Garudas Studies about the Possibility of Humani Sentience.

Garudas Studies about the Possibility of Humani Sentience.

(courtesy of Her Holiness, the Kumari-Emeritus Mirra Zanzibar)

1. Introduction

There is still some academic debate whether Humani are sentient, sapient, or whether they are even truly conscious.

Legally, the Garudas government officially errs on the side of caution regarding Humani sentience, and Humani are to be treated as if they are possibly sentient. For example, for the most part Humani are allowed to make most of their own decisions regarding their own individual personal welfare, are not to be killed for food or sport, or used for medical experiments without consent or in certain cases without due process, kept captives as pets or as specimens in zoos, and so on.

The Realist Faction regarding Humani Consciousness posits that Humani are seemingly conscious and pseudo-sentient in much the way that ant colonies and bee hives can appear sentient as an emergent feature of their collective complex behaviours. Indeed, much of the early studies regarding socio-biology of Mutter Spiral Species came from Garudas myrmecologists, scientists who study various sant species in the Mutter Spiral.

There are many aspects of the Humani brain architecture and behaviour which originally led Garudas researchers to posit that Humani may not be sentient or even truly conscious, or at the very least extremely susceptible to being sentience impaired.

2. Brain Structure Issues

Humani nerve cells in the Humani cerebral neocortex is a large, flat, six-layered cortical laminar sheetlike structure in the roof of the forebrain like layers in plywood with occasional signalling columns to partially emulate a three-dimensional arrangement, which is musch less efficient that a true three dimensional brain architecture, because the processing becomes dependent on surface area rather than volume and is less efficient for signalling to different parts of the brain.

Higher brain functions in Humani, like other primates and most mammalian species, being in the forebrain instead of centrally located is also less efficient for signalling to different parts of the brain, which leads to some difficulties, in particular energy consumption and overheating issues.

The mammalian sheets/layers are of specific cell types such that each layer is unique in where it is receiving input from and sending output to. This structure is what gives Humani and some other mammals their characteristic wrinkled look, since everything is organized in a sheet, you have to start folding it up if you want to fit more into it. There is limits to the effectiveness of this wrinkling to increase surface area.

While the mammalian two dimensional layered cortical laminar sheet map structure keeps different layers close to each other and therefore allows the different layers to connect efficiently, if the brain has to access different areas, it is very slow. The connections between the map layers must traverse relatively long distances and thus in larger brains a greater amount of space must be devoted to the neocortical white matter that carries the "wires" connecting the maps.

The ad-hoc planar laminar sheetlike structure of the Humani (and other typical mammalian) cerebral neocortex, forebrain neocortex location and the overall signalling inefficiency, does not in itself contribute to possible non-sentience, but it does create conditions by which sentience might be too high of a burden on their limited processing capacity.

The overall brain structure of Garudass is organized into neuron clusters nuclei vs. mammalian two dimensional layered cortical laminar sheets, is not an arbitrary difference as it greatly affects wiring efficiency and signalling speed.

Garudass possess what are called "abstract rule neurons" which developed to handle abstract rules, which aids greatly at learning and responding to a variety of situations in a flexible way. The ability to guide behavior by general rules rather than by relying on fixed stimulus-response associations constitutes a survival advantage. Mammalian brains lack abstract rule neurons, and hence must learn thru a substantially less efficient and less flexible fixed stimulus-response associations.

Mammals lack the Garudass specialization of a complex brain area network to support song learning and vocalization, which leads to their relatively slow development and why so many of them are such poor communicators.

The lack of Abstract Rule Neurons and the late adhoc creation of vocalization centers were the first clues that Humani and many other mammalian species might not be capable of sentience as we have come to know it.

Exceptionally gifted Humani do not appear to be especially resilient genetically, and most studies appear that Humani intelligence is mean reverting. Thus exceptionally gifted parents do not produce children who are equally exceptionally gifted and revert toward the mean. This may explain why Humani societies appear to be dependent upon excessive reproduction to produce a certain necessary number of exceptional people.

