Subjective Evolution: Beyond Space and Time

Materialism and the Mind-Body Problem

Materialists dissolve the Cartesian mind-body problem into atoms and the void. The mind-body problem is an illusion, they say. Consciousness is not a “hard” problem; it is a word in search of a definition. Whatever is meant by consciousness must have a natural explanation. For Wittgentstein, philosophy is alphabet soup. It is not philosophically “rigorous” to use the word consciousness. Electrical impulses between nerve synapses produce a symphony of sensations. We label these sensations as “consciousness,” when that word is unscientific. The word consciousness denotes “sense and sensibility,” memory, mind, nervous awareness, and sentience. All these processes may be mimicked by micro-processors. Artificial Intelligence can beat us at chess, word-games and trivial pursuits so completely that the “Turing” test has long since been surpassed. Computers have achieved what we call “consciousness,” proving that what we consider “mind” is merely an epiphenomenon of the brain, a peripheral function of a certain ensemble of nerve endings. Mind exists as a function of matter. The neural impulses that constitute mind are functions of a structure within brain-forms that took millions of years to evolve. It may take some time to understand how that function works, but science and philosophy is working on the problem. In the mean time, we should enjoy the short time we have on this earth, since there is nothing to look forward after death. The afterlife is an illusion and God is a delusion.

Limited Thinking

The above arguments of the materialists are intellectually dishonest. The great skeptic David Hume confessed that while he considered Berkeley’s idealism false, it was “impossible to refute.” Scientists refute the mind-body dichotomy by claiming it doesn’t exist. Since only matter exists, mind is a function of matter and there is no duality. The body is physical and is accounted for by physical principles. There is no need to appeal to anything called a “mind,” or psyche for an explanation of purely physical principles. Any appeal to supernatural principles is an abdication of our intellectual responsibilities. Both mind and body are products of a long process of evolution that took place over millions of years and that we are only just now beginning to explain. Anyone who questions the evolutionary process is uneducated and superstitious.

However clever these great scientific minds, we cannot simply wish the mind out of existence. It is wishful thinking to banish the thinker out of existence. If mind is a figment of the imagination, we are still faced with the problem: what is imagination and who is the imaginer? While the existence of consciousness is self-evident, materialists engage in millions of hours of word-games to avoid accepting any spiritual reality.

Space and time cannot be known. And in analyzing space and time as phenomenon it is intellectually dishonest to discard the hard problem of consciousness as a mental invention. Albert Einstein is often credited as a scientific genius; the greatest mind of the 20th century. Einstein discovered relativity by the use of thought experiments. He famously dreamed of riding on a beam of light and considered the nature of time and space relative to the speed of light. But where is Einstein’s theory without thought?

Subjective Evolution of Consciousness

Science claims to be “objective,” but the entire edifice of science is built upon thought. Thought is subjective by nature, being a product of mind. How then are we to conceive of the phenomenon of reality without considering consciousness.

Materialists consider consciousness as a consequence of matter. The Theory of Subjective Evolution poses the question, how can this be? How can the object of thought create ideas? Is it possible that inactive, inert matter exerts some spiritual influence upon brains that conjures consciousness into existence? And what of living entities without brains? If consciousness is always an “epiphenomenon” of the brain, are beings who have no brain sentient?

Plants are both heliotropic and geotropic; their roots seek out earth and their leaves seek out sunshine. Plants are biological entities. They are clearly living beings. Can they be said to be “conscious?” If so, then “consciousness” is not an “ephiphenomenon” of the brain, but an ever present reality that permeates the entire time-space continuum even at the cosmic level.

“Thought” and the brain may be connected, and yet their manner connection is much more subtle than casual observation reveals.

Henri Bergson, "Creative Evolution"

Henri Bergson and "Creative Evolution"

The last of the great 19th Century philosophers was Henri Bergson, who lived to debate Albert Einstein. Henri Bergson had no complaint against Einstein’s science. He had great appreciation for the genius of Relativity theory. And yet, he objected to the mechanistic ideology underpinning Einstein’s contribution. By promoting a mechanistic and deterministic view of reality, Einstein was minimizing subjective reality and the role of consciousness.

If mind was matter, Bergson argued, and every mental act a merely the mechanical result of neutral states, of what use was consciousness? Why couldn’t the material mechanism of the brain dispense with this “epiphenomenon?” Why would determinism necessarily be make more sense than free will? If there is no free will, if time has no choice, then we live in an entirely deterministic universe. Like the balls on a billiard table, once set in motion everything moves according to the laws of Newton and Darwin. Every event since the dawn of time is an expression of matter and motion. And as one motion creates another equal and opposite reaction from the time of the big bang every movement of every atom is simple action and reaction. From the age of the dinosaurs to every line of Shakespeare’s plays, every word of Chekhov, every rebellious scream of Elvis and the Beatles is simply the endless reaction of atoms in the void, moving to the rhythm of a predetermined beat.

Each movement of Beethoven’s symphonies, every step of Fred Astaire’s dance routines was written in a far off galaxy by the molecular structure and movement of the orginal explosion that rocked the universe. If belief in the supernatural origin of consciousness strains credulity, then what of this weird faith in deterministic physics? What an amazing suspension of disbelief the scientific world demanded of the 20th century!

The biblical legends of the Old Testament pale before such bleak and cynical myth as the idea of a dead nebula of fading stardust composing tragedies for all time.

Such was the dilemma facing the philosophers who confronted the scientists of the early 20th century. Their complaints would be blasted to smithereens by the atomic bomb.

