Tag: consciousness

  • In a world of abstractions…

    It was in Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus that I first became really aware of how much of an abstraction money is. Just to clarify what ‘abstraction’ is in this context, vegetables, meat, human labour etc all have clear, tangible value. Money is a transactional device with many advantages but it has no inherent value. Its common acceptance is its value. The exercise on 8th November 2016 is a great example to illustrate this –  those pieces of paper we thought were valuable until a minute ago suddenly became worthless. In fact, at one point, there was a chance that after Dec 31st, they would even be harmful!

    At some point, I started thinking of abstraction with respect to consciousness. At a very broad level, I think of consciousness as having three basic fluid forces at play – sensations, emotions, and thoughts. We tend to use the adjacent ones (sensation/emotion and emotion/thought) interchangeably but if you think about it, nuances separate them. They all have a role to play, but I also see them as a hierarchy with respect to their influence on consciousness – thoughts at the top. (more…)

  • The case against cosmic justice

    Evolution, as I have already stated sometime back on this blog, is a fascination these days. Fundamentally, I see it as a gigantic A/B testing mechanism operating over large swathes of time, with only one seeming agenda – moving on. A lot of things make immense sense when I accept that as the only framework. Including the idea of God, which has several key roles. e.g. to provide the impetus to move on even when things are not going well (faith), explain the things that science cannot (yet) and so on. If it helps someone, it is a great idea, though as a species we have been consistently been stupid enough to let the practitioners of organised faith take advantage of us for their own needs.

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    But that’s not what this post is about. One of the offshoots of faith (God/Cosmos/insert whatever works for you) is the related idea of cosmic/divine justice. I used to believe in that until very recently, and it was one of the attributes of being what I called myself – a spiritual person. But at this point, I don’t think it exists. There are at least two perspectives that brought me to it. (more…)

  • Memories & Consciousness

    I was looking at the bookshelf a few days ago, and realised that though their relative position indicates they are among my favourites, I couldn’t recall some specific plot points and in some cases, even the ending, of some of the books! I was more than a little dismayed, but thankfully, found some solace in this post “How You Know“, specifically “Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists.” It immediately set me thinking on the idea of consciousness and what technology can do to it, and it was a wonderful coincidence that the author too touched upon it towards the end of that post. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

    Two nieces have ‘happened’ to me in the recent past, 🙂 and I have clocked a few hours with them. The older one is just over a year old and is in general, a happy child. In my erm, ‘conversations’ with her during her stay with us, I have wondered what she perceives of the world around her. This was probably influenced by the fact that I had just finished reading Michio Kaku’s “The Future of the Mind” (must read!) and the four levels (starts at zero – plants) of consciousness. The final level, where humans are, are distinguished because of self awareness, and our understanding of time – specifically the enormous amount of feedback loops. This allows us to simulate, in our mind, possible future situations, and go beyond instinct and even emotions.

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  • Conscious choices

    I found this video shared by K (part of a series by Professor Russell Stannard) offering me a very interesting perspective on the free will vs determinism debate. (earlier post)

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8EI4obG5zM

    He starts with talking about the brain as a physical object which is governed by the physical/chemical/biological rules of nature – like a computer works within a  set of mechanical/electronic laws – and therefore predictable. So it should be possible to predict our choices. But it doesn’t work that way. Consciousness is different.

    He then talks about how some are trying to apply quantum theory to the free will – determinism debate. Apparently, at sub atomic level, the ‘future’ is not predictable with absolute certainty. It has a built-in uncertainty in it. What we can do, however, is predict the odds of various possible outcomes – the average behaviour of various items. So if this is applied to individual cells whose behaviour is unpredictable, it would be free will, say the proponents of this theory. But the prof refutes this, and says that this is one of the debates that can’t be solved to everyone’s satisfaction.

    [This prediction of group behaviour reminded me of Asimov’s Foundation series and specifically Hari Seldon‘s psychohistory, through which he predicts the future in probabilistic terms.]

    But more importantly, it made me think that if indeed, there is a creator, maybe he built the automaton inside our head to make us predictable. The automaton grows with us, making most of our decisions unconscious ones, based on baggage accumulated over time – conditioning. That could explain why those few who break out of it are able to attain a higher level of thinking in which they can bend the rules, predict the future and so on and the only advice they can give others is to be aware of every second.

    And when I think of predicting the odds of outcomes, I wonder if the results of all our free will choices are written, like a tree with infinite branches. And as we continue our journey of choices that is life, one by one the branches disappear, until on hindsight, they look like one straight line that was always meant to be that way.

     until next time, a predictable end

  • Stop. Watch.

    Playing music on the mobile as you drift to sleep is probably nothing new. I’m sure many people do it. The snag of course is managing to switch it off before you sleep. You could create a list and make sure it stops after x number of songs, but there’s some joy to be found in random shuffling. There’s probably an app somewhere that will somehow manage it, but I haven’t found it yet. What I would like is something that will sense my breathing pattern and switch off, but that might be wishing for too much 🙂

    ‘The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’ brings up an interesting point, when it discusses sleep in the context of death and the state of consciousness. It asks

    How many of us are aware of the change in consciousness when we fall asleep? Or of the moment of sleep before dreams begin? How many of us are aware even when we dream that we are dreaming?

    From the music example, it is easy to guess that I certainly am not. In fact, my experiment on this failed too, as I completely lost track during a conscious attempt to ‘know’ the moment I fell asleep. I then realised that I should perhaps try being ‘conscious’ while I am awake without flowing from thought to thought unconsciously, especially since D is not very encouraging about me trying to sleep more. 😐

    Try recollecting the last 15 minutes minute by minute, and you’ll sense the unconsciousness 🙂

    until next time, asleep yet?