As you are reading this, you are conscious of it; you are experiencing these words as part of your private inner life. At the same time, you are probably feeling some emotions and there may be some thoughts and images going through your mind. You are "conscious". We all know what consciousness is, yet it defies satisfactory definition. I may say that consciousness is my own inner world that only I can access; it's what makes me different to anybody else. I may also use the words "awareness" and "free will" when trying to define consciousness. I am unconscious at night when asleep but, when morning comes I become conscious again. Yet, even when awake, I experience different levels of consciousness: my mind goes into "autopilot mode" while I'm doing housework or watching yet another rerun of "The Simpsons", but I may suddenly hear a car alarm going off in the street and my consciousness is suddenly focused on the task of finding out what's going on.
Varying degrees of consciousness also appear in the animal kingdom, but human consciousness - with its symbolic thought, huge mental capacity and rich inner landscape is unique in the biological world. But are there even higher levels of consciousness? Is the entire universe a conscious entity? Obviously I cannot answer such questions - particularly since I don't have a clear definition of what consciousness really is - but I think it might be interesting to explore it.
I believe that individual consciousness emerges when an individual has the ability to monitor its/his/her own thoughts. Mind and consciousness are holistic concepts and we cannot search for consciousness among individual brain cells. Trying to understand mind by analyzing individual brain cells is as futile as trying to understand how a human body functions, by analyzing its atomic constituents. Different levels of consciousness - and indeed higher levels - can arise when individual consciousnesses join forces. In nature, honey bees are an interesting example. Individual honeybees are capable of high levels of cognition - maybe even some kind of individual consciousness. Yet, when they are in a hive, they appear to lose their individuality and become embodied into the group in such a way that the entire hive becomes conscious. Somehow, the hive seems to take on a mind of its own. It becomes like a brain, with the individual bees analogous to neurons, signalling to each other using mechanisms that are not clearly understood. It has been noted that a single honey bee has a memory of six days and an average life span of 6 weeks, but an entire hive has a memory of three months.
Just as "hive consciousness" emerges from an interaction between individual conscious bees, so-called "herd behaviour" emerges in humans as a result of social interaction. We regularly see large groups of humans behaving as a single entity. We see it in a stock market crashes where there is frenzied selling of shares, and in a stock market bubble where everybody is greedily buying. It has been seen in cult followings such as with Beatlemania, Nazi Germany, religious cults and weird fashions (remember those ridiculous fashions of the 1970s?). Now, with the ever-growing popularity of the Internet, humans all around the world are linked more strongly than ever before. The Net is helping to bring cultures together into a kind of global village. There is faster and more efficient communication between scientists and students around the world. Just recently I wanted to find some particular information about Leonardo Da Vinci; I logged onto an appropriate chat group, asked the question, and was directed to the information I needed by a person who lives thousands of kilometres away from me. Of course, all these positive characteristics of the Internet are clouded by unpleasant aspects such as cyber-smut, cyber-con-artists and false information, but that's beside the point.
Humans seem to conform and do things just because everybody else is doing them; it appears that this behaviour is hardwired into our brains. Or maybe there is a force that compels us to group together. With this last comment, I do not wish to invoke God or any kind of metaphysics, but there does seem to be something in the universe that tends to bring us together.
In the 1940s, a researcher with the snappy name of George Zipf showed that population growths in cities around the world obey a "mathematical power law" as do the flickering lights of quasars, the occurrences of earthquakes and the economics of stock markets. To me, this is a staggering observation; we humans exercise our individual free wills when deciding on where to live, yet, as a whole, we are subject to the same laws as everything else in the universe. I believe that free will is nothing more than an illusion brought about by consciousness. Seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza once wrote in a letter, "If a falling stone were conscious, it would believe it was falling of its own free will."
The following is from the Bhagavad-Gita (3:27-28). Kirshna says:
"All actions are wrought in all cases by the qualities of Nature only. He whose mind is deluded by egoism thinks: 'I am the doer'.
But he who knows the truth, O mighty-armed Arjuna, about the divisions of the qualities and their functions, knowing that the Gunas as senses move amidst the Gunas as the sense-objects, is not attached."
In other words, it is the forces of the universe that work with their instruments - our bodies, our molecules.
Albert Einstein did not believe in a personal God so we would call him an atheist. However, he did speak of having a kind of religious experience which he called "the cosmic religious feeling":
"The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the subliminity and marvelous order which reveal themselves in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison, and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole."
We, as individuals and conscious beings, are just a part of a much bigger entity - the universe. We are part of the physical universe and are made of the stuff of the universe; we originated from the one source. The late astronomer Carl Sagan would say that we are "children of stardust". Is there some form of unified universal mind that transcends our normal human consciousness? A lot of people have felt themselves being lifted into a "higher state of consciousness"; this has been achieved through meditation, prayer and mind-altering drugs. Such experiences include feelings of oneness with the universe and freedom from everyday thoughts and anxieties. I've personally had such experiences a few years ago while meditating. Can such feelings be explained as just tricks of the mind, or can it be that true consciousness is masked by our brains' physical processes? I believe the latter and I believe that we are just one component of a conscious evolving universe. I mentioned earlier that consciousness arises when one is able to monitor one's own thoughts. In the case of humans (and other animals), having thoughts requires the possession of a brain - a kind of biological computer, but certainly not a digital computer. Is the universe (which includes us biological creatures) a kind of computer?
After the work of great men like Galileo and Newton, the image of the universe was that of a clockwork, initially set in motion by God's hand but now running, on its own, toward a predetermined outcome. However with the discovery, in the 20th century, of quantum mechanics and its statistical nature, it is no longer satisfactory to think of a deterministic clock. The universe can, in fact, be likened to a computer. The matter in the universe can be likened to computer hardware, and the laws of physics can be likened to the software. As the universe evolves dynamically in time, information is being processed. However, given the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, the ultimate "output" of this cosmic computer is yet to be determined.
In fact, it has even been suggested that black holes "compute". This may come as a surprise to a lot of people since it had long been thought that any object that fell into a a black hole would be assimilated, and all information about that object would be lost forever; nothing escapes a black hole, so there may be input but no output. Then, in the 1970s, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes do indeed radiate, by using a quantum mechanism; they have an output. However, Hawking believed that this radiation was of a random nature. This is hardly an acceptable analogy of a computer, with information going in, and random garbage coming out. But current theory suggests that this radiation is not random at all; in fact, it is a processed version of any information that has fallen in; now, that's more like the behaviour of a computer.
The physicist Freeman Dyson once said that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of the universe. I think he just may be right and, if the universe is not infinite, humanity may one day be able to unlock its secrets.
Thoughts about science, human nature and other stuff.
