Light Shed on the Mystery of Consciousness

‘How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate—your brain—that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, is the greatest mystery of all’. (V.S Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. Posted as a photo on the Facebook page for Neuroscience Research Techniques)

It literally blows your mind when you begin to ponder the miracle of your own conscious state and indeed the nature of consciousness...

And as Ramachandran states above, the fact that the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself, ‘truly, is the greatest mystery of all’. It’s a fair observation. That our brains are made up from the primordial soup of atoms forged billions of years ago, through the integration of matter driven by negative entropy, is truly an amazing concept—integration, in fact, is the meaning of life!! (If you haven’t read What is The Meaning of Life from Jeremy Griffith’s The Book of Real Answers to Everything! (2011), then I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU DO!!! That information is all pure, pure gold—the most precious thing on the planet...

The exciting reality now is that pondering such seemingly impenetrable and contentious concepts is now safe to do. The real, dignifying, logic-based explanation of the human condition changes everything!! Knowledge sheds light on a whole landscape—this information transforms your life, the lives of those around you, and begins a whole new dawn for humanity which will be glorious, and the possibilities now and real potential that is unlocked is just so incredibly exciting!!

We can now understand what consciousness actually is; how and why did we become conscious; what were the implications of such a conscious awakening; what blocks other animals from becoming fully conscious; what was our pre-conscious state like? How the human condition arose in our species and importantly how this understanding ameliorates the upset state of the human condition and allows the suffering to end.

We can now understand what is the meaning of life(!!), and what drives the development of order on our planet. And appreciate why we have been unable to explain this until now.

This is such a huge breakthrough for us individually and for the whole human race. And how timely is this understanding of the human condition by Jeremy Griffith!! The world is going crazy—consumerism destroying the planet; religious fanaticism fuelling hatred, wars and violence; the spread of suffocating pseudo-idealism in the Western World; madness, pain and suffering everywhere you look—this really is just in time...

This profound, denial-free approach to unlocking the greatest mystery of all—that of the human condition, is the breakthrough where we now find ourselves. Solving the mystery of the human condition is the critical step forward for the human race and indeed for all life on our extraordinary planet.

If you haven’t already, read the complete chapter on Consciousness. I re-read it recently, and it does just continue to blow my mind what we can now understand and appreciate.

I especially love the clarity of the following passage explaining the difference between the explanation of the Human Condition put forward by Jeremy Griffith compared to those put forward by mechanistic science (Social Darwinism, Sociobiology etc): (underlining is my own).

“Certainly, we have invented excuses to justify our species’ seemingly-imperfect competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour, the main one being that we have savage animal instincts that make us fight and compete for food, shelter, territory and a mate. Of course, this ‘explanation’, which has been put forward in the biological theories of Social Darwinism, Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, Multilevel Selection and E.O. Wilson’s Eusociality and basically argues that ‘genes are competitive and selfish and that’s why we are’, can’t be the real explanation for our competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour. Firstly, it overlooks the fact that our human behaviour involves our unique fully conscious thinking mind. Descriptions like egocentric, arrogant, deluded, artificial, hateful, mean, immoral, alienated, etc, all imply a consciousness-derived, psychological dimension to our behaviour. The real issue—the psychological problem in our thinking minds that we have suffered from—is the dilemma of our human condition, the issue of our species’ ‘good-and-evil’-afflicted, less-than-ideal, even ‘fallen’ or corrupted, state. We humans suffer from a consciousness-derived, psychological HUMAN CONDITION, not an instinct-controlled animal condition—our condition is unique to us fully conscious human...

The second reason the savage-instincts-in-us excuse can’t possibly be the real explanation for our divisive, selfish and aggressive behaviour is that it overlooks the fact that we humans have altruistic, cooperative, loving moral instincts—what we recognise as our ‘conscience’—and these moral instincts in us are not derived from reciprocity, from situations where you only do something for others in return for a benefit from them, as Evolutionary Psychologists would have us believe. And nor are they derived from warring with other groups of humans as advocates of the theory of Eusociality would have us believe. No, we have an unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic, truly loving, universally-considerate-of-others-not-competitive-with-other-groups, genuinely moral conscience. Our original instinctive state was the opposite of being competitive, selfish and aggressive: it was fully cooperative, selfless and loving.”

As I said, it is well worth reading (or re-reading) Consciousness if you haven’t already.

This Blog Post was written by Neil on December 26, 2012