Life and Death: An NP Hard Problem

Finally, I thought of documenting my thoughts, perspective and my incomplete yet ongoing and probably incorrect or partially correct understanding on my beliefs in the concept of life and death, the two widely accepted states of living beings.

My apologies to the state(s) that may be there but I missed to include them here due to my limited awareness.

Let's start with the physical and tangible world we believe we exist in and cohabitate. I believe this physical world is real to me (we will come to real later) as I can perceive it through my accessible sense organs and my brain interprets the signals of following known categories: sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.



These sense organs receive raw stimuli from the physical world and translate them into signals the nervous system can use. Nerves relay the signals to the brain, which interprets them as sight (vision), sound (hearing), smell (olfaction), taste (gustation), and touch (tactile perception). Detailed explanation can be found here.

I want to share an incident that happened when I was 15. I always had a curious and inquisitive mind. For eg: when I was in 5'th standard and had recently read about the voluntary and involuntary muscles,  functions of blood including transporting oxygen and nutrients to the cells/tissues. I wondered how these things are happening inside my body and why am I not aware of this. I became scared with the arising What if? questions that came along. I realised I can walk, I can talk, I can move my hands and body and so on but the reality is, I did't know how I can do any of these activities. I didn't know how I send those commands in form of signals to my organs and they follow along.




What if some day there is an issue with an organ, how would I fix it? Do I loose that organ or may be just loose the control over that organ? I prayed that never happens. The point is, I wanted to know everything about myself. I can't just be learning number tables and solving mathematical problems of addition and division when I don't even understand how I function myself! (rather I don't understand how my body functions but at that time I didn't differentiate between myself and my body). 

Do I believe this world is real just because my sense organs tell me so? Just because I can perceive this world, I believe it's real!
 
Am I real? Who am I? Do I exist? What exactly is existence? These sorts of questions started hounding me. I have a separate post where I talk about existence: Existence: Absolute & Relative.

To be continued...






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