So, consciousness, I suggest, is not all or none, that it grows as brains grow, therefore it accounts for the riddle, as the riddle of are animal’s conscious compared to humans and is the fetus conscious compared to the child.1 And I suggest that a fetus is conscious, but not as conscious as a child, and a rat is conscious, not as conscious as a primate and so on.2 And by having consciousness is something that can be quantified, except for scientifically tractable, which means that we can then look at the brain and see what goes on in the brain that rather like with phenomenology of consciousness varies in degree, because it also means that you as an adult will have more or less consciousness at different times, which means that meditation could be interpreted as having deeper consciousness and losing your mind or blowing your mind, could be less consciousness depending on how you put your scenario of your brain into different situations.3


And therefore it enables neuroscience to then go into the brain and look for some correlate of what might be going on. And what I’ve suggested is that there are these so-called neural assemblies, which are coalitions of tens of millions of brain cells, which are recruit and disbanded in less than a second and we published extensively on that. It was first suggested in Private Life of the Brain published in 2000, and anyone Googling on Medline would see neural assemblies that we now have a lot of evidence using optical imaging that these do change with anesthesia, change with environmental enrichment and so on.

  1. Living In A Fantasy
  2. Take You Into Other Worlds
  3. Brain, Fast As Speed, Physical Discipline, Vedanta Perspective
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