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!

Are all blogs narcissistic?

As soon as I posted my last blog I got this question - "Are all blogs narcissistic?" I know this medium is supposed to be an outlet to express our views and opinions and anything and everything (as I am doing right now). But then, should it be considered as unsolicited advise? Should'nt the reader say - who are you to tell me about this topic? or maybe - why should I care about what you have to say?

Is it enough for us to say - I will just post and I dont care if somebody agrees with me or not. But then I am assuming that all of us post a blog only if we are an authority on a particular subject (and I am not on philosphical ramblings) or because we are seeking approval from the readers. By seeking approval are we being immodest or just trying to raise our own self-esteem?

As I have already mentioned that I am rambling, I will ramble along some more....

Is being raised as an Indian, with an associated baggage of culture and upbringing, force us to be modest? Is that why, when I reached the US, I was encouraged to speak up about myself. Is it true to say that in the western (or non-Indian) cultures you can be heard only by speaking out yourself. Expecting someone else to praise you or being modest is not going to help. So then, does it always mean that you have to have a certain amount of self-love - narcissism to appreciate yourself and talk about it?

Which brings me back to titular question - "Are all blogs narcissistic?" Who out there has an answer? Please speak up!

Satisfaction

Now I feel satisfied. I delibrately did not inform anyone that I started a blog. I guess I was just waiting for the random stranger to trawl by and leave a note. My inquisitive friend RK just could not resist clicking on my name in his blog to see where it leads (am I right?). But that is good, as it has got me my first comment.

Reminds me of my first email reply. Remember those days when email was a novelty? I do. It was only Hotmail in those days and it was a privilege to get an account.

Now that leads to my next random query - If I leave this posting like this, will the next comment be from a stranger or from buddy again? The (un?)lucky person to comment on this blog will get to hear the story of how I got my first email id and other very random memories.

First post

This blog started out as a necessity and I dont know where it is going. Needed an account login to post a reply to my friend's blog (http://rkalsoruns.blogspot.com/) and created one for myself in the process.

Cheppalani vundi, gunde vippalani vundi. But then, cheers to my first post with absolutely nothing to say (yet)!