“The most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.”
What can broadly be termed a “scientific view of the world” began with Greek philosophers some 2,500 years ago in an era when the world was conceived through myths of gods who ruled the world and imposed their whims through acts of nature. As Morris Kline put it:
“The Greek intellectuals adopted a totally new attitude toward nature. This attitude was rational, critical, and secular. Mythology was discarded as was the belief that the gods manipulate man and the physical world according to their whims. The intellectuals eventually arrived at the doctrine that nature is orderly and functions invariably according to a grand design. All phenomena apparent to the senses, from the motion of the planters to the stirrings of the leaves on a tree, can be fitted into a precise, coherent, intelligible pattern. In short, nature is rationally designed and that design, though unaffected by human actions, can be apprehended by man’s mind.”1 Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, p. 10
More than two thousand years later, this conception of of an orderly universe has not changed. Aristotelian notions of a stationary Earth at the center of the universe and the perfection of the surrounding heavens were shattered by Copernicus in the 16th century. But the idea that the universe operates under knowable laws continued as a foundational element of what was to become the classical worldview of science– the dominant worldview of Western thought today.
The classical worldview expanded to include the presumption that the universe can be completely understood as a quantifiable, observer-independent reality, an idea born by Galileo and Descartes in the 17th century. It gained power through the empiricism and inductive reasoning advocated by Francis Bacon, coalesced around the the physical laws first described by Isaac Newton in the late 18th century (amended by James Maxwell in the 19th century and Albert Einstein in the early 20th), and became dogma with the Modern Synthesis of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection combined with the genetic observations of Mendel. Henry Stapp summarized the view, and how the idea of locality was integral to it:
“The ideas of Galileo Galilei, Rene’ Descartes, and Isaac Newton created a magnificent edifice known as classical physical theory, which was completed by the work of James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein. The central idea is that the physical universe is composed of "material” parts that are localizable in tiny regions, and that all motion of matter is completely determined by matter alone, via local universal laws. This local character of the laws is crucial. It means that each tiny localized part responds only to the states of its immediate neighbors: each local part “feels” or “knows about” nothing outside its immediate microscopic neighborhood. Thus the evolution of the physical universe, and of every system within the physical universe, is governed by a vast collection of local processes, each of which is ‘myopic’ in the sense that it ‘sees’ only its immediate neighbors.2 Henry Stapp: “Attention, Intention, and Will in Quantum Physics” ”
Another presumption that persisted through the Copernican revolution, and that is retained by most contemporary scientists and philosophers, is the idea that the world is a singular, knowable place that at least in principle can be fully described by the laws of physics.3 The laws of physics as described by Aristotle were modified or replaced by Newton, et.al. The universe, in this view, is a vast system of objects, fields, and forces that affect them, all interacting predictably by a set of laws, now referred to as classical physics, developed and refined by Isaac Newton, James Maxwell and many others over the last few centuries. Moreover, the condition or configuration of any object in the universe— and therefore the entirety of the universe— is fully determined by its preceding conditions. We are simply observers of a reality that we cannot possibly affect in any fundamental way.
Taken together, these ideas are at the foundation of what is often referred to as classical physics, a body of knowledge that was almost universally accepted as having ontological primacy4 “Ontological primacy” is used here in the general sense of a fundamental truth about the nature of the world, a conclusion that physics was widely thought to be solely responsible for (and for some contemporary scientists and philosophers, still is). through the end of the 19th century. Newton connected us to the cosmos by showing that the same principles or laws applied to both planets and everyday objects on earth. Maxwell unified magnetism, electricity, and light in a set of common field equations. Darwin’s theory of evolution extended the conception of a lawful universe into the domain of biology. But none of those expansions changed the underlying presumption of an objectively real, purely physical, external world with definite properties that are independent of any observer. Hillary Putnam sums it up this way:
“…the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects. There is exactly one true and complete description of ‘the way the world is’. Truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things and sets of things.”5 Hillary Putnam, from Reason, Truth, and History p. 49, about the “externalist” perspective— quoted in The Mind Matters, p. 14. The nature of claims about “truth” are discussed briefly below and in XXX.
And as Jerry Coyne says in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality:
“Physics is causally closed and causally complete. The only causes in the universe are physical, and everything in the universe that has a cause has a physical cause. In fact, we can go further and confidently assert that the physical facts fix all the facts.6 Atheist’s Guide to Reality, p, 25-26”
In this view, there is no room for free will or any other non-physical force or influence. The emergence of life was a random and, most likely, an extremely rare occurrence— and it happened in a completely blind manner. Concepts such as mind and consciousness are human constructs, entirely derivative from physical conditions, different in degree and outcome but not in type from any other physical interactions. Everything that we know about the world, anything that we can possibly know, will come through science.
It is a fundamental dogma of modern science that nothing exists that cannot be measured, at least in principle. That includes consciousness and all the subjective phenomena that derive from it. Spirit, meaning, and other qualitative notions, they’re all just electrochemical reactions in our brain. Reality is purely physical, full stop. Feelings of connection to something greater than ourselves, a sense of magic and spirit are pre-scientific superstitions, emotional detritus from times before we understood how the world really works— as we do now through the lenses of science.
Such is the way the world really is, the presumption of the modern scientific program— and the idea of reality that Wolfgang Pauli believed needed to be replaced.7 This, of course, is the author’s opinion, although it appears to be consistent with the basic theme of a psychophysical model such as outlined through Pauli’s collaboration with Jung.
But at least some of us are engaged with science— its consistency with evidence, its predictability and precise descriptions— but don’t accept the dogma of reality as exclusively physical. Even if we cannot articulate or conceive of what it might be, we believe there is something else, a fundamental, qualitative and very real aspect of the world that we have yet to more than glimpses. We believe that we are part of something far greater than ourselves8 This assumes a reasonably well-educated reader and a conventional western worldview (either secular or thoughtful theism)., something that cannot be explained through scientific methods.