The Journey is the Goal

Yesterday morning on my way to get my computer repaired I found myself thinking about the integrity of life. In particular about consciousness and, after death, what happens to this consciousness? Such questions seem to be the domain of faith; indeed, there don’t seem to be any solid facts regarding what happens to consciousness after death.

Firstly, by consciousness I mean that which allows us to think, feel and make decisions, our free will if you will. Everyone is not only in possession of consciousness but this consciousness is independent of other consciousnesses. The decisions you make and feelings you have might be affected by outside forces (biological chemistry), but you always have some control when it comes to adhering to forces administered by people other than yourself regardless of how strong the compulsions might be. The point of this is not so much that our consciousness is free of persuasion, far from it; rather what I mean is it is entirely independent of other consciousnesses. It is possible for two people, friends, to be talking to one another and be thinking about completely different things, each person’s mind is independent of each other person’s.

Next, given this fact, what is our consciousness and how did it come into being? I’ve often heard that who we are is mostly determined by how we were brought up. Does this apply to our consciousness though? If I were fed jam on toast instead of nutella on toast when I was younger would the very fibre of my being be something other than what it is today? This doesn’t sit well with me, for, from what I can see, during my earliest years, I would have to have been either someone else, or no one. From birth, aside from any chemical issues, from a consciousness perspective I would have been completely identical to every other baby of my age on the planet or at least significant portion of the population of babies would all consciously identical, meaning were they switched they could theoretically become completely different people in the place of those they would have been. This might seem a little confusing to follow, but it should become clearer later.

Related to this last point is another aspect which, while not an issue for us today I think is particularly interesting to reflect on. What if human cloning existed and you had a clone or two made of yourself. These clones, copies of you, would be, in short, you. That which makes you what you are would also make them what they are. Would this mean that when you make a decision, they too would make the identical decision? Should you all complete a test, would you all get the same result? Should you die, would you still feel in some way alive in one of your living clones? I think consciousness is something truly complex and appears completely illusive to our conventional experimental methodology we use to broaden our knowledge.

Lastly, as for consciousness after death, what happens to our consciousness after we die? Could it be that we will inhabit the body of another? It’s unlikely we would have any of the knowledge or experiences we gained in our last life though that said, would we really be who we are then? Imagine if we did ‘come back’, how would our next ‘host’ be selected? Would we as conscious beings actually be aware that we are again conscious beings? Could the consciousness that makes me who I am be the same as the consciousness that makes everyone else everyone else? Perhaps I as a conscious being am existing multiple times at the same time, but if that were the case, wouldn’t I feel something from these other consciousnesses? Wouldn’t I not care about dying because, would I, my consciousness wouldn’t actually die?

As a side note, looking at things in perspective, if you take the universe as a natural ‘order’ as it were and you see the development of life and humanity within this natural order, should human consciousness be little more than the sum of events which have created us, doesn’t it strike you as being odd? The natural order of the universe creating what could only be called historical machines, machines whose very existence is the product of natural development even though they are not identical to each other. Perhaps this is the result of that law of entropy, because chaos is spreading so too will there always be more independent consciousnesses than there will ever be (if ever be) identical ones and as time continues, won’t these consciousnesses diverge rather than converge.

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