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Are We Intelligent Matter or Incarnate Spirit?
One of the most confounding philosophical questions involves our understanding of who we really are. Are we intelligent matter – stuff that got smart – or are we incarnate spirit – smarts that grew stuff around it? This question is inherent in the very nature of our experience of being human. We have bodies and we have the experience of consciousness – mind and matter, body and soul. Which one is more us, which came first, and which is really running the show?
The great religious traditions of the west have tended towards the outlook that we are spiritual beings who became flesh. First there was God, pure spirit and from God came us. Our more recent scientific understanding of reality has lead many to believe that we are matter that evolved into life and intelligence. Now, of course, there are always those who land somewhere in between these extremes – probably most people reading this blog for instance – still this is the divide that has generally separated science from religion and idealists from materialists.
If, in fact, we are essentially spirit that has taken form it would mean that in some significant way human beings are separate from the universe. We have some source of intelligence and will that is free from the rest of nature, that acts in nature while maintaining a foothold in some transcendent outside reference point. In this view, the core of our being stands apart from and above the laws of nature and we are therefore uniquely autonomous and responsible as the source of our own action in the universe.
If, on the other hand, we are a phenomenal product of complex interactions of matter, then there is a different set of implications to contend with. In this case we are an outgrowth of nature and her natural laws. Our actions and thoughts are not sourced from some outside reference point they are a necessary consequence of an intricate chain of cause and effect. Our actions are the result of natural interactions in the same way that the movement of a tree blowing in the wind is the result of the laws of force, energy and friction. And our concept of ourselves as autonomous, willful and responsible beings would need to be re-examined.
In 1825 Samuel Taylor Coleridge published “Aids to Reflection” and put forth a combined view. Most of us know Coleridge as the English Romantic poet and author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. We may not be aware that he was also an important English theologian – a Unitarian minister who had significantly influence the New England Transcendentalist movement in America.
Coleridge – in what was perhaps a misreading of Immanuel Kant – identified two distinctly different kinds of consciousness or knowing. Coleridge refers to one of these ways of knowing as ‘understanding.’ This he described as “an abstraction which the human mind forms by reflecting on its own thoughts and forms of thinking.” This knowing is a natural product of the process of mind, it is limited by and bound up in language and requires no existent “self” to enact it.
The other form of knowing Coleridge refers to as ‘reason.’ He describes this as a direct product of the reasoning faculty. It is an “accident” of reason he says, meaning that it is not an understanding that is constructed through the lawful interaction of the thought process, but rather a direct recognition of truth that is compulsively self authenticating. This implies that there is some part of us that simply knows the truth. Coleridge talks about this knowing faculty in terms of our experience of conscience. Ralph Waldo Emerson a decade or so later would pick up this idea and speak about it as intuition. Emerson identified the source of this knowing as “the Over-Soul.”
The question of who we are – intelligent matter or incarnate spirit – lies at the heart of what it means to be human and as I continue to write about what it means to know and think I want to keep the question open.
My experience tells me that being human reflects Spirit incarnate, as not all things that matter are measurable or countable. And all of my growth, development and change that resulted in shifts in consciousness came when I surrendered to that which is higher or of a different order than matter–difficult to explain, recreate at will, or know by measuring–that which is beyond the telling of it.
And I am open to exploring other ideas about it.
I would say we are both at the same time : Intelligent Matter and Spirit Incarnate.
Both aspects seem to be valid for me.
Well, I don’t have lots of arguments, except that it is probably the only way to reconcile Science and Spirit. I remember the first time I read Teilhard de Chardin, it is when this idea that Consciousness already exists in matter struck me. Before Teilhard put it in his unique way, it was completely alien to my materialistic mind. When I discuss with my Dad, from whom I get basically my scientific heritage, it is one of the points where we completely part : he believes that Spirit is only present in self reflective beings. No way inert matter can have some kind of “consciousness”.
I agree this is a fundamental step; but once this step is taken, one still can be a really rigorous scientist, there is no contradiction anymore. Namely : if it is true that Spirit exists already in inert matter, then there is all probability that everything evolves { Sprit + Consciousness + Matter} according to laws that we know only partially. Physics laws are part of those evolution laws, and
the least expensive hypothesis would be that from then Matter and Spirt evolve together.
I feel the crucial step, the one for which Teilhard was refused publication by the church for all his lifetime, was the credence that spirit, or consciousness is already present in all forms of matter.
Strangely very atheists scientists like my Dad rank sides forcefully with the church on this one… he really doesn’t believe me a single bit when I talk about these things.
Coleridge’s understanding: If we see the rational process as putting pieces of dead knowledge (concepts, forms and structures) behind each other.
Coleridge’s reason: not an understanding that is constructed through the lawful interaction of the thought process’, it would be seeing without concepts. Than experience is alive, one with nature. Seeing without concepts, so we look at reality ‘fresh, always new, as if you see your wife for the first time (Krisnamurti).
An example is drawing: we do not draw an eye or a mouth anymore, from that we are 8-10 years on we learn to draw concepts, this is an eye, this is a mouth, it is a concept. That is what we do in thought –we create concepts. Of our identity, our future, what is good, what is bad everything is captured in concepts. It is the left side of the brain and learning to draw again is using the right side of the brain.
