José Enrique Campillo: "Human beings are the cruelest animals that exist"

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José Enrique Campillo Cáceres, 1948. Doctor, Emeritus Professor of Physiology at the University of Extremadura, 1989 National Research Award. In

Human Consciousness

(Arpa) he analyzes the biological, physiological and cultural bases of this elusive device.

The journal Science published in 2005 a ranking of the 125 most important questions for humanity to which science has not yet been able to answer. The first was "What is the universe made of?" And the second, "What is the biological basis of consciousness?" Fifteen years later, do we know anything new?

No. Physicists, doctors and of course neurologists still do not know where that very specific function that is consciousness is. We know intelligence, we know how the brain operates, how we write, how we make calculations, which centers regulate all this ... But consciousness, that intimate sense that we exist, that we have a past, a present and a future, that we know that we are going to die, that we can believe in things that do not exist as spirits, all that so exclusively human we have no idea, no idea, where it is produced. Doesn't consciousness reside in the brain, the engine of knowledge? There are many suspicions, supported by very interesting research, which propose that possibly not all consciousness is generated in the brain. So where would it be generated?

We do not know. But the heart is for example an organ that has thousands of neurons and many connections. Several articles, books and I even believe that a Netflix series or movie speak of how many heart transplants, after transplantation, began to have tastes that they did not have before, to think and feel things that they did not feel before. When a cardiologist investigated this matter, he realized that most of the new memories and new sensations that heart transplant recipients had corresponded to sensations that the heart donors had enjoyed in life. But apart from that, there is also a possible extracerebral and extracorporeal connection in relation to consciousness. I don't know if I understand it ... There is much talk today of shared consciousness, of universal consciousness.There are very interesting studies carried out by the University of Princeton, in the United States, in which about 60 sensors capable of capturing brain activity have been distributed around the world. So to speak, these sensors are collectors of variations of the cosmic consciousness, of the universal consciousness. There is a website of the university laboratory that does these studies where world events such as the attacks against the Twin Towers or the coronavirus pandemic are pointed out, and they have always, always been associated with changes in the sequence of ones and zeroes that generated these gadgets, and that were evidently due to the influence of modifications of consciousness at the global level, at the universal level.There are many studies that suggest that consciousness is not just a matter of the brain but may not even be limited to the realm of our body. Is consciousness what makes us human, what most distinguishes us from other living beings? Yes, of course. It is the fundamental characteristic, the most important. Are animals not conscious? There is quite a controversy about whether some animals, for example apes, could have consciousness. But it has been proven not. There is a very curious book by an American philosopher that deals with this subject and asks in the title what it is like to be a bat, because the difficult thing is to know what a bat or a dog feels like. The computer that makes up the head of a dog or other similar animal is as if it did not have the software, so to speak,with the feelings of consciousness. Animals can have mental activities, they can solve problems. When I was researching I had some rats that were taught to press a lever to eat, and they learn that. But that is not consciousness. And what is consciousness exactly? There is a lot of confusion in general about what consciousness is. The first confusion is that many people confuse consciousness with consciousness. And according to the Royal Academy of the Language they are different things. Conscience has to do with morality, with sin, with what is right and what is wrong, it is the examination of conscience that Catholics do before going to confession. Consciousness is that feeling that we are alive, that we exist. And that feeling we do not share with the animals,because most animals are not aware of the future or of the past, dogs that are now large do not remember, for example, how well they had a day when they were puppies ... Animals do not have the software capable of housing that type of feelings. So do not confuse intelligence, mind, and mental activity with consciousness. They are different things.In his book he gives a very illustrative example talking about chess of what is brain activity and what is consciousness ...In his book he gives a very illustrative example talking about chess of what is brain activity and what is consciousness ...In his book he gives a very illustrative example talking about chess of what is brain activity and what is consciousness ...

