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WORLDVIEWS AND THEIR KEY PHILOSOPHICAL ASSUMPTIONS[By Merv Dickinson, PhD – October 2014]

Synopsis: Every culture and sub-culture has its own worldview. Composed of scientific and mythic accounts of what’s happening in the cosmic drama of which we are a part, it is passed on as a meta-narrative from one generation to the next and functions for members of the society as a shared meaning system that shapes and makes sense of their experience. An analysis of worldviews, as they have evolved over time and vary from one culture to another, reveals thateach rests on a key assumption regarding the relationship between mind and matter, between consciousness and the physical realm. This paper explores each of these philosophical assumptions.

Introduction: worldviews as evolving meaning-systems

(This Introduction also appears as the Introduction to two other papers that I have authored– “Worldviews and their Core Metaphors” and “Worldviews and their Approaches to Transcendence.” If you have already read this Introduction in either of these other papers, you may wish to skip it here and proceed directly to the discussion of the key philosophical assumptions that begins on page 5.)

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Our uniquely human mode of self-awareness is characterised by a measure of detachment from the world. “I” as subject is able to reflect on “me” as object in relation to the various contexts of my life. These contexts – family, community, nation – are nested, like Russian dolls, one inside the other, all the way up to the most inclusive context of all, the cosmos as a whole. Seeing where we areand the role we play in each of these yields a sense of belonging andpurpose, which for us are the hallmarks of a meaningful life.

Our quest for contextual meaning in relation to the universe as a whole drives our construction of a worldview. Not content with seeing our place and role only in the immediate contexts of our life, we seek answers to the Big Questions. What’s happening at the macro-level? What game is the universe playing? And what role do we play in it all? Since any account of “what’s happening” can only be told as a story, we weave our answers to these questions into what

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cosmologist Brian Swimme calls a “universe story.” 1 Indeed, we are hard-wired to be story-tellers. Located in the left hemisphere of our brain is what neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga calls “the interpreter.” It is, he says, “a system, a module, a capacity that is constantly trying to see the meaning in the patterns of activity in the brain. And it’s trying to put this into a story line. It’s the thing that builds our story.” 2 And since the dawn of human history, that’s what we’ve been doing – sitting around the campfire telling stories. The purpose, says Gazzaniga, is not so much to create an accurate account as a coherent account, and to that end we will embellish the story as needed to ensure a viable and meaningfulstoryline. The story – of which we are the author, the reader, and the main character – enables us to maintain a coherent sense of who we are within a narrative account of where we’re coming from and where we’re going. And like any good drama, be it comedy or tragedy,it moves inexorably toward its own conclusion.

The fact that we don’t know, and perhaps can never know, the answers to the Big Questions does not deter us from pursuing them and fashioning our own universe story. “We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance,” wrote theoretical physicist John Wheeler. “As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of ourignorance.” 3 It’s as if we are engaged in a never-ending

love affair with the mystery that surrounds us. We can’t resist exploring it, from the farthest reaches of space to the microscopic world of subatomic particles. Born of our observations, we create in our minds an organised and stable universe that we can objectively consider. Then, attracted by all that we do not know anddetermined to subdue the mystery, we generate still more hypotheses,put them to the test, and, if successful, add more territory to our island of knowledge. But for all that we have learned, and for all that we like to think we know, our lives remain surrounded by mystery. At the level of this ultimate cosmic context, whatever story we construct is never the final story.

How sad if it were otherwise, if there were no unanswered questions – if, as Lord Kelvin reported to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1900, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise

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measurement.” No more mystery! No more need for science! Nothing anylonger to wonder about! Fortunately, as physics itself was soon to demonstrate, Lord Kelvin could not have been more wrong. Over the ensuing decades, we have been forced time and again by the evidence to revise our cosmic story. And we remain today what we have always been – beings who wonder. It is who we are. Entranced by a starlit sky, we wonder. Witnessing the birth of springtime, or the birth of anything, we wonder. Weeping at the graveside of a loved one, we wonder. We cannot not wonder. Driven to understand who we are in thelarger scheme of things, we are destined always to wonder. “The deepest and most beautiful experience we can have,” said Albert Einstein in his 1932 address to the German League of Human Rights, “is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion and the source of all true art and science. He to whom this experience is a stranger, who does not pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

Our worldview, then, is never the final truth. Even those components provided by rigorous scientific investigation must remainopen to revision as new evidence may require. As philosopher of science Karl Popper demonstrated, we can never prove a scientific theory to be true; we can only fail to prove it false. 4 Or as Thomas Kuhn made clear in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 5 science periodically undergoes a “paradigm shift,” such that its theories need to be radically revised. Some theories, such as the heliocentric view of our solar system or the notion that DNA is the molecular basis for sexual reproduction, have such a high degree of probability as to be well-nigh established facts. But still, there’sno telling which of our current theories will be proven wrong tomorrow.

More than this, our worldview is typically composed as well ofmythic accounts which offer answers to questions for which there is no empirically verifiable evidence, either because we do not yet have the observational tools or because the questions themselves arefundamentally unanswerable Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the nature of Being Itself? Before space-time emerged, from whence did the universe originate? Why is everything in process, and from whence come the laws that structure the processof change? What is the essential nature of life? Is our planet

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alive? Is the universe alive? What is consciousness, and how is it related to the physical world? How shall we speak of the One, the all-embracing Unity, in which the diversity of everything coheres? The mythic accounts in which our answers to such questions are embedded are not intended to be accurate scientific or historical accounts of anything. They are intended only to complete our cosmic story in a satisfying way – that is, in a way that satisfies our need for contextual meaning by addressing questions that, although they are empirically unanswerable, we cannot resist asking in any case.

As science is the generator and repository of empirically verifiable theories, so religion has been the generator and repository of our myths. Our worldviews are usually constructed of both.

Some, such as that which prevailed in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, are shaped more by myth than by scientific theory. Others, such as that now dominant in many secular cultures, rest more on a scientific account of things. And still others, such as that in America today, maintain an uneasy balance between the two. However scientifically or mythically based, our worldview is essentially a narrative about what’s happening in the universe and why it’s happening. It’s a story that tells us who we are and the role that is ours to play. Like all stories, it unfolds over time, usually beginning “in the beginning” when the curtain first went up on the cosmic drama.