3. The Humani Sleepwalker Theory

The study of Humani innovation in science and philosophy, brings forth the Humani Sleepwalker Theory, which suggests that discoveries in Humani scientific and philosophical discovery arises through a process akin to sleepwalking. Not that they arise by chance, but rather that scientists and philosophers are neither fully aware of what guides their research, nor are they fully aware of the implications of what they discover.

Studies, some ironically conducted by Humani themselves, have shown that Humani are mostly unaware of their internal mental processes, and thus by Garudas standards at least appear grossly lacking in self-awareness.

The seemingly contradictory threads of the relationship between faith and reason existed harmoniously in many of the greatest Humani intellectuals. While faith and reason are momentarily estranged among many Humani cultures, in the past the most ground-breaking thinkers were often very spiritual. Humani scientists and philosopher have been at their best when they allowed themselves to behave as "sleepwalkers," instead of trying too earnestly to ratiocinate.

The Sleepwalker Theory further posits that even the greatest of minds merely subconsciously synthesized their culture, but remained unaware of the underlying process. Humani do not think, but merely process, and mostly unaware of their internal processes. Most sleepwalkers go about their lives more or less automatically. Occasionally great movements in their collective memes creates a shift. The sleepwalkers are responsible for the majority, their contribution are reflections of the whole, while a small minority of individuals manifest the conclusions. Like people recreating their favorite holoprogram on a virtual reality platform, much can be learned from them.

The final conclusion of the sleepwalker theory is that like ants and other hive animals, Humani are not truly sentient, but merely appear sentient as certain innovations emerge thru their collective effects, the individual genius only appears sentient by virtue of being the entity thru which the shifting meme emerges the actual innovation, which it was actually the result of collective action.

4. Humani Bicameral Brain Theory

Modern theories of the cultural development of Humani are that Humani did not discover much of their hallmarks of civilizations. For example, the domestication of animals and agriculture merely evolved over time.

Because of the lamellar brain architecture and dependence of fixed stimulus-response associations, the majority of Humani mental processes are mostly conducted without their actual awareness. As such, Humani are susceptible to mythopoetic stimuli and are in general quite gullible, especially susceptible to non-rational demagogic figures. Humani history is littered with devastating results from their inability to apply abstract thinking, critical thinking, or even the most basic of rational thought.

The Humani lamellar brain architecture, its peculiar method of producing neural networks and dependence of leads to Humani being susceptible to a large array of mental illnesses and personality defects and generally irrational behaviours. The high frequency of subclinical and clinical narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy, neurosis, phobias, perceptual filters, cognitive dissonance and innumerable personality defects is astounding.

The strangest behaviours of Humani is probably related to their two-lobed bicameral brain.

The bicameral lobe structure of the Humani brain leads it to profoundly separated brain functions, which may have inhibited Humani consciousness. The Tellurian Consciousness Theory is thought that until the Tellurian Bronze Age Collapse about 4000 years ago, Humani minds assumed a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeyed, preventing introspective consciousness as we commonly think of it.

Garudas scientists have posited theories about Humani Consciousness, particularly Tellurian Humani and their descendants. As the brain structure is the same, it is posited that the conditions exist among other Humani as well.

The Humani mental state exists in which the experiences and memories of the right hemisphere of the brain are transmitted to the left hemisphere via auditory hallucinations. Although each half of a normal Humani brain is constantly communicating with the other through the corpus callosum, the two halves of the bicameral brain are "cut off" from each other but was experienced as a different, non-conscious mental schema wherein volition in the face of novel stimuli was mediated through a linguistic control mechanism and experienced as auditory verbal hallucination.

The resultant mentality is non-conscious in its inability to reason and articulate about mental contents through meta-reflection, reacting without explicitly realizing and without the meta-reflective ability to give an account of why one did so. The Tellurian mind thus lacks meta-consciousness, autobiographical memory and the capacity for executive "ego functions" such as deliberate mind-wandering and conscious introspection of mental content.

It was only much later when this method of social control was no longer adaptive in complex civilizations, this mental model was replaced by the consciousness-like mode of thought which, is grounded in the acquisition of metaphorical language learned by exposure to narrative practice.

