Subjective Perception

     Suppose you are the parent of a family of five that is facing poverty.  You need to support yourself, your partner, your two teenage children and your 4 month-old newborn, and yet you have almost no money, no job, and are soon to be forced from your home.  You are desperate for cash, so that your family may be kept safe and warm, and to compensate, you attempt to rob a convenient store.  Using what you can scrape together, you purchase a sidearm with the serial number filed off, and break into the nearby 7-11 a couple of hours after closing.  Upon entry, you begin to search for the manager's office where you convict a safe brimming with monetary notes will be hidden, and, after a few minutes, you happen upon it and burst into the room.  You find yourself faced with the manager of the store, whose facial expression is contorting into a mixture of confusion, realisation, and consequential anger as he comes to understand the scope of the situation.  He begins to argue with you, and you come to learn that this man's family is as well about to be forced from their home due to a lack of funds, and that stealing from his store would essentially sentence his family to life in a box in the alley leading off from 3rd Street.  After a brief yet passionate dissertation, he steps in front of his safe, and declares that he will die before he allows you access to it.  Herein you are faced with a decision.  Will you kill the man, rob his store of its money, and save your family?  Or will you let him live, and submit your family, your newborn child, to a life on the cold streets, one which will in all likelihood kill them? 
     The situation described above is one riddled with conflicting morality.  On one side, the man is breaking a number of laws and threatening to kill the manager of the convenient store in order to save his family.  On the other, the manager needs the money he makes from the store to save his own family, and in comes a man who is threatening to take that all away from him.  The only absolute truth to this hypothetical occurrence is that the man is attempting to commit armed robbery.  This is what I will refer to as an objective constant, because the action is the same regardless of a given individual's relation to it.  What can and does change is the perception of the morality of the actions.  One could argue that this man is committing these crimes to essentially save the lives of him and his family, and his actions are therefore justified.  It could also be said that he is still committing a violent and criminal act, and no end morally justifies those means.  This variation is what I will refer to as subjective perception, because it is relative to the morality of the given individual.  However, in order for the aforementioned individual to form an opinion, or to acquire a subjective perception of the situation, his brain must first gather information regarding it, and does so through what is known as cognition.  
     Cognition, or the state of sensing, refers to a number of different faculties, or processes, of the brain.  These processes are the ten senses (yes, ten), and are vision (sight), audition (hearing), gustation (taste), tactition (touch), olfaction (smell), thermoception (temperature), equilibrioception (balance), proprioception (spatial sense, or your body's ability to recognise where it is and how it is positioned), nociception (pain), and interoception (the awareness of processes occurring within one's body).  In later posts, I will go into more depth concerning the senses, however for now I will say that being cognisant, or sensing something, does not mean you are consciously aware of it.  To clarify, I will use the visual system as an example.  According to Neil R. Carlson's The Physiology of Behaviour (a text which I have referenced in previous posts), the visual system is actually divided into two systems: the primitive visual system, and the mammalian visual system.  The individual is not aware of information, or stimuli, the primitive visual system gathers, however is conscious of stimuli the mammalian system receives.  As a point of reference, the primitive visual system is responsible for creating the illusion that our eyesight and eye movement is smooth, along with perceiving reaching movements with the hands and other simple behaviours. 
     In my post entitled "The Decision Reflex," I described what I hypothesise to be the decision making mechanism of the brain.  The frontal lobe begins to formulate a plan or strategy, and then communicates with other lobes in order to gather more information about how the plan could be executed, and that communication is what causes the individual to become aware of it.  This sense of communication between regions of the cerebrum is known as interoception, and can also refer to sensations such as being aware of indigestion or muscle cramps.  Moreover, a stipulation of mine that I did not reference in my previous post is that the frontal lobe is almost constantly forming plans, and that we are, in actuality, hardly ever aware of it.  The idea communication between different regions of the nervous system is required in order for the individual to become conscious of something, such as decision making or a reflex, can be extended to include cognition and the senses.  That is, I hypothesise that in order to be considered conscious, either some, most, or all of the sensory systems must be communicating with each other.  Using the decision reflex as an example, I would convict that the individual would become aware of the frontal lobe's plan to, for instance, get pizza, and its consequent interface with the other lobes of the brain in order to further define its plan if the individual sensed something, a stimulus, using one of his ten senses, that the brain could associate with the frontal lobe's developing plan (such as the olfactory sensation of pizza), then the individual would become aware of that plan.  I will refer to this phenomenon as multiphasic cognitive relay, because the senses are relaying information between each through multiple different connection points, which creates as well as accounts for what I consider to be the illusion of consciousness.
    The nature of consciousness is, as I had said in my introductory entry, perhaps one of the most enigmatic conventions in the universe.  It has been debated by the philosophers and scientists of classic Greece, the renaissance period, the modern day world, and everywhere in between.  I, however, convict that consciousness is an illusion, a blending of the senses created by the functions of the brain, and I will use my next series of entries to further develop my hypothesis into one that might be considered plausible.

References

Carlson, Neil R. Physiology of Behavior. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2011. Print.