Before reading my post, I please ask you to take a moment to look at what you consider consciousness to be. Imagine we take away your personality, your memories, your ability to think, essentially everything that makes you, you. What is left is a very minimal "essence" of you that simply feels, or experiences. That's what I'm defining as consciousness, something that has nothing to do with your ability to reason or any connection to this particular human life you're experiencing.
The scientific facts are that we currently don't know anything about why consciousness exists, or how it does. This is the hard problem of consciousness.
I am not religious, but I acknowledge that my entire reality (that I have a memory of) has been simply subjectively experiencing what goes on in the brain of what I consider to be my body. I have no way to prove that others have this same experience, but we all assume everyone is going through the same.
What I mean with this is that consciousness is still a mistery. It might be an inherent part of our universe, an eternal part of reality, just like magnetic forces, or something that arises in complicated systems. Still, we have to acknowledge that experiencing consciousness is a very strange thing when you really look into it, especially since we have no idea why we are experiencing a certain body and not any other.
Now on to my post:
Assuming the following points:
a) Consciousness exists and can be created by the universe
b) Your consciousness was created once, either by random chance or any other process (which process has no importance). This means the same thing could happen again in the future, or it could even have happened in the past. You can't be sure this is the only time (this life) you have been experiencing subjectively.
c) There is no agent looking over the universe and keeping morals in check (the holocaust happened)
From these points we can conclude that an apathetic, possibly random agent (let's say the universe) can cause innocent beings to experience feelings that can be horrible. If you look at history, the majority of lives lived to this day have had a lot of suffering, I would even go so far as to saying more suffering than pleasure. We are constantly in a state of unrest, worrying about staying live or the next meal or keeping warm.
This is a terrifying truth of reality. Life is forced subjective experience of possibly horrible feelings. The option of suicide or sleep can easily be taken from you, even without going too far in thought experiments. Someone would simply have to strap you down.
My conclusion is that consciousness is scary. I would even go so far as to describe it as a nightmare.
There is no current scientific theory of consciousness, and the early ideas are that it is a basic property of the universe, similar to gravity and other kinds of forces. This can mean that either there is one single consciousness from which we are a division of, or each one of us is a consciousness among an infinity of them. Either way, these early theories of consciousness imply we are stuck in reality for as long as it exists (eternity?).
Please go ahead and counterargue, I have been "studying" this topic for quite some time and believe I can further defend my points in more detail. I have very high standards for my reasoning and make sure I'm being rational in my conclusions.
In other words: Please prove me wrong cause I don't want to be scared
The scientific facts are that we currently don't know anything about why consciousness exists, or how it does. This is the hard problem of consciousness.
I am not religious, but I acknowledge that my entire reality (that I have a memory of) has been simply subjectively experiencing what goes on in the brain of what I consider to be my body. I have no way to prove that others have this same experience, but we all assume everyone is going through the same.
What I mean with this is that consciousness is still a mistery. It might be an inherent part of our universe, an eternal part of reality, just like magnetic forces, or something that arises in complicated systems. Still, we have to acknowledge that experiencing consciousness is a very strange thing when you really look into it, especially since we have no idea why we are experiencing a certain body and not any other.
Now on to my post:
Assuming the following points:
a) Consciousness exists and can be created by the universe
b) Your consciousness was created once, either by random chance or any other process (which process has no importance). This means the same thing could happen again in the future, or it could even have happened in the past. You can't be sure this is the only time (this life) you have been experiencing subjectively.
c) There is no agent looking over the universe and keeping morals in check (the holocaust happened)
From these points we can conclude that an apathetic, possibly random agent (let's say the universe) can cause innocent beings to experience feelings that can be horrible. If you look at history, the majority of lives lived to this day have had a lot of suffering, I would even go so far as to saying more suffering than pleasure. We are constantly in a state of unrest, worrying about staying live or the next meal or keeping warm.
This is a terrifying truth of reality. Life is forced subjective experience of possibly horrible feelings. The option of suicide or sleep can easily be taken from you, even without going too far in thought experiments. Someone would simply have to strap you down.
My conclusion is that consciousness is scary. I would even go so far as to describe it as a nightmare.
There is no current scientific theory of consciousness, and the early ideas are that it is a basic property of the universe, similar to gravity and other kinds of forces. This can mean that either there is one single consciousness from which we are a division of, or each one of us is a consciousness among an infinity of them. Either way, these early theories of consciousness imply we are stuck in reality for as long as it exists (eternity?).
Please go ahead and counterargue, I have been "studying" this topic for quite some time and believe I can further defend my points in more detail. I have very high standards for my reasoning and make sure I'm being rational in my conclusions.
In other words: Please prove me wrong cause I don't want to be scared
