Happiness Is A Scam by Santosh Jha (great books for teens txt) 📕

Modern scientific advancements have facilitated so many things and humanity is indebted to those brilliant scientists, who created so many utilities for us, to make our lives better and safe. However, one single important breakthrough of modern science is this vision and wherewithal to unravel and decipher, ‘Who We Are and Why We Are What We Are’. This has become possible primarily because modern science has begun to understand the intricacies, complexities and brilliance of human brain in creating a cosmos of perception for us, which forms the basis of all our cultures, societal normality, aims and purposes of life-living, et al. This newly emerging knowledge has busted the scam humanity has been living out and sustaining since millenniums. This knowledge has paved ways for a completely novel and alternative ‘Normality’ for larger humanity. Our purpose of hypothesizing, ‘Happiness Is A Scam’, is primarily aimed at understanding this scam and actualizing the novel and alternative realities of the ‘cosmos of perceptions’. This shall help us in coming out of the scammed life-living and lead us to true wellness. Together, we journey this probability. This however can be unraveled only in layers. We need to understand different aspects of modern scientific knowledge of realities of consciousness, cognition and causalities to gradually and surely arrive at our ultimate destination. Do kindly remain with me, assimilate and internalize the progression in poised perseverance and enjoy the journey ahead.

Currently, we are talking about the conflict of nature’s own innate intelligence and that of the evolved and man-made intelligence. It is revolting and appalling to accept ourselves as a plexus of chemicals, organizing in hugely complex ways to shape us and regulate almost everything we consider very naturally ‘our doing’. When we click an icon on the smart phone and a whole world of application starts to work in front of us; we seldom think of the complex processes that go on within its hardware to make it happen for us. It does not come to awareness that everything happening on the screen of the smart phone is essentially the mechanism of bits and bytes. The intelligence of smart phone is wired in the hardware through the plexuses of bits and bytes; even though, we feel, we are doing things on the smart phone. Similarly, everything we do, essentially boils down to chemically coded intelligence, wired in over 30 trillion cells, which shape us and make us stand and work. The feel of this idea is revolting.

The intelligence of nature is coded in chemical imprint in the cellular environment. This chemical intelligence is overriding in nature’s scheme of reality and it also is the very basis of how our brain and body works. As modern science now understands the mechanisms and processes at cellular level, humanity now understands how ‘reality’, at seed level, is essentially shaped up very much at cellular levels and the intelligence, which creates realities and its perception, is chemical in content and intent. We have talked earlier how even a single cell organism, which emerged billions of years ago, had sophisticated ways to sense out and respond to its ambient environment. Essentially, reality is an entity, emerging out of this interaction between cellular life and external milieu. This happened as chemical processes have the ability to encode and communicate information. This very idea of Information, in scientific parlance is beyond perception of average mind as we only accept a reality on the restrictive basis of popular and known analogies and symbols. We do not have the space to detail the holism of the idea of Information but it is just a humble request that we must consider Information not in restrictive sense. Evolution and nature’s intelligence has proceeded by evolving this simple and core mechanism and process of chemical intelligence into a mega-complex plexus of information processing; resulting in creation and diversification of life forms on Earth. This hypothesis is at the core of what we shall discuss later, when we talk about scams of perceptions of reality.

We need to keep in mind this hypothesis that reality is emergent and ever-evolving; engendered out of interaction between life form and external milieu, where the organism moves for food and procreation. This hypothesis leads us to accept that brain happened as central navigation space for ‘Reality-Manifestation’ to facilitate the survival goals. The brain is therefore the repository of and culmination of innate intelligence. The brain not only processes information from external and even internal milieus but also navigates the organism moving in the external environment; through appropriate motor actions. What we need to understand out of this discussion is the hypothesis that the brain is a media of two crucial functions. First, brain represents the intelligence of nature; embedded in body physiology of the organism. Second, brain is the navigation room, creating a simulated and metaphored imagery of the reality in external environment. This makes brain as a chemical warehouse, where all realities are engendered and all realities are responded to for behavior and action of the organism. This in turn makes brain the laboratory of testing out and assimilating new and emerging intelligence, in course of continued interaction of organism with ever evolving external milieus.

The human brain has evolved in a very unique way, because of the exceptionality of evolution of humans in an external environment, which is unmatched among all the millions of species living on Earth. As we have talked earlier, human brain also is the repository of nature’s innate intelligence, which is almost common for all living organisms. However, human brain evolved in the last two hundred thousand years in an unprecedented ways. The three factors of cultural complexities, technological complications and relationships intricacies challenged the brain to evolve in a different way, compared to other mammals and primates. Human brain had to be a hugely complex navigation room for survival successes in a novel and different external environment. Humans settled and created complex societal and cultural rules and norms. They created new tools and made technological advancements in changing their ambient environment to their suitability. This needed different processing capabilities in human brain.

