What is consciousness and what does it mean to be conscious? Is an animal conscious? Plants have been known to implement basic forms of chemical communication, are they conscious? Could the whole universe be a conscious entity, and the birth and death of galaxies be just a passing thought in the uber-mind?
The inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, writes:
"In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it's related to, and how it's related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected."
I think Tim Berners-Lee makes a good point. A word is just a combination of arbitrary sounds (spoken) or symbols (written). The fact that there are countless different languages in the world is proof of the fact that the sounds and symbols themselves are not important. Instead, people brought up in a given culture learn to associate concepts from their life experience with particular patterns of sounds and symbols. It is in the connections between these concepts that give birth to meaning and the ability to communicate meaning.
Furthermore, our thinking is always in terms of the structures of our culture. School, work, money, land ownership, court. We all understand these things, but try explaining them to some remote cultures and it could be very difficult because their reality is structured differently than ours. Even subcultures can have a hard time understanding each other because their realities are different. Take high school for example. The Jock and the Computer Nerd are probably not on the same plane of reality. That's not to say one reality is wrong and one correct. Every person lives in their own reality.
Anyway, I'll leave you with this:
The amazing process of this communication (a very short simplified version):- My conceptual construct.
- Words form in my head.
- My brain sends a pattern of impulses to my muscles which move my hands in a pattern on keyboard to make symbols come on screen.
- The symbols are translated into symbols computers understand and sent as pulses over long pieces of metal, (and possibly as patterns of ripples in an electromagnetic field) to your computer.
- Your computer translates those symbols back to the symbols you recognize.
- The light from your computer monitor is focused onto a patch of cells in your eye that are particularly sensitive to light.
- This triggers a pattern of impulses to travel along other special cells.
- Your brain recognizes these patterns and connects them to their meanings and hopefully some personal understanding.
After all that, and if I have chosen my words well, I will have activated some parts of your brain that convey a fascination with the beauty and complexity of the mind and the universe in general.
