Apophenion

by Peter J Carroll

  Westerners frequently misinterpret the Buddhist idea of the illusory nature of reality as more or less equivalent to the denigration of the material plane in favour of the spiritual plane, which occurs in much monotheistic thought. Strict Buddhists however, regard the 'spiritual' as impermanent as the 'material'. Nevertheless, the austere core ideas of Buddhism rarely manifest in common practise and belief. Wherever you look they usually appear dressed in local custom and contaminated with superstition because people generally prefer folksy comforting religions and mysterious rituals to difficult ideas.

  A stone does not have any kind of 'being' underlying what it does. It consists entirely of its doing, and if it ceased such doing, 'it' would not have any kind of existence.

  Any so-called attribute of 'being' invariably arises from some kind of doing if you examine it closely enough.

  We inhabit a universe of events, not a universe full of things. Phenomena can give the macroscopic impression of having 'being' or 'thingness' but only because they actually consist of ongoing processes.

  I don't know about you, but I certainly do not have any sort of intrinsic being apart from what I do. In my youth I exhibited various behaviours, performed various thoughts, emotions, and acts, and expressed various opinions and ideals. In my middle years I now do different activities, my body looks different and it contains hardly any of the atoms or molecules that it did decades ago. I seem to have irretrievably lost many memories of trivial or boring events; and my mind now contains many things that it did not in my youth. When, or if, I get older, the older version may differ markedly from the current one in what it does.

  Thus I conclude that I do not have any sort of 'being', I consist only of the totality of what I do. I proceed through time as a process.

  The concept of 'being' may seem a harmless enough but rather sloppy and inaccurate way of modelling reality but it leads to appalling consequences. Every use of the words of the verb 'to be', like 'is' or 'are', conceals a false or questionable premise.

  The statement 'Today 'is' Wednesday' has only limited applicability, it may well not apply to the situation on the other side of the planet. The assertion that 'Pete 'is' stupid' has an outrageous generality. Does he invariably exhibit stupid behaviour?

  The assertion that Brown, White, Black, Yellow, Jewish, or French people 'are' dirty, clever, devious, brave, stupid, subhuman, evil, or whatever, leads to irrational thoughts and ghastly consequences, despite that some people within those groups, or indeed within any groups, may exhibit such behaviours at some times under various circumstances.

  If we want to philosophise with clarity we can not say that any phenomena 'is' any other phenomena. We can only speak of actions, resemblances, and differences.

  If we try and define what any phenomenon 'is' we merely apply a label to it, or say what its behaviour resembles. We can only define phenomena in terms of their resemblance to other phenomena and by implication, to what they do.

  Any statement about what anything 'is' only has utility to the extent that it implies what it does.

  When we speak of what any phenomenon 'does' we actually imply what we think it has done and what we think it will do.

  'Being' exists only as a neurological and linguistic illusion.

  The behaviour of quantum phenomena barely resembles the behaviour of anything else at all. Thus all attempts to define them in terms of what they 'are' end in failure.

  At best we can hope to describe what they do on the basis of what we think they have done have done and what we expect them to do. That actually that applies to every single phenomenon in the universe if we apply strict logic.

  The assumption that an electron is, or ought to be, either a wave or a particle, or indeed that it 'is' anything, renders quantum physics completely incomprehensible.

  The concept of 'being' implies some kind of metaphysical essence or quality in a phenomenon which exists somewhat independently of what we actually observe it doing.

  This being-doing duality leads directly to the misconception of a spirit-matter dualism which underpins nearly all religious ideas, and to a mind-matter or to a mind-body dualism which gives rise to insoluble but illusory problems and paradoxes in philosophy, psychology, and in our ideas about consciousness.

  So the seemingly innocuous idea of 'being' encourages sloppy inaccurate thinking and prejudice, it allows us to create idiotic religious ideas, it prevents us from understanding how the universe works, and it renders us incomprehensible to ourselves.

  Language structures thought, to at least the same degree that it reflects thought. Only with the greatest of difficulty can we formulate a thought which involves a concept for which we lack a word. Every word you do not understand represents an idea that you cannot easily have, but on the other hand, words can give a spurious reality to concepts that have no correlate in the real world at all.

  In particular the subject-verb-object sentence structure of the English language, and most other languages, encourages users to think in terms of the subject having some sort of separate 'being' from what it does.

  The exegesis presented in this book avoids the use of such words as 'am', 'is', and 'are', except in parenthesis for illustrative purposes. It similarly avoids the word 'was' for reasons which appear in Chapter 5.

  The abandonment of the language and concept of 'being' leads to a strict Monism, which eliminates any kind of spirit-matter or mind-body dualism.

  If we assert the reality of both spirit and matter, or of mind and matter we should only do so in terms of what these phenomena actually do, not what we suppose they 'are'.

  When we look at what kind of events actually occur, we find that we need only a single class of phenomena to account for it, and it makes no difference whether we call it spirit or mind or matter.

