It's really amazing to watch a young child slowly grow into full consciousness over the years. It's like witnessing a kind of awakening of the brain. We have to be born with minimal brain size to fit down the birth canal, so we are subject to explosive growth in the number of connections we have in our brains during our first years, and connections means processing power.Since I don't remember going through that (and some say I never have), I wonder what it would feel like, slowly becoming aware of deeper and deeper interrelationships in the world around you. Is it like a cloudy haze slowly lifting from your thoughts? Do thoughts become clearer or more focused? Does all the new perception just seem to show up from nowhere? Is the change even noticeable or does it happen too slowly? I know it can be frustrating because I can see it, when one system hasn't caught up with another a child can get very frustrated.
I imagine that there is a spectrum of consciousness, going from "rock" to...to where? Do you ever wonder what it would be like to have a more advanced and powerful consciousness than humans do? A higher level of conscious thought? Ok, no LSD jokes here. Perhaps some alien species on a planet far away has evolved a level of perception that is as far above ours as ours is above that of a toddler. Or a roundworm. Or a leaf. Such a brain would think circles around ours, and understand things that we simply could not, no matter how hard we tried. Like a toddler trying to solve partial differential equations. Will we ever design computers that have higher thought functions than we do?
These are the things that I wonder about on random Friday afternoons.
2 comments:
Gee, and while your brain was in overtime with these wonderings I was shopping for clothes...Seriously, sometimes I can't believe how much you and I think alike. I used to wonder the same things, still do. In fact, I have new questions about this subject. For one, I feel like our brains our continually progressing throughout life. Some may say this is wisdom or experience. As we age our attitudes toward life and learning change, which does bring a new understanding to our old knowledge (back to wisdom). However, and this is a big "but", there is also a decline in things like ability to learn new things and short term memory. I may forget some things but I feel I have a better understanding of others and maybe more importantly, I don't worry about some of the things that clutter the brain but don't really matter. Dave, I kmow you're the only one who stuck it out to read this whole comment (which became longer than the original post!) so maybe we should continue the discussion in person some day!
i stuck it out. and next time i see you i will answer this question for you two in a fashion appropriate for your human intellects.
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