Consciousness and Oblivion

It is so important to be conscious. I don’t mean just understanding what’s going on around you but also being able to process your surroundings and express your concerns about them. Realizing the value that a moment can have, absorbing the true nature of something. I believe that this consciousness, this realization of living, is the most powerful trait a person may have. I always felt conscious and aware of everything that’s going on from a very young age, which made me a very skeptical and sensitive person. I believe that the reason some people are more sensitive than others is because they can understand everything in a deeper meaning.

By comprehending reality and actually being aware of what is going on and what life is, people get more emotional and thoughtful, because it is too much for the human brain to process so deep information about the world. That’s why as humans we use less than 30% of our brain. If we used the 100% we would get totally crazy, because we would be able to understand things about the world that from our human nature we are not capable to handle emotionally. Imagine being able to understand that the universe never ends, or that time doesn’t really exist, or that the universe will never stop existing. It’s our nature’s way of protecting us from realizing those scary truths.

My biggest fear has always been, is, and will always be oblivion. I am more scared of losing my consciousness than of dying. Because what is the point of living if you don’t comprehend life exactly as it is, in its most truthful and realistic way? If you can’t communicate deeply with other people and understand their view of the world, why even bother having human connections? If you don’t express your concerns about what “life” is and what it means to exist, how will you realize your own existence? 

But in the end, is consciousness a good or a bad thing? On one hand, you get to discover the world in its true meaning. On the other hand, will realizing those truths make your life better? The ultimate goal of life is pure happiness, right? Spending your life worrying about things that your brain is not able to control can make you feel scared and insecure, but also informed and aware. It’s safe to say that an easier and happier life is spent by not worrying about things, not caring about finding a deeper meaning to everything. By not being completely conscious, you protect yourself and ignore the scary reality of existence, which makes it easier for you to be happy and stress-free.

So, I guess there’s two ways to live your life, and I’m not sure if there’s a correct one. You either deal with life exactly as it is and concern yourself with everything that’s happening, or you choose to ignore the deeper and scarier meaning of life and end up happy. The most logical thing is to choose the second way that leads to happiness. But how is this happiness not fooling you when you know that there are so many real things about the world that you haven’t taken account of?

Kant's Approach To Experiences

Immanuel Kant was the only philosopher who managed to combine rationalism with empiricism. He proved that there’s not only one way or another. Combining reason and senses to prove reality is not an easy doing, and explaining it is not easy either, so let’s take this step by step.

We have experiences and create memories. We remember, we feel, we act. That’s how we work. But where does experience come from? Do we feel it directly, or is it something that just exists? Until Kant, there were two ways to understand experiences.

Berkeley believed that there is no procedure of inner feeling. He believed that behind the impressions we get from our senses, there must be some kind of material substrate that we cant realize directly. That’s why, according to him, our ideas and what we acknowledge is all that reality is. “For something to exist it means that it is being acknowledged”. He supported that all that exists is souls and ideas and that reality is only one. The most important part of his theory is that everything in this world (which is not materialistic) exists inside God when it is not acknowledged by humans. He supported that God is “a priori”, and whatever He acknowledges exists.

Hume, on the contrary, didn’t think that the mention of God is essential. He believed that the imprinting of sensory impressions on the mind is enough. He thought that there is more to the outside world than what we can acknowledge, that we have a limited cognitive ability. As we can only collect data from 5 sensors, he thought that reality is wider than what our mind can understand. According to Hume, material objects have no objective substance, and we create their representations based on personal impressions. Eventually, he didn’t think that inductive generalizations have any real logical power.

Here is where Kant steps in as a pure empiricist. He took the rational mechanism of the mind and the input of knowledge through senses and made them cooperate. He made a new guess about the development of experience: experiences provide the “data” that the mind is going to process, and this data works as direct representations. The mind processes the representations that it receives, and the data gets modified with previous data of the mind. This shows that time and place are not dependent of experience but rather the condition for empirical perception to exist. Experiences are blind without understanding, and understanding is empty without experiences. According to Kant, “real stuff” are phenomena organized by the mind.

It was a big step to bring two opposite philosophical approaches into one. It may seem normal to some of us, but it’s not that easy to realize it on our own. Bringing rationalism and empiricism in piece is, in my opinion, one of the greatest achievements of man.

My thoughts on time,reality, and nostalgia

Why do good times end? That’s where we always end up, after thinking and thinking and brainstorming. Every single time it starts with the same thought and it ends with the same question, but the truth is, there’s no answer to that. You can’t really say why something ends or why something exists at the first place. The only difference between then and now is just time. Do things really change? Maybe they do. Maybe everything changes actually, because time can never be the same. It passes and passes and things change without realizing it. Even if you don’t want something to change there’s  nothing you can really do about it. You’re not the same person you were a second ago. It’s another time, another part of reality. As well as you’re not the same person you’re gonna be in one second. One. By reading this you now know more than you knew a second before, which makes you different. Well, that’s how life goes. When you experience something, even if you go back to the same place,with the same people, do the same stuff, it wont be the same thing, because you’ll be a different person, knowing more things than you did before. Knowledge is power. I finally understand this phrase. This is actually what existence is if you think about it. Knowing that you exist is existing. If you didn’t know you existed you wouldn’t really exist. Cause what is existence? Where do we exist? Some might say on earth, which is a planet in space. Okay. Then where does space exist? It’s all a matter of perspective, you see. By knowing that I exist and that others recognize my existence I can safely say this is a reality and not a fantasy. So, is it that we experience different realities everyday, and then we decide on which ones to stick ?

  Now, there is a problem with good experiences: you either cry because it’s over or smile because it happened. I’m usually in a kind of combination of those two, for I get really attached to moments. I’m extremely happy that I get to be so happy and so full of life on numerous occasions, but at the same time I’m sad that I only get to experience a particular type of happiness only once. But is happiness even a choice? Do we want to be happy? Of course we do, but something tells us we're too stubborn to accept our happiness without being where we want to be. We keep punishing ourselves for some reason, as if it is our fault that time passes and we're not the same person as then. We keep thinking and thinking and trying to remember even more things just to feel closer to that reality. But that reality has passed. It does not exist anymore, which basically makes it a fantasy. The past doesn’t exist somewhere, it is not something real. Pictures are just representations of those realities, just ways of keeping a fantasy with us. The only thing “real” is RIGHT NOW. Imagine how many “nows” have passed. Countless. Then I think about how many nows I’ve spent thinking over fantasies. Usually there are times where I have lived more in a couple weeks than in countless months. So I guess the goal of life is not to live many years, right? Because this is proof for myself that quantity really doesn’t mean ANYTHING. So it’s not really time that exists, but moments. Time is relative, everything happens simultaneously. But moments, they are knowledge, which keeps our existence going. It’s all a matter of perspective. Distinguishing realities and fantasies. Adding value to a moment according to the knowledge it provided you for realizing your existence.