When we're in a human body, we don't care about universal collapse - instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair.

Even while it's true that we are tied to our molecules and proteins and neurons - as strokes and hormones and drugs and microorganisms indisputably tell us - it does not logically follow that humans are best described only as pieces and parts.

Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.

Even though the outside world has not changed, your brain dynamically presents different interpretations.

A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.

This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.

In our current understanding of science, we can't find the physical gap in which to slip free will - the uncaused causer - because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts.