I’m a citizen disappointed by the shallowness of our media and lack of honest examination of today’s deeper challenges. Such as coming to grips with what society has done to our Earth’s biosphere (life support system). I realize no one likes bad news, but faith-based denial isn’t going to do our children any good either.
~ ~ ~ Thus I’ve taken to writing what I'd like to see more of and to sharing selected writings of others.
~ ~ ~ feel free to copy and pass along any of the following.
Physics is about physics. Physics operates under exacting natural laws, that we can track via mathematics.
Where is there any need for a choice when puzzling over a differential equation? It’s all about following rules and where they take us.
Beyond physics?
What could be beyond physics you ask?
Think about it, … there is physics and there is Earth !
What’s so special about Earth? Stop to ponder your response.
Here’s mine,
Behold Earth, where: Chemistry + geology + harnessing electricity + deep time = biology > Life > creatures > complex creatures > self-reflecting minds.
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Mother Earth
Ethan Siegel — May 21, 2025 wrote:
¶3 At other times, however, the rules are a lot more complex, and we can only state that something happens (or must happen), lacking a full understanding of how it happens. Perhaps no puzzle falls into this category is more mysterious than the nature of consciousness: something that humans definitively possess, and yet can only describe subjectively.
¶4 What does it truly mean to be conscious?
We don’t need to be turning it into a brain teaser, it is fairly straightforward.
As Merriam-Webster explains: “… awareness of a state or object, either internal to oneself, or in one’s external environment.” Most other definitions dance around that concept.
¶4b Where does consciousness come from?
From inside of our body/brain working in a coordinated symphony with the act of living.
“Consciousness is the inside reflection of our body/brain communicating with itself.”
¶4c Are humans the only conscious species, or do other animals, non-animal forms of life,
Every living creature that has ever existed requires some form of internal bodily awareness and communication. Inside, outside, goals, what to excrete, what to ingest, where to move, what to do. Sensing, processing, commanding, engaging.
Nothing living on this planet Earth can survive without that.
There is no way around it, consciousness is on a spectrum.
¶4d or even non-living things possess some form of consciousness?
Why would they?
Why should they?
How could they?
Historically it is only when biology got up to speed — that choices appeared on Earth’s landscape. That is when the need for decisions and consciousness arose.
¶4e While many have opined and put forth hypotheses on the matter, it remains a mystery.
Without incorporating biology, evolution and a bottom up deep-time understanding, it will remain a dog-chasing-tail mystery.
Why are philosophers so hesitant to discuss the very real biological evolutionary aspect of our human consciousness?
¶4f Here’s what physics — the most fundamental of all the scientists — has to say about consciousness.
¶5 At the very core of the matter … :
the idea that we live in a material reality, and that everything that exists in our material reality can be described in terms of, well, the constituent parts of reality that exist in space and time,
Absolutely true — when it comes to regular physical matter.
Earth’s biology is not regular naked physics, it goes way beyond that.
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Biology is magnitudes of a quantum leap beyond the regular molecular complexity of straightforward chemistry.
Scientists are still scratching the surface of mapping our body/brain’s architecture and they continue discovering new modes of intercellular communication.
Simply describing recent findings is mind boggling — let alone comprehending all they have to teach us.
and the idea that any phenomenon — including consciousness — can be rigorously defined and put to experimental, observational, and/or measurable tests.
Very Abrahamic and western, … (zipped lips here) …
What about asking ourselves to evolve smarter questions?
¶7 However, when it comes to consciousness, many who opine on the matter find themselves unconstrained by these concerns.
There’s more to it than that. Humans are exceedingly self-absorbed and self-serving — this distorts our questions and the answers they can provide.
Recognizing our innate ego driven biases would help us form more intelligent questions, and insights.
The universe’s constituents evolving into elements followed straightforward “natural laws” — none of that had any need for consciousness, no need for decisions, no choices, no need for weighing impulses or evidence.
Show us anywhere before biology and living creatures appeared, where choice or awareness is a requirement?
