The Merits and Demerits of Quantum Explanations

Almost since the rise of quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small, speculative thinkers have formed a kind of aura around the field in attempts to help them give various puzzling phenomena  a scientific explanation. Among these are consciousness, the mind-body problem, telepathy, near-death experiences, and the like.

A philosophically serious attempt in this direction is an appendix in Hans Jonas’ book, The Imperative of Responsibility, 1979. The appendix (pp. 204-231 in the 1984 University of Chicago Press edition), is titled “Impotence or Power of Subjectivity, A Reappraisal of the Psychophysical Problem.” I have read many other such takes, to be sure, but none has shown any rigor, whereas Jonas’ work does. He tackles the problem that Descartes had already struggled with. Assume that we do have an autonomous spiritual self, however it is called (res cogitans by Descartes, subjectivity by Jonas); hereafter I’ll refer to it as “self.” How does this immaterial something interact with the physical world in a meaningfully causal way—or vice versa?

The merits of quantum mechanics as an explanation lie in the fact that it deals with the extremely tiny phenomena at the subatomic level—where the energies involved are also minute. The tentative solution to the mind-body problem is that the self, whatever it is, may have energy enough to move “matter” at the quantum level. Then, if an appropriate structure of amplification has evolved, thus a neuronal network like the brain, an immeasurably tiny intervention by the self can eventually result in a physical action like raising the arm or saying something, both because I want to. This has merit—and produces, at least in me, a kind of intuitive ascent. It points to a potential explanation—and Jonas does not go any further than that. The only assumption we have to make is that the self at minimum has some minute ability to interact with matter at the subatomic level.

The demerits of quantum explanations (and Jonas does not go there, but others do) is to suggest that the only difference between what we traditionally call the spiritual and contrast to the material is a difference in density or wavelength. Therefore souls are just as material as everything else—they’re just made of more subtle stuff.

Here I have the opposite reaction. I don’t believe a word of it. There may be subtle regions made of subtle matter, etc., etc., but matter, no matter how subtle, can’t possibly produce consciousness. The entity we call the self, therefore, is different from matter in kind, not just in degree. Nor is it absent in this coarse material realm. It’s plentifully present here in the ordinary world—and doing plenty of damage as well as good. And in both realms (coarse and subtle) it has, no doubt, a certain amount of force that it can exercise. In these dense regions, however, to exercise that force on the congealed energies we call matter, it needs amplification through machines—of which our bodies are the first and most potent versions.

Jonas wrote his appendix before extensive assembly of data on near-death experiences had even begun. One of the interesting result of those studies is the discovery that disembodied selves have the devil of a time interacting with other people—but an easy time passing through walls. But they do move about, more or less at will. Separated from their tool, the body, they are seriously handicapped here. But, presumably, not so in the regions beyond the border. Manner of speaking. And it would seem to me, those who first arrived here, finding themselves in this valley of dense matter, started to mess about with particles at the quantum level. And lo and behold. In the wink of a few millennia they had made the first living cell. First came chemical civilization, fashioned by nudging quantum particles this way and that. Next came life, then civilization. And now back to studying quantum mechanics again. What goes around comes around. But what they were then, and we still are, is something other than either energy or matter. This is a vale of body-making, not of soul-making.

Dissipate or Concentrate

One of the more elegant but ultimately meaningless descriptions of “life” is as the activity of dissipative structures. The phrase belongs to Ilya Prigogine, the Russian-born Belgian physicist; he won the 1980 Nobel Prize for this description. So what is it that living structures dissipate? Energy. Prigogine studied what are called open systems, thus systems in motion but in disequilibrium. A river is such a system—a lake is not. He discovered that if you apply shocks to such a system, by further disarranging it, that intervention causes matter to organize itself. Let’s put a big boulder into the middle of a shallow, fast-flowing brook. The boulder compresses water between the bank and itself. Turbulence results. If the water keeps on flowing with the same force as before, vortices will form. They will retain their shapes while the water is flowing. Turbulence is water’s way of shedding, dissipating an excess of energy. In a manner of speaking, those vortices are alive—and remain so until the energy, produced by water and gravity, diminish. From such beginnings have arisen concepts such as the “self-organizing” character of matter. Life processes, therefore, are defined as dissipative structures at the chemical level. We are merely vortices in matter of a certain complex kind.

