Sanity Is Impossibility by Santosh Jha (books to read in a lifetime txt) 📕

Just take a glimpse on this seemingly very irrelevant social data, which has not even caught imagination of the mainstream consciousness. We have this piece of US data about changing food behavior of millennial and young generation. A Harvard study says, total amount of money spent on food away from home has risen 94 percent since 2003, with average American household spending average of 3000 dollar per year on dining out. The study says, only a miniscule 15 percent of Americans said they loved to cook, 50 percent said they hated to cook and 35 percent were lukewarm to the idea of cooking. Market research says, in 1984 over 70 percent of meals eaten were cooked at home which has fallen to less than 60 percent in 2014.

There is already question in air in USA as, ‘Is The Home Kitchen Dead’, as analysts predict that online food ordering and delivery would grow by 20 percent per annum between now and 2030. The US online food market orders is said to be set to reach 365 billion dollars from current 35 billion dollars in just 11 years.

Now place these factual data with health warning handed out by experts who believe, majority of human diseases and health issues are related with food we take. There is a growing call by experts to observe sanity in what we eat and how we eat. Since long, almost all researches on longevity of human life have clearly state that it is the home food, cooked with local resources, consumed fresh and taken in loving family gathering that is at the root of long life. In sharp contrast, breakfast, lunch and dinner are being taken, away from homes, ordered from outside or packaged foods are replacing freshly cooked food. It is also stated that food is taken in very unhealthy ways as millennial are said to be growingly eating alone, away from homes and in runaway mode.

As we said, we may not be having enough data on emerging trends in human cultures, lifestyle choices and societal behaviors but we surely have sound indicators to warn us that we are all failing in singular front and this is – we are ignoring the holism of our life-living Reality and taking care of only partial aspect of ‘successes’ in growth and attainments. In our zeal to maximize the attainments and proceeds of ‘Heads’, we are happily ignoring the causalities of the probabilities of ‘Tails’ and thus in a definitive way, augmenting the innate and systemic entropies. In a way, we are ourselves being the facilitator of our own troubles and the final destruction. And then, if we assume that such a life-living milieu can have the possibility of sanity, we are simply not helping ourselves. That is why this is high time we take it to our personal and individual enterprise to begin the right process in our personal domains to revert back to ways and initiate novel ones to install and sustain sanity in personal life-living. Sanity is impossibility in collective spaces.

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Entropy Of Human Consciousness

We need to assess first, how our consciousness seems to have been designed and how our brain states communicate with body structures, using which media. There is enough scientific knowledge available now and it is a huge sense of satisfaction that modern quantum science has focused very intently on the idea of ‘Consciousness’.

There is a primary hypothesis that is now being widely accepted in new millennium of scientific mindset, which underlines that humans are very closely associated with their close cousins, the chimps and other mammals as huge majority of our genes are common. We humans are different and way ahead of all other species of complex organisms primarily because we have highly advanced brain states. That exclusivity of large and complex brain structure with all its yet un-deciphered mechanism and processes make us stand on top of the pyramid of lives on Earth. It is this complex brain that has made possible a ‘Consciousness’ in we humans, which is rare and probably exclusive in this universe. But, now we have known that this exclusivity is good in many senses but also happens to be the primary cause of almost all troubles that humanity has had and continues to add more. This is interesting…!

When we look at and accept life-living realism and ‘I’ or self positioned in them from the modern and path-breaking concept and realism of ‘Consciousness’, we have ease in internalizing the ideas of the ‘Media’ that our body-brain uses for ‘Communication’. We also get to feel less revolted by this precarious realism that ‘I’ or self operates simultaneously in different layers of consciousness and almost certainly, our unconscious and subconscious selves dominate almost over 90 percent of our thoughts, behaviors and actions. It is a miniscule percent of thoughts behaviors and action that ‘I’ or self takes as ‘Conscious Self’ that is fully aware and in control of them. This stupidity is our design, we cannot help.

There are three major aspects of the realism called Consciousness, as science has so far deciphered. The ancient Oriental spiritualism had hinted about them many thousand years back but they could not clearly know the Rules of Causality. It could be because realism has always been there and available for those who cared. Truth is singular and already there, we humans cannot create truth or realism but always can decipher and unravel it. This science of consciousness and cognition and the causality among them is deciphering many aspects of that singular realism but still evolving and has not yet reached a definitive stage. Still, the three aspects we are going to discuss here that science has successfully deciphered shall help us big way in understanding Consciousness. The three aspects of consciousness we list as:

1. Entropic: There is this seemingly very valid and probably self-verifiable interpretation of consciousness as an entropic situation and expression of human brain. In the long, varied and potentially complex process of evolution, human brain states probably developed and evolved to such an intricate and multilayered system that reached a criticality of entrenched entropy. This entropic ecosystem of advanced brain engendered consciousness that stood exclusive to humans as no other complex organism had this level of ‘Criticality of Entropy’ of such a complex brain. What does this mean? What we can make out of this scientific yet ambiguous idea of Entropic Consciousness?

