Well, something
is not right. The familiar one is “Oh My God!” isn’t it? Is it deliberate?
These are the questions that immediately show up in front of us and yes, of
course, everything does not seem to be alright.
So let us embark our journey to
gain more insight on this topic and possibly get some directions for obtaining the
right answers.
The
plain definition of the word consciousness is “the state of being aware and
responsive to one’s surroundings”. And, in general, that is pretty well
understood you say? Hold on for a while.
Is it that simple? Are we really “conscious”
enough? Now that is a tricky question. To answer this, let us understand the
source that can be attributed to satisfy the definition. Which entity is
responsible for maintaining a state of awareness?
Is it the body, mind or
something else? Some amount of rational thinking will rule out that body is
responsible. Nobody has “seen” mind, even though we associate many of our feats to its power.
We talk of its capabilities but at present science has a
limitation in understanding it entirely. It is something that can only be
experienced.
Having talked about body and mind, the subsequent question any
sane person will ask is if there is something else that is not known to us yet
which might be the source of holy-grail – consciousness.
The
closest modern science can get in explaining mind is by exploring the
powerhouse of a human being – brain.
Neuroscientists enjoy their involvement in
performing experiments with respect to human brain, monitoring its actions,
measuring its performance in various situations and propose many theories that
would look weird at the outset.
Possibly
it would have been simple enough if the research had stopped there, but here
comes the interesting bit. The theory says that consciousness is not a
privilege of humans alone.
The researchers extend it to “any” object for which
their experiments are able to “detect” consciousness. You guessed it right – it
includes the entire world – animals, plants, cells, etc.
The possibilities are
endless. We may not be able to differentiate if consciousness is within us or
we are engulfed within consciousness!
Koch
has debated his thoughts with the Buddhist spiritual leader Dalai Lama and
concluded that in many ways his research agrees with that of Buddhist
philosophy.
And
that is what makes the researchers say, “consciousness as an intrinsic,
fundamental property of reality.”
Currently it is a theory. Pure
rationalists might just dismiss it as it is.
However, if we happen to get an
evidence in favor of the researchers, there might open new avenues to
understand the scheme of universe, ultimate truth, no assumptions – only pure
reality.
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