The meaningless character of this description arises because it views life as merely a byproduct of matter in the presence of energy. But life, of course, has a certain tricky originality as well. Vortices may form in brooks, but they don’t reproduce—certainly not by extraordinary complex routes requiring two sexes and the combination of two sets of DNA; or, at the simpler level, by separating twin strands of DNA and then, rebuilding them, parceling them out, one to one and the other to the other half of a dividing cell.

But life, surely, is a great feeder. Yes. It gobbles energy. It sheds, dissipates it not only in maintaining itself but in all kinds of other more entertaining activities galore—like texting with the thumb while driving a car. And this activity, the continuous use of energy, is certainly one description, and an accurate one, of what life does.

What’s in that energy? Suppose we make a slight adjustment to the conventional description. Suppose there is in energy—hidden within it somewhere—a subtle form of stuff that we need to develop ourselves as souls. Then, finding ourselves at the bottom of some vast dark cosmic chasm—probably because we strayed—and finding ourselves quite starved of the nutrition we really need, we began a process of concentrating energy in just the right way to extract that subtle substance from the coarse stuff reaching us from the sun—in order to help us climb out of the pit. And chemical civilization is born. In this slight adjustment of the materialistic view of life—without in any way changing its description—we introduce an intervention, our own. It is we who drop the bolder into that rapidly flowing brook—not mere chance. It is because we are involved, agents with a purposive nature, that life display a few more curious innovations, like reproduction, that we do not observe in the inorganic ranges.

Dissipate or Concentrate? What if our task is both. We dissipate the energy to get more that still holds the vital stuff we need to take wing out of the valley of the shadow.

What Is, Is?

Material reality is all that we see and it is therefore compelling. We exist before we know that we do; we’re aware of being very early, but not of being selves. For all of us—I think that everyone experiences it, but I can’t be sure—a moment comes later when self-awareness suddenly erupts.  It happens in childhood. At that moment our human life begins. No sudden memories of having been before accompany our abrupt awakenings.  And by that time we’re so habituated to our bodies and surroundings that self-awareness isn’t felt as anything radical. The last thing we think at that moment is that it’s odd that we are here. The moment, indeed, doesn’t last long. In a minute or two we’re back to doing our usual things—at that age play or exploration.

We come awake in an environment we can’t compare to any other. It appears as an absolute. What is, is, etc. We know the difference between living and dead, but both were always present, so the crucial difference does not exercise us. That sort of thing comes later, with development, and that experience—wondering about life, as life—isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. The What is, is remains an adequate explanation for lots and lots of people.

Some years back now I spent two years writing a book entitled What Does Life Want? I shopped it around, too, but had only a single positive reaction, that from a woman who thought it was great, fascinating, wonderful—but her firm couldn’t take it on, she said, and then came a litany of where that firm was now putting its emphasis. Those experienced in trying to publish books will know that this response was way, way beyond what you can expect in a rejection. I’d reached one reader—not the public. That book had had its origins in the question that arises later, after many years of life, if your curiosity is still alive and standard answers to the question, provided by various traditions, do not satisfy.

Life is as radical a phenomenon as self-awareness—and of course I don’t merely mean human life, I mean the life phenomenon. In its accessible, physical form, it is a chemical mechanism. In its behavior it is something one cannot find anywhere in the inorganic realm. It is end-seeking. It preserves, with enormous tenacity, complex forms generation after generation. But in every individual instance, it comes to an end. Yet it is, and always and only is, individual, whether that entity is a bacterium, a grass plant, or an elephant. This self-perpetuating something exists, so far as our telescopes can tell us, only in one place. Peopling the galaxies with countless life-supporting planets is a projection based on the notion that life is entirely material and arises spontaneously from chemicals “when the conditions are favorable”; thus it is a theory, not an incontrovertible fact multiply demonstrated in laboratories busy nurturing brand new man-made species. The presence of life, therefore, in an enormous wasteland of matter, is a question well worth exploration. A long but useful word is incommensurability. It applies to life when viewed against the backdrop of billions of galaxies each holding billions of suns, some few of which, by statistical extrapolation of the modern mind, will have planets situated just right and with the appropriate chemical composition, atmosphere, plentitude of water, etc., etc. to produce life spontaneously. Life as a whole for one, individual self-aware selves for another, are incommensurable to the inorganic order that seems to dominate the universe.