  Let's leave spirit out of the argument for a while because it does not seem to do anything except allegedly act as the mind of supposedly superhuman creatures.

  Now that we know a lot about how the body works, we have no reason to suppose that the body consists of anything other than matter. Thus we need only consider the mind-matter duality.

  Most people subjectively experience the actions of mind as quite separate from the activities of matter, although our ancestors and our childhood selves often did not make such rigid distinctions, and personified what we now usually think of as natural forces.

  Modern adults still continue to personify mammals, birds, and reptiles, and many still include insects in the category of mind possessing phenomena. But most people have given up on oceans and mountains and trees and relegated these phenomena to the category of matter only.

  Those who now theorise about the nature of mind in non-theological terms, mostly seem to have concluded that it emerges when biological nervous systems reach a certain threshold of complexity and sophistication. Such Emergentism describes mind as a mere epiphenomenon of matter, rather as we might describe rainbows as a surprising side effect of planetary meteorology. Darwin's theory of The Evolution of Species has lent considerable support to the idea of Emergentism, as it shows a gradual increase in complexity resulting in some creatures which think they have minds.

  However a radically different view remains possible. Perhaps mind constitutes a fundamental property of matter, and all matter does mind activity of some kind, and we should not regard it as dead and inert.

  Back in the days when thinkers felt fearful of espousing outright atheism, the idea of matter as a living substance found expression in the idea of Pantheism. To a pantheist the universe itself constitutes the mind of god. Every last star and atom constitutes a component of the mind of a god who does not exist separately from the universe which as a whole functions like a living creature, and we can regard ourselves as thoughts within a mind universe.

  Gradually the theism leached out of pantheism as it became apparent that the universe did not act as though its mind corresponded to that of some vengeful elderly gentleman with a rigidly authoritarian moral
agenda.

  The spirit-matter duality merely comprises a moral distinction. If the entire universe consisted of spirit or if the entire universe consisted of matter, then we would have no way of distinguishing which it consisted of, because they would both have to act in an identical manner to produce the universe we perceive. Religions mostly depend on the assumption that the universe consists of good spirit and bad matter and then they further confuse the issue with some bad spirits and some acceptable forms of matter, or at least some acceptable forms of behaviour on the material plane.

  So if the thinking pantheist must abandon the theism and seek a strict monist paradigm in which spirit, mind and matter consist of the same phenomena, what does that lead to? It leads to Panpsychism.

  * * *

  Part 2.

  Panpsychism

  Panpsychism has a history. Some anthropologists identify Panpsychic ideas in Animist and Shamanic systems. We can identify Panpsychic ideas of various kinds in the works of many philosophers including Thales in ancient Greece, Cardano and Giordano Bruno in the renaissance, then later in the works of Spinoza and Leibniz and Schopenhauer, and in more recent times in the works of Whitehead3 and Chalmers.4

  Panpsychism solved the mind-matter problem at a stroke. If matter naturally includes mind, then the presence of mind in the universe should occasion no surprise nor create any metaphysical paradox, for it occurs everywhere. Panpsychists dismissed the lack of apparent mental activity by teacups, tables and chairs on the basis that either it occurred so slowly that we could not perceive it, or that such phenomena consisted merely of more or less incoherent aggregates of their constituent parts, and therefore do not exhibit much more mental activity than those constituent parts.

  However the ubiquity of mind proposed by these philosophers did not find favour with Christian theologians who wanted to maintain a strict spirit-matter separation, and interest in the idea declined from an apogee in the nineteenth century in favour of a mechanistic Emergentism fuelled by the success of Darwinian evolutionary theory.

  But then along came Quantum Physics, and after a while it became apparent that the behaviour of the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy did seem to exhibit mindlike behaviour from a certain perspective.

  Quantum physics has a reputation for producing contra-intuitive experimental results which permit a wide spectrum of interpretations about what sort of reality underlies them. One interpretation states that no underlying reality exists. This seems less shocking when you consider that quantisation means we cannot continuously divide nature, at some stage we seem to come to the smallest possible bits of reality, and if so, nothing simpler or more fundamental can underlie them, the chain of cause and effect ends there.

  In practise the whole universe seems to run a very economical number of types of quanta. Atoms have only electrons orbiting just two types of quark which make up the protons and neutrons in their nuclei. We also have photons which account for light and most other rays and radiations. Two heavier versions of the electrons and the two types of quark do sometimes appear, but they play very little part in the activities of the universe. A couple of other energy exchanging particles seem to make nuclear processes work and the universe swarms with very tiny neutrinos which don't seem to do much except help old exhausted stars explode. The behaviour of this small number of types of quanta leads to all the splendidly complex and peculiar events we observe in the universe.

  Quantum Panpsychism depends on the idea that the basic quanta of matter and energy exhibit mind-like behaviour. Both mind and quanta exhibit a mixture of apparently causal and random behaviour.

