MATTERS OF DEATH AND LIFE
In one of the earliest, and arguably the most eloquent, of the great texts advocating the systematic application of the empirical method, we find these wise words: “Nor shall we be led to the doctrine of atoms, which implies the hypothesis of a vacuum and that of the unchangeableness of matter (both false assumptions) ... “ 1. It is only fitting that at the very outset of the scientific venture the wisest of mankind 2 should have put his finger on what was to prove the most stubborn obstacle (I call it The Fatal Trap3) to obtaining a rationally coherent, empirically grounded conception of the world. It is immediately obvious that it presents us with two baffling problems. The first is that it is wholly unable to account for change: the atoms, by definition, are unchanging, and change is totally inapplicable to a vacuum – itself, as spatially extended nothing, an absurdity, as many of the Greeks, Aristotle among them, saw. The second is that there can exist no causal ground for attractions and repulsions between the atoms across empty space. And the attempt to resolve this by postulating a plenum merely creates further insoluble problems. Fewer than seventy years on saw the publication of Newton’s ‘Principia’ 4 the magnum opus which undoubtedly was to have the greatest single effect on the future course of science. Later, in his “Opticks” of 1704, Newton left us in no doubt as to his advocacy of the reality of the undifferentiatedly enduring ‘billiard ball’ atom; but though he saw no objections attaching to the transmission of momentum by impact among atoms, he emphatically rejected action-at-a-distance through a void,5 such as was inescapably implied by his empirically substantiated theory of gravitation. It is worth noting here that one great physical thinker, Newton’s contemporary Gottfried Leibniz, never accepted Newtonian ontological theory, describing space considered as an ontological ultimate, as “a fancy”.6 He proposed instead a world-ground composed of ones and zeros, but was never able to develop this idea into a coherent theory.
Newton accepted Galileo’s theory of primary and secondary qualities7, and confined his own theory entirely to the primary qualities: those postulated as belonging to the perceived bodies themselves, as distinct from the secondary qualities which were wholly confined to the mind of the perceiver. And until the mid-nineteenth century, devotees of this Newtonian world-view, by now deeply into assimilating chemistry and the “subtle fluids,” were content to relegate mind to an inexplicable ‘ghost in the machine’, and all mental events to the status of mere epiphenomena, an inexplicable play of feeling associated with material processes, but without the smallest causal efficacy.
The year 1859 saw the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” the effect of whose revelations on the scientific world-view was second only to that of the “Principia”. It had a significant influence on matter theory highly relevant to our present theme. That the general trend of biological evolution was to produce ever more mentally complex beings, culminating in humans, implied that mind had a more important place in nature than a mere epiphenomenon, though scientific orthodoxy still refused to grant that the causal factors at work in living organisms were anything but more complex instances of those operating in physics and chemistry. Then, again, the most basic activity of mind is memory, but if the substance of the world consists of changing configurations of intrinsically unchanging atoms, any such configuration must cease to exist in order to make way for its immediate successor – which renders memory impossible. Such considerations as these tended to promote process, as distinct from solid intrinsically unchanging bodies, to the ground of the universe, thereby elevating change of some kind to an essential ingredient of the world-ground. Neither atoms nor space had an independent existence; they existed only as abstracted parts of some process, and it was this which was truly fundamental. This conception of the world-ground, though extremely vague, seemed both more in accord with reality and more intellectually sophisticated than any advanced hitherto.
But against all such processes as science has postulated as possible candidates for the world-ground there exists an insuperable objection. In every case, the ultimate changes are envisaged as motions of some kind, and that necessarily implies space. And this, as an ultimate existent, is no more intelligible today than it was in the days of Newton. This insuperable objection may be expressed in another way. Physics invariably attempts to explain intrinsic change in terms of spatial change. But this is to stand the world on its head. Put simply: the ubiquitous error of physical thinking from the outset has been the attempt to account for intrinsic change in terms of spatial change, instead of the converse. The ultimate ‘particles’ are processes, but processes which involve only intrinsic change.
We are therefore seeking a fundamental, purely intrinsic process. Where are we to find one? It is a ubiquitous ingredient of experience, preeminent in the Arts, that an intrinsic or absolute one gives rise to a contextual or relative many by existing in many different experiential contexts. We say that these contexts differently qualify the intrinsic one. It is natural to ask: What is the smallest number of absolutes required to create an indefinite number of relatives? The answer is one, which we term The Absolute (X). This creates absence of the Absolute 8,9, which, for notational convenience, we equate with Nullity (0) qualified by the Absolute (X). We write this as X→0. Since this is different from both X and 0, it gives rise to two further relatives: X→0→0 and X→0→X. Each of these, in turn, gives rise to two further, and so on indefinitely. With each qualified addition defining one instant of time, the ontological ground of the universe after n instants will consist of 2n-1 qualification sequences. These qualification sequences are our ultimate ‘particles’. Since, in effect, the Universe is the Absolute One unfolded (the Absolute One being the Universe enfolded) we define the Absolute One as ‘That which becomes Itself’ or Self-Becoming as such. It is this which accounts for the hedonic tone of experience, without which life would be devoid of all significance!
