Weltanschauung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Category: The Creative Cosmos

  • Was the Noble Savage a Happy Bunny?

    Was the Noble Savage a Happy Bunny?

    The Noble Savage was probably simply a figment of 18th Century imagination but it is pleasant to imagine that there was a day in the distant past where people did not live in Grenfell Tower and didn’t have to look at Trump’s haircut in the media.

    It is easy to imagine the life of the savage as a rural idyll. He is a hunter gatherer: he gets up in the morning, picks a date or two off the tree and goes out in search of brunch.  Perhaps he ambles along the sea shore and eats a few raw mussels; perhaps he picks up a crab or two and takes them home to brew up over an open fire.

    Not bothered much about housework or paying his taxes he strolls off in the afternoon in search of dinner. A small pig to roast perhaps? A wild foul to pluck and grill?

    Perhaps he takes his eldest son with him while his wife and daughter sweep out the mud hut. Back from the hunt he reclines in his stone age deck chair for a snooze in the sun while the wife picks the wild pheasant and stuffs it with a few cloves of garlic for the evening repast.

    They may not have had much of a concept of tomorrow or yesterday. Perhaps they lived in an eternal now.  It is a pleasant figment to imagine the Noble Savage was indeed a Happy Bunny. No existential angst, no deep thoughts other than stoking the fire and turning the spit.

    Eat, sleep, fornicate and repeat. Mend the hut. Chuck out the chicken bones. Burn the rubbish.

    Sadly I suspect it’s all hogwash.  Of course if I really believed my hypothesis I could always put a bone through my nose and shack up with the natives, deep in some rainforest or tropical island. And many is the time I have felt like doing so.

    Sadly, Hobbes probably got it right. ” During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called warre; and such a warre as is of every man against every man”.

    The savage, noble or otherwise was no better than modern man. We still live “in that condition which is called warre.”

     

     

  • Was Albert Einstein into Alchemical Healing?

    Was Albert Einstein into Alchemical Healing?

    I was reading a post this morning on “alchemical healing” and was a little puzzled by it.

    I believe in the scientific concept of “emergence”. Namely that the sum is greater than its constituents parts.  I believe that great complexity has arisen from a few simple rules of nature and that as time goes by science will reveal more to us. I believe that eventually intelligent life will become what our ancestors would have considered “gods”

    We now know the aims of alchemists are achievable – we know that any one element can be turned into any other element given enough heat and pressure.

    On “spirituality” we are coming to understand more about the mind and indeed I am interested in recent scientific research on qualia and the nature of consciousness.

    But I believe one must distinguish such concepts as “art” on the one hand from “science” and the search for facts on the other.

    My sense of spirituality is to sit in a Norman Church in the English countryside and read the book of Psalms. Not because I believe in a god or gods but because it puts my mind at ease.  I do not believe my experience is “mystical” in any sense; I believe rather that the space and peace, the beauty and the language give my tired mind the ability to rest and to contemplate my “weltanschauung” in tranquility.

    I believe that the world is a miraculous enough place as it is without the necessity for belief in anything other than what is there, than what we can prove by experiment.

    I love the idea of pixies and goblins; I have been an avid fan of Tolkien, CS Lewis and fantasy all my life.

    But I am very aware that I must not confuse fantasy and fiction with reality.

    Beauty and escape in art, literature, music and theatre are essential to me. But when I want to know about healing I look to science. I may be inspired by Ents and Gandalf but if I want to know how the world works I look to CERN or Roger Penrose rather than Ursula le Guin.

  • A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design

    A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design

    Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek’s book “A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design” is certainly worth reading although I think to be honest I was expecting too much of it.

    I enjoyed the first few chapters a great deal but became rather bored and bogged down when the author hit his specialist subject – the atomic world and below.

    I general terms I certainly get the gist of it and have done for some years. At heart, at the very small end of the scale everything is made of the same minute building blocks and the universe is incredibly simple, beautiful and symmetric.

    Where I became a little bored was in the description of all the various sub atomic particles. Any layman is likely to have a very hard time indeed with the minutiae of the subject and may come away, like I did, wondering whether it is necessary to try and grasp every spin, gluon, quark and particle zoo specimen.

    Perhaps for the layman a science book written by a philosopher may make more sense. I have read countless books on physics for the layman by authors from Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, David Deutsch and on.

    The Deutsch approach suits me far better. And in particular his book The Fabric of Reality which I have read several times.

