Mind and Matter on Superphysics

The Physical Basis of Consciousness

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

THE PROBLEM

The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories.

It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own.*

The Future of Understanding

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A BIOLOGICAL BLIND ALLEY?

We may, I believe, regard it as extremely improbable that our understanding of the world represents any definite or final stage, a maximum or optimum in any respect.

The Apparent Gloom Of Darwinism

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

These considerations suggest that as a developing species we have come to a standstill and have little prospect of further biological advance.

Even if this were so, it need not bother us.

Feigned Lamarckism

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A chance-mutation gives the individual a certain advantage.

Why does it also increase the opportunities for its being?

Dangers To Intellectual Evolution

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Is further biological development in man likely?

The biological importance of behaviour. B

By conforming to innate faculties as well as to the environment and by adapting itself to changes in either of these factors, behaviour, though not itself inherited, may yet speed up the process of evolution by orders of magnitude.

The Principle of Objectivation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Nine years ago I put forward two general principles that form the basis of the scientific method, the principle of the understandability of nature, and the principle of objectivation.

Since then I have touched on this matter now and again, last time in my little book Nature and the Greeks. I I wish to deal here in detail with the second one, the objectivation.

Sir Charles Sherrington's Man on his Nature

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Physical science is concerned with a world of shadows.

Sir Charles Sherrington's Man on his Nature

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born etc have pushed for the topic of subject and object in quantum physics.

The Arithmetical Paradox: The Oneness of Mind

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is nowhere within our scientific world is because it is itself that world picture.

It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it.

The Arithmetical Paradox: The Oneness of Mind

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I find it utterly impossible to form an idea about either how, for example, my own conscious mind (that I feel to be one) should have originated by integration of the conscious- nesses of the cells (or some of them) that form my body, or how it should at every moment of my life be, as it were, their resultant. One would think that such a ‘com- monwealth of cells’ as each of us is would be the occasion par excellence for mind to exhibit plurality if it were at all able to do so. The expression ‘commonwealth’ or ‘state of cells’ (2ellstaat) is nowadays no longer to be regarded as a metaphor. Listen to Sherrington:

The Arithmetical Paradox: The Oneness of Mind

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sherrington’s paradox too is an arithmetical paradox, a paradox of numbers, and it has, so 1 believe, very much to do with the one to which 1 had given this name earlier in this chapter, though it is by no means identical with it. The previous one was, briefly, the one world crystallizing out of the many minds. Sherrington’s is the one mind, based ostensibly on the many cell-lives or, in another way, on the manifold sub-brains, each of which seems to have such a considerable dignity proper to itself that we feel impelled to associate a sub-mind with it. Yet we know that a sub-mind is an atrocious monstrosity, just as is a plural-mind - neither having any counterpart in anybody’s experience, neither being in any way imaginable.

Science and Religion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

There are questions about the ‘other world’ with ’life after death’ and all that is connected with them.

Kant and Einstein

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Kant

Kant taught the ideality of space and time.

This can be neither verified nor falsified.

but it does not lose interest on this account (rather it gains; if it could be proved or disproved it would be trivial). The meaning is that, to be spread out in space and to happen in a well-defined temporal order of ‘before and after’ is not a quality of the world that we perceive, but pertains to the perceiving mind which, in its present situation anyhow, cannot help registering anything that is offered to it according to these two card-indexes, space and time.

Kant and Einstein

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The new view has its strongest impact on the previous notion of time. Time is the notion of ‘before and after’ with 2 roots:

The notion of ‘before and after’ resides on the ‘cause and effect’ relation.

We know, or at least we have formed the idea, that one event A can cause, or at least modify, another event B, so that if A were not, then B were not, at least not in this modified form. For instance when a shell explodes, it kills a man who was sitting on it; moreover the explosion is heard at distant places.

The Mystery of the Sensual Qualities

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Democritus of Abdera wrote that:

All our knowledge about the world rests entirely on immediate sense perception.

This is easily granted by everybody.

This knowledge fails to reveal the relations of the sense perceptions to the outside world.

This is why our model of the outside world all lack sensual qualities.

The Mystery of the Sensual Qualities

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The principal organ of the ear is the cochlea, a coiled bony tube which resembles the shell of a sea-snail.

The Intellect Versus the Senses

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

How is light produced?

Light is usually produced by electrons in an atom where they ‘do something’ around the nucleus.

An electron and proton have no color.

But their union in the hydrogen atom produces electro-magnetic radiation of a certain discrete array of wavelengths.