Ancient people in the bicameral state of mind, experience the world in a manner that has some similarities to that of a schizophrenic. Rather than making conscious evaluations in novel or unexpected situations, the person hallucinates a voice or "god" which gives admonitory advice or commands which they obey without question. One would not be at all conscious of one's own thought processes per se.

This is possibly one of the major reasons why Humani are susceptible to a large range of seeming mental illnesses. They are only a few thousand years adapting to the new innovation of near, pseudo, or semi-consciousness, and perhaps only a small minority of any of them are possibly conscious.

Citing evidence from many diverse sources including historical literature and taking an interdisciplinary approach, drawing data from many different fields, until roughly the times written about in Homer's Iliad, Humanis did not generally have the self-awareness characteristic of consciousness. The Tellurian individual was guided by mental commands believed to be issued by external "gods" - commands which were recorded in ancient myths, legends and historical accounts. This is exemplified not only in the commands given to characters in ancient epics but also the very muses of Greek mythology which "sang" the poems; the ancients literally heard muses as the direct source of their music and poetry.

In the Iliad and sections of the Abrahamic Old Testament, no mention is made of any kind of cognitive processes such as introspection, and there is no apparent indication that the writers were self-aware. The older portions of the Abrahamic Old Testament (such as the Book of Amos) have few or none of the features of some later books of the Abrahamic Old Testament (such as Ecclesiastes) as well as later works such as Homer's Odyssey, which show indications of a profoundly different kind of mentality - an early form of pre-consciousness.

The Gilgamesh epic seems at first glance to predate even the oldest passages of the Old Testament, yet it describes introspection. The most complete version of the Gilgamesh epic dates to post-bicameral times (7th century BCE), dismisses these instances of introspection as the result of rewriting and expansion by later conscious or near-conscious scribes, and points to differences between the more recent version of Gilgamesh and surviving fragments of earlier versions. It may also been considered to be an anomalous exception. We will leave aside for the moment the as yet unproven assertion that the historical Gilgamesh or whoever he was modelled upon was possibly Trantorian.

In ancient times, gods were generally much more numerous and much more anthropomorphic than in later times, and speculates that this was because each bicameral person had their own "god" who reflected their own desires and experiences. Ancient societies the corpses of the dead were often treated as though still alive (being seated, dressed and even fed) as a form of ancestor worship, the dead bodies were presumed to be still living and the source of auditory hallucinations. This adaptation to the village communities of 100 individuals or more formed the core of religion. Unlike today's hallucinations, the voices of ancient times were structured by cultural norms to produce a seamlessly functioning society. For instance, in Ancient Greek culture there is often mention of the Logos, which is a very similar concept. It was a type of guiding voice that was heard as from a seemingly external source.

These "voices" seem to come from the right brain counterparts of the left brain language centres - specifically, the counterparts to Wernicke's area and Broca's area. These regions are somewhat dormant in the right brains of most modern Humani, studies show that auditory hallucinations correspond to increased activity in these areas of the brain.

There is little or no consensus as to the cause or origins of schizophrenia, but may be a vestige of Humanity's earlier bicameral state, or at least what makes Humani so susceptible to it. Many schizophrenics do not just hear random voices but experience "command hallucinations" instructing their behavior or urging them to commit certain acts. These command hallucinations are little different from the commands from gods which feature prominently in ancient stories.

The shift from bicameralism marked the beginning of introspection and possible consciousness as we know it today. This bicameral mentality began malfunctioning or "breaking down" during the 2nd millennium BCE. Primitive ancient societies tend to collapse periodically (e.g., Egypt's Intermediate Periods, as well as the periodically vanishing cities of the Mayas) as changes in the environment strained the socio-cultural equilibria sustained by this bicameral mindset. The Bronze Age collapse of the 2nd millennium BCE led to mass migrations and created a rash of unexpected situations and stresses which required ancient minds to become more flexible and creative. Self-awareness, or at least simulated consciousness, was the culturally evolved solution to this problem. This necessity of communicating commonly observed phenomena among individuals who shared no common language or cultural upbringing encouraged those communities to become self-aware to survive in a new environment. Thus consciousness, like bicamerality, emerged as a neurological adaptation to social complexity in a changing world.

