Hello Reader,
The following blog contains both scientific and my personal take on both consciousness and emotions. Firstly, I’d talk from research papers and books that I’ve read on the topic and at last I’d share my take on the topic. Again, I am neither a clinical psychologist nor a professional therapist so the scientific side won’t be my original words but taken from renowned personalities like Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, Dr. Ander Huberman, Jordan Peterson, Daniel Kahneman some research papers, articles and my personal experience.
Lets begin with the scientific part of consciousness. I won’t go deep into the neurobiology and consensus mechanisms of our brain since the blog would be too long. Consciousness can be divided into two broad subparts, the experiencing self and the narrating self. The experiencing self is our moment-to-moment consciousness and is seldom consulted when it comes to major decisions. On the other hand, the narrating self is forever busy in the past or evaluating for the future. However, it doesn’t narrate everything and only averages the highest peak moments with end moments. (That why most great communicators end with a nice dialogue or a question to intrigue the individual). The prior information was proven by one groundbreaking experiment conducted by Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. Every moment the biochemical mechanisms of the brain create a flash of experience, which immediately disappears. The narrating self tries to impose some order on this never ending story by giving each experience some lasting meaning. *If you want to know further about this, I highly recommend reading Homo Deus by Dr. Yuval Harari and Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
Now since we have a brief knowledge of consciousness, lets dive into emotions. Before we start with science. In the book Homo Dues, the author mocks the liberalist world based on emotions by giving a hilarious example. He says and I quote, “Today, people marry for love, and its their personal feelings that give value to this bond. Hence, if the same feeling that once drove you into the arms of one man now drive you into the arms of another, what’s wrong with that?” Personally, I don’t think that the example above is true love or true feelings but only a never-ending desire for pleasure and lust. However, I believe the point of that example was to understand true bonds, meaningful relationships and genuine care in a partner. Just wait for a minute, we would touch this topic relating to love and relationships soon. But first, I want to make you understand that modern science still doesn’t know what emotions are exactly. Lets take a look into some of the theories. Mind (not brain) isn’t some mystical eternal entity nor an organ, it is a flow of subjective experiences like pain, pleasure, anger. Neurologists describe consciousness as concrete reality but the existence of emotions is a bit controversial. The most famous theory argues that the brain is a highly complex organ with more than 80 billion neurons. So, when billions of neurons send billions of electric signals back and forth, subjective experiences emerge. The funny part is that this theory explains nothing and merely affirms that the problem is very complicated. I’d explain this with an example. Suppose, there is heavy traffic jam on the streets of Delhi, cars are moving back and forth, does it mean that a supreme entity rises from the streets and makes some changes in the position of the cars? Due to lack of research and data, scientists describes emotions as “mind pollution”. Further research will for sure bring more data out soon.
Does this mean that we should discard emotions from our life? I and many experts in the field believe the answer to be no. Emotions are the biochemical result of thousands of years of evolutions and they might be difficult to handle sometimes but they are the reason we are alive. Let’s touch the topic of love and relationships in this regards. Now, in the above arguments we disregarded the idea of desire like lust and pleasure. The stoics have a very good take on all this but still, today I won’t touch that perspective. If you take my perspective, I’d say any relationship is beautiful in itself. The idea of two complete individuals agreeing on stuff, compromising and growing together is utterly gorgeous. I was watching a series lately, a secretary of a lawyer dies in one scene and apparently he hated her. But when she was gone, he was devasted. I realized at that moment that we only live once, we only love once (truly) and we only die once. What we do with our lives is in our hands. We should always prioritize family over work because when we are 80 years old lying on your deathbed, we won’t regret that we didn’t make more money. We’d regret that we didn’t spend enough time with our family.
This is Vedant Verma, signing off…
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