¶8 A materialist view of reality, importantly, doesn’t simply state that “reality is nothing more than the sum of its parts.” Instead, it’s important to remember that, from a physical standpoint, even:
a very simple set of fundamental ingredients,
adhering to a simple set of just a few rules,
can very swiftly wind up creating large numbers of extremely complex outcomes,
many of which display emergent properties that are not “obviously” encoded, in a trivial way, by the underlying rules and ingredients.
Why stop at chemistry?
Why not spend time writing on what happened during Evolution’s next chapter?
Poetically, if not factually, this is where Earth’s geology and chemistry tamed and harnessed electricity to create biology and then life itself; then complex life; then life with an observant introspective mind.
¶9 For example, if you take all of the quarks in the Standard Model of particle physics and just leave them in a confined space, they will swiftly bind together into a huge array of composite structures (baryons) that will then swiftly decay away into other, less massive particles. After only about a microsecond, the only quark-containing particles remaining will be protons and neutrons.
Thing is, that consciousness is the product of complex creature life, not naked “physics”.
The profound differences between chemistry and biology deserves center stage for a while.
¶10 Similarly, if you take only protons and neutrons …
This is all plenty true, and fascinating, but it is light-years from there to the mysteries of our evolved biological consciousness.
It seems to me a distraction, pulling attention away from learning about our mind’s biological origins and how it actually operates — and pushing instead for yet another human-centric form of theology — instead of putting our faith in understanding the underlying biology, which cannot be done without incorporating an evolutionary framing.
¶11 For human beings, the material reality of our composition has been well-studied for centuries. We know, that, atomically, we are made of approximately ~10²⁸ atoms. …
¶12 Those atoms are configured together …
¶12b Within the body, of specific relevance to consciousness, are the body’s nervous system, including the human brain.
¶12c For most of us, there’s an assumption that seems so obvious that “of course consciousness arises in the brain” that it’s rarely challenged. It would mean, if true, that if we want to study human consciousness, we have no choice but to study the human brain.
{ I don’t know, some thinkers argue that in men consciousness arrises from an altogether different organ. ;-) }
I’m not a physicist so I don’t know how I would “prove” the following formula. But, what I do know is that this formulation is a factual summary of the obvious observable components of consciousness:
Body + Brain + Interaction (interior & exterior) = Consciousness
¶13 You then might wonder just how the brain produces consciousness, and what mechanisms are at play. To begin, we can talk about the structure of the brain with some confidence. The human brain, primarily, is composed of two classes of cells:
neurons, which transmit electrical and chemical signals,
and glial cells, which are defined by the fact that they do not produce electrical impulses, and are instead thought to form a substrate that supports neurons.
That is all nice and good, but neuroscientists and physiologists have been busy discovering addition systems of feedback and communication within our mammalian bodies.
But we have learned enough to know that Consciousness will never be found in the brain because consciousness is a symphony, where all the components matter to a living creature’s ongoing stream of consciousness, until death do us part.
Body + Brain + Interaction (interior & exterior) = Consciousness
Working out from that perspective offers material, physicalist understanding, along with genuine opportunities for spiritual challenges and resolutions.
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¶14 Nearly all discussions of consciousness focus on the neurons and ignore the glial cells. …
¶15 But glial cells may yet play a vital, if only poorly understood, role in the presence of consciousness. …
¶16 In addition, the brain contains blood vessels, salts, a differentiated composition (gray matter and white matter), (¶17–20)
Worth including is that everything the brain knows, first gets processed through the body, its moods and conditions drive the brain’s functioning, which are constant feedback loops on numerous independent, yet interwoven levels serving different functions, in service to the whole creature being.
Striving to isolate consciousness to the brain makes no sense to me. After all, it is our body that is doing all the actual living and experiencing.
¶21 … there is no widely agreed-upon definition for what consciousness actually is.
Are all humans conscious?
Does this include newborn babies?
Sleeping humans?
Humans still developing in the womb?
Segue, Baby Appreciation Time
Truly appreciating that we are evolved creatures clarifies much of the confusion behind those questions.
Regarding babies, from conception to beyond birth a baby’s development does roughly recapitulate it’s own evolution — not in any Haeckelian “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” manner — simply the fact that a baby is built from scratch, following the genetic plan developed and laid out by the past half billion years of its own family’s evolutionary history.
