Consciousness, Free Will, Information and Enlightenment
Recent view from my living room. Pretty, huh? Even without rainbows, even at its most humdrum, reality should blow our minds.
HOBOKEN, JULY 31, 2026. Blame this column on Tyler and Joe, retired professors of environmental science (Tyler) and neuroscience (Joe), whom I met recently for dinner and conversation. Our powwow inspired these thoughts:
What Consciousness Is For
Does consciousness serve a purpose?
Well, part of me thinks nothing has a purpose. Not consciousness, not Homo sapiens, not life, the Earth, Milky Way, universe. Things just exist, for reasons no one, not even a machine with godlike intelligence, will ever fathom.
Another part of me thinks: Without consciousness, the cosmos would be pointless. If we were automatons, lacking sensations of gladness and sadness, anticipation and remorse, desire and fear, life would be meaningless. We might as well be rocks. So of course consciousness serves a purpose.
Consciousness alone can’t make our lives meaningful. We also need free will, the capacity to discern and make choices. Consciousness and free will, I’m guessing, evolved in tandem, like Escher’s hands. Together they are adaptive, that is, they promote survival and reproduction, that’s their biological purpose.
Consciousness and free will are intertwined. Each depends on, makes no sense without, the other. To the extent we have free will, we have it because we are conscious, and vice versa.
Here’s an analogy: Just as electricity and magnetism are two aspects of electromagnetism, so consciousness and free will are components of a more fundamental thing. What is that thing? Ah, good question.
If you don’t believe in free will, if you think we are just passive observers of a predetermined fate over which we have no control, I won’t try to change your mind. I will merely pity you.
Information and Free Will
Wait, here’s an idea that might change your mind. Various theorists--physicist John Wheeler, philosopher David Chalmers, neuroscientists Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch—link consciousness to information.
So does Claude Shannon, who invented information theory in the 1940s at Bell Labs. Shannon originally called it a theory of “communication,” because he was concerned with how one person reliably sends information—a recipe for coconut layer cake, design for an H-bomb, pornographic haiku--to another person via wire, radio or other medium.
Information theory is abstract and mathematical. Shannon represents information with “bits,” which you can think of as answers to yes/no questions. A bit can be a 1 or 0, Y or N, an electrical pulse or its absence. Shannon relates information to entropy, whatever that is.
But Shannon, whom I interviewed in 1990, also defines information in a straightforward way: The information in a message is proportional to its capacity to “surprise” a recipient, to tell her something she doesn’t already know.
This definition has profound implications. It means physicists who try to reduce information to something strictly physical and objective are wrong-headed. Information is intrinsically subjective; what’s information for me isn’t necessarily information for you.
Pardon the tautology, but information—whether it takes the form of a stock tip, anarchist manifesto or “Cross-Check” column—must have the potential to inform someone. That is, to change someone’s mind and hence course of action.
QED: If you believe in information—and you should, because you are absorbing it at this moment—you must also believe in free will.
The Surprise of Enlightenment
Paradoxes arise.
Many messages, like Spain 1, Argentina 0, surprise you only once. Works of art like Gravity’s Rainbow or To the Lighthouse can repeatedly surprise you. And reality, even at its most humdrum, should perpetually surprise you.
Think of everyday reality as your mom playing peek-a-boo with you when you were a baby. She covers her face with her hands, then pulls them away and says, Surprise! And you chortle and wave your chubby little arms and legs about in delight.
Your mom does this over and over, and every time you chortle, you’re surprised all over again. That’s what enlightenment is to me, that pure, primordial surprise at the raw fact of existence. This is what Wittgenstein has in mind when he says: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”
This feeling, or vision, is at once highly subjective and objectively true. Science, after all, has demonstrated that our existence is infinitely improbable, or, as I like to put it, weird.
Unfortunately, most of us, as we age and get caught up in the business of living, stop seeing existence as surprising. And what can you do with this feeling of jaw-dropping astonishment, anyway? Far from helping you live, it can be a distraction.
You focus on getting through college, pursuing a career, finding a mate, having kids, writing a book or two, getting divorced and so on. Every now and then, like when your daughter is born or you’re playing hockey on Lake Alice or doing mushrooms with your girlfriend, the universe pulls its hands back and says, Surprise!
Those moments are increasingly rare. You can remember what it was like to be surprised, you can even talk about it to your students, tell them the universe is miraculous yada yada. But it’s been a long time since you felt that miraculousness.
You grow jaded, world weary, you feel like maybe you’ve seen what there is to see, nothing surprises you anymore, except maybe in a bad way. You end up in a nursing home, no one visits you, most of your friends and family are dead, you lie on your bed watching TV or just staring at the ceiling, feeling glum, ready to call it quits, and at that moment, when you least expect it, the universe pulls its hands away from its face and says, Surprise!!!!
And you chortle and wriggle your withered limbs like a baby. You think, Life, what a trip. Or words to that effect.
Further Reading:
A Buddhism Critic Goes on a Buddhist Retreat
Theories of Consciousness, Gaza and My Cognitive Dissonance
Entropy, Meaninglessness and Miracles
This column is also related to stuff in my free online books Mind-Body Problems and My Quantum Experiment. And my other books, too, actually.