Conundrum of Consciousness

It will not be like a typical story where events occur within a particular time frame. I will try to illustrate some of my day to day experiences that pushes me to think about the essence of life and our origin and existence among the stars. One day me and my sister were sitting in our balcony of our house. I saw a dog underneath the balcony looking at us, staring for brief period and then ran away. My sister asked me “ why the dog is staring at you ”. I said that I do not know, I have no idea. And then she told me that he might be thinking about you, thats why he was staring at you. Well I am not sure what the dog was thinking, the important question is does the dog able to think in the first place. The thought process of a dog or any animal is substantially distinct from human beings. Their brain is highly rudimentary compared to humans. Human brains can process information more efficiently and can produce a meaningful output. Human brain is more complex and structurally delicate. Thinking is a process which I think requires intelligence to operate. Thinking exists because our brain can grasp the ideas of objective reality and can give meaning to it. Its hard to imagine and conceive the thought of how exactly thought arise in animal brains. Animals are conscious without doubt, but their level of consciousness is different that of ours. Humans are self aware about their environment and accordingly able to predict future events. In my case, the dog was staring at me with no reason at all. The creature was just observing the environment with no innate purpose. I think animals aren't able to think or they don't think at all. They behave as nature allows them to like a body in autopilot. Free will I think can be dismissed in the case of animals. In the case of humans, we can do things that has no natural significance, things that are not part of nature. We are able to do it because of our superior level of intelligence arising from millions of years of progressive evolution in consciousness.

Consciousness is an emergent phenomena that requires coordinative functioning of different parts of the brain. Scientist were trying to unravel the mystery behind the origin of consciousness. The significance of consciousness in the evolution of mankind and all of its subjective and intersubjective order is unsurmountable. Its hard to imagine how our world would look like without the presence of consciousness. Consciousness could be a universal phenomena, which would mean that its emergence on earth is not unique. There could be multiple origin of consciousness across the galaxy. You know, my parents have a peculiar character of attaching spirituality and divinity with every day objects. They believe that every object in the universe have mind and emotions or feelings. What exactly they are trying to say as far as I can understand is consciousness is everywhere and universal. My parents love plantation and gardening very much. Before going for daily official work they always assign me a task to water the plants. But most of the time I forget. One day some how they got to know about my irregularity and started scolding me. Further they advised me to regularly water the plants and also stated that plants have feelings and emotions, so they will feel bad if you don't water them regularly. I don't know whether its a rational way of thinking or not. But based on the current science that we got its utterly an irrational approach towards understanding nature. In the philosophy of mind, there is a term called Panpsychism. Panpsychism is the view that the mind or mind like aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. Its also described as a theory that “ the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists through out universe”. Now we don't have any concrete evidence that support the existence of panpsychism, but there are a large chunk of people in the society that believe in this unusual phenomena.

Lets look at this conjecture through scientific perspective. I think the being of consciousness or intelligence is a local and temporary relative to cosmological time scale. I mean imagine that we are the only place where there is intelligence in the galaxy. I would go as far as to say there would be nowhere else where meaning exists in the milky way. What is self evidently true that meaning exists here because it means something to us, life means something to you and me and so meaning exists. But the picture behind it is that meaning emerges from configurations of atoms which is what we are. We are simply that, we are nothing more than that. We are very very rare configurations of atoms. So that means if we go all the way down to that line of logic we are the only island of meaning in the galaxy. Meaning only to ourselves, it means something to us because we are the only one who can grasp the concept and we are finite, we are finite organisms. We have this temporary existence while we are here and to us there is meaning. This is the deepest point in the vacuum of thought I am able to reach. Universal mind or universal consciousness is highly unlikely to exist. I think the idea of consciousness transcends human imagination and our ability to comprehend this idea. So in my view, consciousness should evolve in order to understand itself. The whole conundrum of consciousness is now at the frontier of scientific research and a crucial part of cutting edge science and research across the globe.