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Responding comments by Paul
Prueitt -> .
4/14/2004 6:06 PM
Communication from Howie Firth to the minciu_sodas_en yahoo
e-forum
<In response to an article
on Crick’s philosophy of brain>
Francis Crick puts the materialistic and reductionist case quite
brilliantly, but I think that he is working in an outdated paradigm. When
Descartes cut the link between matter and consciousness, he did not mean to
suggest that the one was more fundamental than the other. Each had its own
territory, and with the two separated, science was able to develop as the study
of matter.
The time has now been reached when we need to study consciousness,
and there are two approaches. One is that of Francis Crick and other
like-minded people, to postulate that all the phenomena of consciousness are
consequences of the nature of matter. This is not a very scientific approach,
more like the approach of the medieval church, who decided in advance what
should be investigated and what would be found by the investigations.
The other approach, the truly scientific one, is to investigate
the nature of consciousness systematically - to start without any preconceived
ideas or fixed agenda, and simply seek out the truth, whatever it will be.
Descartes taught us to doubt, and one of the core methods of science is to
doubt everything, to put everything into question, just as we would test a rope
before risking a climb with it. So we have to investigate the phenomena of
consciousness with an open mind, not with a fixed quasi-political agenda.
The irony is that the reductionists in biology, from Huxley
onwards, have set out their stall as an attack on religion, yet they have
replaced the authoritative top-down approach of the medieval church with a
similar structure in the new Church of Science. The content has changed, but
the autocratic nature of the approach is the same as it was in the medieval
church (including the persecution of heretics).
The really deep ideas come from such people as the physicist David
Bohm and the brain expert Karl Pribram. Bohm sees matter and consciousness as
two different emergences from something deeper - 'what is'. He pointed to the
hologram as a model of the new way of looking at reality. In a lens, we break
up the world into separate pieces, with each piece of the object corresponding
to a piece of the image. So if you break off a piece of the image, you lose the
information about the corresponding piece of the object.
But in a hologram, each part of the image has information about
the whole of the object. Break off a piece of the image and you still have the whole
picture left, although a little fuzzier. Break off more, and what's left still
covers the whole object, but with a further reduction in definition.
With images like this, Bohm developed a picture of the world in
which wholeness, rather than fragmentation and reductionism, was the pattern.
Pribram's work on the brain included the development of the
hologram model for its workings. His work draws on many disciplines, including
physics and mathematics, and is quite superb.
At the moment science is like a butterfly trapped in its
chrysalis. The old materialistic and reductionist paradigms took us a long way,
but now is the time when we have to move forward, from that vantage point, and
transcend them. But our body mass is stuck in the cracked chrysalis and we
can't get out.
Thanks again, Bala, for opening up this discussion. It's one of
the most important issues of our day - how to get science back into a living
dynamic growing creative process, rather than a body of fixed dogma and rigid
worldview.
All the best, Howie