The human

To look at it from a somewhat philosophical point of view, the human body itself, or any organism, is like a form of nanotechnology.

But I think burnabowl just dropped some serious knowledge on our asses. I guess everything reflects consciousness in some form or another. And by that standard, assuming it's true, action and reaction itself is consciousness.

 

Gee this is very true... I'm more talking about human though though, how could a pile of minerals turn into.. me?

 

I'd look at it like this. the basic amino acids didn't really evolve into higher and higher degrees of sentience, but rather built upon themselves. cell upon cell, each its own living unit with its own form of consciousness, and united together in different ways becomes more functional and creates a being greater than themselves individually.

those piles of minerals were basically building blocks, that can be used to make anything. they were a form of life that through uniting became a greater form of life. the driving force behind it was consciousness. if you look at the cells of plants or animals, they really aren't any less amazing than we are. the things they carry out compared to how tiny they are is stunning.

the same cells comprise us. I as an individual am no more impressive than a single cell within me in terms of inexplicable natural life processes. to know that each cell within you is its own microcosm of existence, working tirelessly to partially make up your body and mind is overwhelming and humbling. to realize the magic and complexity of what occurs on a cellular level is to wonder how much the human being is capable of. our level of consciousness is a meticulously designed bio-computer made up of cells arranged in such a way to carry out the things we enjoy and take for granted.

and I believe that our purpose and efforts are no different than that of the cells we are made of: to partially comprise another "whole". with so much depth and complexity at each of these levels of life, the whole that we make up is so beyond our capacity to understand, the same way one cell in your body can't understand how magnificent you are. The cell just focuses on its tasks at hand, motivated by the desire to stay alive, which is an adequate definition of our existence.

don't really know if that answered your question, just my take on it:cheers2:

 

^and this part about partially comprising the whole is relevant to the acid experience. the sense of self, or ego, is dissolved in the same way the membrane around a cell would be thinned and for the cell to realize it's attached to billions of other creatures like it, comprising a higher entity.

it's easy for us as humans to buy into the idea that we are separate, individuated beings because of the perceived physical reality around us. the sense of self blocks us from feeling and seeing our connectedness. but the feeling of being in a concrete, fixed world is an illusion, a mental projection we perceive because of our neural wiring. this reality is just one frequency in a sea of quantum possibilites, one channel on an infinite intergalactic satellite dish.

it's important for the ego to maintain its position in our psyche, the same way the membrane around a cell needs to stay intact. the feeling of being separate and embodied motivates one to carry out life's processes, to ensure one's own survival. and when the cells stay alive we stay alive. as we stay alive our higher entity stays alive and so forth.

 

That's what I was looking for. Synergy.

 

I dont think people should be happy by looking for some post that supports their own view. This views must make sense. Quite frankly, they only make sense if we apply consciousness to cells, or to the whole universe. We as humans love to take concepts that exist in one part of teh world and suggest that they exist in the rest of teh world, using our imaginations to work out how or why, in the absence of their atual existance.

How did the mind come about from cells?

It might help to start considering the different sorts of minds that exist in teh world.

There is the most basic form of neural structure - ganglion of insects and molluscs, like a little biological computer that processes the environment and reacts.

moving up are more structured brains of fish and amphibians, which can process more information, or perhaps, have memories.

then are reptiles, that start to concieve their own actions. Reptiles have states of emotions like fear and excitement that go beyond the lower animals, probably due to a greater ability of emotions to attatch to memories or ingrained interpretations, instead of just occuring in the present.

the mamals gain a greater scope of identifying the world through emotions and relevance, by gaining concepts of status, of place. of novelty and skill. I believe mamals are very conscious like we are, but do not stop to react to their own thoughts. The crucial point is at which time or developmental step did humans phase into thinking totally within our heads, dealing with abstract notions that we can seemingly 'will' into existance.

One theory that I have faith in, is that language was the instigator of human thought. When humans started to use language, they were able to, in effect, talk to themselves. externalise themselves as symbols that can be communicated, to other people, or, to ones self.
And then?
Well once language took off, those humans who could use words effectively would have appeared much more attractive. those humans who could chose the right words would have a huge advantage over others, being able to manipulate and control the other apes.

