, "the brain doesn't create consciousness, consciousness created the brain."

By Clive,
The compelling question is whether consciousness always is, such that everything that exists has a degree of consciousness, or whether consciousness is a human phenomenon i.e. it has evolved in humans. It could be simply a matter of the accuracy of our definitions - what do we mean when we say something is "conscious"? Does "it" possess a degree of self-organisation, in order to be conscious, for instance? Another term for this is "autopoiesis". This is the cumbersome detail that you are referring to! Elizabet Sahtouris offers an accessible explanation about this subject. I recommended her book "Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution" on here quite a long time ago.

Trouble is, I read the opposing viewpoint, the materialist viewpoint, such as expressed by Daniel Dennett and find that to be equally persuasive! Having said that, even Dennett has written something along the lines of "humans are now the nervous system of the planet".
But, if we go with a sort of expanded definition of Consciousness, then one ends up with a point made by Tolle, namely, "the brain doesn't create consciousness, consciousness created the brain." Which is a "spiritual viewpoint", I guess, and not that far from deGrasse Tyson's observation. But the phrase "the devil is in the detail" applies here, as well. How far does one go when talking about an underlying intelligence, or life force? What characteristics can we attribute to it?
Your joke about shit isn't far away from the truth, is it? Shit is fertiliser for soil. Micro organisms break it down and the plant uses the nutrients for growth. It is because we are so far away from Nature in our cities that we create such huge amounts of non-recyclable waste. You have written about this before, in your post about the dangers of plastics.
I also wonder what the fxxx I am doing here! But I suspect we all do, at times. I am pretty convinced that this stuff is important. I feel a bit like Richard Dreyfus's character in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". It's important, but I don't know why. I feel like I'm creating meaningless shapes out of mashed potato and I end up being isolated as a result. Until I read deGrasse Tyson's observation, or something similar and I get sufficently inspired to carry on with the Quest. Really, the bottom line is whether or not one thinks that Consciousness is, somehow, driving us to evolve to a deeper, or higher, level of understanding and self-awareness about humans and our relationship to our Planet and the Universe. If so, then we are vehicles for this emergent consciousness. If not, then sure, it looks like a total waste of time, if you don't enjoy the intellectual challenge! We might just as well join the throngs in the malls and the shopping centres and help our economies by spending money that we haven't yet earned. That one really did the trick.

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A história de um homem.

The man's history is the saddest of the adventures. The life passes, the dreams hardly ever take place, the death is an absurd and incomprehensible destiny. I remember of when one day my boyfriend told me that the love only agrees with the life. But my boyfriend died, and today I know that nobody is loved in this world.



In front of the window I have the sea. Behind, the walls of this house fill me with memories. They are not just walls, but a whole life that the pass by, is they previous and he/she is prolonged for besides them.



It is perhaps that that am moved so much whenever here return. A picture is not just that that he of facto means, but also the sound of the voices that you/they spoke about him and before him they were dazzled. Thus, I can look at this picture and to say that my boyfriend had found in him the symbol of an appeased universe. I can say that this Sweeping naive of my old Rembrandt makes me to remind the broken-hearted mother that pressed in it arms, not a simple broom, but the son's of its lost dreams cadaver. Then, all these old pieces of furniture and dusty act on me as a velvet hand traveling me the hair. That whenever something of important happens in my life, so that I return to the baleal, as to take a sea bathing and to become purified. You will say perhaps that that eagerly seek everything this, that suffer and that partly that suffering pleases me. You will also say that to everything this I love in a crazy way and that, loving him, simultaneously I love me own, living him. It is true; tends reason.



But I need to love me to love the other ones, I need to suffer to meet. You will Object although my attitudes don't pass of a try of placing me in a situation-limit. It is also certain.



But you grieve in a situation –limit he/she knows him the Man; just in a situation-limit him the is truly forced to choose and to decide. And it is deciding that he is defined and it characterizes. Like this telling you that my life doesn't have future he/she doesn't want to say that she just has present, but yes that am to that future me that the invention I am forced to choose and, therefore, to place me permanently in a situation-limit.