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Tallis in Wonderland

The How & Why of Consciousness

Raymond Tallis says the mysteries haven’t been solved.

Of the many mysteries in which our existence is wrapped, three seem especially resistant to being transformed into soluble problems: why there is something rather than nothing (the origin of stuff); how the material world gave rise to organisms (the origin of living stuff); and how organic life came to be aware of itself and its surroundings (the origin of conscious stuff).

Physicists, who routinely go, even dance, where others fear to tread, sometimes imagine they have an answer to the first mystery. According to Lawrence Krauss in A Universe from Nothing (2012), the universe may have arisen out of nothing in virtue of an instability in the quantum vacuum that somehow delivers a preponderance of stuff over anti-stuff. This seems closer to creative accounting than a plausible creation story.

As for the second mystery – the emergence of living stuff in a dead world – a succession of theories, and numerous experiments replicating the conditions prevailing when life is thought to have begun, have brought us no closer to a coherent story of the origin of organisms.

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