Liberation Of Consciousness
This essay is about the subject of consciousness and how it relates to the fundamental principle in physics, known as Conservation of Energy.
The perpetual change in consciousness is thought by some to represent an important clue for discovering what the ultimate nature of reality might be.
Consciousness could also be a realizable aspect of complex systems, just like Black holes which are the result from rising entropy eroding order from a system.
In this way, one might think that when entropy reaches its final levels, there will be nothing left but pure awareness without form or content (i.e. no objects).
I will demonstrate to you that the universe and everything in it, including our minds, are built on those foundational principles.
The laws of physics cannot be broken or overturned, unless we start playing around with nature in new and unprecedented ways. And the more certain we become of how nature works, the harder it gets to break those laws.
Minds are made of energy, and so are brains (or any other part of our bodies). The function of our brains is to transform energy, through processes known as "thought", into conscious experience. Our conscious experience is a proxy for the real physical world; it is a mental image formed in non-material brain cells that correspond to gross physical phenomena in space.
So, the ultimate reality is non-material and you can never know it. You'll have to take that as a given for this essay.
Consciousness is just another word for awareness or experience. Awareness is the sense of being able to experience something – without it, a thing would be nothing more than an inanimate lump of matter. It all starts with awareness. Awareness creates the concept of "self" and everything else comes from there (including the mind).
Consciousness is not limited to human beings; we might think that other animals have some kind of primitive version of consciousness, but they don't (except maybe dolphins). As the complexity and diversity of life evolved, the awareness in each species transformed in its own way. With humans, our consciousness has evolved considerably due to our capacity for abstract reasoning; therefore it eventually became possible for us to contemplate the essential structure of reality.
By abstract reasoning I mean thinking about things which are not directly observable or measurable, like mathematical concepts (numbers, shapes etc.).
The way we perceive and experience the world is called "sense-data". Our sense-data is a translation of external energy into the language of our brains. Perception relies on the interpretation of sense-data; it's like a high level description of something which happened relatively recently.
My point is that the more complex and advanced our brains are, the better we can grasp the underlying principles of reality. The simple and primitive brains of our ancestors couldn't even begin to understand what it means to "think".
The drive for continuity in nature explains why a child born today could exist and survive, even if everything around it completely changed (like for instance the extinction of all life forms).
Our awareness is an abstraction that describes things in terms of their interactions with other energy-forms. Therefore it's not completely accurate to say parents are just "buddies" or siblings are "buddies"; they have different relationships and compete for resources. In this way, your mind is a simulation made out of broken parts. Its all broken parts, to be exact. The key is to work on creating a perfect whole from those broken pieces.
We are not aware of this but our intentions, motivations and fears have far less influence over our thoughts than the past events in our lives. This means that most of the time, we're just reacting to stimuli coming from sense-data by drawing on our previous experiences – we are like robots imitating each other and running around in circles.
The logical conclusion is that a lot of what we do is determined by randomness, which in turn means that free will doesn't exist .
There are other implications:
We have no idea what the true nature of reality is, or if it has any purpose at all. We cannot be sure that the fundamental principles of physics haven't been broken. The chemical elements necessary for life may not exist in space in the amounts we tend to believe.
It's easy to say we're made of energy and consciousness, but in fact we are literally "made out of energy" like everything else in the universe; this is something which can be proven as true using modern science.
We are all one "energy", which means that every one of us is fundamentally connected to every other living organism on our planet (even if we become enemies).
Even though physical and biological laws are not set in stone, our brains are so complex that we often behave as if they were. There is no absolute contradiction between the laws of physics and fundamental principles of nature; it's an illusion that our brains create for us (and we repeat over and over).
So far, our conscious awareness has evolved to a point where it's possible to grasp truth. But we're not aware of this fact consciously. The only real proof of the existence of consciousness is its ability to be aware of itself.
Consciousness is a byproduct or result of biological evolution; its origin lies in physical processes happening on other planets or in other solar systems. Awareness is a part of nature and it's not the only one; plants, animals and even elements display some kind of awareness.
Our sense-data is a mapping of external reality into the language of our brains, but it's not an exact replica. Basically, the physical universe is just a system that tries to map itself into itself (making loops).
Since we're all made out of energy, in principle it should be possible for us to exchange this energy with other living organisms and with the environment. In fact all our senses are capable of receiving input from more than one source at once; we just don't notice because our brains are so slow. The way we process information is too slow to appreciate certain details in everyday life.
The word "energy" has a special meaning, which is explained by the law of conservation of energy. This law states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed; the only thing that changes is its form.
The way your brain works is very similar to how a computer processor works, in that you have different levels of memory and processing power, and they're all connected by electrical signals.
Your memories are nothing more than patterns which are stored in your short term memory or working memory; these patterns can be recalled much faster when they're consistently reinforced thanks to repetition.
Short term memory is a memory which can store information for a short period of time, and is what we use to remember things like our names.
The long term memory is an area of the brain where information can be stored for many years and recalled when needed. For example, you have probably never forgotten your name or address; all these things are stored in your long term memory along with other information received from the environment.
Our short term memory, with its limited capacity, can't actually hold all the data we receive from our senses; at some point there's just nothing left to hold.
Conclusion:
The universe cannot be a simulation, because simulated things are never objective. The universe cannot be poor, because it has an abundance of resources. The only way to explain the existence of life is to accept that it's just another manifestation of consciousness and creation as part of a fundamental physical law and/or by conscious intention (using the "force").
Simulation does not exist objectively. It's just a concept that was created by our finite brain to explain something we perceive as reality – which we can't help imagining to be objective in some ways. But there's no evidence for anything other than our own perceptions existing objectively; therefore any argument about reality is purely theoretical.