Every society organises itself around its worldview, presentedand passed on to us in its central stories, designed to ensure that we share a common understanding of who we are and what’s required ofus. A culture is, in fact, a vast system of shared interpretations of the raw data of our experience, and its worldview is its cornerstone. It shapes our perception and behaviour in a manner conducive to the goals and values of our society. Usually enshrined in religion and repeatedly enacted in rituals and social festivals, it is imprinted in the psyches of the young and continually reinforced in the minds of the citizenry. Only by growing into and accepting the prevailing worldview, if not as literal truth then as

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a viable working hypothesis on which we may stake our lives, can we claim membership in our society.

A worldview, then, is a comprehensive, largely unconscious, and

generally coherent set of beliefs about the nature of the universe, how it operates, and our place within it. Our worldview orients us. It exists within us as a governing mental construct, a conceptual window that frames our understanding of the world. Like a set of spectacles, it acts as a perceptual and interpretive filter to both shape our experience and help us make sense of it. For the most partit functions automatically. We aren’t aware of it. We just assume that how we see things is the way things really are, until circumstances conspire to give us a different set of spectacles. Then we may find ourselves in a whole new world. We may have some choice as to what spectacles we wear, but we cannot choose not to wear spectacles at all. What we see is always and only as we construct it within the context of our prevailing worldview.

Worldviews differ enormously from one culture to another, witheach interpreting the same data in its own distinctive way. My wife’s sleeping with a house guest may mean “infidelity” in one culture and “hospitality” in another. What is important is that members of any given society agree on the meaning and value they attribute to such events. We may add our own individual touches. Butif we don’t fit into the culturally approved way of seeing the world, we will be dismissed as being either very bad or very mad. Most of us, reflecting only rarely on the Big Questions, are contentto accept the answers given by our culture and to live by the stories we’ve been told. Others of us, knowing the extent to which our mind-set shapes our experience, strive to become more conscious of the meaning system with which we were imprinted and perhaps to re-write the story that we tell ourselves. Reflecting on our culture’s worldview, we may endorse, challenge, or elaborate it as we choose – which is what prophets, sages, and social innovators have always done. But they did so at their peril. To step beyond thelimits of what is permissible in terms of how we see the world or the values we embrace risks excommunication if not crucifixion.

Resistant though worldviews are to change, they do of course change. Like everything else, they evolve over time. As societies

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adapt to changing circumstances, their worldviews change accordingly– reflecting such factors as population density, social complexity, changing political structures, internal and external security threats, expanding knowledge, the principal mode of

communication, the energy resources on which the society depends, and the technologies developed to access those resources, etc. Ever since Homo sapiens emerged, human cultures and their worldviews have evolved together. In fact, it’s how we adapt. Human cultures adapt by changing their worldview. The evolution of our meaning system is as important to our survival as are the genetic changes selected by the new environments to which species must adapt. So every social revolution begins with a new way of seeing the world. Every culturaltransformation is born of a new understanding of how things are and what is possible.

Such changes do not happen easily. Over the course of history,worldviews have usually changed only when a conquering empire has imposed its worldview on its colonies, or when missionaries or others who are convinced that they have the truth have persuaded people to adopt a different view of things. Sometimes we simply outgrow a particular worldview when we move from one level of cognitive development to another. Or the accumulation of new information that cannot be accommodated by our existing worldview may gradually erode it until it finally collapses. In every case, however, the change is an adaptation – whether to mitigate the threat presented by a conquering and occupying power, or to satisfy the demands of a higher level of cognition, or to incorporate new knowledge that will make our worldview a more reliable conceptual map.

Even when we suspect that our worldview may be a less than useful or accurate map, we can still find it hard to reconstruct it.Twisting new information to make it fit as best we can, we cling tenaciously to what has for so long provided a stable and meaningfulunderstanding of our world. Only when the anomalous information is so overwhelming, or when some individual or societal crisis forces us to recognise how maladaptive our worldview has become, are we prepared to consider something new. Only then is our worldview, which hitherto has been largely unconscious, likely to become

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available to us for critical review. Only then are new ideas seriously considered. As more and more our worldview fails to explain “what’s happening” in a credible way, and before it has beenreplaced by a new and better understanding, we can find ourselves ina painful state of transition, stripped of the meaning we once enjoyed and struggling to adapt to our changing circumstances.

Because our worldviews are continually changing meaning-systems that are more or less adaptive in helping us make sense of the universe, it follows that no worldview should be embraced as thefinal truth. Our worldview should of course reflect our best understanding of the universe we live in. But we have only partial knowledge, and what we do have is continuously changing. Any worldview, therefore, is only a tentative organisation of working hypotheses that are more or less useful in binding together and advancing the interests of a particular group. It is not only a question of truth but of utility. And the final test of any worldview must be how well it satisfies our need for contextual meaning and helps us navigate our world in the best possible way.

What follows is an exploration of certain fundamental structural components of worldviews – in this case the key philosophical assumptions that vary from one worldview to another regarding the relationship between consciousness and the physical realm. Other structural components – the core metaphors that have given shape to our worldviews as they evolved over the course of history, and the basic approaches taken by our worldviews as regards “transcendence” – are discussed in two complementary papers that I have also authored and published.

Key philosophical assumptions

A key characteristic of every worldview is that it rests on one or another of a handful of assumptions regarding the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. Because no one until now has been able satisfactorily to explain this relationship, or solve what is often called the mind-body problem, all we can do is select one or another working hypothesis from among

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a limited number of possible philosophical positions that have lain at the heart of our differing worldviews ever since we began pondering the Big Questions and fashioning our cosmic stories.

The problem exists in the first instance because consciousnessand thought seem so very different from anything physical. And it continues to this day because we have been unable, over the millennia, to reach any consensus on how to build a unified picture of the universe, or our place within it, that integrates these two different realms. The physical is characterised by properties such as size, weight, shape, colour, location in space and time, etcetera– all of which are public in the sense of being observable by anyone, if not by our unaided senses, then with the help of scientific instruments. The mental realm, on the other hand, is characterised by properties such as consciousness, intentionality, subjectivity, and a sense of self – all of which are private in the sense of being accessible only to the experiencing subject. Althoughyour behaviour may suggest to me what you are thinking or feeling, only you know what you are actually experiencing.

