What Makes Us Conscious?Where does consciousness come from? How does it come about?
Carter Blakelaw unravels the nature of consciousness by making the distinction
between the mind's eye (what he refers to as the homunculus)
which unifies our experience of our world, and individual sensations, feeling or emotions
which underpin the collective experience that is then attributed to the homunculus.
Consciousness is a product of the brain. For each of us, our consciousness does not extend beyond our brain and nervous system. The external world impinges upon our senses, which send signals to our brains and, following various neurological (which is to say bio-chemical) processes, our brains re-present those signals as feelings (in a broad sense: light, sound, heat, smell, emotion and so on) in a co-ordinated way so as to produce what seems like a unified self. Blakelaw systematically disects the homunculus using philosophical logic and psychology (as needed) to show that the homunculus can and is produced by the brain on its own (without recursion, which is the standard trap: how does perceiving-thing-X perceive anything at all other than through the 'eyes' of another perceiving-thing-Y?) Having shown that consciousness (taken as a whole) can be reduced to a collection of individual 'atomic' sensory experiences, Blakelaw examines by what mechanism can (must) the brain use to avail itself of 'atomic sensations', thereby revealing the mechanism by which the brain becomes conscious, as well as identifying the essential components of consciousness in the universe. Once the principle and understanding are established it becomes possible to talk of classes of creatures (and even machines) in the universe to which we might therefore, reasonably, attribute conscisouness. The full analysis is delivered in nineteen logical steps in the book "A Wave-Particle Theory of Conscious Awareness" co-authored with Jack Calverley. The book while addressing the nature of self, determinism and free-will, also extrapolates from the basic notion of consciousness to provide accounts of morality, beauty and the 'good and fair' society.
Wave-Particle Theory of Conscious Awareness
(A philosophical viewpoint) 
Addendum - updated March 31 2025 Please note: The fully updated 2025 version is now published. The latest edition includes all the material of the first plus new chapters on "Why Today's AIs Cannot Be Conscious", "The Nature of Evil", Evolution, The Intellectual fallacy, and the Natural-Unnatural Equivalence Fallacy. To explain consciousness we must explain not just sensations but how a three-dimensional world is perceived without relying on an inner eye that can make sense of depth cues etc. Both problems are tackled here as well as aesthetics and morality. | ||||||||