In making sense of all of this, living on a planet covered with life—but challenged by absence of really good telescopes on the one hand and electron microscopes on the other—the ancients took the weird single sample to be representative of the all. They assumed a chain of existence from matter to plants, to animals, to humans—and extended it upward to living orbs, angels, and God. They hadn’t as yet developed a plethora of machines as intricate as ours and fueled by the residues of life, which is what oil and coal are, or studied bodies and discovered that they’re machines. Nonetheless, minds more intuitive than intellectual and therefore less inclined to engage in intellectual system-building, discerned, already in ancient times, that something wasn’t entirely right in all of this, that something didn’t fit. Hence arose the fascinating religious projections suggesting that What is, is is just illusion, or that the world is the creation of an inferior demiurge, or that a race once living in an exalted paradise was forced from the garden by an angel with a flaming sword and, in consequence, fell, as it were, into another world.

Or into a kind of darkness, a dimension so low that the spirits, as they fell, saw nothing any more, were deprived of virtually all nourishing grace, and, in the great darkness, desperately started exploring that realm and adapting to it. Some glimmers must have been present even in those deepest depth because the ancestors of what we now call life began to notice patterns in the coarse energies they saw down there and nudged an electron here, one over there, to make a new combination. And thus began what I call chemical civilization. A long time ago.

Avoid the Void

Souls plunge into the Void, but the face that the Void reveals is an enormous confusion: it is an ever-changing flux of constant change—and its extent seems limitless. Making sense of this cosmic storm eventually produces an enclosure. At first it’s nothing more than an enclosing wall—something to keep the chaos out. Let us call this thing a cell, a world within the world. Mind you, it’s a very tough assignment. The wall itself is made of bits and pieces of the confusion—and only after the nature and behavior of each bit is minimally understood can we, the souls, link them together to make that wall. It gives us a momentary sense of place and of control. The wall’s no sooner made than it starts making trouble. It won’t stay in place; it comes apart. It must be constantly renewed. We must fashion better tools to capture and align the few bits and pieces we’d managed to understand. The wall is all.

Now mind you that plunge into the Void was probably something typically human, some kind of reckless self-assertion. We had probably been told that the Void is something to avoid. But we plunged in anyway and discovered the harsher version of that initial, gentle teaching. The harsh one says, Pay me now or pay me later. The descent did not elevate us, as we thought it would. It made us do tedious work. Finds those bits. Coax them together. Build that wall so that we can, if possible, collect our wits enough to look around.

Thus I imagine the origins of chemical civilization which, these days, we refer to as life. The cell is the first attempt to separate ourselves from the flux. Instead of exalting us, it drove us to near despair. Making that first habitation practical and self-sustaining took us, like, forever. And after we had done that job, we could still not see much of anything. So the labors continued, and they continue still.

The odd thing about that Void, of course, is that while ever more of it can be coaxed to reveal itself, after each vast billion-year step, we are still caught in chaos, as it were. We’ve made lots of tools since our cell days. Lots. And now our satellite-born telescopes provide us visions of the Void so massively thick with galaxies and nebulae that dizziness makes us reach for the nearest chair or desk (yet other tools) to hold us steady. Meanwhile we, ourselves, have formed, by our billions-great multitudes, yet another smaller kind of void called collective humanity—which it takes a lifetime vaguely to understand. Yes, we’ve built many other walls since then; call them ideologies, religions, philosophies, and such. They too keep coming apart and letting the original harsh Void come in again as doubts and upheavals, bloodshed and the rest.

Boy oh boy. The labor’s never done. Won’t be done until, at last, we find the wormhole by means of which we can wiggle out of here.

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.

What the Muon Told Me

Elsewhere the other day I had occasion to note (to paraphrase Wikipedia) that an elementary particle is one not known to have a substructure. Not known, to emphasize, to be made up of yet other entities. While I conventionally assent to this, something tells me, “It ain’t so.” Beneath the muon, electron, strange quark, and such must surely be a wealth of structure yet—and so on ad infinitum. But that known refers to us. In a way, as we’re now constituted, we are the limit. In one direction the elementary particle—in another the black hole or the Big Bang, the singularities. Like death itself they are but bulky, visible stone markers of various border zones.

So I went on a walk and, watching the leaves fall, unwrapped an old cosmological fossil from my collection. Like many children so I too have had this thought quite early: Beneath the smallest the yet smaller; above the greatest the even greater. I encountered that same idea later in sophisticated wrapping in David Bohm’s writings on physics, thus Bohm’s suggestion that when we encounter singularities we’ve simply exhausted our theoretical powers and need to shift our gaze further to the left, right, up, or down. New laws will then eventually become perceivable; they won’t abolish our old theories but will render them as applicable to a narrow range of reality rather than to the All. A Grand Unifying Theory will never be discovered because reality is limitless.