The mind-body problem boils down to just a few questions that,for thousands of years, have frustrated the best efforts of the bestminds to come up with answers that we all might agree upon.

The question of ontological primacy. Can mental states be reduced to physical states? Or vice versa? Or are they each ofirreducible primacy, each belonging to a different realm?

The question of agency or causation. Do physical states influence mental states? Do mental states influence physical states? And if so, how?

The question of will or intention. Does what we experience as conscious will, intentionality, and freedom of choice have anyreal existence and efficacy, or is it only a more or less useful illusion – a kind of convenient and adaptive shorthand – generated by the brain?

The question of consciousness. What is consciousness, and how is it related to the brain? Is it generated by the brain? Or is it a universal “field” that is accessed by the brain?

The question of the self and our experience of subjectivity. What is the self? Does it have an existence beyond that of a mental construct? Is there a self housed in the body? Does

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this body belong to a particular subject? Is there a “ghost inthe machine?”

The seemingly intractable nature of the problem has given riseto every conceivable solution, each represented by a different philosophical position that can be located on a spectrum ranging from Idealism at one extreme to Physicalism at the other.

Idealism – Panpsychism – Dualism – Dual-Aspect Monism – Emergentism – Physicalism

As in the visible portion of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation where no neat dividing lines can be drawn between the different colours, so in this spectrum no tidy distinctions can be made between the different philosophical positions. At the one end, idealism shades into pansychism which shades into dualism, while at the other end emergentism shades into both physicalism and dual-aspect monism. For the same reason it can be difficult to assign particular philosophers or scientists to only one position. That being said, the following description of each position, and the representatives assigned to each, can be taken as sufficiently accurate for our purposes. Idealism

Idealism solves the mind-body problem by reducing the physicalto the mental. It comes in two varieties, epistemological and ontological, with assorted gradations of the two. The former maintains that reality as we know it is mentally constructed. Our experience consists solely of mental phenomena – sensations, perceptions, ideas. All we ever have is our “in here” experience andcan never know if it accords with any “out there” reality. Ontological idealism goes further. More than just sceptical about our knowing anything that is not mind-dependent, it contends that reality is immaterial at its core. Physical objects do not exist in themselves but only as perceptual phenomena. What we take to be the physical world is entirely empirical and, as such, is the inter-subjective product of our collective experience. This is a radical empiricism that reduces the physical entirely to the mental. In the

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final analysis, consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental stuff of the universe.

Idealism in its various shadings has been a fundamental premise in many cultures for a very long time. It emerged in ancientIndia in the Hindu Upanishads between the 8th and 3rd centuries BCE and remains central to the Vedanta philosophy today. Some few centuries later it took root in the “mind only” doctrine of the Yogacara school of Mahayana Buddhism. And more recently, in 18th and19th century Europe, it was revived by British philosophers George Berkeley (1688-1716) and David Hume (1711-1776) and by philosophers in the influential school of German Idealism, including Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Johann Fichte (1762-1814), and Georg Wilhelm Hegel(1770- 1831).

In our own time, since the advent of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, idealism has again been advanced as a solution tothe mind-body problem – not so much now by philosophers as by some eminent physicists. They include:

Sir James Jeans (1877-1946) – British physicist and astronomerwho, in The Mysterious Universe (1930) wrote, "The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.” 6

And in a 1934 address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he said, “I incline to the idealist theory that consciousness is fundamental, and that the material universe is derivative from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe.”

Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) – British astrophysicist, whose observations first confirmed predictions made by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity, who famously said that “the stuff of the world is mind-stuff." He went on to acknowledge that “it is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everythingis of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else isremote inference." 7

Bernard d’Espagnat (born 1921) – French theoretical physicist,for whom idealism is more a scientific conclusion than a philosophical assumption. In an article entitled “Quantum weirdness: What we call 'reality' is just a state of mind,” he

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maintains that "What quantum mechanics tells us is that the basic components of objects – the particles, electrons, quarks, etc. – cannot be thought of as self-existent," but grounded in an “ultimate reality that is not embedded in spaceand time.” 8

Amit Goswami (born 1936) – American quantum physicist, who hasproposed an idealist interpretation of quantum mechanics. In The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material Universe,9 he argues that quantum physics makes sense only if we set aside the assumption that there is an objective reality independent of consciousness and begin instead from the assumption that consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental ground of existence.

Panpsychism

Rather than reduce everything to mental phenomena or assign ontological primacy to consciousness, panpsychism acknowledges the existence of the physical world but sees it as infused with mind. Mind, in other words, is a fundamental feature of the universe. It is everywhere, if not as human-style consciousness then as a kind ofproto-mentality that pervades the universe. Its various shadings range from the animism that characterises pre-literate societies (i.e. the idea that inanimate objects and natural phenomena are intentional beings animated by a soul) to the highly sophisticated pan-experientialism proposed in the early 20th century by Alfred North Whitehead. Throughout the intervening centuries, panpsychism has found expression in the theologies of pantheism, panentheism, and theosophy, and continues to play a part in Hindu, Buddhist, and Shinto mysticism.

Panpsychism was introduced into the philosophy of ancient Greece by Thales of Miletus (624-545 BCE), the father of Western philosophy, who believed the universe to be alive and full of spirits. It found expression again a century later in the philosophyof Anaxagoras (510-428 BCE) who introduced the concept of Nous (Mind) as the ordering force behind all things. While not going so far as to say that everything has a mind, he proposed that everything has some portion of mind in it. From the early centuries of the current era until the Age of Enlightenment, panpsychism, at least in the West, was eclipsed by the dualism of Christian theology

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and effectively suppressed by the Church. But then, in the 16th century, it was revived again by the Italian astronomer and mathematician, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), who linked a pantheistic worldview with his defence of the Copernican hypothesis and was burned at the stake for his heresy. In subsequent years, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, panpsychism became almost fashionable as the preferred means of resolving the mind-bodyproblem. During these decades, some of its leading exponents included:

Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) – German philosopher, who believed in a world soul (anima mundi) – the idea that the world is a living being, endowed with intelligence, that contains all other living entitites.. "Nature is visible Spirit,” he wrote. “Spirit is invisible Nature." 10

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) – German philosopher, who heldthat everything is conscious, but not everything is alive

Ernst Häckel (1834-1919) – German biologist and defender of Darwinism, who proposed an evolutionary argument for panpsychism.

Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906) – German philosopher, who believed that unconscious mind could be extended to the level of atoms

William Clifford (1845-1879) – English mathematician whose work on of the nature of space and time prefigured Einstein's general relativity. Like Häckel, he argued from a Darwinian perspective that even the simplest life forms must possess something akin to consciousness.

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) – English mathematician andphilosopher, who proposed that the fundamental elements of theuniverse consist not of things but of events or “occasions of experience.” Known as pan-experientialism or “process philosophy,” his ideas represented a culmination of 19th century panpsychism.

William McDougall (1871 – 1938) – British-American psychologist, Fellow of the Royal Society, professor of psychology at Harvard University, and founder of the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University. In Body and Mind: A History and Defence of Animism,11 he rejected materialism, defended the idea that all matter has a mental aspect, and held that

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his theory of animism would replace the philosophical views ofboth dualism and monism.

For some 50 years following the publication of Whitehead’s Process and Reality 12 in 1929, panpsychism was largely relegated to a philosophical backwater, while the physicalist assumptions associated with physics and technology came to dominate the Western worldview. More recently, however, panpsychism has again emerged in the thinking of some, including:

Sir Roger Penrose (born 1931) – English physicist, renowned for his contributions to general relativity and cosmology, whocontends that the known laws of physics are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of consciousness and that mind cannot be reduced to the algorithmic processes of a computer. In the 1992 documentary film A Brief History of Time, he says that “the universe has a purpose. It’s not somehow just there by chance.Some people take the view that the universe just computes, andwe happen somehow by accident to find ourselves in this thing.But I don't think that's a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe, I think that there is something much deeper about it." 13

Nick Herbert (born 1936) – American physicist and author of Quantum Reality,14 who argues for what he calls "quantum animism" – the idea that every natural system has an inner life, a conscious centre, from which it directs and observes its action.

Rupert Sheldrake (born 1942) – British biochemist, who argues that morphic fields animate the universe at all levels of complexity, from atoms to galaxies. In his most recent book, The Science Delusion,15 he defends the hypothesis that all of nature is alive.

David Chalmers (born 1966) – Australian philosopher, who holdsthat consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe that becomes evident at a certain level of physical complexity. What he calls the “hard problem of consciousness” is that of explaining the generation of consciousness by “merematter”. Challenging physicalist assumptions, he insists that we must either show how mind can emerge from matter or else seriously entertain the possibility that mind itself is part of the fundamental structure of the world.

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Dualism

At one end of our “philosophical assumptions spectrum,” idealism reduces the physical to the mental. At the other end, physicalism reduces the mental to the physical. Each tries to solve the mind-body problem by dismissing it altogether and contending that there is only one fundamental kind of reality. Between these two extremes, dualism takes a different tack. It asserts that mind and body, the mental and the physical, both exist at the most fundamental level, and puts the problem of how two such radically different kinds of reality could possibly interact in the too-hard basket.

As a formal philosophical position, dualism originated with Plato (427-347 BCE) during the classical period in Greece. In Phaedo,he tells of Socrates’ final hours before drinking the hemlock – his death sentence for not acknowledging the state’s official gods and so corrupting the youth of Athens. In the dialogue, Socrates discusses the nature of the afterlife and explores various argumentsfor the soul’s immortality, all of which hinge on the idea that there is a realm of eternal, immaterial, and unchanging Forms, of which all that we experience are imperfect copies. So there is a Form of Beauty that is only more or less reflected in the things of this world, or the Form of a Circle which all actual circles only more or less emulate, and so on. Just as this realm of immaterial Forms is different from that of physical things, so the imperishablesoul is different from the mortal body. Indeed, the affinity betweenthe soul and the eternal Forms is so strong that the soul longs to leave the body in which it is imprisoned so that, after many reincarnations, it may finally dwell unencumbered in the realm of Forms. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) later took exception to the idea thatForms have an independent existence, but continued to hold that formand matter coexist, that immaterial forms are embodied in material things, and that the immaterial soul, in contrast to the body, is incorruptible and continues beyond the death of the body.

During the early centuries of the current era, Plato’s dualismremained a central feature of classical philosophy and strongly influenced emerging Christian thought, both Gnostic and orthodox. It

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is clearly represented in the thinking of such influential figures of that time as:

Valentinus (100-166) – Egyptian Gnostic Christian theologian Justin Martyr (100-165) – Palestinian Christian apologist Athenagoras (133-190) – Greek Christian apologist Clement of Alexandria (150-215) – Egyptian Christian

theologian Origen (184-254) – Egyptian Christian theologian Plotinus (205-270) – Egyptian Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry (234-305) – Syrian Neoplatonist philosopher Augustine (354-430) – Algerian Christian bishop and theologian

Throughout the Middle Ages, from the fall of Rome in 410 CE until the dawn of the modern era in 1650 CE, dualism remained the unchallenged cornerstone of theChristian worldview. Indeed, it became even more firmly cemented into Catholic theology by the reconciliation of Christian thought with Aristotle’s rediscovered texts by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). Dualism also found a home in Islam during its Golden Age, most notably in the works of the Persian cosmologist, al-Farabi (872-950)and of the Persian mystic, al-Ghazali (1055-1111). And it left its mark on Judaism in a reconciliation of Jewish theology with neo-Platonic and Aristotelian dualism by the mediaeval Spanish philosophers, Solomon ben Judah (1021-1058) and Moses Maimonides (1135-1204).

Modern versions of dualism originate with the French philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes (1596-1650), who, together with a handful of contemporaries, was pivotal in launching the scientific revolution. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) provided empirical confirmation for the Copernican model of a sun-centred planetary system. Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) laid the foundations for the inductive scientific method. And Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was just a few years away from publishing his monumental Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. It remained only for Descartes to provide the philosophical context – what has been known ever since as “Cartesian dualism” – in which these revolutionary new ideas could find a home and comfortably co-exist with the prevailing Christian worldview.

