Why do you need a person?
Who controls us? Consciousness or our unconscious? It would seem a strange question. If man were a slave to the unconscious, chaos would rule the world. However, everything is far from ambiguous. Today, many scientists believe that in fact, conscious thinking and decision-making occurs after the choice is made on an unconscious level. In other words, the brain makes decisions for us, we only fulfill its wishes. On the other hand, the ant's lack of freedom turns the anthill into a clear and balanced system. Why do you need a person ?
I would not say so unequivocally 🙂
Before our unconscious mind can make intuitive decisions, it must learn from scratch.
We are not born with the unconscious, it is formed by the method of learning (consider, according to Bandura's theory): reading all the behavior, individual emotional components, catching intonation, timbre, color, speed of speech, etc. and so on, first from significant adults, then from everyone else, of course, selectively.
I have always called the unconscious a kind of” library ” of our cognitions, which have long ceased to be conscious for us and are so significant that we always keep them in focus and can immediately get them out of memory.
Unconsciously, it never forgets, unlike consciousness.
In this case, all individuals will have a different subconscious. it is important. Then the essence.
The human unconsciousIt is NOT equal to the instincts of insects such as ants or bees, since there is no complete response system.
I'm talking about a response system that is expressed in many personal constructs (temperament, character, locus of control, degree of personality differentiation, intelligence, laterality, ability to reflect, triggers, etc., etc.) of a person, as well as the presence of experience, and is thus completely different.
No, of course, if you take emotions and self-preservation instincts, they will be as similar as possible, since they are laid down by nature itself (the limbic system itself), but the reaction will not be the same.
For example:
About why the person was needed… The question is ambiguous. I think that we are just improved versions of monkeys over many years of evolution and personal ontogeny, who have learned all sorts of useful things 🙂
If you do not take into account the meaningless theories of the random appearance of everything from nothing at all, then everything on Earth has its own development plan, tasks for life. This is evident from the study of natural ecosystems. Everything is in harmony and in complete interdependence.
In this case, a person, as part of this ecosystem, should also have a development plan and tasks for life.
In order to find the answer, you must first identify the fundamental difference between humans and representatives of the rest of the animal and plant world. It is such that man is the only species on Earth that does not initially have an unambiguous future development. And it depends entirely on the environment.
What I mean: for example, a cat, no matter where it is born, no matter how it is raised, will always remain a cat with embedded reflexes, instincts. The same goes for all animals, birds, fish, and insects.
But there are at least some variations of parenting. With plants, it is even tougher: what seed, fruit, sprout – such a plant will grow, without options.
With a person, this is not the case. There is no unambiguous development, except for physical development. Many people know the cases of so-called “Mowgli children” raised from birth by dogs, cats, wolves, etc. All of them are not adaptable to life in human society, as they consider themselves dogs and cats, respectively… They can be trained, but they remain essentially animals. Deprived of human companionship from birth, an infant has no chance of becoming human, not even of speaking.
In fact, humans are the only species that can become anything (possibly anything). Depending on the situation.
The question arises: what should a person become in order to fulfill his destiny?
They say that for everyone it is different. But then the fundamental difference between each person would be different, like in different species of animals or plants.
On the basis of Christianity, it can be argued that a person is created in the image (not the external appearance, but the inner essence) God, but the similarity (to realize your essence, learn to be yourself in essence) must be achieved by yourself. Yoga also states that the essence of man -his dharma-is his eternal pursuit of God.
But you can't become a human being without human society. It turns out that it is not enough to realize yourself, it is necessary for the whole society to do it. To realize that we are all essentially the same, different parts of the same whole. To realize and learn to be this very whole (like the anthill from the question).
To do this, you need to engage in spiritual practice, go to this very thing and, if possible, pull others along with you.
Then we live.
To answer the question ” Who controls us?”, you need to find a definition for the concept of“we”.
1. If by” we ” we mean the body, then to a greater extent it is not controlled by our consciousness. There are too many mechanisms in the body and nervous system to consciously control all this, so thank you that the consciousness is spared from this.
2. If by “we” we mean our consciousness, the key parameter of which is our attention, then it is our consciousness.:
1) very limited(volume 7+ / -2);
2) they still need to learn how to manage (some of the training techniques: meditation, reflection).
Therefore, even if it is possible to manage ourselves, it is difficult and our capabilities are limited.
Once Nature became interested in what it is. She created Life, but forgot about Speech and began to think further. At first, she – Nature-decided that it would help her if Life acquired a complex nervous system. But that didn't help either. Nature even added hands, feet, and sensory organs to the nervous system so that Life could get a better look at everything around it. And Nature also decided to attach Reproduction to living creatures so that they reproduce themselves. (Nature was lazy and decided that one living creature would not be enough – suddenly it will break. And she didn't have time to mess around and create new living organisms every time.) But again it didn't work out. I couldn't get any speech. Then Nature decided that some qualitatively different creature would be able to invent and tell it what it is, and created Meaning. And again the discrepancy – the meaning crumbled before our eyes and turned into Chaos. It was urgent to come up with some kind of carrier of Meaning. And Nature invented man. Said and done. The man was made (they say, from clay). As an external form, Nature took the monkey, as the most intelligent of all that had grown up by that time (so it seemed to Nature). But again there was an overlap, even two. First, the person was attached to the senses, tuned to a certain range. Therefore, a person would still not be able to tell what Nature is in general. He looked at what he could and tried to pass off the part as the whole. And, secondly, the created person could not learn to speak, because, in fact, there was no one to talk to. Then Nature decided to create a second man. It was created from the same material, clay. But even then there was an overlap. This man was too silent, and Nature decided to scatter this copy ( and this is the saddest part of our history) and repeat it. This time it seemed to Nature that it would be necessary to make a second person from a different material. Since clay, as an object of inspiration, has exhausted itself, Nature decided to look for something else and looked inside the person. And there – a lot of ribs. The head is one, the spleen is one, and the ribs are full. Nature took an extra rib and made a second person. And again-bad luck. First, the second person came out somewhat too talkative and with some other logic. But this-a trifle, a trifle, a household problem-can be tolerated. The second problem is much worse. Nature forgot to attach a limiting valve to the self-reproduction mechanism. There is a third major flaw. Humans, and now there are many, many of them, have begun to create their own meanings, and everyone tries to tell Nature about their own. And everyone thinks that he is right. So Nature does not know what it is and what else it can think of to understand what it is. Trying to improve, so to speak, your project.
Conclusion: when creating a business plan, do not forget about goal setting.
In this way, the question immediately implies someone external to the person himself. Really, who needed it?
God, the universe, may still be unknown to anyone…
Or maybe all of them at once.
Or maybe he needs himself for some kind of reflection, awareness of himself as a reflection of reality, of Being itself in the multiplicity of its manifestations…
Or maybe – with a natural scientific approach-evolution needed it to reproduce a new artificial world (technosphere) and its counterpart-artificial intelligence?
And then the answer to the question “why?” becomes clear – to continue development in the future.
And then, for some reason, the author of the question jumps to a completely different topic-who controls us, whether consciousness, or the unconscious, or maybe it's the brain that makes decisions without our will? Again, assuming this control is external, rather than separate, autonomous.
There is a perplexity, and whether all of the above is not the person himself – and his brain, and consciousness, and subconsciousness, and superconsciousness, and unconscious. Does his right hand (which automatically grasps the doorknob) act independently of his entire body and mind? And the heart also has nothing to do with our thoughts, emotions, desires, functioning separately?
The mistake is that the mind (rational thinking) seems to be identical to the entire consciousness, which in reality is multi-layered and multifunctional. And not all of his actions lend themselves to reflection, logical comprehension. Because
consciousness also has irrational mechanisms that cannot be directly tracked.
A person naively believes that if he lets go of his consciousness, eliminating control over it, then chaos will immediately begin. This will not happen, because it (our consciousness)is not going to happen. it is able to act independently-without the strong-willed intervention of a subject who thinks of himself as a certain manager. This is confirmed by the practice itself.
In people with an expanded (activated) state of consciousness, even the articulation of thoughts (putting them into words and speaking) occurs automatically. And all actions are carried out spontaneously, without any deliberation. This is how true freedom manifests itself, when there is no conditioning of behavior by internal or external factors. For example, emotions that have a negative character, or difficult life circumstances.
Who needs a human?
Human consciousness in its modern form appeared when human speech and human writing appeared, that is, when a person began to think in symbols.
However, up to this point, man also lived like other animals and made decisions like other animals, only these decisions were not conscious, since there was no human consciousness yet.
Whether there is consciousness in animals – of course there is, but it is not the same as in humans, and animals do not think in words, symbols and signs, they do not assign names to everything they see.
And at the same time, a person has only one hemisphere of the brain-speech-the left, and the right hemisphere lives just like the brain of animals, it makes decisions wordlessly, and we would say that unconsciously.
Research scientist Roger Spary conducted research on the psyche of people with divided brains https://psy.wikireading.ru/13607 and I came to the conclusion that if a person breaks the connection between the hemispheres, then he begins to behave as if there are two beings in his body somewhere.
Moreover, one of the creatures can speak and write, and the second does not understand either speech or writing and can not say anything about itself, but despite this, it is also well-versed in the world around it.
What you call “consciousness” is not necessary for the life of animals, including humans, who are also animals.