How does distance, the root ingredient of ‘space’, arise in this conception? Although the number of X/0 sequences is doubling at every instant, this is clearly not the case in “our universe”, or Cosmos, the number of whose ‘particles’ at any time increases or decreases by a minute fraction at most. This implies that, at every instant, the vast majority, at least, of our Cosmic (qua Cosmic) sequences do not bifurcate: either a presence or an absence being selected. Since the mode of this selection in effect defines the Cosmos it must be made by the Cosmos itself, taking the form of some unifying law or laws which all its constituent sequences obey. The X/0 selection at any instant on any Cosmic sequence is a resultant of all the selections made by some one instant on every Cosmic sequence. The relative effects of these individual selections are not, in general, equal in magnitude, but are inversely proportional to the square of the duration between selecting and selected instants. We call this particular duration, or number of instants (n) between selecting and selected instants, the distance, or number of points (n) between them. Since orthodoxy measures distance and duration in independently defined units, (metres and seconds, say) there must be an arbitrary constant of proportionality between them, so that, measured distance (r m) equals ‘universal’ constant (c) x measured duration (t s), or r = ct. Mechanistic orthodoxy calls c (= 1 point per instant) the speed of light. All physical phenomena can be no less rationally accounted for in this conception. For example, electrons (positive and negative) are our qualification sequences, the two opposite types of charge arising from presence/absence preponderance; likewise periodicity arises from rate of consecutive presence/absence alternation, with absolute speed fixed at one point per period. As a consequence of these constant laws acting on the Cosmic qualification sequences (i.e. electrons), there is a tendency for small groups of them to maintain their mutual relations over long periods. These localised rhythmic entities, grounded ultimately upon repetition, are the atoms and molecules of conventional physics.
But the structural feature that utterly distances this conception of the universal process from that of orthodoxy is that it is not commutative but cumulative. The content of each instant is not substituted for that of its predecesssor, but added to it. Not only does it not require the demise of its predecessors: its individual uniqueness positively requires their continued existence as providing a unique context of qualification. So that what, very broadly speaking, mathematico-mechanistic orthodoxy sees as the Universe, in actual fact is only the temporal surface of a cosmos, the overwhelming bulk of which lies in the past! In a word, it mistakes the hide for the living animal.
Clearly, there must exist law governed processess in addition to the laws of physical association touched on above: those which govern the connections between past and present physical experience. Sympathic Association, grounded in the experiential togetherness of present physical unities and past similar unities is the most fundamental. Only less so, because deriving directly from it, is Mnemic Causation, which governs the selective effect exerted by past physical unities upon the physical present, making for a repetition of that past. And, finally, there is Paraphysical Causation, which, as a consequence of Sympathic Association and Mnemic Causation, gives rise to associations between present physical and non-physical qualification sequences. It is these laws, then, that operating in conjunction with physical laws, are responsible for the whole biological, and eventually human, levels of existence.10
Finally, this truly rational world conception with its eternally persisting past - Yeats’ “Spiritus Mundi”, the “mother sea” of William James, the unconscious of the depth psychologists, the akashic record of the occultists - is able to establish without strain the basic truth of beliefs that the naively irrational ‘scientific world-view’, with its crackpot notion of memories stored in brain cells, has long since relegated to the realm of superstition. I allude to so-called psychic phenomena - telepathy chief among them – and, above all, to individual survival of bodily death, and reincarnation.
I append a table summarising the differences between the implications arising from the particulate and the sequential conceptions of matterDeath.............................................................................Life
PARTICLE THEORY.................................................SEQUENTIAL THEORY
Originates in naive realism ..............................................Originates in philosphical analysis (phenomena)...................................................... ...........(noumena)
Classical atomism ...........................................................Future foundation of physics?
Universally accepted.......................................................Virtually unknown
(basic to science)Unsuccessfully attempts to explain....................................Successfully explains spatial change
intrinsic change in terms of spatial change..........................in terms of intrinsic change.Time and Space as existing..............................................Temporal and Spatial relations
independently of matter....................................................adjectival to material process.
Past obliterated................................................................Past wholly preserved (the akashic ........................................................................................record, the unconscious etc.)Implies a materialistic world conception.............................Implies a spiritual world conception
Biology not arising logically out of physics..........................Biology logically implied by physics
Accounts for a few aspects of human ............................ ..Accounts for all aspects of human experience........................................................................experience
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. The New Organon. Francis Bacon (Pub. 1620). Book 2. Aphorism 8.2. “The wisest brightest meanest of mankind” Alexander Pope. An Essay on Man, Epistle IV, lines 281-2.
3. See www.geoffreyread.com ebook & papers: The Fatal Trap
4. The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Isaac Newton (Pub. 1687).
5. “…. That one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else through which their action may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.” Letter to Bentley (Feb. 1693).
6. Third letter to Clarke §§ 4, 5.
7. Derived from Democritus.
8. “not-being is not mere nullity but ‘otherness’.” (Plato, The Sophist, quoted by G.R.G.Mure, The Philosophy of Hegel, Oxford University Press, 1965, p.13).
9. “the non-possession of any given attribute is also an attribute …” (John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, 1843, Bk 1, Ch. II, §6).
10. “At present, even in these days of ‘molecular biology’ there is still not one inferential chain which leads from anything important in physics to anything important in biology; despite decades of concerted effort by some very clever people biology forces physics to transform itself, perhaps ultimately out of all recognition.” (Professor Robert Rosen, Essays in Honour of David Bohm on his 70th Birthday, 1987).
RECOMMENDED READING
1. William James on Psychical Research. Compiled and Edited by Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou. VII, The Last Report. The Final Impressions of a Psychical Researcher (Chatto and Windus, 1961)
2. R.G. Collingwood. The Idea of Nature (Oxford University Press, 1945)
3. Herbert Dingle. Science at the Crossroads (Martin Brian and O’Keeffe, 1972)
4. Ian Stevenson. Children who Remember Previous Lives (The University Press of Virginia, 1987)
5. Peter Hewitt. The Coherent Universe (Linden House, 2003).
GEOFFREY READ.................................................................................MAY/JUNE 2008