The small cottage was situated near a quiet strand. Facing south west, it overlooked the shingle beach and had the mountains sheltering it from the north. I loved it the moment I laid eyes on it. Simplicity was what I needed - two small bedrooms, a central living room with open fire surrounded by a large hearth and a small surprisingly well-equipped kitchenette. The bathroom didn’t have a bath but the shower was fine. All in all just perfect and cozy too. The owner was quite happy to get rental off-season and I had it as long as I wanted, at least until the high summer season. I had no intention of staying that long so it suited my requirements perfectly.
The first thing I did was set the fire using the turf that was stacked under cover outback. The smoke rose reluctantly but after some vigorous fanning the flames took off. As I admired the warming fire, I felt peacefully at home. I pulled an armchair closer and, sinking in, closed my eyes and dozed.
Sleep is our release from reality. It loosens the strained strings that tie us to current worries. Life of the sleeper is not the now or the future but is a conglomeration of the past. Histories get mangled and reconstructed into improbable mixtures. Worries and desires feed off one another. Fear is a frequent visitor. Experiences that have been etched on the memory are brought forth in an unknown pattern. Dreams are voyages around a life. They travel backwards and forwards in an unconscious past. They pluck a fruit here and sow a seed there, always creating an enigmatic experience in the chaotic total.
As I opened my eyes I was aware of having dreamt but as I blinked my eyes, focusing on the dying fire before me, the memory was already fading. I had a slight uncomfortable feeling and this made me want to let the dream go. I concentrated on the fire assessing the smoldering ash and wondering whether it would revive if I added a few more sods. This utilitarian thought succeeded in banishing all remnants of the dream. I strained to recall it but there was a mere blank. All that remained was that uncomfortable unease. I reached out to the turf basket and threw a dry sod onto the ashes. I waited. The first smoke rose and I knew the fire was saved. The simple relief was enough to banish my unease and once more I felt calm descend.
After a while I added more turf and the fire was now warming and alive. Instinctively I placed my outstretched palms in front of the nascent flames and felt the added heat. There is a primitive fascination with fire. It was missing from my life when I lived in the city. My apartment never had that sense of heart that this fire presented to the cottage. Perhaps it’s because the fire is, in a sense, a living process that without nurture, feeding and care will eventually die. It is an extension of our own living, totally dependent on us much more so than a living pet or our inert environment. It is our creation and we can sustain it or let it perish at our will.
The evening light had faded and there were shadows in the corners. The flames sent light dancing about the darkened room. I rose and pulled the curtains. I didn’t bother to put on the overhead light but lit the reading lamp in the corner. As I put on a kettle of water I stared in contentment at the homely scene framed by the kitchen door - armchair by fire in a flickering dimly lit room. This was just what I wanted to assist me in my quest. I needed peace and tranquility to allow my mind free itself of its former life. I wanted to forget the past and just dwell on the present or more importantly my present thoughts. I wanted to excise the personal experiences that had taken heretofore so much of my energies. Such negative strivings for personal happiness - a happiness that was always going to be unattainable and at best fleeting, creating confusions and frustrations!
Now I banished them all. I was going to dedicate my life to sifting through the myriad ways of the mind. I wanted to leave behind something that maybe would add to the sum of mankind’s journey to enlightenment. I had only a vague sense of what that contribution might be but I knew that at best it could only touch on the distant verges of understanding. I sat down and started to write.
The more I explored the world of knowledge and thought the more I saw it as a fractal like surface - increasingly complicated the closer one looked. Investigation, rather than solving the mystery, was only adding to it. This negative loop was frustrating initially but I had a faith in the ultimate meaning of reality. The search for it may be a Quixotic joust at a shifting target or, worse, inaccessible by the very fact that we are part of it. If we live inside a large box we can only know about the interior of the box and of that we can expect to know all. But of the exterior of the box we can know nothing nor can we guess or surmise or theorize on the infinities of exteriors. The box exterior may be painted in any of an infinity of colors. Its surface can assume any shape it wills. Each degree of freedom thus has an infinity of options none of which we can predict. In fact we can not even form the set of the degrees of freedom such as color, shape, texture and so on and on. There may be essences of the exterior that do not display themselves or are not present in the interior. There can be an infinity of such new or unknown essences. From within the box we are severely hampered. The cosmos is our box and we, as thinkers and explorers of meaning and understanding, are forever confined within.
