Month: March 2024

What are you without your experiences?
What are you without your knowledge?
What are you without your memory?

Assuming you read the first article and might have been curious about what or who you are at some point in your life, where do you feel that curiosity came from? No matter where the curiosity came from and where it would take you, the only medium to perceive that knowledge or information you receive as answers, is the brain. And that applies to cats and dogs whose curiosity is quite visible just like ours. Your physical body is the medium to serve this curiosity of finding what and who you are and where it came from. As mentioned in the first article, the physical body you feel yourself is objectively defined in biological science. The progress of biology led us to the formation of life and various branches of science connecting all the discoveries from the animal kingdom including our species.

The quest to find answers to life and the universe did not just give birth to biology but also various other branches of science like chemistry that teach elements of this reality. As we try to understand chemistry, we start learning physics which is the study of matter and energy.

So where did it all start?
Physics or biology?
And since you are a mass of matter and energy, do you belong to biology or physics?

The development of science is not linear in history as we go about studying science. It is very much related to the dependency of subjects on each other and the emergence of each one of them.

Well, for me, it all started with history when we tried to understand our origins through the environment and started documenting them. But as the species which are categorised as predecessors of us homo sapiens had to climb up the ecological pyramid for survival, we took over the planet and as it is said, history is written in blood. As a tool to communicate and operate in collaboration, one of the first sciences that emerged was mathematics through numbers and division which helped us manage food distribution, war strategies and trade. But as humans survived the jungle and began settling down, the environment kept evolving as we created global trade and human progress. The quest to find answers to life and existence took over and we observed the space above us giving birth to astronomy. Science is broadly categorised into formal, natural or life science, social science, and applied or space science. Education is diversified through various forms of syllabuses making each learner unique. Your curiosity drives your learning journey.

As per the Oxford Dictionary, science is the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained. So it is nothing, but our quest to find answers. And as we keep going deep into each science, we get to learn the complexity of the subjects. Hence in 1854, August Comte gave an organised structure to science called ‘Hierarchy of the Sciences’ which is taught in schools as ‘Classification of Science’. We shall get back to this by the end.

Let’s jump into the most recently emerged science – neurosciences and quantum mechanics. Neuroscience is the study of neurons, the brain and the nervous system, whereas Quantum Mechanics is the study of particle behaviour below the atomic level which branched out of classical physics when physics got complex. The significance of these two cannot be explained without knowing how both are connected and what happened in 1801 along with a few other stories from physics.

In 1801, when Thomas Young conducted the famous double-slit experiment where light and other particles such as electrons, neutrons and even whole atoms were passed through two slits. The experiment shocked the scientific community as we inferred that particles and photos behave differently when there is an observer, or else the pattern that gets created is random. This experiment laid the foundation for quantum mechanics and strengthened the idea of a deterministic universe. Adding up to this story is Schrödinger’s cat theory which strengthened the idea that everything is in a state of superposition unless observed. There are a series of experiments that prove the universe is deterministic and not random, and some prove the universe is a collation and collision of random events that state free will exists. Hence Netwon’s laws of classical physics stand true to some extent.

Coming back to the point of view – you!
Who is reading this article?
And who is writing this article?
If we consider you as a mass of matter and energy, then the brain is a physical object made of atoms i.e. biology, chemistry and physics combined. And this evolution gave birth to neuroscience.
So are you just a mechanism running inside your body through nerves?
If so, is determinism true in your case as well?
That implies you don’t exist here and are just an observer inside your body having no control over your life. Every choice you make is predetermined and the feeling that you are in control is an illusion.
So if you are an observer, can you get to the quantum level and change the nature of your being?
In other words, can you change your destiny?
Or is your life a journey to reach that destiny?

In 1983, Benjamin Libet, a neuroscientist experimented on human subjects where we observed that the brain initiates voluntary actions before the subject is aware of their intention to act. It was concluded that the subjects’ brain unconsciously initiated their actions, 350 milliseconds earlier than they were aware of their decision. This again strengthened the idea or belief that we are not in control of ourselves.

Whether or not the universe is predestined and you have no control over your life cannot be proven as of now. So it comes down to what you believe. The only way to find that out is by exploring life through experiences increasing your knowledge and building your own story.

Below is an illustration from Wikipedia that shows the present hierarchy of the sciences developed chronologically starting with simple mathematical logic and emerging into complex space science.

Thus all the knowledge we have gathered throughout history and discovered in the present era and progressing to find out in the future is simply by observational study as a collective species that has no control over their own lives. Hence this being a physical reality, what you feel, think and act is just a magic of physics!