To put that into the context of this blog, there is no borderzone. Where we see a radical discontinuity what we really see is simply the darkness of our ignorance. The reason why we cannot see beyond the border (lets call it death), is because we are so well adapted to a narrow range of reality, what we call this, the well-known here and now. What if this is simply a very dense form of reality. When we first came into this region, we couldn’t see a damn thing—because our powers of perception are suited to a much more subtle realm. Let’s suppose that we tried to adapt, to figure out what happened. We began manipulating the coarse matter of this realm at the subatomic level. Our feeble powers could actually do things at that level, not at the gross. Slowly, gradually, we succeeded in shaping structures. These in turn gave us more and more abilities to get a handle on this new environment. We used the matter of this realm itself to make it show us what it is. We learned to maintain these structures—by feeding them, as it were. We devised ways by which they would reproduce. This, of course, is my (let’s call it sci-fi) notion of Chemical Civilization.

We are accustomed to thinking of the realms beyond (heaven, hell, etc.) as different in kind, not merely in degree. But what if they are not? What if Reality has many, many regions with many different kinds of…let me simply call it density. What if matter is always and everywhere present within it, but differences in its structural arrangements make it more or less manipulable by agents. What if there are also agents everywhere, and, like us, have the same characteristics we have. And what if the real difference in kind is that between agents and matter. Arguably that is certainly the case in this here and now. The radical difference we observe in ordinary known reality is between life and matter. Some of us, e.g. Mortimer Adler (see his The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes) would restrict that crucial difference to man, but I apply it to all of life. Agency is present in it everywhere.

Supposing that is true. Supposing, further, that on death, having accumulated subtle energies enough to escape this pocket of coarse density, we find ourselves once more back in a realm much better suited to our “natural” powers. Yes, it has matter, but it is of a much more subtle kind very easily formed by us for self-display and communications. No, we don’t have to eat it in order to “live.” What if our sustenance in those regions is energetic? What if the reason why we were captured in this “pocket” in the first place was because insufficient quantities of those energies reached us here? (Something analogous to that is suggested in Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series.) Would everything then suddenly turn heavenly?

Interesting question. A good answer to that might run as follows. No. Nothing’s really changed except the density—but that does make a difference. Agents there, as here, are free. And they’re either drawn to ever greater unity or ever greater denial of the same. Good guys, bad guys. Still all there. But in realms of lighter density—where we do not need machines by means of which to see and “live”—where space is not, therefore, as demanding a container as it is here, the good guys will congregate with the good, the bad will cling to their like. And some will still vacillate between two minds. Heaven, hell, and purgatory. Your choice. Strong hints like that come to us from the writings of Swedenborg—difficult of access although these are because the old Swede would try to be a prophet and explain every the and and in Genesis in endless volumes of erudition.

Well, my walk is over. The falling leaves are wonderfully bright, so yellow. Sun shines in this lovely pocket of deep density.

Chemical Civilization or More Comments on ID

Human imagination has limits of sorts—not at the individual level, to be sure, but when we get more collective, certain thoughts never seem to occur to groups—at least not in public writings. The Intelligent Design movement in biology (I call it the new biology), using very powerful reasoning, based on observation, not on first principles, has concluded that actual design underlies biological systems. The proposition surfaced—and in the wink of an eye ID proponents were tarred with the brush of creationism. If life is actually designed, the only possible explanation anybody can come up with is that the designer must be God.

The leading thinker in this field, in my opinion, is Michael J. Behe, a biochemist. I rank him thus because he stays close to the actual observational data at the lowest possible level—and he isn’t tempted to knee-jerk reactions. His two books are Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution. These are must reading for anyone who wishes to understand the ID proposition. I’ve quoted Behe earlier to show that he does not name the designer but simply insists that design is present in life. In his second book, which is largely concerned with malaria, a disease caused by a one-celled organism (a so-called protist) of which the most virulent kind is Plasmodium falciparum, Behe faces the “designer” question squarely when he says:

Here’s something to ponder long and hard: Malaria was intentionally designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts…. What sort of designer is that? What sort of “fine-tuning” leads to untold human misery? To countless mothers mourning countless children? Did a hateful, malign being make intelligent life in order to torture it? One who relishes cries of pain? Maybe. Maybe not.

