How we went from quanta packages to the laughter of kids on a summer time afternoon.
By Maria Popova
In his poetic ode to the wonder of life, the physicist Richard Feynman gasped at our inconceivable inheritance as “atoms with consciousness” — a stunning phrase that in so few phrases intimates the immense superstructure of matter and that means, the best way wherein 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 could 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 Feel: The Science of Human Emotions (public library).
With an eye fixed to how our emotions, our ideas, our sensations, our total 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. By way of shared electrons, or the unusual attraction of not like prices, quivering molecules, not free to roam, take up and emit their attribute quanta packages of vitality with the encompassing fog. Free gasoline molecules, virtually oblivious to gravity however buffeted in all instructions by their neighbors, type swirling turbulent flows or march in zones of compression and growth, in response to the dictates of oscillating substrates. A large photo voltaic flux and cosmic radiation from occasions gone crisscross house with their radiant vitality and silently combine with the thermal glow of residing creatures, whose hungry metabolic programs pour their infrared waste into the chaotic milieu. However throughout 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. Lifeless molecules erupt into flavors of bitterness or sweetness, electromagnetic frequencies burst with shade, hapless air strain waves develop into the laughter of kids, and the influence of a passing molecule fills a aware thoughts with the aroma of roses on a heat summer time afternoon.
Complement with the fascinating entwined history of light and consciousness, then revisit quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger on the ongoing mystery of consciousness.
