Playing with Modern Dualities

A modern version of Aristotle’s elegant concept (that substance is a duality of matter and of form) is David Bohm’s suggestion of two orders in reality. One he calls the conditioned, the other the unconditioned order. They suggest something analogous. The conditioned order for Bohm is matter, in that it follows laws. He proposed the unconditioned kind in order to explain intelligence; he found it impossible to derive it from the material, the conditioned order. Intelligence, as I conceive of it at least, is not something self-existent. It is the characteristic of an agent. Therefore his two orders might be named Matter and Mind.

In Aristotle (as best as I can gather), what we call real is substantial. Therefore neither matter nor form can exist alone. It is their fusion that makes reality. Hence unformed matter and immaterial form both produce categories the ontological status of which is rather fuzzy. It is potential—which gives time itself a strange sort of role. In Bohm, at least conceptually, a hierarchy is suggested. The Conditioned Order, just viewed linguistically, demands a conditioner—whereas the Unconditioned Order can be imagined standing alone.

The mere existence of two orders, one hierarchically beneath the next, suggests that the lower of the two has some meaningful purpose. What is that purpose? Is it the medium in which the mind can give itself expression?

Now to flesh this out a little. The Ultimate Mind can condition all matter. But we know that other levels of mind exist as well—minimally like ours. And if minds like ours exist, they imply an Ultimate mind. And we also know that lesser minds are capable of arranging matter but unable to alter its ultimate “conditioning.” We also know that matter itself manifests in a continuum—from invisible electromagnetic waves on up to planets and such. And gross, dense matter can and does block the flow of the electromagnetic. We know that. If the power of lesser minds is insufficient to even to “arrange” electromagnetic waves—and here I mean directly, by simply willing—and those minds found themselves (voluntarily or otherwise) in a region where dense matter predominates, wouldn’t those minds have suddenly felt a sudden drastic loss of functionality? They would have found it difficult to give themselves expression using subtle matter (not enough of it around) or to see each other (blocked by coarse energy everywhere). And what if self-expression and relationship, thus interacting with their like—were the sources of their creativity and their exercise of love? Would they have felt lost in space and time—and blind?

Such is the grounding for my concept of chemical civilization. The presumption is that long ago we found ourselves genuinely lost—thus in an environment of coarse material density. Next we discovered that our only power to influence matter in this region was at the subatomic level—but sufficient to begin using local matter to build tiny and then ever greater machines—until we could finally, by means of those machines, see ourselves and begin to arrange the matter of this region of reality.

It’s just a suggestion, of course. But such a line of thought, it seems to me, has explanatory powers much greater than many of our other myths. It suggests that the two, the conditioned and the unconditioned, may very well be everywhere—but happiness demands that the agents at every level must be matched to their environment so that they can create and relate. And when they’re not, “going home” becomes Job One.

The Freedom of Free Will

Free will is one of those abstractions rarely examined in its vast complexity. Its existence is denied in the materialistic conception of reality. Let me spell out the reasons why. Any action whatsoever is traceable to antecedent stimuli; these can be viewed both as causing the choice and as themselves caused by others. In any purely brain-based conception of action, we can trace the “decision” back to two kinds of cell structures: those hierarchically arranged and those based on what might be called legislative structures; concerning the last, a brain node will only fire if a majority of brain cells forming it signal yea. These structures may operate alone or in combination, but all of them respond to stimuli ultimately traceable to physical causes. And in that thoughts themselves are mirrored in brain action, they can be reduced to brain activity alone, the seeming immateriality of thoughts declared as illusory. In this view all action is chemico-mechanically determined. What we call freedom of will therefore translates into saying that we’re ignorant, unconscious, of the precise process that necessarily leads to this action rather than to that one. The roots of the action are theoretically—but not practically—traceable to a status quo ante in which everything experienced by the actor up to that point contributes something, however minimal, including habits, memories, even forgotten memories—the last by absence.

This view of the matter is strongly compelling because, in most of our day-to-day decisions we do act pretty much as above described. Real choices, free choices (assuming they exist) are rare. These rare, free choices do, of course, also habituate us, form memories, attitudes, and leanings that later produce moral behavior automatically. Free choices therefore also become part of the deterministic background that produces our total behavior, most of which arises from our animal heritage. The question that looms, then, is this: How can we discover that we really do have free choice. The curious answer, I would suggest, is that we cannot do so by looking at the will as such. The answer comes from another source, the examination of intelligence or, put more broadly, consciousness. It must have freedom to function.

The basic premise I want to present here, and I’ll cite the source for it in a moment, is that thoughts may be legitimately viewed as mechanical presentations of a brain mechanism, the brain drawing material from memory by association. This presentation, of course, is on a much more sophisticated level than a computer’s search based on key words, for instances, but functionally equivalent. Now if a stimulus produces such a presentation, selection of some part of this presentation for relevance to our situation must take place. Just as Google can and will present a vast number of items in answer to a search, it cannot and does not select the relevant answer. That selection involves an activity outside of the system that produces the thoughts themselves.

David Bohm, the physicist, develops this approach in his book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge, 1996, p. 50-53). Let me quote from the cited passage:

There is in this mechanical process [of stimuli producing thoughts] no inherent reason why the thoughts that arise should be relevant to the situation that evokes them. Then perception of whether or not any particular thoughts are relevant or fitting requires the operation of an energy that is not mechanical, an energy that we shall call intelligence. This latter is able to perceive a new order or a new structure, that is not just a modification of what is already known or present in memory. For example, one may be working on a puzzling problem for a long time. Suddenly, in a flash of understanding, one may see the irrelevance of one’s whole way of thinking about the problem, along with a different approach in which all the elements fit in a new order and in a new structure. Clearly, such a flash is essentially an act of perception, rather than a process of thought…, though later it may be expressed in thought. What is involved in this act is perception through the mind of abstract orders and relationships such as identity and difference, separation and connection, necessity and contingency, cause and effect, etc.

We have thus put together all the basic mechanical and conditioned responses of memory under one word or symbol, i.e. thought, and we have distinguished this from the fresh, original and unconditioned response of intelligence (or intelligent perception) in which something new may arise.

Now if the exercise of intelligence, of consciousness, requires an act that arises in an unconditioned (read free) order, the will, which is part and parcel of consciousness, is also rooted in that same order and is, therefore, capable of acting freely.