I just noticed that I neglected to include the note at the end of
the last post, on death and consciousness...
What I had intended to discuss was related to the fact that one
of my father's favorite things to do was point out what "nobody knows" in many
our various discussions. All my life, he did that; talking in great depth
about what some of the beliefs are and the controversies, but pointing out not
only what isn't known but how it effects other things we THINK we know. There
is often a domino effect similar to what he discovered when he retraced the
steps leading to the current reductionist approach in mainstream science, only
to discover that some of those steps were poorly thought out.
Many of our discussions involved human physiology. My
father talked about the fact that human bodies are able to
perceive the proximity of other human bodies in ways not related to our
conscious perceptions. He cited as one proof of this the well-documented fact
that adult women living together will entrain their menstrual cycles. "Nobody
knows how that happens," he said. He further said he had never heard
of anyone trying to study the phenomenon, not even in Obstetrics
or Gynecology. I asked why, and he said he presumed that nobody thought it
important enough to study. However, he pointed out that the mechanism at
work behind it could be very important, indeed. How does one human body "read"
another? How does it detect something as subtle as an internal model (an
anticipatory model, incidentally) that controls timing of a
menstrual cycle-- or perhaps even just the timing of the menstrual cycle
itself? Even more fantastic, how and why does one body make changes in
its own cycle to begin to achieve simultaneity?! How many steps are there to
achiving a synchronous cycle? (I can attest to the fact that it
really does happen, from personal experience throughout my life.) Another
aspect to the phenomenon is that one woman's cycle seems to be "chosen" as the
dominant one, and her's doesn't deviate. Instead, all the others will alter to
match hers. So, how is this subtle but crucial complex information being
communicated, back and forth???? It is not connected to volition. It is a
completely independent mechanism from the conscious mind! If medical
science can answer these questions, it will be a breakthrough on all kinds of
other things that have so far eluded researchers.
The reason I think this pertains to the question about
consciousness and whether the organization of that particular complex system
can persist after the death of a human being's body is because the above
example is a glimpse at the kinds of things that we don't know
about something so familiar as our own bodies and minds. I can certainly be
accused of watching too much Star Trek in my life, but the fact that the
example mentioned is not even being studied raises huge credibility issues for
me with regards to how medical science approaches learning about human
physiology. It doesn't sound all that farfetched that there may be life forms
that live off ambient energy the way plants use sunlight to make sugar. If
consciousness is a stable complex system that only requires energy to maintain
its cohesion, then the metamorphosis from using visceral sources to
ambient sources isn't out of the realm of possibility to me.
If it IS possible, then what sort of existence would that be
like? My only certainty on that subject is that it would be very different
from what life, as we experience it, is like. So much of our knowledge of the
universe is bounded by what our human perceptions are capable of perceiving--
and how our senses perceive it.
Judith