About us

In my previous post about reality, I talked about how arbitrary is what we experience as "reality"; based on our size scale, limited senses, and strictly human concepts (causes, delimitations, similarities...), which are not extrapolable to whatever exists outside us. That "outside" existed before any human concept shaped it, and will exist free of shape after the last human dies. Finally, doing science beyond macroscopic observables (beyond Newton and Maxwell laws), we have started to discover an extremely counter–intuitive Nature; this time the real one. But while deconstructing everything I could, I noted briefly about we ourselves, so then... Are we as false or arbitrary as our concepts?

Evolutive requirements for efficient reactions, environment comprehension, problem resolution, and so on, drove us to form ever so complex concepts, find ever so subtle relationships between them. But the important part is that the process of forming such abstractions is completely automatic (as the color reconstruction of our vision is). We don't notice it. Our senses make an implicit division between "observer" and "observed", it's just a matter of geometry, of perspective. If we add memory to the mix, as a mechanism for selective sensorial recurrence and behavioral inertia formation, we form an ego... automatically. So we have a name, a history (though we only remember a minimal part of it), a style, multiple supposed relationships with many supposed "others", like objects, people, communities, ideas...

The fact that our senses induce perspective on our perceptions should not be so important after all; it's only geometrical perspective. Sadly, this perspective constantly feeds a sense of false duality, which is deeply rooted in our psyche and our occidental culture: Our languages have dichotomic grammars, separating subjects who act from objects of action, from actions per se. Prevalent religious views split the world even further, between "animate" souls living in our priviledged bodies and "inanimate" "rest of things" subject to exploitation. Memory helps a lot, feeding conciousness with subjective sensations, albeit past ones.

It's really interesting to note that, what we are now seems fleeting and intangible, while what we were previously seems fixed and definite; so we identify ourselves more with what no longer exists than with what really is (we, now). Sure, there are many subjective points of view, which are able to experiment (conciousness), while many other things (stones, plants, computers, people deeply asleep or under anesthesia...) are unable to. But, does it justify such a bigheaded dualistic attitude, considering ourselves separated, esentially different from the rest of the universe? Wouldn't be better for those little, temporarily concious regions of the big universe to consider themselves freckles in a skin, being also skin?

Yes, it would be better. Big mistakes bring big costs. From the very moment a person defines herself out of arbitrary boundaries from her matrix, Necessity, the Great Devil, promptly appears. Now individuals constantly feel endless needs, including even the need to needing something. All of them are related to the basic error, that of a false identification with our geometric point of view and our distorted selection of memories, but we usually take this error even further, dropping ideologies into the sack of identity, pieces of religions (often contradictory ones, like being Catholic and believing in past lifes or the inevitability of fate), obsessions, historical nationalist falsehoods, heinous hatred against other identities... Every atrocity ever made traces clearly to this Great Devil.

With basic knowledge of astronomy (I mean remembering the name of a handful of stars, being roughly aware of the size and power of those enormous balls of hydrogen, at those enormous distances in space and time from which they seem to be little spots in that gargantuan emptyness), just humbly look at the sky on a starry night and all those stupid needs should now be difficult to hold. In fact, it's so easy to have those moments of truth... I guess every lie in the human world is aligned toward not allowing people to experience such an easy nirvana (or so easily forgetting it in our daily life).

Well, then, after all of this... What are we?—We're not the content of that "sack of identity", but what painfully carts the sack around; we're not our memories, but that which remembers; we're not any of the emotions that can be felt, but that which feels them; we're not (curiously, this one might seem more obvious, but it's in fact identical to previous sentences) what we see, but that which sees it... it's so simple to understand that by our unprecedented lean toward artificial complexity it becomes impossible to do (I mean always understanding, not only in the moment when reading about it). Finally, what's "that" which carts around, which remembers, feels or sees?—An instant.

The brain is a hierachical abstraction machine. From sensorial impulses, small neuron groups recognize simple patterns (lines, musical intervals, smells, colors, etc.), from which more and more neurons recognize patterns over patterns, reaching higher abstraction levels, up to being able to deal with incredibly subtle ones, such as when we notice false emotions in someone's face expressions. This abstraction capacity is fundamental to our conciousness function, in a chalk–blackboard relationship. Finally, it turns out that this abstraction system, with all of its arbitrariness, false needs and mistakes, is the best the universe has managed to achieve feeling and understanding itself... around here.