I discovered “intelligent design” before that movement began when—already a father with children—I studied biology on my own and discovered what I called the unmistakable signs of what I called technology—present at the cellular and sub-cellular level. I was then professionally engaged in technology assessment—the human kind—and the conclusion seemed obvious. Being also a science fiction writer, my own intuitions rapidly produced the concept of chemical civilization. (That subject is mentioned multiple times in this blog; here are one, two, three, and four posts on the subject.) What I saw in Brigitte’s textbook (Biology Today, Random House, 1972, which is the book I had been reading) was precisely what I saw in my work-life, but more sophisticated in design at the sub-microscopic level—namely technology of the human kind. It wasn’t perfect; it showed the same tendencies as our own—thus definitely goal-seeking arrangements of chemicals to get certain jobs done, by far not perfect, frequently not elegant at all—but working. I imagined this civilization peopled by what I called “little people”—invisible to us, utterly invisible, who made machines by nudging atoms around to achieve some end which still remains murky except, on certain days, to the primitive cosmologist who cohabits this body with me.

The picture I have of life is of an intelligent striving but by a civilization that cannot see the whole picture at all—indeed is striving mightily to see anything at all. We are one of its most successful ventures, because we do, indeed, see a little something ourselves—still not enough, but something. The very fact that life eats life, nature red in tooth and claw—and the fact that life is innocent, innocent, innocent—right up to our appearance—tells me that intelligence is present but, above the chemical, not vision of the sort we sometimes manage. Assuming that our observations are correct—that something intelligent but certainly not even very scient, much less omniscient, is the causative agent of life—indeed that it is life, as we really understand it, and bodies are merely tools it needs in this weird dimension—assuming all of that, quite interesting cosmological ideas surface—and indeed this blog is filled with such speculations.

Now to my opening statement concerning imagination. Nowhere in the ID literature have I thus far encountered serious speculation of the sort that imagination and a little thought—particularly about the fractal nature of this universe—suggests, namely that intelligence may be diffused in the universe and may be as common as matter, thus that many orders of intelligence may exit—to be sure all of them created. Deep down I am a creationist, but not of the primitive variety. Some of us, anyway, accept two orders already—the human and the angelic, beneath the Ultimate. Why not, minimally, a third? My conclusion? It might best be expressed, perhaps, by modifying a popular saying. Keep it simple—and you’ll stay stupid.

More on Chemical Civilization

The ideas that I’ve outlined briefly in the last post (in the narrow compass of the brain’s function) will strike some positively because they suggest a naturalistic (meaning “scientific” or “secular”) approach to reality—while holding on to the meaning of existence. Others will shy from such an approach because it seems to ignore God’s presence and providence. The truth of the matter is that I’m temperamentally more of a medieval than a modern man, but medieval man was far from stupid and much more comprehensive in his world view than modern man for all of the latter’s minute explorations of the Big Bang theory one nanosecond at a time. The naturalistic does not deny the transcendental unless the focus is too narrow. Let me give an example.

The most divine musical composition reaching us, say, by public television broadcast from Vienna, producing sublime shivers in us as we listen in rapt attention while our eyes are focused on the interior grandeur of some great basilica—that experience has a quite mundane and naturalistic underpinning which, at that moment, we are altogether unaware of. To pluck some examples at random: The piano we hear produces its sounds by small hammers hitting wires, the sounds coming from strings made of hexagonally shaped steel cores wound tightly round with copper wire. The winding is one layer of copper at the beginning and at the end of the string (“start of winding,” “end of winding”) and multilayered in the working area where the hammers hit. Every other instrument we hear is a manufactured or crafted product of great precision. The music is printed on paper that comes from paper mills that reduce trees to pulp and then to paper in massive and malodorous processes. The music reaches us from Vienna by means of electronic equipment arrays, not least those on satellites, the transmitted signal, reaching us through air or cable, is transformed into sound and pixels in our television set, the colors of which are in part produced by rare earth elements the names of which virtually nobody knows.

Does the “mechanical civilization” that transmits the beauty of a composition in any way deny the inspired composer, his great work, the talents of the musicians, the guiding skill of the conductor, the reality of the architects who designed the basilica? No. We’re looking at different ranges of reality as we experience a fusion of them in a moment of perception—a moment that is itself produced by chemical machinery serving the needs of a spiritual agent.

In computer and engineering lingo, people speak of “black boxing” something—thus ignoring some aspect of complexity, at least for the time being, by putting it mentally into a black box. The same thing happens in the cultural sphere but, often, with less awareness. Some people “black box” the higher ranges of human experience and dismiss them as epiphenomena. Others black box the infrastructural elements as if those needed no explanation at all beyond the poetical symbols derived from myths or revelations.

