Physics and Consciousness

So little time and so much to do. What is discomforting, as a physicist, about my narrative below is that it is only an argument from analogy. What we'd really like to do is derive an equation that shows what conscious experience is and how it works. But we don't know how to do that. We are not even close. And no one really has any idea. People like David Chalmers acknowledge this and at least state the problem correctly. Understanding the brain is difficult enough. But even knowing the physiological correlates of consciousness do not tell us what it is. We may know something about how the electrical impulses move about as I lift my arm. But we have no idea how it is that I can do that. I can lift my arm, change my heart rate, and change my body chemistry. If I were a young man again, research in this area might be the path I'd take.

Physics and Emergence

I'm going to ramble along the lines of the conversation that Rob and I have been having in the responses to recent posts below. I'm not sure exactly what I'm gonna say but let's get started.

The way one is trained in both physics and engineering is by learning from simplified examples. Concepts are taught from the most basic, fundamental representation. Then the problems at the end of the chapter are just one or two steps of complexity above that. For instance, to learn kinetics, what happens when two objects collide that are going at different speeds and directions, we start with infinitely hard billiard balls that are perfect spheres and do not absorb energy from each other. There are other background assumptions we won't go into. There is no spin involved and no friction with the surface on which they sit. Everything is idealized. There is good reason for starting in this way. We must start first with the simple and get practice in order to learn the concepts and make sure we understand what we are doing.

There is a well known joke about this. A physicist was once asked to consult with a farm regarding a herd of cows that was not producing enought milk. After studying the problem and determining his solution, the physicist went to the blackboard to explain to his customer, saying "First, we assume a spherical cow..."

That's the end of the joke and everybody laughs.

But, when we get jobs and go out into the real world to solve real problems, all the easy things have been done. The equations get complicated. The machines we work with are not ideal spheres or cylinders and cannot be described by simple equations. Mathematical models are constructed. Data collected, the models are corrected and provided with "fudge factors" to make them work so they make the right predictions enough of the time to be useful.

The problems to be attacked in this way are many. But, we can only do simple machines and circuitry this way. And some simple fluid dynamic problems. Mechanical and fluid flow devices follow the rule's of Newton's mechanics. With electrical devices we use not only Maxwell's electromagnetic theory but quantum theory as well.

But, as great as physics and its subset of mechanical and electrical engineering is, it is pretty useless for telling us what a living cell is doing and what it will do. With such a complex, higher order system, new laws apply. I'm guessing emergence theory tells us that the with the higher complexity, new order and new phenomena have emerged which exert control over the lower. When we progress from single cell life to multicellular life, the next level, the new entity exerts control (supervene's) over it's cellular constituents. At some point in the appearance of life, consciousness appeared, that is, the ability to feel and experience. Now, it is the highest level.

postscript: I watched the special on the Gospel of Judas on the National Geographic channel last night. Enjoyed that. But, can't say that GJudas has anything new to tell us either about the real Jesus or the real Judas. Perhaps, it highlights that we really don't know that much about the latter.

Music and the Meaning of Life

It has always been a mystery to me why music is so important to me and to others. Music reaches way down deep.

I led congregtional singing twice Sunday. Dorothy and I drove 80 miles north of here to a small church in Speedwell, TN. for a morning service there. The scenery of the rolling hills with the mountains as backdrop was oh so beautiful and comforting. Tonight I led at the West End Church of Christ. Several commented that I'd sung some of their favorites. That was my good fortune to have picked what so many wanted. Some remarked that they liked it because I picked older songs that they knew. One person said a new song to him was one he learned in college. I reckon that was about 30 years ago for him.

Yes, music is something that goes way deep inside of us. What we hear becomes part of us and even who we are. The music of our youth helps to form our personal identity. When I was a teenager, I don't believe they used Led Zeppelin or the Who music to sell cars or as introduction to television shows. Back then they used something more appropriate to the buyer's age group.

I once read about a doctor in Vienna who treated spinal injury patients. He claimed that playing music that was popular during a person's puberty produce noticeable effects in healing. It got their juices going in a special way that music from other era's in their could not. I read that twenty or so years ago and don't know if anyone has followed up on that but it rings true with me. The Beatles hit the scence as I was going through puberty and they and the other bands of the British Music invasion of the sixties stir things up inside me in a way that other music doesn't.

