The Miracle of Existence
By Henry Margenau
I bought this book on recommendation from Aldous
Huxley. Well, he referenced Margena
often in his book. Margenau, a physicist
by education, writes this book from that view.
Which makes for a challenge for a layperson such as me. The subject matter is very metaphyseal that
bends towards the East. For that I am
grateful to Huxley for the recommendation.
Essentially the thesis claims that existence is derived from
thought. This thought in
particular: The universe must therefore
have been created, together with the laws that regulate it. This leaves us with two possibilities (1) a
designer, knower, was responsible for its genesis, he designed it like a clock,
which is still running. But the clockmaker
disappeared or died; (2) the clockmaker still exists and knows the course of
the universe. And at the same time this clockmaker’s thought
is of one mind, in mankind. This being
an abstract idea for many, A new word for me is brought forth reification.
Reification is the act of treating something abstract, such as an
idea, relation, system, quality, etc, as if it were a concrete object. It is
the conversion of an abstract concept into something concrete. And the concreate idea is we are all of one
mind, a universal mind. Thus to sum up
the enigma of existence, only Universal Mind, the cosmic consciousness,
possesses existence in full unlimited measure.
The Universal Mind confers existence on conscious beings in varying
degree, and these beings create, out of the minds bestowed on them and in
accordance with principles imposed by the Universal Mind, everything else they
call real or existing.
Excerpts from the book:
1.
Page 2: He then takes force, this power of persistence
to be the reality, the metaphysical principle of existence.
2.
Page 2:
Lebnitz’s compete answer, however involves God, the most perfect monad,
that is of highest degree of self preservation.
3.
Page 6: Therefore it is equally necessary to
make intuition, as it is to make or concepts senses, ie, to add to them their
object inn intuition, as to make our intuitions intelligible, ie, to bring them
under concepts. These two powers or
faculties cannot exchange their functions.
The understanding cannot see. The
senses cannot think. By their union only
can knowledge be produced.
4.
Page 7:
The faculty allowing us, indeed forcing us, to soar above natural
confines of experience Kant calls “pure reason.”
5.
Page 16 (1) The vast rang of application and
immense fruitfulness of a law regulating the observable calles symmetry and (2)
its abstractness, its lack of referanceto any of the ordinary properties of
matter. The distinguished biophysist
Harold Morowitz calls symmery noetic, a term derived from the Greek word vove,
which man’s mind of consciousness….. there is no evidence whatsoever that
adjustment to the principle requires time.
…
6.
Page 16: The discovery and application of
Pauli’s exclusion principle is perhaps the most remarkable example of
transcendent but comparable elaboration.
One wonders weather further , as yet unknown, noetic principle may not
be needed for the fact of life and of consciousness.
7.
Page 17: A law of inanimate nature claims tha
entropy never decreases. Only in
processes related to living systems, which are always open, does it decrease.
8.
Page 17: while the story of information says
nothing about conscousn3ss, consciousness would be meaningless without
information.
9.
Page 19: Darwin’s random genetic propagation and
survival of the fittest. The main
philosophic issue ad one that has stimulated controversy ever since 1859, is
hidden in the word random.
10. Page
22: If the reader sees a loophole and argues that after all, Einstein proved equivalence
of energy and matter, and matter is therefor universal. I counter that some fields, such as the
probability field of quantum mechanics, carry neither energy nor matter.
11. Page
24: This author’s private belief is that
the term instinct is very poorly defined and its use by psychologists covers a
deficiency of basic understanding. It is
certainly as vague as Jung’s subconsciousness.
12. Page
24The appearance of the concept of chance in a fundamental theory is by no
means unique; we observe its action in most sciences, indeed in all those that feature
epistemic feedback.
13. Page
32: Only a minority of authors explicitly avow the action of purpose in
evolution and all processes of life. … Teilhard de Chardin who uses the
impressive phrase “paroxysm of harmonized complexity.
14. Page
35: To me this implies that if the development of man were entirely a result of
chance it would be an accident, a sequence of events that a statistician would
regard its occurrence as absurd.
15. Page
40: This circumstance may be responsible for the fact that an increasing number
if distinguished philosophers and indeed some of the most celebrated researchers
in the field of neurology are discarding the ind-brain identity theory, seemingly
approaching the acceptance of a thesis as transcendence with compatibility.
