Philosophy: Mind, Soul, Consciousness, Body - Part 11
The Clockwork Universe
How much one was convinced that the universe was a gigantic machine – something like a large mechanical clockwork that would work like a giant pocket watch and would be strictly deterministic may become clear from a quotation from the 18th-century mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace that I want to attach here. Laplace wrote correspondingly,
If an intelligent living being knew all forces acting at a certain moment in time and additionally knew of all matter – from the largest celestial body to the smallest atom – where they are at that moment, and also were able to do the necessary calculations sufficiently fast, it would be able to predict the entire future of the universe, and also to reconstruct the past, completely and down to the smallest detail [involving all human beings and all human behavior; my note].
That's exactly this horrible idea I have already mentioned in Part 10 of this essay.
The following anecdote is attributed to Laplace.
Laplace had published a book on celestial mechanics that made him so famous that Napoléon invited him to the audience. The Emperor spoke to him about the fact that he did not even mention God in his book and wanted to know why. It must be known that at that time it was one of the good manners to mention God in every publication at least once. Laplace is said to have answered,
Sire, je n'ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse.
[Sire, I did not need this hypothesis.]
- Does man have any free will at all? Or does the human body, including its mind, whatever that may be, also have to be understood as a mechanical system that works like a clockwork in the same way as the universe does?
- Could one predict (pre-calculate) the future behavior of a human being if one only knew the state of all the atoms and molecules of his body, including his brain, at this moment?
- What about God in this system? Can God be thought of as the first cause of the world, the uncaused causer who created the world out of nothing?
- But if everything is causally determined since the time of this creatio ex nihilo, what has God been doing since then?
- Is he still resting?
- Or does he intervene every now and then, steering, correcting and maybe fixing? Does he, so to speak, as a motionless mover, keep the big movement, called the "cosmos", running?
- Is there still room for God, the soul, mysticism, and spirituality in this clockwork universe?
- Or does this "watchmaker-god" lead himself to absurdity by his own creation?
By "watchmaker-god" I refer to a god who acts like a watchmaker / takes the role of a watchmaker.
Incidentally, the idea of an infinitely old, so always existing cosmos, with which one could avoid the above questions, had to be rejected for reasons that are known under the term Olbers' paradox, but which I would not like to elaborate on here. To learn more about Olbers' paradox, please follow this link.
The physicists of that
time, however, excluded these philosophical questions, and by the end
of the nineteenth century they were in fact successful in explaining
many measurements and observations through the application of
Newtonian mechanics. The mechanistic view of the world had reached
its peak, and some physicists, including the famous Max Planck, even
thought there would soon be nothing new to explore so that physics
would soon be completed and nothing left to do for junior scientist.
Even today, this mechanistic view of the world is still the basis of
scientific thinking and acting insofar as macroscopic effects are
concerned. At least implicitly it also represents the basis of
biology, medicine and neuroscience.
The works of Sigmund
Freud, who is considered the father of psychoanalysis and the
discoverer of the unconscious, are also strongly influenced by the
mechanistic view of the world. At Freud's time, consciousness began
to be understood as a rational, logical and above all mechanical
process. Just as Newton had postulated mechanical forces as the cause
of all movement of material bodies (or more generally of all kind of
matter), so psychic forces were now regarded by analogy as the cause
of human behavior. It was concluded that all mental functions could
be traced back to processes in the brain, and that the physical
cause-and-effect principle would also determine and control the human
psyche and its behavior.
The brain was understood
(who wonders) as a kind of machine. Freud, who began his scientific
work when classical physics was at its peak, worked on the basis of
these theories. Thus, one could consider him as the "Newton of
psychology". The neurobiology of the time, for example, already
knew that the brain consists of neurons that store electrical energy
and thereby build potentials that require discharge. Accordingly,
Freud imagined that dreams were the result of such discharge
processes. Even the obvious fact that people act irrationally over
and over again, left no doubt about the "machine theory".
It was believed that psychotics could be healed by tracking down and
eliminating the (neurobiological) causes of their irrational actions.
To be continued
