Series:
Essay #2:
Synopsis:
Spirits
Mind and Matter
Reality is mind and matter, together but distinct
Mind exists and consciousness is real: we have direct, personal experience of them, and there’s no need for further proof. Just look inside. Said Carl Jung, “It is an almost absurd prejudice to suppose that existence can only be physical. As a matter of fact, the only form of existence of which we have immediate knowledge is psychic” (From Psychology and Religion).
Mind is first-person consciousness, and they're immaterial. It’s intuitively true that the mind and its ideas are distinct from matter. To use a Freeman Dyson example, a Euclidian geometric point, by definition, has no parts and no magnitude, therefore it’s an idea that can’t exist in the material world. It’s a material impossibility. But a point does exist in idea-world, within the pattern of relationships that is geometry. Further, a geometric point corresponds with reality when we use geometry to map the world, which we’ve been doing quite successfully for more than two thousand years. The idea of a geometric point exists, and it’s distinct from matter.
All mathematics is immaterial, take for example, X=Y. Equality exists in math but not in the material world because no two material things can be identical. The material world consists of particulars, whereas ideas are universals. Are universals illusory? Of course not. If universals are illusion, then so is mathematics, and so is modern science which, since Galileo, is built on math.
Ideas are real, but who knows what they’re made of? Ideas are not made of atoms. If an idea is made of atoms, you could say that formerly 2+3=5, but now 2+3=4 because the number 3 lost weight. But that's silly. If ideas are made of particles, you could open up my skull and see ideas among the blood and neurons. But you can’t. If ideas are made of matter, they’d be restricted by the physical laws of matter. But they’re not. One of my daughters works at Facebook and they have a saying: “it’s easier to move bits than atoms.” We move ideas around in ways we can’t move matter, which is why we say, measure three times, cut once. If ideas are reducible to matter, we could trace the movement of an idea from the page of a book to my mind by tracing the mechanical movement of particles. Doesn’t work that way. Light photons bring lots of data from page to eye, but photons don’t carry the meaning of “to be or not to be.”
Mind and first-person awareness are not made of atoms, but they exist in the world on the same ontological basis as atoms: they are exactly like fundamental particles in that we cannot reduce them any farther to more basic things, nor can we explain what they really are. We describe an electron sometimes as particle and sometimes as wave function, but we don’t know what a particle or a wave function really is beyond the mathematical equation we use to describe it. Idea and matter are both ontological mysteries where every few decades we think up new words to describe them without ever knowing what they are.
An idea lives in first-person consciousness when a person thinks it. The immaterial world of ideas and mind exist inside internal, first-person experience, which is why they can’t be observed from an outside, third-person perspective. A neurologist can open up my skull and look at my brain, but he can’t experience what I’m experiencing, he can’t know meaning as I know meaning… unless I tell him, and then he re-creates my meaning in his first-person consciousness. Particles in the brain don’t add up to the meaning that we feel. Therefore, although it’s true that first-person experience runs on a meat platform (the brain), the meat and the mind aren’t identical: one is immaterial and experienced from the inside, while the other is material and seen from the outside.
Meaning lives in a realm beyond the meat, beyond its control. Viktor Frankl gives an example of starving concentration camp prisoners who talk of food all day long yet despair not the lack of food, but that their suffering had been converted into that of an animal not a man: “How we longed for proper human suffering at that time, real human problems, real human conflicts, in place of these degrading questions of eating or starving...” (from Yes to Life). The meat/brain says, “we’re starving!” and the mind replies, “yes, we feel it, all day long, we can’t get away from it, but there’s something here that's more important than that.”
Therein the mystery of mind, self, this me who exists behind the neural networks. Are they illusion? No, that’s more silliness, because a self, a conscious mind, is required to have an illusion! Both truth and illusion are experienced, and atoms don’t experience anything. Mind experiences.
Mind is real, and it dominates human reality. Even a thorough-going materialist spends most of his day in the immaterial, whether talking (to others, to himself), reading, writing, watching TV, thinking up arguments to defeat spiritualism. A friend once mentioned to me how cool it was that zen masters could meditate past all that talking in their brains, and by doing so the meditator gets to ultimate reality. I replied, human reality is that endless monologue in our minds; it’s the meanings we share in conversation, in communal belief, and if we can't get it from outside, we self-generate it inside. I have voices in my head all day long, and although the sounds are a manifestation of my material brain, the meaning of the words are not.
Every living being actively experiences the world, he knows what things mean to him, and it’s more than material. To steal an idea from David Deutsch, we’re more important than matter because we add knowledge to matter. Freeman Dyson says it best in Infinite in All Directions: “Mind, through the long course of biological evolution, has established itself as a moving force in our little corner of the universe. Here on this small planet, mind has infiltrated matter and has taken control.”