"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them.
A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may
be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of
cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of
gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"
While this is not a true story, Scrooge does make a valid point. Our thoughts and perceptions can be influenced by what we ingest. That is why we have laws about driving while intoxicated. When we are cold sober, however, it is usually safe to assume that our thoughts and perceptions are our own. And so we do.
The adoption of a materialistic point of view questions this assumption. If all we are is what can be seen, touched or measured, then what we commonly experience as our own thoughts and perceptions is nothing more than "an undigested bit of beef." To the true empiricist, everything that we know as our consciousness, our minds, our souls, and our personalities can be reduced to random chemical reactions and electrical impulses.
Call me pretentious, but I can't resist the compulsion to see human consciousness as more than a cosmic accident. Call me greedy, but I prefer to take ownership of my thoughts and refuse to attribute them to a blob of grey jelly inside my skull that is at the mercy of what I eat and drink.
I love my brain, but it is not all that exists of my mind. I am thankful for my heart that beats so strongly and makes possible the vast conduit of health throughout my body that is my circulatory system, but it is not all there is of my soul. So much of what we are is not accessible to our senses and never will be.
Human consciousness is much more than "a fragment of an underdone potato."
This article was originally posted on my blog Triessence and is available at DisturbingTheWorld.org.
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