Try observing the tiny new born creature via an evolutionary lens. Over time we witness the tiny flailing body, driven by a biological will to discover and master its body. Those intent eyes always observing and absorbing. The effort put into evolving awareness and controlled motion those early phases of self discovery, moving every muscle to understand what it does, then how to coordinate that with other muscles against the pull of gravity. Constantly calculating and readjusting.
I’ve been fortunate, recent years have had me doing some extended child care for infants, then turned toddlers. Where others see a wiggly thing I see a real person busting to get out. Tiny as they are, they “see me” when we lock eyes, thereby naturally establishing a bond of trust and rapport. It’s why they’ve been able to teach me so much, as I’m teaching them about life. It’s always about interaction.
A baby is born brimming with internal knowledge and an agenda laid down by evolutionary-biological drivers. In an infant our elemental core is at the surface until experience and learning increasingly occupy our ever growing body/brain, giving form to ego and consciousness, and on we go with life.
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Eye to Eye
Also, important, appreciating that consciousness is on a spectrum, it is not some all or nothing phenomena.
¶21b Are animals other than humans conscious? Many brain-containing animals, from dogs to cats to horses to birds, exhibit strong individualistic preferences and behavioral oddities — what many would call personalities — and observations such as these have been validated through scientific studies. Is a brain a sufficient and necessary ingredient for consciousness to be achieved?
Do living organisms without brains exhibit consciousness? Simple subjective awareness, or the ability for an organism as a whole to act as a unified structure that engages in acts of self-protection and self-preservation, particularly in response to various stimuli in their environments, may be enough, as many have suggested.
From an Evolution appreciating perspective most of those questions dissolve, leaving room for a host of more interesting questions to ponder.
“Consciousness is the inside reflection of our body communicating with itself.”
¶25 In fact, the most compelling definition of consciousness that I’ve ever heard didn’t come from a scientist of any variety, but rather from the recently-deceased philosopher Daniel Dennett, who simply posed that consciousness was the ability to understand, “I am me,” or to otherwise possess an internal conception of what we call “one’s self.” Humans have clearly crossed this threshold …
That’s an example of “self-consciousness”.
I would conjecture that all living creature bodies, that have survived half a billion years of evolutionary pressure, have a level of self-awareness — known from within — I am me, this is my inside, this is my outside, this I want to ingest, this I want to excrete, that I am afraid of, etc.
Admittedly nearly all of them appear not to be able to reflect on that self-knowledge the way humans do — but then again animal studies have done nothing but surprise and amazement at the intellectual feats that lowly animals do accomplish.
¶25b Siegel writes: "… Rather than being a property that’s special to humans and to human brains, consciousness may simply be a physical manifestation of an emergent property associated with any form of life itself."
Perhaps the best sentence in his essay.
Which brings us right back to the need for more focus on an evolutionary biological approach to understanding the entire spectrum of consciousness among living creatures.
¶26 The big takeaway … ask yourself. …
And, perhaps most importantly, can this explanation detail how what we perceive of as consciousness arises from purely physical entities, without invoking some sort of mystic quality that exists outside of our physical reality?
¶28 Consciousness is a very difficult puzzle: one that is difficult to even define, much less to solve. But it is just as much a part of our physical reality as anything else we interact with, and any approach that asserts otherwise has a fatal flaw from the outset: it’s already abandoned science.
From an Evolutionary bottom-up biological perspective it’s not that tough a nut to crack.
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It’s not that far.
Where does all of this leave God?
In our hearts and minds, as real as we want our God to be.
God as another element/character of our respective Mindscapes.
But not of Physical Reality!
Anything wrong with that?
God as the product of our own individual and collective consciousness, as we race through life.
Ethan asks: Does physics truly have anything to say about consciousness?
How can it?
We need to look beyond physics.
What kind of beyond physics, you ask?
Think about it, … there is physics and there is Earth !
What is so special about Earth?
Lots of things. As for helping us understand consciousness, there is this:
Chemistry + geology + harnessing electricity (Krebs cycle) + deep time = biology > Life > creatures > complex creatures > self-reflecting minds
Nothing close to it anywhere else we’ve looked.
Thank you, reasoned feedback is invited and welcomed.
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