Hi John,
Thanks for reading and commenting. I'm always interested in your ideas, as you tend to take a more catholic approach, and don't sweat the details. But, of course, the devil is in the details!
I'm very happy that FQXi has finally created an essay contest where the topic of 'consciousness' must be treated, since knowledge, information, interpretation, meaning, and similar terms make no sense in a dead, unaware, universe.
John, you say: "I think though, that I would compare awareness to light, rather than gravity...". But I am not "comparing". I am stating (proposing) that self-awareness *is* the nature of gravity, not *is like* gravity. This is a very important distinction. The field exists, and has a 'nature'.
I just finished posting on another thread you are also contributing to, (forum/topic/1778) and I will repeat the relevant content here:
I consider consciousness to be a field capable of awareness and volition. The awareness is of mass flow, including the mass of the field energy itself, ie, self-awareness. The "information" that 'in'-forms the brain is energy that contributes to (at one level) the establishment, through learning or adaptive response, of connectivity between neurons that results in complex 3-D flows of ions in axons and vesicles across synapses. Actually 4-D flows, since they are dynamic. Thus the visual (or other) senses stimulate the neural network and activate a pattern of mass flows through it. This is typically a very specific pattern whose interconnectivity has already been learned.
As Basudeba pointed out in a comment above, the perception (or awareness) is essentially "(this) is like (that)". It is in this way that we gain our understanding of reality. He also mentioned that: "in the perception "this (object) is like that (the concept)", one can describe "that" only if one has perceived it earlier."
That is, it was not meaningful the first time!
That is, one can correlate only after there is something to relate to.
That is why, for example, if one meets someone at a party with an unusual name, it's very hard to understand the name the first time one hears it. Similarly, one must listen to complex music more than once to hear the complexity.
This model answers (for me at least) Lev's question of "How do I recognize a previously unseen cat as a 'cat'?"
It also has seemingly unrelated implications, such as why one can, in a dream state, get caught in a "loop".
This model, nor any other, does not 'explain' awareness, per se, but, as a self-aware being, I know it exists. If it is of the proposed field nature, aware of complex dynamic mass flows determined by learned connections (in 4D) I believe the above captures the essence of our mental nature, and fits with my definition of intelligence as "consciousness plus logic", where the logic is physical interconnectivity in the network(s). We know that multiple networks are interconnected, so this model also yields hierarchical structures of 'ideas'. Thus 'thinking' is simply appropriate self-generated stimulation of these dynamic flows, while 'observing' is external stimulation of these dynamic flows, and dreaming is semi-random stimulation of these flows.
The key to all of the above is the field's awareness of local mass flow. This is the significance of the C-field circulation equation relating local circulation to local mass current density. This comment is the tip of the iceberg. Much more ice can be found in my essays and books.
As simply a matter of interest, this comment (and all my comments) was dictated to Dragon software. If software is capable of pattern recognition of this order, the model I describe above is capable of pattern recognition of the order that we exhibit.
Best,
Edwin Eugene Klingman