: : : I'm not sure what you mean by

: : "But to get self-consciousness a kind of split consciousness is needed."

: : Is this from Sagan's "Dragons of Eden" or possibly "Bocca's Brain"?

: : You lost me here. Help.

: I think that self-consciousnes requires one consciousness to do the thinking and another to observe that one is thinking. : This is hypothetical, but it stems from the common experience that often we will do things unconsciously, so to speak. For example, when we are completely absorbed in some activity we loose all awareness of time or our environment. Then I think we are operating with a single consciousness, as I expect higher forms of non-human life do. : It takes a second source of consciousness to be aware of everything including what we are thinking. : Our logical thinking seems to be a classical physics effect, probably performed with collapsed quantum wave functions, whereas our awareness seems to me to be a coherent quantum effect stemming from uncollapsed wave functions that are invisible to us.

:::::: Interesting. I believe Freud addressed this as his delineation of the Conscious vs the Sub-conscious and led to his definition of the Id.

Zen Buddhism has a concept of "being" as opposed to "thinking about being", and certain modernisitic Christian faiths have adopted the "Living in the now" approach although I can't recall which one(s).

It's interesting also how many time I've heard someone say "I've never felt more alive" then when engaged in some activity that requires full attentention to the task at hand...like skydiving, or rock climbing or some other activity where significant risk is involved.

As to your hypothesis on the quantum aspects of all this, well, we do have to come up with some explanation for just what constitutes "thought" don't we. I think I'll reserve judgement on quantum wave collapse as a cause however if you don't mind, but it does ring a bell so to speak, and I can see where you're coming from here even if I can't, as yet, say I buy into it.