10 of the Best Things Consciousness has Given Us

We were born into this Garden of Eden but, over the years, we have kept trying to build our own. And certainly, this planet would be a lot different – maybe happier – without us. But what we’ve achieved has been astounding and inspiring. And for better or worse we’re here to stay. We have done a substantial job at controlling the world around us. From thatched roof cottages to the Burj Khalifa, here are a few steps we’ve taken to become master of our own universe.

1. Safety – The Simpsons’ vision of a fat, happy, American family sitting on a couch in their living room is something that, until recently in human history, was as unachievable as writing a series of famous novels about a boy wizard. But they both represent something that has allowed us to manifest every great human achievement: safety.

It’s a well-known fact that J.K. Rowling was a poor single mother on welfare when she began writing “Harry Potter.” And her fans hold in reverence a small café in Edinburgh, Scotland called “The Elephant House” [LINK 1] in which she used to write. In an interview [LINK 2] she says “the best place to write […] is in a café” adding that the best café is “crowded enough to allow you to blend in, but not too crowded that you have to share a table with someone else.” That was her comfort zone. And without it, the challenges life gave her might have been too overwhelming to write a massive work of fiction. And without a cave to hide in, that first neanderthal would have been too busy being hunted to rub two sticks together and make fire.

2. The Plough – Nobody likes the plough. It never gets enough credit. Nobody thinks of it anymore except for farmers. But despite this terrible marginalization of humanity’s greatest achievement since the wheel, it has pushed humanity into three of the largest steps it ever took towards civilization: a mastery of animals, large-scale agriculture, and creation of an economy.

One could argue that the mastery of animals was the invention of the first engine. Be it for better or worse, when the horse pulled the first plough or when the dog fetched the first rabbit, a great burden was taken off of humanity’s shoulders. And by placing that burden on another organism, it allowed us to produce more food than we needed. We could trade that food to obtain the things we didn’t have, so we no longer had to waste more energy. [LINK 3] Life became a game of efficiency instead of a struggle for survival. And so entered a differentiation of classes between the gamers and the strugglers. (Does that sentence make me a libertarian?) Anyway, for the first time in history, we could feed more than just ourselves and spend time doing things other than hunting and gathering. [LINK 4]

3. Writing – The singular thing that allows society to advance so far beyond its primitive beginnings is our ability to store information. Elephant matriarchs continually lead their children and tribe along the same paths to the same watering holes, thus ensuring a generational knowledge [LINK 5] is maintained amongst the herd. This is a useful trick when it comes to species of mammals that live in groups. And our species would find it much harder to survive if instructions for something like a combustion engine, were passed down verbally.

While there are a number of theories about the evolution of language, one thought suggests it evolved from humanity’s talent for abstract symbology shown in things like cave paintings. [LINK 6] And most anthropologists believe writing was first used to account finances. So I suppose we were thinking, “If I can’t make a symbol for it, how will I ever remember who owes me money?” But much better things came from this innovation besides the invention of debt. Without it we couldn’t study. We couldn’t code. We couldn’t keep recipes or text each other. But most importantly, it transformed information from a concept into a physical thing that could be tracked and measured. It gave us the ability to take an image from our minds and make it real, again and again and again.

4. Religion – Probably the best and worst creation of humankind, Religion joined people together and estranged others. It opened our eyes to new possibilities and kept them closed when those thoughts were challenged. It has brought peace to whole nations and exported war on a massive scale. But this is what power does. It isn’t good or evil. It just has great consequences for how you use it. But an important fact about religion – it gave humanity, community. It gave us something to congregate around besides gathering food and building shelter.

It’s likely that religion began in forms of ancestor worship and ceremonial burial. These two things show a tribal desire to protect generational knowledge by honoring those who have it. And these practices are the reasons why we don’t kill our grandparents when they turn 80. They are still useful. They have information. Which helped the tribe explain the world around them. Even if those explanations were silly sometimes.

Religion helped humanity explore the invisible. If something happened that could not be explained, like a disease, then it was a curse or an angry god. But this curiosity about the origin of things that kept humanity exploring; even if those who explored too far might have been burned at the stake. [LINK 7]

5. Medicine – I think we can all understand the value of a cast on a broken bone, or a surgical procedure for a burst appendix, or an emergency tracheostomy [LINK 8]. But I think the most valuable thing about medical science (besides the uncountable number of lives it’s saved) is how it’s inspired humanity to find a reason for its suffering.

Our love of abstract thought has often led us astray; imbalanced humors, unnecessary amputations, ghosts in your blood. But these thoughts began at a place of curiosity, and continued investigation. And without the search for an explanation to our pain, no one would have sought knowledge in the first place. Artists became polymaths, and illustrations of men in circles were more than drawings, they were studies of anatomy. Aside from it being one of the most urgent of intellectual pursuits in human history, it has also been the most curious, the most empathetic, and the most necessary of any science to date.