Shifts in the form of divination, prayer, and oracles arose during this breakdown period, in an attempt to summon instructions from the "gods" whose voices could no longer be heard. The consultation of special bicamerally operative individuals, or of divination by casting lots and so forth, was a response to this loss, a transitional era depicted, for example, in the book of 1 Samuel. It was also evidenced in children who could communicate with the gods, but as their neurology was set by language and society they gradually lost that ability. Those who continued prophesying, being bicameral, could be killed. Leftovers of the bicameral mind today, include religion, hypnosis, possession, schizophrenia, and the general sense of need for external authority in decision-making.

Divination is also considerably older than that date and the early writings he claims show bicamerality; the oldest recorded Chinese Writing was on oracle bones, meaning that divination arose even earlier than writing, in Chinese Society.

This hypothesis is controversial, but is popular among academics as it is an easy to understand model to explain the seemingly bizarre range of Humani mentality.

Recent neuroimaging studies provide new evidence for the bicameral neurological model (e.g., auditory hallucinations arising in the right temporal-parietal lobe and being transmitted to the left temporal-parietal lobe).

The most frequent criticisms of the bicameral theory are either incorrect or reflect serious misunderstandings of the theory, especially the more precise definition of consciousness used in the bicameral mind theory. The bicameral mind theory defines consciousness - in the tradition of Locke and Descartes - as "that which is introspectable". The bicameral mind theory draws a sharp distinction between consciousness ("introspectable mind-space") and other mental processes of mere sapience such as cognition, learning, and sense and perception. This distinction is frequently not recognized by those offering critiques of the The Bicameral Mind theory.

The Bicameral Mind Theory is mostly based on the writings and culture of the Mediterranean and Near-Eastern regions, although occasionally refers to ancient writings of India and China. It does not explain how such bicameralism could also have been near totally lost at the same time across the whole planet and in the entire Humani kind. In particular the aborigine culture was completely separated from the rest of the world from 4000 BCE to 1600 CE and appears today to be both historically unchanged but also self-conscious.

Alternative and similar theories include referring to the right cortical hemisphere as "Thinker" and the left cortical hemisphere as "Prover". "Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves." Others referring to the left cortical hemisphere as an "Apologist", and the right cortical hemisphere as a "Revolutionary". An inversion theory posits that the left hemisphere of the brain (the "emissary") has increasingly taken over from the right hemisphere (the "master"), and that rather than a shift from bicameralism there evolved a separation of the hemispheres.

Sense of agency is closely connected with lateralization. The left parietal lobe is active when visualizing actions in the first person, while the right parietal lobe is active for actions in the third person. Additionally, Wernicke's area processes the literal meaning of language, while the homologous region in the right hemisphere processes the intent of a speaker. It has been found that people with damage to the right inferior parietal cortex experience alien hand syndrome, as do people who have had a corpus callosotomy. This reverses the relationship between the right and left hemispheres posited by bicameralism: it is the left hemisphere that "speaks" and the right hemisphere that is responsible for self-awareness.

The primary evidence for The Bicameral Mind Theory is mostly based upon what is considered "post-empirical", and is more akin to philosophy and literary analysis (sometimes amusingly referred to as 'ironic science'), as it depends upon examination of ancient writings and minimally upon present day empirical experimental science.

Another illuminating "post-empirical" examination regarding humani and Tellurians in particular is the striking absence of the colour blue in ancient writings. Ancient Greek, Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew had no word for the color blue. Studying Greek myths, Icelandic sagas, the Koran, ancient Chinese stories, an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible and the Hindu Vedic hymns, shades of black and white are common, red and yellow much less so, followed by the rare reference to green, with the absence of the colour blue; until Egyptians began to trade in blue coloured textiles. Ancient Egyptians were the first people to have a name for the colour blue. It seems that with the possible exception of Egyptians, that the ancient Tellurians lived in a murky and muddy world, devoid of color, mostly black and white and metallic, with occasional flashes of red and yellow.

