerry] Fodor, is another, and [the philosopher Colin] McGinn concurs. […]" (p. 383)

Michio Kaku, Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel (Doubleday, 2008)

"Marvin Minsky describes consciousness as more of a 'society of minds,' that is, the thinking process in our brain is not localized but spread out, with different centers competing with one another at any given time. Consciousness may then be viewed as a sequence of thoughts and images issuing from these different, smaller 'minds,' each one grabbling and competing for our attention.

If this is true, perhaps 'consciousness' has been overblown, perhaps there have been too many papers devoted to a subject that has been overmystified by philosophers and psychologists. Maybe defining consciousness is not so hard. As Sydney Brenner of the Salk Institute in La Jolla says, 'I predict that by 2020—the year of good vision—consciousness will have disappeared as a scientific problem. … Our successors will be amazed by he amount of scientific rubbish discussed today—that is, if they have the patience to trawl through the electronic archives of obsolete journals.' " (p. 121)

Well said and well quoted very strange and interesting topic i dont have something personal to add but i am also working on some aspects of it. When we sleep and a mosquito bites us an unconscious state also slaps the mosquito to kill. What triggers this   

Physicists know what the materials of the human body are made up of. Examples: bones are made up of protons, most of the weight of the body is due to water and so on. There is a standard model chart of the 16 fundamental particles of physics. But scientists do not know what the mind is made up of. Some of them cannot even distinguish between the brain and the mind and between the mind and the spirit.

When the mind is conscious of its surroundings in the waking state, we say that the mind is alive. When the mind is conscious of its functions (motion of heart and lungs etc.) in the state of sleep, we say that the mind is alive.. When the mind is unconscious of its surroundings, we say that the mind is temporarily unconscious (coma). When the

functions of the heart and lungs stop, we say that the mind is permanently unconscious or dead. So the mind is operating at two levels of consciousness. Conscious level and the subconscious level. When both these operations stop, we say that the man is dead.

Most of the western psychologists and scientists don't think that mind is a form of matter because scientists don't know what kind of matter the mind is made up of. Following is what I propose as to functioning of the mind.Consciousness and unconsciousness are states of the mind. If you take mind as a bulb, and light and darkness as the consciousness and unconsciousness, then it becomes easy to understand that there is a power like electricity that lights the bulb when turned on. This power that lights up the mind is the Spirit which is present in every one as "I". When the mind detaches from the Spirit, it becomes unconscious. When you look at the eyes of a new born child you can feel this Spirit, it is pure life. There is very little mind there, virtually no intelligence, no wisdom, just pure life. This spirit is capable of growing a mind for itself just like the body. Materials of the body are known to science, but the materials of the mind are not known to science. Materials of the mind also come from the food that the person eats. Every food eaten has an effect on the mind. The extreme examples are the drugs and alcohol. What is this subtle material that comes out of the food and cretaes the mind is not known to science. If a person stops eating food for few days, his mind will begin to decay.

Matter of physics is just the condensed form of energy. If energy is water then ice is the matter. So the entire universe is made up of energy. But there is a connection between Spirit (consciousness) and energy. Spirit is all pervasive, infinite, indivisible consciousness which is perfectly motionless. When this Spirit begins to move, it becomes energy. So energy is Spirit in motion. Both energy and Spirit are indestructible and existing through eternity. More details in following articles.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262494186_Consciousness_and_energy

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266618399_Unified_field_of_consciousness

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Big-Bang-Assumptions-Problems/dp/1613245777/ref=sr_1_5?

s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333360764&sr=1-5

Chapter Consciousness and energy

Article Unified field of consciousness

Dear Prof. Ashique Ali,

Thanks for your kind comment. Slapping of the mosquito during sleeping you mentioned might be explained by the presence of learning by the unconscious state from the conscious state through a certain duplicating process within the brain. I expect some one could explain in more detail.

Best regards,

Tatsuo Tabata

Dear Vikram Zaveri,

Thanks for your kind and informative answer. Your theory of "Spirit" seems to be interesting though I cannot believe it immediately. I wish that you further develop your research on the problem of consciousness.

Best regards,

Tatsuo Tabata

A related question to the discussion of spirit is: what are the necessary conditions for consciousness? I wonder if there exists any way to scientifically demonstrate that non-human animals possess consciousness. It seems we conclude that they possess consciousness based on analogical reasoning with our own experience. The issue is then whether such reasoning is valid.

Dear Dr. Kirk MacGregor,

Thanks for your insightful answer. Surely, the validity of analogical reasoning about nonhuman animals' having consciousness is a problem to be examined.

Best regards,

Tatsuo

One of Schlicka and Carnapa's dreams was united learning. These were only observation sentences, but later came the problem with theoretical statements and ad hoc hypotheses. The project of united science is reductionism, because all science was to be brought down to physics. If you know how to reduce chemistry to physics, you might know what particles make up consciousness, because it is the result of the action of 13 trillions of synapses aRb and bRa and 60 neurotransmitters. Emotional state can be reduced to pituitary action, which is responsible for secretion of hormones.

Dear Piotr Grabowski,

Thanks a lot for your kind answer in which you mentioned about the importance of reductionism in the research of consciousness.

Best regards,

Tatsuo

Dear Sydney,

Thank you so much for your interesting answer from the viewpoint of likening consciousness to the field filling the universe.

Best regards,

Tatsuo

A similar question "What is consciousness?" was posted by Ahmed Al mayahi at the following link later than the present question. Answers to Ahmed's question might also be interesting to the visitors to the present question.

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_consciousness6#59d7641e615e276bd6414f2b

Dear Sydney,

Thank you so much for sharing the interesting free book written by Sarah Durston and Ton Baggerman. I have downloaded it and will enjoy it.

Best regards,

Tatsuo

Tatsuo Tabata Yes, science can. It is starting to happen right now, with first, theory.