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In his Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641, Descartes argued that mind and body are very different things. The mind is an immaterial “thinking thing” (res cogitans) and the body a corporeal “extended thing” (res extensa). Only the latter, the physical realm, isthe proper domain of science. Here physical bodies function deterministically as machines according to fixed laws. When mind interferes with intentions of its own, it does so by manipulating the levers of the machine – perhaps, Descartes mused, via the pinealgland near the centre of the brain – though just how two such very different realms could influence each other remained a mystery and is acknowledged still as “the problem of interactionism.” This radical separation of mind and matter did, however, serve its purpose. It enabled these “fathers of science,” and countless otherssince, to pursue a scientific exploration of the physical world while at the same time remaining deeply religious. As Francis Bacon expressed it: “I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind.” 16

An unusual attempt to sidestep the problem of interactionism was advanced by the German philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz (1646-1716). In what is known as “psycho-physical parallelism,” he proposed that the separate realms of mind and matter do not causallyinteract at all but operate in parallel with each other in a pre-established harmony ordained by God. What seems, from our point of view, to be a causal interaction between these different realms is only an illusion generated by this cosmic harmony. However creative,it was a thesis that failed to attract much popular support.

As the machine metaphor grew in popularity throughout the 19th century, it more and more carried with it a physicalist bias. The universe was increasingly seen as a closed system in which everything happens in accordance with the laws of physics, with no interference whatsoever from mind. Indeed, the very notion of mind as a separate domain fell into disrepute, and Cartesian dualism as aphilosophical position was dismissed by many as an outmoded belief in what British philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), in 1949, disdainfully dubbed “the ghost in the machine.” 17 If mind was acknowledged at all, it was only as a by-product of the mechanistic physical system.

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The latter half of the 20th century saw a modest revival of dualism, born of a growing discontent with physicalism among some scientists and philosophers. These have included:

Sir Charles Scott Sherrington (1857-1952) – British Nobel laureate who laid the foundations for modern neurophysiology and defended dualism as the only position that adequately preserves the data of consciousness.

Sir John Eccles (1903-1997) – Australian neurophysiologist andNobel laureate whose philosophical dualism rests on his explication of how mind and brain can interact without violating the “conservation of energy” principle.

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) – Austrian-American mathematician who demonstrated, in what has become renowned as Gödel’s theorem, that there are rational forms of mathematical thought of whichhumans are capable which cannot be exhibited by a mechanical system of the sort that a physical mind would have to be.

Thomas Nagel (born 1937) – American philosopher who maintainedthat there are subjective aspects of experience (qualia) that cannot be reduced to anything physical. Even if, he argued, weknew everything there was to know from a scientific perspective about a bat’s sonar system, we would still have noidea what it is like to be a bat. In his most recent work, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, he forcefully defends philosophical dualism against the physicalist assumptions of neo-Darwinian reductionism.18

A common thread that runs through most anti-physicalism, pro-dualism arguments was formulated in 1928 by J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964), a British geneticist and evolutionary biologist. “It seems tome immensely unlikely,” he wrote, “that mind is a mere by-product ofmatter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true.” 19 The Irish novelist and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) echoed the same argument. “If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry onthe meaningless flux of atoms,” he wrote, “I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.” 20

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Dual-Aspect Monism

Cartesian dualism had intended to clear the way for a scientific exploration of the physical world by relegating mind to aquite separate realm and thereby sidestepping the problem of mind altogether. The problem, however, would not so easily go away and quickly returned to centre stage. While some joined the physicalist bandwagon and, in a move known as “eliminative materialism,” chose to treat mental phenomena as all but non-existent, others reopened the age-old debate by wondering whether there could even be a physical world devoid of mental phenomena. Among the latter, some adopted a solution known as “dual-aspect theory” or “dual-aspect monism.”

Unlike dualism’s radical separation of the physical and mental, and unlike the monistic solutions of physicalism and idealism that reduce mental states to the physical and vice versa, dual-aspect monism holds that the physical and mental are two aspects of one underlying reality. Like heads and tails of the samecoin, or the north and south poles of Earth’s geomagnetic field, or the particle-wave manifestations of quantum reality’s undivided wholeness, you can’t have one without the other. The physical and mental are distinct, but they are inseparable and mutually irreducible.

Whereas dualism regards the physical and the mental as quite separate domains, and must then face the problem of how they causally interact with one another,

Physical Mental

dual-aspect monism sees them as expressions of one and the same underlying or background reality.

Physical Mental

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Underlying Reality

The distinction between these dual aspects may also be understood as that between first- and third-person (I and It) perspectives. The former refers to subjective conscious experiences (or qualia). The latter has to do with the objective world of what isexperienced. The gap between the first- and third-person perspectives is what David Chalmers calls “the hard problem of consciousness.” From the standpoint of dual-aspect monism, however, we need not explain a causal link between the physical and mental, but rather recognise the correlation between the two, born of the underlying reality of which each is an expression. The nature of that underlying reality remains a mystery, since we can never experience or know of it other than as the dual aspects by which it manifests.

Dual-aspect monism is sufficiently similar to panpsychism thatit can be difficult to assign particular theorists to one category or the other. The Jewish-Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) is a case in point. Though often dubbed a panpsychist, we willrecognise him here as the first exponent of dual-aspect theory. A pantheist in either case, he understood mind and matter to be aspects or attributes of an infinite and eternal reality that he identified with God. For Spinoza, God is not a supernatural causal agent but the whole of existence that manifests as mind and matter. There is nothing in nature that does not have a mental aspect, nor does mind exist apart from matter. Both are flip sides of the same coin.

Subsequent representatives of dual-aspect monism, as well as of a subtly different variant known as neutral monism, include:

Gustav Fechner (1801-1887) – German philosopher, psychologist,and founder of “psycho-physics,” who conceived of the physicaland mental as two different aspects of one and the same reality.

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) – German physician and a founder of modern psychology.

Ernest Mach (1838-1916) – Austrian physicist whose formulationof “Mach’s principle” was an influential factor in Einstein’s

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later development of the general theory of relativity, and whogreatly influenced the seminal thinking of William James and Bertrand Russell.

William James (1842-1910) – American philosopher and “father of American psychology.”

