  It is argued that human consciousness is likely to have emerged during the
self-consistent evolution of the physical universe, through the gradual
accumulation of biological entities' ability to tap into the intrinsic
non-deterministic potentiality in the global nonequilibrium phase transitions
occurring continually in the quantum universe. Due to the fact that the matter
and energy content participating in these global phase transitions is a
continuum, there are in effect infinite degrees-of-freedom in the substratum,
which invalidate the usual deterministic laws of the mechanical evolution, and
allow chance factors to appear in the emergent properties of resonantly-formed
quantum particles, especially in the acquired phases of their wavefunctions.
Such chance factors, though occurring mostly randomly during the early cosmic
evolution phase, can be harnessed more "purposefully" by the biological
entities co-evolving with the physical universe, due in part to the
globally-entangled nature of quantum interactions. Over time, this ability to
deliberately manipulate the chance factor in the fundamental level of quantum
interactions gradually evolves into the free will and self-awareness of higher
biological beings. The emergence of higher-level consciousness in turn greatly
enhances the entropy-production ability of the biological entities, making them
a powerful new form of the "dissipative structures" that nature constructs to
accelerate the entropy evolution of the universe. It is further shown that
complex, nonequilibrium systems (including the universe as a whole) have the
innate ability to spontaneously generate ever-renewable, highly-complex
structural features in response to a changing and evolving environment;
therefore natural selection is not the only driving mechanism for the
irreversible evolution of the internal characteristics of biological species.