My impulse is to open black boxes to see if I can link their contents with those of others without using magical gestures. I’m sincerely persuaded that no structure of human thought (here I really mean religions, world views, philosophies, metaphysics) is absolutely wrong, none is without some level of divine inspiration, but none is absolutely on the mark. The best that we can achieve, it seems to me, is to achieve approximations to a clear view of things. What I say about chemical civilization, therefore, must be seen in proper perspective. The idea is intended to enlarge rather than to narrow our view. In no way do I intend to question other people’s visions of how the reality is organized and wither God’s providence points.

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Illustrations courtesy of Balaams, a piano servicing company, taken from here.

The Brain as Mediator

Positive science and internal experience have produced conflicting philosophies. Materialism is based on the first, transcendental metaphysics rests on subjective experience. Both have a plausible rationale. Materialism is supported by the undeniable observation that brain function is necessarily involved in mental activity; hence brain injuries can interfere with any one or all of the modalities I’ve talked about before. A transcendent view is supported by experience and logic. The logic is simple. It’s impossible to imagine mental phenomena arising from mechanical underpinnings, be these chemical or electromagnetic. We lack even a single instance of genuine mentation arising from machines that we have made. To think that chemistry, complexly arranged, gives rise to thought requires a leap of faith. We have to believe that chemical reactions, like oxidation, hydrogenation, etc., can produce self-consciousness, will, intelligence, memory, and all the rest. That is negative evidence for the positive reality of soul. The experiential evidence, beyond ordinary human life, comes from near death experience reports which suggest that mentation is possible and takes place in the absence of brain function too.

Materialists are prohibited by their very starting premises—all is matter/energy—from granting the possibility of an immaterial soul. The traditionalist—if I’m a reasonable representative—is more flexible. I find it easy to accept the positive evidence that brains are involved in mentation. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that brain activity is mentation. My explanation is that spirits are in some way limited in this realm of reality by the very nature of matter. In this range of the cosmos, therefore, we need tooling and instruments. The brain then becomes a mechanism by means of which we can experience this domain—see it, feel it, interact with it. Without the tooling we may be able to touch it at the subatomic level only. Hence my working model of reality is that life itself is a chemical civilization gradually built up by a spiritual community somehow entangled in this realm, voluntarily or otherwise. The why and the wherefore of that is the Big question, and this entire blog is part of an examination of that question. Here, however, my aim is much narrower. It is to suggest that, culturally, we often confuse the means with the end, effect with the cause. Thus brains are the consequence of mentation, not the cause of it. They are tools chemical civilization has built as instruments by means of which to see; they are not structures chance has produced to aid survival—the reason for that survival never explained by positive science. In my rough working model survival is not an issue because our stay here is not permanent. In the positive model it is incoherent because only individuals experience but no individual survives. And matter, to survive, doesn’t need such fancy instruments as kidneys and livers.

It is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis to suggest that if we are spirits and if we are caught up in this realm against our will—or came here to see what it is all about—and if we are relatively weak in an environment of colossal forces, over against our own, we would actively exert ourselves to bring what force we have to bear to make the situation better—much as we do the same thing routinely in ordinary life. If we can only move matter by interacting at the subatomic level, we would build instruments to obey our will. And the brain is such an instrument. We need but to decide something, and action follows—at the personal as at the collective level. I decide to lift my arm. The brain does the rest. Muscles lift my arm. The vast biological machinery necessary to do that would take volumes to describe. The brain also serves me by giving me the information that I need. And when it is injured, I’m deprived of instruments. I’ve elsewhere on this blog reported the frustrating incapacity of souls, deprived of brain function, in trying to communicate with others who are still “encased” in bodies. This suggests that so long as we’re inside of bodies, we cannot act as discarnate souls, and in a bodiless state, we cannot move these vast hulking masses of matter without the instrumental aid of brains and muscles. We need bodies to act in the world. But this doesn't mean that we have no other and, for us, more appropriate environments in which we could get along quite well without our circulation systems, food intake, oxygen, livers, hormones, and the rest. Given my hypothesis, which at least provides a meaning for existence—which living, breeding, aging, dying, by themselves, do not—my interest in cosmologies is almost self-evident. I’m looking for the bigger picture that will accommodate the vast evidence available for a process either of entanglement, exploration, or development—of souls.