  If we take 'Free Will' as a defining quality, or perhaps THE defining quality of mind, then we cannot explain it satisfactorily either in terms of deterministic or random behaviour, and we seem to have a paradox. Few people like to think that their behaviour always arises as a completely automatic response to circumstance. Few people like to think that their behaviour always generates itself randomly either.

  However, on closer inspection of the thinking process, it appears that we actually conjure free will quite satisfactorily from a mixture of deterministic and random mind processes. If I cannot decide between alternatives because each has equal logical or emotional appeal, then I end up choosing randomly or by mere whim. If no alternatives suggest themselves in a situation then I allow ideas to arise and combine randomly until I find something that makes logical or emotional sense.

  In practice I actually use a complex and stratified mixture of these procedures to reach decisions. Free will would have no use if it meant absolute freedom from all previous conditions and the demands of current circumstances.

  Thus by using a mixture of deterministic and random processes I arrive at decisions which lie within limits but which no agency, including me, could predict with certainty beforehand. I submit that what we call free will consists precisely of this kind of activity.

  If someone claims to have free will, ask them, 'free from precisely what?'

  We could fairly easily build information processing machines which exhibited any degree of free will by using the above principles. However we usually prefer to aggregate machines to do exactly what we want. When they act unexpectedly we tend to get annoyed with them.

  Chapter 5 presents evidence for the irreducible 'randomness within limits' in the behaviour of the quanta underlying reality, but for now it remains assumed.

  Although quanta have a simple form of free will, because they behave randomly within limits, most forms of bulk matter behave fairly deterministically and we can describe their behaviour with the approximation of 'cause and effect'. This arises because of the law of large numbers. Throw one dice and any of the six numbers may come up top, but throw six million of them and you will get almost exactly a million of each of the six numbers. The total of all the top numbers showing thus always comes out to almost exactly three and a half million every time. The more dice that you use, the smaller the deviation from exactly a one in six appearance of any number becomes.

  Random quantum behaviour can thus lead to apparently causal macroscopic behaviour.

  Large aggregates of quanta such as billiard balls thus behave predictably and with apparent determinism for short time periods.

  Yet if bulk matter aggregates or acts in such a way that some of its component quanta can affect the behaviour of the whole, then that whole begins to act with free will. The weather acts like this, and so does the brain. Even a 'low-minded' billiard ball exhibits non-causal behaviour eventually. The final position of a billiard ball becomes progressively less determinable in advance as it undergoes more and more sequential collisions. If it sets off with enough momentum to bounce off the cushions of the billiard table more than about 7 times, then its final position remains indeterminate until it happens. We can calculate the limits of this indeterminacy, and they equate roughly to the entire area of the table, so the ball could end up anywhere on it.

  Some philosophers regard Panpsychism, the paradigm of the ubiquity of mind, as neither provable nor falsifiable, and therefore that it lacks use or consequence, and thus that it merely qualifies as a mystical belief system.

  However quanta do exhibit a number of behaviours that do not always appear on the macroscopic scale of tables and chairs and stones, and these seem far more mind-like than the matter- like behaviours we get used to on the macro-scale. In particular, under certain circumstances, quanta seem to 'remember' what happened to them, and they also seem to 'communicate' with each other without apparent material contact.

  (Chapter 5 deals with these phenomena of 'quantum weirdness' in some detail.)

  Such quantum activities may explain how the apparently 'material' brain performs apparently 'mental' activity and why parapsychological events sometimes occur.

  Quantum Panpsychism can perhaps give us an economical explanation of how magic occurs and also provide some ideas on how to improve its effectiveness in practise.

  * * *

>   Part 3.

  Quantum Panpsychism

  and Magic

  In a dualistic spirit-matter or mind-matter paradigm, any kind of mind to matter effect (including ordinary thinking) appears mysterious, or parapsychological. Matter to mind or matter to spirit effects remain equally incomprehensible, or even more so if you put spirit in some sort of superior position.

  Now spirit-matter dualists frequently cite miracles as evidence for the reality of spirit or spiritual agencies. Claims of miracles underpin most religions, and most religions have a habit of interpreting the most trivial anomalies as hard evidence.

  Non-religious magicians tend to regard parapsychological events as evidence of nothing other than magic, because they can occur in non-religious contexts and also in the contexts of religions which specifically deny each others validity.

  Any religion which considers another religion false finds itself in the ridiculous position of having to attribute any miracles manifesting in the other religion as arising from the activities of the devils in its own.

  Quantum panpsychism suggests that we turn the whole argument on its head and interpret parapsychological events as evidence for the absence of spirit or mind as phenomena separate to matter.

  Miraculous, parapsychological, magical events tend to occur rather capriciously and infrequently on the macroscopic scale. However on the quantum scale they occur frequently and in a much more dependable fashion. The quantum level of reality seethes with weirdness, quanta appear to teleport by disappearing at one place and appearing at another, they appear to communicate instantaneously across space and probably time as well, sometimes they appear to exist in two places simultaneously, or in two contradictory states at the same time, and they may travel backwards in time.