IS HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS, A TRAGIC MISSTEP IN EVOLUTION?

Blog number 2

True Detective - season one - by Nic Pizzolatto

Consciousness is the awareness of the self, the environment, and the relationship between these two distinct worlds. Consciousness means we can contemplate our existence.

Humans are the masters of consciousness, or so we believe, giving us a fabricated level of importance. “I’ve got something intangible inside me. It’s not an eyeball a head or an arm. It exists without substance …” We have come to believe that our ability to self-reflect makes us supernatural or at least something special. But is consciousness just a sensation that is no more valuable than any other neurological process? Does it just appear as a by-product of natural selection to help us navigate our environment more successfully?

For those who don’t believe consciousness reflects a God, the existence of consciousness can be heartbreaking. The more mindful one is of the appalling state of the world, the selfishness of man and the futility of life, the more one desires to become oblivious to that fact.

As a result, many humans engage in behaviours designed to suppress this knowledge: living healthily, obsessing with youth (even though everyone dies), having a desire to have children (genetic immortality), and submerging themselves in their careers.

Ligotti argues that “being alive is not ok, as suffering mostly cancels out pleasure. The only complete escape from the predicament of consciousness is either to undergo ego death, which very few humans successfully achieve or for humanity to cease existing, preferably through voluntary human extinction.“