The Meaning of Life and the Nature of Consciousness

Abstract

The laws of physics that apply within living organisms are identical to the laws that hold outside them. But this implies that there is nothing "special" about life -- nor about consciousness! And it implies that anything that can happen inside a living organism can also happen outside living things (if a distinction between living things and nonliving things even makes sense) -- including consciousness. The fall of Newton's deterministic physics, and the triumph of "probabilistic" quantum mechanics, implies that our behavior is neither predetermined nor predictable. Since it is apparently decided at a molecular (hence quantum) level, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle prevents us from ever knowing causation for certain. In other words, we probably don't have free will, but we have no way of ever knowing for sure, and we feel that we have free will. In spite of centuries of thought and research into human-, animal, and plant behavior we still don't know why people commit murder -- or much else.