I’ve asked
to my philosopher Iacopo to define what conscience is for him – as the atheist
he claims to be – and this is what he told me (in the best English I can use):
1) What is
consciousness? It’s our ability to understand that "something
happens" and, in greater or lesser extent, the ability to understand
pretty well "what actually happens".
2) What is
the self? The ability to distinguish between what is happening around us and what happens to us, which are the awareness of being a person with a body
that is distinguished from the "rest of the world" and other people
in particular.
3) So
defined, consciousness and self-consciousness are not things that are transmitted
in a conscious way among the generations, they are phenomena that emerge from
the physical structure and in particular from the brain, which has been refined
through the natural selection of species.
4) What we
hand down our culture that condenses the experience of the generations that
have gone before us and allows to better use and develop our consciousness,
meaning the ability to understand and interpret correctly what happens to us
and to act appropriately in the circumstances we are in. In this sense, our collective knowledge amplifies our individual consciousness.
5) The most
amazing thing of our world is that in nature have appeared living beings, i.e.
beings can manifest a behavior that reacts to external stimuli in order to increase
the chances to preserve the self, and that can replicate in a fairly faithful
way, but that’s open to the possibility
of random changes. The first living beings had to be unicellular but even with
these characteristics.
6) Random changes
normally help the individual to survive and reproduce, but exceptionally changes
may instead help the individual to increase his or her chances of reproducing,
transmitting positive mutations to the next generation. In this way, the
positive changes - although they are a small minority - continue to accumulate
through the generations, while the majority of adverse changes disappear
quickly. And the same goes from bacteria
to humans.
7) The
development of a brain capable of producing a consciousness is part of this
continuous accumulation of constructive changes. The emergence of
self-consciousness gave to mankind the crucial tool to control nature and be
able to change the environment to suit the needs. The accumulation of technical
information represents our cultural baggage that we transmit through
generations.
8)
Unfortunately, our instinct to conquer and exploit nature has been suitable for
us to survive in the struggle of the selection of species, but it isn’t suited
to survive in a world that’s now overcrowded and with limited resources as ours
has become. To adapt to this new state of affairs, requires intelligence and a
firmness which contrast with our primal instinct. The most difficult test for
our survival is to be able to win over our rationality or our instinct. Not a
test that gives an outcome to be taken for granted.
I truly
believe that our future leaders will have to be able to manage the social
outcome of decisions that will have to be made to ensure the survival of our
kind in such a world of rapidly extinguishing resources, I guess that we best
give a very high education to our children to ensure the survival of human kind
(already
in existence since few millions of years).
- http://in5d.com/10-scientific-studies-that-prove-consciousness-can-alter-our-physical-material-world/
- http://www.crystalinks.com/consciousness.html
- https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630190-500-the-human-universe-does-consciousness-create-reality/
- http://thespiritscience.net/2015/04/05/proof-that-consciousness-creates-reality-welcome-to-the-matrix/
- http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/11/11/consciousness-creates-reality-physicists-admit-the-universe-is-immaterial-mental-spiritual/
- https://www.quora.com/Does-consciousness-create-reality
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biocentric_universe
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