WHY AM I ME AND NOT YOU.

Scientists have for centuries tried to work out what consciousness is. Why am I self aware? Why can I only know what is happening to me but not know about you? How is it that I cannot know beyond my existence in time and space, yet time and space are infinite? I exist for a short period under a century, yet existence is already over 13 billions years old. Where was I before I was born and where will I be after I die?

Questions that have troubled philosophers and now scientists for millennia. Descartes, a philosopher who lived about 400 years ago believed that there was the body and then there was something different, a dualism, that caused us to be aware. In other words our body is merely a receiver for signals coming from some other place or dimension. In reality this has not been entirely disproved.

Today they talk of the links between the central receiver station of stimuli called the Thalamus and its links with two higher function areas that make sense of the information the Lateral Prefrontal Cortex and the Posterior Parietal Cortex. And of course electrical/chemical messages are what are relayed along these very complex connections and systems. That information is then sorted subconsciously to help make sense of so much information, and then subconsciously we know what we have perceived briefly before we consciously know what we are perceiving.

Any disruption to the flow of information can cause a variety of misinterpretations such as what someone with schizophrenia experiences. If we are unconscious whole areas of the prefrontal cortex shut down. There are even examples of what's called Blindsight, which involves actually being able to see something, but a faulty function doesnt allow the information to reach logic sections, so they cant see what they are actually seeing. And of course as we reach our final years often signals dont get through such as memories, recognition, perception such as in Alzheimers Disease.

But does that explain self awareness. What that all sounds like is a machine that allows us to observe the World in an understandable manner. But a Zombie (someone functioning automatically reacting to stimuli) could do that. Why am I aware that I am aware and able to make choices based on that information. How is my imagination able to create something in my mind that doesnt exist. The answer is that no one knows and Descartes' explanation is just as likely as today's scientists. Could my brain be just a receiving box like a radio, and depending upon the effectiveness of the system, receive increasingly complex elements of something else as yet unknown and possibly outside of our concepts of space and time.. Sounds SciFi but that's how we learn.

And as a final element to cause you further discomfort, are we able to reproduce the elements in our brain sufficiently to create self awareness in an Android...a true Ghost in the Shell. I guess it all depends on what we finally realise self awareness is.

Extrapolations and other elements of this item are from excerpts from articles in New Scientist 18 May 2013

I think a lot of life on earth has self awareness maybe the ability to dream might indicate that. Brunner asked do androids dream and probably the answer is no that would be considered a design fault. When we die we take our reality with us. Is there a reality outside yourself? hard to prove and recently they have a new theory about black holes. There is a law that u can neither create or destroy energy/matter well in theory black holes do just that. Until this new theory (brain hurter) came along where the event horizon saves everything in a holographic form so maybe all we are, are echoes in an event horizon

I can live with that G6...or can I?