John Lennon got it wrong!

John Lennon once stated life is what happens when your making other plans a profound enough statement but then again open to much interpretation and in this bright sparks eyes it kinda fell short of the mark.

For you see to me life is what we forget about when we are making other plans or at least the really important aspects of it. Plans ladies and gentlemen, Plans are merely a life times distraction to keep our minds from wondering and pondering on those most profound and terrifying truths about life, the truth being we have no idea what the truth is and most probably could not come close to comprehending it if we didI mean what is life? Or more specifically what is reality? How do you define it? How do you even define "consciousness"??? For example a tree is classed as being alive and just like us is made up of cells but to the best of my knowledge a tree does not know it's alive because it has no state of consciousness.

This being the case I can only assume that being "conscious" is "being alive" rather than just alive. So if we accept that then the next question I guess is what creates consciousness? It would seem to me that the "procession of a brain" is the answer to that question. So what does a brain do and how does it give birth to consciousness? At it most basic function it would seem to me that a brain is there to process and make sense of the information feed to it by all the different senses of our body that once interpreted by the brain give us each our unique idea of reality and thus this is the first step of consciousness.

I guess then that in very simple terms the brain could be compared to a circuit board. A circuit bored that has senses attached such as a thermometer for sensing temperature aswell as light, sound, and movement senses etc all hooked up to a central processor (this being the brain) that interprets the information from these sensors to determine whether it's night or day, hot or cold and so on. All pretty straight forward so far but where it becomes really interesting is when we look at some of the other aspects of consciousness, things like drive, emotion, and sense of self. How is it a bunch of cells that receives and sends electrical signals can create theses phenomenas?? Where does sense of self come from?? It's the old adage "I think therefore I am" but just thinking about the ability to think is mind blowing in itself!! The answer to this I think (see what I did there) is the answer to everything! It opens up so many more questions that drags into the mix things like religion, afterlife, and whether a person has free will or their actions are all pre determined by the way their brain has developed inside them. Then we have to throw emotions and drive into the mix!

Are emotions and drive just another aspect of the brain the strength of which is determined purely by how well a brain has developed! Or do we have a soul??

The concept of a soul makes much more sense to me, the idea that or bodys and brain are nothing more than a vehicle that carries this life energy around for a while on its (our) short stay on planet earth before the human body dies and releases it again to go back to whence it came. If we are to believe in a sole I think we have to accept that we have no understanding of what life is at all and for this stage at least we are just hear for the ride. To be fair I think most of us do accept this, anyone who does not in my view shows arrogance to a ridiculous degree :)

this does for me however raise two very different arguments as to what consciousness is but what an exciting and all consuming argument it is!! It comes down to this I feel, is consciousness created purely by a heartbeat and electrical signals racing round a brain or is consciousness created by a soul that's been transferred into a body whilst it hangs round this planet for a while. I guess some would argue it's a religion V science argument but I'm not so sure it's a clear cut as that.

So the first argument, is consciousness created purely by a heartbeat and brain? Well if this is the case then surely we are nothing more than advanced robots that have a set life span and when our bodies die we cease to exist as quickly as we started to exist. I'm not sure that I like this idea but I can kind of see the logic. As I touched on earlier you can sort of compare us in very basic terms to computers in that we are merely entities that process data in our brains sent from our senses and as such we act and behave accordingly. The issue with this theory though is how and where do emotions and drive come into the equation? Can electrical signals in the brain really create these? Surely not!?! I guess the answer to this question maybe given to us one day in our far future because if the day comes that a robot is designed who starts to cry because it's lonely then the human has become god and as such in my view we're all fucked as it would clearly indicate that we are indeed just advanced biological robots with no sole and no judgment or after life when our time finally comes. If this is the case however it leads onto another massive question, if we are just advanced robots then what or the hell designed us!!!! If we some where in the future develop the ability to create consciousness out of circuit boards then something out there must have designed and created us right!?! The whole thing just comes full circle! Maybe God is some unimaginably advanced life form out there and our universe is sitting in a Petri dish as they continue to experiment as we do! Now the question is what created them?? Do they have a soul??

Oh Mr Lennon sir, what have you started ?? ;)

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