Fluid consciousness

In the beginning was the spirit, a quixotic and instantly malleable fluid substance that animated the human soul. And then the spirit was replaced by neurons, synapses,

and the whole physiology of humanity. Even at this time, however, consciousness is not experienced as a phenomenon that relates in only mechanical or computational ways to information inputs. Consciousness is still fluidly, and electrically-fast, malleable, and it almost instantly fuses the "whole" together. The mind is not spirit, but neither is it a computer or some other machine.
   I included a picture of lightning on this page because it drives home the point that, despite the wonderfully solid, and essentially exact processes happening in the brain, the colors representing the data encoded in the brain do float, sometimes run, and especially they coordinate, clash, and interact in the fluid sense that had people thinking that the mind or "soul" was analogous to air, fire, and lightnings back in ancient times.
    Our "spirit" could not be like a fire or lightning, of course, or our minds would far too unstable to recognize the extremely rapid changes in lightning and in fire. The lightning flashes into our consciousness immediately, with a consciousness of a whole lightning bolt that fuses together as quickly as the lightning composes itself through propagating electric fields. Were the mind performing the function of a camera using film or CCDs, nothing would be especially surprising in the fact that grains or pixels record the lightning flash. It is the actual synthesis of the whole bolt in one's mind, a lightning form for which the brain has no exact schema, that indicates the mind's fluidity across the granular data (nerve impulses) by which the eye records the lightning flash. Nothing makes a picture of lightning--or of a computer screen--whole, except for the mind's molten syntheses, its running together of the "pixels" that a machine merely records and reproduces (yes, there are resolution issues that factor in, too. Still a lightning bolt in the mind is both almost instantly fused together and fairly well resolved, like no machine made by humans).
    It is, in a sense, spirit all over again, only this time with the recognition that only the high resolution of the mind allows us to understand the world. Resolution is probably even enhanced by the fluidity that lets dots and contrasts melt into more coherence than the information presented to the mind had in its original status as sets of nerve impulses. The interactions of visual qualia seem not to be merely analogous with experience, rather it would appear to be the experience itself, for consciousness is fluidly melded in a way that the neural data itself (which impulses apparently are not exclusively responsible for conscious experience) is not.
    As illustration I was limited to a photo, and suggestion of what an amazing process it really is to see lightning as a whole almost instantly. If I could have used music instead, the effect might have been more poignant and illustrative. For if anything is intensely interactive in terms of the qualities of perception, it is sound and our experiences of music and other acoustical harmonics. A "fluorescent" impressionist painting may show how glowing and intense color interactions may be, but it is music which reveals itself as an intensive interaction between tones that nevertheless remain very distinct and separable from each other (however the overtones, undertones, and timbres do typically disappear as discrete phenomena in the listening experience). In music, both the fluidity and discreteness affecting consciousness enhance the signals, not to mention the pleasure, within the synthesis of the sensual experience--which seems to be why two notes in harmony are certainly as discrete by being part of a continuous medium that connects them as if they were fully separated. The way I envision the process in this model of consciousness is that the discreteness of the tones of the music is enhanced by allowing fluid electric field interactions to "self-organize" and enhance the frequencies which resonate together. And our electric consciousness just happens to be the medium in which a good deal of this happens, it would appear.
    Mentally, we seem to melt and flow at certain sound combinations, like harmonious music. We think that we're analogizing when we say this, but in the sense of the "spirit" comprised of electric fields, it may well be that it is a good description of the energy/information interactions occurring during a particularly fluid period of consciousness. The signals are thereby fusing within a consciousness that is comprised of the electric field interactions of the brain, and this "liquid consciousness" is supporting the instantly-combining flow like a water wave, or an acoustic wave (of course).
    Should we really suppose that we can have "fluid-like" experiences without there being a medium in the brain that can and does act like a fluid in many of its aspects? It seems an unlikely suggestion, indeed, for some kind of physics must underlie experience. Even watching water flow by oneself would seem to require fluidity on the granular scale, rather than the frames, pixels, and grains that have recorded information discretely in the machines we have made. Our minds flow in order to watch the water flowing, but our minds flow only in strict accordance with the data resolution provided to us by our eyes and reliable nerve signals. Conscious fluidity is astonishing in its ability to conform to practically infinite data sets given to it, and thus it is able to "instantly" compose a complete and unified picture of the discrete information existing in the brain at any given time. Otherwise we would be like a computer, able to use data, but without ever actually making a single connected picture, no matter how perfectly our senses present pixels to us to melt together into objects which have been imagined to be represented only by a magically fluid "spirit".
    I will leave off, and hope that many will ponder the actual effects that different experiences produce while interacting within consciousness. Not all that goes on in the mind is simply calculated, in fact I would wager that most that goes on in the mind is really not calculable at all. Much of it is simply what happens as electric fields interact in ways that probably will someday be correlated with the physics of the brain.
   For, the physics of brain computation is fairly well understood, even at this relatively early stage, and what needs explanation is not only the unity of a given field of consciousness, but also the fluidity of this consciousness. Cause yet needs to be correlated with effect, but there really are few if any phenomena that could allow for both the unity and the fluidity of consciousness except electric field phenomena, and these kinds of processes are actually well-known in our brains.

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