THIS IS THE CONCLUSION of Eddington's lecture, The Concept of Structure
To sum up. The physical universe is a structure. Of the X of which it is the structure, we only know that X includes sensations of consciousness. To the question: What is X when it is not a sensation of any consciousness known to us? the right answer is probably that the question is a meaningless one - that a structure does not necessarily imply an X of which it is the structure. In other words, the question takes us to a point where the form of thought in which it originates ceases to be useful. The form of thought can only be preserved by still attributing to X a sensory nature - a sensation in a consciousness unknown to us. What interests us is not the positive conclusion, but the fact that in no circumstances are we required to contemplate an X of non-sensory nature.
The temptation of someone brought up in the materialism of the common type is to assume that when he said "X includes sensations of consciousness" is to think he means that consciousness is totally contained in the physical universe, that consciousness shares in the limits of physical objects, when I don't think that's exactly what he does mean. Every time I reread Eddington on these topics, it's clear he was making extremely subtle and powerful arguments that take up little regarded distinctions that are all important to understanding what we can discern of things. In a later section of the book Eddington talks about the possibility that there are physical laws which are "irrational"* ever precise in his language, as a mathematician and logician, he clearly means that human reason and logic and observation and all the other tools of our intelligence cannot deal with them and so such laws would forever be unknowable to us. The modesty with which the man Einstein said had written the best book explaining his theories in regard to the percentage of the universe we likely had dealt with, even at the highest levels of knowledge is only one of the things that set him apart from the materialists vulgar and more sophisticated who were his ideological opponents.
The fact that the concept of structure affords an escape from dualism has been recognised especially in the philosophy of Bertrand Russell. Although I have quoted it in three earlier books, I feel obligated to quote again a passage from Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919) which has greatly influenced my own thought;
"There has been a great deal of speculation in traditional philosophy which might have been avoided if the importance of structure, and the difficulty of getting behind it, had be realised. For example, it is often said that space and time are subjective, but they have objective counterparts; or that phenomena are subjective, but are caused by things in themselves, which must have differences inter se corresponding with the differences in the phenomena to which they give rise. Where such hypotheses are made, it is generally supposed that we can know very little about the objective counterparts. In actual fact, however, if the hypotheses as stated were correct, the objective counterparts would form a world having the same structure as the phenomenal world . . . In short, every proposition having a communicable significance must be true of both worlds or of neither ; the only difference must lie in just that essence of individuality which always eludes words and baffles description, but which for that very reason is irrelevant to science."
This is written independently of the new scientific theories, which were then in an early stage; but it illuminated the philosophic trend which was beginning to appear in them. It is interesting to compare the scientific position in 1919 with the position in 1939. In 1919 it was a fair inference that physical knowledge must be knowledge of structure, although in the form in which it was then presented it did not look much like it. In general the structural knowledge did not appear in physics explicitly; it was thought of as the kernel of truth which would outlast the changing theories which enhulled it. In the intervening years the importance of digging out the structure from its inessential trappings became recognised, and it was noticed that the Theory of Groups in pure mathematics the necessary technique had been developed. Moreover, the idea of structure, which had previously been rather vague, was found capable of exact mathematical definition. Consequently to-day it is not merely a truth hidden in our physical knowledge but physical knowledge in its current form that we recognise as structural.
[Update: I unintentionally clipped the paragraph in which I point out that Eddington could have very intentionally been tweaking his sometimes colleague, sometimes adversary, Bertrand Russell, perhaps getting back for that 1929 review I quoted from yesterday, by pointing out that the germ of his views in The Concept of Structure and its consequences for materialism were contained in Russell's own work and found its own intellectual scaffolding in pure mathematics, Russell's realm perhaps even more than Eddington's.]
I read an interesting paper by Matt Stanley last night, about the attacks on Eddington by one of the more popular atheist loud-mouths of the 1930s, a now largely forgotten man named Chapman Cohen and Eddington's response. And the paper went into what Eddington said and his political and religious motives, as well as his motives as a physicist. I was a little hesitant to read it because I don't think Cohen was particularly interesting as compared to some of Eddington's more competent critics but it turned out to be important. I think the paper gives a lot of insight into Eddington's motivation, not least of which was his fear of Marxism - certainly in the form developing in the thuggish gangsterism of Leninism and Stalinism in the foremost example of Marxist political success, the Soviet Union.
The tendency of an American lefty, when you read about Eddington's reaction to the legendary General Strike is to isolate that as a purely democratic trade union phenomenon, imagining trade unions as known to us in the post-WWII period, ignoring that there were real, true believing Marxist and Leninists involved in the General Strike who wanted, very much, for Britain and all countries to emulate what the Marxists in Russia, then the Soviet empire were doing. By the time of these lectures the mass murders of both Lenin and Stalin were well reported in Western media, the planned starvation of Ukraine, the purges, the show trials - which had the overt support of Western Marxists. The stupidity of the linear graph of political identity that political scientists popularized that showed Marxism on the other end of some imaginary teeter-totter with "centrism" at the pivot and Nazism on the other end is something I'd like to know if someone as capable of seeing through the falseness of many graphic abstractions as Eddington was commented on. The true identification of Marxism, as it is, as it has been every place where it gained power was that it was the kissing cousin of Nazism (the Hitler Stalin Pact proved that), of fascism, of nationalist fascism and, as it has developed, the most appallingly vicious capitalism, which has largely replaced any pretense of socialism in today's Marxist paradises. And today a lot of materialist-atheist true believers in scientism are ready to declare themselves "libertarians" who are Republican who have kinky predilections and worry about getting arrested or regulated. I think that with few if any exceptions they are not egalitarian nor are they especially fond of democracy except when it can be worked the way they like it. Nor are they especially interested in anything like the common good. The atheist cover ideology of "skepticism" contains a lot of them.