Then through accidental symbolism, humans start to be able to create new thoughts that had nothing to do with the world as it directly influenced them. As soon as symbols become mainstream, humans start flourishing with abstractions and 'novelty'.

Once the basis for this abstract thought has been catalysed by accidental symbolism, the benefit of a bigger brain becomes apparant. only once humans have the ability to use and externalise their abstract thoughts will abstract thoughts begin to be a primary factor influencing who survives or not.

Once humans communicated, they would have started sharing knowlege and understanding, and those humans that can store the most diverse, spontaneous, and coherent symbols would have a large advantage over those humans that could not advance beyond their ways (like most animals - early humans would probably have stopped learning new abstractions at a certain point, and lose the abilty to continue adapting).

humans stay around in babiness and childhood for so much longer than otehr animals - because it is in this period that we absorb symbols like sponges. then we go through a period of creating new symbols (late adolescence to early adulthood), and this slowly dries up leading to merely the processing of symbols, aka late adulthood.

Most animals go through the first stages very quickly and efficiently, because only few symbols are necessary to them - those of food and their family and enemies etc. They just need to learn how to react to these symbols.

But humans put their eggs in the symbol basket.

When the world is full of symbols and everyone is communicating them all the time, the significance of 'new ideas' starts to become apparent, and thus, the ability for individuals to create new ideas that specifically improve their survivability, is a very important trait. Being able to not just react to the environment and situation around you, but to be able to react almost simultaneously to your whole bank of knowlege in order to come up with your resultant judgement or decision.

this is a way of looking at consciousness/our wills. it is like a window in which we can act within, making choices. ultimately, we feel as though we have free-will, but that is another issue. whether or not our wills are free or not, they are definately bound by principles. The -feeling- of free will is perhaps required to motivate people in a human world. I feel like I have free will but at the same time I can always see how my actions and judgements have been influenced directly by my experiences and my perceptions of them. When I lift my arm in the air to prove my own free-will, I must remember that at the time, the concept in my head was none other than 'do I have free will' and when this concept is in your head, it is likely that you would react in such a way to resolve this concept. So perhaps I lifted my arm out of free-will, or perhaps my way of responding to the concept of free-will is to do things that I consider marks of free-will. I have been taught to revel in my free-will. But I know that my will is never free from the world that precedes it. Thoughts are never totally random, they occur in the presence of stimuli. However, we are not actually aware of all the stimuli that influence our thoughts. thus, we believe our wills are free because we see only their expression, and not the specific factors that contributed to our initial notion in the first place.

 

Well our observations of teh minds of other organisms are just that-observations. We don't actually occupy their minds so we can hypothesize what they do or don't feel or think or remember. But all we have is external observation.

For example, when bugs start to excessively eat the leaves of certain plants, the plants will sense this and release pheramones into the air that attract bees and wasps that follow the scent and when they arrive, they kill teh bug that is eating teh plant's leaves. And of course the bees are essential tot eh pollination process.

Could be cousciousness.

Bu I see what you mean about us wanting to apply our beliefs to the universe.Like concepts of life and death, beginning and end and numerical ascension.

 

one distinction between us and other primates and animals is that animals follow their perception of what is needed to survive. humans on the other hand take perception of raw nature and turn it into concepts, and then base their lives and idea of happiness on those concepts. for some it would mean accumulating ever larger amounts of wealth and for others it would mean collecting enough spare change to get a 40 oz. of beer at the end of each day. Either person has the same capacity for happiness, it just depends on whether they meet the goals that they associate with it. The values are created (or inherited) first, then the degree of happiness depends on how much those goals were actualized.

If a person sees no distinction between survival and happiness, he has an emotional advantage because he's learned that even though he is capable of anything he can dream up, all he really wants is to be happy. When you're independently happy like that, mere survival is sufficient to fulfil your life's purpose. A person can in this case require no more provisions than a primate but feel total ecstasy and the range of good emotions to a greater degree (or at least to a human degree).