6. Logic – I don’t want to sound like a Vulcan, but logic is probably responsible for most of the good decisions we’ve made over these many millennia. Up until now, evolution has had to rely on its guess-and-test formula; with its most useful tool being the process of elimination. Instead of giving a species a selective trait on purpose, that species’ environment decides what lives and what dies. Logic presents humanity with the ability to save itself from that meteor. And not just survive, but become more selective based on the conditions in which we are living.

Plato and Aristotle studied Logic to establish what it was. [LINK 9] But people in Hindu and Chinese cultures were using logic long before it was identified. In the ancient Sanskrit text of the Rigveda, [LINK 10] there are examples of ontological thought following a formula similar to Boolean logic: “this or that,” “this not that” etc. [LINK 11] They formed these tools to search for the source of their own creation. They sharpened their minds as much as possible to make sure the unknowable truly was unknowable.

7. Storytelling – Ok, I keep reinforcing this point of generational knowledge, but, like the mighty elephant, it’s probably the reason we’ve managed to stay alive so long. Stories are probably the first way humanity passed knowledge down and the skill probably existed before writing did. [LINK 12] They help us teach one another. They grab our attention and help us create a path between ideas. They also tend to simplify things, making it easier for a master to communicate with a novice. [LINK 13]

Along with being a good teacher, the most important lesson a fiction can teach us is that it is, essentially, a lie. As Albert Camus once said “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” And this discovery is a key moment in anyone’s life. Knowing where the line is between reality and fantasy, and seeing how the two join together is a key part of growing up. Whether it be realizing Santa is not real, or being disappointed that your Furby does not actually think, finding these things out are the first steps children take to teaching themselves, and seeing the difference between the truth and a lie.

8. The Steam Engine – It is probably the best thing to use to mark our entrance into the industrial age, and for good reason. This invention is responsible for a great deal of urban development and helped our civilization to share resources on a much greater scale. Crossing continents became a much easier thing to do. Harvesting and utilizing resources was suddenly much simpler. All of the building blocks that make our modern age possible, came from this change in technology and scale.

Really the important thing here is that this engine represents (more or less) an end to animal driven systems and opened our eyes to automation. Without this first engine we couldn’t make espressos, heat our homes, or harness nuclear fission. We were done doing things by hand and became designers of our own universe. [LINK 14] You know…more or less.

9. The Microchip – Just like paper, the integrated circuit, or microchip, is the greatest invention since sliced bread. This tiny little square began humanity down the road of information storage like never before. And like I said in the section on writing, storing information is the single most important skill that allows our species to advance. And microchip technology is the best way of performing that skill to date.

As automation has increased, our society has become more efficient. The vast quantity of information being created with an automatic way of storing it; as farming was the game-changer before, now our fields are filled with data. And so are our markets. Anything is possible with the right information. You could…prevent a video game shop from crashing in the stock market, create a fake festival on a remote island or troll people on Facebook to manipulate their political opinions. [LINK 15]

10. Artificial Intelligence – Where automation and information meet, artificial intelligence is probably the best way to understand our own consciousness. It’s like painting a self-portrait with reflective paint. In the shared imagination of humanity, this is a species we are making, but really, most of what we’ve already created are just automated programs with an installed chat bot. A “Strong AI” or “Strong General AI” as they would call it in the industry, [LINK 16] is the Skynet, Matrix, HAL version of AI most people would picture when they hear the phrase Artificial Intelligence. An Intelligence like that would be able to fully replicate human consciousness, learn by itself, and plan for the future. But that is still very theoretical since we haven’t even nailed down a solid definition of what consciousness is yet.

But if science fiction writers have taught us anything it’s that this is the next big step. The first alien race won’t be landing on the planet in flying saucers, it will be created, right here, by us. And this will be our journey; to look upon our own creation and set it free, knowing that it may kill us or it may help us, but knowing also that whatever decision it makes, it’s done because of us, because of who we are, as a people.

LINK 1 https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/jk-rowling-harry-potter-birthplace-clapham-edinburgh-a9527656.html

LINK 2 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tikY729VzqY?&ab_channel=TimeToMotivation

LINK 3 https://sciencenordic.com/agriculture-agriculture--fisheries-anthropology/how-the-heavy-plough-changed-the-world/1381548

LINK 4 https://www.ploughmen.co.uk/about-us/history-of-the-plough

LINK 5 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/elephants-never-forget/

LINK 6 https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/96/14/8028.full.pdf

LINK7 http://www2.southeastern.edu/Academics/Faculty/mrossano/recentpubs/religious_mind.pdf

LINK 8 https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/tracheostomy/

LINK 9 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-ancient/

LINK 10 https://sanskritdocuments.org/doc_veda/naasadiiya.html

LINK 11 https://www.lotame.com/what-is-boolean-logic/

LINK 12 https://reporter.rit.edu/tech/evolution-storytelling

LINK 13 https://www.nyu.edu/faculty/teaching-and-learning-resources/strategies-for-teaching-with-tech/storytelling-teching-and-learning/the-purpose-of-stories.html

LINK 14 https://www.iqsdirectory.com/resources/the-history-of-the-steam-engine/

LINK 15 https://slate.com/culture/2009/06/1959-when-america-first-met-the-microchip.html

LINK 16 https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/strong-ai