The following is a re-written and condensed form of my earlier draft It will hopefully clarify my proposition. Please comment. Thank you.
Quintessence Revisited: What is Reality Made Of? Conscious Free will is quintessential: The universe cannot exist without it. Physics has observed four fundamental building blocks, so to speak, of the universe. They are matter, energy, space, and time. Everything that science observes can be described in terms that require at least one of these four basic concepts. They are the modern version of what ancient scientists called the four essences, except that their four essences were earth, wind, water and fire. The ancients found the need to recognize a fifth essence, the quintessence. In their case, that essence was what composed the astronomical objects they saw in the sky. Likewise, we also must recognize a quintessential component of reality, a fifth fundamental building block of nature. This fifth essence is composed of three stages: life, consciousness and free will. Of these three, consciousness is the easiest to discuss, because no conscious person can rationally deny that consciousness exists. Consciousness represents a fifth essence of the universe because it cannot be explained in terms of the other four. Life can largely be explained in terms of biophysics, but consciousness, as we experience it, cannot. And when it comes to the apex of consciousness, that is to say, free will, not only is physics unable to explain it in terms of the other four essences, it actually forbids free will unless we accept it as quintessential. Free will is the monkey wrench in the standard model of physics, the 800 pound gorilla in the room that science strains to ignore. Consciousness is the ocean in which that fish, physics, swims. So pervasive is consciousness, and its ultimate expression in free will--- so pervasive is it that we tend not to notice it. Okay we notice it, but only in passing. Physics is the conscious understanding of reality by scientists exercising free will. But free will is far more than just another element on the periodic table, vastly more important than the discovery of exotic phenomena such as dark matter, and exceedingly more strange than the singularity in a black hole. Free will can be described as, among other things, a non-random, purposeful, uncaused cause. Such a concept must shake the conventional study of physics to its foundations. For in conventional physics, every observed event is the result of a preceding cause, and that cause, even if it is randomness itself, forces the observed effect. But the concept of free will posits the idea of an independent agent in nature, a truly volitional creature, one that can break free of the chain of cause and effect, and so to speak, rewrite part of the script that nature has up to then been following. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.