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) – British philosopher and mathematician who flirted with neutral monism for some time before finally adopting it.

Carl Jung (1875-1961) – Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) – German-born theoretical physicist who, in a letter penned in 1929, declared himself tobe one of the “followers of Spinoza” who, though unable to believe in a personal God, can nonetheless “see God in the wonderful order and lawfulness of all that exists and in its soul as it reveals itself in man and animals.” 21

Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) - Austrian theoretical physicist and pioneer of quantum physics who supported Jung's concept ofa psychophysically neutral archetypal order.

Karl Popper (1902-1994) – Austro-British philosopher, widely regarded as the 20th century’s foremost philosopher of science,who is sometimes wrongly labelled a body-mind dualist. In facthe did not think of mind as something separate from the body but rather, like the body, as comprising distinct yet complementary properties that are distinct from physical ones.

David Bohm (1917-1992) – American theoretical physicist who developed a detailed theory of how an implicate order of “active information” unfolds into the separate explicate domains of mind and matter.

Kenneth Sayre (born 1929) – American cyberneticist who, like David Bohm, maintains that the physical and the mental domainsare each reducible to an underlying state of information that is ontologically prior to them both.

Max Velmans (born 1942) – British psychologist who co-founded the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society in 1994. His extensive studies of consciousness stress the importance of both first-person accounts of consciousness and third-person accounts of brain states, which he regards as complementary.

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Emergentism

On our spectrum of philosophical assumptions, emergentism falls between dual-aspect monism and physicalism. Like dual-aspect monism, it regards the physical and the mental as distinct but not separate – but rather than seeing them as complementary manifestations of a single underlying reality, it contends that the mental is an emergent or higher-level manifestation of the physical.Like physicalism, it ascribes primacy to the physical in that the mental is said to emerge from it and remains dependent on it. Ratherthan reducing the mental to the physical, however, it recognises a certain independence in the emergent mental properties that are not reducible to, or predictable from, their physical base.

Emergentism entails the idea that the cosmos evolves as a layered reality. Higher layers, characterised by greater organisational complexity, are said to supervene or emerge from morefundamental layers in such a way that each is genuinely novel and cannot be reduced to the layer from which it has emerged. Each, in other words, is greater than the sum of its parts. Korean-American philosopher Jaegwon Kim (born 1934) explained it this way. “As systems acquire increasingly higher degrees of organizational complexity they begin to exhibit novel properties that in some sensetranscend the properties of their constituent parts, and behave in ways that cannot be predicted on the basis of the laws governing thesimpler systems.” 22 While novel and irreducible, however, emergent properties remain dependent on, and cannot exist apart from, their underlying base. Applied to the mind-body problem, this means that consciousness, albeit an emergent and irreducible property, does notexist apart from the brain.

The layered nature of reality was at least tacitly acknowledged by the way in which science developed, with a special science being assigned to the study of each layer. So the science ofphysics addresses the base layer of the physical domain by investigating the properties and the laws governing the elementary constituents of nature. The science of chemistry builds on this, followed in turn by biology, followed in turn by psychology and the later social sciences. As we move up through the emergent layers, the corresponding sciences become increasingly specialised, dealing

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with ever smaller sets of increasingly complex structures, each withits own distinguishing characteristics.

It was not until the mid-19th century, however, that emergentism arrived on the philosophical scene in conjunction with Charles Darwin’s revolutionary account of the origin of species. According to Darwin (1809-1882), quite novel species of plants and animals emerge from their ancestral forbears by an evolutionary process of adaptation that he called “natural selection.” Later, contemporary American philosopher Daniel Dennett (born 1942) called this “Darwin’s dangerous idea,” 23 because it leads to the conclusionthat mind, far from sharing primacy with the physical realm, is in fact a latecomer in the universe that has evolved from its physical substrate by this utterly blind and mindless process of natural selection.

Assuming this to be true, the only remaining question is whether the emergent realm of mind, so totally dependent on its physical substrate, can influence or have any effect upon that substrate. Can this emergent mind act as a casual agent? Is there such a thing as “downward” as well as “upward causality?” Or is everything finally determined by the laws of physics? Virtually fromthe outset, this question divided the field of emergentist scholars.British philosophers John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and C. D. Broad (1887-1971) argued that emergence gives birth to higher-level causalinteractions additional to those that operate at the more fundamental level of physics. Australian-born British philosopher Samuel Alexander (1859-1938) disagreed. While acknowledging the emergence of causal patterns that cannot be expressed in terms of more fundamental principles, he insisted that these do not supplement or in any way supersede the underlying principles. Emergence, in other words, may give birth to something truly new under the sun, but the fundamental dynamics remain unchanged.

In the latter half of the 20th century a new interdisciplinary field of study known as the science of complexity began to investigate “complex adaptive systems” and, in so doing, generated renewed interest in emergentism as a possible solution to the mind-body conundrum. Complex adaptive systems are dynamic, non-linear networks capable of adapting (i.e. mutating and self-organising) to

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enhance their sustainability in a changing environment. Examples range from ant colonies to geopolitical organisations, from developing embryos to the stock market, from individual brains to the worldwide web, from the immune system to ecosystems and the biosphere. The models used to describe these systems are essentiallyevolutionary, and the term “emergent” is used to describe their high-level properties and collective behaviours that are so much greater than the sum of their constituent parts. The behaviour of anant colony or of our immune system, for example, is far beyond that of the individual ants or immune cells involved. Even greater is thedifference between the properties of mind and those of the neurons on which they depend – so great indeed as to raise the question of whether they perhaps belong to quite separate domains.

Key figures in the development of complexity theory and contemporary emergentism include:

Luwig von Bertalannfy (1901-1972) – Austrian-born biologist and founder of General System Theory.

Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) – Russian-born Belgian chemist and Nobel laureate who argued that self-organising complex systemsinvolve emergent dynamic principles that cannot be reduced to basic physics.

Harold J. Morowitz (born 1927) – American biophysicist who provided an extensive compilation of emergent forms in nature.

Fritjof Capra (born 1939) – Austrian-born physicist whose writings have helped to popularise General System Theory.

Ursula Goodenough (born 1943) – American biologist who, by showing how complexity arises in the natural world, offers an evidential basis for emergentism and her own version of religious naturalism.

