Consciousness Violates The Laws of Physics
Ideas don't have mass or velocity. Humor has no thermal dimension. If you had an inorganic cosmos of whirling debris and gravity, it would not be possible to invent subjectivity without some a priori framework for it's existence. It would be like algae developing the ability to travel through time in order to catch more hours of daylight as a survival adaptation. Even if every thought and perception can be definitively mapped to neuroelectric biophysics, there's just no physical continuum that is relevant to the life of the mind as it is experienced subjectively.
Our universe is not made of matter or energy, it is made of order. Order that gives rise to the laws of physics, order that organisms experience in every aspect of their perception of existence, order that is knowable, unknowable, and known to be unknowable. To try to disqualify the coherence of the cosmos on the basis of materialism relies on a willful reduction of all of human experience to the behaviors of human bodies during waking hours.
We know from what's left of our memories of childhood, sleeping, dreaming, drugging, and using our imagination, that it is not necessary for our universe to have coherent laws in order for us to believe in it completely. We watch a movie and we don't see photon emissions on a plastic sheet, we don't see a flat simulation of reproduced optical analogs, we see and hear people in places. Whatever the human brain does physically to make memories is not relevant to the content and experience of the memories themselves, because the content can only be decoded fully by a fully human consciousness.
Until science recognizes the psyche as an irreducible whole, manifested into existence through biophysical processes but not identical to them, religious fundamentalism will likely continue to plague civilization. As long as people are being told that they don't 'really exist' but are just a collection of mortal tissues no different from a cadaver, they will continue cling to the Bronze Age religious model they have. As wrong as these Pre-Copernican notions are on evolution and cosmology, they succeed in their intended purpose - to directly address the questions of the human psyche such that they can create meaningful (and politically manageable) lives and communities.
The crisis now, in the face of the radical transformations wrought by technology and exploding populations, is that the Classical model fails to satisfy post-Enlightenment reasoning while the Scientific model fails to address human existence from the inside out. The answers to the big questions of our existence have become irrelevant to science, which is now lost in the far reaches of abstracted specialization, smashing infinitesimals together in a vacuum while elementary schools repeal the 20th century.
The universe gives us a lot of clues about our own limitations. We know that we cannot see the colors of most of the electromagnetic spectrum. We know that we can't hear above or below a range of sound frequencies. Through the scientific revolution we know that our naive assumptions based on superficial observations can be replaced by more powerful and coherent models by using naive objectivity. By taking ourselves out of the center of the cosmos, a new cosmos opened up for us.
The territory ahead, I think, has to do with tapping into a deeper objectivity - one in which the totality of ourselves, our lives, and the content of the meaning attached to it is not disqualified but rather rediscovered as an expression of cosmic structure as ancient as the atom and more important to us than all of the matter and energy in the galaxy. The Classical religious model suffered from a fatal egotism which was replaced with a more subtle egotism of scientific objectivity. Subtle since we know that we can never really have true objectivity. We are what we are. We're not a galaxy or a molecule, we're not apes or Australopithicines, we are members of a specialized tribe of domesticated primates, conditioned by centuries of cultural programming on top of millenia of physiological adaptations. We are a lot of things, but objective isn't one of them.
Our universe is not made of matter or energy, it is made of order. Order that gives rise to the laws of physics, order that organisms experience in every aspect of their perception of existence, order that is knowable, unknowable, and known to be unknowable. To try to disqualify the coherence of the cosmos on the basis of materialism relies on a willful reduction of all of human experience to the behaviors of human bodies during waking hours.
We know from what's left of our memories of childhood, sleeping, dreaming, drugging, and using our imagination, that it is not necessary for our universe to have coherent laws in order for us to believe in it completely. We watch a movie and we don't see photon emissions on a plastic sheet, we don't see a flat simulation of reproduced optical analogs, we see and hear people in places. Whatever the human brain does physically to make memories is not relevant to the content and experience of the memories themselves, because the content can only be decoded fully by a fully human consciousness.
Until science recognizes the psyche as an irreducible whole, manifested into existence through biophysical processes but not identical to them, religious fundamentalism will likely continue to plague civilization. As long as people are being told that they don't 'really exist' but are just a collection of mortal tissues no different from a cadaver, they will continue cling to the Bronze Age religious model they have. As wrong as these Pre-Copernican notions are on evolution and cosmology, they succeed in their intended purpose - to directly address the questions of the human psyche such that they can create meaningful (and politically manageable) lives and communities.
The crisis now, in the face of the radical transformations wrought by technology and exploding populations, is that the Classical model fails to satisfy post-Enlightenment reasoning while the Scientific model fails to address human existence from the inside out. The answers to the big questions of our existence have become irrelevant to science, which is now lost in the far reaches of abstracted specialization, smashing infinitesimals together in a vacuum while elementary schools repeal the 20th century.
The universe gives us a lot of clues about our own limitations. We know that we cannot see the colors of most of the electromagnetic spectrum. We know that we can't hear above or below a range of sound frequencies. Through the scientific revolution we know that our naive assumptions based on superficial observations can be replaced by more powerful and coherent models by using naive objectivity. By taking ourselves out of the center of the cosmos, a new cosmos opened up for us.
The territory ahead, I think, has to do with tapping into a deeper objectivity - one in which the totality of ourselves, our lives, and the content of the meaning attached to it is not disqualified but rather rediscovered as an expression of cosmic structure as ancient as the atom and more important to us than all of the matter and energy in the galaxy. The Classical religious model suffered from a fatal egotism which was replaced with a more subtle egotism of scientific objectivity. Subtle since we know that we can never really have true objectivity. We are what we are. We're not a galaxy or a molecule, we're not apes or Australopithicines, we are members of a specialized tribe of domesticated primates, conditioned by centuries of cultural programming on top of millenia of physiological adaptations. We are a lot of things, but objective isn't one of them.