My philosophy in a straight talk
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Abstract. Here is an attempt to address the notions typically avoided and even feared of in the contemporary scientific discourse. These notions are such as Platonic universe, Soul or Consciousness, Free will, Feelings, and Design by a Designer (like God). These notes are suitable both for those who came to conclusion about existence of God (or blindly believe in Him), and also for those, who came to the opposite conclusion.
This article is closely related to the paradigm of the Trialism by Karl Popper and by Sir Penrose4 called THE THEORY OF THE THREE WORLDS (though this text was written without prior knowledge of the Penrose's paradigm). While in the Dualism they discern the Physical world vs. the world of Abstractions (the Platonic universe), in the Trialism we add the third component – the world of Mind and Soul distinct both from the Physical and Platonic.
The article also addresses the topic of Creationism. Was an object in question created by a designer or emerged in a natural unaided process? The answer to this problem depends entirely on our understanding and criteria for distinguishing between things that can emerged in natural processes vs. those which could be only created.
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Here we must inevitably deal with indefinable concepts (in analogy with points, lines, and planes in geometry). By its very nature, the indefinable concepts may be only vaguely explained via other such concepts. We will also introduce some axioms.
There is a difference between accepting axioms in science vs. accepting them in philosophy.
Axioms in natural science, even though accepted without logical proof, remain always subjects of experimental verifications. Axioms in science are carefully selected based on multiple experiments and their feasibility for constructing theories.
On the contrary, some axioms in philosophy cannot be verified experimentally. We can accept either a statement A or negation of A. Neither of the two may be verified or lead to contradictions. In philosophy, therefore, selection of axioms is motivated merely by convenience or even by blind faith.
For example, the solipsism claims that our entire stream of perception and Consciousness is a never-ending dream, and nothing but this dream even exists. There is no way to disprove the claim of solipsism1.
Most people do not accept solipsism merely because it is inconvenient. Paying attention to and believing in our stream of perception is more beneficial and interesting than entirely ignoring it.
Here is a scheme of the fundamental philosophical concepts and their interrelations, as a tripartite, or the three worlds: Platonic, Mental, and Physical.
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Everything |
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Reality or Concreteness |
Non-reality or the world of ideas, |
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Physical or Material world, the Matter |
Non-physical world |
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Inanimate |
Animate world, Life |
Soul, Consciousness, Subconsciousness, Mind (1) |
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No Free will, Determinism |
Primitive forms, having only physical features |
High forms, possessing also some of features (1), understood here as physical |
Free will |
Feeling, emotions |
Ability to contemplate, to learn, to access the Platonic universe, to Design, to Set Goals, to Plan and Affect the future |
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Table 1.
Consciousness (including Subconsciousness), Mind, Soul: do they even exist?
Here we use the terms Consciousness, Mind, and Soul as synonyms. We are aware about our Consciousness; however, it is only a surface layer of the Sub-Consciousness which acts much faster and entirely beyond our awareness.
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Consciousness means an ability to contemplate, to feel, and to exercise the Free will over… · own mind (which is immaterial and non-physical), plus … · over a part of the physical world (our own body). |
The main reason for appearance of these notes is that a significant segment of the contemporary scientific community denies their existence, and absolutely evades the term "Soul". The community does acknowledge the Consciousness in the highest forms of life, but they consider it only as a possible natural (or physical) phenomenon. In so doing, they forcibly push the Consciousness with all its particular properties into the Physical or Material world – the only kind of Reality they recognize. They deny, therefore, the entire section "Non-physical world" (Table 1), associating all or some of its items with the high forms of life, yet treated entirely as a physical phenomenon.
"Why do we need anything beyond the Physical world anyway? We already have the Platonic universe as something clearly immaterial. Do we really need anything else immaterial?"
We do, and here is why. First let's agree what we understand as the Physical world.
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The Physical world is the part of Reality governed by the laws of Physics. The distinctive feature of the Physical world is its Determinism or a predetermined outcome. In particular, Determinism means an absence of effects of the Free will. |
On the contrary, Abstractions are unreal and "out of this world" entirely. How do we know about them at all?
