{"id":3245,"date":"2015-01-10T21:11:16","date_gmt":"2015-01-11T04:11:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/?p=3245"},"modified":"2017-07-06T13:35:00","modified_gmt":"2017-07-06T20:35:00","slug":"fundamental-reality-ix-stories-and-atoms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/fundamental-reality-ix-stories-and-atoms\/","title":{"rendered":"Fundamental Reality IX: Stories and Atoms"},"content":{"rendered":"

You might say that, at any rate, it is very natural<\/em> to suppose that an animal whose brain processes sensory stimuli, represents them as patterns, and then reacts to them should be conscious<\/a>.\u00a0 Granted, it is very natural for you<\/em> to think this, since you are yourself a conscious being, and what’s more you are evolved to attribute mental states to other things in order to help you survive and reproduce.<\/p>\n

When we engage with fictional characters displayed in books or anime (leaving aside plays and movies, since in them the actors are real people), we are indulging our tendency to treat sets of letters or pixels which have no inherent <\/em>meaning, as if they did have meaning, in fact as though they were people.\u00a0 But none of us think that the characters in books have an independent mental existence, since <\/em>apart from the actions of an external mind in making sense of them, they have no intrinsic meaning or significance.<\/p>\n

Well, in some sense we are in the same boat as these fictional characters.\u00a0 We have the advantage that our brains, lives, and actions are specified in considerably more detail, whereas in the case of fiction there are a lot of gaps to be filled in.\u00a0 But from a sufficiently \u201cobjective\u201d perspective, we are ourselves just a collection of material objects, a set of 1’s and 0’s in the cosmic computer with no inherent meaning.\u00a0 Well, evidently this supposedly objective perspective is wrong.\u00a0 Our Universe seems to be more hospitable than that.\u00a0 Sometimes, when there is a collection of matter to which meaning might <\/em>be ascribed, it is <\/em>so ascribed.\u00a0 Something is to us as we are to anime characters, interpreting the pattern as significant.<\/p>\n

As Muriel Rukeyser writes in her poem “The Speed of Darkness<\/a>” [erotic themes, not safe for work]:<\/p>\n

Say it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Say it.
\nThe universe is made of stories,
\nnot of atoms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, all of this suggests that the fundamental nature of existence has to be more like a mind than like a set of equations, because no set of equations interprets itself.\u00a0 And obviously we<\/em> are not the most fundamental minds in existence, because human beings are contingent.\u00a0 We are born and we die and we need not have existed.\u00a0 The Universe existed long before we did.\u00a0 Therefore, some other mind-like entity must be.\u00a0 At best we participate <\/em>in the operations of this mind.<\/p>\n

Being the most fundamental entity in existence, there can be no distinction between its subjective thoughts and feelings and the objective \u201creal world\u201d, as we have seen previously<\/a>.\u00a0 Its thoughts are what is.<\/p>\n

This is not the only way to try to incorporate mental qualities into the fundamental description of the world, but it has a certain appeal due to its simplicity.\u00a0 In any case, these considerations turn the tables on claims that Naturalism is simpler because it can describe everything in a mathematically quantitative way, without any appeal to basic mental qualities.\u00a0 You can’t get mental qualities out of any<\/em> model of the world, unless somehow you put them in from the beginning.<\/p>\n

To recapitulate: <\/em>a book is a material object containing a set of letters in a row.\u00a0 The words in a book contain meaning because a human being, who is conscious, reads and understands them.\u00a0 But why does the human brain contain any consciousness or meaning?\u00a0 Because the ultimate nature of reality is like a mind, not like a set of equations, and it “reads” our brains and finds them to be meaningful.<\/p>\n

Given that the series has to terminate in any case, why not just stop at our own minds rather than on God?\u00a0 Because we know that we, as complicated, evolved, and contingent constructs, are not the most fundamental entities in existence, and therefore any reasonable worldview should explain everything about ourselves in terms of a more fundamental picture.<\/p>\n

Or to put it another way, if there are any types of meaning in the world which cannot be deduced just from the laws of physics, then it follows that the most fundamental reality is more than just those laws of physics, and indeed it must be something capable of supporting this meaning.\u00a0 This increases the probability that the fundamental reality is more analogous to a mind than a set of equations.<\/p>\n

By itself, this Argument from Consciousness might well support a pantheistic conclusion, rather than a theistic one.\u00a0 But for the reasons given before<\/a>, I think the unity and clarity of Monotheism has a decided advantage, not least for making sense of a scientific approach to the world.<\/p>\n

Next: Theories of Ethics<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You might say that, at any rate, it is very natural to suppose that an animal whose brain processes sensory stimuli, represents them as patterns, and then reacts to them should be conscious.\u00a0 Granted, it is very natural for you to think this, since you are yourself a conscious being, and what’s more you are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metaphysics","category-theological-method"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3245"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3269,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3245\/revisions\/3269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}