Couples In Love As Particles In Motion

Newspapers will not herald in bold headlines that "Your World View Is Changing," but it will happen to the public, slowly, almost imperceptibly, as research thinking on brain, neuroscience, and the philosophy of consciousness spreads into the public sphere.

Let there be no doubt: the current thinking is revolutionary. Whatever you thought was obvious about yourself is threatened to be undermined by the revolution. Among potential threats, one is that people will come to believe that life is pointless, meaningless.

A young couple in love, walking along the bank of the Seine in Paris become only moving particles. Such is the logical culmination of the revolution in reductionism. Reductionist approaches to brain and consciousness study have the ear of mass media, and that view is trumpeted to the public.

As society and culture absorb the view, there will be no moment when thought shifted, no memory of an earthquake in public perception. It will happen quietly, over many years, seeping into society and culture. It will be a change as powerful as the impact Darwin had on the Victorian world, but without the explosive quality. It will whisper, relentlessly corrosive.

Unless a counter-view becomes ascendant.

Let me be clear. I am not a creationist. I believe in scientific evidence and not superstition. I have one argument, and it is not with reductionism as fruitful science, but with the sweeping claims of reductionism.

In reductionism we already witness an erosion of belief in meaning, value, agency, and a sense of purpose in life. As physicist Steven Weinberg put it, “All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.” Weinberg also says, “The more we know of the universe, the more meaningless it appears.” That is the consensus among thorough-going reductionists.

There is an alternate view, non-reductive emergent phenomenalism. It is a mouthful, and other terms describe the same concept, but essentially it argues that you can't get there from here--from the top down to a reductionist explanation of everything at the top--because Darwinian evolution is not a simple two-way street. Preadaptations are an example of the dynamic and creative quality of evolution. (As an example, an early fish jaw became tiny parts of the inner ear.) Purpose, agency, meaning, and value are real in their own right precisely because they are at the top and cannot be entirely explained by downward-pointing physics and biology. You and I are not simply a bunch of moving particles.

Mass media unquestioningly presents scientific research to the public. People can be influenced by the loudest reductionist voices for explanations of consciousness and the brain. Your neurons made you do it, according to these experts interviewed by reporters.

Below, a pundit addresses the issue--the effect on the public of brain and consciousness research--but I am not as sanguine as he is about public reaction to the new thinking on the subject. In his New York Times column David Brooks provides window dressing, but does not explore the field in depth. I wish he had given even some attention to the alternate view, non-reductive emergent phenomenalism, a top-down, dynamic systems approach that could well rescue morality, value, purpose, and agency. For Brooks, read on.

"In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called 'Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,' in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists.

To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion is an accident.

In this materialist view, people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems. You put a magnetic helmet around their heads and they will begin to think they are having a spiritual epiphany. If they suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, they will show signs of hyperreligiosity, an overexcitement of the brain tissue that leads sufferers to believe they are conversing with God.

Wolfe understood the central assertion contained in this kind of thinking: Everything is material and “the soul is dead.” He anticipated the way the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate. They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God exists.

Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.

The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as The Origin of Species reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world." More

A Physicist's Proof of God's Existence: Point and Counterpoint

Point. Physicist Amit Goswami "is convinced, along with a number of others who subscribe to the same view, that the universe, in order to exist, requires a conscious sentient being to be aware of it. Without an observer, he claims, it only exists as a possibility. And as they say in the world of science, Goswami has done his math. Marshalling evidence from recent research in cognitive psychology, biology, parapsychology and quantum physics, and leaning heavily on the ancient mystical traditions of the world, Goswami is building a case for a new paradigm that he calls 'monistic idealism,' the view that consciousness, not matter, is the foundation of everything that is."A professor of physics at the University of Oregon and a member of its Institute of Theoretical Science, Dr. Goswami is part of a growing body of renegade scientists who in recent years have ventured into the domain of the spiritual in an attempt both to interpret the seemingly inexplicable findings of their experiments and to validate their intuitions about the existence of a spiritual dimension of life. The culmination of Goswami's own work is his book The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World. Rooted in an interpretation of the experimental data of quantum physics (the physics of elementary particles), the book weaves together a myriad of findings and theories in fields from artificial intelligence to astronomy to Hindu mysticism in an attempt to show that the discoveries of modern science are in perfect accord with the deepest mystical truths. (Link gone. Formerly at homepages.ihug.co.nz) Another link can be found here.

Counterpoint. "My main objection to Goswami's philosophy is that he has defined consciousness in such a way that it no longer has its normal meaning of mental consciousness, but instead is supposed to refer to something non-mental. We might call this 'Goswamian consciousness' or 'quantum consciousness', as opposed to 'mental consciousness'. He says, for instance:

...consciousness transcends both matter and mind ... [Hard Questions, Sect. II]

Conventionally, Western philosophers attribute properties of consciousness - experience and choice - to the mind. This has been corrected in quantum functionalism in which consciousness is defined to transcend both matter and mind. [Hard Questions, Sect. VI]

In so far as Goswami's philosophy is a monism at all, it is therefore a neutral monism, not a mental monism (or 'monistic idealism' as he calls it). As I have argued elsewhere, any neutral monism is actually identical to a version of physical monism, just because the physical world is already as neutral as a world can be. . . . You will not, for instance, spot any electrons by looking out of the window of the Clapham omnibus*: we are acquainted with the basic constituents of the physical world only through the propositions and formulae of physics. So, those extrinsic properties are the only properties possessed by those entities. Hence, physicalism itself is 'neutral' in the relevant sense. Therefore, to say that a metaphysical theory such as Goswami's is a 'neutral' monism is just to say that it is a 'physical' monism." (Link gone. Formerly at easyweb.easynet.co.uk) 

*(The man on the Clapham omnibus is a hypothetical ordinary and reasonable person, used by the courts in English law where it is necessary to decide whether a party has acted as a reasonable person would – for example, in a civil action for negligence. He is a reasonably educated, intelligent but nondescript person, against whom the defendant's conduct can be measured.)

My comments. In the counterpoint, an experiential approach is used. (Looking out the window of the Clapham omnibus.) For whatever it is worth, a different kind of experience consistently supports monistic idealism. All the accounts of mystics, be they Christian, Hindu, Buddhists, Sufi, share a pattern of description in terms of monistic idealism. People who report their experiences under hallucinogens also reveal a pattern of monistic idealism.

For a different perspective, I offer William James' classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience:

"Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. . . . And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined. . . . "

"According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to . . . scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see "the liver" determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. . . ."

"To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our DIS-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor's body at the time."