A contemplating Mind may figure out their "existence", or to pick them from their "ultimate database" (say, the desktop of God). The Mind may notice or discover Abstractions (such as the laws of physics and mathematics) in the design (oops!) of the Physical world. So, the (immaterial) Mind figures out their "existence".
Abstractions may be also encoded into material carriers. However, neither the
Mind, nor material carriers are containers of Abstractions. Abstractions
"exist" on their own independently from Minds or physical carriers.
What is actually a container of all Abstractions? We do not know.
On the contrary, we do know what is the (temporary) containers of the immaterial Soul or Consciousness: the living creatures of high forms of life (belonging to the material world). The Consciousness, therefore, is not detached from the material world entirely, though it also extends beyond it.
The Consciousness extends beyond, and its basic feature sticking out of the Physical world is the Free will, which literally, by definition, is not a part of the Physical world, but something outside of it, controlling the Consciousness and capable of limited control of the Physical world: in violation of the determinism – its defining feature. Free will is incompatible with the Physical world and beyond it.
Though it's impossible to prove existence of the Free will, everyone can
demonstrate it for oneself experimentally: at least up to a point.
Both Free will and Feelings are attributes of a Soul not transmittable to other souls in accordance with this Axiom.
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Axiom. The Feeling of one Soul is neither transmittable to another soul, nor detectable by physical tools.
· over the own Soul; and... · over a limited part of the Physical world namely... · over the own body (the home of this Soul), and · over something outside of the body – by means of the own body2.
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We can experiment with our own Free will in various ways. We can (if we wish) even temporarily resign from our own Free will delegating it to other souls, or setting our decision-making dependent on some external random physical process. As long, as the goal of our Free will remains within our physical abilities, we see that it works: it's ours.
The materialists adhere to the opposite claiming that what we perceive as our Free will is merely an illusion created by our working Mind functioning entirely deterministically within the laws of physics. Therefore, our hesitations, attempts to work out our "decision", or reluctance to work out anything – it all is predetermined by our deterministically functioning entirely physical Mind.
Similar to the situation about the Solipsism mentioned in the beginning, neither Axiom 1, nor its negation, can be ultimately verified. However, the notion of "Free will" is closely related to the notion of "Responsibility" of an individual. Denial of the Free will leads to doubts about justification of all humanly-made laws (punishing the perpetrators for crimes). After all, if the mind-work and actions of those perpetrators are all predetermined at the molecular level or even lower, to accuse them in anything would be as senseless as to accuse a natural disaster. However, if so, then also all humanly-made laws are predetermined no less than the law of gravity, thus there must be no reason for doubts about their justification either. Nevertheless, denial of our Free will leads to some controversies in the existent social fabric.
Summarily, we see that denial of acceptance of the Free will significantly affects our attitude to our life. In fact, the very opportunity to deny or accept the Free will is already an argument in favor that we do have the Free will. Moreover, by its very nature, the Free will is something which acts (or doesn't) as a result of contemplating the Physical world – therefore having to be outside of the Physical world. In this sense, being outside of the Physical world, the Free will of humans makes every human like a (negligibly small) replica of God – the illustration of the Biblical statement that God created a man in His own "image" (meaning not the "appearance", but an ability to exercise the Free will).
Many scientists tend to get rid of everything non-physical (1), enforcing every
aspect of Consciousness into the Physical world. Yet whichever they do, the
Free will would inevitably stick out anyway.
We may delve deeper and deeper into sub-molecular biology down to quantum phenomena. However, it's still a matter of philosophical axioms to recognize the final addressee of the entire stream of physical signals and information coming from outside. This final addressee is our Soul – the ultimate non-physical interpreter of the entire incoming stream. It is our Soul which generates the non-physical phenomenon of our unique and non-transferable Feeling as a reaction to the incoming physical stream. And it is our Soul in us which exercises the ability of decision making – our Free will.
Design
Another controversy of the contemporary scientific discourse is an upfront denial of a possibility that certain phenomena in our Universe may be a result of Creation or Design – i.e., of engineering efforts of some Designer.
