RWP, my heart goes out to you, as to one who has witnessed the devastation of Alzheimers in persons close to you. You have felt their horror (experienced in relatively rare moments of partial lucidity) as your own. In a certain way, that seems to open up a wider sphere for consciousness than perhaps we are accustomed to assume -- a meaning of consciousness in the sense of something that can be shared, as verified by strong emotional reactions (how I hate to use that word in this context) rooted in compassion and love.*
There is no "language" to express this sort of thing in the sciences today. And yet experiences like this are so much a part of human existence, of what it means to be human.
I really need some time to think through the issues you raise, which are inspirational for me. It might take me a while, and I'll probably post whatever I come up with as a separate thread, in due course. I'll ping you when the time comes.
Thank you so much, Professor, for writing.
Jean
*I've recently read about experiments conducted in regard to "induction effects" of consciousness, which suggest that there's more to consciousness than the sense of discrete self.
We were speaking of consciousness, a subject matter science has seemed to avoid as something having existence in its own right. That is, in the sense of being a primary phenonenon, rather than as an epiphenomenon or by-product of the activity of something else — i.e., matter (specifically, the electrochemical activity of the brain). The subject is huge, and largely unexplored. What follows is speculative. But speculation — from whatever source, IMHO, provided that the insights gained are reducible to the technic and language of science at the end of the day — is where science must begin if it’s going to get anywhere, still being science, and still telling truths about the nature and structure of the Universe.
I have to start somewhere; the following quotes from Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works seem to make for a good beginning:
| Ethical theory requires idealisations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused.... The world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events.... Moral reasoning assumes the existence of things that science tells us are unreal. |
I cannot see how this statement can be valid. For it falsifies human experience and human nature, which is something that has been observed and recorded for millennia by now. It is a failure to observe real facts about man, such as: Man is a living creature, an organic unity that is more than the sum total of his “material” parts and their activity; he is capable of intelligent self-direction, acting within a certain sphere of freedom; he is a thinker and a doer, who chooses what to think and do; he is a part and participant in the worlds of nature and society; he is an individual who expresses his life in human communities. And this makes him a moral agent.
If Pinker’s “maxim” were correct, then man is not only self-delusional; but there is no way to hold him accountable for his moral choices. He is just a process emanating from a more basic process, the electromechanical/electrochemical activity of inert matter and nothing more. His life process is inexorably determined by random events at the subatomic level. He has no sphere of freedom whatever. He is just a cog in a blind physical machine. Utterly relieved of freedom in any degree, he cannot be held accountable for what he does in life.
If this were true, then the very idea of courts of justice would be unjust: You can’t hold a man accountable for anything, if he’s just an inane by-product of the activity of matter. There could be no law; for that would be an imposition of cruelty on a hapless, helpless entity. You can’t hold a person responsible for anything, or to anything, if he wholly lacks the capacity of making free choices. This is the death of ethics. It is also the death of human communities, the death of human capacity for social life, not to mention the death of man’s capacity to shape his own future by means of rational choices according to personal aspiration, talent, and genius. Man is cut off from the world of nature to which he belongs as a living being, from human community, and ultimately — from himself.
Man is reduced to the condition of hostage to blind, random phenomena at the atomic and subatomic levels — which is effectively nothingness. I gather Pinker would like us to “get used to” that idea. But if we do, we lose our humanity. The ramifications of accepting such a thesis is manifest in a parable A. Grandpierre offers on this point:
| What should we think about a leaf of a tree, who does not regard itself as a leaf of a tree, but a mere leaf, a unique, separate being, having a separated essence different from the essences of every other leaf and of his tree? [The “randomness problem” makes this unavoidable; yet I wonder: What if randomness were just a kind of “covert admission” that we do not understand a more basic law of nature that, if we knew it, would dispense with the idea of randomness altogether?] ... How many different essences belong to nature? Does Nature have essences in a number of many billions? Or only a few essences for which it is worth to live? I wonder whether the essence of a leaf, and its belonging to a tree, to living beings are not essential? And if the leaf rejects these essentials because of their universality [i.e., the polar opposite of the random] in order that its separate essence could become dominating, then what kind of essence will remain to these leaves? And if they still will have some kind of essence, will this remaining, non-common and certainly inexpressible essence be more important than all the essences of leafness, tree-leafness, all its more general natures akin to a plant, a living being, an existing being, and all together? And what happens if all the leaves on a tree think similarly, and the leaves could not agree on which tree they were grown, and after an overly long discussion they agree that it is not possible to solve this question? And if they regard the question to which tree the leaf belongs as a matter of personal decision? And what will happen if the leaves of a tree regard themselves as belonging to many different trees, or do not belong to any tree at all? And what then happens to the tree? What will happen if the leaves with the energy and knowledge arising from our star, from the Sun, will not supply the tree? How would the tree become able to circulate its vital liquids from its roots to the leaves? And what will happen if the tree becomes sick and most of the leaves become ill as well? What will happen to the life of the leaves if they fall down to the soil, dessicated, and rattling in the wind? Is this the life we human leaves need, the life of the freedom of being alienated? |
This to me is a parable on the socially-relevant, post-modern intellectual and cultural condition. And the present dominance that materialism/physicalism has achieved through the midwifery of science is responsible for that condition. Pinker, I gather, thinks such concerns as adduced in Grandpierre’s parable are not only baseless, but laughable: Materialist science doesn’t deal with such things; therefore, such things do not exist. Not to worry!