I love all kinds of music. Recently, I bought a couple of Lone Ranger episodes on DVD from Cracker Barrell just so I could hear the background music, the William Tell Overture and other pieces. An older man at church gave me a CD of his favorite: Dixieland music. It is great. Each type of music takes one to a different time and place. One can be transported there to smell the smells experience the scene. Reggae music can change one's mood after the first few beats and induce feelings of relaxation and ease. I could ramble on about the different feelings produced by different musics. I love classical. There just is too much good music to keep up with these days. I don't dislike Rap. I just haven't had much exposure too it. Can't Touch This by M. C. Hammer was a work of genius I thought. Too much music and so little time.

Yep music is important and I'm not sure why. Don't know how it has evolutionary value or how it arose in our brains. Exploring that issue could be fruitful for understanding the mind body problem. Who knows?

Process Theology

Am exploring process theology by reading Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition by John B. Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin. The book was published in 1976 and is oriented mostly toward the influence of Alfred North Whitehead. This is interesting on page 24:

We have had the view that the ultimate constituents of the world were like tiny billiard balls. Any changes brought about in the world involved only the rearrangement of externally related bits of matter. Since they did not permeate each other, no irreversible changes could be effected. If some combination of things is found to have unfortunate consequences, the combination can simply be undone, and things will be returned to the state they were in before. Ecology, as the study of the interrelationships of things, has taught us that this view is false. Interrelations are internal to things. Whitehead's thought is throughly ecological. It involves extending to the status of a universal truth Paul's insight that we're "members of one another."

This book is now thirty years old but is amazingly contemporary in its emphasis on relationship and emergence and other things.

Worldview

Have been reading Everyman Revived: The Common Sense of Michael Polanyi by Drusilla Scott. Am finding out about the idea of emergence as it is applied to the development of life and evolution. Perhaps, I'll have to check, Ken Wilber was influenced by Polanyi's work and others cited, like Arthur Koestler. The latter is an author I've been meaning to read for years but have never gotten around to it.

On page 105, Drusilla quotes from Koestler's book The God That Failed in regard to K's communist upbringing

"My party education had equipped my mind with such elaborate shock absorbing buffers and elastic defences that everything seen and heard became automatically transformed to fit a pre-conceived pattern."

That describes a lot of us doesn't it?

Current Readings

1. The Amazing Law of Influence by King Duncan - a positive upbeat book about people influencing other people. My friend and boss invited me to hear this man at a local Methodist church recently and I like what I heard.

2. Mapping Postmodernism by Robert C. Greer - A survey of christian approaches to postmodernism by a former missionary. Pretty deep. Still soaking it in.

3. Restoring the First-century Church in the Twenty-first Century - Essays on the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, In Honor of Don Haymes, ed. by Warren Lewis and Hans Rollman. Lots of good stories here.

4. Evangelicalism and the Stone-Campbell Movement - ed. by William R. Baker Essays on whether or not SC churches are evangelical or not etc. I have never identified with evangelicals.

Stephan's Quintet - Galaxies in Collison

Explanation from Hubble Site. And Science Daily.

Jesus Parables

Back when I was a student at the University of Virginia, I heard a weekend lecture from a prof in the Religious Studies Department by the name of Dan Via. He discussed Jesus' parables from a literary perspective using the categories of Comedy and Tragedy. Subsequently I read his book The Parables and then one of his sources, Interpreting the Parables by A. M. Hunter. What I learned in the latter book has stayed with me all these years. I will follow with a post on it eventually.

This week I did some reading in Via's book for the first time in over twenty years. Now, I am just beginnng to understand some of it that I hadn't earlier. It approaches Jesus from an existential direction and it seems quite contemporary in some ways as it fits with my recent reading regarding postmodernism and foundationalism.

The very fact that Jesus compared the kingdom of God to ordinary, everyday people and activities suggests some kind of analogy between God and man. p. 104

he says regarding the parables,

Because of their aesthetic nature they are in certain ways more effective than propositional statements could be, and because of their realistic and dramatic subject matter they give a particular content to our understanding of our relationship with God and tie it to human experience. p. 65

And this statement has stayed with me all of these years,

It may be agreed that the biblical text transcends the author's self-understanding...the author of artistic works says more than he knows he is saying... p 39

Relationship

"The way to save the world is not through more rules to live by, but through right relationships to live for.
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Relationship is the soul of the universe. "(p 1)

Out of the Question ...Into the Mystery by Leonard Sweet


We need to move from Protestantism's propositional, fact-based, science-objective orientation to relationality. Life and reality: its all about relationship.