Douglas Hofstadter (born 1945) – American cognitive scientist who presents an emergentist explanation for mind or consciousness. In a book, co-authored with philosopher Daniel Dennett, he asks “Is the soul more than the hum of its parts?”24

Robert B. Laughlin (born 1950) – American physicist and Nobel laureate who has focused attention on a range of properties that are well-understood through high-level principles but areinexplicable in terms of basic physics.

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Melanie Mitchell (born 1953) – American cognitive scientist and student of Douglas Hofstadter, whose research interests include emergent computation or how natural systems perform computation.

Daniel Bor (born c. 1975) – British cognitive neuroscientist who argues that consciousness is a brain-based faculty that has emerged / evolved as an intensely practical knowledge-gathering tool and idea factory.

Despite the fact that emergentism has become the default position for many scientists today, it is still just a philosophical assumption that no more solves the mind-body problem than do any of the other assumptions on the spectrum we are considering. As Jaegwon Kim makes clear in Making Sense of Emergence, we still must choose whether to acknowledge only “upward causation” and regard consciousness as an epiphenomenon of aclosed physical system, or whether to acknowledge “downward causation” as well and regard consciousness as a causal agent that produces effects in the physical realm. Opting for the former is tantamount to espousing physicalism, according to which every event,physical or mental, can be fully accounted for by physical causes. Opting for the latter finds us drifting back along the spectrum towards dualism and something resembling an old-fashioned vitalism. Simply to say that life emerges from inert matter, or that macromolecules somehow come alive, really explains nothing, and “thehard problem of consciousness” remains.

Physicalism

The term “physicalism” was introduced into philosophy in the 1930s by the German-American philosopher Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) who proposed it as an update on what had previously been called “materialism” – a school of thought which holds that everything in the universe consists of inert, senseless matter. As more recently we came to understand that there are forces in nature such as gravity that are not material in this sense but are nonetheless physical, it was deemed more accurate to refer to this position as “physicalism.” By either name, the philosophical assumption is the same: the fundamental nature of reality is physical and what we

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experience as mental phenomena are, despite appearances to the contrary, all determined by the laws of physics.

Materialism goes back at least to ancient Greece and the philosophy advanced by Leucippus (500-440 BCE) and his disciple Democritus (460-370 BCE). Between them, in a theory that bears an astonishing resemblance to modern-day chemistry, they proposed that reality consists of multi-shaped “atoms” that interlock in such a way as to create a whole universe of more complex shapes. Mental phenomena not easily accounted for in these terms were said to be produced by the “causal powers” of the physical world. A century later, Epicurus (341-270 BCE) echoed the same idea. Everything, he said, is ultimately based on the interactions of atoms moving in empty space. From then until the modern era, however, materialism virtually vanished from the intellectual landscape. It was briefly revived in the 17th century by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) who, though primarily concerned with political philosophy, tried to make the case that everything – all our thoughts and feelings and even God himself – is nothing but matter in motion. Despite his protestations to the contrary, he was unkindly judged to be an atheist by his peers, almost all of whom, until the 20th century, remained either good Christian dualists or panpsychists with a decided bias towards mind being a primary component of reality.

During the last hundred years, the accelerating progress of science and the astonishing technology that it has spawned have issued in the virtual overthrow of mentalist assumptions by the physics-based metaphysics that largely shapes our Western worldview today. Descartes had tried to ring-fence the physical world as the exclusive domain of science by creating an ontological gulf between it and the realm of mind and spirit. But many scientists since have come to regard the latter as unnecessary from an explanatory point of view, and have chosen instead to believe either that it doesn’t exist or, if it does, that it has no causal significance. Accordingly, they tend to fall into either one of two camps – reductive or non-reductive physicalism.

The former acknowledges that, while the world contains much that seems non-physical, all such phenomena, be they psychological

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or social, must finally be reduced to the physical domain since it alone exists. Mental states are simply by-products of physical states and will ultimately be explainable by the laws of physics. Some exponents of this position, who are known as “eliminative materialists,” go so far as to predict that words such as think, feel, desire, believe, etcetera, will one day be eliminated from our language because the states to which they refer simply do not exist.

Non-reductive physicalists hold a slightly different position,called “supervenience physicalism,” that borders on emergentism. As in emergentism, supervenience describes a layered universe in which higher levels supervene on, and are dependent upon, lower levels. Any change in the higher (e.g. mind) depends on a change in the lower (e.g. brain). As proposed by American philosophers Donald Davidson (1917-2003) and Jerry Fodor (born 1935), the physical is the sole category of being, but the language used to describe the mental cannot be reduced to the language of the physical. This layered universe is akin to a dot-matrix picture in which the picture that appears, while real enough, is simply a perceived pattern in the dots that comprise it. Any change in the picture depends on a different patterning of the dots. Jaegwon Kim, however,argues that non-reductive physicalism is a contradiction in terms. If events can be sufficiently explained by their physical determinants, there is no need for presumed mental determinants suchas decision and intention.

Among the many recent and contemporary scientists and philosophers whose work rests on one or another version of physicalism, those whose names are most widely known include:

Francis Crick (1916-2004) – British molecular biologist Marvin Minsky (born 1927) – American cognitive scientist Gerald Edelman (born 1929) – American biologist Edward O. Wilson (born 1929) – American biologist John Searle (born 1932) – American philosopher Carl Sagan (1934-1996) – American astrophysicist Richard Dawkins (born 1942) – British evolutionary biologist Daniel Dennett (born 1942) – American philosopher and

cognitive scientist Stephen Hawking (born 1942) – British theoretical physicist Michael Persinger (born 1945) – Canadian neuroscientist Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) – British journalist

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Steven Pinker (born 1954) – Canadian cognitive scientist Sam Harris (born 1967) – American philosopher and

neuroscientist

In addition to these well-known luminaries, there are enough contemporary proponents of physicalism to indicate a clear trend since the mid-20th century towards the emergentist-physicalist end of the spectrum. Certainly in the West there has been a marked shift from a predominantly Christian to an increasingly secular worldview, such that a “new atheism” has in some circles become fashionable in a way that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. The shift is closely linkedto a widening embrace of emergentist-physicalist assumptions that spirit or consciousness, if they can be said to exist at all, are but accidental by-products of the physical world and not a fundamental aspect of reality.