Weird Squared

Let me now attempt to sketch how, say, a crocodile, might be explained by the weird theory that an order of intelligence, an order of souls, may have invaded the order of matter. Crocodiles are a neat and also difficult example because they appear (to us) as vicious and ugly creatures that prey on innocent zebras and wildebeests. I think you know where I am going.

Serious problems arise when we contemplate this theory in any kind of detail—indeed the same problems arise no matter how we picture the agency behind living, embodied entities. One is that intelligence seems to be required for the arrangement of matter into effectively functioning and self-reproducing chemical machines. The only alternative explanation we have, if not intelligence, is the operation of sheer chance in a cosmic space where movement is possible. But the complexity of life is so great that the odds against this explanation are impossibly high, the time demanded impossibly long. Quite an extensive literature is available critiquing the theory of evolution based on chance. In popular parlance, this is the problem of a hundred monkeys, pounding a hundred typewriters, accidentally producing the collected works of Shakespeare.

Instead of belaboring an explanation based on probability, let’s assume that intelligence must be at work. The dictionary defines it as a power to apprehend facts and their relationships. If you unpack that definition, you ultimately get consciousness. But what we actually see in nature is end-seeking entities that seem to operate without consciousness, at least as we understand that word. How can these observations be reconciled?

I would propose that seeing things at the right scale might turn out to be helpful. I offer an analogy. Would you say that the City of Detroit is intelligent? Obviously by Detroit I don’t mean any official representative of it—not its mayor or its city council. I mean the city itself. The City of Detroit itself is most definitely real. But it is not, actually, in the category of things usually thought to be possessing or lacking intelligence. Next question. Could the City of Detroit have come into being without intelligence? It is literally made of objects all of which clearly testify to the presence of intelligent agents. I think you also suspect where I am going here.

Now to extend this. I claim to be an intelligent agent, but my effective reach diminishes a great deal away from my immediate surroundings. I’m served by highly developed modern transport and communications systems, but I can only form the vaguest comprehensive consciousness of anything as big as Detroit. If asked what Detroit needs or what may be wrong with it, I’m capable of speculation, but individually I cannot do much about it. And if we enlarge the scope, my already nonexistent powers diminish at each step: Michigan, the United States, the Western civilization… I’m less than a molecule at these scales.

Now I turn to an order of intelligence interfering with, or invading, the order of matter. Suppose that this process began at a very small scale—say at the atomic or subatomic level. Why there? Well, it may have begun there because a very subtle power, the power of immaterial intelligence, may only be strong enough actually to influence matter at its lower manifestations, down there where minute quanta of energy are moving. Let us say that souls, intelligences, encountered matter down there in the tiny, examined it, differentiated this from that, drew inferences, understood this, understood that—and, again at the very small scale, began a process of experimentation. Let’s further assume that they found this environment difficult to work in—too much flux, huge, coarse, violent energies, etc. And let us assume that an entire community of such beings, attempting to get a foothold, messing with matter as best they could, fascinated by it—or, alternatively, unable to escape it—at last succeeded in delimiting the disturbance of the material flux by building a spherical container inside of which the flux is low. Here, inside the proto-cell, they next began to optimize this interesting world. The first problem, of course, would be to continue to maintain the wall that keeps things relatively peaceful inside. If we image the scale in the right way, the agencies would be small compared to the proto-cell. And in the same way in which I barely understand Detroit so they, also, barely understood the cell but, collectively they maintained it for their own purposes.

But how do you get from here to crocodiles? It’s not a very great jump. It strikes us as outrageous to imagine an intelligent order creating a biosphere that is hierarchically organized so that the higher feed on the lower—so that crocodiles waste innocent wildebeests so that the green, ugly, scaly things can laze in the sun satiated. “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” It’s entirely possible that an intelligent order, limited in its ability to perceive, can produce vast structures that live destructively on others, the others also created by other groupings of the same intelligence. The inhabitants may not be aware of what they’re doing. The crocodile, of course, is a later creature, but its machinery, thus its brain, is still quite limited. The information that flows from it to the inhabitants is not very useful.

Another analogy. When our military in the righteous pursuit of that sacred duty, national security, vast distances away, in brightly shining aircraft (don’t they resemble a little the white teeth of the crocodile?) rain death and destruction on villages in the border zones of Afghanistan and Pakistan, hunting some Al Qaida operative, and producing regrettable collateral damage in the process, is the beast that does this, the United States of America, really conscious? Is any collective really conscious? Are there, perhaps, awakening souls inside the crocodile who mildly mourn the wildebeest?

