Consciousness
As humans, I argue that we have becom enamoured with our own thoughts that this experience sits pride of place amongst the other senses for the individual. However this bias is deceptive, for the brain is a vital organ like all the others in the body protected by a case made of bone and carrying out a specific function namely to relay signals. And consciousness has mistakenly become the preserve of the ‘mind'. Yet. that the awareness of our own thoughts as no different to our awareness of other senses; to hear, smell, taste, feel. And our actions be they overt physical movements such as the use of our limbs or adjusting the output from our voice-box or else discrete chemical processes. All these and many more are one and the same manifestations of our consciousness and Descartes' mind body problem mislabelled thoughts as distinct and unique purveyors of our own intellectual capacities. I suggest this flawed reasoning allowed for centuries people to understand the workings of the mind as different from the rest of the body …which they simply are not. When we ask where is consciousness? we could very well ask where is touch, or pain exactly. Simply put we locate thought in our brain in the same way we locate touch at our finger tips or hunger in our stomach. Nerve impulses run throughout the entire body necessarily. Whether attributes are functioning on a conscious or subconscious level is a matter of focus and contemporary life has demanded over use of our language capacities in order to function in modern society and often at the neglect of our other physical attributes. All senses are consciousness, not just thought. The application of human intelligence is not localised or limited to the brain which provides a vital function in the same way the other major organs do. Our intelligence is the summation of all our faculties from reading text in a language known to us, to playing a violin. This seamless integration means humans experience the world and their own existence in every part of our bodies - this is all equally a part of our conscious and subconscious life force, the coherent manifestation of intelligence is not limited to our ability to ‘think’. Until we embrace this understanding that human intelligence is not reliant on thinking, we will know the trees but never be fully aware of the woods that is the nature of our own existence within the cosmos. Ipso facto. by AJRowe-Jones
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