Experiments performed on modern tribal isolates who lacked a word for the colour blue were tested and were not able to differentiate between green and blue, although they were able to discern very subtle differences in the colour green. This is an indication of the extremely peculiar difficulties of Humani perception and thinking; unable to see that which they have not been taught to see.

Given the humani lack of abstract thought neurons, compounded by their strange preponderance of perceptual filters, and their neural pathway development dependent upon fixed stimulus-response associations, it is not surprising to see how the majority of Humani struggle with abstract conceptualizations.

Up until the Renaissance, no individual Tellurian nation state had a literacy rate greater than 20%, which the planet did catch up as a whole until 350 years later in the mid industrialized era. By the Tellurian nuclear era, barely more than a third were literate. By the Tellurian Information age, worldwide literacy hit 80%. Humani have not had enough time to acclimate to being literate, much less the modern needs to be analytical. The foundations of their cultures were based on non-introspective sleepwalking, and their social structures based on a minority being literate and a even smaller minority being analytical. These fundamental structural flaws in their cultural makeup has lead to many conflicts related to large populations of Tellurians easily misled and acting destructively based on profoundly flawed ideas.

5. Possible Glimmers of Humani Consciousness

Brief glimpses of Humani capability to be conscious are not overly uncommon. A humani can walk into a room and instantly recognize all of the people present; that is more than just a case of mere parallel processing but possibly of actual potential holistic mindfulness. An encouraging albeit as yet an inconclusive sign.

Other manifestations are slightly ironic, such as when a Tellurian cannot remember something despite great concentrations, then when they shift their attention they suddenly remember it. One of the more interesting manifestations of Humani intuitional capability is their capacity for humour. When a Humani 'gets' a joke, there is a momentary spontaneous flash of intuitive insight. Humani intuitional capability is exhibited in their arts, music, and even occasionally in their problem solving, what they refer to as the 'Eureka' moment is also a momentary spontaneous flash of intuitive insight. These occasional flashes could be considered signs of potential sentience, or merely part of the Sleepwalker Theory based phenomena.

It is not that Humani are incapable of intuitive thought, but that their brain structure makes it such that the humani intuitive processes are mostly hidden from their awareness without rigorous training and practice.

With rigorous training and practice, Tellurian Humani are able to enter into mindful holistic state that could possibly indicate true consciousness, able to directly experience apprehension of undifferentiated, indeterminate, undivided 'suchness' without the crude approximations of language, conceptualizations, discriminations, classifications, abstractions and other distractions from the speaking part of their brains.

Once liberated, the Tellurian mind can enter into an altered state of consciousness which allows for the mindful experience much longer than the momentary spontaneous flash of intuitive insight. The humani brain structure is not conducive to the mindful experience, nor are their various cultures prone to promoting it, and only very few undergo the rigorous training and practice to be able to experience non-momentary mindfulness. Thus, Humani civilizations have been dependent upon unhindered expansion and over population, and the hopes that they won’t miss the few emergent glimpses of genius emergent from the sleepwalking populace that would allow their civilization to progress.

There are example of Tellurian intuitive training in some unlikely places. Some as humble as determining the gender of poultry. Newborn chickens do not have gender differentiation until about 6 weeks of age, there is a substantial profit incentive to determine as early as possible. The process of training the gender difference is done in a completely intuitive manner. An apprentice is required to guess and an experienced poultry screener tells the apprentice whether he has guessed correctly or not. No instruction is given, only correcting the guesses. Eventually the apprentice poultry screener learns to guess accurately enough that he is profitable enough to be allowed to screen the gender of poultry. In a substantially more sophisticated manner, traditional diagnostic physicians were trained in much the same way. In both the traditional diagnostic physician and the poultry gender screener, no actual instruction is given, purely an intuitive process through an extended apprenticeship with an experienced master. Painting, calligraphy, athletics, dance, music and in some rare cases even medicine has been taught in an analogous way.

Because of these, while not conclusive, give us hope that possibly Humani might possibly be sentient, or potentially conscious, or may be merely suffering from widespread suppression of their potential to be conscious or sentient. Garudas sociologists note that Humani and in particular Tellurian entertainment & infotainment broadcasts and social media are saturated with memes which promote anti-sentience.