on being a Being

   

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On the edge of the forest, a strange, old-fashioned animal still hesitated. His body was the body of a tree dweller, and though tough and knotty by human standards, he was, in terms of that world into which he gazed, a weakling. His teeth, though strong for chewing on the tough roots of the forest, or for crunching the occasional unwary bird caught with his prehensile hands, were not the tearing sabres of the great cats. He had a passion for lifting himself up to see about, in his restless, roving curiosity. He would run a little stiffly and uncertainly, perhaps, on his hind legs, but only in those rare moments when he ventured out upon the ground. All this was the legacy of his climbing days; he had a hand with flexible fingers and no fine specialized hoofs upon which to gallup like the wind.

If he had any idea of competing in that new world, he had better forget it; teeth or hooves, he was much too late for either. He was a ne’er-do-well, an in-betweener. Nature had not done well by him. it was as if she had hesitated and never quite made up her mind. Perhaps as a consequence he had a malicious gleam in his eye, the gleam of an outcast who has been left nothing and knows that he is going to have to take what he gets. One day a little band of these odd apes—for apes they were—stumbled out upon the grass; the human story had begun.

[] Apes were to become men, in the inscrutable wisdom of nature, because flowers had produced seeds and fruits in such tremendous quantities that a new and totally different store of energy had become available in concentrated form.

[] Down in the grass by a streamside, one of those apes with inquisitive fingers turned over a stone and hefted it vaguely. ... He liked the feel of it in his fingers. The attack on the animal world was about to begin.

—Loren Eiseley

The Immense Journey

How Flowers Changed the World

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It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. 

Between lies the level of molecular biology, where mechanical models are adequate and mind appears to be irrelevant. But I, as a physicist, cannot help suspecting that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. 

I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call "observation" in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. 

In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call "chance" when they are made by electrons.

—Freeman Dyson

theoretical physicist and mathematician (1923–2020)

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In the final stages of his quest to find a new way of thinking about the essence of being, Heidegger came to an understanding of awareness as the very ground of such a thinking - indeed of being itself - recognizing awareness as the open field or clearing which first gives or grants Being to beings.


—Peter Wilberg
Heidegger, Phenomenology and Indian Thought

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