Self-Knowledge. Who Are We and Why Are We Here? Or "It Is Hard to Be a God".

Facebook archive. First published on 2015-02-15.

Scientists believe that what distinguishes a human being from an animal is the need to search for an answer to the question: "Who am I". If a being asks itself this question, it is intelligent. We often worry about everyday problems, about what others think of us or how we look in society. But this is not true for all people; for introverts it is more important how they look before themselves than how they look in society. But what does not worry us at all is how we look in the eyes of an animal or, even worse, in the eyes of an insect.

Let us assume that besides people and animals, gods live on earth, no, not the creator of the universe himself, but one of the pantheons of gods made of flesh and blood. But it is hard to imagine this without a stable association. Therefore one should imagine that animals are people, and people are gods. And try to understand what is happening. This is a natural mechanism of cognition for consciousness through the connection of the studying subject with the object being studied. And so, for us gods should possess certain characteristics:

1. Gods should be immortal, or long-lived.

2. Gods should have superpowers.

3. Possess foresight.

4. Heal diseases and resurrect the dead.

5. Gods can command nature.

6. Be able to create new life.. So, from an animal's point of view, people can do all this. We know more, and some of our knowledge may seem to an animal like the superpower of foresight. We can heal far more diseases than animals, and in some situations we can even bring an animal back from the other world. We can disperse clouds, put out fires, and turn rivers backward. And again, we are capable of creating a completely new kind of life with the help of genetic engineering. If we compare the length of our life with the length of life of a cabbage white butterfly, which lives one day. Then the average human life of 80 years, multiplied by 365 days, gives 29,200 average butterfly life spans. By human standards, this is 2.3 million years. Now imagine that for an animal you are a being who lives 2 million years, who can fly (on airplanes), summon thunder and lightning, communicate at any distance with the help of magic stones (a mobile phone), and grow mountains (cities) and drain seas. I do not want my thought experiment to offend anyone, but if this association is moved one rank higher, we pray in churches to beings similar to us. It is foolish, of course, to suppose that animals have religion and offer prayers to us. But if that were so, then anyone praying would ask that the gods come into his world for salvation. So we have come into their world, and in fact there are more of them than us. And it is strange why we are not saving anyone. But each person decides for himself what kind of god he is, good or bad. And what is more important to him: what a neighbor or a stranger will think of him, a crow sitting on a branch, or a dog from an alley. By the way, dogs are among the few of our worshippers. And if animals had religion, dogs would be the first to preach the divinity of man.