Science tells us that this created a new brain plexus, on top of the mammalian brain states, which fashioned more space for new challenges. This in turn created and installed a new intelligence in brain’s existing inventory of nature’s intelligence. Science tells us, much of the cortical region of human brain, which evolved late, deal with this new intelligence, which humans created. Interestingly, many of these new intelligences, which were installed as hallmark of new cultural and civilized life-living, stood in conflict with nature’s intelligence, ingrained already in mammalian brain states. Science confirms that the prefrontal cortex; the latest addition in the human brain, happening probably around one hundred thousand years back, essentially handles such tasks, which is referred to as ‘Executive’ decisions. These decisions happen as the prefrontal cortex layer of brain mediates and processes conflicts between nature’s wired intelligence in limbic system and human intelligence, encoded in benchmarks of normality and appropriateness of societal and cultural life-living in cortex region.

We already know that social scientists accept the ‘Social Contract Theory’ of organized human life-living and civilization-culture, as the most likely hypothesis of the reality, which humanity accepted. The theory accepts that thousands of years back, at certain stage of community living, when tribes grew and became big enough to spread in a large geographical area, they decided to enter into some sort of a contractual agreement for civilized societal living. The contract was entered upon by people, who agreed to surrender many of their personal liberties to an entity called State and its authority, which in turn assured them safety and security from internal violence and external aggression. We also know; how since then, states and governments have always scammed the ‘threat perception’ of average and unsuspecting people to curtail more personal liberties in the name of national security and strategic interests. It is also well known how states and governments have failed miserably in protecting individuals against violence and unsafe internal milieus. In contemporary times, the state, its autocratic structures and functional depravity are the most dominant agency of most violence wreaked on average person. This creates huge amount of conflicts in people, which impacts their sense of normality, appropriateness and reality.

This conflict embedded in human brain is very critical reality of human life-living. It is something, we may say, is exclusive in human world, which has very little parallel in any animal kingdom. Human brain itself is unique and also probably one of its kind, in its modern form and functionality. It is here that most of the scams of human life-living are embedded. In our brain states is the seed of most of our brilliances and stupidities. It is the uniqueness of the design of human brain, which evolved out of exclusive growth of human life-living in man-made cultural and civilized milieus that creates loads of hypocrisies in human action-behavior. They catalyze scams and delusional perceptions of realities. The conflict emanates out of the millions of years of evolution of human brain, which most scientists believe was not entirely linear; as in the case of most animals. The man-made intelligence and perceptional universe of realities; mostly in contradiction and conflict with intelligence of realities of nature and evolution, made human brain evolve in a precarious cyclicality. These unique processes evolved the human brain where two conflicting intelligences vie for dominance in overall ‘decision-making’ processes of life-living. Modern human brain has embedded structures of this primeval ‘conflict’ between personal and collective – liberties and duties – individuality and sociability – personal normality and political normality, etc. This aspect we shall detail later to arrive at the realities of scammed perceptions in human life-living and the ways out. The scam of happiness is also very much a perceptional one and that is why a holistic view of all perceptional scams shall help.

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Soil and Seeds of Scam and Illusion

Just for the sake of continuity of the progression and for straightness of perspective; we need to sum up briefly what we have discussed so far and what simple hypotheses we need to keep in mind. This shall help us keep in linearity all the discussions ahead, facilitating our understanding of complex brain process, which we shall talk now to understand how brain has evolved to work out realities for us. We shall primarily talk about Consciousness, Cognition and Causalities. This discussion shall ultimately facilitate our understanding of why we are hypothesizing that happiness and many other cognitive realities, we accept as true and real may actually be scammed ones.

Essentially, we talked about three aspects of our perceptional world, which emanate out of the way our brain evolved in a unique way; different from all other mammals, including primates. We have discussed that ‘perception’, as we make of it, has a very long history of thousands of millions of years as it was present there even in a single cell organism. This historicity is never consciously felt but it may shape up the subconscious and unconscious behavior-actions in us. The genome of humans has this historicity still imprinted in the chemical lineage. Scientists are still attempting to find out how the so-called 90 percent of DNA, which is said to be ‘doing nothing’ in human genome, may have some role in conditioning our unconscious and subconscious. The so-called ‘Dumped DNAs’ are definitely the archives of human journey from that worm-like common ancestor, some 500 million years back to the present day humans. Secondly, brain evolution has a very long history too and the brain we humans have, which has a dominant role in engendering the cosmos of perceptions for us, evolved primarily to facilitate a viable navigation mechanism for organisms, which opted to move out in external milieus for survival and mating successes. Thirdly, much later, human brain took a leap ahead, jumping the usual linearity of brain evolution,