Life's Origin: First Steps

When it comes to the origin of life, we seem able only to come up with two theoretical structures, possibly a third if we combine the other two. One is that life emerges from matter spontaneously by chance. The other is that God creates the living by a special act. The combination, favored in Catholicism, for example, is to picture God creating the cosmos in such a way that life is already present in it; thus at the appointed time, life will emerge from matter. Here the absolute sway of chance is mitigated if not entirely removed; it is replaced at the crucial point by an intention hidden in the very structure of physical reality.

The third solution is both elegant and subtle. It leaves science to follow its naturalistic methodology wherever it might lead without the embarrassments that the intrusive correction of Galileo occasioned for the Church. At the same time it preserves the ultimate ground of creation as an act of God.

When I look at this solution in more detail, however, it has a troubling aspect. If life is hidden somewhere inside of matter, its emergence is a change in degree rather than in kind, and I’m persuaded that life is different in kind. My reason is that life displays teleology, thus it displays purpose. The most obvious evidence of this is reproduction. It is the continuation of a very complex arrangement of matter, what might be called an extremely complex form, by an intricate step-wise method, a whole long chain of intricate processes. We do not encounter anything resembling it in inorganic nature. We do encounter various examples of simple structural changes in response to stimuli, thus the formation of crystalline forms, e.g., snowflakes, but we don’t find anything at that level in which a necessary chain of formations takes place and must take place for the end result to emerge.

Purpose is, strictly speaking, associated only with agency. I grant you that this is an intuitive finding. It takes a special effort to deny that agency is present in living entities. It is observable. To explain it away mechanistically is always possible when the entity manifests in physical form. The physical expression of agency will take place using mechanical means. But to assign agency, purpose, strictly to mechanism requires that we willfully ignore that which we really see and feel. It is literally impossible to deny that we feel purpose. It's presumptuous on our part to deny the same feeling to dogs, to plants, indeed even to cells. What we observe is a difference in awareness, not a difference in end-seeking tendency. This is the same-old, same-old battle between two ways of perceiving. I don’t want to waste time on it. But the point I’m after here is that the third solution, given above, namely that life is embedded in the cosmic whole from the start, that it permeates matter so that, in the ripeness of time, it may emerge, that solution doesn’t please me. Even when offered by Catholic thinkers, it still reminds me of panpsychism.

There is a version of this mode of thought that I find much less troubling. It is that two (or at least two) orders of reality are present in the cosmos. David Bohm, the physicist, formulated this conception as the presence in the Whole of a conditioned and an unconditioned order. You can find this idea in Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, 1996. Another way to put this is that an order of agencies or souls exists and so does an order of matter. There may be many other mansions in the Lord’s house as well, but here I’m pondering two. This sort of concept can be imagined as two orders that coexist and possibly also interpenetrate—and under certain circumstances the unconditioned order may, in fact, act upon the conditioned order where circumstances permit such interactions. Both, however, exist independently. As for their origin, my view is simply that if agency exists at all, its origin must be God. The unconditioned order, of course, has both consciousness and freedom; that freedom is clearly delimited, as we see from our circumstances. It isn’t, in us, omnipotence. But it has freedom as the order of matter does not.

The difference I see in this position, call it 3A for convenience, is that it keeps separate what are, in my view, two orders, separate in kind, not one rising from the other. I can thus imagine a community of spirits becoming entangled in matter, seduced by it, as it were, and, over long periods of time, building a strange intermediate world of incarnation just because it’s possible. In my science-fiction role I’ve named this chemical civilization. Thus all of life is a construct by spiritual agencies, working on their own. They don’t originate life—because they are life. But they cause it to manifest in matter, where it does not properly belong. This notion first arose in me when studying biology as a grown man with three children. It has long intrigued me because it fits in many ways that which I see displayed in biology. What it requires is that we also imagine the possibility of many grades of consciousness—upward and down. We find no difficulty imagining higher beings—we even have names form them: angels, whole choirs of them. We find it difficult to imagine spirits operating in vast choirs of their own at levels way lower than ours.

This conceptualization demands a cosmology different from the Aristotelian/Thomistic which builds its hierarchy from unformed matter to absolute act. Thus I’m challenging a tradition vastly more grown-up than I am. But I find that hierarchy difficult in spots. Since it goes on into orders of spirit, ever higher, it does not seem to have a proper justification for matter—unless it is to make sense of man. But what if man is just trespassing on matter? What if original sin has another meaning yet? What if matter has a different explanation?

Obviously there is more to say here, but these posts shouldn’t get too long.