First, pose the following question. Do all material things around us arise only in unaided spontaneous natural process? The answer is No indeed. Most of the things surrounding us were designed and created by humans. They can never emerge in any spontaneous natural process due to their enormous specific and structural complexity. Therefore…
· Things that cannot arise in unaided spontaneous process do exist.
Second. Any scientific research of a natural phenomenon must begin with preliminary inspection of the scene: whether the chosen for study phenomenon is a physical system well isolated...
· From the rest of the inanimate physical world;
· From effects of animate world (such as rats, flies, contamination); and…
· We must also ensure that the system for study was not deliberately corrupted by a joker to trick the researcher.
That is why even those, who deny the Free will (but make the scientific experiments responsibly), do care to eliminate all possible intervention of unwelcome effects or Free will of others.
And finally, one of stages of any such a preliminary inspection must be determining whether the phenomenon for study is entirely natural, or possibly a result of engineering efforts of some designer. Some folks may rebuff it saying that inspection of natural objects (whether they are or aren't an engineering project) is superfluous, because nobody but us is known of being capable to design – God (God forbid!) is out of consideration.
By the way, what are the criteria for figuring out if the objects in question were designed and manufactured (unless we see a tag "Made in China")?
While science fiction offered scenarios when it may be even impossible to figure out whether objects in question were actually engineering projects of some super intelligent designer, we can rely at least on the already known criteria for determining the origin of objects in question: can we recognize its purpose, functions, structural complexity, and similar.
Imagine that in a billion years some intelligent beings land on Moon and find the remnants of the machinery left there by the Apollo crews in the 1960s. The machinery doesn't work, yet still preserved its look and controls – to the great embarrassment of the visitors! Why? Because by the dominant paradigm of their science, they cannot admit as though anything in the natural world were created at all – as there cannot be any creators but them. To admit a possibility of other creators seems superfluous, notwithstanding their Occam's razor. Therefore, seeing these mysterious objects, they direct all their efforts to explain emergence of the machinery exclusively via natural mechanisms such as lunar dust turbulence and random formations after billion years of "trials and errors". Would such a train of thoughts be productive for figuring out the truth about that Apollo equipment?
By William Paley (1802): if a pocket watch is found on a heath, it is most
reasonable to assume that someone dropped it and that it was made by at least
one watchmaker, not by natural forces.
Similarly, the human scientific community now struggles to explain the origin of life on Earth. On the one hand, the science acknowledges that we absolutely do not know how the first living cell could emerge in the primordial broth. At that, we do know that a living cell functions as a sophisticated plant controlled by some code while using pathways and servo-mechanisms. We can recognize all these features because they are so familiar to us in projects designed by us. And though there is no natural explanation for unaided emergence of the living cell anyway, the science vehemently denies any possibility, that the living cell was designed and created by a Designer.
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Science does see sophisticated code recorded in living cells. Science sees biological machinery running this code and manufacturing an enormously complex product. Yet science is in denial that there must exist the Coder who developed that code! |
What about the emergence of the known diversity of species on Earth from one living cell? Every next species displays a qualitatively more and more advanced construction ideas, functionality, and structural complexity. Yet the only mechanism admitted to explain this diversity is the Darwin's evolution via natural selection mechanism.
The natural selection mechanism was known also prior to Darwin as the mechanism responsible for the preservation of a species (rather than emergence of a new species) – because most of random mutations in a living thing are harmful. Only a few of them may happen to be neutral or even beneficial for improving a certain parameter (provided that it is the parameter whose continual change in one direction immediately delivers some benefits). Otherwise, random mutations cannot lead to improvements based on a package of interrelated parameters, much less to conception of a new design or a new organ – as we observe in the over billion years long evolution and emergence of new forms of life on Earth. The science does not know any natural random process leading to increasing structural complexity from a simple to a complex. The opposite usually takes place: decay, always increasing disorder3 .
