What is consciousness – why does science have difficulty in understanding it?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Are you conscious of your consciousness? Consciousness is life’s most fundamental reality. The scientist David Kammer said that there is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness.
Yet, it is extraordinarily difficult to reconcile it with everything else we know. So what do we exactly mean by consciousness? And what is the difficulty in understanding it? Consciousness basically is awareness. Awareness of the things around us, and awareness of the things within us.
When we see a red colour, and say a computer has a visual detector which sees the red colour, both get the same visual input. But we experience something internally. If that red object were a rose, it might remind us of a loved one who had offered that rose to us, and that triggers a certain set of emotions.
Consciousness is the awareness of external stimuli. It is also the awareness of the inner feelings, thoughts, intentions that are triggered within us. Let’s do a small thought experiment to understand what consciousness is.
If you close your eyes, you can see on your mental screen a parade of images who you are. Maybe something that happened today, something that someone said long ago, something or the other is going on, on that mental screen. And yet, you are different from that mental screen.
You are the observer of that screen. Try to take a step back, and look at that observer. You cannot look at the observer because what we are looking for is what we are looking with.
Consciousness is the reality by which we can perceive all other realities. It is only because we are conscious that we can acquire any kind of knowledge, including scientific knowledge. Today, science has progressed phenomenally, especially in terms of the technology that it has produced and the way the technology has transformed our life.
Unfortunately, when attention focuses on one thing, attention is lost from another thing. And with science’s focus on the capacity to understand how material things function and how they interact, and how they can be made to interact through technology, we have become blinded to consciousness, which is a non-material reality. Suppose we go to meet a friend, and while going to meet that friend, we use a map.
Whatever the map tells us, it sends to the cosmos.