Quantum Non-Linearity: Matter vs. Soul vs. Spirit

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Matter vs. Soul vs. Spirit

Humunculus dualism

I was recently asked the following question by a Christian:

What are your thoughts, or have you written anything, on whether we are spirit? I think that we have the Holy Spirit enter into us when we become a Christian, but what’s your understanding of whether we humans are spirit as well as flesh and bone?

As this is such a frequent and pivotal question I thought I would publish my answer here for future reference:

I've long since given up any dualist "ghost in the machine" concept:

Early man probably noticed the difference between beings capable of cognitive action (animals and humans) and non-cognitive action (like falling rocks and even complex clock work and chains of events). The difference is that on the one hand we have reactive complex adaptive systems (animals and humans) and on the other hand passive systems incapable of a reactive adaptive response. We now have to add another ingredient: Consciousness: Most people instinctively empathetically construct other people as centres of the first person experience of conscious cognition and don't just see them as unconscious calculating machines.

These two ingredients of a) adaptive reactive cognition and b) and the instinctive empathetic construction of the first person perspective that takes place between normal people were presumably both noted by early man and may respectively account for the two terns "soul" and "spirit"; Viz: "soul" being recognised as adaptive behaviour and spirit being recognised as the presence of a conscious first person perspective at least in the case of human adaptive behaviour. (And in my opinion, also in the "higher" animals).

But whether or not this is the Biblical origin behind the words "Soul" and "Spirit" (that would need a Biblical theme study on these words), I would want to express my current opinion that matter, being Created, Sustained and Managed by an Omnipower is likely to be "miraculous" in its properties. Therefore I have no qualms in proposing that both cognition and the first person perspective are "natural" phenomena of "matter"; but only if its Divinely ordained vitalities are correctly exploited; we are still learning about that one! On this proposal there is no "ghost in the machine": Conscious cognition is matter through and through, but not "matter" of the naive "gritty" or dualistic "billiard ball" sense that most people in the West habitually think of t; rather, matter is haunted and enchanted by God's presence.

I've written a lot on this subject and continue to do so. I am coming to the view that conscious cognition relates to the question of the nature of that enigmatic process of "quantum state reduction". That's what I'm working on at the moment.

See here for my writings to date:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/search/label/Consciousness

I certainly don't follow the absurd opinion offered up by some subliminal dualists that "consciousness" is somehow an "illusion" in contrast to "matter" which is somehow "real". For me conscious cognition is the cornerstone of empiricism. Without a grounding in experience and conscious cognition the theoretical constructs of science are unintelligible and meaningless. It is science, the child of conscious cognition, that underwrites the reality of the constructs that provide the means by which conscious cognition can understand itself in terms of so-called "matter". Matter is a rational and metaphorical construction of conscious cognition: In fact it may even be justified in calling matter a mythical construct, a way of joining the dots of experience. That this intellectual construction activity can be carried in such a systematic way and generate such highly coherent conceptual objects which harmonise our experience, is a testament to the Divinely ordained order of the Creation.

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Matter vs. Soul vs. Spirit

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION