Reality, Consciousness, and the Case for Free Will
In Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, a group of prisoners have been chained to the floor of a cave all their lives such that their heads cannot move. All they can see is the wall opposite them, upon which they observe shadows in constant motion. The shadows are of people and objects moving behind the prisoners, which are projected onto the wall by the light of a fire that is constantly burning. But the prisoners cannot see any of this. For the prisoners, the shadows are their reality. It is the only reality they have ever known. If they could turn around, they would see the world as it really is. But they are incapable of doing so.
In essence, our reality is much like that of the prisoners. There is a deeper level of reality which we cannot see. In our case, it is not because we cannot turn around physically, but rather because our mind does not have the necessary perceptual and conceptual apparatus to experience it. The human brain is the most advanced of any species, and therefore we like to think that we have a true grasp of reality – reality, as it really is. After all, as a species, we are unique in that we have the ability to use reason, to employ logic, and to understand cause and effect. And because we possess these powers, we assume it is theoretically possible for us understand everything there is to know about the universe. Given enough time and the accumulation of the right kind of knowledge, we will eventually discover a theory of everything.
But while the human mind is the most advanced of any species, it is a mistake to assume we possess a mind good enough to uncover all of nature and lay bare its fundamental essence. There is no reason to think that a more advanced mind is not possible, a mind capable of experiencing the world with much better perception, or a mind that could understand reality with far superior concepts. Think of the difference between the consciousness of a frog and that of a person. Now, for the sake of argument, imagine a being whose mind is so superior to our own that its distance from us – in terms of its conscious experience – is greater than the distance between our mind and that of the frog. Its perceptions would be impossible for us to imagine, and the concepts it holds would be unfathomable to our thought processes.
I maintain that we are locked into our particular version of reality. What we witness and comprehend is a mere shadow, not an actual shadow of course, nor an image. Rather, a shadow consisting of all our conscious experience. It includes not merely our visual, auditory, and tactile sensations, but also our comprehension of the way in which the world works. It is a feint and poor-resolution semblance of the real thing, constrained by the human mind’s limited means of perception and circumscribed by its mechanism of understanding. And thus, it is impossible for us to witness or understand nature as it really is in itself. We can go so far, but no further. We cannot turn around toward the fire. Only an infinite God-like mind can comprehend the true nature of all reality.
Nevertheless, physicists have long sought to find a grand unifying theory of everything; a theory that unites concepts contained in general relativity – which describes nature at very large scales – with those of quantum mechanics, which applies to nature at the subatomic level. The search is for a single, coherent theoretical framework that can describe the fundamental forces and particles that make up the universe. Now, the external world that we experience appears to consist entirely of matter and energy in one form or another. But describing the basic building block of this world in terms of a particle or object, which itself is matter or energy, is problematical. For it is a question-begging exercise to describe the fundamental essence of a thing in terms of itself. As long as physicists persist in this endeavor, the question can always be asked, what is the composition of the latest “fundamental” object discovered thus far? John Dalton proposed the atomic theory in the early 19th century. Then in the 20th century, scientists discovered protons, neutrons, and electrons. Today, the Standard Model of particle physics describes quarks, leptons, and bosons. But what are these made of? The search is endless.
It would seem that the fundamental essence of nature and the most basic substance in the universe must be something other than matter or energy. Certainly, it makes sense that it must be a different substance if our everyday experience is a mere shadow. The essence of a shadow is not another shadow, but ra
Article from LewRockwell
