User:Viriditas

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Viriditas is taking a short wikibreak and will be back on Wikipedia soon.

1RR This user prefers discussing changes on the talkpage rather than engaging in an edit war.
This user is a member of WikiProject Hawaiʻi.
Consider a world without consciousness. The darkness is a bubbling cauldron of energy and vibrating matter, locked in the incessant dance of thermal agitation. Through shared electrons or the strange attraction of unlike charges, quivering molecules, not free to roam, absorb and emit their characteristic quantal packages of energy with the surrounding fog. Free gas molecules, almost oblivious to gravity but buffeted in all directions by their neighbors, form swirling turbulent flows or march in zones of compression and expansion, according to the dictates of oscillating substrates. A massive solar flux and cosmic radiation from events long past crisscross space with their radiant energy and silently mix with the thermal glow of living creatures, whose hungry metabolic systems pour their infrared waste into the chaotic milieu. But within the warmth of their sticky protein bodies, the dim glow of consciousness is emerging to impose its own brand of organization on this turbulent mix of energy/matter. The active filter of consciousness illuminates the darkness, discards all irrelevant radiation, and in a grand transmutation converts and amplifies the relevant. Dead molecules erupt into flavors of bitterness or sweetness, electromagnetic frequencies burst with color, hapless air pressure waves become the laughter of children, and the impact of a passing molecule fills a conscious mind with the aroma of roses on a warm summer afternoon.

Victor Johnston, Why We Feel: The Science of Human Emotions pp.19-20, as shared by Joseph Goldstein in "The Origin of Dukkha"