Eyes See. Ears Hear. Tongues Taste. That's Their Nature.
I read an interesting book last week. It was a book on the evolution of consciousness that was written by a philosopher and physicist. It's not really light reading, but it was a fascinating perspective on consciousness from a scientific perspective. To be honest, a lot of it went over my head because it's been a long time since I've given any thought to Planck's Constant or Bohr's Model - but it did strike me that I'd have LOVED this book if it were used as a textbook in school. It basically walks you through the evolution of all the major theories of math and physics up to this point -- all in an effort to let us examine this thing we call consciousness. There were a number of interesting ideas in the book, but there was one section in particular that made me laugh out loud so I thought I'd share it with you:
The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size
by Tor Norretranders
At the end of the last century, the notion of the transparent man was severely challenged. Hermann von Helmholtz, the German physicist and physiologist, began studying human reactions around 1850. On the basis of the technical data, he concluded that most of what took place in our heads was unconscious. Sensing is based on inferences that are inaccessible to our consciousness. Even if the conscious mind understands and knows these inferences, it cannot change them. Helmholtz pointed to the fact that one can invoke an experience of light by pressing the closed eye. The cells in the eye that have been constructed to pass on a message when they receive light receive something else (not light) and pass on the message that something was seen; since all these cells know about is light, they report light when they are stimulated by pressure. Even though one knows that the pressure has nothing to do with actual light as radiation, there is nothing one can do about it."It may be ever so clear how we get an idea of a luminous phenomenon in the field of vision when pressure is exerted on the eye; and yet we cannot get rid of the conviction that this appearance of light is actually there at the given place in the visual field," Helmholtz wrote.
The eye sends at least 10 million bits of info to the brain every second. The skin sends a million bits a second. The ear one hundred thousand, our smell sensors a further one hundred thousand bits a second, our taste buds perhaps a thousand bits per second. All in all, over 11 million bits a second from the world to our sensory mechanisms.
Over the decades, scientists have measured the amount of information the human consciousness can take in per second... through various ways. That number is, at most, 40 bits per second. And that figure may even be exagerated. Every single second, every one of us discards millions of bits of information to arrive at the special state known as consciousness. Millions and millions of bits are condensed into a conscious experience that contains practically no information at all.
Consciousness itself is not very old, but has changed the world over the few thousand years it has dominated human life. It has brought about so much change that it is falling victim to the mechanisms that created it. Consciousness pretends that the simulation of the world it experiences is the actual sensation of the world; that what people consciously experience is what they sense; and that what they sense is the world itself.
