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Consciousness and Technology – 3 Mind Expanding Comparisons
Of all the pursuits of human kind, the understanding and exploration of consciousness offers the most likely opportunity for us to realize a civilization oriented towards cooperation, compassion,sustainability, and respect for life. Awakening to higher states of consciousness is the process by which a person, or a collective, can re-organize their identity from an ego-centric material orientation to a level of awareness that is capable of holding many perspectives.
Only with an evolution in awareness can we discover the ever-greater aspects of ourselves.
Consciousness might be described as the quality or state of awareness that human beings have of themselves, their environment and their surroundings, including sensation, thought, feeling and intuition. Consciousness functions on many levels, including the dream states, the sub-conscious mind, the ever-present observer mind, waking consciousness, and many meditative and spiritual states of awareness. It is dynamic, always changing throughout the day, and continuously evolving throughout life.
Everything is both a mirror and a reflection of something else, and the technological world that we’ve constructed is a glimpse at our inner universe. The way we use technology is analogous to how the mind interacts with nature, collects and stores sensory data, formulates ideas and adapts to surroundings. Humans first dominated nature by studying and imitating the workings of the natural world, and this process has evolved into a symbiotic relationship where the evolution of the species is heavily warped by our own invention. Now we are totally dependent on technology for survival and for any further evolution.
As such, it is enlightening to consider just how similar the human mind is to the computer, the core technology contributing to the evolution of human consciousness most by enabling communication to occur at synaptic speeds. Consider the following:
1. Consciousness is the Operating System of the Human Being
Similar to how an operating system (OS) is loaded onto a computer to command hardware, consciousness is the program which sets the parameters for human behavior and thought, instructing us on how to be ourselves. The user chooses programs to load onto the OS in order to support a wider possibility of functions for the device, and anything that we take in consciously or sub-consciously contributes to the quality of our presence of mind and overall awareness.
As a newborn, the mind is a relative blank disc and we are limited to the default capacities of an infant. Embarking on a journey of acquiring information and formulating it into ideas and behaviors, the baby begins to add programs to the OS. Observation and imitation are keen human instincts, and throughout life we are in a continual process of collecting sensory data and adapting to our environment, imitating that which we see. We adopt programs such as beliefs, mannerisms, and sometimes the habits of our family. We might spend decades in school, then maybe an entire lifetime gaining knowledge and experience, all of which is perpetually woven together to form our awareness and understanding of the world.
The amalgam of our experience becomes our consciousness at any moment, and we can add or subtract programs to this that work either for our benefit or detriment. Choosing to run positive programs enhances the quality of life and our resilience to the suffering in life.
Source: http://truthisscary.com/2014/08/consciousness-and-technology-3-mind-expanding-comparisons/