At this point, Professor, perhaps you may be wondering: Whut that hail does any of this have to do with consciousness? Well. Grandpierre’s parable is all about the present forms of consciousness as they are vividly playing out in the human world today. Alienation is the key word. And people really do suffer from this: I imagine that it is not for nothing that such pathologies as senile dementia and other pneumopathological diseases are rising at a geometrical rate these days. The above parable demonstrates the kinds of forms of consciousness that may very well contribute to such forms of human malaise.
But let it not be said that I am operating entirely from the perspective of anthropomorphism/anthropocentrism here. The deeper problem is that scientific materialism/physicalism may entirely achieve its goal of unifying the four basic forces of Nature very soon. I expect this, and wholeheartedly welcome that brilliant achievement. But — that achievement will have little at best to contribute to the perennial problems of human nature, human life, or to the explication of the deeper mysteries of Nature or Cosmos. For my suspicion is that materiality/physicality is only one aspect of the Universe. The problem of the human condition screams this out loud. The problem with thinking that all of Nature reduces to one unified physical principle is perhaps simple-minded, at best. Its basic working assumption is that the Whole can be understood by the examination of finer and finer of its parts. But to me, it seems that the parts cannot tell you very much absent a sense of the greater Whole in the first place. “Ratio” is measurement: of something in terms of something other than itself. Present-day materialist science denies the “something other” in principle.
So I resonate to the respective projects of the three scientists who inspired the essay at the top of this thread: They are seeking a wider context than “mere” materiality and (mind-numbing) randomness can adequately accommodate in the search for the truth of the Universe and human existence in it.
What the three men agree on is that science needs a wider framework than the materialist view can provide. The name they give to this project is: Integrative Science. For Kefatos and Drãgãnescu, science needs to be reformulated in terms of the structural (physical laws) and the phenomenological (laws of consciousness, thought, reason, experience, feeling, choice). Grandpierre — though perhaps more philosophical in basic motive — is a bit more precise in specifying the constituents that must comprise valid science. He thinks the universal principles informing the Universe are: physical laws (atomic and subatomic matter in its motions and relations, particularly encompassing the insights of QM), biological laws (the “life principle”; Ervin Bauer is his great inspiration here), and noetic laws (consciousness, reason; on my reading, the man is a “hard Platonist”).
In the case of Grandpierre, the three laws are universal, expressing in a hierarchy of being (as it were). All constituents of reality, all existents, manifest the three laws in the degree compatible with their own particular “degree of freedom.” Atoms and subatomic particles are less free than, say, a plant or an animal or a man. But they make choices, constrained by the laws applicable to them. Thus, they possess a type of consciousness.
Grandpierre specializes in solar physics. On the basis of his research, he has propounded an hypothesis of the Sun as a living entity, not biological, but alive on all the criteria of aliveness that fundamentally define what aliveness is. The irreducible characteristic of aliveness is the ability of an entity to make sensitive adjustments to changes in its internal and external conditions, which presupposes some type of thought and choice of alternative responses. His research into what appear to be strong correlations between planetary tides and solar flare activity has recently been presented for peer review.
He allows the same “degree of freedom” to the atom, on its own level — the ultimate microcosm (together with its planets, the sub-atomic particles) of the ultimate macrocosm of Sun (ultimate at least from the human perspective, within our solar system; but there’s no reason to conclude that the limit of this principle can be found there). Physical law is the basis of, not merely materiality, but also of biology and consciousness. It is not, however, the entire explanation of biology or consciousness — whose possessors display greater degrees of freedom than material entities do.
Must close pretty soon. But need to mention something about “consciousness induction,” alluded to in my last. The gist is: The contents of consciousness have been shown to be “contagious” in social settings involving groups and individuals; involving relations between humans and special other humans; involving humans and animals — even human-to-plant relationships. Conceiving of consciousness as a fundamental law, or field or substrate fundamental to reality, gives a way to explore such things as NDEs and ESP, among other “strange and uncanny things.”
My sense is that consciousness may have “inductive properties,” laterally (human to human), and downward (to animals and even plants) because it is a field that existents bearing the life principle commonly participate in. And — what do we make of the following, which suggests that the induction of consciousness may proceed from a source UPWARD from us humans?:
| Shortly before her seventeenth birthday, Rosalyn Tureck was playing the Bach fugue in A minor from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier when she lost all awareness of her own existence. As she came to, she recalls, she saw Bach’s music revealed in a completely new light, with a new structure that required the development of a novel piano technique. Over the next two days she worked out this technique on four lines of the fugue and then played it at her lesson. Her teacher told her it was marvelous, but impossible, it couldn’t be done. “All I knew,” says Tureck, “was that I had gone through a small door into an immense living, green universe, and the impossibility for me lay in returning through that door to the world I had known.” Tureck went on to become a renowned concert artist, the first woman to conduct the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and author of several books, including one...that links the structure of Bach’s music to two physical theories. |
It has been said that Einstein’s relativity theory was “induced” in similar vein. As I recall, it was he who said as much....
In conclusion: There are more things in heaven or earth than are dreamt of in your -- or my -- philosophy, dear Professor!
And this Universe is a most vivifying, marvelous, sublime sort of thing to be a part of!
God, bless and good night!