We all know that entropy itself is a complex idea yet in simple terms, we accept entropy as measure of order or disorder in a system. A high entropy system is one with higher measure of disorder. This disorder is broadly expressed in terms of the system’s higher propensity towards randomization. This disorder may in broad sense be accepted as something that makes the overall optimal efficiency of a system uncertain. So, when we say that human brain has far more and greater entropy than any other animal, we are essentially saying that human brain states have greater range and repertoire of mental awareness and cognitive capacities. The core hypothesis is that the consciousness we humans have that makes us aware of ‘I’ or self, as distinct and exclusive from others, is because of our brain evolving to unparalleled complexities, thus having a critical level of entropy that in turn engenders consciousness that we have. Other animals, especially higher organisms also have consciousness but as their brain is less complex and therefore the entropy level is much below the criticality that human brain has, only humans have a consciousness that finds expression in much higher and deeper awareness of ‘I’ or self.

Now, as we have understood and can accept the idea of entropic consciousness, we need to look at the modern and contemporary explanation about ‘I-Awareness’ or what we may call levels of self-awareness. It is accepted by scientific experimentation that consciousness, as it was engendered and happened because of ‘entropy-expansion’, it is designed and wired to a higher state of randomization. Why? It is explained that thermodynamics theory has established that a closed system is always naturally aligned to optimize the system entropy. That is probably why human consciousness that is the outcome of entropy-expansion has this innate and intrinsic orientation and propensity for entropy-optimization. This means, human consciousness, in its innate and intrinsic character is given to higher randomization. Science accepts entropy-expansion as the ‘defining property’ of consciousness but also admits that it has to be automatically followed by entropy-suppression to bring about system reorganization or systemic settlement.

So, what we can conclude for ease of understanding and also for accepting a simplified hypothesis for our further journey is that human consciousness is innately randomized and disorderly because this very entropy made consciousness possible and therefore there is this auto-process within the ecosystem of brain states itself to introduce and install a process of order and stability. In other words, human consciousness has in-built mechanism for disorder and disruption but the same consciousness has the in-built mechanism to feel and recognize the disorder. Naturally, when consciousness can decipher disorder, it also has the mechanism to correct them.

Therefore, it is only natural that within the ecosystem of consciousness, there are tangible media and communication plexus to ‘identify’ and then ‘correct’ entropic expressions. We are traversing this undulating path of consciousness and cognition to decipher the causality of that ‘media’ and ‘communication’ plexus. This needs to be understood then only we can arrive at our hypothesis that sanity is impossibility in collective spaces primarily because of the entropic design of the media of consciousness but at the same time, the consciousness also is a media powerful enough to organize back the disorder it is naturally inclined to and thus sanity can be possible at personal level. Disorder is an innate design (subconscious) but restoration is an evolved artistry (conscious), requiring personal enterprise to grow in desired neural plexus.

2. Emergent: Having discussed the probable origin and innate nature of consciousness, we now have the task at hand to have a feel and internalization of the realism of consciousness. This shall facilitate the understanding of the media and communication system of our body-mind mechanism. Defining consciousness and having a definitive idea about consciousness is a tough task. Why? Because, primarily, when we speak of consciousness, we know we are dealing with something that does not have a physicality to it. It is a realism that has all trappings of virtualism. Consciousness is an intangibility that we have to see and understand not with the help of our five senses but with a mechanism, which itself is very much our consciousness. Therefore, the challenge is to understand the realism of a virtualism with the help of the virtualism itself.

So, without further complicating the issue, we begin to attempt a defining process that helps us understand consciousness. There is a rather simplified yet smart interpretation of consciousness that maintains that consciousness is an intangible, emergent and ever transient (shifting) property of two-way information processing by brain states and mega plexus of neurons, spread throughout the body. First, it works as a storehouse of information, which is gathered from sensory organs. It matches these info with the milieus around and creates an imagery of physical model for the body to deliberate on a decision for appropriate action. This imagery is intangible. This is first part.

Simultaneously, when these models lead to tangible actions and behaviors by body, it also stores those ‘experiences’ emerging out of these set of actions of body and converts them into processed information for future decision-making (memory of experiences). Therefore, consciousness works not only as warehouse but also as agent of gathering and processing multi-dimensional information. As deliberating imagery of workable models out of the previously stored information is an intangible