The Universe in One Atom: Science and Spirituality in the Service of the World. 6. The problem of the emergence of consciousness
The joy of meeting, the sadness of parting, the wealth of vivid dreams, the serene calm of a spring walk, complete immersion in a state of deep meditation – all these and similar states form the sphere of our conscious experience. Regardless of their content, no one in their right mind would doubt the reality of these experiences. All of them, from the completely ordinary to the most sublime, have a certain orderliness and at the same time are highly personal, and therefore their existence can only be discussed from a certain point of view. The experience of inner feelings is completely subjective. The paradox, however, is that, despite the undoubted reality of our subjective world and the thousand-year history of its philosophical research, complete agreement has not yet been achieved in understanding what consciousness is. Science, with its basic principle of the primacy of external objective observations, has so far made very little progress towards answering this question.