Dialogue ~ 51

The Nobel prize-winning biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi said, “Life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.” His statement emphasises an importance of energy transfer in living systems.

If energy transfer is ‘the conversion of one form of energy into another’ or movement of energy ‘from one place to another’, then it is a process of communication. Can we say that life is communication – that it is information – or is it something else besides?

In her book ‘The Rainbow and the Worm’, the geneticist Mae-Wan Ho described how they had discovered an optical technique which enabled them to see the vibrant interference colours being generated through the liquid crystalline nature of the anatomy of living organisms. She said that liquid crystals are states of matter between solid crystals and liquids. Ervin Laszlo, in his book ‘the interconnected universe’, has spoken of how a liquid crystalline ‘continuum’ of the body may be a holographic medium.

In an article published in 2014 on the media platform ‘futurism’, Marina Jones wrote about the scientist-philosopher John Archibald Wheeler and his conceptualisation of ‘quantum foam’ and of a ‘participatory universe’; quantum foam being at the foundation of the fabric of the universe in which ‘virtual particles’ pop in and out of existence in space.

Wheeler proposed that everything is particles, everything is fields and everything is information. A question which intrigued Wheeler in his final years was “Are life and mind irrelevant to the structure of the universe or are they central to it?”

Wheeler’s concept of quantum foam and of a participatory universe is fascinating. Where does one begin in terms of comprehending spatial relationship; does it not render any means of measuring the complexity as redundant or at best as arbitrary?

Recently, I referred to a conversation between physicist Max Tegmark and Robert Lawrence Kuhn, in which Tegmark said, “A mathematic structure such as Einstein’s space-time - Minkowski space - doesn’t exist in time or space because time or space exists in it.”

Robert Lawrence Kuhn replied to Tegmark, “.. it’s impossible for mathematics not to exist - you can devise any possible world that you want to have, but you can’t do one that doesn’t have at least certain kinds of mathematical structures in it.”

There is somewhat of a chicken and egg idiom being presented in this argument - does mathematics generate the existence of the universe or do we comprehend the universe by way of mathematics?

Is the mechanism of our thought mathematical? If mapping is mathematical, how to interpret nascent thought? What about intuitive or sensory experience which precedes thought, is this mathematical?

If a person contemplates their world through a lens of spatial relationship, how does it frame the structure of what is thought and interpretation of meaning? Does life require increasing complexity so as to reveal itself through one’s being?

Essentially – is consciousness (or that which is thought) at cause or caused by whichever model of the world as appears through mathematics?

Rather than to assume that mathematical structures are timeless and this ‘removes a predicament of having created them somehow’, is it fair to suggest that mathematical structures are congruent with thought; so it is that ‘I am to you as you are to me: we are one’?

It remains pivotal to any debate as to the nature of reality that the topic in hand concerns not only what we know but how we know what we know, given that we apply or ‘become’ our knowing and are influencing what has been dubbed as a ‘field’.  

According to Wikipedia, “Christian scholasticism emerged within the monastic schools that translated scholastic Judeo-Islamic philosophies and thereby ‘rediscovered’ the collected works of Aristotle.”

It appears that these monastic schools attempted to “harmonise his (Aristotle’s) metaphysics and the account of a prime mover with the Latin Catholic dogmatic Trinitarian theology…”

Further, whilst “Scholasticism was initially a program conducted by medieval Christian thinkers attempting to harmonise the various authorities of their own tradition and to reconcile Christian theology with classical and late antiquity philosophy, especially that of Aristotle but also of Neoplatonism … these monastic schools became the basis of the earliest European medieval universities, contributing to the development of modern science.”

“Scholasticism is a method of learning more than a philosophy or a theology, since it places a strong emphasis on dialectical reasoning to extend knowledge by inference and to resolve contradictions.”

This method of learning has been applied to many fields of study.

What is dialectical reasoning? I came across this definition, “… it is the process of arriving at truth through a process of comparing and contrasting various solutions.”

Mae-Wan Ho said, “To those of us who do not see our quest for knowledge as distinct from the rest of our life, there can be no permanent boundary between science and other ways of knowing. Knowledge is all of a piece. In particular, it is all of a piece with the knowing consciousness, so there can be no ‘a priori’ dualism between consciousness and science. For from implying that consciousness must be ‘reduced’ to physics and chemistry, I see physics and chemistry evolving more and more under the guidance of an active consciousness that participates in knowing.”

The term ‘A priori’ is from Latin and means ‘from what comes earlier’; it denotes reasoning or knowledge which proceeds from theoretical deduction - informal logic, based on hypothesis or theory that is without facts which are derived from empirical observation or experience. The validity of an argument in logic is decided by its form (the relation of its assumptions and its conclusion) and not content.

What does it mean to have no ‘a priori’ dualism between consciousness and science? To avoid making assumptions (judgment) or associations without having direct experience of a thing - potentially that knowledge also is inconclusive? This does not appear to suggest that we suppress reason but it might be that the means by which we have interpreted what we know has been under-utilised at an expense of expediency and influence.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (whilst originally offered in respect of biological evolution) suggested that an alchemical force drives organisms up a ladder of complexity; a second environmental force adapts them to local environments through use and disuse of characteristics.

We exist in a time wherein much of our species is preoccupied with experimental science and of validation as a primary means of knowing (and of knowledge). Does this predilection negate the knowing of the synergy of the field (waves) and of particles? We comprehend this dilemma only too well, in that we have given ourselves the Zen wisdom of the ‘overflowing cup’ or the words of Jesus when he said, “… unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Perhaps it is pertinent to ask, “Are we sustaining what is a theological as well as cultural representation of knowledge such that we are becoming increasingly specialised and intent upon gathering and containing data (complexity), at a cost of comprehending its innate purpose in life?”

To return to Wheeler’s essential question, “Are life and mind irrelevant to the structure of the universe or are they central to it?” Clearly, he was an advocate for living in the question so as to discover its answer.

He said, “The universe does not exist ‘out there’, independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about what appears to be happening. We are not only observers; we are participators. In some strange sense this is a participatory universe. Physics is no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, fields of force, into geometry, or even into space and time. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself.”