Part I: There Is No Consciousness

There is no consciousness.

This is a ridiculously bold claim, and its truth is very much predicated on what you mean by "consciousness". So let me clarify.

Consciousness is not a thing in and of itself. It exists only as a label which we give a number of separate things which happen to coincide.

Observe your senses. Do it right now.

Do you see how they are fundamentally independent? If you were deafened right now, your sight would still work the same way. If your eyes were put out, you'd still feel things with your skin exactly the same way. Every single sense works perfectly well without the others. You could make the case for some senses being composite, like the overlap between smell and taste, but the actual streams of data coming from the tongue and the nose are entirely independent of each other even if they are being stimulated by the same thing at the same time.

"Consciousness" is what we call the sum of processed sensory input at any given time, including the sensations that we call verbal and visual thoughts and feelings (which we experience as forms of hearing, sight and physical sensation respectively). Nothing more.

As long as at least one sense's worth of input is being processed (e.g. data from the eyes into what we call seeing), we call ourselves conscious. Whenever none of the input is being processed in that way, we call it unconsciousness.

As with everything I write, put this to the test. If you had hearing and no other sense, would you be conscious? What about touch and no other sense? Taste and no other sense? What if you couldn't sense anything except hearing your own thoughts?

When a given sense isn't delivering processed input, is there a big empty space called "consciousness", waiting for it to come back? Or is "consciousness" just the name we give to whichever senses are currently active?

Consciousness doesn't exist. Not as a thing. Only as a label that unifies a number of entirely separate phenomena taking place in the same brain.

What are the implications?

Well, for one thing, if you think you ARE consciousness, then good luck with that. It means you don't exist in reality, only as a mental label that doesn't refer to an actual object.

You might want to look into that.

For another, it means consciousness isn't an environment or a space or a substrate. Things, including thoughts, don't happen in consciousness, they constitute it. Among other things, this requires a re-think of Demon Theory and its mechanics, which I go into below. Read Demon Theory before you get onto that.

For a third, it means consciousness isn't a thing that can be focused on. Any time you are trying to place your attention on consciousness itself, you are only placing it on a given one (or more) of your senses. This is bad news for the claims of any number of mystical doctrines.

"There is no consciousness". Comprehend the proposition. Then test the bejeezus out of it. Chase down all the implications and see if they're consistent with what you're experiencing. Not with what you think is going on - with what you actually perceive as happening at this exact moment in time.

Part II: Implications for Demon Theory

One key element of Demon Theory is that thoughts have consciousness as their substrate, as the environment within which they compete for information as a resource. Obviously, consciousness as described here cannot be an environment.

However, this is not yet a reason to reject Demon Theory altogether. Thoughts, as we experience them, are another form of sense data. I've discussed this before. Only as sight, sound and feeling (and combinations thereof) do they participate in consciousness.

On the other hand, we know that the senses as we experience them are already the product of processing. Signals from the eyes, for example, have to travel down complex networks of neural pathways before they are processed, on an unconscious level, and interpreted into what we call seeing.

If we experience thoughts as the same sort of processed sense data (which we do - check it out for yourself), then it stands to reason that the actual processing that generates them, on an unconscious level, takes place via signals travelling via specific neural pathways which determine what happens to them.

Those neural pathways, neural patterns, fit the description of Demon Theory's thoughts perfectly.

Let us take a belief as an example. When a particular piece of information comes from the senses, it travels along a particular neural pattern on its way to being processed into how we consciously experience it. That neural pattern gets reinforced in the process - that's why practising a skill makes it easier and more automatic to do the next time.

If the pattern is a belief, every time it processes data, which is to say every time sensory input gets filtered through the belief, that belief grows stronger.

If the neural pattern grows in ways that mean such signals get routed through it more often, which is to say it filters a greater proportion of sensory input, it continues to become stronger. Again, this is common sense.

If it grows in a way that means signals which would normally get routed through a different pattern get routed through it instead, it has effectively won a competition for food with another belief. It will now get even stronger, while the other pattern will atrophy, to the extent that signals are being redirected.

The pattern may even grow in a way that means all the signals that pass through another pattern also pass through it, in which case it has effectively consumed that belief and made it part of itself. Everything that feeds one belief feeds into the other.

Yes, these neural patterns behave exactly like individual living things. Their environment isn't consciousness, it's the actual physical structure of the brain. Their food is indeed information, as Demon Theory states - information in terms of the signals that travel through the brain's neural network.

If you don't believe that simple patterns can act with such sophistication, check out John Conway's Game of Life (credit to StepVheN of "Burning, True" for relating this to Demon Theory; you can find his blog in the blogroll on the right).

Ghostbusters references aside, I think this is pretty important. It discards a vast amount of the fluffy mysticism that has accumulated around the notion of "consciousness", and provides a solid experiential and at least vaguely scientific foundation for Demon Theory's claims.