Remember the X-files?
Well, the question about there being a truth “out there” is an interesting one. Out where, exactly? I’ve stumbled across an interesting couple of phrases recently which are getting me thinking about the nature of reality and how we experience it.
Our experience of the world helps to mould our brains, and our brains help to mould our experience of the world.
Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary, uses a lovely word – “reverberative” – to capture the idea of reality being a dynamic interactive relationship between the subject and the object.
….right-hemisphere qualities of being a betweenness: a reverberative, “re-sonant”, “respons-ible” relationship, in which each party is altered by the other and by the relationship between the two..”
So, even if there is an “out there” it can only be known in the acting experiencing, a two-way, constantly changing experience.
Everything that we know can be known only from an individual point of view, or under one or another aspect of its existence, never in totality or perfection. Equally what we come to know consists not of things, but of relationships, each apparently separate entity qualifying the others to which it is related.
“…what we come to know consists not of things” – now that’s a thought-provoking phrase.
Then I came across an article by Professor Richard Conn Henry, from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at John Hopkins University. His article, published in Nature, is titled “The Mental Universe”, with the summary “The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualise observations as things”.
He quotes the physicists Sir James Jeans….
..the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter….we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.
and Sir Arthur Eddington
It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character.
But, says Professor Henry, that’s exactly what quantum physics is showing us. In this article he says “The Universe is entirely mental…and we must learn to perceive it as such”, concluding with the following words –
The Universe is immaterial – mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy
I have a feeling materialistic scientism is in its last days!
Heroes Not Zombies 