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| Photo by Frank Cone Source |
A reading of the world around us and of the internal domain that gives rise to our capabilities relating to our experience will fail if it sources everything solely in the material. Rather, the evidence compels an understanding of the world as having a dimension that we might term spiritual.
This is highlighted in the work of Iain McGilchrist whose two-volume book on epistemology and metaphysics was published last year as The Matter With Things.
From Wikipedia, a quick account of McGilchrist's status in the world of literature and neuroscience:
Iain McGilchrist (born 1953) is a psychiatrist, writer, and former Oxford literary scholar. McGilchrist came to prominence after the publication of his book The Master and His Emissary, subtitled "The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World".
McGilchrist read English at New College, Oxford, but having published Against Criticism in 1982, he later retrained in medicine and has been a neuroimaging researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a Consultant Psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital in south London. McGilchrist is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and has three times been elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
He lives on the Isle of Skye, off the coast of Scotland and continues to write, and deliver many lectures and interviews.
In this post I draw on the study of McGilchrist's The Matter with Things conducted by American author Rod Dreher, who is delving into the work as preparation for a book he is writing on what we miss in our experience of life because of the filters that our learned ways of thinking, and especially our culture, impose on us. Dreher has created excerpts from the text (possibly behind a paywall) which I will use to further my exploration in this blog on the subject of how many scientists today go with the mentality of the age and close their minds to all the possibilities that make up reality.
To start, there is a growing awareness that the laws of physics and those observed in human psychology come together in a way that demands we open our minds to new ways of perceiving the whole of existence.
To quote McGilchrist (per Dreher):
Legendary astrophysicist Fred Hoyle famously remarked: ‘A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature’. Astrophysicist Paul Davies’s view similarly is that ‘there is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe … the impression of design is overwhelming’. And for Einstein, the cosmos showed evidence of ‘an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection’.
We will see how this is true by quoting McGilchrist in his assessment of recent discoveries in neuroscience:
Neuroscientists VS Ramachandran and Colin Blakemore conclude that ‘consciousness, like gravity, mass, and charge, may be one of the irreducible properties of the universe for which no further account is possible.’ Physicists agree. According to Heisenberg, ‘if we go beyond biology and include psychology in the discussion, then there can scarcely be any doubt but that the concepts of physics, chemistry, and evolution together will not be sufficient to describe the facts.’ This is very similar to Bohr’s insight that ‘consciousness must be part of nature, or, more generally, of reality, which means that, quite apart from the laws of physics and chemistry, as laid down in quantum theory, we must also consider laws of quite a different kind.’ The great mathematician and physicist von Neumann confirmed that ‘it is inherently entirely correct that the measurement or the related process of the subjective perception is a new entity relative to the physical environment and is not reducible to the latter. Indeed, subjective perception leads us into the intellectual inner life of the individual, which is extraobservational by its very nature.’ And in similar vein, Adam Frank, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Rochester, New York, writes that we must entertain the ‘radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to the list of things, such as mass or electric charge, that the world is built of.’
There is, to put it conservatively, a good chance they are right. It may be irritating to some to face the fact that after several thousand years of ratiocination and experimentation we are arriving at truths that were anciently known to philosophers and sages, East and West, though it is exciting and perhaps reassuring to have them confirmed by elaborate experimentation.
McGilchrist continues:
If asked my view, I would say that matter appears to be an element within consciousness that provides the necessary resistance for creation; and with that, inevitably, for individuality to arise. All individual beings, including ourselves, bring forms into being and cause them to persist: each of us is not, ultimately, any one conformation in matter, but, Ship of Theseus-like, the conformation itself, the morphogenetic field, which requires matter in order to be brought into being, but, once existent, persists while matter comes and goes within it. Could matter be a ‘phase’ of consciousness?
He offers this observation:
Mass and energy are interconvertible: the brain is a manifestation as mass, the mind a manifestation as energy.
An important question:
How on earth might consciousness – immaterial and lacking extension in space as it is – emerge from matter, which is very clearly both material and extended in space? Since, as Colin McGinn reflects, this ‘looks more like magic than a predictable unfolding of natural law’, he suggests ‘the following heady speculation: that the origin of consciousness somehow draws upon those properties of the universe that antedate and explain the occurrence of the big bang … If so, consciousness turns out to be older than matter in space, at least as to its raw materials.’ That would be one very important difference.
'Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical – that is, capable of combining into mental wholes.’
Max Planck, who died in 1947, was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him a Nobel Prize:
A long roll call of the most distinguished physicists would support the view that the originary ‘stuff’ of the universe is consciousness. Thus Max Planck was famously asked whether he thought consciousness could be explained in terms of matter and its laws. ‘No’, he replied. ‘I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.’ It is worth noting that the interviewer prefaces his piece with the remark: ‘In my interview with him Professor Planck replied to all my questions with a quite remarkable lack of hesitation. It would seem that his ideas on these subjects are now definitely formed, or else that he thinks with remarkable rapidity – probably both suppositions are true.’
Thirteen years later, and three years before he died, Planck went further:
As a physicist, and therefore as a man who has spent his whole life in the service of the most down-to-earth science, namely the exploration of matter, no one is going to take me for a starry-eyed dreamer. After all my exploration of the atom, then, let me tell you this: there is no matter as such. All matter arises and exists only by virtue of a force which sets the atomic particles oscillating, and holds them together in that tiniest of solar systems, the atom … we must suppose, behind this force, a conscious, intelligent spirit. This spirit is the ultimate origin of matter.
Further on this topic:
Astronomical physicist Richard Conn Henry writing in Nature avers that ‘the Universe is entirely mental … and we must learn to perceive it as such’. Elsewhere he expands on this theme, and goes further:
Non-local causality is a concept that had never played any role in physics, other than in rejection (‘action-at-a-distance’), until Aspect showed in 1981 that the alternative would be the abandonment of the cherished belief in mind-independent reality; suddenly, spooky-action-at-a-distance became the lesser of two evils, in the minds of the materialists.Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the illusion of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism.
So we read that "a theistic view of our existence" is more credible than solipsism, the egocentric "doctrine that, in principle, 'existence' means for me my existence and that of my mental states" (Source).
McGilchrist continues to mount his argument that science is finding that there is more to reality than meets the eye:
The eminent evolutionary biologist Sir Julian Huxley wrote that:
the relation between mind and matter is so close that mind or something of the nature as mind must exist throughout the entire universe. This is, I believe, the truth. We may never be able to prove it, but it is the most economical hypothesis: it fits the facts much more simply … than one-sided idealism or one-sided materialism.
McGilchrist provides a summary of what the science means:
In sum, it seems that (1) mind and matter have a close relationship; that (2) we cannot logically dismiss the existence of consciousness; and (3) ought to be unwilling to dismiss the existence of matter; that (4) they are not so distinct that they cannot interact; that (5) neither are they identical; and yet (6) may be aspects of one and the same reality. Nonetheless (7) they are not equal, in that there is reason to believe that consciousness is prior ontologically to matter.
The filters of past scientific assumptions need to be eradicated:
The re-admission of the observer’s consciousness into the description of the cosmos is a change of unequalled significance in the history of science since its banishment in the seventeenth century. In a theme that should be familiar to my readers, that exile enabled us to become hugely, indisputably, powerful; but at the price of a lack of understanding of what it is we had power over.
Assumptions made in the past have been found to be eccentric and illogical:
Before we conclude that it is absurd to suppose that other organisms, perhaps far removed from us in terms of evolutionary history, have awareness, let us remember that the detached post-Enlightenment view of life as mechanical, and of consciousness as something we must not make the mistake of attributing to any creature other than ourselves, on the basis that to do so is to make assumptions we cannot validate, is both historically anomalous and illogical. Historically anomalous, because such a view would never have been accepted by Greek or Roman, Chinese or Indian philosophers, or our own, until Descartes. Illogical, because to assume that they do not have awareness is also an assumption we cannot validate, but which, unlike its alternative, does violence to every other human faculty.Another key point:
That consciousness interacts with matter, an insuperable problem in the seventeenth century, is no longer insuperable, since matter is already intrinsically a field that interacts with a field of consciousness.
'What has always made science possible is [...] our imagination, not our avoidance of it.'
Imagination is likewise crucial:
In the words of Lakoff and Johnson,
as embodied, imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place. What has always made science possible is our embodiment, not our transcendence of it, and our imagination, not our avoidance of it.