    To me at least broad brush concepts are what I am seeking not detailed explanations (even if in simplified terms) of subjects I will never managed to grasp in their entirety.

    Deutsch is a physicist but with a wonderful way with philosophical concepts.  His life long ambition has been to know everything and he managed to convey his enthusiasm and knowledge of “everything” in a way which made intuitive sense to me.

    I am glad I read Frank Wilczek’s book but it was more about “where every sparrow fell” in the sub atomic-world than a treatise which made me feel I had accomplished a broad grasp of reality.

    Mea Culpa.

  • The Existence of Evil

    The Existence of Evil

    Evil cannot exist without consciousness and free will.

    Imagine a universe without consciousness. Our own universe by way of example but with no life forms with the gift of consciousness. There would be great violence of course: supernovae, asteroids pummeling planets, volcanoes, tsunamis….and Big Bangs.

    But none of that would affect any “body”. None of that violence would be evil since evil must surely show intentionality. And if there were no conscious entity in the universe there could be no intentionality.  No one who deliberately does horrible things to another. And inert matter can not perpetrate or suffer an evil act: however violent a physical reaction may be, if it has no intention of causing harm to a conscious entity which can experience that harm, then evil can not occur.

    Equally there must be conscious beings whose subjective experiences are those of pain and suffering, physical or mental, for evil to exist.  There must surely exist a victim, a subject for an evil to act upon..

    The question becomes a great deal more complex when one factors in the existence (or not) of free will.

    Leaving aside the endless religious nonsense which has clouded the subject for millennia, the question of free will boils down, ultimately, to physics.

    Most physicists are determinists of one sort of another.  Steven Hawkins was convinced humanity are mere robots with no free will. Chemical scum as another enthusiastic optimist called us.

    Strict determinism means that physical cause and effect govern everything from the orbit of the earth round the sun to wars and human history. Using such laws, physicists believe they have traced back our origins back to the singularity of the big bang and forward to the big whimper, the petering out of energy and matter. Atom hits atom in endless Newtonian cause and effect and in such a world free will is an illusion.

    We may believe we have decided to cosh our neighbour over the head with a steel mace but in fact we had no choice in the matter.  Our atoms did it.

    To add to the confusion many physicists also claim that time is an illusion. Without time there can be no change. Without change what evil act or thought could arise?

    So there you have it. Or rather you don’t. The existence of evil is not a simple question..

  • A Secular Epiphany

    A Secular Epiphany

    A Beautiful Question

    Epiphany is usually thought of as the appearance or utterance of a deity to an earthbound mortal but it can equally be a secular phenomena, where one is suddenly struck by some extreme beauty, truth or revelation.

    The beautiful illumination above from Liber Scivias shows Hildegard of Bingen receiving a vision, dictating to her scribe and sketching on a wax tablet.  A classic religious revelation or epiphany.

    We modern Brits in 21st Century London don’t tend to get many religious epiphanies these days but secular epiphanies can inspire equal awe. The illustration below shows Archimede’s Eureka moment: a secular epiphany.  My morning was graced by such a moment; I know how he felt.

    Let me explain. I am engaged in research into the nature of consciousness and have been particularly taken by the approach of the Qualia Research Institute.

    Their hypothesis is that qualia (subjective, conscious experiences such as pleasure or anxiety) can be formalised.  That such experiences can be categorised, precisely described, mapped and explained. In particular they are looking at the pain/pleasure valence and believe that pleasure is caused by harmony or symmetry in the state of the brain. Pain is caused by the opposite: dissonance.  They intend to quantify qualia and believe qualia have mathematical isomorphisms.  It’s all part of our homeostatic control mechanism.

    They recommend Franc Wilczek’s book A Beautiful Question :

    A Nobel laureate and friend of Tegmark, Wilczek asks the question, “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?” and proceeds to explore how looking for beauty & symmetry in the laws of nature has been an extraordinarily successful strategy for physicists. Core takeaway: the Symmetry Theory of Valence is a reasonable extrapolation from the past trajectory of physics.

    I dutifully bought the book and was stunned by the lucidity of a chapter headed “Pythagoras II: Number and Harmony”.

    I have been engaged in classical choral music since childhood and have tried in vain to gain an academic intuition of harmony as well as an understanding of WHY music gives me such intense pleasure.

    Suddenly this morning all appeared to be revealed. It was a Eureka moment.

    The book explains the physical processes involved in the production, transmission and reception of harmonic sound and then ventures an explanation as to why such notes sound so good together.

