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How Black Holes Help Solve the Mystery of Consciousness
Life’s revolt against nature’s entropy, and the pivot points of cosmic transformation
Consciousness is one of the strangest things in the universe. Why is some matter conscious at all? How can any material object, like the brain, be conscious?
Given the scientific standpoint, how can anything which is fundamentally objective have a subjective point of view such that there are facts about what it feels like to be that object? Philosophers call these subjective, oddly private facts of what it’s like to see red, to hear rainfall, or to feel angry or happy “qualia.” So are qualia simply miracles? Is the plain existence of consciousness in a universe of objects and unconscious events already supernatural?
The Thermodynamic Essence of Life
Whatever consciousness is, its oddness must be tied to yet another oddity, which is the existence of life. Why is there life in the universe? How does life arise from nonlife, and what’s the fundamental relationship between the two?
We can surmise, at least, that the nature of consciousness depends on the role of subjectivity, and that the latter depends, in turn, on the nature and role of life. After all, as far as we know, consciousness is found only in living things, and both are anomalous, which isn’t likely coincidental.
The physicist Erwin Schrodinger provided an invaluable thermodynamic perspective on life in his book What is Life? in which he pointed out that “It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of ‘equilibrium’ that an organism appears so enigmatic.” Every process in nature, he elaborates, increases the entropy or disorder in its region.
Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy — or, as you may say, produces positive entropy — and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually…
