Thomas Berry suggested to me that pre-horses became horses through the choices by many generations of pre-horses for the love of galloping. Pre-bison meanwhile became bison through the choices by many generations of pre-bison for the love of butting.
These two types of species evolved from similar gene pools in similar grasslands. Both set of choices worked in handling adequate survival probabilities of escaping extinction from the work of large predators.
Evolution is more complicated than cause or chance explanations can fathom. Choice is another human explanation that must take its place alongside cause and chance explanations. The myth that cause and effect can be the whole explanation for the doings of nature is incomplete. The myth that probability explanations can completely fill the gaps that cause explanations cannot handle is also incomplete. The human explanation called “choice” is also required to handle our experience of this ever-more mysterious actuality we call “nature,” or perhaps “Final Reality.”
Watching our cat choose or not choose to jump up on the table is another bit of data for my master view of thoughtfulness about nature. This choice is being made by this cat who knows it would be easy and fun to do this and who also knows that I strongly disapprove of this behavior. This cat is not using my language and mathematical skills to make this choice. His mental mechanisms are composed of more primitive multi-sensory reruns that I call “images,” rather then “symbols.” But these mental processes, that I also use, are good enough for cat consciousness to make all sorts of choices that make cat life what cat life is.
I am blessed with a power of consciousness that uses art, language, and mathematical symbols to make choices no cat has the power to make. Even a worm has a level of consciousness, and worm consciousness also makes choices. “Nature” we might say waits to “work out” what the future will be until each worm, cat, and human decides what his or her gift of consciousness will choose to add to the history-making process.
Herein is my description of what consciousness is: attention and intention—taking in reality and putting forth reality-bending acts. We also call these two dynamics “awareness and freedom.” In all levels of its intensity, consciousness is both of these dynamics. Consciousness is always both awareness and freedom.
As a human being, I am not only determined by millions of causally understood forces, but I am also myself a determining force—a freedom sourced in the essence of my human consciousness. My choices make a difference in the course of time. Nature as a whole waits to decide what the future will be until I decide what I will be and do now.
Let us notice that the explanation “choice” points to a truth about nature that differs infinitely from the explanations of “cause” or “chance.” Choice means opting for an option based on no cause and no chance. In this sense, every choice is a choice out of nothing except choice itself. If there is some cause for a choice, then it is not a choice. If there is some probability for a choice then it is not a choice. Choice is a third overall explanation of events that differs completely from cause and chance explanations. So let us look more closely to these three ways of interpreting events.
Cause
Is “cause and effect” a pattern of nature, a pattern of the human mind, or both. It is both, but it exists in nature as something different than how it exists in the human mind. In nature “cause and effect” means an approximation of the workings of nature. In the human mind “cause and effect” means a creation of the human consciousness using the human mind. What is not true is that cause-and-effect explanations can explain everything. Yes, Reality is one huge connectedness, but that connected wholeness is more complex than a cause-and -effect network of reasoning. Nature is mysterious beyond all our cause-and-effect interpretations. The truth about nature is more complex than “causes we have not yet discovered.” Nature breaths a Mysteriousness or a Profound Reality that no finite mind (horse, cat, or human) may never be able to fathom. A thousand years from now humans will fathom more, but will that be all? As far as you and I are concerned, the answer to this questions is currently unfathomable. I am not standing aside from this questions. I am guessing our knowledge will always be limited by the finitude for the human mind.
Chance
Chance or probability is another creation of the human mind that can also be an approximation of nature. We use it all the time. When we throw a six-sided dice that is carefully carved and well balanced, each side has an approximately equal chance of landing upward. You might be able to explain that side coming up with a few thousand tiny causes, but you cannot measure them, so probability is a type of explanation we use quite frequently. The whole of what we call “statistics” uses a probability type of mathematics. And probability explanations differ profoundly from cause and effect explanations.
In the super-microscopic realm of sub-atomic processes of tiny discrete energy quanta we find our situation to be somewhat like throwing dice. The mathematics of probability serves us very well in this realm. The attempt to measure causes and their effects is rendered impossible by the fact that our measuring beams significantly change what we are attempting to measure. In this realm of nature we also run into the strange truth that every distinguishable item turns out to be a ripple in an energy field that spans the universe. This means that every entity in this realm of physical reality can be visualized as both a discrete particle and a wave in a comic-wide field. I will not attempt to describe those complexities further in this essay. For now, I only want to note for our overall thinking that the truth about nature has been expanded by the chance/probability mode of careful thoughtfulness, right alongside cause and effect explanations. We can arrive at wonderfully accurate approximations about the goings-on in the sub-atomic realm using probability thoughtfulness. We don’t need to know the minute causes.
