“The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.” – Carl Jung
Conscious meaning ”knowing with”. An other entity within ourselfs, following closely what we do. Consciousness and language opening multitudes of mirroring minds inside. Knowing other’s feelings akin to your own, sensing me, seeing others, as theory of mind. Knowing together we call empathy. Knowing your own experience of experiencing like multiple chess layers and beyond. Multimirrors of knowing. Our mind lets out free ranging autonomus existences, wills of their own roaming inner worlds, talking to us in dreams laying out sceneries testing possible outcomes unimagined. Consciousness and dreams, free meetings in our own inner cosmos. Infinite worlds of our own.
Ancient times a genious was a twin companion. A mental guardian, present there in dire straits, an always trusted friend to rely on. We now say a representation of our wiser unconscious, yes, but an ever reliant companion in ancient times threatful and dire, it needed faith. Dependent on the better of you, faith in your own faith.
Multipe recorded instances, people’s reports of dangerous adventurous circumstanses, tells of fighting cold, starvation, long walks heading back to civilized areas when people experienced a guiding real companion, real as anything, right beside, talking to them, having long conversations, urging them to safety, without this stable faith coming from within they would have been lost to dispare. Our nature of consciousness is as if we have a multitude of theaters and characters within at disposal. Friends, foes, allies. We by them see possible scenes of now then and the future. Juggling with what there is and what is possible. In faith. Fair hallucinations but real manifestations of our mind.
Experience experience. Contemplating contemplation— Consciousness. Our first mental multimirror after ages of meeting only our vague fleeting image face reflection in the pond.
Consciousness is a mere fraction of our total mind. But powerful ever important possessor of the Grand Veto. Our ability to say no. Thus consciousness subsequently leading us to our will. Conscious will. The great force of survivor. Conscious but with an enormus hubris. Consciousness takes credit thinking it is does all the work. It does’nt. Robert Stickgold, senior dream researcher, says the unconscious teams up for 99.9 % of our thinking. A grand celebration to the unconscious. My hero.
So strongly we believe the very foundations of society rests upon consciousness.
One of the beautiful mythological allegoric tales from early chapters of Genesis is the Fall. It tells the symbolic story of how we humans became conscious. A story that have preoccupied and puzzled christian mind and art throughout time.
Adam and Eve living innocent free like animals in moral freedom in paradise, the persian word for a lushly garden. All was well until a symbolic snake proposes a bite of an apple from a certain tree of knowledge, by God a forbidden tree to eat from. A fruit like magic gives one knowledge, awareness of oneself and makes one able to differ good from evil. Forbidden, it turnes out, if they want to stay forever innocent in animal paradise. Without moral pain. Without reflection. A qurious Eve shares the apple with Adam, a temptation of enlightment, from this knowledge they for the first time look upon each other as seen from the other. Forever. This knowledge turned out to be our consciousness.
The beginning of shame, guilt, judgement, the ordeal of choice, doubt, calculated love, deception—but also the invention of written history, the skill of empathy, philosophy, the megatheater of war, the greek Parnassus, the cathederal, the airplane.
The beginning of the theater that’s only your’s. Sitting in the rows, enjoying your own performace on the stage. Consciousness the enabler of exctacy, the discoverer of death. Your own drama is played out on the stage, as well sitting in the salon. The famous russian-born ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev had the ability to watch himself as seen from the audience while dancing at the stage. This doubling, sometimes tripling or even more of perspectives is part and parcel of the conscious experience whether we are aware of our mind’s juggle stunt or not.
A puzzle, the mystery of this allegory is the snake. What is it’s motive? We get no hints in the story, and thinkers have made many interpretations, one as the devil trying to destroy God’s creation. My own take is it’s the representation of pure animal instinct, curiosity, nature’s living force, the inavitable future. Nature itself forces consciousness into history.
And now AI, the dawning of the second mythological story of the Fall.
FUNDAMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Fundamental Consciousness could be seen as the important ability to predict. For that you need information, sentience, memory and pattern recognition. Cellular enteties have such fundamental ability. Caution, curiousity, madness to explore.
Anesthetist Stuart Hameroff, mathematician Roger Penrose and biologist Michael Levin, all three at the forefront of the research raises questions and points to circumstances that must be taken into concideration on intelligence at lower levels not taken seriously before.
Together Orch OR, high frequency brain waves, cells with free will, promise new paradigms perhaps. Lining up with our intuitional blurry soft way of thinking/feeling megamultitasking brain. As we percieve.
ANIMAL CONSCIOUSNESS
We now also must define higher animal consciousness as a defined concept of it’s own. Animals can certainly forsee the future. We now probably have to divide consciousness into three; -cellular, -animal and -human.
Serious speculations on cosmic intelligence or awareness or consciousness or knowledge are now discussed. But here I hedge my bets.
HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS
How are we most fundamentally different from the animals? – By Talking. Awareness of Awareness is the expanded version we humans use.
We have all the traits animals have, but speech catapults us into a space of abstractions symbols story and myth. It enables us tell and highly appreciate stories.
Our mental world is criss-crossed in every dimension and direction by concepts patterns definitions as beautiful endlessly complex tapestry that’s supposed to mimmick our world.
In this context as a crucial tuchstone; has the language ability changed the circut of the brain or did something else before language affect the brain to facilitate language development. What about a child’s ease to sponge up words and language, does it not indicate a preparedness among the network of neurons ready for the task.
WAVES IN MIND
Electromagnetic radiation permiates throughout and within our brain. Megahertz, Gigahertz, Terahertz, Infralight Electromagnetic waves within our brains. Frequencies only recently subjected to more serious speculative theories about the function of the processes in the brain. We have our inside of electromagnetics as well as outside scull radiation, faint but detecable, some we neglect, some we recieve.
Adding the newly fresh Orch OR quantum microtubules theories from Hameroff and Penrose in the making.
It might change.
Much more continued and reiterated…