Understanding what consciousness is, and the way
that we as “intelligent” beings perceive our world is simply the most damning
intellectual pursuit available to us as human beings. It is a yearning that
lies deep within even the most callow and insincere among us.
Philosophers and cretins alike are at the mercy of our unanimous inability to
look around and intrinsically apprehend what it is that we are. This
species-defining introspective journey for knowledge about ourselves exists at
the intersection of our most important fields of inquiry.
It is a ponderous desire that bridges between
all of our great disciplines; mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology,
philosophy, theology, etc. We can hypothesize the way that brain
chemistry and neural architecture function to create the way we think and
interpret the world around us. We are able to determine the myriad of
chemicals that course through our veins and arteries depending on whether or
not we feel happy, frightened, or morose. Philosophy allows us to perform
hopefully objective thought experiments and to develop ideology about the way
our own brains analyze and decipher the world that exists both around us and
within us. Understanding the minute interactions between atoms and
their constituent pieces allows us to speculate on how our own macroscopic
world functions.
These are interpretations and perspectives that
cannot be consciously accounted for as a result of our own human
perspectives. We know as scientists and mathematicians that there is a world
around us that is terrifyingly alien and uncompromisingly strange. For
example, beams of light function concomitantly as both particles and as
waves. Nearly all of the energy and matter in the universe is of a form
that is completely undetectable and indescribable by science. Quantum
particles behave differently depending on whether or not they are being
directly observed. In the words of J.B Haldane, “Now my own
suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer
than we can suppose.”
Despite our best efforts and our most
high-minded desires, the world around us is in many ways more awe-inspiring
than it was during the time of our first ancestors. In many ways it seems
as though the more we know about the world around us, the less we know about
the one inside us. Indisputable facts of human knowledge are in no way
easily mixed with our human consciousness, and in many ways they are directly
contradictory to it. We can say unequivocally that the universe around us
is 14.6 billion years old, and is constantly expanding at an increasing
rate. These are observable, justifiable, reviewable axioms of our human
knowledge. But they are not concepts and ideas that sincerely inhabit
us. They have not taken hold of our overarching perception.
Culturally it is has become beneficial for most
of us to develop a conscious shield against much of our knowledge, like a kind
of necessary amnesia. Many of the most important pieces of information
that we carry within us as humans have become abeyances, stuck in a sort of
limbo or state of willful disuse. We know without any doubt that the
universe contains on the order of billions of other planets and star systems in
addition to earth. We know that there is a person somewhere on our own
planet dying of thirst, or being savagely raped, or siphoning money from honest
people. These are not debatable interpretations, they are verifiable
realities. And yet they do not seem to affect us in any lasting,
measurable way.
All too often it is impossible for us to
conceptualize the totality of these facts and pieces of knowledge at a
synchronic point of thinking. This unfortunate hindrance mitigates the
truth and honesty that we as intelligent beings are able to glean from the
world around us.
We revel in forgetting things whether or not
they are perceived as good or bad, because they complicate our view, they can
fog up the lens with which we see the world. We cannot process the
totality of information that results from knowing that violent massacres occur
all over the world with a huge degree of frequency, and that neutrinos
constantly pass through our body uninhibited at hundreds of kilometers per
second. We have the ability as humans to distinguish these facts from one
another, and apply labels like good, bad, interesting, and off-putting.
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