What do you think is the relationship between your consciousness and your thinking process?
Answers
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Explanation:
You can be conscious through thoughts, emotions, and senses which all three can be grouped semantically in perception.
Those perceptive qualities are cognitive tools for abstracting reality and making memory of it.
You are conscious because you are alive, and those cognitive tools make you feel so.
As you can see, the more abstract the tool the further away we can go from the truth of life; for example, with thinking you can get to believe that life is an illusion and you are actually a set of dead things (atoms) which together bring about consciousness; such subjectivity has many doors and there are many ways to think about reality and life, but! Pain (which is a sense), for example, is much less abstract and certainly much more objective (in life’s perspective*), there’s nothing to question there; you feel physical pain? Move!
*I said in life’s perspective because senses can vary too from human to human, for example, daltonism for the sense of sight.*I said in life’s perspective because senses can vary too from human to human, for example, daltonism for the sense of sight.
So given this background, consciousness is an act of input, output and feedback loop, and the process between the input and the output is made by a cognitive tool (such as thought, emotion or sense).
In this image, “A” is the process made by a cognitive tool, and “B” is the output’s result in feedback, which will be again processed by the cognitive tool.
Feedback is only given in living beings, so we can self-regulate our responses; everything started very easy with pain or pleasure, then its complexity increased to the spectrum of emotions and finally its current complexity lies in the discernment of thinking.
Through all that complexity, you feel you are You with all your experiences, memories, and dreams; without it (the “A” or process part), your consciousness would remain in an atemporal, non-local state, which there would be only indeterminacy. The best we can think of this state is nothingness.
After this, you can read again the TL;DR.