The basic principles

It is a principle by which we live every day that there are conscious things and that there are things that are just things. Many people wonder what it might be like to be a dog, but except for a few self concerned vegetarians, few question themselves about the experience a tree has, let alone a molecule or a web of genetic exchanges. However, it has not always been so.

In a time when nature was a major part of a human being's existence, natural phenomena were considered conscious. But as man moved away from nature and integrated larger and larger communities of other people, it ceased to ponder strongly about anything beside other humans, and natural phenomena lost their place among living things.

The height of this scission happened in the west during the Hellenic period around 500 B.C., when in certain societies not even women were deemed capable of thought and decision making. It was then that concepts such as soul became philosophically popular and, by extension, the concept of things that didn't have one. Things that can't experience existence, that can't hear, see or feel, things that can't think or conceive, suffer or rejoice; things that are just props in an otherwise bright and colourful universe to those who have the gift of sentience and choice: Men.

This period also witnessed the very early beginnings of modern science, a movement which throughout its succeeding centuries aimed and succeeded at relating the human's rational mind with it's surrounding environment. And as men related rationally more and more with other organisms, women, barbarians, africans and new-world indians rejoined the western pantheon of sentient beings, then apes and mammals and, nowadays, with the rise of neuroscience, anything with a nervous system. That's why some will go to the extent of eating tofu.

Neuroscience has uncovered that most and potentially all human experiences can be associated with a particular physical phenomenon, located in the brain. As there is little evidence suggesting otherwise, the rest of our discussion will be based upon the assumption that all experience can be traced back to some physical phenomenon. However, our first principle goes beyond that. Since there is a direct link from human experience to physical phenomena and there is nothing cosmically special about the brain, we also postulate that:

Every physical phenomenon has an experience associated with it which is consistent with its dynamics.

 Of course, the experience is only an expression of the phenomenon, so we're not claiming apples hate Mondays and love pizza. The phenomena within the apple, or which the apple participates in, have some experience associated to them in a one-to-one correspondence with their dynamics.

However, one might wonder why aren't we all conscious of everything then, since we're all just a big soup of consciousness. The answer is, of course, that the processes happening in my brain have little to do with the processes in the brains of others. Therefore the degree of mutual consciousness is very low. Brains are mutually conscious in the appropriate way consistent with physical observation: they have an experience of each other through light (vision), sound (speech), chemical compounds (smell) and so on. A collection of agents will likely be unaware of the personal experience of its constituents in the same way we generally are unaware of the particular dealings of each of our individual brain cells. Which leads us to our second postulate:

Processes can only be said to be mutually aware of each other. There is no absolute consciousness.

This means we shouldn't ask ourselves what is conscious and what isn't. We can only say whether two things are aware of each other. This strongly goes against our intuition towards identity, but let's not forget that identity is only itself a phenomenon, one of our many experiences linkable to activity in certain areas of the brain and sometimes even to firing of certain specific brain cells. Children at an early age have no concept of self. It is a structure which develops later likely out of the social necessity to distinguish one's needs from others'.

The last principle means that the more processes interact the more complex the experience is, because a great number of processes are mutually aware. That is why complex systems such as ourselves experience an immense inter-webbed myriad of phenomena. The study of the experience of other systems is the purpose of this blog: what ingredients of our own experience are universal? Which other unexpected phenomena share similar experiences with us? Can a given system suffer? Throughout this blog we will explore this new incredible world and step off this lonely course of existence mankind has set for itself -- of carrying the burden of being the only ones aware -- into a vast living universe.