16. Page
40: Penfold concludes that the mind, as an independent agency, can give
direction to the brain in advance of the brains action
17. Page
42 the substance of physics is no longer single and uniform but multiple yet
compatible and coherent.
18. Page
44: Where then does consciousness reside?
The best answer might be: no where.
The mind is something sui generis.
The fact that it cannot be located does not worry the physicist , for he
know of other onta that defy locatability.
19. Page
47: Transcendental dualism is a term Eccles assigns to his philosophic view.
20. Page
48: What is the external world? In what
sense does it exist? Can it be explained
without a mind? To answer these
questions requires an excursion in epistemology, into the way we gain knowledge
of the world, an to the features of this knowledge stable, objective , and
independent of the mind.
21. Page
50: reification, making a thing out of sensations. Obviously if there were no mind, there
would be no reification. In the
strictest sense, therefore, mind creates the external world. … So far as the
single mind is concerned the continued identity, stability, the cohesion among
reified P-states are inexplicable, are an aspect of the miracle of existence,
for which no simple scientific reasoning can account.
22. Page
51: Noncognative experience is
charactistic of ab explored in the arts, the humanities, and all the ethical
religions concerns and involves feelings and mental acts of remembering,
willing, and certain kinds of analytical reasoning.
23. Page
52: Northrop calls our rules of correspondence
epistemic correlations;
24. Page
53: The term construct suggests a
measure of creativity,of participation on the part of the scientist, and was
intended for, as we shall see, the passage of P to the field of constructs is
not wholly unique but subject to selection under rational principles.
25. Page
58: This passage, which in essence a
rule of correspondence leading from a complex of P-facts to a construct
belonging to the class of external objects, I have called reification. … All this combined in the rule of correspondence ® called reification, and
it is the rule thatfills the world with innumerable external objects … uninterpreted
complex of sensations.
26. Page
64: In other words, our construction, and hence our recognition of reality, or
the world, depends on compulsive features that are not of our arbitrary choice.
27. Page
70: Lateral extension suggests two things (1) there are many minds, each of
which constructs the same C-field if it proceeds along the lines of our epistemology
suggests. Beyond this observation we account
legitimately go at present. Later, however, I shall have occasion to suggest
and elaborate on the existence of a Universal Mind. I therefore list here
suggestion (2) the lateral extension of the figure may mean a merging of all
individual minds into a universal one.
… Could this account for inspiration of scientific genius which leads to
bizarre conjectures that are ultimately verified empirically?
28. Page
83: Let us be reminded that
consciousness, despite the desire of many physicists to adopt it, has not yet
found a in physics.
29. Page
93: From what has been said it appears the concept of mind or consciousness
resembles most closely what physicists call a field: it is not necessarily
localized in a limited region but is capable being located predominantly withing a given space, say the
human body….Although science no longer forces us to regard mind as material, or
even as associated with matter, we do know that it interacts with matter,
primarily the brain.
30. Page
97: The mind may be regarded as a field in the accepted physical sense of the
term. But it is a nonmaterial field; its
closest analogue is perhaps a probability field. …The mind has no mass at all.
31. Page
98: My thesis was that primary (P) experiences, the edge of the C-field, are subjective, contingent,
qualitative, and by themselves in coherent, the form part of the rhapsody of
perception. Because of the lack of
rational relations among them, P-Facts require to be organized, made stable,
objective, rationally tractable, by translation into constructs via rules of
correspondence.
32. Page
100: Scientific time, which characterizes scientific reality, is an abstract
idea employed in the description of observable processes. It is represented bya
line space and has an arbitrary origin denoting the present, but the present
has no absolute significance and can be located by choice anywhere on the line.
33. Page
102: The other solution to the problem of evil, the one I prefer is simply
this. Suffering is mistake for evil. … Further I discuss the view that religion
may be a meta science, a discipline with its own structure that ponders the
somewhat miraculous circumstance that man ai able to apply the scientific methd
and that the unruly mass of factual (P) experiences can be made to obey simple
rules and laws.
34. Page
104: it has now been shown that a sphere of matter having sufficient destiny
and thus possessing positive mass energy (MC2) and negative potential energy because of gravitational
attraction, may have zero total energy as well as zero momentum. Hence it would satisfy all known conservation
laws if it were created out of nothing.
