One Mile Walk

Entity Directive

         Reflections while walking Friday but life got in the way.

         Just what is consciousness?
         Let's first consider the academic notion of consciousness. (Looked it up when I got back home.)
         consciousness - noun
         The state or condition of being conscious. A sense of one's personal or collective identity, including the attitudes, beliefs, and sensitivities held by or considered characteristic of an individual or group Special awareness or sensitivity.
         The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

         This dictionary definition is a bit inadequate. I consider it more as a verb. It gives direction to thought and subsequent action whether (trying to avoid a circular definition) purposeful or not.
         During sleep, direction of thought derails from purpose. Recall becomes intermittent, if not absent.
         During waking, the body's automatic systems give a portion of their function to consciousness. Some breathing, some heart regulation, some primary canal functions, skin and temperature reactions, etc.
         Any encountered experiences slip in responses from recalls.

         Rather than calling it consciousness, I'd label it an entity directive that forms from the sum total of sensory input experience with their reflections and comparisons to previous experiences. Senses get reinforced by repeated exposures. Reflections are the reinterpretations of experiences through re-experiences and recalls. Subtle re-experience differences lead to changes in recalls. Repeated recalls strengthen them. It is impossible to erase recalls, but subtle changes creep in from recalls of similar events (possibly modified by subsequent re-experiences).
         I think of this entity directive as residing in the brain's neural networks similar to the way a 'program' exists in the memory chips and disks of a computer. We can measure the states of each memory bit, (neuron) but the functions of a program can only be seen by running the whole system. The program was developed from a higher source, the programmer.
         In the human case, the program's bits are not computer static, but dynamic and subject to alterations from use and time. And, as Wallace and Darwin posited, the higher source is evolution (or our DNA).