Consciousness
Our individual reality as conscious beings are our thoughts and feelings, chemical reactions in our brains, triggered by electrical signals zipping around in our nervous system. Even the world’s greatest scientific minds are distracted from their deep thoughts about quarks when their urge to urinate exceeds their cerebral tranquility.
Consciousness is a popular Internet topic and a popular philosophical debate before that.
Speculation about the existence of a cosmic consciousness abounds. Does our obvious individual consciousness terminate when the chemistry in our heads stops or does it float off into a universal consciousness? Does it keep its individuality? Do lifeforms far more intelligent than we are exist and can they communicate without pushing air past vocal cords? Do they have lungs?
People are interested in claims that we really don’t have free will. We are not masters of our own ships, or souls, a concept that seems to have existed forever but whose particles remain to be discovered.
We stare into our beloved dog’s eyes and try to imagine dog consciousness.
How far down the biological ladder do we go to find the end of consciousness?
Physical Reality
Matter and energy are all that we can measure as actually existing. Call it Physical Reality. What we think of as space has no intrinsic mass or energy; it’s just a concept in our heads to help us navigate our own existence. So, when we move about in our environment, we go in what we call three directions, what scientists like to call three dimensions measurable by lines intersecting at right angles into a point.
The thing we think of as space may be full of energy or it may contain something called dark matter because we don’t know what it is but it appears to exist. But space is basically nothing. So does nothing exist?
The same is true of time. It has no mass or energy. It’s not a real thing despite its utility helping us measure our own perceived existence. We observe and measure things and then put a language or math label on it. A word or label makes it real to us. Then even if it not real, we cannot let it go.
Einstein famously went so far as to imagine that space and time are connected into a fabric he called spacetime, which now has its own Wikipedia page. The concept has been keeping physicists entertained, and some even employed, for over 100 years, which are not real if time is not real.
Then we try to discover how things work; what gravity is and how it works. It’s difficult stuff to try to understand and for almost everybody it’s not worth the effort.
If you accept that matter and energy constitute all that’s real, and everything else, space, and time are inventions for our own convenience, you are led to the inescapable conclusion that when the sun reaches the end of its life and can no longer provide our energy, we too as conscious entities will cease to exist. Only our physical matter will remain, un-recyclable, silent, cold, motionless, and unknown. (Maybe not motionless, certainly silent, maybe not un-recyclable. We don’t know.)
But what about that other word we invented: consciousness?
Rene Descartes famously proclaimed, “I think, therefore I am.” He was a very bright guy who gave us an early look into skepticism but his skepticism didn’t carry him all the way to the finish line.
Descartes, like present day humans was caught up thinking mostly about his own existence. To him, something so special as consciousness must necessarily transcend death.
Existentialism and Philosophers
Existentialism is an area of inquiry of the human mind by people who style themselves as philosophers. As its name implies, existentialism attempted to explain the nature of human existence. It became obsessed with trying to define the meaning of Being, of human existence itself. Meaning was a human definition that proved so elusive that people gave up on paying attention to existential philosophers.
Philosophers still debate things like logic, language, and a dead area of inquiry called metaphysics. Nowadays they mostly worry about getting a job that pays a living wage. If they are lucky they publish their musings and actually receive a paycheck.
Philosophers as a profession, both the kind that call themselves analytical philosophers and the European type that have been described as continental philosophers, have been replaced by more specialized professions like engineering, psychology, chemistry, and other human academic pursuits, many of which venture off into the land of imagination, far away from physical reality.
All people, including the few who make their living doing hard science, physics or chemistry, or biology or medicine, have to contend with trying to stay alive by earning the currency of human life: money!
