Consciousness, Free Will and Values
“One of the great unresolved paradoxes of science
involves consciousness, free will and values, three
long-standing thorns in the hide of science. Materialist
science couldn’t cope with any of them, even in
principle. It’s not just that they’re difficult. They’re in
direct conflict with basic models. Science has had
to renounce them—to deny their existence or to say
that they are beyond the domain of science. For most
of us, of course, they are among the most important
things in life.â€Â                                      Roger Sperry
To the extent that we are conscious
We become the largest and most distant
And the smallest and most intimate non-stuff there is.
In other words,
To be aware, to be conscious
Is perhaps to liken ourselves with the farthest and the nearest.
With the earliest—and we must assume the last.
There are two directions of astonishment. Above arches the immensity of the heavens; and if the thickness of a sheet of paper were to equal the 93 million miles between the earth and the sun then the distance to the edge of the known universe would be a stack of papers 31 million miles high.
And within there breathes the intricacy of the human body. That in each of 100 trillion cells there are roughly 100,000 genes coiled on a molecule of DNA, which if uncoiled and unwound would stretch back and forth between the sun and earth 400 times.
In the biology of a cell
The boundary between life and non-life blurs.
Less “things†are just things than they used to be.
And at the bottom of it all
There will probably be
“Things†more like energy than matter.
More like time than space.
Just as matter becomes energy,
And just as space becomes time.
Light is formed.
Myriads of tiny photons of whirring light.
Light which is but a metaphor of human awareness.
Awareness, which is but another name
For the ultimate evolutionary expression of man.
At last reunited with his creator.
In the primordial and messianic light of consciousness.
Lawrence Kushner