In 1967 British biologist and Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar famously characterized science as, in book title form, The Art of the Soluble. “Good scientists study the most important problems they think they can solve. It is, after all, their professional business to solve problems, not merely to grapple with them,” he wrote.
Are consciousness, free will and God scientifically insoluble mysteries?
Credit: Izhar Cohen
For millennia, the greatest minds of our species have grappled to gain purchase on the vertiginous ontological cliffs of three great mysteries—consciousness, free will and God—without ascending anywhere near the thin air of their peaks. Unlike other inscrutable problems, such as the structure of the atom, the molecular basis of replication and the causes of human violence, which have witnessed stunning advancements of enlightenment, these three seem to recede ever further away from understanding, even as we race ever faster to catch them in our scientific nets.
Are these “hard” problems, as philosopher David Chalmers characterized consciousness, or are they truly insoluble “mysterian” problems, as philosopher Owen Flanagan designated them (inspired by the 1960s rock group Question Mark and the Mysterians)? The “old mysterians” were dualists who believed in nonmaterial properties, such as the soul, that cannot be explained by natural processes. The “new mysterians,” Flanagan says, contend that consciousness can never be explained because of the limitations of human cognition. I contend that not only consciousness but also free will and God are mysterian problems—not because we are not yet smart enough to solve them but because they can never be solved, not even in principle, relating to how the concepts are conceived in language. Call those of us in this camp the “final mysterians.”
Consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness is represented by the qualitative experiences (qualia) of what it is like to be something. It is the first-person subjective experience of the world through the senses and brain of the organism. It is not possible to know what it is like to be a bat (in philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous thought experiment), because if you altered your brain and body from humanoid to batoid, you would just be a bat, not a human knowing what it feels like to be a bat. You would not be like the traveling salesman in Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis, who awakens to discover he has been transformed into a giant insect but still has human thoughts. You would just be an arthropod. By definition, only I can know my first-person experience of being me, and the same is true for you, bats and bugs.
Free will. Few scientists dispute that we live in a deterministic universe in which all effects have causes (except in quantum mechanics, although this just adds an element of randomness to the system, not freedom). And yet we all act as if we have free will—that we make choices among options and retain certain degrees of freedom within constraining systems. Either we are all delusional, or else the problem is framed to be conceptually impenetrable. We are not inert blobs of matter bandied about the pinball machine of life by the paddles of nature’s laws; we are active agents within the causal net of the universe, both determined by it and helping to determine it through our choices. That is the compatibilist position from whence volition and culpability emerge.
God. If the creator of the universe is supernatural—outside of space and time and nature’s laws—then by definition, no natural science can discover God through any measurements made by natural instruments. By definition, this God is an unsolvable mystery. If God is part of the natural world or somehow reaches into our universe from outside of it to stir the particles (to, say, perform miracles like healing the sick), we should be able to quantify such providential acts. This God is scientifically soluble, but so far all claims of such measurements have yet to exceed statistical chance. In any case, God as a natural being who is just a whole lot smarter and more powerful than us is not what most people conceive of as deific.
Although these final mysteries may not be solvable by science, they are compelling concepts nonetheless, well deserving of our scrutiny if for no other reason than it may lead to a deeper understanding of our nature as sentient, volitional, spiritual beings.
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Joseph A Olson
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There are three dimensions of space, time is the forth dimension and CONSCIOUSNESS is the fifth dimension. Once humans discover, and connect to this Universal Consciousness, they mysteries of Free Will and God will be resolved. To do this requires removing the elitist woven veil of deception.
“Piñata Planet Syndrome” at CanadaFreePress website
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David W Thomson
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All aspects of the physical Universe are quantifiable, and this includes the non-material aspects. The Universe is not just physical, and any physics paradigm that treats it as such is just delusional. For example, velocity is a non-material, yet measurable and very real aspect of the physical Universe. One might delude themselves into thinking that only material things can move, and yet, magnetic fields are non-material aspects of the physical Universe, and magnetic fields are quantified and measured as moving phenomena.
There are some major flaws in the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which I explain and correct in my book, Secrets of the Aether. The error is rooted in the incorrect notation of charge as a single dimension relative to mass. Charge is a dimension that is always distributed. When you fix this error, then suddenly it is very easy to unify the fundamental forces using simple, Newtonian type force equations. And just as Albert Einstein predicted, the fundamental forces of gravity, electrostatic force, and magnetic force have a common factor, which is a reciprocal force, and it is this reciprocal force that possesses the qualities that many people might consider to be “God.” Further, consciousness is not the same thing as ego, as is confused in this article. Consciousness is a broader quality of mind that allows for the formation of egos. When an individual trains their mind to be perfectly still, only then can they truly experience consciousness as it really is. The quality of “feeling,” which is the interface of mind and matter (ego and body), is measurable when the error in charge notation is fixed. It turns out that conductance is the reciprocal of magnetic flux, and not resistance. Measuring true conductance gives accurate quantification of feelings.
The space-time realm of the physical matter exists as a subset of space-resonance, which has a more complex temporal structure than the realm of half-spin subatomic particles. Just as a three dimensional world on a flat screen TV (area-time) is infinitely less interesting than our four dimensional space-time world, our space-time world is infinitely less interesting than the greater space-resonance world, where the mind resides.
God, consciousness, and free will are quantifiable, you just need the correct physics paradigm to properly work with them.
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Michael Grace
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Error is an old concept and it was believed unavoidable; for how could anything be absolute or perfect? The Age of Reason has lead to certain mistaken scientific methodologies and ideologue or equation and thesis based self-justification of analysis of matter. Every thing tries to approach an ideal state which becomes ever more entropic and unresolvable
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jerry krause
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Hi Michael, Joseph, David, and any others who might read this,
Sometime between 1969 and 1971 I attended a lecture at Cornell University by a physics professor from some institution of higher learning at Pittsburg PA on God’s freewill and the laws of physics. I remember neither the name of this professor nor his institution. What I remember was his thesis was that the freewill given to humans by God was allowed by the uncertainty principle and that in the audience was a young man (possibly a student) who, at the question and comment period after the lecture, began to make a long comment which seemed (to me) totally unrelated to the lecture. But before he completed his comment, I knew this was no ordinary young man as he brought what I had considered off-the-wall comments neatly back to the lecture. This young man was Brian David Josephson who in 1973 was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics ‘for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier, in particular those phenomena which are generally known as the Josephson effects’.
I take this opportunity to remark about how I read, here on PSI, that person after person argue how the GHE effect is a wrong idea using only the claissical law of physics. And sometimes I even read that some distrust the ‘quantum mechanical’ phenomena for which this young man won a Nobel Prize. What it seems these people don’t recognize, as they argue, is that the foundation of science is observation and not argument regardless of the reasoning involved.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Michael Grace
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I can’t understand, Jerry, why I never got a Nobel Prize considering the number of times I’ve been through the Dartford Tunnel
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jerry krause
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Hi Michael,
Given your reference to the Dartford Tunnel and the comment about the Nobel Prize, I have to guess you are a technologist and probably an engineer. But you could also be an actual worker operating a piece of equipment doing what an engineer was telling you needed to be done. Or a worker with a shovel doing thing a piece of equipment could not do.
I have read the autobiographer of R. G LeTourneau, an inventor of modern earth moving machines (equipment). Maybe he or the Wright Bros deserved a Nobel Prize for their contributions. I really do not know why Nobel evidently chose to honor scientist and not technologists. They are different even though given the number of engineers righting about what I consider scientific topics, I am not sure some of these engineers recognize they are not scientists. I am not an engineer but it seems to me that mathematics and classical physics is all that is required in their profession which involves macro-sized matter. Where as quantum mechanics (QM) and the tunnel referred to in the description of the Josephson effects involves microscopic particles of matter whose phenomena (properties) classical physics could not describe. There were reproducible experimental observations which classical physicists just could not explain so they had to admit that radiation (light) could behave as a wave in some cases and as a particle in other cases. Then they considered an electron, a particle without a doubt, could behave as a wave in some cases. And the physicists who turned to QM could not explain the results of quantum mechanics except to admit that it predicted the experimental results that could not before be explained.
I am not a physicist. I am only a chemist who knows the results of QM could explain what we already descriptively knew (molecular structures, etc.) and predicted phenomena like light scattering which we observed had explained it as being reflection which is a different phenomena.
Have a good day, Jerry
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David Dirkse
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People have consciousness = brain with capabilities of virtual reality.
Result = realisation of what is unknown, This requires answers.
Religions answer questions about the unknown to eliminate existential fears.
Religious theses become true by authority, endless repetition and consensus, which is the reason heretics have to be silenced.
Scientific proofs are by demonstration: experiments, analytic reasoning.
So, science and religion are complementary. It’s frontiers only slide somewhat as science progresses.
Science’ goal is to understand life. Not to solve problems in the first place. Later when implemented it provides progress.
God is just another word of the Unknown.
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