1. We don't live in nature. We are nature.
2. All of life has four main properties: It is encoded (genetic), responsive (to the environment, also called epigenetic), reproducing and interdependent.
3. Everything in the universe is always motion. Even things that are apparently stationary, a rock on the ground for instance. At some level, the atomic, even a rock on the ground is in motion. The essence of all that exists is motion. Another word for motion is interaction. Another word for interaction is Time.
4. The term Time describes the sum total of all interactions that ever was and will be.
5. The term consciousness describes what it feels like to be conscious, just as fearfulness describes what it feels like to fear. Insofar as no one can know how another person feels, consciousness is by definition an individual experience. This suggests that any inquiry about consciousness, beyond an attempt to describe how it functions is moot. It's emergent aspects can be perceived or sensed, as criteria demonstrating its existence eg. patterns of activity in the brain, but it cannot be independently validated with complete certainty.
6. There are an estimated 86 billion neurons in the human brain. The maximum number of possible interactions between 86 billion is approximately 3.17 quintillion connections. A quintillion is one followed by 18 zeros (10 to the power 18). This gives one a sense of the complexity of consciousness.
7. A simple empirical experiment: Look at the colour red, say on an object. Now close your eyes and think of the colour red (on the same object you were just looking at). It's a markedly different experience. The first experience is 'perception' (sight), the second is 'sensation'. This describes the difference between inner and outer experience. Perception describes the properties one can discern of the outside world. Inner experience (sensation) is generated within the brain and body. Perception ans sensation are distinct, and may or may not be causally-linked, but we tend to conflate them into a single experience, and call it 'reality'.
8. Consciousness is inseparable from a sense of time. Altered consciousness alters the perception of time.
9. The central mystery of human experience is not the fact of consciousness (animals possess consciousness, because they too have a sense of the passage of time, although limited to varying degrees), but self-consciousness, by which we mean the sure sense that life is ours, that it belongs to each of us (a self). It is a paradox because the preponderance of evidence indicates that almost nothing about life actually does belong to oneself. From our individual birth, to our genetic inheritance, to the circumstances into which we are born, geographically, historically, ethnically, economically etc. None of it is of our choosing or determination. And yet our experiences feel like they belong to us, they feel unique and unprecedented, and our decisions feel independently formulated. This is paradoxical. One way that we attempt to escape this paradox is by searching for something we call identity which is a way of staking independent claim to existence. We declare that we have a point of view, our own thoughts and feelings, and say that we possess freewill. But most of what we associate with freewill is encoded (genetically) or narrowly determined (culturally). At best, the extent to which we are able to engage with life is akin to solving a puzzle that has a pre-set limited number of pieces, and in which there is only one solution, life’s completion in death.
10. If we are nature, consciousness must be understood as a natural phenomenon emerging from the evolutionary process.
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