What is a Human?
What am I?
How do you define this abstract thing that I am?
At first it seems like the true me is my thoughts. However, when meditating with absolutely no thoughts, I am still me.
In a thoughtless state, I typically feel even more connected to myself and the world around me. Without thoughts it seems that my physical self is what truly defines me…but what is a physical self?
A physical self is the experience of all your senses combined. You experience these senses because of your brain, a physical thing.
However, a brain without consciousness does no good, so it seems the consciousness is the master and what makes you who you are…but what the heck is it? CONSCIOUSNESS IS SO ABSTRACT and as the human I am, it bugs me that we cannot seem to define it, even though billions of people have it.
Are thoughts and consciousness different? I believe there are people in vegetative states that are conscious, but incapable of thought, so I think these two concepts are indeed different.
What if you had no thoughts and no senses, but still had consciousness. This means you cannot see, hear, smell, touch, or taste, BUT you are still alive. Would you still be you? What are the first principles of being a human?
Even more interesting, what if you had no senses, but still had thought. Imagine laying in bed one day and everything goes black. You physically feel nothing. This means you have no connection with reality, yet you are still thinking.
Based on centuries of human life, we know if the system of the physical body fails, the consciousness disappears…you disappear. In this situation of no senses, you would have no way to know if your body is failing or not. So, again, which one is you: body or thoughts?
Are you the physical body that you are no longer connected to or the consciousness sitting in the void thinking?
As a deep thinker, I personally would say that the part of you that is thinking is truly you. However, even though you would no longer be connected to the physical world, you would still rely on your physical body to continue to have the ability to think. So, maybe you simply cannot have one without the other.
Can you even think if you no longer have senses? You have senses because your brain is interpreting the physical world for your mind. So, if your senses stop working it probably means the physical neurons in your brain are no longer communicating with each other, meaning you can no longer think. However, you are still conscious.
What if someone was born without senses? Can that person conjure up thoughts without any input from the physical world? Are all thoughts based on input? In our physical world, we are basically forced to learn how to function. For example, you need to learn how to understand language. If born without senses, there would be no motive to learn anything, so the consciousness would probably just stay in a comatose state without input.
Now is time for the conversation to get very wacky, so bare with me.
What if there is two pieces to a self? One piece exists in the physical world: your brain, neurons, electrical signals, and everything else that makes up your body. The other piece exists in a non-physical area: your consciousness and thoughts. However, the two pieces must be connected in order to function, one cannot work alone. They can exist alone, but cannot function correctly.
As a computer scientist, I imagine a client-side server and a back-end server. They are both running constantly, but if the client-side server never sends input or requests information from the back-end server, then the back-end server never functions. The processes that make it exist are functioning (it is alive), but the functionality of the server is never used without input.
However, we are not servers and I can think of an exception to the two pieces not being able to function alone. In the event of randomly losing all of your senses, you have already taken in so much input that you can conjure up new information with it. So, in this case, maybe the thinking self could function alone.
Typing all these thoughts out makes me realize how little we really know about ourselves and the universe.
This is why it is important to continue research on the mind and the universe in general
Personally, I encourage fact-based research of the universe because it is realistic and offers higher potential of discoveries. However, I also encourage out-of-the-box thinking as used in my writing.
Who knows, maybe someone’s outrageous thoughts will help discover a new aspect of reality one day.
