I SHOULD HAVE probably included the last paragraph in section IV of Eddington's The Concept of Structure but left it out to avoid an even longer post and because I wanted to make a point about it.
Thus, when you tell me that you hear a noise, the information imparted is represented in my knowledge by (a) a general concept of a heard-noise, i.e. a concept of something of similar nature to my own awareness of noises and (b) a structural concept of a heard noise, i.e. a part of the structure of the physical universe which we describe as an electrically disturbed terminal of an auditory nerve. Of these two concepts of a heard-noise, the one refers to what it is in in itself, the other refers to what it is as a constituent of the structure known as the physical universe.
It is given as an illustration of what Eddington said in the last paragraph posted here yesterday:
The disturbance at the nerve terminal is generally the result of a long chain of causation in the physical world. In familiar thought we usually leap to the far end of the chain of causation, and say that the sensation is caused by an object at some distance from the seat of the sensation. In the case of he visual sensation caused by a spiral nebula, the object is not only remote in space but may be millions of years distant in time. Causation bridges the gap in space and time, but the physical event at the seat of sensation (provisionally identified with an electrical disturbance of the nerve terminal) is not the cause of the sensation it is the sensation. More precisely, the physical event is the structural concept of which the sensation is the general concept.
The statement taken modestly is not outrageously speculative, though I have never known anything in this area being taken as a careful or modest statement remaining in bounds. If I were able to question Eddington about it, I would ask him if he really believed his description bridged the gap between the passive sensory reception of the sound and its active presence in the mind which would then, match it or put it into a context involving its previous experience, its memory of sensory stimulation because I think someone of his experience would admit he has absolutely no means of describing what happens. What happens there is something which I believe no one can say, I believe it is exactly what gets left out in the famous Sidney Harris cartoon in which a term in an equation on the black board is "Then a miracle occurs," which is, I guess, supposed to be a condescending gesture to religion from the true disciples of science and rationalism and modernism. That's certainly how it was used on this Pinterest pirating of it. Only whenever they talk about this in terms of science, they always do exactly that. There is no way to bridge that gap that will make what they can describe in in the general way of modern science, in equations, and the actual experience of consciousness.
It is exactly the same thing I confronted in asking my questions taken so badly by atheist-materialist would be science-rangers about how the brain would know how to make the physical structures that it would have to make to produce their miracle of a material mind, how would it know how to do ALL OF THE THINGS INVOLVED WITH THAT BEFORE THE ACTUAL IDEA OF THE THING THE BRAIN NEEDED TO MAKE WAS IN THEIR BRAIN TO TELL IT WHAT TO DO.
If you are going to insist that the mind is a product of material causation and operates in accordance with the limits of physical materials and forces then you will run up against that gap because you can't explain how a brain could do what would need to be done to do what we experience as our minds. I remember that I teased them by pointing out that even if they resorted to one of the list of things on their Index Of Forbidden Ideas, extra-sensory perception, they would still have to explain exactly what it is that was perceived and that would get them into the tangle of what a perception was.
If you choose to believe that the mind is most sensibly explained as non-material an, so, not limited to what a materialist will call "the laws of physics" or "natural law" because those only can deal with what they are formulated to deal with, the observable physical universe, then you will not only not need to come up with an explanation of that, YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO COME UP WITH ONE AND SHOULD NOT EXPECT TO BE ABLE TO COME UP WITH ONE. If science has its limits, which it so obviously does to anyone who thinks about it even not very hard, human language has its limits too.
Eddington began this lecture by pointing to the virtue of his mathematical-structural approach to the physical universe that it can be communicated one mind to another mind precisely and, if done well, without a host of ambiguities or controversies. The many controversies in theoretical physics are, I think, largely a result of them reaching far past where observation of particles give them a secure, common understanding of those observed things, that's certainly the case in the most fashionable of theoretical physics and cosmology today and it is in those areas that most of the public ideologues of scientism among scientists seem to congregate. But they achieve that non-controversial level of minimal ambiguity by leaving out things and looking only at the kind of limited things that can be treated mathematically. As soon as you put those back into it or you try to extend your method past where those can be carefully applied, the reliability goes and the controversy starts.
If you want to call my approach a resort to religion, "miracles" go ahead, I can't stop you but I can point out that such "miracles" are not only happening every time you think of something, they are intrinsic to all of our conscious activity, including science. I don't suppose that was Sidney Harris's intention to put his finger on that but I don't think a scientist could get from one end of an equation to the other without ignoring that the unexplained and, if I'm right, unexplainable is what gets them through it. Equations are, perhaps, even more an act of pure consciousness than the hearing of a sound, all of that fitting them into a structure based on previous conclusions about previous ideas is far more a complex act of consciousness than the mere hearing of a sound and far more removed than the act of identifying it as the falling minor third of a black-capped chickadee's Spring song that I'm hearing as I type this out.
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