Consciousness and the Apocalypse, Part 1 of 4: Who Cares? 🤨
It's only THE way by which we can know or perceive anything... other than that, I guess it ain't that big of a deal. 🤷♂️
It’s hard to re-create my path into consciousness and the philosophy of mind. I’ve been interested in the brain and psychology since high school despite knowing I’d never be “successful” in science or maths. I quite enjoyed ninth grade geometry but felt the flame snuffed out a couple months into tenth grade “Algebra 2.” Rather strange considering how much I enjoy math as a concept, especially where application ends and the theoretical begins—there’s something moving about the questions we can ponder when logic is divorced from whatever the ‘real’ thing is. Kinda like consciousness.
Probable or Determined…? Are We “Free” or Not?
You can ask it any number of ways; we often boil the core question down to one of free will—is it real or not? Do we have ‘it’ or any version of it? If your framework of existence is purely material, and with only Newtonian physics at your disposal, it’s reasonable to conclude that if all the mechanisms of reality are reducible to the interactions between particles and if those particles’ behavior can all be predicted with perfect accuracy given the requisite data and Newton’s laws, then each and every movement is knowable. And by necessity, we can say that each and every movement is pre-determined. If all existence is deterministic, we may conclude that what we consider “free will” is, at best, a useful illusion.
Right.
Humans live and feel as though they exercise a freedom of choice; we seem to do it every waking moment of the day. But if you then think about a world before we knew anything about quantum mechanics and the probabilistic nature of subatomic motion, you have to wonder how our consciousness—if it’s simply the ‘physics’ between our ears—grants us any kind of freedom from precisely calculated outcomes. Of course I don’t believe that’s the whole story. I’m not convinced you would either.
Quantum Mechanics as Proof of God’s Hand in Creation?
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