The Big Bang Theory doe does not contradict this conjecture.
35. Page
107: …protons and neutrons. When these are separated in space and therefore
noninteracting, one is charged and the other is neutral. But at sufficiently close distances their identities
disappear, their properties merge, and distinction between them becomes
impossible. But they are still two onta.
36. Page
109: Thus one is led to a new notion of unbroken wholeness which denies
the classical idea of analyzability of the world into separately and
independently existent part. Should this
kind of denial also be necessary for conscious, for mind, so that the question
of separate mind making up or adding the universal mind become meaningful
37. Page
110: … the concept of reality, unformed and unfixed by consciousness, is
completely meaningless …. The game of give and take that goes on between
consciousness and reality.
38. Page
111 As to the explicit claim that the external
world – physical reality – is produced by the mind, I have merely this claim is
in harmony with the epistemology developed previously. Sensations transcribed by rules of
correspondence into coherent constructs subjected to certain metaphysical
requirements, finally constitute reality, in essence the same for all.
39. Page
112: In order to establish the reality of external object, the starting point
is a protocol called sensation (P-plane)
..this sensation is translated or converted into a construct by means of
rules of correspondence and regulation by certain metaphysical principles. Everything in the external world…owes its
character to this process. Every entity
is a construct of our mind called real because it satisfies this procedure.
40. Page
113: …time and space are modes of representation of external objects, mdes
generated by the mind. …space provides a unity and universality our sensations
do not possess. We are spaces filled
with objects, limited to their extents. Different
spaces are differentiated by objects they contain, within a complex of
sensations.
41. Page
113: We experience time directly in the flight of our consciousness, both amid
external sensations and internal awareness, both different an efferent, as in
introspection, memory, or meditation.
But like space, appears in fragment or pieces characterized by what
occurs, the momentary contents of our consciousness, and again, as in the case
of space, we proclaim time to be a single and infinite duration: all times are
one.
42. Page
114: On death of any living creature the spirit returns to the spiritual world,
the body to the bodily world. In this
however only the bodies are subject to change.
The spirit world is one single point who stands like unto a light behind
the bodily worls and who, when any single creature comes into being, shines
through it as through a window.
43. Page
117: In special relativity, time enters as a fourth coordinate. When this is introduced, space becomes four-dimensional,
and its character changes from Euclidian to hyperbolic.
44. Page
117: The history of the physical universe – provided it is made up of discrete
onta – os therefore an immense collection of world lines, represented as an
enormously large set of formulas, the aggregate of which I shall call the World
Formula
45. Page
119: It is clearly wrong to assert tha knowledge
implies or requires existence, ot that existence requires knowledge. For knowledge can be erroneous, incompatible with
existence. True knowledge of an
occurrence , however, implies existence.
The occurrence in this case is a segment in te process of the
universe. This leaves us with the
question “Does existence imply true knowledge
46. Page119:
The universe must therefore have been created, together with the laws that
regulate it. This leaves us with two
possibilities (1) a designer, knower, was responsible for its genesis, he
designed it like a clock, which is still running. But the clockmaker disappeared or died; (2)
the clockmaker still exists and knows the course of the universe. I accept the second alternative.
47. Page
121: Our human satae inflicts further impediments on us which set us apart from
the Universal Mind…. It produces the prevailing sense of individual isolation
and gives us an identity as well as an ego.
48. Page
122: The past is regulated by determinate and determinable causes; the future
by probability
49. Page
127: By way of concluding this book I wish give a summary that relates its
title to its content. The word esistance
is not unique in its meaning but admits of a considerable variety of interpretations. A different one appears in each of the following
sentences: The tree exists. Electrons exist. Photons exist. Life exists. ….God exists.
50. Page
129: Thus to sum up the enigma of existence,
only Universal Mind, the cosmic consciousness, possesses existence in full
unlimited measure. The Universal Mind
confers existence on conscious beings in varying degree, and these beings
create, out of the minds bestowed on them and in accordance with principles
imposed by the Universal Mind, everything else they call real or existing.
51. Page
130: God the creator is also responsible
for the laws of nature. Many forms of
evil are the results of physical, psychological and other processes. Hence we add the quality of consistency,
action in accord with the laws he created, to the character of God, the problem
of evil may disappear.