S

í. Playing chess one morning with a friend is brain activity. That can be emulated by a computer, even with advantage. But if I play that game the week after my grandfather died, who was the one who taught me to play chess and with whom I played a game every weekend, I am going to add to that game a feeling of sorrow, of longing , Of memory. That is consciousness. Can computers reproduce consciousness? No. The sentiment I was talking about in the chess example cannot be emulated by any computer at the moment. Not even quantum computers, because their algorithms are not capable of reproducing an activity as intimate and deep as feelings, imagination. An American professor says that consciousness are thoughts that move in space and time.In the book I tell for example that one night I was watching the rover on television, the vehicle that is on Mars taking walks. I went to bed excited about that, and when I was in bed I did a fun mental exercise: I imagined that I suddenly left my house, jumped up and planted myself on the surface of Mars. Consciousness allows me, in my pajamas and in bed, to imagine that I jump and arrive next to the rover vehicle in the middle of the Martian surface. These are activities solely and exclusively of consciousness, it is not the mind, it is not intelligence, it is not ability. A computer can play the violin, but the emotion that a violinist gives it, and that is consciousness, the computer does not have. Consciousness is a totally unknown thing that the day we are able to dominate our lives will change.Does consciousness die when we die? There are already quantum physicists who speak of quantum immortality. Bones can rot, but the contraption that holds the most intimate part of ourselves, that persists in some format. Religious people can think of heaven or hell, in which they are transmigrated into another living being ... I launch the "smartphone" hypothesis of consciousness. The best of our mobile phone is not in the device, it is in a cloud, in a mysterious place where you can download it. If this phone that I now have in my hands I throw it on the ground and break it, the videos of my granddaughters and the photos are in the cloud, I can rescue them even if my mobile has died. That idea has a huge following today and is called quantum immortality.And all the things that quantums are saying about consciousness they find out with the same mathematics they use to start all the gadgets that make cell phones work. But if consciousness can survive us. Wouldn't it then be the soul? The soul is a broader concept. The soul, in the Smartphone model, would also include the battery, the time, the flashlight that I can turn on if I stay in the dark ... The soul for the Greek philosophers was what moves us. A small part of the soul, fundamental and exclusive of the human being, would be consciousness. And that consciousness, with the very special qualities it has, possibly survives in some kind of format. I was saying before that it is possible that there is an out-of-body connection in relation to consciousness. Can you explain it to me? We are connected to everything.Atoms are immortal, atoms only die in nuclear explosions. And all the atoms that we have, that make up our body, are second-hand. And all the atoms that we have, all of them, come from some star that exploded in its day. So we are all connected on a quantum level, so to speak. That connection exists. Physicists themselves speak of quantum fields and that this exists. It is as if we are connected by threads. That attraction we feel for someone, those magical connections that we establish with a person we suddenly meet, when you make a mistake when dialing a phone number and you connect with a person with whom a relationship is established that can change your life. ..All these kinds of things would indicate to us how the activity of our consciences would modify a kind of space or field that we have around us or even at great distances. Gravity, for example, we know is a warp of space / time, as Einstein showed. It would be something similar to that, something that would allow us to connect remotely, without our realizing it, and that we call coincidences; all those kinds of things that we cannot explain ourselves and that at all the crossroads of life have made us take one direction or another. Consciousness would be responsible for some of the great things about human beings: empathy, altruism, love, spirituality ... But it would also be behind such terrible things as cruelty, right? Humans are the cruelest animals that exist.All animals kill their prey simply and exclusively out of necessity, and also with minimal suffering. A lion swoops down on a zebra, bites into the body and kills it instantly. But we are not, we human beings are capable of frightful cruelties: of crucifying, impaling, burning, torturing, destroying entire populations ... This is solely and exclusively the product of our consciousness, because it is an activity that moves in space and time, which is what characterizes our consciousness. So unfortunately, cruelty is typically human and is a product of our conscience. As is altruism, the one that a boy who goes on a skateboard confronts some terrorists when he sees that they are stabbing a girl and dies trying.Does consciousness also believe in things that do not exist? Yes, in things that do not exist or that we are not able to see. For example, if I go through the countryside and see a plane fly over me at high altitude, my conscience allows me to imagine that a lot of people go inside that plane, some enjoying the trip, others eating, others watching a movie, some hopeful to see his family ... All that I can imagine and even see with my conscience. But what perception does the ant that I just avoided stepping on have of that plane and of the life within it, and which is as real as the plane itself? One of the things that consciousness does, and that most people do not know, is that it invents the world in which we live.Because in the world we are living in right now, reality has nothing to do with what we see. I don't understand ... Bishop Berkeley already said it in 1710, in that phrase that is now so fashionable: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make any noise?" No, it does not make noise, because sound is a vibration that our senses capture through the ear, and if when the tree falls there is no one near it, there is no noise. Likewise, everything that you are seeing around you right now is false. It does not exist at all in the way you are viewing it. Consciousness invents a quantum world of atoms, particles, photons, and energy for our own use. But, going back to your previous example, when an airplane passes through the sky we all see an airplane ...And how do you know that we are all seeing the same thing? Einstein himself said: "When I don't look at the Moon, the Moon is not there." To your computer, through Wi-Fi or fiber optics, only ones and zeros enter, nothing more, millions of ones and zeros. But the computer has software that transforms this gibberish of ones and zeros into images, text, figures ... Consciousness does exactly the same. What comes to us are practically computer signals in binary code, ones and zeros. Our sense organs act like graphics cards, like computer software, and take all that noise of ones and zeroes in the form of vibrations in the air and transform it into sound, into light if they are in the form of photons ... Organs of the senses transform those ones and zeros into something that allows us to live.One of the functions of consciousness is precisely to invent the world for us. Berkeley already said it and many philosophers have said it. And the American scientist Robert Lanza, in his book "Biocentrism", goes so far as to say that time and space do not even exist.

