Consciousness is an ambiguous term. It can mean awareness, the state of being awake, cognition and processing of data, perceiving and being interactive with the environment. David Chalmers uses Thomas Nagel’s definition of consciousness: the feeling of what it is like to be something. Consciousness is an experiential phenomenon. Understanding this ubiquitous attribute from perspective of the most fundamental prokaryote to the incredibly complex mammalian brain is indeed the ultimate challenge for science. Philosopher David Chalmers introduced the term ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, in contrast to the ‘easy problem’ that deals with deciphering the physical systems that give us and other animals the ability to discriminate, integrate information or focus attention. The easy problem was deemed easy because all that was required was to figure out the network that mediated these functions. The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how we have qualia, phenomenal experiences. What makes our perception a unique, first-person, personal experience? Qualia is defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. Examples of qualia could be the perceived sensation of pain of a headache, the taste of a mango, or even the hues of scarlet in an evening sky. The existence of qualia seems indisputable, but it cannot be identified with or reduced to anything physical. The uniqueness of any sensory experience could possibly be due to the sensory data being coupled or tagged with a coefficient of emotion. Emotional tagging of every byte of data that’s stored in a master database. Indic philosophy talks about a unique entity — Vritti. It is a cycle of thought patterns to which our awareness keeps bound to, or determines affinities or repulsions to all objective sensory inputs. This bound awareness is the result of the coupling of sensory data along with a specific emotional tag. In the above example of qualia, the taste of a mango in addition to the objective gustatory data gets tagged with an emotion that’s a blend of joy, relief, exultation, celebration, as also perhaps a shade of lust. The objective scarlet evening skies could get tagged with a subjective emotional tag of a bit of sullenness, a sense of isolation, and separation. This composite of objective and subjective data constitutes the vritti. It could be a huge database that extends across many births, called samskaras. Deepak Ranade