Of course we have a tendency to apply our beliefs to the universe, but the distinction is things you come up with on your own, want to believe, then apply to the universe or things that come to you when you are absent of concept and belief and don't care to solve the mysteries of the universe. If the pure energy of existence instills truth in us, it'll be by means of a conceptual idea. We can't accept the idea as final or feel we've figured it all out; in fact if it's from the source it should confound the hell out of you and make you think of dozens more questions. But that doesn't mean it's not genuine, and it doesn't mean you need to base your life around it.

Any thought we can entertain about the nature of existence is going to be at best incomplete because concept, logic are just crutches for us humans to give us a sense of purpose and reality. But if we want to exist in this life and still have some connection to the source, we need some kind of fusion between concept and being. Tibetan monks have compared that feat to balancing a needle on a thread in perpendicular fashion, and rocking the balanced needle back and forth along the string with nothing keeping the needle there but its center of gravity (did I explain that right?)

But anyway, the beliefs that give you a feeling of closure and finality (like the ones you find in churches) are the ones that are flaccid. the ones that create many more questions than they answer are viable because they are consistent with the ebb-and-flow contradictory nature of tangible existence.

 

This has turned into an excelent discussion as I hoped it would, I'm going back and reading the last 5 posts now that are about a page long each, I will update this post in a minute.

 

I was gonna quote part of Aristotle's One Man In The Universe where he speaks about the ends and means of happiness but you pretty much summed it up.

 

Closure and finality I believe will never be achieved, at least not in the time that humans exist (we will go extinct eventually). Simply because you cannot conceive of yourself. I don't know how I work so I can't understand how I work type of thing. This is not a search for the one final answer in my eyes, its a search to satisfy my ego, my ego is driving my body right now and it wants to know how it's body was invaded by my conscious.

I believe my ego (and yours) is a part of the human organism, a very advanced machine that is designed to survive, to live. The conscious that powers rational thought, ideas, and the thing that's partially dictating my actions in the world (with the translator of my ego between my conscious and this body that I loosely call mine). The conscious is the spirit of a person, it inhabits a body and leaves when the organism's cells fail and begin to break down (a thing we may call death).

I wish there was no ego, but it's will to survive that's been in the making for 6 billion years is strong enough to resist the effects of LSD or to withstand my (consciouses) wish to fully take over, and in fact this process may work in reverse from the time that we are born when a spirit enters the body until we are old and our spirit is leaving the body.

 

It's simple. The ability to harbor long-term memory is the answer. If you had say, the memory of a fish, which I believe is around 5-10 seconds, you'd have no reason to want to think about anything other than survival because 10 seconds later you wouldn't remember it. You'd live moment to moment, never questioning anything at all.

If you want a much more simple theory. Thought is nothing more than electrical signals, chemicals, and molecules running to and fro at speeds we can hardly imagine in our brain.

There's not really any mystery to it, we as humans just want there to be much more to our existance than what is.

 

There's one thing that I can still question, do animals have consciouses? I know that lots do but are theirs different from ours, if they're different why have certain spirits entered certain beings?

Here a single answer will lead to an infinite number of questions, and so it has progressed.

 

Ahh but there's plenty of mystery to it in my eyes; how do those fast moving molecules up there in this head that I seem to inhabit make thoughts and create reactions. I believe that they don't, I think what you speak of is what makes the ego function but not the spirit. This is no black and white matter to me.

 

I believe animals have consciousness. I don't know if it's in anyway similiar to ours though. Animals have the ability of language, something we have mastered through speech, but their language is reduced mainly to body language or a few choice noises they're able to yell.

I want to know if insects have a conscious mind, that's where my "theories" fall apart really. Insect' brains are extremely small, which means there's very little room for a memory of any kind, let alone any other thought capabilities. Are insects basically sleep walking all the time? Not aware that they are even alive? What about hives of insects like ants and bees, they're controlled by a single queen... so is the whole colony itself like one creature with the queen acting as the brain?

