Consciousness is a work in process.
Each of us becomes conscious in relation with those around them. In a medium created by those before them.
Becoming conscious means figuring out about things. Not merely acknowledging their presence – dogs also do it, they don’t bang into close doors but once. Becoming conscious means attaching meaning to things. Figuring out their relative importance, how they work, ‘what’s in it for us’, etc, etc., etc. …
How is this done?
I don’t remember how I did it and I never really understood how my son had done it.
What I know is that it was a gradual process. He was able to communicate with us, his parents, way before he had learned to speak. He may not have had the concept of hunger but he was able to tell us he wanted to eat. What toy he wished to play with. And so on.
I grew up in a communist country. Born into a secular family. My relatives went to church, very rarely, because other people did it. On very specific occasions. God wasn’t present in our house.
At some point during my early adolescence I came across a bible. I had already learned, at school, about religion being bad for the people. I had also learned, from my family, that some people do believe in God. I decided to learn for myself. By myself. And started to read the book. I stooped when I reached the Book of Numbers. Too boring. But Genesis had fascinated me. Not that different from the Greek myths I had already read by that time.
I few years later, for whatever reason, I started again. Reading the bible. This time I finished it. Somewhere in the middle, I was wondering. What if this book tells not the story about how the world had been made by somebody? But the story about us discovering the world around us. At first, we had learned to speak. To use words. Logos. To speak about the difference between light and dark. Water and dry land. Heaven and Earth. Man and Woman. And so on.
At some point, one of us -one of our ancestors more exactly – had had an intuition. Discussed it with their peers. Discarded it. Or not. Somebody else, or maybe the same person, had another intuition. Discussed it with their peers. And so on.
In time, those discussions had built a specific understanding of the world. Of their world. The world of those people. Their weltanschauung. The paradigm they were living in.
As life went on, generations and generations of people living in that paradigm had slowly changed the world they were living in. Some changes had been meant to happen, others just happened. In time, that world was no longer the same with that in which the ancestors, the ‘Founding Fathers’, had developed the ‘original Weltanschauung’.
Somebody had an intuition. Discussed it with their peers. Discarded it. Or not. Somebody else, or maybe the same person, had another intuition. Discussed it with their peers. And so on.
Another weltanschauung was born. The world was very much the same as that of ‘last year’ but for them, for our new ancestors, it had changed dramatically.
Jupiter Tonans had been replaced by God. Or Thor… But the lightning had remained the same!
Now, that I’m preparing to wrap up, I must explain – for those of you who do not speak German, the ‘Entwicklung’ thing.
I first came across this word while learning to develop B/W film. That was how we made pictures 50 years ago. We put film into cameras, shot it, developed it, enlarged the image, projected it on photographic paper and, again, developed the image. In Romania, we used East German film, paper, chemicals. And the German word for developing something – from image to a lot of other things, is … “Entwicklung”.
Same thing here. The world is here. Laid out in front of us. All that’s left for us to do is to make sense of it. With our limited consciousness.