Speaking of American society, contemporary spiritual teacher, Ram Dass, summed it up in this way:

At root we are a secular society whose deepest leanings are toward the school of thought known as philosophical materialism – the idea that reality is limited to what we perceive through our senses. If something cannot be seen, smelled, tasted, heard, or touched with our physical bodies, or measured in a laboratory, materialism posits that it does not exist except as a creation of the mind. . . We use science as our bottom line, our gauge for determining what is real and what is not. Our culture tends to disregard the possibility that there is any reality beyond our senses. 25

Postscript

Each of these philosophical assumptions must be taken as just that – an assumption rather than a statement of fact. There are arguments for and against each position. Each has been the preferred “solution” to the mind-body problem at one time or another, and each continues to be defended by eminent scholars who regard it as the best and most accurate account of our experience. This fact alone should make clear that none of these positions can be hailed as the final solution to the so-called “hard problem of

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consciousness.” If indeed a solution to this problem could be found,one might reasonably expect that, after a few thousand years of reflection by humanity’s best minds, a solution would have been found. But this has not happened. The debate continues, the arguments for and against each position become more refined, and theproblem remains as intractable as ever.

It would seem the better part of wisdom to acknowledge that a solution has not been found because a solution cannot be found – that, because consciousness is a subjective, first-person phenomenon, it cannot be understood as if it were, like the brain, an objective, third-person entity. To treat it as such is to treat it as something it is not. Just as, for Lao Tsu, “the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao,” so “consciousness explained” (to use the title of a book by Daniel Dennett) is not consciousness at all. Perhaps, in short, the hard problem of consciousness has not been solved because, by its very nature, it is insoluble.

For many of us that conclusion is difficult to live with. We like to imagine that our worldview, whatever it is, represents a true and accurate picture of reality. And we can be so encouraged byfinding others who share our philosophical assumptions that we easily slip into imagining that we have “the truth.” The popularityof any philosophical position, however, has nothing to do with its truth or falsity. The emergentist-physicalist positions are currently fashionable, as panpsychism was in the 18th and 19th centuries, and dualism was before that. Nor does it follow that whatis fashionable today is necessarily more enlightened than what was fashionable yesterday. In every age, including our own, respected scholars have embraced each of these positions. If indeed the mind-body problem is insoluble, the question of their truth or falsity does not apply and needs to be replaced by a different consideration– namely the question of which assumption, treated as a working hypothesis to be tested in our everyday experience, best serves as the philosophical basis for a satisfying worldview.

Notwithstanding this, the fervour with which we typically defend our worldview when it is threatened suggests that many of us still prefer to think of it as God’s own truth. This is clearly the case as regards religious worldviews presumed by believers to contain a truth quite literally written in heaven, revealed by

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inspired avatars, and contained in sacred texts. But not dissimilar claims are also made, or at least inferred, for our scientifically informed worldviews. Despite the fact that science, by its very nature, can never claim to have “the truth” but only theories that, in order to be valid at all, must be potentially falsifiable, many scientists are reluctant to relinquish their pet theories or change their fundamental paradigm even in the face of contrary evidence. The great merit of science is precisely its refusal to declare anything to be the final truth and its willingness to continuously evolve by adapting to new evidence. But still it seems difficult, for the scientifically-minded as well as for the religiously-inclined among us, to humbly acknowledge, especially as regards the Big Questions, that our metaphors are simply metaphors, our assumptions only assumptions, and that none of us has a corner on the truth.

References

1. Swimme, Brian, The Universe Story (New York: Harper, 1992)

2. Gazzaniga, Michael, Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain (New York:Harper Collins. 2011).

3. Wheeler, John, in Scientific American, 1992. Vol. 267.

4. Popper, Karl, The Logic of Scientific Discover ( London: Routledge, 1959).

5. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

6. Jeans, Sir James, The Mysterious Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1930).

7. Eddington, Sir Arthur, The Nature of the Physical World (New York: Macmillan. 1928).

8. d’Espagnat, Bernard, “Quantum weirdness: What we call ‘reality’ is justa state of mind,” published in the guardian.co.uk blog on 20 March 2009.

9. Goswami, Amit, The Self-Aware Universe: How consciousness creates the material world (New York: Tarcher. 1995).

10. Schelling, Friedrich, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, “Introduction,” 1797.

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11. McDougall, William, Body and Mind: A history and a defense of animism (London, Methuen. 1911).

12. Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality: An essay in cosmology (New York: Macmillan. 1929).

13. This quotation, spoken by Sir Roger Penrose, starts at 1:08:10 in Errol Morris’s 1992 film, A Brief History of Time, about the life and work of Stephen Hawking.

14. Herbert, Nick, Quantum Reality: Beyond the new physics (New York: Doubleday. 1985).

15. Sheldrake, Rupert, The Science Delusion: Freeing the spirit of enquiry (London: Coronet. 2012).

16. Bacon, Francis, Essays, Civil and Moral, Chapter XVI, “Of Atheism” (1625) – edited by Charles W. Eliot (New York: P. F. Collier & Son. 1909-14).

17. Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002). p. 11.

18. Nagel, Thomas, Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. 2012).

19. Haldane, J. B. S., “When I am Dead,” in Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937 edition), p. 209.

20. Lewis, C. S., The Screwtape Letters, with Screwtape Proposes a Toast (San Francisco: Harper, 2001), p. 58. “Scretwape Proposes a Toast” first appeared in 1959 as an article inthe Saturday Evening Post.

21. Einstein, Albert, in a letter to Eduard Bűsching, dated 25 October 1929, amd quoted in Jammer, Max, Einstein and Religion (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. 1999).

22. Kim, Jaegwon, “Making Sense of Emergence,” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, Vol. 95, No. 1 / 2, August 1999.

23. Dennett, Daniel, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster. 1995).

24. Hofstadter, Douglas, and Dennett, Daniel (eds.), The Mind’s I” Fantasies and reflections on self and soul

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(New York: Basic Books. 1981), p. 191.

25. Ram Dass, Still Here (Sydney: Hodder. 2000). p. 22.