Tag Archives: instinct

Quantum Physics and Free Will

My basic theory is that consciousness has one foot in the brain and one foot in the quantum vacuum, a.k.a. zero-point energy, the Implicate Order and the Akashic Field.

How do we make decisions? How do we decide whether to go up the mountain, or down into the valley, looking for food? How do we decide which lipstick is most likely to attract some nerd to buy us a beer? Why do we buy one shirt instead of another? Do we have free will, or are our behaviors predetermined? Or predestined? Or encoded?…

…The opposite of free will would seem to be instinct. Pre-programmed behavior. So I went looking for instinct, thinking that if I could just find out where instinct ends, I might find out where free will begins. But I got nowhere because no one knows where instinct is located, or how it works. Birds do not have computers in their brains that tell them to fly south in winter.

However, instinct seems to be a type of memory, albeit an “inherited” memory. So I went looking for memory and couldn’t find it. But I was in good company. Neither could James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, who said understanding memory is the biggest remaining mystery in the biological sciences.

I wasn’t done yet. Memory is a property of “mind”, so I went looking for mind, and couldn’t find that either. Nobody can. We can find our brains, but not our minds.

Mind is an aspect of consciousness, so I went looking for consciousness. Descartes said: “I think therefore I am”. A comparable way of saying that is: “I’m conscious, therefore I am.” However:

So far attempts to modify quantum physics to include consciousness have failed. [Taking the Quantum Leap Fred Wolf; p220]

We know what unconsciousness is. And we know what is going on inside someone’s brain when they are thinking about an apple. But we simply cannot find any scientific evidence that a “place of consciousness” exists. [Fred Alan Wolf; The Spiritual Universe]

It’s been said that the most human thing about us humans is that “we’re aware that we’re aware”. And yet we have no idea what that awareness is, what consciousness is. Where it comes from, or how it works. None. Stuck again. Really stuck. All four wheels.
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