----Extended Introduction----
In the light of all that has been said up to this point, I have found it
necessary to expand the content of the six PDF chapters of Transcendental
physics by including two extra chapters within the compass of this
website, addressing each of the two contrasting overviews of Reality -the
status quo one of positivism and my proposed neutral monism
alternative. However, this has turned out to be no trivial task; it
has become one in which the tail has come close to wagging the dog. To
keep things under control, my treatment each -and particularly my own- has been
unavoidably skimpy. For those having an interest to learn more of the
latter, I would refer them to a separate website in course of preparation that
I hope will be available by year's end or soon after.
I have already referred to my discovery of a gaping void within the scope and
compass of natural law as currently recognized and accepted. That there be
such an omission is made clear by the manifest bankruptcy of the "Artificial
Intelligence" initiative, and of Neo-Darwinism as a theory sufficient
to account for the origin of life, and the expanding cornucopia of
phylogeny continuing to issue from it. Clearly, if solvency is to be
restored, extensions to the lex naturalis must be sought for. This is not
being done. Instead, the intellectual has preferred to resort to a series
of exercises in creative accounting that might well excite the envy of those
recently caught 'cooking the books' within some of our giant corporations.
The stratagems and dodges through which an appearance of solvency has been
maintained are a wonder to behold. More on this may be found in the
secular_physicalism pages
Why should this be so?
After all, it is very much within the tradition of science that
from time to time, new empirical discoveries are made that defy explanation
within the scope of the ambient natural law. Whenever this
happens, the canon of the lex naturalis has been extended to bring the
formerly recalcitrant discoveries within the fold. At the present day,
cosmologists, in particular, have granted themselves a very free hand in their
speculations, taking on quasi-theological overtones that would have done
credit to Duns Scotus and his fellow Scholars of
the Middle Ages.
Yet, no such license is being granted
when it comes to the manifestations of life
and mind. Why? Well, we don’t really have far to look. If
mind is truly to be taken as something special, with its own private
prerogatives, then before you know it, the Psyche –as efficacious, authentic
agent- will make its re-entrance; next it will be the soul
and finally "God" -as the intellectual takes
Him to be- will be back in. To give mind (and life)
any kind of special recognition is, they seem to fear, to poke a hole in the dyke. Before we know it, the
trickle would become a stream, the stream a flood,
until the entire scientific endeavour would find itself submerged under ten
meters of twelfth
century North Sea water.
To switch metaphors; it has taken centuries of burdensome labour,
we are reminded, to
confine the Imp within the bottle; let us
take care, therefore, lest we loosen the cork.
Unmentionable Consciousness
This brings me to the c word, the one that heads the list in the
intellectual's lexicon of
neo-obscenities. I do apologize, but the time has come for
plain speaking. So I'm going to spell it out -and can only hope there are
no ladies present. It is c-o-n-s-c-i-o-u-s-n-e-s-s. The
dedicated positivist views its presence with the deepest disdain. For him, it
is as though the awake brain emitted a malodorous phosphorescent gas –a
revolting self-conscious stench, as Sartre
might have put it. Seemingly, there is some kind of abscess hidden deep
within the medullary substance that becomes active during waking hours. From it
oozes a loathsome
putrescence as the cortex threatens to go into autolysis.
As Hartwig Kühlenbeck has noted,
there is something incorrigibly corrupt about the carbon atom with
perverse and surrealist consequences. So, what are we to do? Faced
by this dilemma, the intellectual has vacillated between turning a blind
eye to the whole matter, or alternatively, granting consciousness a grudging re-entrance
-after being shorn
of almost all of the properties that make it what it truly is. It has been
reduced to a mere non-efficacious
epiphenomenon devoid of all influence upon the flow of events. It is
carried along as a helpless captive to the workings of Sherrington's 'enchanted'
cortical loom. The
threat, of course, is not merely that of allowing a true agency to
take hold. The problem is that of the whole world addressed
by the richness of the mind/brain ensemble's subjective interiority. There
are too many things to be found there -unmentionable things within that same
lexicon. I'm going to be addressing some of these within the pages of the
current website -so parental discretion is advised. [Click
Here for More Mind/Brain Images. to Return, X-out the Page]
Science
prides itself upon its open-mindedness, but this doesn't extend to the
underlying set of beliefs upon which it stands. It is constrained within a
dogmatism as rigid as any of those of religious fundamentalism to which its
spokesmen point with derision. In short, it has established itself
as a cult -with its full measure of credos and sacerdotals. There
is a College of Cardinals,
with annual investitures at Stockholm. Those so elevated receive something more
than medals and money. Merlin’s cloak is
laid across their shoulders, or so it seems to be believed. Scarce unpacked upon their return, the newly-elected are
already
busily at work offering the Received Opinion upon the ‘Great
Questions’ having
nothing to do with their particular areas of expertise –and they are listened to
with respect and deference. There is also evidence of a trafficking in relics;
some of Einstein’s hand-written notes recently
changed
hands –to the tune of 3 Megabucks
I have in my possession a personal letter to me signed by Francis Crick. Who
knows; maybe fifty years from now, passing under the auctioneer’s gavel at
Sotheby’s, it may fetch a price sufficient to put my great-great-grandson
through Stanford. Though not formalized in any 'black candle'
ceremony, anyone
straying far from the received orthodoxy may find
himself excommunicated by a lock-out from peer-protected
journals; worse, he may suffer truncation of
funding.
These, then were the sticks by which I was belaboured. But more important than
these was the carrot. Before tackling my review of physics, I had already
completed my own novel Weltanschauung -that grounded upon an ontology of neutral
monism. This residence (I hesitate to call it a mansion, despite the many
years of hard labour that its construction demanded) was essentially complete,
save for a roughed-in empty suite of rooms reserved for the occupancy of Natural
Law and the physical world grounded upon it. The moving-in would call for some
substantial adaptations on the part of the tenant. After all, the abode
into which he was transferring bore little resemblance to that being vacated.
In particular, the raison d'être had been reassigned -its mission
couched in the language of eschatology. In this, I was but doing for
science what science, limited to its own resources, cannot do for itself.
Clearly, whatever the final compass of the lex naturalis may turn
out to be, it must be such as to make good the mission assigned to it. Let the orthodox be
reassured that I'm not, in so doing, seeking to replace the present a
posteriori regimen by any Aristotelian a priori forerunner.
I'm doing nothing to impugn the sovereignty of Natural law which, in the final
analysis, is-what-it-is, regardless of how we may suspect it to be or wish to see
it. And what-it-is can, in the final analysis, only be determined by an
informed look-see. But let us never forget that speculation, in terms of a
long-term look-ahead, has always been strongly intuitive or a priori. The ideas that come to surface in the process of
speculation will very
much be a function of the mind-set that is brought to the enterprise. To
the degree that this is sound, so will the ratio of hits over misses go up
proportionately. In consequence; the a posteriori will end
up having the last word; thus will things come full circle. But most
of this will have little impact upon what the troops in the front line of
empirical interrogation will be doing in the lab next Thursday
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