The Purpose of Consciousness I

 No person can be conscious of, and therefore say anything about, anything that they have never experienced. A person cannot image a winged horse unless he has seen them or has been told about them. A person can know that Paris is the capitol of France if he has been taught by reliable teachers who have themselves been taught by books that they have read written by reliable historians. A person can also assume a something is real by his use of a logical deduction which is a type of experience. Democritus logically calculated that atoms had to be real. He was wrong about how atoms are constructed and how they operate, but modern scientists have discovered that his basic idea happens to be true. The point of this is that any thought object or sense object that enters the consciousness of humans has been experienced whether real or not real.

A person can disbelieve that wings and horses are real if he has never seen them, and even if he distrusts his teachers who told him they are real. Nevertheless, he can still imagine a winged horse because his teachers have made him experience wings and horses as ideas. A person can also disbelieve that Paris is the capitol of France if he does not trust his teachers. Yet, he will always know about Paris and France because he has experienced them as ideas. A person can also experience a logical miscalculation that results in a judgment that something exists which in fact does not exist. At one time, certain scientists deducted that light has to have some medium to be propagated through space, and they called that medium "aether." But later other scientists discovered by experiment that aether does not exist. Yet, aether still remains as an idea in the human mind even though now it means nothing. Any idea that enters human consciousness has to be real even if it means nothing.

A person who disbelieves that wings and horses exist has nevertheless experienced them if he has been told about them. A person who disbelieves that Paris is the capitol of France nevertheless has experienced that fact as an idea. The theory that atoms exist was at first just a real idea of a possible substance, but when atoms were discovered to be real, they became real as a material substance. Yet, atoms happen to be real in either case. If atoms had never been discovered to be real, the idea of them would still be real as meaning nothing. Aether was considered to be a possible substance in space, but when scientists discovered that aether does not exist, it became a real idea of nothing. Aether was considered to be a real possible substance, but it became a real nothing. The point to be made is that whatever enters human consciousness happens to be made real by that consciousness as an idea, a material object, or as the real and useful idea of nothing. Ideas are just as real as are material objects for the same reason that a picture taken by a camera is just as real as are the camera and its film. The very purpose of consciousness is to make everything it experiences real, even the real and useful idea of nothing.

Every idea, every feeling, and every sense object is made real by consciousness. Everything that becomes subject to consciousness is experienced by consciousness. Everything experienced by consciousness, whether believed or disbelieved, becomes real to consciousness because consciousness puts it all to some useful purpose. A person might disbelieve that wings and horses exist even if he were shown pictures of them. He would consider his real ideas of wings and horses to be equal to nothing within his ignorant reality. But if he imagines a winged horse, he would be right that it does not exist even though his reality is ignorant. If a person who disbelieves that Paris is the capitol of France were taken to Paris and shown that Paris is indeed the capitol of France, and he accepted that fact as true, then his consciousness would expand his reality.