It's a strange question, one I'll probably never really have an answer for.

 

I understand what you're saying. I suppose I just look at things from a less meaningful manner. I'm still unsure if I believe a "spirit" even exists in us, but I'm not completely unconvinced.

 

this has been a great thread i need to go to sleep as im getting up early tomorrow to go shopping for things to start my shroom grow .

hope to continue tomorrow.

 

All the matter, together with all "living" things are part of only one organism and everything got its role to play. Maybe we think that we are special and that we have free will and mind and body, but we are just one part of the chain. I don't know why, but I think that begining of the chain is connected to its end, so it just circulates in circles, or spirales. If you break things on smaller parts, you will always find smaller part, and smaller, and at the end, you will find out that everything is made of the same thing, so you will find another beggining of the chain. Its all like a Carusel, we are all going in the circle, but everybody individually is also going up and down, we are part of the same "machine" or I like to call it creature. When you try DMT, this theory comes like a natural thing, so clearly. There is no time, space, or matter, we are all energy, vibration, om, we just change shapes the way the creature shift us.

 

Early religions had a symbol representing this very philosophy. The Oroborous, a snake eating it's own tail, represented many things one of which was cyclicality.

If you really want to think hard, what's beyond a quark? Nothing that we know of currently. Maybe our whole universe is just one giant quark and we're so tiny we can't see out that far, or switch it around we're so large we can't see the parellel universe inside the quarks of our universe.

The big problem for people with that scenario though is most people don't like the thought of Cyclicality because it doesn't offer them a true "meaning" to life. Not to say there has to be one.

There are limitless possibilities to what could and couldn't be, and the question of "Why" will probably never be answered.

 

Bend and be straight;
Empty and be full;
Wear out and be new;
Have little and gain;
Have much and be confused.
A man is born gentle and weak.
At his death he is hard and stiff.
Green plants are tender and filled with sap.
At their death they are withered and dry.
Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.
Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle.
A tree that is unbending is easily broken.
The hard and strong will fall.
The soft and weak will overcome.
- Tao Te Ching

The problem with understanding how consciousness, the awareness of being aware, came about, is that we will never know. It's impossible because it leaves no trace, other than everything that exists.
To think that the Universe just happened by chance, or that we INITIALLY came from nothing, not only makes absolutley no senese, but it would mean that we do not exist. Sure, Im very open to the idea that we came from a sort of absence but only because that absence is the very transitional point that we all experience before birth and after death. You exist, dont you? Did you exist before you were born? And what about after you die? You still exist, because you are composed of what is already here.
As for the Universe existing in infinity, I dont know that I feel that as a truth in my heart. When I look into explanations about the Big Bang and what have you, sure Im not very learned in science, I spent my time in high school hitting nitrous baloons and stopping time, feeling the heart beat of Nature. But I have experienced the Big Bang, I have experienced the end of the universe when it collapses in upon itself due to a lack of matter, the attraction of heavy bodies and a rapid rate of growth which cant keep up with itself.
We dont know what is outside of the universe, and that is enough to say that we dont know shit. We are here, it is very magical, and to label this magic as pure chance and give it different names and claim that we are on the verge of any breakthrough is just limiting your own experience. If you cant prove anything now, then there is no reason to assume that what we think we know is true. I can prove right now that a tree grows around a knot, or that botanical life is aware of itself, quite easily and even the scientific world has done experiments which validate that claim. There's nothing wrong with a scientific approach, nor with a mystical appraoch, but to act like we know anything is entirley wrong because we close ourselves off to reality.
I personally dont see how the Universe is just here by chance and that consciousness is a product of evolution, but I have my own reasons. I admit that Im not at all open to the idea that consciousness came from chemical reactions and a maturity of a the attraction and repulsion of particles, but again I have my own reasons. There is seeing things with microscopes and telescopes, and then there is seeing things from the heart, and if you really take a look around you and can not sense a presence of some kind of love, you should really look a little harder. It is not imagination when you learn how to silence your mind and just observe in humble reverance.
God Bless.