How a Chilly Cosmos Kindles the Glow of Consciousness – The Marginalian

In his poetic ode to the surprise of life, the physicist Richard Feynman gasped at our unbelievable inheritance as “atoms with consciousness” — a beautiful phrase that in so few phrases intimates the immense superstructure of matter and which means, the best way by which the austere realities of the bodily universe undergird the nice and cozy loveliness of all that makes us human: love, artwork, surprise, magnificence, Bach. There might be no real appreciation of consciousness — the thriller of it, the intimate reality of it — and not using a passionate appreciation of the summary, distant realities of cosmic forces and subatomic particles.

That’s what the Irish evolutionary psychologist Victor S. Johnston explores in a passage from his altogether revelatory ebook Why We Really feel: The Science of Human Feelings (public library).

With a watch to how our emotions, our ideas, our sensations, our whole acutely aware expertise and all of the properties of our minds “are firmly tied to the bodily construction and chemistry of our mind,” in flip inseparable from the bodily actuality of the universe, Johnson composes a splendid homily on this eternal astonishment:

Think about a world with out consciousness. The darkness is a effervescent cauldron of vitality and vibrating matter, locked within the dance of thermal agitation. Via shared electrons, or the unusual attraction of in contrast to prices, quivering molecules, not free to roam, soak up and emit their attribute quanta packages of vitality with the encompassing fog. Free fuel molecules, nearly oblivious to gravity however buffeted in all instructions by their neighbors, kind swirling turbulent flows or march in zones of compression and enlargement, in accordance with the dictates of oscillating substrates. A large photo voltaic flux and cosmic radiation from occasions long gone crisscross area with their radiant vitality and silently combine with the thermal glow of dwelling creatures, whose hungry metabolic methods pour their infrared waste into the chaotic milieu. However inside the heat of their sticky protein our bodies, the dim glow of consciousness is rising to impose its personal model of group on this turbulent mixture of vitality/matter. The energetic filter of consciousness illuminates the darkness, discards all irrelevant radiation, and in a grand transmutation converts and amplifies the related. Useless molecules erupt into flavors of bitterness or sweetness, electromagnetic frequencies burst with shade, hapless air stress waves grow to be the laughter of youngsters, and the impression of a passing molecule fills a acutely aware thoughts with the aroma of roses on a heat summer season afternoon.

Complement with the fascinating entwined historical past of sunshine and consciousness, then revisit quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger on the continued thriller of consciousness.