All of that had a background to Eddington's public lectures that I admit I had not much considered, being more interested in them for the consequences for current atheist-materialist-scientistic hegemony. But I have never thought any of that was as divorced from politics and the moral basis of egalitarian government and democracy.
There are a lot of interesting things to note about this paper and its subject matter, one of those I'll point out is how Chapman Cohen and his buddies seem to have taken to blasting the concept of freedom of thought in the atheist-secularist house organ The Freethinker, apparently obsessively and at great length.** That is one of the central incongruities, hypocrisies and phony advertisements that you run into continually in dealing with materialists and atheists and devotees of scientism. I don't think it's at all unrelated to the propensity of materialists and, so, determinists to go for anti-democratic forms of government, everything from free-market "liberalist" corporate states to Marxism and fascism and Nazism. I don't think the determinism forced as a conclusion by their ideologies of materialism or "naturalism" or "physicalism" (the paper wants to distinguish among them but I think that's a mistaken notion) and the often fawning love of dictators among them is likely unrelated.
I will disagree strongly on one thing in this paragraph from Stanley's paper,
Thus determinism was already a significant issue for him [Eddington] even before it was a widespread problem in twentieth-century physics, and the constellation of religious and political values underlying his science popularizations provides a compelling explanation for why that was the case. According to Eddington, Heisenberg’s principle denied classical determinism because it eliminated the foundational elements of the Laplacian calculator: precise measurements of position and velocity. Thus the innate human intuition that one has free-will needed no special defense. Instead, the traditional objection (the tyranny of deterministic physics) was simply gone, so for the first time since Descartes volitionists started on an equal footing with determinists.
Since, as I pointed out yesterday, all of the determinists, all of the materialists, from those who were crude determinists to today's merely less seemingly crude eliminative positivists are at the distinct disadvantage that the very thing they want to deny or demote to a mere side effect of chemical causation in brains is the very thing they are using to come up with everything they are using to do it with, their minds, it has to be there for them to do what they want to do whereas the idealists didn't have that fact as a problem for their position.
I would point out another thing, if we are all determined by the molecules and "forces" that control their movements and all of our thoughts are determined by those molecules and not by any metaphysical realm of existence, then their deteriminism has exactly the same total lack of truth value to it as the idealism or, to use the phrase in the quote, "volitionism" and are therefore equal and other people adopting one or another should be a matter of total indifference to the convinced materialist determinist. But they obviously are not indifferent and insist that their position has a value that their position would logically deprive it of. The idealist, the "volitionist" those who assert the reality of freedom of thought are not at any such disadvantage. Their preference is for something that is true and their desire is supported by the moral position that the truth is good and the untrue is not. That materialists have not come to terms with these defects in their position, there is every reason to believe they are full of soup or full of themselves, really, under materialism, what's the difference?
* Eighteen years ago I was responsible for a remark which has often been quoted:
" It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has had no control. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them."
This seems to be coming true, though not n the way that then suggested itself. I had in mind the phenomena of quanta and atomic physics, which at that time completely baffled our efforts to formulate a rational system of law. It was already apparent that the principle laws of molar physics were mind-made - the result of the sensory and intellectual equipment through which we derive our observational knowledge 0 and were not laws of governance of the objective universe. The suggestion was that in quantum theory we for the first time came up against the true laws of governance of the objective universe. If so, the task was presumably much more difficult than merely rediscovering our own frame of thought.
Since then microscopic physics has made great progress, and its laws have turned out to be comprehensible to the mind; but.as I have endeavored to show, it also turns out they have been imposed by the mind - by our forms of thought - in the same way that the molar laws are imposed. Meanwhile a new situation in regard to laws of objective origin has arisen, because the systems of physics is no longer deterministic. The totality of mind-made law does not impose determinism. It is in the undetermined behaviour, for which room is left within the complete scheme of physical law at present recognised, that the governing laws (if any) of the objective universe must appear. Eighteen years have therefore not brought us any nearer to a formulation of the objective laws of governance; the only difference is that what I ten described as possibly irrational l behaviour is now described as undetermined behaviour.
** The same thing can be seen today in the antics of one Marxist member of the NYC Central Labor Council, Mike Gimble whose Left Forum program to rehabilitate Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism led me to read about his book condemning the entirety of 20th century physics (including some pretty primitive materialist celebrity scientists) for its idealism as opposed to his preferred dialectical, 19th century materialism. As I found in the Amazon description of it (I assume author written, who else would bother?)
This book is a response to the myths created by an idealistic theory called "Relativity". Physics and cosmology has been in a disastrous crisis for almost a century. Mathematics is not physics, yet it is treated as such. The fourth dimension exists only in mathematical equations, not in reality. Black holes do not exist. Space is not curved. There is no fundamental "God particle" from which all matter is built. Objects do not carry their own time. Above all, consciousness does not determine reality. That is the old metaphysics masquerading as science. In addition, this book is a Marxist answer to Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku's psuedo-scientific creationist theories. Here is the endorsement by Glenn Borchardt, Ph.D, author of "The Scientific Worldview" and Director of the Progressive Science Institute: "I want to congratulate you on the excellent piece of work! I definitely like your critique of Hawking and Kaku. It puts these jokers in their place. A great job! You have done so much that is needed to expose the BS that goes for physics and cosmology today. "Above all, consciousness does not determine reality. That is the old metaphysics masquerading as science."
Clearly the 19th century is still alive in the consciousness of these throw-backs, determining their reality.
I hope he didn't do too much to damage important union efforts by non-Marxists. I think the labor movement paid way, way too much for the participation of the Marxists and the other atheist-ideologues. They and the larger left would be a lot better off if they'd been categorized with the fascists and Nazis and other anti-democratic ideologues.
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