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The Rise and Fall of the Western Mind
The hardware and software of consciousness analysed
Consider what consciousness is, as this awareness between the emotions, desires, intentions bubbling up and driving our individual body, interacting with all the diverse phenomena of its environment.
While our reductionist tendency is to consider it an effect of the physical brain, the reality is that it is a feedback loop, an interface between body and world. Trying to explain it in terms of the brain alone would be like trying to understand a radio, without considering radio waves. It’s a node in the network. One is the node, oneness is the network.
Given that we are mobile organisms, the most basic process is this sequence of perceptions, that enable us to navigate the environment. Then with the decision making process, thought sorts and prioritizes the desires and the opportunities, then organizes how to respond.
The basic funneling and sequencing of sense into thought creates a significant conceptual bias, as we experience time as this point of the present, going from prior perceptions to subsequent ones. Past to future. It is the basis of human culture and the resulting civilizations, as narrative. Even the sciences simply codify it as measures of duration. “What a clock measures.”
