Anh Pham-Week 8

Ever since I was a little kid, I have always been curious about consciousness, the human kind’s external existence, and how God “made” that happen. If God was once alive, who gave him consciousness? How did we develop common sense? I asked myself.

      Consciousness is one of the biggest conundrums that even scientists could not solve for hundreds of decades; it is everything that you see and experience. According to an article by Joan Walton “The significance of consciousness studies and quantum physics for researching spirituality”, consciousness is our deepest mystery, like mentioned previously. The origin and nature of these experiences, sometimes referred to as qualia, have been a mystery from the earliest days of antiquity right up to the present. None of what we’re experiencing happens outside of our consciousness. Further, in the article, Walton mentioned a researcher's theory of consciousness, in which he proposed the idea of  “transcendental consciousness”-the theory that knowledge naturally arises from intuitive sources. Moreover, the experiences we have had, our findings and knowledge has built science to be the field that is structured in a particular way. This particular way is that whatever we are trying to find must be able to go through a series of tests.

Question: What determines our experiences of freewill?