Anomalies in physics, cosmology and cognitive neuroscience pile up

The next new world Philica has an intriguing article by Christopher Holvenstot by Ulrich/ by rjon on Fri 19 Jan 2007 06:40 PM PST Permanent Link

Western culture has found the unlikely combination of science and religion a comfortable enough fit because each seems at first glance (by the tidiness of the physical/spiritual divide) to accommodate the explanatory deficit in the other. The psychological comfort of this familiar formula will not be easily wrested from the culture. Each of us embodies the prejudices of this combined scientific/religious thought since it is embedded everywhere in our languages, cultures, public institutions and private ideas concerning the nature of reality. The most confirmed rationalist among us will call out to God in moments of great suffering just as the most faithful religious devotee in the same circumstance will expect the best medical relief science and money can provide.

It is an unlikely pairing of thought processes, the scientific and the religious, as they represent diametrically opposed explanations of our condition. Rather than eliminating one another by logical reduction they function in combination to provide comfort and expand our understanding of material properties and processes. The limits of this self-serving patchwork system, however, become increasingly evident as we witness anomalies in physics, cosmology and cognitive neuroscience pile up in the 20th and 21st centuries…

All biological organisms are required to comprehend their environment in terms of one very narrow and specific set of abstract and fictional concepts. To fail at this odd trick is to fail completely. The requirement of awareness, interpretation and intention indicates the necessity of a condition of consciousness at the moment of life’s first emergence from matter. A configuration space for animate experience had to be instantly accessible. Immediate survival cannot have relied on the eventual evolutionary development of organs of perception and cognition to discern fundamental features.

Evolutionary development of any kind would only be possible within a fully developed contextual availability rendered functional by a conscious awareness of all relevant features simultaneously. The entire biospecific configuration space (time as a line; extension and solidity; separateness; the concept of cause and effect; a freely willed sense of purpose and volition; and the positive valuation of continued life) needed to be fully functional and fully available from the start. While consciousness at this early level can be considered merely mechanical/procedural awareness, these reductive metaphorical descriptors do not degrade the extraordinary fact of the presence of awareness in the universe…