    The brain receives a repetitive pattern which is predictable and easy to interpret: accurate prediction is essential for human survival.  Success in prediction of the repeating vibrations of the harmony has to be rewarded by the higher functions of the brain as pleasure so that the lower operative brain functions know they have got the task right.

    Discordance and dissonance is not repetitive and predictive and is thus discouraged with a feedback of pain or displeasure.  Its an evolutionary argument: the familiar selfish genes.

    And thus argues the Qualia Research Institute: pain is dissonance and disharmony in brain patterns; pleasure is harmony and symmetry in the brain.

    It’s a theory.  But the intuitive “rightness” struck a sweet chord in my mammalian brain. I was being rewarded for getting something right perhaps.

    So, a secular epiphany. An enjoyable and profound revelation, or thus it seemed.

     

     

     

  • Renaissance Man: Dead or Alive?

    Renaissance Man: Dead or Alive?

    Wren, Newton, da Vinci and Galileo, to name a few,  were “renaissance men”.  They were able to master and practice a number of widely different professions.  Can it still be done in today’s highly specialised world?

    David Deutsch in the Fabric of Reality puts a slightly different slant on the question and it remains one of the most interesting and convincing  books I have ever read.  As a child, like many scientists, Deutsch wanted to “know everything” and wondered whether that could ever be possible.

    To qualify his ambition he did not require knowledge of “where every sparrow fell” – a wonderful biblical allusion to Matthew 10:29-30.  He did not aspire to be god.

    Many of us have this unquenchable thirst for knowledge. We want to know where we came from, how the universe began, the nature of time and consciousness. What is the “meaning” of maths? Its object, its goal, its range of competence?  It is all so mysterious and complex and many experts seem to spend their entire lives ruminating on just one tiny piece of the puzzle.

    A Renaissance Man living in the 21st Century on planet earth has to curtail his ambition somewhat. We no longer live in the days of Galen and should not expect to become surgeon barbers.  You have to specialise.  But that does not mean we can not, as laymen, understand at least the rudiments of modern medicine.

    Roger Penrose has spent a lifetime as a distinguished mathematical physicist and as laymen we should not expect to attain his grasp of cosmology or quantum mechanics.

    And yet we can and should know in broad general terms about all these things. We should at least aim to have a broad understanding of what the outlines of current human knowledge actually are.

    So yes, Renaissance Man lives on. He can not be expected to both build Cathedrals and replace broken hearts (or mend arms or legs) but he can at least have a broad and cultured knowledge about what it is his colleagues in other fields practice.

    I will never grasp the minutiae but I do at least want to understand what such men do.

  • Seeking Consciousness

    Seeking Consciousness

    In my post In Search of the Soul I talked of giving up one life and seeking another.  Some become itinerant monks and if I lived in a warmer climate I would be tempted to do something similar.

    Regardless, my post was metaphor and I hope to achieve something more satisfying.  As a child I had frequent occasions when my brain would short circuit leading to a feeling close to panic.

    It was a single and simple thought which provoked this reaction: “what would there be if the world I see around me did not exist?” I could not conceive of nothingness in a calm and reasoned manner. Somehow the thought terrified me.

    Many years later I can see that the answers to such questions can only be sought through science and empirical, rational thought.  At the time such words did not form part of my vocabulary.

    If this post had not been a whimsical one, it might have been destined for the taxonomy “science” and not “spirituality”. I am not even sure what the latter word means.

    And yet I do not intend to talk of consciousness as such but merely of the importance of the search.

    We have little understanding as yet as to what makes us subjectively aware of the world.  This is perhaps not so surprising: the difficulty of studying consciousness might be likened to that of a goldfish in a bowl contemplating cosmology.

    And yet we need to get there. How can a “Theory of Everything” be complete without understanding what gives a collection of star dust the ability to ponder the origins of the universe?

    And so back to  In Search of The Soul.  Instead of wandering India with a begging bowl it might be rather more satisfying to turn my coat.  We may not have an understanding of what “Breathes Fire into the Equations” but to study what we do know about life, the universe and everything holds rather greater interest for me than the financial markets which I have studied to little avail for much of the past 30 years.

  • Am I a Quale?

    Am I a Quale?

    A quale is the singular form of the plural qualia.  Qualia are a linguistic attempt to describe the subjective experience of consciousness.

    Pain and happiness are qualia. Physicist  Max Tegmark argues that consciousness itself is a quale. Our experience of colour is a quale. Any subjective experience our consciousness allows us to feel is a quale: sadness, joy, wonder, epiphany.

