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Human Consciousness

Consciousness, in reference to the human mind, describes the reflective perceptual dynamic emergent at the center of the mental structure we call "self". At times we experience it sequentially, not unlike a series of chronological movie frames. Most of the times simultaneously, as an evolving awareness of the people, objects and events we encounter in our life.

What makes it so interesting is that every center of consciousness is unequivocally unique and this is true not just at the human level. No two moments, people, places, events, organisms, objects, grains of sand, solar systems or galaxies.... could ever be identical, throughout our infinite universe. From this observation we can endlessly speculate, resolving to believe, for instance, that creation is equally conscious of itself, everywhere and at every moment. But, at least for now, these are suppositions and cannot be considered facts.

The human "self", reflectively aware of its uniqueness, is born from, and grows surrounded by, other selves, interdependent on one another and similarly conscious and unique. For humans, the self becomes the referential psychosomatic center of being, barring events that affect memory and/or perception. The child learns to maneuver his or her own particular unit of consciousness through identification with its physical instrument and at the same time negotiating the ever growing storehouse of feelings, emotions, perceptions, memories, thoughts and ideas that constitute the fabric of a human mind.

The totality of these factors must be coherently organized enough to establish a permanent identity. However, the self being a never ending work in progress, our inner representation of who we are must also be flexible and adjustable to an unpredictable universe. Self recognition can be likened to a morphogenetic field, in the sense that, believing in the image we paint of ourselves as if it were objectively true, our mind shapes our physical self in accordance with whom it believes us to be. The mental image, perceived inwardly and reflected outwardly, becomes the visible representation of the human being we create day after day, inclusive of conscious and unconscious aspects.

In infancy, when we have almost no "self" consciousness, we look alike more than at any other time in life, while our uniqueness seems to emerge and blossom as we live and discover who we are. In an attempt to define human consciousness I propose that differentiation is therefore a direct

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