The transcendent in physics, psychology and mysticism/religion

Posted by Olly Robinson on 20 April 2010 | 2 Comments

Tags: science, physics, dark matter, mysticism, psychology, unconscious

The notion of the transcendent is one we traditionally associate with religion or with a mystically-informed worldview. The word refers to that which is ineffable, beyond normal experience and the phenomenal world.  It is traditionally associated with those worldviews that postulate a sphere of existence beyond the confines of our five senses and the material world. There is a transcendent premise in all the world’s great religions – while they disagree on whether there’s a God, or how many Gods there are, and on what the ends of life may be, they all concur on the issue of a transcendent plane of existence, or multiple planes beyond our own.

Some see the idea of the transcendent as incongruous with science – that it in some way undermines the idea of a closed and rule-bound lawful physical universe. Other don’t, and think that it’s rational to suggest that the visible world may have invisible origins and that there is more to this universe than can be accounted for by our five senses and our linguistic-rational faculties.

Here, I would like to briefly reflect on how both physics and psychology in fact provide support for the idea of the transcendent.  In psychology, we have known for a century that there is a vast space of ourselves and our pasts that we are unaware of.  We know that our conscious life is the visible tip of an iceberg, with the morass of ourselves resting dark under the surface in the unconscious. When we have visions, hear voices, experience deeply meaningful dreams, or feel deep intuitions, it is seen as the operation of mysterious forces within us, beyond our conscious control, that shape us and make us. Or when we perform mundane activities like driving or singing, we have no idea how we do it – it operates subconsciously.

Furthermore, there is now robust evidence from parapsychology to suggest that some kind of as-yet-undiscovered medium or process can transmit information between individuals. We don’t know what this is, and we don’t know if we can know what this is. It may be transcendent to our waking conscious minds.

In physics, data now suggest that we are unable to see 80% of the universe. This hidden majority is composed of dark matter. We can infer the effects of dark matter on the visible bit that we can see, but we don’t know what it is.  It is everywhere, passing through us all the time. Dark matter doesn’t interact with light, so we know it’s not composed of atoms, and if it does interact with us, we don’t know how. Every material thing in the universe is 4/5 dark matter, 1/5 normal matter. That applies to you and me too – 4/5 of you is something else, something weird that you can’t see. You are not just your visible body. That is just 20% of you. Physicists such as Jocelyn Bell Burnell tell us we are at the dawn of a new age of cosmology. And cosmology is increasingly telling us that the manifest universe is part of a greater reality that is...transcendent, in the Kantian sense. Are we at the door of a worldview which will validate ancient spiritual ideas that the world as we see it is just part of a greater reality? Maybe. Exciting times.

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Laboratory psychology attacked

Posted by Simon Raggett on 2 April 2010 | 0 Comments

Tags: psychology, consciousness, freewill, Libet

Professor of psychology, Merlin Donald, attacks the laboratory approach to the study of consciousness and by implication freewill, which he sees as being exclusively focused on short-term memory and attention, plus perceptual illusions. He argues that consciousness is not just present in short bursts, but is a continuous background to social and other human processes. For instance, lengthier conversations are viewed as extended control-processes, involving attention selection, maintenance of attention and allocation of priorities. In particular, a delayed response, in contrast to an immediate response to the environment, is seen as a hallmark of consciousness. In humans, consciousness is seen as being less about responses to the external world and more about internal processing of events. This is contrasted with the mainstream view based on the Libet experiments to the effect that because brain processing for trivial actions starts up before the will to act comes into consciousness, therefore consciousness must in all cases be something that lags our actions in the real world. It is emphasised that this view takes no account of how we deal with social or other longer-term/more strategic activities. It is laboratory psychology's sole focus on the short-term trivial rather than the medium-longer-term governance of activity that is most criticised here.

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