What we do know from our experience, that increasing structural complexity and
new functionality emerges only in a process of contemplation, planning and
design by designers rather than in a process of random trial and errors,
mutations, and unaided natural selection. At the level of our contemporary
knowledge about the complexity of life, the idea that it was designed by a
Designer is the only honest hypothesis. However, the terms Creationism and
Intelligent Design are forbidden in the scientific community, infected by
ideological dogmas of materialism even more, than it was in the former
USSR.
Just a few video references:
A Physicist’s Explanation of Why the Soul May Exist
https://theepochtimes.com/a-physicists-explanation-of-why-the-soul-may-exist_757910.html
https://youtube.com/watch?v=PI-cESvGlKc
David Chalmers - Does Consciousness Defeat Materialism? Yes, it does.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z9EeVRD43qA , particularly @ 24:23
If God Knows the Future, What is Free Will?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=x-Ti2wzASfg
How is God the Creator? 17.27
Do abstractions sabotage existence of God?
The (Crazy) State of Origin-of-Life Research
https://youtube.com/watch?v=G6fhmJcvUM4
https://closertotruth.com ,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HOJyRnDsdlk
Why is Free Will a Mystery?
Roger Penrose: Mathematics & What Exists | Episode 2210 | Closer to Truth
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bl7xvKY_kmI
Closer to Truth's host Robert Lawrence Kuhn takes viewers on an
intriguing global journey into cutting-edge labs, magnificent libraries, hidden
gardens, and revered sanctuaries in order to discover state-of-the-art ideas
and make them real and relevant.
1 The main protagonists in the novel "Solaris" by S. Lem did set an experiment in order to determine whether everything that he experienced was real (finally convinced that yes, it was). However, his experiment did not fully prove that his stream of perception was not a dream.
2 Here are a few more hypothetical features of the Free Will not yet proved enough and bordering with unknown. The Free will of one individual may affect ...
- the Consciousness of another individual via hypnotic suggestion, or ...
- via a kind of paranormal effects.
- At quantum level, the Free will of the experimenter may affect the outcome of some physical experiments.
3 Perhaps the only case of naturally increasing complexity is the evolution of the Universe from the Big Bang: from quarks and elementary particles toward emergence of more and more complex structures up to atoms, inorganic molecules, crystals, organic molecules. However, the possibility of this entire process is based on the values of several fundamental constants of Physics, which gave a reason to think that the creation of the Universe was fine-tuned and programmed by its Creator.
4 The source of this paradigm is here https://hrstraub.ch/en/the-theory-of-the-three-worlds-penrose/
Roger Penrose: Mathematics & What Exists | Episode 2210 | Closer to Truth
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bl7xvKY_kmI
I had come to a realization about the tree-worlds paradigm (similar to that of Sir Penrose) on my own, drawing the Table 1 above.
However, here I dare to disagree with Sir Penrose in two aspects of his paradigm which claims as though…
1) Each of the three worlds affects the two others. And …
2) "Undoubtedly, there are not three separate worlds in reality but only one".
This triggers an immediate question. If the "everything" is (or must be) just "one world" governed by some Unified Extended Physics, then everyone's Consciousness (or soul) must be also immersed into that Extended Physics! An idea as though our soul (or mind) were deterministic, governed by (Extended) Physical laws (rather than being above them) seems abhorrent!
Similarly, an idea as though Platonic world were a part of the Extended physical world seems abhorrent also. In fact, it is exactly the materialistic philosophy by ... Lenin!
Lenin claimed as though the Matter possesses a fundamental property of "self-reflection", so that the Platonic and Mental worlds are merely properties of the Matter reflecting onto itself.
I dare to assume, however, that there exist all the three worlds, and ...
a) The Platonic world affects nothing and IS AFFECTED BY NOTHING. It "exists" eternally, independent on the other two.
b) The Physical world perhaps was designed and created (by God) using the ideas of the Platonic world.
c) The Mental world (Consciousness, soul) is beyond the Physical. By its very definition, Consciousness is an ability of free CONTEMPLATION of the reality in many ways: wrong or right. However, yes, the Consciousness (the mental world) may affect a part of the physical world, which is within a living body containing this Consciousness.