Is this a hopeless cause then for the great thinkers of our age? The search for a Theory of Everything must rank as man’s greatest hubris. It is surely a misnomer to call a theory that may unify gravity and quantum theory a theory of everything. For one, it will not give a theory of life. Nothing in any of the current candidate theories even suggests why conscious life arises in our cosmos. The best theory is that so-called Anthropic principle that we are alive in a world such as ours because that is a world that facilitates life. This is deeply unsatisfactory and suggests that there are infinities of worlds out there where there is no life or where there are an infinity of lives different to our own. Occam’s razor should be used unscrupulously to excise all these superfluous worlds. A theory should be as simple as possible and that approach certainly fails miserably. That it is considered a potential theory shows how much we have become divorced from our personal realities by the unbounded efforts of theoretical scientists driven by mathematical frenzy and love for the esoteric.
These ‘many worlds’ theories are not properly criticized by either their creators or by philosophers. Their creators are driven by increasingly complex mathematical structures that require additional dimensions to space and time to facilitate the creative ideas. String theory, on which the best minds in the world of science and maths are staking their professional lives, may be a theoretical cul de sac. It is so difficult to understand that philosophers, who should be concerned with the vague claims it makes about reality, are in no position to criticize it at all. What is the rationale for thinking that matter at its most basic is composed of bits of string-like existence? Is there evidence for this within the box or is this one of the infinity of theories about the exterior of the box that has for some reason gained credence?
In the last one hundred years science has made major advances in the deconstruction of nature. The original atomic ideas of the indivisibility of matter beyond a certain limit, so naively proposed by some ancient Greeks, lay dormant for over two millennia. But the evolution of the scientific method and the liberation of the Enlightenment allowed scientists to explore ideas of origin that did not coincide with extant religious dogmas. At the end of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century the greatest revolution in human thought took place. It can be traced back to Copernicus and Galileo breaking the earth-centric world view. Newton and Leibnitz added the science to the dynamical world of the planetary rotations. Maxwell and Einstein expanded the world to include electromagnetism and gravity. The founders of quantum theory, Planck, Schrodinger, Bohr, Dirac and a host of other great minds, along with the great sea of experimenters from Rutherford and colleagues at the famous Cavendish laboratory onwards, all contributed to the pushing back of the frontiers of the infinitesimal. The world they created of electrons, protons and neutrons gave way to even smaller and more exotic particles based on the theoretical work of great mi
nds in the latter half of the century - their names are too many to mention. Now the world was composed of strange particles called quarks which in theory can never be seen in isolation. These quarks are held together by forces mediated by other particles called gluons. The force acts in exponential proportion to the distance of separation and thus an infinite force is required to cause two quarks to part.
A strange world this is compared to the original atomic simplicity. But it is even stranger still. Dirac one of the greatest theorists of all, predicted the need for anti-matter when developing his famous equation for the electron field. There was and is a particle called a positron, identical to the electron but of opposite charge. When the two meet they annihilate and turn into photonic energy. This concept of anti-matter had never occurred in philosophical exploration before. It was hard to comprehend and moreover all the anti-matter had been annihilated and there remained an amount of ordinary matter of which our world is composed.
What can philosophy take out of this modern scientific world view? It is difficult to get one’s head around the many developments in the rapidly evolving theories. When even that severe complexity for the average philosopher struggling to understand becomes even more convoluted by the development of string theory then most philosophers throw their hat at it. They consign it to what they call the philosophy of science and debate over things they are more comfortable with such as what constitutes a theory and how can a theory be contested, or how theories evolve. Many tomes have been produced on these aspects or on the more debatable areas of quantum theory. Schrodinger’s Cat became a very popular paradox. Young’s ‘Two Slit’ experiment was discussed in all the latest papers. The nature of the dual wave or particle entity was an intriguing paradox. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle being simple to understand was tossed about in all the right debates. Scientists themselves were drawn into the debate. Bohm saw in quantum theory the potential for overlap with the ‘wholeness of nature’ idea of eastern religions.
In the view of many of today’s theorists all the foregoing developments were just the forerunners leading to a string theory of the world. The world comprises vibrating strings of infinitesimally small length in one dimension which can be open ended or looped and which move in world lines through space time mapping out complex multidimensional manifolds of equally complex topology. It was once said by an acclaimed quantum theorist that if anyone claimed they understood quantum theory fully then they really did not understand it at all. The same can be said even more forcefully about string theory. How are poor philosophers to enter this complex world without becoming accomplished theorists themselves which, assuming they had the mathematical capability, would in itself demand all of their time leaving none remaining for philosophical development?
