A Novel insight on Consciousness and Free Will

by Arunava Sarkar

We've come a long way in understanding the workings of our world through thinkers across eras. Pioneers like Plato, Pythagoras, Marx, and Einstein have expanded thought's frontiers immensely. However, humanity remains curiously ignorant of life's deepest enigmas.

What is consciousness? Do we truly possess free will? Mainstream science claims eventual answers, yet as philosopher Kant warned, empiricism has limits for explaining metaphysical concepts like consciousness or free will. Materialists assert that the metaphysical is an illusion, yet they fail to answer these core questions.

René Descartes argued that the certainty of all knowledge can be doubted except our own consciousness—we think, therefore we are. Whether in reality or simulation, Descartes knew that as long as one thinks, they are conscious. Arthur Schopenhauer quipped that while evolution describes our emergence, it can't explain the prime motivator prompting life's initial journey.

The key, I believe, lies in context. Everything makes sense within a context; a cancer cell has a purpose in the system called life, while rocks lack biological functions. Similarly, states of matter transform fully after crossing thresholds, like water emerging at 0°C from ice. Though scientifically analyzed, philosophy illuminates their deeper significance.

Taking a cue from transitional states, consider the Big Bang and black holes—the laws of physics ultimately break down at their boundaries. But rather than laws disintegrating, such a threshold merely transforms the context. This new context must guide our comprehension as we leave the realm of materialism and enter the metaphysical realm. Denying metaphysical possibilities, one might claim water ceases to exist at the 100°C threshold if no way to interact with it exists. An utterance displaying a lack of broader perspective. Think of how dark matter and dark energy, which make up the majority of the universe, remained invisible to our analysis until the recent past.

Ice to water and water to vapor is an interplay where both changes of context at a specific threshold are limited to the material world. While the change in threshold of the material world itself brings about the change in context where the material world ends and the primordial world of metaphysics begins, this is the true driver behind consciousness. Since it is beyond the material world, no empiricism or falsification methods can analyze it. However, as I said before, we can directly access it, as we are children of it and driven by it.

Consciousness perplexes as this viewpoint remains absent. As Einstein revealed, energy and matter comprise the same essence, yet why bifurcate into particular forms? The universe and evolution operating randomly seem unlikely without founding principles, just as computer games spawn structured worlds from randomness.

Some argue consciousness motivates none, serving solely to alert our senses until death strips them away. I disagree. Consciousness feels akin to an omnipresent energy, lacking particulars yet catalyzing initial life by interfacing with physical substrates. Multiple conscious entities may thus arise simultaneously across the cosmos, like electricity activating diverse appliances simultaneously.

While the combination of consciousness' from the primordial metaphysical realm with the material state of the world defies empirical validation, each aware being intrinsically knows consciousness forms their essence, whether Descartes or a rural farmer from Arkansas. Our primordial directive is “retain consciousness; don’t lose it”. To fulfill this, we struggle endlessly for power as per Nietzsche's "will to power", maximizing survival odds via suboptimal means like reproduction lest death dissolve our experience.

In closing, focusing on how contexts transform our comprehension and limitations hints that free will concerning the material world is an illusion. However, metaphysics endows one choice: accepting or rejecting consciousness and, by extension, material existence. Only non-willingness preserves autonomy.

I would like to simplify by using an analogy. Suppose you are a student, and you enter the classroom. The teacher says, "You can either act according to the rules I have set, or you can exit the class if you refuse to accept the rules. Here, the classroom is like the material world. The limits of the rules create the causal chains, and you cannot make a free choice. However, the context will change at the threshold when you refuse to play by the set rules. In the class, you have no free will, but exiting the class and not being part of the classroom is the only free choice you can make in that circumstance. Thus, at the boundary, the change of context allows you access to a single free decision.

This is why no action is possible to choose freely as long as it involves the material world.

However, only one action has been bestowed upon us by metaphysics. You are the sovereign of your own consciousness and not a mere slave to it with no access to free will, no matter what materialists suggest misguidedly.

Whether or not to accept the gift of consciousness If we do not wish to continue, we can simply give up our consciousness and the material existence that is part of it. That is why only the choice of not wanting to continue our own existence can be taken freely. As Albert Camus has said, although I suspect from a different perspective, "The only philosophical question worth anything is the question of suicide."

It is not possible to tell what comes after if we give up this existence, as we have no knowledge of the metaphysical world, as Kant showed. Whether it is nothingness or a different form of existence, someone can only find out the answer to this question with the ultimate experiment that can be performed by a living being. Suicide. I think the quote by Socrates, "Why fear death if you don’t know it’s true form?" applies here aptly.

There can be a misconception that arises from my explanation that this is an anthropomorphic view since I mention suicide.

It is not necessary for a being to analyze things logically and then give up on life. Even a bacteria can give up its existence, as consciousness precedes material processes, which are the key motivators of beings. Biological structures and dopamine neurobiological pathways are limited to the material world.

Consciousness bridges the divide between nihilism and existentialism.

Any hypothesis provides some testability.

I suggest that if we dig deep enough and look hard enough, we will be able to find nihilistic bacteria or any other beings that do not possess the craft of philosophy. Which gives up without the need for higher brain structures and consequent logical analysis.

The end. Sayonara.