According to geneticist Ho, there is
no mismatch between knowledge and our experience of reality. For reality is not a flat impenetrable surface of common-sensible literalness. It has breadths and depths beyond our wildest imagination. The quality of our vision depends entirely on the extent our consciousness permeates and resonates within her magical realm. In this respect, there is complete symmetry between science and art. Both are creative acts of the most intimate communion with reality.
McGilchrist raises the stakes with this declaration:
In this light, the question ‘what is consciousness for?’ appears to be based on a false premise. Consciousness is nothing to our purpose; we are to the purpose of consciousness.
He develops this theme of a clash of world views:
‘Physicalism’, writes Whitehead scholar Matt Segall, referring to what I call scientific materialism,
is the idea that the universe is fundamentally composed of entirely blind, deaf, dumb – DEAD – particles in purposeless motion through empty space. For some reason, these dumb particles follow the orders of a system of eternal mathematical laws that, for some reason, the human mind, itself made of nothing more than dumb particles, is capable of comprehending. On this definition of physicalism, ‘life’ and ‘consciousness’ are just words we have for epiphenomenal illusions with no causal influence on what happens. ‘Life’ is a genetic algorithm and ‘consciousness’ is a meme machine, in Dawkins’ and Dennett’s terms. We are undead zombies, not living persons, on this reading of physicalism.
By contrast, according to Thomas Nagel, ‘the inescapable fact that has to be accommodated in any complete conception of the universe’,
is that the appearance of living organisms has eventually given rise to consciousness, perception, desire, action, and the formation of both beliefs and intentions on the basis of reasons. If all this has a natural explanation, the possibilities were inherent in the universe long before there was life, and inherent in early life long before the appearance of animals. A satisfying explanation would show that the realisation of these possibilities was not vanishingly improbable but a significant likelihood given the laws of nature and the composition of the universe. It would reveal mind and reason as basic aspects of a nonmaterialistic natural order.
If one is certain that consciousness emerged from matter, then this is indeed a conundrum, and I agree with Nagel’s conclusions. But to me even for the possibilities of consciousness, and all the rest, to be inherent, the actualities must have been present, otherwise we are back to what one might call the Midshipman Easy problem. Nagel points up the trap for reductionism, since, if consciousness exists (and it does) and it cannot emerge (and it cannot), this implies that consciousness was there all along. So he continues: ‘since conscious organisms are not composed of a special kind of stuff, but can be constructed, apparently, from any of the matter in the universe, suitably arranged, it follows that this monism will be universal. Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical – that is, capable of combining into mental wholes.’
Later:
The grounding consciousness is not deterministic. It has none of the characteristics of an omnipotent and omniscient engineering God constructing and winding up a mechanism. It is in the process of discovering itself through its creative potential (one thing we all know directly from our own experience is that consciousness is endlessly creative). …
More:
Nobel Prize-winning physiologist George Wald thought that ‘the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is Mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life, and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create … In them the universe begins to know itself.’
This is entirely in keeping with the model I am recommending for consideration. But, echoing Yukawa’s words, Wald reflected: ‘Let me say that it is not only easier to say these things to physicists than to my fellow biologists, but easier to say them in India than in the West’. He continues: ‘Mind is not only not locatable, it has no location. It is not a thing in space and time, not measurable; hence – as I said at the beginning of this paper – not assimilable as science.’
McGilchrist continues quoting from Wald:
He put forward the hypothesis that Mind,
rather than being a very late development in the evolution of living things, restricted to organisms with the most complex nervous systems – all of which I had believed to be true – that Mind instead has been there always, and that this universe is life-breeding because the pervasive presence of Mind had guided it to be so. That thought, though elating as a game is elating, so offended my scientific possibilities as to embarrass me. It took only a few weeks, however, for me to realize that I was in excellent company. That kind of thought is not only deeply embedded in millennia-old Eastern philosophies, but it has been expressed plainly by a number of great and very recent physicists.
The recourse to a multiverse to avoid acknowledging even the possibility of God as principal agent in bringing all that we know into existence is raised in McGilchrist's exhaustive study of the various realms that comprise reality:
The multiverse hypothesis suggests that the explanation for the unimaginably intricate interrelationship of highly precise factors necessary to permit the evolution of life in the cosmos just happening to be present together and to the right extent is that, as long as you keep multiplying universes indefinitely, eventually you are bound to end up with one like this. It is worth setting the probability in context, because it shows that the number of such universes would have to be effectively infinite. Here is astrophysicist Lee Smolin:
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