Tom Campbell writes: "Love is the result of successful consciousness evolution. Love is what grows within consciousness in the absence of fear. Love is your purpose; it defines the positive direction of your growth. Spirituality and love must be personal achievements of personal consciousness―they cannot be organizational achievements. A poor quality of life is the inevitable result of a poor quality of consciousness. Your ego makes your fears come true.
“You do not have the ability to improve anyone else. All you can do for others is to provide opportunity for them to do for themselves. What we do with the opportunity to evolve our consciousness is entirely up to us.
“Given that consciousness exists, it must be enabled by memory, information processing capability (intelligence), the interactive sharing of data, and free-will choice-making in the service of profitable evolution. Thus, the question of free will reduces to the question of are you conscious, and, if so, is your consciousness part of a complex interactive system of consciousness?
“If these are answered in the affirmative then your consciousness, and the system of which it is a part, must be evolving against some measure of value because that is a requirement of all self-modifying interactive systems. Such a system cannot evolve toward greater value without free will to make the required choices.
“Consciousness cannot exist without the ability to make self-determined, self-modifying choices. Without free will, there is no consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no free will. Consciousness and free will cannot be separated―they are simply different aspects of the same thing.
“A free will needs only to be free enough to make choices within its own local logical system and decision space. Functional free will, at whatever level of application, requires no more than the practical ability to make intent based choices where the intent is a function of the quality of the consciousness making the choice. If such a mechanism for making value choices at the local level (perhaps based on an evaluation of past choices) can be arranged, consciousness can provide the instrument for its own evolution.
“An evolving consciousness system like ours cannot be supported by either a wholly random or a wholly deterministic system because there can be no cumulative profitability in either. Our existence and human nature exhibit clear universal patterns that contain much more consistency and direction than randomness―a fact that must have a holistic, comprehensible explanation at its core. Because our existence is about us, about who, what, and why we are, surely the explanation lies accessible within us.
“Free will is simply the result of consciousness energy and evolutionary process slipping into bed together for a joyous moment of creation that has not yet ended. From that union, all reality and existence flows.”
Thomas Campbell, My Big TOE (Theory of Everything): A Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics (Lightning Strikes, 2003), 311-423.
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