In attempting to explain consciousness¹, delving ever deeper into the structural components of the brain is unlikely to reveal the spring from which consciousness flows. Consciousness is to the living being as Culture is to a civilisation, it is the synergistic result of interactions between all the components of the living being or civilisation. Culture and Consciousness are the result of all the messages that flow among the components of the system.

It is no accident that individual conscious experiences are sufficiently similar for individuals to reach agreement about the shared characteristics of the environmental milieu they inhabit. Each individual within a species is equipped with similar sensory apparatus that produces essentially the same inputs to the brain. As usual, every individual is unique and therefore subject to slightly different sensory experience, though not so different as to cause disagreement about colours or tastes and such like. Also, each brain is slightly different, modified by different life experiences, and influenced by the culture in which it finds itself — as such, these differences produce different conscious experience for every individual.

Consciousness is the culture of the entity, its outputs influence the Culture of the civilisation in which it lives; in turn, the Culture of the civilisation influences the individuals of whom the civilisation consists. As a whole, it is a closed system that feeds upon itself, reaching a stability in each age of its existence.