In his excellent book,  The Story of Philosophy, Will Durant summarizes Bergson as follows:

Mind, then, is not identical with brain. Consciousness depends upon the brain, and falls with it; but so does a coat fall with the nail on which it hangs,—which does not prove that the coat is an “epiphenomenon,” an ornamental ectoplasm of the nail. The brain is the system of images and reaction-patterns; consciousness is the recall of images and the choice of reactions. “The direction of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course. Consciousness is distinct from the organism which it animates, although it must undergo its vicissitudes.”

Henri Bergson:

It is sometimes said that in ourselves, consciousness is directly connected with a brain, and that we must therefore attribute consciousness to living beings which have a brain, and deny it to those which have none. But it is easy to see the fallacy of such an argument. It would be just as though we should say that because in ourselves digestion is directly connected with a stomach, therefore only living beings with a stomach can digest. We should be entirely wrong, for it is not necessary to have a stomach, nor even to have special organs, in order to digest. An amoeba digests, although it is an almost undifferentiated protoplasmic mass. What is true is that in proportion to the complexity and perfection of an organism, there is a division of labor; special organs are assigned special functions, and the faculty of digesting is localized in the stomach, or rather is a general digestive apparatus, which works better because confined to that one function alone. In like manner, consciousness in man is unquestionably connected with the brain; but it by no means follows that a brain is indispensable to consciousness. The lower we go in the animal series, the more nervous centers are simplified and separate from one another, and at last they disappear altogether, merged in the general mass of an organism with hardly any differentiation. If, then, at the top of the scale of living beings, consciousness is attached to very complicated nervous centers, must we not suppose that it accompanies the nervous system down its whole descent, and that when at last the nerve stuff is merged in the yet undifferentiated living matter, consciousness is still there, diffused, confused, but not reduced to nothing? Theoretically, then, everything living might be conscious. In principle, consciousness is coextensive with life.6

Mind-Energy, New York, 1920; p. 11.”Excerpt From: Will Durant. “Story of Philosophy (Touchstone Books).” iBooks.

Bergson wants to explore the idea that we seem to think of mind and thought in terms of matter and the brain. Why do we objectify consciousness? Upon reflection, he concludes that the rational aspect of mind, or the intelligence, is materialist by nature. Intelligence arrives at its conclusions through analysis. Intelligence has a reductionist tendency: this or that. It moves through negativity: this process of elimination is called in Sanskrit neti neti, not this, not that.

Bergson argues that human intelligence has evolved to manipulate the objective world; And with this manipulation as object, intelligence scrutinizes “matter” or what we conceive to be real in the world of exploitation. As the subjective soul conceives the world, it sees reality through the filter of the mind which is interested in exploitation. The intelligence facilitates exploitation through analysis.

In his seminal work, Creative Evolution, Bergson points out, “Our intellect, in the narrow sense of the word, is intended to secure the perfect fitting of our body to its environment, to represent the relations of external things among themselves,—in short, to think matter.”

The intelligence, having conceived the world as “objective” analyses reality in terms of objects. It is at home with solids, inert things; it sees all life as objective. This kind of analysis misses the inner reality of consciousness. It mistakes the tissue of things for their innate being. In the same way that our obsession with the objectivity of space denies us a glimpse into the soul, the objectivization of time obstructs our view of duration. The duration of consciousness is the essence of reality. The flow of time goes undetected even as we measure its fragments.

If we watch a movie it seems to our tired eyes to be alive with motion and action. What an achievement of technology. In cinema, science and mechanism have apparently caught the continuity of life. And yet, Bergson argues it is quite the contrary. The movie does not move, is not a picture of motion; it is only a series of instantaneous photographs, “snap-shots,” taken in such rapid succession that when they are thrown in rapid succession upon the screen, the willing spectator enjoys the illusion of continuity. But it is an illusion none the less; and the cinema film is obviously a series of pictures in which everything is as still as if eternally congealed. Science and intellect here reveal their limitations.

Just as the “motion”-picture camera divides into static poses the vivid current of reality, so the human intellect, using the scientific method of analysis does not capture life: it catches a series of states, but loses the continuity that weaves them into life. We see matter and we miss energy; we think that we know what matter is; but when at the heart of the atom we find energy, we are bewildered, and our categories melt away. “No doubt, for greater strictness, all considerations of motion may be eliminated from mathematical processes; but the introduction of motion into the genesis of figures is nevertheless the origin of modern mathematics”; nearly all the progress of mathematics in the nineteenth century was due to the use of the concepts of time and motion in addition to the traditional geometry of space.

“Exact” science doesn’t exist for it misses both the duration of consciousness and the quality of inner life. According to Bergson, science is analysis dissecting objective phenomenal experience; merely an approximation, which catches the inertia of reality better than its life.

We are not anti-science. But the ideology of science obscures spiritual vision. And by accepting the scientific weltanschauung, we face moral hazard. We run the risk of losing our soul. By insisting on a physical model of reality when experiencing consciousness, we impose an objective form of study on a subjective reality. But the subjective soul resists becoming an object of study by the analytical intellect; we can only dead end in an impasse of determinism, mechanism, and materialism.

A simple moment of reflection

A simple moment of reflection might have shown how inappropriate the concepts of physics are in the world of mind. Einstein dreamed of riding a bolt of light. He set the speed limit of the universe at the speed of light. But his own mind was faster. As Einstein did, we can think of traveling not only at the speed of light, but at warp-light speed. A flash of thought can traverse millions of light years to the origin of the universe, as Stephen Hawking has shown. Thought is faster than the speed of light and defies the known laws of the universe.

Our very ideas escape the concept of material particles moving in space, or waves floating at the speed of light. Thought is limited neither by space nor time. I can as easily travel back to the origin of the big bang as to the end of the cosmos mentally. The atma escapes these solid concepts of hard reality; Life is beyond both space and time. The Cartesian mind-body problem dissolves not into naked material energy, but into sublime consciousness which is the source of both space and time.