Consciousness and Communication

 

Are you conscious of anything at the top of this page just above this text? Yes? Good. Okay, so now inform my consciousness of what you consciously perceive but WITHOUT USING SPOKEN OR WRITTEN LANGUAGE to inform my consciousness of what you perceive. 

It is a classical example of communication of information.

Your consciousness -- whatever it might be -- contains information about whatever it was that you perceived to be at the top of the page. And, in fact, that information about whatever it was that you perceived to be at the top of the page is the only knowledge you do have of it. You did not feel it or smell it or taste it or hear it. Your conscious awareness was entirely the product of sensory information.

But now your task is to reflect the sensory information in your conscious awareness in your mind back to me so that I, too, may have conscious awareness of your conscious awareness of what is at the top of the page. That is, the information you possess (message) as conscious awareness (information source) must be transformed by your brain into a coded signal of some kind that can be transmitted (transmitter) along with any extraneous noise in the transmission channel to be received and decoded (receiver) as information (message) which can produce conscious awareness (destination) in my mind.  

So, WITHOUT USING SPOKEN OR WRITTEN LANGUAGE, you begin. The only thing you know with certainty is that you consciously perceived an image of SOMETHING at the top of this page. But what did you perceive that something to be? 

An abstract image with no further information?

Pixels on your viewing screen? 

A photograph? 

 

An apple sitting on a table? 

 

An apple with a leaf still attached? 

 

A red apple?

And that is only a fraction of the information that might be communicated by image to your conscious mind.

Because you only have visual information, you can only respond in kind with visual information. And you must use light as your transmission signal.

Here is how Paul Cézanne accomplished the task of communicating the conscious awareness of a red apple with a leaf still attached and on a table from his mind to yours. Or, as the painting's name, Deux pommes sur une table, implies in the French language that is what he intended it to represent.

And so, despite all the noise Cézanne introduced in his channel of communication and despite both the apple and Cézanne no longer existing, a memory of what was once in his conscious mind still persists to this,very day. In this case the painting itself serves as the vehicle to retain a memory of what was once in his conscious mind. The human brain provides exactly this same function so long as it is still living.

We can only have conscious awareness of what we observe directly through our sensory channels of commutation carrying sensory data or are indirectly made aware of through some channel of communication, all of which are fraught with noise.