    We do not know what we are or how we work.  We do not know whether mind and body are one and hence our mental states are merely a production of our physical mind and body. Or whether by contrast subjective consciousness is a law of nature – a physical “force” or object in its own right.  Perhaps we are more than the sum of our physical parts.

    I know that “I am”, but I do not know what I am.  The question of consciousness and its nature has puzzled us for millennia and in some senses, we are no further forward in our understanding than we were back in the times of Plato and Aristotle.

    We may have sent man to the moon. Man may have traced our origins to stardust. We may have posited the Big Bang and forecast Big Crunches or Big Chills but we are no further forward in understanding how, what, why or where we are.

    As a matter of “belief” I think science will eventually give us all the answers we seek to the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Neuroscience is already using techniques such as MRI scanning to spot the neural correlates to qualia. We can already control machinery using thought alone. The Human Brain Project seeks to understand cognition and to map and simulate the human brain.

    In the meantime, we are left wondering whether we are mere information processing systems and whether the processing of that information leads to subjective feelings.  Has evolution given us pain and pleasure to secure the survival of the selfish gene?  Or is there more to it than that? I don’t know and currently no one else does either.

    Leading writers I have dipped into include:

    Susan Blackmore

    Daniel Dennett

    Oliver Sacks

  • What am I?

    What am I?

    The question “what am I” is the most important avenue any sentient being can enter.  It is not a question we can currently answer but we have been trying for as long as we have existed.

    The first difficulty is that this is a true “rabbit hole” and once entered you are unlikely to emerge or find any definitive answer. Because the answer at present is “I do not know”.  Even for that unsatisfactory conclusion, you have to take a detour down every possible scientific avenue of enquiry we are currently pursuing or have ever pursued.

    The questions which naturally follow from this one deseptively simple enquiry do not end.  At the macro level it inevitably leads to the BIG question: “what is reality”?

    Until and unless you discover the nature of reality you will be hard pressed to try and answer the much smaller question “what am I” since it must be self evident that we are a mere subdivision of reality.

    Unless you are a single, lonely solipsist.

    So you have to take in physics and its derivatives chemistry and biology.  Not on a professional level but as that of an enquiring layman.  You have to consider cosmology and particle physics. You need to know what our current state of knowledge is.  What is our universe? How big is it? What is it made of?

    You need to know that we are made of the same elements as everything else in our universe and that all that “stuff” out there (and in us) was created within stars.

    You need to consider “consciousness” because that apparently distinguishes us from the vast majority of “stuff” out there. It allows us “self awareness” which can usefully be defined in this context as the ability to ask what we are in the first place!

    My current reading is Our Mathematical Universe by Mark Tegmark .  It is fascinating and easily understood by the layman and those not versed in mathematics.  It is well suited to someone of a more philosophical than actual scientific bent.

    It is telling me that I am a mathematical structure and so is the rest of reality. It is one man’s theory of the ultimate nature of “what is”.

    It is one of numerous such books I have read on my journey and there will be a great many more.

  • Science and the Sublime

    Science and the Sublime

    Science fiction has long dreamt of an impossibly sophisticated future where mere intelligence has transcended to the superhuman. Religion through the many millennia of human history has peddled an opiate of post death eternity where all will be well and all manner of things will be well.

    Religion has not made good on its promises: we still await the parousia among other things. And as for bodily resurrection, I visited San Lazzaro degli Armeni and was shown around by an erudite and charming young believer.  We were looking around the monastery’s museum and I rather unkindly quipped that the preserved corpse on display was evidently still awaiting resurrection.

    Unfazed by my sarcasm the young man replied: “It will happen”.

    Will science provide what religion has failed to give us?  According to the “transhumanists” the answer is assuredly yes. Per Wikipedia the most common transhumanist thesis is that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into different beings with abilities so greatly expanded from the current condition as to merit the label of posthuman beings.

    I have always been captivated by the transcendent (inspired in childhood by the Narnia Chronicles of CS Lewis and the lore of JRR Tolkein) but in adult life my interest has veered towards the scientific possibility of nirvana and the possibility of different planes of existence and post physical life.

    Mathematical physicist Frank Tipler veers firmly towards religious belief. At the end of time he believes our distant ancestors will be able to re-create every living being that has ever lived in virtual reality. Hence he came to believe in the resurrection and became a Christian.  Perhaps encouraged by the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin.

    While eschewing religious faith I understand its longings.  I’m with Iain M. Banks.