Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

Choose your reality

   Post 77. April 04, 2019

  What Matters to Me?

   What’s Really Real?

 As noted in Post 76, Terrence Deacon’s theory of Absence “offers a naturalistic account for Life, Mind, Soul, Sentience, Consciousness, and most other immaterial features of the world”. He laments that “Our scientific theories have failed to explain what matters most to us : the place of meaning, purpose, and value in the physical world.” That is exactly why I have spent the last few years trying to reconcile pragmatic Science with the more idealistic values of Religion. Previous posts have discussed how Deacon's “incompleteness” (absence) at the heart of Nature could be a sign of the teleo-logical entention of a Prime Programmer. That enigmatic First Cause is not a replacement for the emotional appeal of anthro-morphic deities. But it does offer a philosophical argument for an ultimate goal of evolution, which seems to have a key interim role for humans, if not as the beloved chosen people.

As a biological anthropologist and neuroscientist, he presents a hypothesis for the emergence of Life & Mind from completely natural causes. No divine magic was needed for that seemingly impossible & statistically unlikely event. This is in agreement with my own theory of Intelligent Evolution, in which the only magic was the creation of matter/energy from the nothingness of infinite potential. Scientists agree that Life from Matter is a quantum leap, but Mind from Matter is even more implausible from a materialistic perspective. So Deacon speculates that Mental stuff may be even more elemental than the solid stuff. “What could it mean that consciousness cannot be derived from any physical theory? Chalmers argues that we just need to face up to the fact that consciousness is non-physical and yet not transcendent. . . . consciousness may be a property of the world that is as fundamental to the universe as electric charge or gravitational mass.”

I agree that Consciousness is immanent in the world as a non-physical function of physical processes. “Charge” and “mass” are causal properties of matter that are defined by what they do, not by what they are. But the ultimate source of Physics and Consciousness must be super-natural, in the sense of a Nature-creator, who lit the fuse of the Big Bang. The physical world is now a closed system, in which energy cannot be created or destroyed. But in order to begin from scratch, it must have been an open system, with inputs from someone or something prior to time T=0. Yet Deacon’s theory assumes that consciousness is “nonphysical . . . yet not transcendent”, which seems to be the definition of the philosophical term “meta-physical”, in reference to the immaterial aspects of the  temporal world. Only, an eternal cosmos-creator could be described as transcendent and out of this world.

In my thesis, Life is not the literal breath of god, added as an afterthought to a body of clay. And Mind is not an eternal wandering soul, transporting from body to body1. They are instead, emergent holistic functions of corporal cells, and neurons, just as Deacon surmised. In other words, Life & Mind emerge from and are dependent upon Energy & Matter. However, the key to my thesis  is that energy is dependent upon something even more fundamental : Information, in the sense of abstract mathematical/logical relationships2.

Post 77 continued . . . click Next

Incomplete Nature
How Mind Emerged From Matter
by Terrence Deacon (2011)

Professor of biological anthropology & neuroscience

“It offers a figure/background shift that shows how even meanings and values can be understood as legitimate com-ponents of the physical world.”
https://www.amazon.com/Incomplete-Nature

1. Transmigration of Souls
   Unlike most animals, humans are capable of imagining what other minds are thinking. That’s called a “theory of mind”. In a fanciful sense, you can “import” another person’s mind into your own, to feel what they feel, and to predict what they might do next.
   I suspect that the ease with which we inhabit other minds gave someone the idea of the soul jumping from one body to another. It’s a metaphor, but some people take it literally.

2. Mathematical Universe :
   Max Tegmark’s contro-versial hypothesis is a form of radical Platonism, which claims that ideas are more real than matter. Furthermore mathematics is the purest form of conceptual inform-ation, consisting of only abstract patterns of relation-ships. The objects linked by those ratios may be either material or mental.
   In Quantum theory, energy is the substance of matter, and mathematical inform-ation is the substance of energy. So Information is the foundation upon which the real world is built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis