Human
Consciousness
and the
Personality
Development
Trajectory
The notion of the dynamic hybrid [change/event and information] that I refer to as the Personality Development [PD] trajectory is central to the entire process that differentiates what constitutes a corporeal human being from all other forms of life that are equipped with a brain. While it may be easy enough to assert that such a trajectory exists, what is more difficult is proving that the PD hybrid trajectory exists. In fact, it may ultimately be impossible -– given our present technological capacity to perceive such a thing –- to prove the physical existence of the PD trajectory by way of specifically identifying it and separating it out from the overall system that includes it and the process that it enables as a result of its inclusion.
Still, that process can be examined, and there may be ways of inferring its existence if we examine this process from a perspective that allows for its existence. Of course, this can't be offered as definitive proof, but it might go a long way toward promoting the plausibility that such a dynamic process does exist, and possibly even allow us to further identify relatable aspects of the PD trajectory and how these aspects might provide their own level of inferred verification that this process does, in fact, exist, regardless of the specifics concerning how the process itself is accomplished.
The first part of this examination focuses on the creation of consciousness as a brain process, with a look at one theory concerning how this event happens. I’ve chosen this theory due to the fact that it is fairly indicative of a strict materialist concept where the brain itself manufactures the consciousness stream as definite bursts of information events. My affinity with this overall concept is due primarily with its obvious alignment with other established tenets concerning the nature of physical reality involving the change/event unit as a basis within any development arrangement –- specifically Planck's Constant, in this case.
Professor Susan Greenfield [Oxford University] has proposed that the mind may arise from the activity of brain cells at the level where the cells are connected together [the synapses]. Rather than arising from a single isolated region of the brain, she suggests that consciousness arises diffusely from the brain-cell connections.
The reasoning, Greenfield argues, is that there is no single complete function that takes place in one region of the brain. As mentioned above, it is known, for example, that vision is divided up into many separate components that are connected together to give rise to the conscious experience of seeing, such as color, motion, and form processing, and the function of vision can preoccupy over 30 brain regions. So brain regions are smaller parts of a wider brain stage and not units that work alone. Thus we know that conscious experience arises from the actions of many different parts of the brain.
However, when we break each area of the brain down into its smaller constituents, we see that each area is a complex circuit that is ultimately reduced down to the connections between the cells, or synapses, or in other words, to the individual wires of the circuits themselves across which electrical signals are passed. This signaling is dependent on a series of different biological products, or proteins, which are themselves products of genes. Therefore, Professor Greenfield has proposed that the neuronal correlate, and in effect, the physical substrate of the "mind" is a process that occurs at the level of the brain connections, or synapses, which are not only highly dynamic, but which also reflect experience through their strength and extension of connections.
According to this theory, consciousness, or our sense of self-awareness, is thought to arise from the interaction of assemblies of neurons involving up to tens of millions of