Observe the abnormal.
The out of ordinary.
That’s how you might figure out the regular…
Psychology 101

We live on faith.

Without faith, one cannot even raise from their bed in the morning…
‘What’s the use?’

Animals start looking for food whenever hungry.
Human beings, for as long as they remain conscious, check whether there’s any chance of finding food before attempting to find it.

Faith in what?

Living organisms are made of matter.
Atoms and molecules stacked in a certain order and interacting according to certain rules. Rules being preserved, managed and passed over from generation to generation as ‘genes’.
Individual organisms have very little influence about the whole process, except for some ‘checks and balances’. Which checks and balances work according to some rules also contained in the genes.
Species, generations and generations of individual organisms, evolve. The genetic information passed over from generation to generation becomes slightly altered as evolution forces it to fit the changes in the environment.
According to Ernst Mayr, evolution is about the demise of the unfit. Individuals need to be able to survive in the environment where they happen to have been born. If the genetic information inherited from the parents is suitable for that environment, the individual has a fighting chance. To live and to pass over the genetic information which made survival possible.
The nature of life – the existence of successive generations and the mechanisms which pass genetic information from one generation to the next one – makes it so that genetic information may be slightly altered when copied into the new organism. The alterations appear haphazardly and ‘survive’ only if they don’t jeopardize the existence of the individual organism harboring them. If the organism survives for long enough, the alteration is passed over to the new generation. If the alteration happens to be beneficial for the organism in the context of circumstances where it needs to survive, that alteration has increased the chances of survival for the organism. And its own chances to be passed over to the next generation. Please note that no agency is involved in this process. Nobody and nothing but happenstance has anything to do with what’s going on here!

Conscious organisms are made of animals plus conscience.
You need a living organism in order to have a functional conscience.
Which conscience is nothing but a set of rules learned from the other members of the ‘species’ to which the individual belongs. In fact, conscience – individually speaking, is nothing but a set of ‘cultural’ genes.
Lumps of information passed on from generation to generation which allow us to actively interact amongst us, people, and between us and the environment where we happen to live.
Each individual conscience is like a ‘cultural’ organism riding on top of a biological one.

The difference between the cultural organism and the biological one being the fact that the cultural organism is aware of itself.
Of its mortal nature!

Being an organism, conscience has only one job. To survive for as long as it can and to pass over the information it has gathered to the next generation.
Just as a biological organism is driven by a ‘vital force’ – named ‘survival instinct’ by those trying to make sense of this whole thing – conscience is driven by hope.

Biological organisms have a symbiotic relationship with their environment. They ingest substances and excrete the consequences of their metabolism. They also notice information and react to it. Individually as well as collectively.
As a consequence, the world we currently live in is the ‘byproduct’ of 3 billion years of countless biological organisms having already lived on this planet. Without this teeming life we wouldn’t be here and the planet would be barren.

Cultural organisms have deepened and accelerated the process.
Not only they have physically transformed the planet but they have also built meaning.

As I mentioned before, consciences need hope in order to survive.
In order to have hope, you need meaning.
Things have to make sense.
Out of sheer necessity, we’ve built explanatory scenarios for what’s going on around us.