The Future of the Mind

Ultimately, I think free will probably does exist, but it is not the free will envisioned by rugged individualists who claim they are complete masters of their fate. The brain is influenced by thousands of unconscious factors that predispose us to make certain choices ahead of time, even if we think we made them ourselves.

The Catholic Church split in half on this precise question during the Protestant revolution. According to Catholic doctrine at that time, one could change one’s ultimate fate with an indulgence, usually by making generous financial donations to the Church. In other words, determinism could be altered by the size of your wallet

The material world may come and go, but consciousness remains as the defining element, which means that consciousness, in some sense, creates reality. The very existence of the atoms we see around us is based on our ability to see and touch them.

Physicists embarked on an eighty-year debate that continues even today. On one hand, Einstein would proclaim that “God does not play dice with the world.” Niels Bohr, on the other hand, reportedly replied, “Stop telling God what to do.”

some people claim that we will never understand the secret of consciousness, since consciousness is beyond our puny technology. In fact, in their view consciousness is more fundamental than atoms, molecules, and neurons and determines the nature of reality itself. To them, consciousness is the fundamental entity out of which the material world is created.

Dr. David Eagleman says, “What a perplexing masterpiece the brain is, and how lucky we are to be in a generation that has the technology and the will to turn our attention to it. It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.” Instead of diminishing the sense of wonder, learning about the brain only

He concludes, “Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.”

We are literally children of the stars.

So on one hand, the Copernican Principle indicates that we are just insignificant cosmic debris drifting aimlessly among the stars. But on the other hand, all the latest cosmological data are consistent with yet another theory, which gives us the opposite philosophy: the Anthropic Principle.

And if string theory (my specialty) is correct, it means that even the entire universe coexists with other universes in eleven-dimensional hyperspace. So even three-dimensional space is not the final word. The true arena for physical phenomena is the multiverse of universes, full of floating bubble universes.