0.19 Functional consciousness {cp}  (Page 8/7)

In the previous chapter I showed how consciousness is the experience of deep emotion, deep thought, and your ability to process ordinary events. That type of consciousness, however, is simply what makes humans aware of who they are, which is different from being aware and conscious of their environment. Being conscious of your environment is another type of consciousness altogether, and would involve things like working memory (which is storing and manipulating information in the short term). That is because when you are in an environment the data around you goes into your mind and then leaves shortly, like observing a cars passing by. Baddeley (2001) associated consciousness with the central executive component of working memory. There was a central executive system that was aided by two subsystems, one concerned with acoustic and verbal information, the articulatory, and the other for visual and spatial information. There was an “articulatory rehearsal” that was supposed to repeat words in your head so you could remember them for longer than a few seconds.

Working memory isn't the only functional aspect of consciousness. There would have to be a central processing unit of sorts to process the information and use it effectively. That unit would be more core to who you are because it would be the part making decisions, which is more conscious than memory, which only parts of come into consciousness for short periods of time. For instance, if it was possible to leave your body and take over some mechanical machine, or control technology or mechanical devices with your mind because you simply couldn't think about doing all the things needed to control the device at once becuase your central processing unit just can't do that. Say control a car with your mind, that wouldn't be possible even though it is possible to do it with your body because you can't feel what it is like to press the pedal a certain degree with just your mind. The physical experience makes it real. Even if you just understood what the machinery should do, it wouldn't be possible because you'd have to understand exactly what it should do, which you can't really think about because you only have a loose idea of, say, where the car should be and at what speed.

So you can only make a few decisions per minute, and when it comes to doing technical things like placing a car in the right location, are general and not specific. This explains why if someone were to use magic their mind would have to be clear in order to properly visualize what should happen. Though even that wouldn't be possible with a clear mind because the image you have of the result you want isn't going to be perfect. An example of that would be moving things using "the force". However, there are also emotional components to supporting consciousness. I do not believe a zombie or anything like that could be conscious because it wouldn't have the proper emotional support. Zombies are so lifeless that they wouldn't be sharp enough to support the conscious functions humans do.