I started reading a book on consciousness. As I am rather far away from congnitive science research, the different perspectives advocated and rebuked in the book are rather distant to me. But since I just want to know more about this most important topic, I find it a rather interesting read.
I was enjoying myself when the author said that for many centuries, the quest was to heighten our awareness, of the world surrounding us, and of our own selves. Except television and computers, he wrote.
I was startled, and when I thought about it, I found it extremely amusing.
This is the source of my amusement: many activities we do in daily life are mostly done subconsciously. For instance, when I type on my keyboard, I don't really think about how I am typing. I don't know how my four fingers peck on the keyboard. Actually, I don't even think conscously about which finger I will use to hit which key. Most other activities are carried out in this way. We don't reflect very much on what we are doing. Of course, writing a program is one of the exceptions. It is simply not possible to write a program in any other way than in a very conscious way. To make programs as bugfree as possible, we think and re-think, plan and re-plan, the lines of code we write. Many smaller constructs are done more or less subconsciously, in terms of their syntax, but the meaning of the constructs always weigh on the mind, as one little mistake and the program will do something we don't want it to do.
The author's quip is amusing because I do agree with him; our programs are completely void of any kind of consciousness, of course. They don't heighten our awareness of ourselves; that I completely agree with as well. The content of a web page might move us, get us to reflect, but the programs themselves? No. Never.
So, with utmost conscious effort, in perhaps the activity that requires the most conscious effort on our part, we programmers produce things that are completely void of any kind of ability of any kind of conscious activity.
Very amusing.
