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Sci Tech    H4'ed 3/25/10

Consciousness, Values, Science, and Nature

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We sometimes experience our willfulness by its absence, its nullification, in the frustration we feel when we're restricted by external forces. To be truly constrained by cause-and-effect, as when locked in a room or tied to a table, can be a terrible feeling - a repression that shocks us into an immediate recognition of willfulness by the experience of its duress.

We can experience our willfulness in both the enjoyment and dread of our freedom to make choices. We can embrace beliefs, and customs, and dictates, because they enable us to avoid our willfulness and its attendant dilemmas - and its sometimes fearsome implications. But we have to choose not to choose, as when we invoke some given commandment to determine our behavior, rather than act according to our own preference.

To stand at the edge of a cliff is to confront the terror of one's potential for spontaneous and arbitrary willfulness: In the next moment I can choose to defy my cherished wish to remain alive, to take the smallest step, to lean the slightest bit, and plunge to a painful death, just by invoking a simple act of will that I know, without doubt, to be within my power - as surely as I know the ledge is beneath my feet.

Consciousness can be RATIONAL. To be rational can be defined in this context as the sum of our abilities to be purposeful, to transcend and negate the elements of experience, and to choose deliberate, self-determined courses of action. It allows us to act resourcefully in the world, to have the world react in a way that confirms both our rationality and the world's affinity with reason, as when a bridge stands strong according to design.

These common and observable manifestations of consciousness - rational behavior - seem as certain as any principle or law of science. Although it is difficult to reconcile consciousness with nature as defined by physics and biology, it's just as true that the meta-scientific world-view is difficult to reconcile with our personal experience. It's been an age-old problem for philosophers, and for meta-scientists (closet-philosophers!), to correlate the evident subjectivity of consciousness ("mind") with the objective world ("matter"). But regardless of how the seeming duality of mind and matter might one day be resolved, the meta-scientific view is clearly inadequate, as it defies the evidence of our personal experience and actions, and our sense of values.

Ours is a universe of intricate physical structure, a world of astounding biological organization, populated with conscious beings able to reflect upon all there is - capable even of imagining things that don't exist. Though physical science has discovered much about the rudiments of existence, and biology has revealed much about the mechanisms of life, to believe they could be adequate to fully comprehend consciousness - maybe the most consummate development in all the universe - is to believe that what is expressed in more highly developed and organic systems is somehow alien and disconnected from the more basic and undeveloped. As-if life is to be understood in its reduction to physics, to the exclusion of how it has been able by its abounding nature to develop into consciousness. As-if consciousness is to be understood in its reduction to biology, to the exclusion of its manifest powers beyond biological explanation.

This much seems evident, if we are to trust our own experience rather than defend a philosophy of analysis, objectification, and reduction: A conscious being (we might better give it the form of a verb rather than a noun, and say a conscious beingness) is beyond objectification and reduction, because as a beingness, consciousness is not an object, and as individual, it is irreducible.

The values grounded by consciousness - such as life, love, freedom, ethics, morality, art, friends, community, fun and laughter - are not to be found on a chalkboard, or under a microscope. A world where consciousness is possible is a world of more wondrous matter, more wondrous life, more wondrous mind and culture than analysis, objectification, and reduction can comprehend, or value. It's evident, it's good, it's valuable.

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A former visitant of UC Santa Cruz, former union boilermaker, ex-Marine, Vietnam vet, anti-war activist, dilettante in science with an earth-shaking theory on the nature of light (which no one will consider), philosopher in the tradition of (more...)
 

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