Philosophy: Mind, Soul, Consciousness, Body - Part 12

The Decline of the Purely Mechanistic View of the World

The correctness of the mechanistic approach described in the previous parts of this essay must be questioned. As a matter of fact, from the extremely reductionist approach of science and from its attempt to describe the world objectively arise interesting problems and internal contradictions, which seem to lead at least at first glance to a variety of topics that science and the holistic view of mysticism and in particular Buddhism may have in common. On closer inspection, however, it also becomes clear that we actually deal with the approximation of an extreme form of monistic materialism (science) on the one hand to an extreme form of holism (Buddhism) on the other hand, both referring to the material world as well as to manifestations like the I, the self, coenesthesia, self-esteem, and similar as maya (illusion) without going into any detail about how these illusions come about, why they exist, and why we need to live with them. By the concept of monistic materialism in relation to science and to physics in particular, I mean the doctrine that only matter is real and that it can be reduced to a few elementary building blocks (elementary particles), from which all more complex forms are composed.

Before I continue I would like to present three sayings which are related to the topics of this essay that shall be discussed next.

Jesus says, "Know what is before your face, and what is hidden from you will be revealed to you.
For nothing hidden will fail to be revealed!". 

(Jesus Christ, The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 5)

Why do you wash the outside of the cup? 

Do you not understand that he who made the inside is also he who made the outside?

(Jesus Christ, The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 89)

And you who seek to know me,
know that your seeking and yearning
will avail you not,
unless you know the Mystery:
for if that which you seek,
you find not within yourself,
you will never find it without.
For behold,
I have been with you from the beginning,
and I am that which is attained
at the end of desire.

(The Charge of the Goddess; Wiccan text)

The scientific view I have described so far is like only washing the exterior of the cup without thinking to its interior at all. Indeed, Verse 89 of the Gospel of St. Thomas quoted above does not say that we should not wash the exterior of the cup but it points out that the cup also has an interior unknown to us that can be traced to the same cause as the exterior known to us and that the interior might be clearly ahead of us though it has remained hidden to us up to now.

I would now like to try to explore the interior of the cup, because "there is nothing hidden that will fail to be revealed," as verse 5 of the same gospel says. As a matter of fact, Einstein's theory of relativity and above all the so-called observer effect of quantum mechanics have shaken the mechanistic view of the world. In order to illustrate this development that had its beginning at the end of the 19^th century and, in particular, to make clear the consequences for our understanding of the relationship of mind, psyche, consciousness, and matter, I will now take a closer look at these topics.

In the years 1881 to 1887 it could be proved experimentally without doubt that the speed with which light moves through airless space is in all circumstances the same. This knowledge is known as the principle of the constancy of the speed of light. "The same in all circumstances" means the measured velocity regardless of whether the light source moves relative to the measuring apparatus or not. 

Newtonian mechanics, in contrast, predicted that one had to add the speed of the source of light to that of the light itself when measuring the velocity of the light emitted by a moving source. That is to say, if a source that emits light (a light bulb, for example) is moving with velocity v, and if c denotes the speed of light, then a measurement of the total velocity of the emitted light should yield the value v + c. This is a blatant contradiction to the principle of the constancy of the speed of light!

At first glance this may seem harmless, but it brought the mechanistic world view to collapse within a few years and made in particular land Newton's mechanistic concept of space and time on the scrapheap of physics. It also promoted Albert Einstein's famous theory of special relativity (published 1905) to emerge although Einstein's theory also contains some absurd-sounding predictions as for example 

• that moving bodies will be shortened compared to non-moving bodies or non-moving observers; 
• that moving clocks will slow down relative to non-moving clocks; 
• that two events, which for the one observer according to his clock take place simultaneously will take place for another observer at two different moments in time according to that observer's clock; 
• that no material body can move as fast as, or even faster than, light; 
• that a material body becomes heavier the faster it moves; 
• that matter and energy are two different manifestations of one and the same underlying physical reality, which is expressed by the famous equation E = mc² (energy = mass times the square of the speed of light). 

Unfortunately, the formula E = mc² has not only made Einstein famous, but is also the base on which nuclear power plants function, and what is worse, the correctness of this equation was demonstrated in all horrible details by the hydrogen bombs that detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

A truly amazing consequence of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, which was also discussed very controversially among physicists after its publication and which is diametrically opposed to the notions of our so-called "common sense", is the so-called twin paradox. The twin paradox is a logical consequence of the fact mentioned above that moving clocks slow down and moving bodies therefore age more slowly than non-moving observers. As an example of the twin paradox, imagine that one partner of a pair of twins climbs a spaceship for a round trip through space, with its cruising speed close to the speed of light. After his return to the Earth he will be much younger than his twin that stayed back on Earth. Millennia or even millions of years may have passed on Earth when the space traveler returns after let's say 3 weeks on board. Stanislaw Lem's novel "Powrot z Gwiazd" (1961) is about this topic. It was published in German entitled "Transfer" (1974, Marion von Schröder Verlag) as well as "Rückkehr von den Sternen" (2001, List Taschenbuch). I could not figure out whether an English translation is available.

To be continued