How does one define a Conscience? One can define it as an ability or a faculty that distinguishes whether one's actions are right or wrong. Its the conscience I guess that gives a person a feeling of goodness or remorse, but is there some science behind this conSCIENCE. Does one develop a conscience or is he born with it? Are we humans the only entity in this universe who have a conscience (I leave aside the possibility of alien life forms)? And finally is there some bigger picture to this conscience and can one logically find an answer to its existence? Here is my feeble attempt to answer these questions...
I try and look at conscience from a completely new perspective, I believe that conscience is nothing special. It is just a collection of past experiences or basically reactions to previous actions (I guess I take my physics quite seriously). Our senses are some of the most amazing receptors ever. Every second of our life we gather in all the information around us and possibly only 1% of this information is really processed by our brain. What I mean by processed is that this 1% is what we able to analyze and rationalize. But what about the rest 99% since we have absorbed it, it is stored somewhere and mostly this is what we call the sub-conscious. So very logically speaking our sub-conscious is nothing but just a series of past experiences which are not really perceived by our brain due to its limited processing capabilities but are nonetheless present. So now what about the conscience? So if we take a sub-set of all these past experiences which have been beneficial to us, (maybe the benefits were realized not at the time of occurrence of the event, but after it...) we term this sub-set as our conscience. Let me give an example to explain... If we ask a small child who has no idea about theft or the consequences of theft to go and pick up a candy from the store and not pay for it, the kid will do it without any hesitation and will have no remorse whatsoever for what he did, but the same act for a responsible adult would be an act of shame. So basically a child who does not have any previous experience in the field of robbery has no conscience to guide him while he commits the act. So that's basically the answer to my first question.
So quite obviously we are not the only ones with a conscience, every thing which can have an experience i.e. all living entities have a conscience. Now lets go to the final and most important question... So is there a pattern at a larger scale? Now instead of taking about past experiences we just term it as history. In physics we generally learn about objects being influenced by its history so now the question is do inanimate objects have some kind of a conscience? At the level at which I plan to explain it might sound quite far fetched, but I'm not planning to lay a foundation here I'm just trying to draw a rough sketch. So all objects no matter how small or how big are influenced by the past. For example if we remove the sun at this instance the earth will feel its presence 8 minutes later so basically the Earth reacted to the action of the removal of the sun which was the past and hence its again a series of actions and reactions that the inanimate objects work on so doesn't this give them a conscience too...
So to conclude I believe that humans are nothing special and all the qualities we have learnt over the period of our evolution are nothing but manifestations of the properties of so called "Inanimate" objects around us and immaterial of how special we consider our self we are just a tiny spec in this gigantic system...