So we could each see a different world?

Yes. I can tell you that I see right now the sky is blue, but what is blue? I call photons with a certain wavelength blue that my cells in the retina process and make the occipital cortex of my brain see it as blue. But the blue color that I see is probably not the same color that you see. A child is born and does not see, a child has to learn to see. It is a lie what the typical movies tell of the girl from a humble family, blind from birth, with whom a rich boy falls in love who gets her a terrific ophthalmologist, who charges a lump, and who operates on her; and that when the girl's dressings are removed she sees. No, that girl does not see anything, she has to learn to see, she has to learn to interpret the photons that reach her retina to compose images. And there is still another thing ...What? Atoms are 99% empty, so things we touch and perceive as hard are not. You are sitting right now. However, there is a space of a few angstroms between its butt and the seat, because the electrons in the atoms repel each other. And the same happens when someone is touched: the electrons of the atoms repel each other, and that repulsion causes the skin to deform, and when the skin deforms, it sets off receptors that transform that sensation of electromagnetic repulsion into a tactile sensation. There's no doubt. If my system broke down right now and I saw people as they really are, as a source of photons and particles, as a hodgepodge of moving atoms, I would run away, it would be terrifying. Will consciousness ever be understood, where it is,how does it work? Efforts are being made. All the functioning of the nervous system was solved with electricity and with physics. But consciousness is not explained by that. Quantum physicists are doing impressive work. However, while I can take a frog's leg, connect a wire to a nerve in the frog's leg, see if the leg contracts, and then study that and pass it on to human beings, with consciousness you can't do, because it does not exist in animals. Between the fact that there is not much medical interest and how difficult it is to study consciousness, there are not many advances. But efforts are being made. Only quantum physics will solve the problem.But consciousness is not explained by that. Quantum physicists are doing impressive work. However, while I can take a frog's leg, connect a wire to a nerve in the frog's leg, see if the leg contracts, and then study that and pass it on to human beings, with consciousness you can't do, because it does not exist in animals. Between the fact that there is not much medical interest and how difficult it is to study consciousness, there are not many advances. But efforts are being made. Only quantum physics will solve the problem.But consciousness is not explained by that. Quantum physicists are doing impressive work. However, while I can take a frog's leg, connect a wire to a nerve in the frog's leg, see if the leg contracts, and then study that and pass it on to human beings, with consciousness you can't do, because it does not exist in animals. Between the fact that there is not much medical interest and how difficult it is to study consciousness, there are not many advances. But efforts are being made. Only quantum physics will solve the problem.see if the leg contracts and then study that and transfer it to human beings, with consciousness it cannot be done, because it does not exist in animals. Between the fact that there is not much medical interest and how difficult it is to study consciousness, there are not many advances. But efforts are being made. Only quantum physics will solve the problem.see if the leg contracts and then study that and transfer it to human beings, with consciousness it cannot be done, because it does not exist in animals. Between the fact that there is not much medical interest and how difficult it is to study consciousness, there are not many advances. But efforts are being made. Only quantum physics will solve the problem.

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