Consciousness
Consciousness is the state of awareness that gives meaning to what we normally receive through our five senses. The data produced through the organs to feel, hear, see, taste and smell are what we perceive as reality. Once perceived, we have the ability to think about and evaluate these perceptions. But without consciousness we could understand nothing about reality at all.
We humans have consciousness superior to other life forms. Like other animal life forms we have many different types of conscious bacteria in our digestive track for the processing of food. These many different types of bacteria work in conjunction with each other. These bacteria do not only have consciousness, but are conscious of each other so as to work in harmony and get the job done.
Consciousness, in a simpler form, isn’t confined to animal life. Plants also have it. For instance, fields of wild flowers face the sun in the east every morning and then follow the sunshine to the west as the day progresses. At the day’s end, you could rearrange the flowers any way you wanted to, but the next day they would once again follow the sun.
In the field of quantum physics the term consciousness has become as important to understand as anything else. Some of the top minds in that field express the opinion that without consciousness reality could not exist. Accordingly, reality is created by consciousness instead of consciousness being created by reality.
Could it be possible for some form of consciousness to exist in inanimate things? Take for instance light. You can study it as either a particle or a wave but not both at the same time. In the double slit experiment, when the light passes through both slits, it behaves as a wave and creates a pattern of interference. Cover one of the slits and the same light beam passes through the other slit only as a particle. Thomas Young first did this in the early nineteenth century. Since that time many scientists have tried different things in order to ‘fool’ light but failed one hundred percent of the time. It is as if light knows what you are trying to do. But light is an inanimate object and has no way of knowing anything. Could it be that light is exhibiting a type of consciousness that has been totally overlooked thus far?
The next profound advancement of mankind could be in the field of quantum physics and the understanding of consciousness. It is now accepted that all of space and time exist in its entirety. If this is true and we master consciousness, then we could travel through space and or time without using any physical apparatus at all. At that time, we will no longer be human; we will have evolved into whatever is next.