WE'RE ALMOST AT THE END OF THIS. The concluding section of Eddington's lecture, The Concept of Structure gets him back on more solid ground. Remembering this opening paragraph of the lecture during one of my recent blog brawls is what led me to go through this series going over what he said because it turns materialism on its head through a careful analysis of what science does. While I think Eddington, often said or sometimes accused of being an idealist (in opposition to being a materialist) was a bit naive in his declaration that what he said abolished dualism, it is pretty clear that his scientific learning had led him to an admission that everything science does must be considered as an activity of human consciousness and so will inevitably exist within the realm of what our minds create. The subsequent century was one of the losing side of his analysis, the materialists, declaring victory and, with their hegemony over the culture of modernism, they've been successful in imposing their ideology on pretty much everything. And the best and brightest have shown the level of decadence that people are willing to swallow in letting them do that.
The typical, most widespread of materialism does the opposite, it either attributes to our minds the limits it observes in the physical universe or, when they find that doesn't work, materialists will declare that consciousness doesn't exist (which they were already doing by that point in Eddington's life) or minimize it in some of the most decadent academic babble in the entire history of Western thought. That the culture of modernism has bought that to the extent it has, given its nihilistic demotion of all human culture and mental activity to the banal, rote action of molecules divorced from questions of truth and any significance is certainly nothing that can continue without producing the kind of dark age that Bertrand Russell predicted when Eddington, in a previous set of lectures, let him in on the fact that his 19th century materialism was, in fact, at least within formal physics, dead.
The recognition that physical knowledge is structural knowledge abolishes all dualism of consciousness and matter. Dualism depends on the belief that we find in the external world something of a nature incommensurable with what we find in consciousness; but all that physical science reveals to us in the external world is group structure, and the group-structure is also found in consciousness. When we take a structure of sensation in a particular consciousness and describe it in physical terms as part of the structure of an external world, it is still a structure of sensations. It would be entirely pointless to invent something else for it to be a structure of. Or, to put it another way, there is no point in inventing non-physical replicas of certain portions of the structure of the external world and transferring to the replicas the non-structural qualities of which we are aware in sensation. The portion of the external universe of which we have addition al knowledge by direct awareness amount to a very small fraction of the whole; of the rest we know only the structure, and not what it is a structure of.
Eddington, if he sought in that to inform his fellow scientists and mathematicians of the limits within which their work and, in fact, all of science proper was made, he greatly underestimated the hubris of scientism among his fellow scientists and the naive faith in the scientistic view of science in modern culture.
I'll give a metaphor for what that modernist, materialist-atheist-scientistic view of mental activity is, it is someone looking at themselves in a mirror and mistaking the glass and metallic reflective component of the mirror as comprising the true stuff of what they are seeing reflected back to them.
I am not confident that I'm going to be able to reproduce Eddinton's logical subscripts of X with bases of "u" and "s" in the next section on blogger without screwing up the page coding (I suck at HTML) so I'm going to go to the makeshift of using Xs and Xu (not wanting to confuse anyone, I don't mean to imply multiplication) to indicate his use of them in his text.
Let us denote X the entity of which the physical universe is the structure, and distinguish the small part Xs known to be the sensory nature from the remainder Xu of which we have no direct awareness. It may be suggested that there remains a dualism of Xs and Xu equivalent to the old dualism of consciousness and matter; but this is, I think, a logical confusion, involving a switch over from the epistemological view of the universe as the theme of knowledge to be an existential view of the universe as something which we have to obtain knowledge. Structurally Xu is no different from Xs and to give meaning to the supposed dualism we have of Xu we have to imagine a supplementary non-structural knowledge of Xu revealing its unlikeness to Xs. We have to suppose that a direct awareness of Xu, if we could possess it, would show that it is not of sensory nature. But the supposition is nonsense; for if we had the supposed direct awareness of Xu, it would ispo facto be a sensation in our consciousness. Thus we cannot give meaning to the dualism without a supposition which eliminates the dualism.
Now, if materialists really wanted to come up with an attack on dualism that sticks, that would be the way to do it but they lose more than they gain by that because Eddington's rather brilliant argument reveals that any knowledge of the material universe people will ever possess is totally dependent on human consciousness. I think in that he put the problem of observation in physics in a more general form to cover, not merely photons or electrons, but the entire supposed non-known, non-observed universe. It also covers all language because we can't talk about what we can't conceive of and ALL WE CAN TALK ABOUT IS WHAT WE CAN CONCEIVE OF and by representing it with words, we have give it a structure, not made of what we cannot conceive of, what is not a product of human minds because that, if it's even there, is excluded from humanly made structures.
Having done that, Eddington does, in fact, almost take the last step.
Although the statement that the universe is of the nature of "a thought or sensation in a universal Mind" is open to criticism, it does at least avoid this logical confusion. It is I think, true in the sense that it is a logical consequence of the form of thought which formulates our knowledge as a description of the universe. But it requires more guarded expression if it is to be accepted as a truth transcending forms of thought.
By which he means, I'd guess, acceptance within academic discourse, not science because by agreement science doesn't deal with such matters, it ignores them. He was conceding that his argument was not going to gain any traction in the culture of academia and its product because it was too much like God talk.
I think what he did is demonstrate that materialism is a dead end, more so, actually than its warring twin idealism (the ideology that everything is mental, not material). Materialism, which is, after all, inevitably an aspect of dualism, can't assassinate the mind, much as materialists have tried to do and which the eliminative positivists still get paid by universities to try to do. The idealist side of that ideological war at least had that in its favor, the very minds that were articulating materialism were minds made of the very thing which idealism posited as the ultimate reality, it was the very thing that the materialists depended on for any knowledge of the "matter" which their ideology claims to be the ultimate reality - if it's not there, the entire materialist-atheist-scientistic side of things will inevitably go "poof" or, as Russell foresaw, wind down to a dreary, dark, valueless, meaningless hodge podge of insignificance and decadent superstition. I think that prediction of the even more modern world than Russell and Eddington knew, is what has come with the cultural hegemony of materialist-atheist-scientistic modernism.
Eddington's view of things is in a direction away from there. Though you have to be brave enough and modest enough to give up materialism to get there and some of our best and brightest are far too cowardly snobs to even admit what they're doing.
I know how stunted the imaginations of most of us are that some people reading this will think I'm advocating going back to some pre-modern time, I couldn't be less enthusiastic for that than could be expressed. We can't go back, attempts to do that are inevitably a disaster - look at what the Republican-fascist "originalists" on the Supreme Court have brought us to on that retrograde slogan- we have no choice but to go ahead, leaving the decadent, old, moldy "modernism" behind as certainly as they left the 19th century behind, as every time leaves the past behind.
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