What is consciousness?

After a little detour when emotions ran high after yet another senseless terror strike, its back to the usual ponderings. This time the question is 'what is consciousness'. In fact it could very well be 'what is the human brain'. Although the two are anything but synonymous as the following lines will reveal, they are the flip sides of energy and matter - maya and purusha, two esoteric and complex ancient Indian concepts. These are two states of our existence. Read on... ... The human condition comprises of two states of being. One is the physical state. This is the material body that emerges out of a Darwinian struggle and repeated adaptations to become what it is today. This state is created out of blueprints stored in the DNA of our chromosomes and provides the ‘recipe’ for what the physical body contains. By physical one is referring to, in addition to the visible physical body, blood, tears, urine, lymph, bile, hormones, neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, vitamins and minerals, nerves and brain, the air in our lungs – oxygen and carbon-dioxide, etc. In other words, everything that has physical ‘presence’ and can be observed, analysed, measured and categorised. The other state is consciousness. This used to be known as mind, spirit or soul in previous times. Some say that this refers to an emergent property of the interactions between the physical constituents of the material body. However, this state is non-material. Whilst one can map changes in EEG (electrical activity of the brain) fMRI (flow and volume of blood utilised by various components of the brain and the rest of the body), PET (indicates use of glucose as a source of energy in various parts of the brain and the body), GSR (measures the changes in electrostatic energy across our fingertips), etc., there is no way of observing consciousness directly much as one would observe other aspects of the body and the brain with its constituents. Consciousness remains hidden. What emerges on the various electrical and electro-magnetic activity mapping tools is just that – evidence that certain parts of the human brain are active; some more active than other parts and that this activity alters with change of each thought to another, each feeling to another, and each movement to another. The question is whether this is all there is to consciousness or whether what we observe is just parallelism, i.e. it’s merely an analog to what happens in our minds. Much like the dashboard of your car which reads out a lot of information that guides you in your use and maintenance of your car. The dashboard readouts are however not the real thing under the bonnet and underneath the car. The fuel readout for example is not fuel itself, the speed readout is not equal to the sense of movement at a particular velocity. The distance covered is not equal to the topography of the land you have come through. Much the same way, the brain and its activities are like the dashboard readouts. The what is consciousness if its not the activity of the brain?