The Unification Of Physics And Consciousness

I challenge the reader to engage in a deep form of skepticism, challenging our fundamental notions of what matter is, what physicality or the whole category of the physical is, and together with this challenge many of our deepest assumptions within the scientific community and elsewhere about the nature and origins and potentials of consciousness and the role of consciousness in the universe. Mainstream views that dominate academia, really quite worldwide, insist that everything in the universe really consists of space, time, mass, energy and the emergent properties that arise from mass and energy - the functions, the emergent properties, the characteristics of mass and energy. Hence, the term physicalism or scientific materialism. 

The assumption underlying this view is that what is absolutely out there independent of our human concepts, independent of our measurements, really is precisely this: space, time, mass, and energy. What people often fail to recognize, however, is that the very category of the physical, of the material, is a category that we humans have constructed. And we've not only constructed but we've reconstructed over the last 400 years and in fact much longer. But over the last 400 years of science, we have created, we have devised, based upon our modes of observation, of measurement, of experimentation exactly what the parameters of the physical are. What is matter? What is not matter? These are human definitions and these human definitions have evolved as science has evolved. The physical, matter, is precisely what the physical sciences are good at measuring. But the category, once again, is a physical construct. So the notion that everything in the universe must fit into a construct that we human beings have devised, and then insisting moreover that everything in the entire universe must fit into a construct as we have devised it now, that is the 2009 version, strikes me as really being a form of idolatry. Just as the ancient Jews had the golden calf - something they created and then worshiped - likewise we've created the golden calf of the physical, the matter, virtually worshiping it as a source of all of reality, the source of all goodness, the source of all happiness. But as a construct. It's a type of idolatry. And frankly, I think it's absurd to believe that everything in the universe fits into some construct that we've created based upon the types of measurements we human beings have been engaging in for the last 400 years. It is rather pretentious. 

So I'm suggesting that, in this book, that we look beyond this single category of the physical since after all space itself is not composed of mass-energy, time is not composed of mass-energy and perhaps very importantly, mathematical equations, the laws of nature, they too do not consist of space, time, mass, or energy. And yet who can deny that these mathematical principles, these mathematical laws of nature, do exist but they are not physical. 

So I proceed in the book, then I challenge the reader to reassess also the nature of consciousness. Thus far, mainstream science overwhelmingly has assumed that consciousness simply emerges, in some as yet inexplicable way, from complex configurations of chemical compounds engaging or interacting with electricity. But no one's proposed exactly how this occurs. No one has proposed, with any degree of confidence or any empirical confirmation, when in the evolution of life on this planet consciousness first arose and what were the conditions for its arising. Nor do we know, in the development of a human fetus inside the mother's womb, when consciousness first emerges or what are the necessary and sufficient causes for doing so. We simply assume that somehow consciousness must simply emerge from matter. And why? Because we're very good at observing matter. We're very good at observing, investigating, running experiments on configurations of mass and energy. But the whole of science over the last 400 years has never devised any sophisticated means for directly observing states of consciousness, the mind, mental processes. Especially over the last century, the overwhelming majority of scientific inquiry, into nature the mind, has always been indirect, focusing on what scientists are good at looking at: the physical, the objective, the quantifiable. So certainly scientists - cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists - will interrogate others about their subjective experience. But as one cognitive psychologist recently commented, we do not take other people's reports of their subjective experience as facts. We simply take them as reports, as data. This same cognitive psychologist claimed all of our subjective experience consists of hallucinations. So we are to rely then more upon the metaphysical principles of materialism then we are upon our own immediate experience, as if our own immediate experience doesn't count and we should rely rather on the scientist's observations, as if they have some special access and upon their metaphysical assumptions that everything must boil down to matter and the emergent properties of matter. 

This mindset of dismissing or marginalizing first-person experience and insisting that metaphysical principles, the appeal to authority of a certain community, is exactly the mindset of medieval scholasticism. It is exactly the mindset that the pioneers of the Scientific Revolution revolted against. It is said that scholastics, scholastic philosophers in particular, refused to look through Galileo's telescope or comparable telescopes because they were sure before they looked that if they saw anything that refuted their own metaphysical assumptions based on the Bible or based upon Aristotle and other Greek thinkers, if they saw anything that refuted what they believed to be true, they were sure that what they were seeing must be a hallucination and therefore didn't need to be given any credence it, could be dismissed, marginalized. That's exactly the attitude of many cognitive scientists today. If you witness anything as you observe your own mind that violates the principles of scientific materialism, you must be observing a hallucination. Your direct observations of your own mind don't count. And in fact cognitive psychologists, cognitive neurophysiologists have devised no means of observing any mental state whatsoever. They leave it in the hands of amateurs but then say the amateurs reports are not factual, they're simply what the amateur said.

So we are now in a situation with respect to consciousness, and in fact to the mind, comparable to what medieval natural philosophers were in in the early 17th century. A massive and very powerful Church, but some people such as Galileo who were true empiricists and insisted that what we perceive with our senses as we look into the night sky - observe the Sun, Moon, planets and stars - if we see something directly, especially using sophisticated means of observation, that overcomes the assumptions or refutes the assumptions of medieval scholasticism, those assumptions have to go and we will rely primarily upon experience. This is the view of Buddhist contemplatives and other contemplatives around the world. We'll rely primarily upon immediate experience of the nature, of the mind of states of consciousness, and we will probe the space of the mind as astronomers have probed physical space, the space of the universe.

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