Science, Religion and its relation to Human Consciousness

More interesting posts will follow.

For my first and inaugural post, I will briefly set out how I see the relationship between consciousness, religion (more aptly named mythology) and science. Although - disclaimer - this will not be as detailed or as good as the similar (but different) critique on the blog "descent into darkness."

The structure is as follows. I start of with (1) the origination and the problem, and (3a) and (3b) are the routes that consciousness can take. In a future blog post (most likely the next one) I will detail why consciousness originally took route (3a) and now reverts to (3b)

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(1) We are born into this world with a consciousness, abiding the human individual is relatively healthy, that encompasses all the five senses (taste, smell, touch, perception and hearing) and the qualitative phenomenal experience that goes with it, i.e. thats what a rose smells like, or music sounds like this etc. (note: this is the problem of consciousness within philosophy - How can physical properties (if we assume physicalism - the doctrine that the universe is fundamentally made out of physical stuff -) give rise to phenomenal experience.)

All consciousness has is itself and its phenomenal experience. However, specifically (although a few animals may have a limited version of this) human consciousness also has a self-reflective capacity; it can reflect on its own consciousness, for instance, an adult looks at itself in a mirror - and receives the phenomenal experience - and asks: is that what I now look like?

Now, consciousness, for some reason (and I will not speculate what the reason is) has a self-preserving life instinct.

(1) Assumption - Consciousness has a self-preservation instinct

The problem for consciousness is that the world is terribly violent. Nature itself whilst nourishing and reasonably protecting, is destructive, overwhelmingly powerful and everything in the end becomes decadent and turns into death. (Hence the "mother" Kali mythological character) Nature is overwhelmingly abhorrent to consciousness.

(Kali representing primal and overwhelmingly powerful nature - standing on Shiva)

(2) Within nature is decadence, violence, and death

So consciousness has a massive problem, consciousness is brought into nature, a world of terrible violence and ultimately death. How does consciousness with its self-preservation instinct guard against the world? We have the two options:

(3a) Religion - You begin creating gods and the afterlife - why? - Consciousness realises that nature is impassable and the world will forever contain predators, danger, loss, sorrow, violence and finally consciousness itself will be annihilated. So Consciousness (not allowing itself suicide, it has a self-preservation instinct so it does want to be voluntarily annihilated - this is not to deny that suicide happens - but there is no suicidal mass movement against the conditions of life) has to envisage a time when itself still survives; and not only does it still survive, the primal destruction of nature is removed. Consciousness obviously would not accept its prolonged survival with violence and death because what's the point? Moreover, consciousness sees violence as a potentiality towards death, so its not acceptable to have a consciousness that lives ever-lasting with terrible nature because it would be a contradiction for consciousness, and obviously we can cite empirical information: when has anyone ever talked about a heaven-type existence that includes pain.

(3a) To avoid the death of consciousness, consciousness projects God and the afterlife.

(3b) Science - For various reasons that I wont go into here (but will at a further date), consciousness turns towards science. Now science (and technology) ultimately is a defence against nature and the pre-set conditions of life, for instance, we build a house to go against the weather, and we try to figure out reality so that we can defend it better against it in the future

Now, the movement of science denies the projection of God and the afterlife, which is fine. So science has to deal with nature itself. So what does Science do? It tries to find cures to disease, pain, sorrow, suffering and eventually tried to avoid the annihilation of consciousness - with all the promise (or more accurately the hope) that science will prolong life within an average life-span and finally, prolong life indefinitely so that death will not exist and be an issue.

The ultimate aim of science is to transcend nature and make nature void, we only have to look at the recent transhumanism movements, scientific utopia's, and basically, the whole world: as amazing as pharmaceuticals and medicine are, what are they if they are not to stop consciousness from feeling the violence of nature - not that itself is not an unworthy, if impossible, task.

(3b) To avoid death, consciousness "turns" to science.

And in the end, just like this post, is:

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In another post I will explore (3a) more deeply. I've named this position as religion for simplicity's sake, although more aptly it should be labelled mythology, and the difference between the two concepts is vast