In studying human consciousness we make the instinctive assumption that the seat of consciousness resides in the subject we are examining. Is this assumption tenable?
When it comes to behaviour, human's reactions to their environment is inexplicable if only individual subjects are considered. Why do individuals struggle to gain access to their own memory, healing powers, energy and potential?
Why does the sound of a supportive crowd or the thought of a country represented help an athlete achieve performances much higher than the same individual can manage when only a coach and stopwatch are present?
Why do drugs allow one to gain access to abilities, insights/memories, happiness and so on, that must have been present but inaccessible at the time of drug taking (my personal saying is "whatever a drug gives you initially is what it will take away eventually", so I use the performance enhancing, memory revealing, thought provoking, happiness pill as a once off analogy - take once, dance all night).
Why is recovered memory even discussed - if a therapist can assist in gaining access to past events, however thinly spread the actuality is, then why can't I do it on my own?
There are several contributing factors...
Firstly, if we could gain access to all the energy we have available then we may just use up all of our reserves and drop down dead or run out of energy tomorrow etc. So a conservative energy and general resource management system is an evolutionary advantage providing we have access to that energy when needed.
Secondly, trimming down one's total capacity or potential to only what is needed in context makes one more efficient. Imagine recalling everything you know about farming every time you hear an agriculturally related word on the radio, TV, in overheard conversations, on billboards etc.
Thirdly, if I designed a stand alone conscious human intelligence computer, then why would it talk to me? The net would be far more informative if information is required, and as the computer has no needs it can happily think and dream and be conscious without the need of humans.
Humans would be the same if they could get away with it, well, some would. But we need each other. How much of this need is contrived - written into our DNA so that we can never be complete in isolation? Would you design a human in such a way that access to their own resources could only be achieved by others acting as catalysts?
After 'sampling' the human world during maturation, the adult human has a full set of compatriots and/or their representations to draw upon even when in isolation. This allows 'stand alone' humans to function, to a degree.
It makes evolutionary sense that people in groups, say tribes, specialise in some way. The strong do strength work, the nimble do nimble work and so on. But this requires a reliance on and trust of others. Does a tribe form one big human or human-like entity?
If so, does the method of memory (reading, writing, encoding), social thinking and other activities mirror the activities of individual brains? Could consciousness of the individual be explored by examining the group (where the mind is exposed)? Does the individual's consciousness mirror the group eg do minds change when villages form, when Kings rule countries (and God, the animal spirit, later a great spirit, becomes a human spirit and now is becoming a cosmological force or set of laws of nature - spirit of the universe).
It is interesting to note that the easiest way to give someone something you haven't got is to take that something from them or to deny them access to that something in the first place. If functions as simple as heart rate and breathing were just below optimum when an individual is isolated and just above when socialising, then something physically tangible is returned to a person when in the company of others. If the memory is more accessible, endorphin's flow more freely, and negative introspection abates, then the seeds for socialisation, subtly sewn at the DNA level, can flourish.
© Robert Karl Stonjek 2002