Einstein, you may recall, complained about having to stop with these probability explanations with the comment that he “did not believe God played dice with the universe.” I take this to mean that Einstein preferred rendering the truth of every natural process in terms of a mathematics of the cause-and-effect type of thinking.
Choice
If this conflict between probability explanations and cause-and-effect explanations gives a lurch to our hope of having a “rational view” of Reality, the explanation we call “choice” further frustrates any hope of creating a rational view of the every-thing-ness of our lives. Yet, we find ourselves using the choice interpretation all the time. For example, in playing a game of cards we not only use probability to predict the next card we draw and cause and effect to explain moving a card in our hand to the table, but we also use choice to describe playing our queen rather than our ace in that often-faced crossroads in the game of bridge.
Also, we expect our cat to make the choice to remain on the floor or in a chair rather than jump up on the table. We commonly assume that even grasshoppers (with a consciousness more limited than cats) make choices. When a grasshopper in my garden becomes aware of my presence, she (perhaps he) moves to the opposite side or the stem on which she is clinging and apparently assumes a readiness to leap off in an opposite direction from me if she is further observed or threatened.
I am willing to hypothesize that all living forms have a level of consciousness, and that all these levels of consciousness manifest both of these two dynamics of consciousness: awareness and choice, attentionality and intentionality, presence and freedom.
So what is a choice? Some have attempted to show that every choice is so conditioned by cultural influences, peer-group expectations, personality patterns, and other near invisible causes that a choice is actually nothing more than a figment of our imagination, or that choice is an after-thought about our totally determined actions. In other words, that living beings are an unbroken system of causes. To say this means that we are guessing that human consciousness does not actually intend anything; it simply watches.
But no creative artist actually believes that their consciousness simply watches. A poet, a novelist, a painter, a composer, a choreographer experiences their own consciousness creating something new out of the many products, trends, and influences that surround them. This bit of newness comes from nowhere other than that conscious being’s consciousness. It comes from human freedom being freedom. It comes from choice being choice. “Choice” we might say is an uncaused cause bending the course of history alongside many other causes.
Humans are especially gifted in being benders of history. Thousands of other forces condition history to be its actual outcomes, but human freedom adds a cause to all these other causes. Or to put all this in another metaphor: we humans are response-able. We are able to respond to the cosmos of realities approaching us in history. I am going to accuse most people who deny this response-ability that they are hoping to handle their guilt by denying the existence of guilt. The courage to confess guilt and trust its forgiveness is how guilt is handled in most of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thoughtfulness.
We spirit descendants of Abraham have commonly spoken of confronting Profound Reality and of responding to this encounter. We have not meant that as an illusory reflection, but as a prime agony in the now of living. Life has been described as a process of dialogue: Thou-I-Thou-I-Thou-I-Thou-I-Thou-I-Thou. “Thou” gets the first and the last word in this dialogue, but the human also speaks back to this Thou-of-Total-Reality and then this Thou-of-Total-Reality speaks back to the “I” of human consciousness. This is metaphorical talk, but it is artful talk about the actual historical flow of time as lived by a human being.
Spirit Freedom
“Spirit Freedom” can be defined as human consciousness operating beyond the rational expressions of art, language, and mathematics. Of course we can point to causes that are functioning in all the performances of our bodies and psyches, but Spirit Freedom is NOT CAUSED by any other factor than our own consciousness consciously intending a contribution to some specific action of our being.
This understanding of freedom is a Western interpretation of the existential meaning of the Buddhist “no self” awareness. We can agree with the East that our human self image or ego is merely an idea created by the human. Such a self-created “self” is nowhere to be found in our actual experience. What we can find, however, is this NOTHINGNESS of UNCAUSED SPIRIT FREEDOM.
Consider the life of a research scientist who is seeking to create a better causal explanations for the events of nature. His or her act of creating a whole new theory of science is not itself caused by some causal conditioning. The scientist with his or her own Spirit Freedom creates that new theory that then proves it to be a better approximation of the causal factors of some specific set of natural processes. Scientific research is a super-rational process of thoughtfulness that is, nevertheless, at its creative core irrational inventiveness. Or if you wish, scientific research is trans-rational; it dips into a creative freedom that we sometimes call “intuition.” “Intuition” is a word that we use for a sort of thoughtfulness for which we have no causal explanation. “Sprit Freedom” names this intending side of whatever the word “intuition” is indicating on the awareness side of our profound consciousness.
It is understandable that the poetry of Christian theology calls both intuition and Spirit Freedom “Holy Spirit” and views “Holy Spirit” as a “wind” breathed from the mouth of that Final Source or Profound Reality that is the God-devotion of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus—Sarah, Deborah, and Mary—and perhaps you and me.