A flower bloomed and the world became fragrant.

A flower bloomed and the world became fragrant.

How did the flower feel? Did it feel anything? Do flowers have consciousness? Even if it did, it could be just a matter of chemical change, releasing some molecules into the air.

Enjoying a scent is an animate experience. My life momentarily gets enlightened when I pass by a bush of murraya outside my home. Did the flower have a concept of scent? I doubt so. Like an object can not be moved by an agent inside it, but it has to be moved by an outward force, it seems it is strange that the flower will know its scent.

Similarly, I wouldn’t know and wouldn’t definitely care about how ugly my face is, until I look at a mirror or into my reflection in the pond, or experience a stranger’s reaction when meeting me.

The molecules causing fragrance is simply a physical matter, when my consciousness comes across this matter, I experience smelling. Similarly, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.

My biological existence is a part of this physical universe. When my umbilical chord was detached from my mother’s body, my life’s primary inputs were disconnected, and it got its alternate input by getting air into its lungs and starting a natural living process.

The concept of living, in my mind, is synonymous to consciousness. It is similar to a mathematical expression made of literals and operators; the difference is that the literals, and operators of a human life are way too complex to write down, or even enumerate. Passage of air into my material body started my consciousness: an expression of life. It evolves with its surrounding worlds, education and interaction with other lives on this planet and gathers its experiences. These experiences can be thought of to be synonymous to a collection of information, continually stored into my memory.

So, in my mind, there are three elementary things here: matter, consciousness and experience.

Simplistically, collections of matter is similar to the literals, consciousness is similar to a mathematical expression building up on those literals, connected by some predefined operations. The result of evaluating those mathematical expressions is similar to our consciousness gaining an experience, in other words, an information to store into the memory.

Hope it does not make you think that we are all simulations. In the contrary, we are very real. More effort we put in to deepening our experience by creating multitudes of interactions with the world outside and inside our brain, the richer the experience of our life is.

This is inpired by https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220216-the-man-rethinking-the-definition-of-reality