Aware Brain

Humans have proven their inability to manage the advancement of a civilization beyond a certain point. All “great” civilizations in history have at least failed to retain their dominance, and at worst, simply failed. While modern humans have learned much, the in-bred instincts of animals, necessary for survival in the wild, take hundreds of generations to change. Humans are modifying the world around them at a pace faster than their hard-wired instincts and reflexes can adapt to it.

Humans will continue to act in ways that provide pleasure, even if the known, logical, rational, and reasoned affects are negative. Smoking, drug abuse, and obesity come to mind as obvious and common examples.

Humans grouped into commercial corporations have created objects which appear to the senses of sight, taste, and smell to be nutritious food. Scientific study has proven these objects, called fast-food hamburgers, to be about 10% actual meat.

“The purpose of this study is to assess the content of 8 fast food
hamburger brands using histologic methods. Eight different brands of hamburgers were evaluated for
water content by weight and microscopically for recognizable tissue types. Glial fibrillary acidic
protein (GFAP) staining was used to evaluate for brain tissue. Water content by weight ranged from
37.7% to 62.4% (mean, 49%). Meat content in the hamburgers ranged from 2.1% to 14.8% (median,
12.1%).”

In spite of this direct evidence, humans continue to consume large quantities of these objects, presumably for the entertainment value alone.

“Americans consume about 5 billion hamburgers a year.”

Maybe we pursue these examples of folly because our entire sense of the universe is self-generated. Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all. Instead of assuming a reality that predates life and even creates it, scientists propose a biocentric picture of reality. From this point of view, life—particularly consciousness—creates the universe, and the universe could not exist without us. In other words, we are creating the entire world with our minds, not necessarily IN our minds.

There is beginning of this concept called the anthropic principle, first articulated by Cambridge astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1973. This principle holds that we must find the right conditions for life in our universe, because if such life did not exist, we would not be here to find those conditions. Then there is biocentrism, which holds that the universe is created by life and not the other way around. This is an explanation for and extension of the participatory anthropic principle described by the physicist John Wheeler, a disciple of Einstein’s who coined the terms wormhole and black hole. Even the most fundamental elements of physical reality, space and time, strongly support a biocentric basis for the cosmos. According to biocentrism, time does not exist independently of the life that notices it.

Everything we perceive is actively and repeatedly being reconstructed inside our heads in an organized whirl of information. Time in this sense can be defined as the summation of spatial states occurring inside the mind. So what is real? If the next mental image is different from the last, then it is different, period. We can award that change with the word time, but that does not mean there is an actual invisible matrix in which changes occur. That is just our own way of making sense of things. We watch our loved ones age and die and assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime.

It is related to the philosophical question;  “If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” How do we know what reality is?

First, if the logic of biocentrism is followed, the tree never falls to begin with. Fallen trees are simply created by the mind in their fallen state, as the human comes upon its location. But if the tree does actually fall into its prone position, physics, gravity, acceleration, quantum mechanics, and the compression of gasses forms a chain of events that claims that the vibrations of matter humans calls sound, does occur. But is it correct to call these physical processes “sound” if they are not translated by the human brain into the mental experience we define as such?

These two subjects come together in the realm of blogging. According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned. If a blog is written, and nobody reads it, does it exist? Until the blog page is pulled up into a viewers browser, it exists as nothing more than magnetic impulses on a hard drive. No more tangible than the original thought in the human brain which conceived it, and questionably no more “real”.

Once read by a visitor, a blog post then becomes simply a memory in that person brain, much like the vision of the fallen tree. Coincidentally, this metaphor is used by the New York Times in describing the fleeting nature of blog readership; “Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest.”

Regardless, 133 million blogs exist, with millions of humans continuing their journalistic efforts, even if they do not matter. Is the futile pursuit of writing an unread blog more or less  irrational than knowingly eating an artificial burger?

Coincidentally, the very publication which reported on the unread blogs is unread itself. The rapid decline in readership of the New York Times has been in the news for a year. And as of this week, industry experts continue to see newspapers as a dying industry.

“This seems to leave newspaper managers with only one way to stay in business for now. If you want your credit rating not to fall further, lay off a few hundred or thousand more employees and make sure the newspaper features a bunch of under-edited news, lame stories and mostly wire copy. Repeat process as often as possible”

Billion dollar newspaper publishing corporations clinging to a failed business model, repeating operations which result in losses; writing articles about bloggers who continue to write blog posts they know are not being read; on subjects such as why irrational people can’t stop eating fake hamburgers. You can’t make this stuff up.

But according to scientists, maybe the whole thing is made up, in the human mind.

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~ by Dave on June 8, 2009.

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