Science, mind and the creative cosmos

Posted by Science, mind and the creative cosmos on 30 June 2008 | 2 Comments

Tags: Science, Philosophy, Cosmology

The American logician WVO Quine once remarked that “Consciousness is to me a mystery, and not one to be dismissed. We know what it is like to be conscious, but not how to put it into satisfactory scientific terms”. This seems to leave us with a very unsatisfactory situation in which there is a seemingly unbridgeable gap between our understanding of the outer world of nature and the inner world of consciousness. It leaves a sense of consciousness as an alien in a world of matter, of not being at-home in the world.

It is difficult to see how this gap can be bridged within the framework of the old mechanistic paradigm, but some have seen in the new physics, especially in quantum theory, a glimmer of hope that a more unified understanding of the world, which combines both inner and out worlds, may be possible. I want to suggest another approach via what has become called ‘emergentism’ and which has been suggested by new ideas within both physics and biology, especially in relation to complexity theory, but which also has a place in discussions about the nature of human consciousness.

The term ‘emergentism’ first appeared in philosophical writings in the 1920’s and was seen as a way of understanding the evolution of consciousness without going down a reductionist path or treating consciousness as a mere epiphenomenon. In recent years, the decline of once popular physicalist theories of mind, which saw mental and neuronal activities as identical, has led to a revival of interest in emergentism among philosophers. Put simply, thoughts, feelings and sensations are seen, not as identical with brain processes, but as irreducible emergent properties of the brain.

One problem with this approach is that it leaves consciousness (at whatever point in the process of evolution it occurred) as, in a sense, an uncomfortably isolated phenomenon, a kind of miraculous, almost super-natural product in a universe whose workings otherwise are, if not fully understood, certainly not conceived as transcending the material world. One possible way forward, I suggest, is to place this particular, seemingly one-off, case of emergence in a wider context of recent scientific speculations where it can be seen to have a more comfortable theoretical home as part of a more comprehensive picture.

In the purely scientific context, emergentism has come into fashion in some quarters as a way of understanding how complex phenomena have appeared in the course of both cosmological and biological evolution. A selection of such emergent phenomena typically include: the original Big Bang in which the cosmos emerged out of, perhaps, the quantum vacuum, or maybe out of a black hole from another very different universe; space and time, particles of ever-increasing complexity, and perhaps even the laws and universal constants of physics; properties such as liquidity, temperature, friction and conductivity; self-organising phenomena in the biological sphere such as swarming, flocking, morphogenesis, and life itself.

To sum up, emergentism is a conjecture about the natural world which, in contrast to reductionist materialism, suggests that, in the process of cosmological and biological evolution, new properties and phenomena are formed which are not to be found in less complex, or in the basic components of, natural phenomena. These emerged properties are therefore not reducible to their constituent elements, and could not be predicted from them, even if at the same time they could not exist without them. One advantage of this idea is that the emergence of consciousness at some unspecifiable stage in the process of biological evolution appears simply as one example of this universal propensity of nature to create new unpredictable and ever more complex phenomena.

We could take this speculation even further and suggest that, within the history of human consciousness itself there is evidence of the emergence of radically new features such as language ability, moral feelings, aesthetic appreciation and a creative propensity, all of which, though related to behavioural characteristics found in pre-human animals, also represent the emergence of something irreducibly new.

For those such as myself who want to see the emergence of a new form of spirituality, one which is not tied to a trans-natural, eternal world beyond this one, but which grows out of the fertile soil of nature, emergentism is an interesting path to follow. It seems to me to point towards a spiritual way which is rooted in nature, and in the sciences which seek to comprehend it, and yet makes a place for our spiritual powers. And it honours our need to create a meaningful home in the world by linking our own creative potential with that of the cosmos from which we arise.

Prof John Clarke