Consciousness

My previous post on being a bird has brought me to my next question - are all of man's troubles (or good times) only due to his consciousness?

Before we can answer the above question we have to first understand man’s quest to understand consciousness. What is consciousness?

I got this from Wikipedia:

“Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment. Many philosophers divide consciousness into phenomenal consciousness which is experience itself and access consciousness which is the processing of the things in experience (Block 2004).”

I am not well versed in spiritual or philosophical topics so I will approach this as a naïve person from the outside. I have a modest awareness of studies by the ancient Hindus on the soul – the ‘Atman’, which is related to self and an awareness of the self. This shows that such enquiries are not new and have been with us ever since recorded history. I just wonder what an early hominid might have thought about this. Was he aware of his self? There is no way to tell this as all of recorded history from that time is only in terms of cave paintings and other such observations about the nature that surrounded them. The first such notions come from the Egyptians and their theories about the soul and how it transcends into another world (which implies that they were thinking about souls and themselves).

Another of my observations on this is how and when a child reacts to seeing their image in a mirror. If you consider that the brain evolves (just like the body does) in evolutionary terms, i.e. from conception onwards in stages of brain power that can be termed equivalent to various lower species, then by the time of birth, they would be equal in brain power to an early hominid. After that, any non-instinctive development in brain capacity is due to the intellectual skills gained as a human. A child that recognizes its own face after one year of post-delivery growth is probably representing millions of years of evolution in the human brain to a point where the self was realized. Does this then imply that all lower (talk about a superiority complex!) forms of life do not have self-awareness? This could very well be true as very few species understand the concept of a mirror. The few examples that come to mind are chimps and dolphins (what they say in the Hitchhikers guide is true?).

And that brings me to my question for today – is it beneficial to have a consciousness and then worry about it?

What if I had all the skills required to survive as a human and not have any self-awareness? How would the world be then? We would also be just cogs in nature’s grand plan of just running things the way they are with adaptations to suit the environment. Would that have allowed a different species to take over as the dominant species? And is being a dominant species dependent on being self-aware?

What are your thoughts? I would love to hear….

Life and choices

I just got another comment on one of my older posts and this got me excited to write once again (Thanks Sujana!). I had this theme in mind for quite some time so here goes:

I bought the soundtrack of a new Telugu movie called 'Super' which I heard is a remake of a Hindi movie called 'Dhoom'. Anyways, there is a song in the movie whose lines go

"Debbaki manishai puttaaka,
batakaali sachche daaka"

For those who do not understand Telugu - that roughly translates into

"The instant you are born as a man
You have to live till you die" (No Choice is implied)

This got me thinking (this song of all as a seed of thought - what do you say?!)

Why is this so?

In most cultures and societies suicide is considered a sin or taboo and I wont go into that topic altogether. What I want to talk about is the lack of choice - the feeling that you are trapped.

I was just thinking of a hard drive - you buy a new computer, it works fine for some time and then starts to become sluggish (thank you Microsoft). You then have to defragment it or wipe it clean and install everything new. How does one do this with one's life?

One may have lived (say) 20 odd years and then one feels the need to rewind and change everything or just start from scratch - rewrite all childhood memories and teenage anxieties - but there is no way to do this. The compulsion to continue on with baggage that one does not like is either self-imposed or imposed by society.

How do people react to this? In my view, you have the carefree types who just shrug it off and continue, or you could have the depressed types who make the rest of their lives (and most likely the lives of those around them) miserable. There might be a few others who might impose their dreams and aspirations, or at least how they want to rewrite their lives, onto others (their children?). Most people are probably somewhere in between and do not even think about such things. For them, life is just to be lived without any questions, just moving on from day to day and accepting all that comes along.

So the question again rises - is man bound by his society to live a life that is already laid out?

Let me explore this thought a little bit more. Let us consider a natural phenomenon of a species reproducing and continuing through its off spring. The main driver of this phenomenon is that the species should continue. To that end, the parents make sure (either consciously or not) that the best possible scenario is maintained for the off spring. The off spring should be physically strong and also mentally well evolved to adapt to changes in environment. In the case of humans, we have laid more emphasis on the mental evolution as a key to our success. So from one civilization to another we have practiced skills that helped us live our lives successfully so that we can produce off spring who can in turn survive that much more easily (a very reductionist view, but one that might hold some truth). And we have now hit upon a time in our evolution where just physical skills (of say being able to make a pot well) are just not enough and we train our minds through almost 25 years of intellectual education to achieve a life of stability.

This, I feel is the constraint of society and nature as a whole that particularly makes a human being's life more difficult and that much more of a trap. As a comparison, a bird's life has probably not changed as much in the same time frame. It still has to acquire the skills of flying and being able to find its food but not much more. It surely does not have to learn how to use a new version of Office every five or so years!

To cut a long story short - I want to be born now as a bird and lead a simple free life!