This is one of the problems of all modern knowledge. It has expanded at the rate set by the increasing education of an ever increasing number of people involved in the enterprise. At the turn of the century it was possible to keep abreast of all areas, at least to a peripheral extent. That is nowadays impossible. Philosophy as a result will always lag behind scientific evolution. Its only hope is that, in so doing, it will be saved the wasted efforts in coming to terms with the seeming impacts of theories that ultimately have to be discarded. Philosophy is really only coming to grips with General Relativity and quantum theory even though the field has moved on, in its own view, into the world of strings.
The fact that Einstein’s great work and that of the subsequent quantum theorists may at some stage be subsumed or even replaced by a completely new and broader theory does not absolve philosophers from trying to draw out the implications for these areas. Historically it was the developments in science that were the precursors of new ideas in philosophic thought. The barrenness of philosophical evolution during the middle ages can be paralleled with the stasis of science and mathematics during this same period. This period was characterized by superstitious alchemy and the equally superstitious religious institutions. The search for truth and enlightenment almost disappeared from the human consciousness. The eventual rise of scientific enquiry led to the overturn of these powerful superstitions and the reopening of objective philosophical enquiry.
The radical changes to the world view engendered by modern scientific exploration should be accompanied by a comparable revolution in human thinking. That this has not happened is partly due to the scientists themselves who too busily occupied in their complex work areas have no time to disseminate the wider implications of their ideas and discoveries. One only has to look at the success of the engineering take up of these ideas, and the resulting technological revolution that has transpired in the last decades, to see what impact similar take up of ideas into philosophy could deliver. One can argue that it is easier to translate scientific theory into technology than into sociology, politics or ethics but that is not necessarily the case. The impact of communications on all of these areas is enormous and has led to totally new paradigms such as internet and continuous mobile connectivity. These technological revolutions took huge human resources to bring about but nowhere was there a similar effort to mould the developments, except in a reactionary way, to the better good of mankind. This role should have been taken up by a philosophy that kept apace of developments and modified current thinking accordingly.
So much of philosophy is just history of philosophy. Current practitioners are constantly referring back to the great thinkers of either antiquity or the post Renaissance periods. History shows us how incorrect actions have led to bad outcomes and we would be foolish to ignore such valuable hard-earned lessons. There is, however, a big difference between acknowledging these mistakes and being transfixed by them. Development is preceded by error. Note the error and move on. Philosophy seems sometimes to get locked in debate over past errors. The thoughts of eighteenth century man or woman are not those of the modern era. Philosophy should be of its day. The day of the modern philosopher should encompass the current revolution in technology and science that is taking place without its input.
To have input, there has to be foreknowledge and this requires that philosophers become polymaths. Because this will take so much time and energy the necessary sacrificial lamb may have to be the overemphasis on the history of philosophy. This may mean remaking some of the mistakes of the past but this in itself is not catastrophic. Sometimes an error must be repeated many times before the correct approach becomes engrained. Errors made in new ways and in different contexts and time lead to new insights. Maybe the modern philosopher should approach the modern world with a blank slate and allow the philosophy develop organically. This is not to thrash the great thoughts of the past but rather it is to recognize that the present presents a totally new paradigm that requires an objective and maybe totally new approach. The values of the past may need to be jettisoned, or at least parked, to allow the new thinking to evolve.
This is perhaps just wishful thinking because philosophy like religion is conservative. It has structures based in the learned universities that perpetuate the norms of philosophical behavior and discourse. It behaves as a professional elite that only allows the initiated to contribute. The naive are sometimes tolerated but rarely accepted into the fold, without having gone through the full process of initiation. They have to be accredited by their peers and by the establishment. This sets up a terrible inertia to creative thought. If literature and poetry were organized along similar lines the creative flow and innovation would be severely stymied. The poet would be excessively burdened by the necessity of having to study all the great poets of the past and his creative juices would wane in the gargantuan task. Luckily you do not have to go to university or sit exams to be creative in literature. All you need is pen and paper or nowadays a personal computer.
Philosophy should be like this. Everyone should be encouraged to add their contribution or ideas to the pot. The fear of the brotherhood of philosophers might be a total dilution of the quality of the thought. This certainly would occ
ur but it is not fatal, no more than the existence of pulp fiction is to literature in general. The great benefit of the approach is that more people become entangled in the philosophic enterprise. Philosophy could become mainstream rather than elitist. In the modern world, with the demise in many cultures of the dogmas of religion which to their credit at least gave people a fixed if irrational belief structure on which to base their lives, there is a need and an opportunity for philosophy to fill that vacuum.
