Yeah I'm studying mental representation and consciousness in philosophy at university at the moment, and I must say that it's one of the most interesting (and complex) courses that can be taken. In short, there are many, many different theories of concsciousness - what it is, how it is achieved, why it exists etc - and as soon as one is proposed it seems that another theory is ready to challenge and disprove it.
The most basic categories when it comes to theories of consciousness are probably the dualist/materialist divide. Dualism is the idea that there is a 'soul' or an aspect of consciousness that is not physical. This might be the simple, religious view that each person has a soul that leaves the body upon death to go to heaven/ be reincarnated or just the view that conscious phenomenon cannot be explained in entirely physical, material terms.
Dualism is very outdated. One of its most famous champions was Decartes (I think therefore I am,) but many of his theories and ideas have been dismissed by modern philosophers for many different reasons. The empirical view of contemporary philosophy is that there is no distinction between the mind and the body (or soul/body or consciousness/body etc etc.) Hence most theories of consciousness pursue a material viewpoint.
I believe that we exist as a soul, but I think it was somehow created by the neurons in our brains.
This is an interesting view, considering most believers in a soul are usually dualists. I'd say here that your concept of a soul would be interchangable with the concept of consciousness, but I might be wrong.
One of the most confusing aspects of consciousness is that it is impossible to obtain an entirely objective viewpoint because it is our consciousness that allows us to understand any form of information at all.
Personally I think the best way to look at consciousness is from a naturalist viewpoint. What possible evolutionary advantage does consciousness and intelligence give us?
Basically, the more intelligent the organism, the better the organism's concept of 'self' is. An ant it is fair to say, has no concept of self. A chimp, on the other hand, is able to recognise itself and others in a mirror. Intelligence allows an organism to navigate its environment, which gives it better chance of finding food/avoiding danger/finding a mate. Early organisms had very primitive sensory systems - specialised cells that detect pressure and let the organism know that it has bumped into something. As these systems became more complex, special nerve cells evolved that allowed more complex transmission of information, becoming a central nervus system, and finally developing into a brain.
The brain allowed an orgnism to dedicate cells to processing information recieved, and coordinating responses to information. Things like movement (walking etc) are examples of this (your walking is controlled by your spine, more or less, which is why you can walk without actually 'thinking' about it.) As sensory organs become more complex (eyes etc) then the amount of information being gathered becomes more complex, and so the brain gradually evolves into higher levels. Basically, you have the spine, the brainstem (controlling your heart, lungs etc,) your cerebal cortex, and your prefrontal cortex. Proceeding from the spine to the prefrontal cortex is like climbing a chain of command, with the prefrontal cortex more or less being the 'seat of consciouisness.'
So, being able to interact with the environment is all well and good, but the brain needs to do some pretty tricky stuff in order to be successsful. It needs to be able to represent certain features of the environment - food, predators and mates - in order to interact with them. It is a substantial step to go from seeing a big brown blob to knowing that you're looking at a loaf of bread. Simply being able to rerpesent the environment around us is not by itself useful at all. This is perhaps the most important part. We have to be able to represent ourselves in order to interact with the environment at all. If we don't have a representation of our bodies and our needs then we cannot hope to do anything useful with the loaf of bread. As you look along a 'chain of intelligence' from simple bacteria to humans, you see increasing self-awareness. Our level of self-awareness allows us to not only eat the bread in front of us, but to plan ahead. We have a concept of 'this is me' and we know that we have been us since we were born and that we will still be us next year. This allows us to plan into the future for our future survival - we can plan to plant more wheat so that we may harvest it, grind it, cook it so that in a few month's time the person that is me will be able to eat a loaf of bread.
It's pretty crazy, really. Our whole ego and conscious 'sense of self,' which mainly resides in the profrontal cortex (roughly speaking) allows us to have beliefs, desires and emotions. It is still incredibly complex to understand exactly how our brains are able to do this, but when you realise that our brains consist of well over a trillion neurons, each capable of possessing 1,000 to 10,000 synapses (connections to other neurons) it is no wonder that we have trouble understanding the detail. It is one thing to use a computer to send an email, but another to understand how the computer's electrical current is manipulated in ways to represent binary code, which in turn represents pixels, representing font and colour and buttons. It's a bit of a rough comparison, but it's worth noting.
Basically, our consciousness is a form of governance over our bodies that allow us to survive by means of complex tasks. We've evolved to a point where we can use our consciousness not only to survive, but to create art and technology (creativity is arguably our greatest evolutionary advantage.) Sorry about the long post, but I hope it kind of made sense to a few people.
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