Maybe this is ‘beyond the mind’, learning to think beyond 1) our emotions, impulses 2) beyond our concepts
According to the ancient science of Yoga and eastern philosophy of Vedanta, we are incarnations of spirit, individual souls inhabiting bodies, which are cast off at the end of one lifetime and according to one’s karmic pattern, further bodies are inhabited for the evolution of the spirit. The knowing comes from the fact that we are spirit, the soul being made of the same stuff as God, ie. Consciousness, present everywhere in the cosmos, animate and inanimate. So, matter is only intelligent, because it is permeated by Consciousness. Even rocks have a certain vibration, plants and animals even higher. In humans the Consciousness is able to free itself to come into alignment with Enlightened Awareness.
According to the Yogis, the mind’s intelligence is all a reflection of spirit (or Self), but the mind has no intelligence of its own. Obviously the mind has the ability to know, plan, scheme, reflect etc. all as functions of the mind, like the ‘understanding’ faculty that Coleridge describes. His idea of ‘reasoning’ seems more in line with the eastern thought, or with Emerson’s ‘Over-Soul’ which would be ‘the part of us which simply knows the truth’. I am guessing that would be the Soul, Self or Spirit. How else could we know the truth, unless we were part of it?
Intelligent Matter
I looked a bit in the Fabric of the Cosmos from Brian Green, to see if I could back-up a bit what Catherine is saying, it seems good what she says. Green says that combining information of Supernova’s with theoretical insights of Inflation theory cosmological evolution -from the start on- can be explained. A complete description follows in technical detail. Also the direction of time starts at this moment; so evolution is explained. Within this story I would say that ‘matter with the potential to become conscious’ seems to fit in this all. As a total lay-person I would say that matter = energy and it is the energy that can become conscious.
I saw an interesting program ‘ how art shaped the world’ and one of the things that was explained where drawings of heaven and hell in caves. First there was only heaven,
which was explained as ‘comfort against the fear’ everything to make after life good was there. But at a point that fighting became necessary ‘hell’ appeared: if you did not fight ‘hell’ would be there. Also connections between power and God makes it all clear that religion had a huge function in evolution. It seems to fit in this line that it was also used to explain the beginning of the earth, but there is no evidence whatsoever that makes it clear that spirit incarnated…
I read again about the origin of mind according to philosopher Christian de Quincey. It gave me some idea about the connection mind/matter, I do not know if it is all according to the latest insights..
De Quincey describes (Deep spirit, page143) the start of evolution, the ‘zero point energy’ as a ‘vast, infinite sea of quantum potential -emptiness brimming with creativity. He describes a quantum as ‘a package of energy, a bundle of pure energy’ –it is the smallest possible unit of physical existence. One can think of it as the source of everything- an inexhaustible well of potential energy giving birth at every moment to all that is. It has no mass, no charge, occupies no space and experiences no time. It exists in a weird wonderland beyond the grasp of reason or imagination –a world where matter seems to evaporate into wisps of possibility.
De Quincey describes consciousness as Knowing. For knowing A Thing (the inside of the house) mind is needed which is connected with the evolving brain. Before that there is the POTENTIAL to know, subject knows no-thing, which is Intelligence, which is there already in the smallest particle there is, the quantum. According to De Quincey the sequence is: Quantum void /light> elementary forces > atoms > matter > life > minds (ego’s) > spirit.
At a quantum level, everything is interconnected. The universe is an unified web of unbroken wholeness. Physicists call it non-locality. Non-locality means there is no such thing as empty space separating everything. The quantum is the carrier of purpose and consciousness into the world. Consciousness evolves into greater interconnectedness. Minds evolve from separateness into communion and enlightenment. Spirit would be the highest state of evolution. We have to open up to the reality of spirit and intuitive intelligence, which has to be felt/known (not feeling as part of the ego, but feeling as understanding on a deeper level, direct knowing – knowing beyond the senses, concepts and words. It is the key that unlocks the relationship between consciousness and matter.
Deepak Chopra is touring Europe and writes on twitter: Energy and matter are symbolic representations of consciousness. We confuse the symbols for reality.
A separate “me” and the perception that there are “others” are both subjective qualia. In reality there is only the infinite consciousness
Synaptic firings in neural networks are electromagnetic signatures of thought, consciousness appearing as energy and information and matter.
Unman fest to manifest sequence: consciousness=potentiality thought-subjectivity (qualia) Synaptic firings=electromagnetic signature Neurotransmitters-material representation.
Waves of potential that have no physical unit of mass or energy appear as particles that have mass-energy (so far no one knows how)
The quantum micro world appears as the classical world. (so far no one knows how)
Even though positrons run backward time we experience only a forward arrow of time(so far no one knows how)
Every cubic centimeter of empty space has 10 to the power of 37 times more mass-energy than the entire material universe
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As usual, Man makes the Mistake of Assuming that consciousness is the same as Intelligence, and that Consciousness inhabits Matter. The experience of perception, including that of perceiving that which one holds to be ‘one’s own reflection in the mirror’ leads to the3 false assumption of being inside, looking out at a world. In Truth, the concepts (assumptions) of within and without, are false, and therefore, all subsequent investigations based on these false assumptions, can only result in erroneous conclusions about the experience of Being.
Being is also not a state that exists, rather, we are only ever ‘Becoming’ changing from one state to another in the process of becoming. We never really get to ‘BE’ anything in particular. All Names and Words are empty in Nature, as are the things those words and names wish to designate themselves to.
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