I say this even though I'm a research and development engineer, a nerd who's loved and lived science and technology all of his life.

The Christian and Meditation

Meditation and christianity have long been partners, although it has not been at all prominent in Protestant tradition. I would like to learn more about it. Millions of people, of all religions, find value in the contemplative life.

Here's link to an interesting site devoted to a modern, er postmodern christianity and meditation and mysticism.

Ekstasis June 3 2005

Ekstasis Main

A Campbellite selects a quote from a Campbell

"It is a law of our subject, proven time and time again, that where the orthodoxies of the world go apart, the mystic way unites. The orthodoxies are concerned primarily with the maintenance of a certain social order, within the pale of which the individual is to function; in the interest of which a certain "system of sentiments" must be instilled into every member; and in the defense of which all deviants are to be, one way or another, either reformed, deformed, or liquidated. The mystic way, on the other hand, plunges within, to those nerve centers that are in all members of the human race alike, and are at once the well springs and ultimate receptacles of life and all experiences of life."*

*from Joseph Campbell in The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology pp.448-9, Penguin Books, 1987 edition.

Kierkegaard Quote

from Soren Kirkegaard*

"First and foremost, no impatience . . . A direct attack only strengthens a person in his illusion, and at the same time embitters him. There is nothing that requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. If anything prompts the prospective captive to set his will in opposition, all is lost. . . [The indirect method. . . . loving and serving the truth, arranges everything. . . . and then shyly withdraws (for love is always shy), so as not to witness the admission which he makes to himself alone before God - that he has lived hitherto in an illusion."

I have been all these people: attacker, attacked, and the one under an illusion. Wish that years ago I had read this and taken to heart.




*from p. 93 of Mapping Postmodernism by Robert C. Greer, 2003 Intervarsity Press. His footnote is the following: Soren Kierkegaard, The Point of View of My Work as an Author, in The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 751; cited in Taylor, Myth of Certainty, pp. 25-26

Inerrancy

Am reading Mapping Postmodernism: a survey of Christian options by Robert C. Greer. Learned something new on the topic of inerrancy. I had thought that the general opinion was that it was only the original manuscripts that were inerrant and that our extant manuscripts and modern translations are admitted to have typos, misprints, and other problems. But Greer informs that there are some who believe that God has not left us in this situation; and that he has provided an error free version for our times as well, the King James Version. This does seem to be a more consistent position. If inerrancy means so much, what good is it that only the first readers of the original autographs had the only inerrant copy? But there are well known problems with the KJV that nearly everyone now acknowledges, in part due to the better textual evidence discovered since its publication. This is just one more reason why inerrancy is problematic.

Generous Orthodoxy

In Generous Orthodoxy on page 59 Bryan McLaren quotes a mentor of his as having said "Scratch the paint of a liberal and you'll find an alienated fundamentalist underneath." Coming from a fellowship, the churches of Christ, that fractured a religious body over having pianos in worship, I know what he is talking about. This is one example among many of particular doctrinal points that could get one into trouble. Such rule keeping and enforcement, I think, has produced a lot of liberals. Some of these are so liberal that they switched to the Baptists. Some went to seminary/grad school where they fanned out to cover the theological spectrum.

The Meaning of Light

"Arthur Young has pointed out the simple but profound truth that we do not actually see light. Instead, we see by light and with light."

from The Unfolding Self by Ralph Metzner, p164, Origin Press 1998.

And Ralph cites the following in the endnotes on p. 291

"Light is not an objective thing that can be investigated as can an ordinary object. Even a tiny snow crystal, before it melts, can be photographed or seen by more than one person. But a photon, the ultimate unit of light, can be seen only once: its detection is its annihilation. Light is not seen; it is seeing." (Arthur Young, The Reflexive Universe, p. 10)

The meaning of light is of interest to me because I've made my living, beginning in grad school over thirty years ago, by pushing around and capturing light. The connection between the physical aspects and spiritual are fascinating.