Eastern faiths call it "God-consciousness" and the Middle Eastern faiths call it the Soul. Either way, we're talking about self awareness. The ability of humans to know they're aware of the fact they're aware of themselves. It led to language and ordered society. But if consciousness exists outside of the body and is distinct, why is memory and our awareness of ourselves tied so directly with the size and development of our brain ? If it was distinct, wouldn't we have a clear idea and memory of life as, say, a 1 year old ?
The question assumes a mythical premise. In fact, most people are less self-aware as adults than they were as children. What makes you think there's any interdependency between memory and self-awareness?
You are asking a lot of questions, but apparently are still unclear about consciousness. Soul and God consciousness are not concerned with the Conscious mind, but with the Unconscious mind, and its connection with the Collective unconscious mind of all living people collected together.
No because memory is not a recording devise, it is an interpretation of stimuli through our senses. At 1 we don't have enough experiences to full understand what we are seeing and doing to make useful memory.
You are correct on this, but it refers only to Conscious memories that we have lived through ourselves. We also have an ancient memory, one which accounts for itself by Instincts we did NOT learn ourselves. That memory is inside our Unconscious mind and is born again in us all at birth.
why can you remember some things and not others, why do people get amnesia, mental disorders, Alzheimer's... maybe your experiencing the human experience first hand and the real you is separate, kinda like watching a movie, you put yourself in the movie, but is the movie you? - - - Updated - - - get this, if your soul is separate and in your next life you could be born at anytime past, present or future... everyone could really be you.... just you have no memory of the other lives
I would make the question broader and ask - if consciousness exists separate from the brain, why do changes to the brain appear to change consciousness? Why do people become completely different when their brains have been injured (but presumably not their consciousness)?
"""just you have no memory of the other lives""" Then what good are they? I have always wondered why people who believe in reincarnation never have a reason for it....
folks just don't want to 'no longer be'. Evolution requires that we have a desire to survive. Everything has that programmed or hard wired into their psyche. Even things we think doesn't have a psyche. You see a bug truckin' along, put you finger in front of it, it changes direction and speeds up. It don't wanna die. Your dog doesn't want to die. So we invent past lives and reincarnation to sooth ourselves. Just like we invent paradise after death. We simply want to survive...some way, anyway.
[h=2]If consciousness is separate from the body, why is self awareness tied to age ?[/h] Might be a little begging the question here. Who says consciousness is separate from the body? I think consciousness is the subjective experience of brain function - what we might call "mind". The issue of memory is linked only in that (as been previously stated here) that it is a brain function also. Again, as has been stated, we are too young to be able to understand the sensory inputs we receive as very young children so they are not able to be retrieved from long-term memory. We need to develop a schema before we can make sense of anything and process it into long term memory for later retrieval.
Any analysis of consciousness is going to run into the problem of other minds, if that's what you're getting at?
I'm not talking about analysis at all. You say people "become completely different when their brains have been injured", but you're talking about external manifestations from which reliable conclusions about their consciousness cannot be drawn. For example, a comatose patient may be perfectly self-aware, while someone who is so engrossed in a movie that he thinks he's the hero is not self-aware at all.
