Consciousness from Nothing?

Here’s an interesting post on the NewScientist site today:

Spooks in space
17 August 2007
* Mason Inman
* Magazine issue 2617POP.

What are the chances that an everyday object – a rock, a chair, you name it – could suddenly appear out of thin air? Not zero, surprisingly. In fact, given enough space and time, it is conceivable that a conscious being could arise, even if only for a microsecond.

OK, such an event would be incredibly unlikely, but not impossible – at least in theory. Physicists have dubbed such hypothetical beings “Boltzmann brains”, after the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, a pioneer in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. Boltzmann posed the question of whether the universe could have arisen from a thermal fluctuation; his work presaged the idea that a fluctuation could also give rise to a conscious entity that sees the universe. In this regard Boltzmann brains are not necessarily actual brains, but rather are a metaphor for observers of the universe that might appear spontaneously.

This is indeed interesting and fun as an idea. For me it is both encouraging and a little disappointing. Consciousness may arise in a form that is produced out of the “random” froth of quantum (Plank) space, but not because consciousness itself is a random phenomenon. It would be because the vehicle which consciousness occupies may arise from these bizarre behaviors of the quantum reaches of micro-cosmic space. That vehicle, then, somehow “draws” a consciousness into it. Consciousness itself is way beyond the simple cause-and-effect principles of space-time. Heraclitus referred to the Logos, the fundamental principle of creation. This principle determines all events, even these seemingly random events. This principle is itself Consciousness.