There goes my everything

2017 July-August Edition of CoMSAA Newsletter.

Please click on this link to view the latest COMSAA Newsletter

http://www.comsaa.org/reunion-2017/

South Yorkshire Dales trip 2017

Mahendra's Musings - Part 5

Consciousness, "I", a "person"

I do believe that we cannot be ourselves with our store of memories, attitudes, beliefs, fears, apprehensions, exhilarations, sadness, happiness, relationships, puzzlement, amazement, confusion, wonderment, and a whole host of other things, without our physical Brain. Not having a properly functioning physical brain is like having a computer without its processor and memory. I, therefore, believe that the physical brain is a sine qua non for consciousness and self-awareness. I base this on our knowledge of how we change when parts of our brain are damaged by injury or disease. The range of effects seen are enormous and dependent on which areas are affected. It can be just a loss of memory of varying degree to a total change of personality so that the person "now" is totally different from the person "then". But both are conscious in the sense that they are alive with all the bodily functions, responds to questions and exhibit behaviours. They sleep, they wake up, they laugh, they cry, they show happiness and sadness but they could be totally different although the physical likeness is preserved. We, therefore, have a body in which there appears to be now a virtually totally different person. We see this in frontal, fronto-temporal and hippocampal damage for example. Or take a disease like Alzheimer's which can be so devastating in change of personality. To me, this means that our brains when functioning as a whole organ give us a sense of being a "person" and the notion or person is conditioned by what is stored in our brains and what is produced in the brain by the various neuronal circuits interacting with each other. In this case, the sum is greater than the addition of individual parts. A symphony is a collection of music on different instruments but the effect it produces is above and beyond its parts. There is absolutely no evidence that the person who "was" before the cerebral insult is lurking somewhere within him trapped in a physical form beyond his control. If this is the case, this sad person has a "hidden original me" with a "new me" that arose within the same body after the damage. I don't think that is possible. But slightly digressing, the concept we have of being a person is so dependent on what goes on in our brains at any one time that even a "person" can be different "persons" at different times depending on situations, time etc. In a way, there is no "person" as such but a succession of experiences of being a person. We think we are the same because the change is gradual and occurs within a physical body we can see and feel. but we need to only take our minds back a few years and find that in many ways, we are now different, and in some cases, massively so.

So to sum it up, our functioning brain continuously informs us that there is an "I" (consciousness) and this I believe functions even when we are asleep but as sleep shuts us off from experiencing impulses from  our "outer senses" (such as vision, touch, smell, hearing), we are not aware or "conscious" as in the wakeful state but we are there, and our brains are working producing all sorts of activity which can even result in playback of a "video" constructed from true past life experiences and totally "computer generated" images of things which never really happened and we call this dreaming.

"I" arises from brain activity giving us a self-awareness. No brain - no self-awareness -no consciousness! Sounds simple, doesn't it!

Just to complicate matters, if we blow up any living being through a zoom with massive capability, you will just see at first a collection of cells and then as you zoom further you will see  molecules -->  atoms --> fundamental particles --> wave forms and within all this, as much as 90% is empty space!

To add to the confusion, all material things in the Universe makes only 4% and the rest is Dark energy and Dark Matter!

No wonder why the concept of God appeals to many! But only if you are happy to not seek further clarification such as where did God come from? Why is such a super power concerned with us little Humans? Has he got a wife? How does he spend his time? Where is he? Why doesn't he come down at least on Xmas day and give a sermon, may be from the top of Mount Everest with a full multimedia backing broadcast on all the TV channels in the World!

Mahendra's Musings - Part 4

One of the things I find very difficult to accept about rebirth is the fact that hardly any one among billions can recall their "past lives". Such a significant happening must surely be remembered, even by a few. Just imagine for a moment that these instances are common and well accepted, and our lives and how we regard life, our aspirations our hopes and our fears would be totally revolutionised. 

There is a large school of thought who believe that the principle reason why Human beings behave in a moral way is because they believe in some sort of after life which in turn will be happy or unhappy depending on the sort of life you led. From a Theistic point of view, God will either reward you or punish you, from a reincarnation point of view the same will happen but without the influence of a God but as a result of a Natural law that operates in such a way that "good" behaviour begets good results and vice versa. Atheists (and agnostics) believe that this is not the case and that when we die, that is the end, period. Why be moral then? It is because our individual survival and happiness cannot occur in isolation as we are part of a community of human beings and this requires us to be moral and display such characteristics like honesty, respect, empathy and love.Some say that this has to be augmented by the "rule of law" and a judicial system. Yet others are of the opinion that even this is not sufficient and that Religion and God was necessary to introduce order to Society and hence a result of Human social evolution.

Which brings me the Big Question. What is the purpose of life? Why are we obsessed with the idea that there must be a purpose? What is the purpose of purpose? Is the period between birth and death merely a period that is occupied by a series of events some of which are pleasurable and others very uncomfortable, some events over which we have some control and others with no control at all and a whole spectrum in between? As death is inevitable, from the moment of birth, are we mostly expending energy to avoid things that will bring us unhappiness or are we spending our energy doing things that give us satisfaction, while we can as what matters most is the present and the future as the past is gone forever, irretrievable and final although we could gain some satisfaction by "living the past" in our memories (just as we can suffer the past with bad memories).

Why then should we care about others? Extending outwards from immediate family, extended family, community, Country and the World? Is it for the same reason as we do things for ourselves? Because doing good and taking care of others make you feel good and in a way, a selfish action or are we capable of getting away from "self" to be "selfless" because a selfless person cannot by definition be truly unhappy because there is no "self"  to be unhappy? But if we are "selfless" can we still experience happiness as who then is going to have this experience?

This leads me on to consciousness and "person". It is a fact that every single molecule in our bodies turns over such that as an adult, you don't have a single molecule that you were born with. So where is this self, in my case where and who is Mahendra? Is there such a person although in a physical sense there is somebody called "Mahendra", but as his whole physical body has undergone complete change and refurbishment, is Mahendra a self-construct of a continually changing body which gives that body a false sense of an underlying person? If so how much of this is dependent on our physical brain? We know that physical changes in the brain have profound effects on personality, behaviour and beliefs. What makes the Brain so vital? Are all that happens in the brain a result of neural signalling or does the behviour of individual parts produce a whole which is greater than the sum its parts? Is this what we call consciousness?  Is consciousness merely self-awareness?

For those whose answer is an acceptance of a God, a soul and an aim to end up in Heaven or something closely similar after death with the full acceptance that you will be reunited with your parents and other loved ones and the belief that as time passes by, your husband, your children and other close people, and with luck atheist friends who have been forgiven by God and given an entrance ticket!). A very comforting thought I must admit........ if you can believe it.