If people have no fixed creeds they must develop their own personal creed. By creed I don’t mean religious belief but rather life belief. They develop ideas that they are happy with, as to why they find themselves alive, and with supposed free will to do as they please. They learn through social interaction to put constraints on that free will, as heretofore constraints were imposed by the religion of that society. But modern societies are diverse multi-cultural mixes and the intermixing of credos becomes the norm. Gradually in these multicultural societies the role of assigned religious belief and behavior dissipates but nothing has emerged to replace it. Yet it must be replaced. What replaces it has to be capable of assimilating the diversity of modern life and contact between differing peoples. In effect a philosophy of life based not on religious or irrational principles but on firm universal principles that allow maximum free will and minimum personal interference.
Such general principles should emerge not from the current philosophical elite but from an ongoing debate amongst the whole community of the planet. People should be encouraged to enter the debate that ultimately could be conducted over the internet. Millions of people would toss out millions of ideas and a natural evolution of thought would emerge over time. This emergent philosophy of life would not be fixed but would be in continual incremental change reacting to the social, political and technological paradigms.
Elements of this scenario are happening already. The increasing inroads of ‘bloggers’ into the overall internet activity has given a voice to the common person. The content of blogs is very diverse but more and more they are influencing the way people think in general. There is no censorship or direction to the content but organic evolution of content is taking place. The situation is at a very early stage as yet but after decades who knows what will evolve? There is an excellent opportunity to mould this new platform of communication to foster the greater penetration of philosophical discourse to a greater and more diverse audience.
But what philosophy says to this new audience must be rooted in the modern paradigm. The staid world of traditional philosophy with its own private almost impenetrable language, that references historical figures and their passed conceptual ideas and terms, must be dropped. The modern ideas of the universe in which we live must be the stage on which the future deliberations on philosophical thought are enacted. This world of a boundless perhaps infinite cosmos or many such, down to the strange world of the quantum infinitesimal with perhaps string-like structure along with its population of forces and matter types that give rise to symmetrical dynamical laws and time asymmetry, this is the world that must first be inculcated in the minds of the common person. Understanding where you are as an existential being is a necessary prerequisite to all understanding. Likewise the evolution of the cosmos and the consequent evolution of life on earth must be knowledge revealed to all, to give some idea on how our existential personal being came about. Having revealed the where and the how, the why is open to debate against the universally open background. This is the platform for modern philosophical discourse that will become relevant to the common person.
To establish that universal open background philosophers must ensure that early education, so much currently given over to instilling superstition and myth, be open to dissemination of current knowledge. There is no problem to teaching myth and religion as long as the dogmatic element is eased and the historical aspect accentuated against the backdrop of current thinking. There is no point in denying the past - we instead study the past in order to learn from it.
The question of why we are here transcends all areas of thought. It has aspects in science, in philosophy and, despite some modern dissenters, in religion. Science tries to work out causal laws that define the evolution of being. It has been remarkably successful in this endeavor in the last century and the explanations for existence from the moment of the Big Bang up to life on earth are coherent and persuasive. The two remaining big questions are what was before the moment of the Big Bang and what triggered life to come into existence at some point in the earth’s distant past. Philosophy has come up with no accepted coherent world view. It has focused from time to time on specific questions and approaches but there is no consensus or even trend towards a consensus of thought. The philosophy of the ancients stands on a par with modern thought if perhaps not nearly as convoluted. This is surely an indictment of where philosophy is at and where it is going. What religion brings to the table is the power of personal revelation and the way in which this revelation can strike empathetic chords in many others. It is this introspective personal journey that is of value in the seeking of meaning to existence. However the downside of the emergence of dogmatic ritual and belief makes religion unsuitable for the truly liberated modern psyche.
In a way philosophy must take over where religion recedes. Society cannot run in total free flow. There have to normative forces keeping it from imploding. Philosophy must engage with the current scientific paradigm and generate new ideas suitable for that new view of the world. Politics tends to be too parochial to develop ideas that can transcend borders and cultures. The only such ideas to date that have achieved a sense of universality or globalization are the methods and knowledge of science and the power and impact of economics. The latter has failed unexpectedly at the start of the twenty first century causing financial chaos and destruction, threatening the entire fabric of all global cultures. The former has spawned a level of industry and technology that worked initially very successfully but it too has been deemed a failure at the current time as the even greater threat of global warming destabilizes the delicate balance of the earth’s bio-sphere. Both these great endeavors delivered initially great growth and wealth. There is no doubt that the level of poverty in the world fell consistently over the twentieth century. But hidden in the complexity of their operations were the seeds of their demise. What was at fault was the overuse of the concept that free systems tend to self organize to optimum state. The role of philosophy was missing during this long century of supposed progress. Philosophy should be at the forefront of debate of just what progress is for humanity.
Eight
Consciousness