Embodied Human Consciousness, Abrupt Global Climate Change, and Freedom - S. David Stoney, Ph.D.
VI. FREEDOM AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS - Embodied human consciousness and freedom are very closely related. Isn't it true that consciousness without freedom is wasted and that freedom without consciousness is senseless? Can we really claim to be conscious human beings if we persist in declining to accept the reality of abrupt global climate change and the imminent change to glacial phase conditions? How is a human consciousness that lacks foresight different from the consciousness of, say, a dog or a cat?
"Freedom is the awareness of alternatives and of the ability to choose. It is contingent upon consciousness, and so may be gained or lost, extended or diminished."
(Allen Wheelis, How People Change, New York: Harper & Row, pg. 15, 1973)"[T}he most radical form of freedom, deeper in its effects than the political and intellectual freedoms discussed up to now; is liberation from the self; not loss of selfhood but rather a transcendence of the alienation of individuals from one another and from nature that is so common in modern society."
(Robert Grudin, On Dialogue: An Essay in Free Thought, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, pg. 112, 1996)"The courage to be which is rooted in the experience of the God above the God of theism unites and transcends the courage to be as a part and the courage to be as oneself. It avoids both the loss of oneself by participation and the loss of one's world by individualization. The acceptance of the God above the God of theism makes us a part of that which is not also a part but is the ground of the whole. Therefore our self is not lost in a larger whole, which submerges it in the life of a limited group. If the self participates in the power of being-itself it receives itself back." (Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pgs. 187-88, 1952. Italics added) "The past is settled and present action must 'conform' to it; but always there is more than one possible way of achieving this conformation. On the higher levels we call this indeterminancy freedom."
(Charles Hartshorne, Whitehead in historical context, In: Whitehead's View of Reality, Charles Hartshorne and Creighton Peden, New York: The Pilgrim Press, pg. 5, 1981)"The collapse of mind-body dualism into materialistic identism implie[s] the impossibility not only of life after death but also of genuine freedom."
(David Ray Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pg. 314, 2000)"The clear perception that we are the unknown, which is beyond time, allows the mind to give time its proper value...That is what makes freedom possible, in the sense of realizing our true potential for participating harmoniously in universal creativity."
(David Bohm, Time, the implicate order, and pre-space, In: Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time: Bohm, Prigogine, and Process Philosophy, David Ray Griffin [Ed.], State University of New York Press, pgs. 207-8, 1986)"Liberty is a specific relationship between humanity and its natural/social environment: a relationship in which human needs can be gratified and human aspirations expressed to the fullest possible extent. To be free is to have the chance to be human. Take this from us and we cease to be ourselves."
(Robert Grudin, On Dialogue: An Essay in Free Thought, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, pg. 1, 1996)"Science began with the Promethean affirmation of the power of reason, but it seemed to end in alienation - negation of everything that gives meaning to human life."
(Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, NY: The Free Press, pg. 186, 1996)"No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
(James Madison)
Novemeber 2, 2004, the day freedom died in the United States of America?
Quotations on freedom, self-awareness, and the implicate order from David Bohm. What good, I wonder, is consciousness without freedom?
A meditation on some potential benefits of the loss of certainty in the postmodern era. Postmodernism does have its costs. Isolated systems that can be exactly measured, modeled, and described are, it turns out, the ideal. The quantum universe, it turns out, is seamless and interconnected, which means that all models will be more-or-less approximate. Well, even if we cannot be Gods, we can still get on with dealing, as best we can, with the very real problems that we face. There is no predicting what we can do if we work together.
The disutility of taking the subject-object dichotomy as the basis for understanding consciousness. Quotations mainly from Owen Barfield's book, Poetic Diction, and David Bohm's writings (but including some from Pauli Pylkko's book, The Aconceptual Mind, and one from Holmes' classic, The Science of the Mind that point to the need to acknowledge interconnection - quantum wholeness - as a fundamental feature of reality. Some of these quotations also deal with the nature of our consciousness when we were tribal, i.e., the nature of the ancestral mind.
The perils of neuralism, i.e., "materialistic identism." If mind merely equals brain activity (rather than being very intimately related to it, as I propose) then self and soul are illusions, just like everything else we think that we know, and we are each trapped in a solipsism of the present moment within our own skull. The author Tom Wolfe wrote an entertaining and insightful essay on this topic for Forbes magazine
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