All the complicated processes which keep us alive function WITHOUT OUR HAVING TO THINK ABOUT THEM.
Heart beats in perfect rhythm, lungs breathe in and out, blood flows exactly where it's supposed to flow, nerves, cells, etc. etc. all carry out their duties without a word of instruction from us. Therefore what I want to know is:
Given that the
essential functions on which the body's existence depends generally
operate with admirable efficiency without conscious thought, why then
does consciousness behave so unreliably?
All by themselves, fingernails and toenails grow with what seems to me astonishing speed. Why doesn't wisdom grow inside consciousness with similar speed? Why does the body UNCONSCIOUSLY function harmoniously whereas consciousness has to strive, struggle, suffer and sweat to achieve just a small portion of harmony?
All by themselves, fingernails and toenails grow with what seems to me astonishing speed. Why doesn't wisdom grow inside consciousness with similar speed? Why does the body UNCONSCIOUSLY function harmoniously whereas consciousness has to strive, struggle, suffer and sweat to achieve just a small portion of harmony?
8 comments:
Brilliant question, lovely painting. I wouldn't presume to hazard any answers, but it may be relevant to point out that Nature, in the form of evolution has had to strive, struggle, suffer and sweat for millions of years till it was able to produce us. Our complicated consciousness hasn't been here long at all. Most of the other species have to struggle and sweat for much of their lives too.
I guess the best we can do is make something out of what we've been given, to develop ourselves and give something back. NDA springs to mind as a shining example, having started off as as a blob of DNA, like the rest of us.
Do I ever think about this? Indeed I do, but have never found a convincing answer. Religion and other philosophies appear to be focused around this dichotomy; the Real v the Virtual Self; Christ v Satan to name only two examples.
In fact if you do start to think about these processes, you may interfere with them. Breathing, for instance, becomes irregular. Thurber noticed a version of this over seventy years ago and wrote a send-up of the self-help books that were popular then. It was called: Leave Your Mind Alone.
But if I were to follow his advice what would be left? I fear I must tinker.
I did comment, but it became lost in the ether. Briefly, I do think about the point you raised.
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Vincent, thank you. I wasn't being scientific in my musing. It was more of an imaginative exploration of something that suddenly struck me. On my Facebook page (where I duplicate what I post here) several people have commented and I've replied. If you can access my FB page (it's public) have a look. The intriguing thing to me is that we tend to think of consciousness as our "higher" faculty, the most sophisticated feature, but those processes which our bodies perform unconsciously with such amazing accuracy,generally seem more efficient than our consciousness does. By 'efficient' i mean in philosophical/psychological way.
Tom, it's too broad a subject to condense into a comment nutshell and I realise that my post was rather naive, simplistic.But I wasn't venturing into the body/spirit or good/evil dichotomies. I was just looking at the difference between the way things work (or don't work) in a human being. Just sitting here in front of my computer screen typing this reply and trying to find the right words to say what I mean is a rather clumsy, tortuous use of consciousness. But meanwhile, my heart, lungs, digestion, nerves, muscles etc. are all doing their job perfectly without my consciousness needing to do anything at all! I was imagining a kind of upgraded consciousness which would work as well (in every sense) as our physical system works.
Robbie, indeed nind affects body. But I think some design considerations might be useful to look at if my argument were to be expanded in a thinking-outside-the-box fashion. For instance, let's suppose that the reason physical processes work so efficiently in the body is that they follow certain repetitious rhythms: heartbeats, blood flow, in-out breaths,etc. A precise programme.
Whereas consciousness does not follow a programme. It responds to external stimuli and internal prompts (often contradictory)in a more or less random way. This can be called "Free Will" but in fact it's not free at all. Ah, I must stop now because I've got to ponder all this more slowly.
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