Memory is an effort full act of construction, not an effortless trawl of factual reality. When we think of a childhood memory we can be unsure whether we are really remembering. Considering the fact there is not one molecule left that was present when we were children perhaps this ought not surprise us. We remember what we remember because it helps us negotiate who we are today and what we might be tomorrow. Each act of remembering and especially each act of retelling subtly changes the memory itself. Like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.
I was working away in Portsmouth one time and was one of 5 or 6 people who saw an accident. I gave my version to the police. Fifty odd people claimed to have witnessed the accident and amongst those of us who did, none agreed on the details. Some thought the victim was female others male. Apparently this is a common problem for the police.
This idea of abandoning the self or the 'me' inside my head who considers information recieved and acts upon it bares parallels with the abandonment of the idea of a creator. Though we can't completely draw a line as to when our acceptance of evolution took place just as when the flat earth idea was given up, we can agree our template is different from a hundred years ago. The loss of cosmic author and the loss of personal author present us with a new outlook. The implications of selflessness are as great as godlessness. Free will, responsibility, nearly everything changes. It returns us to commonality with animals. To see the flow of human reasoning more like the turbulent flow of fish shoals or the navigation of starling murmur actions is humbling. We are not godlike individuals. It took a hundred years to get from no god to no self.
Comfy Christ once told me cats were merely a bundle of nerves. A collection of robotic responses. He was right, but so are we. I often struggled understanding animal rights as it appeared to elevate animal consciousness in line with ours. Giving them souls etc. I had always seen it another way, seeing us as animals, as soul free as a fly. Soul is another word for the self we are dropping . The soul surviving after death is at the heart of most religions. This survival mechanism, the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living, as Damien Hirst put it is like our feelings on space and time. We just can't do it. We. Know that approximately 100 thousand light years is the spread of our milky way but our minds crumble in trying to conceive such distance. We aren't up to the job. Yet we do know more than we can accept or conceptualise. We make stories. Protective narratives to fill in what we can't cope with. Life after death is one.
If we think further, how did man rationalise creationism? It goes like this, look at the giraffe. God designed it with a long neck to eat from tall trees. If it wasn't design, we say, it's neck would be too short. Why don't eels irises contract? God was kind enough to give them eyes to see in cloudy dark water. This logic is reversed it it can help us. Now we know that through a process of selective breeding of aptitudes t,he giraffes with longer nnecks survived better. So what we see as our self as our lives architect, our belief in our free will may well be something else entirely.
Consciousness is how we define ourselves as above animals. We believe this is an attribute superior to all others. Who are we to judge? It is our belief that our ability to self reference gives us the right to treat animals differently. It is how we justify our sense of species superiority. But ifthisinner spiral is an illusion, aren't we just the same as our fellow beasts. We have driven species in to extinction through our beliefs in god and self, a delusion and an illusion.
Consciousness is beautiful and precious to make us go through anything to preserve it. The more fantastic it is, the better survival chances we have. Just as the strongest survive, so do those who see the greater wonder. Yet a belief in an after life paradise is the opposite is we have seen in the suicide bombing cult of death.
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