You Can't Pull a Conscious Rabbit Out of a Material Hat

Not on my watch.

I'm still miffed -- miffed, I tell you! -- at the idea of a materialist conceding that consciousness is the ground of reality, but remaining a materialist, as if nothing happened to her paradigm.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. --Churchill

It's just not sporting to argue for hundreds of years that consciousness is purely epiphenomenal, and then, when the absurdity of your position is exposed, to claim it is primary after all, but that it's still just material -- which not only changes the very definition of matter, but means that matter is immaterial. Which only violates the first principle of logic. 

If matter is conscious, then I think we have to start all over, beginning with new definition of matter, because it's not what we thought it was. Not even close. But in reality, it hasn't been what we thought it was for over a hundred years now.

After all, peak modernity occurs in the 19th century. Historically speaking that century ends with World War I: no more naive belief in endless progress for you!

But metaphysically speaking it ends a little before that, with Einstein's discovery of special relativity in 1905, followed by general relativity in 1915. That put the kibosh on the dream of the machine paradigm. Nevertheless, most people slept right through the snooze alarm, so the dream continues.

Others, who took the new physics seriously, woke up in a new and baffling cosmos that calls all our basic categories into question, e.g., space, time, matter, and consciousness. Alfred North Whitehead was probably the first to construct a new and comprehensive metaphysical vision based upon relativity and quantum physics.

In Enchanted by Eternity, Slattery devotes a couple of chapters to the subject of our strange new cosmos. It's nothing we haven't discussed in the past, including in the bʘʘk. Nevertheless, a little review never hurt anyone. 

Consider just the fact that "quantum particles can be found anywhere, but we have zero certainty of finding one of them in a particular place." That is not how things behave in our familiar macroworld:

If you build a house on a certain street, you're not going to wake up tomorrow to discover it's on the other side of the city!

I remember Whitehead using the example of an automobile traveling down the street, but instead of doing so continuously, leaps from position to position.   

Which naturally leads to the question of how and why the macroworld behaves so differently from the microworld. Moreover, which is the "real" world? Is the world of quantum physics more real than our familiar world? Or less real? Or are they just two sides of a deeper reality? Hold that thought.

Even more mind-boggling, physicists have discovered that a quantum particle may be found in many places at the same time! 

Again, that's not how things work in macroworld, where it's one spacetime coordinate to a customer. 

Scientists have also proven that pairs of quantum particles can be entangled with each other, even if they are on different sides of the city.

Or different sides of the cosmos. In other words, nonlocality: nothing simply is where it is, but in a sense is everywhere at once. Moreover, the connection between particles is instantaneous, thereby violating the idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light. What is going on here?

We recently wrote of Wolfgang Smith's solution, which is really an updated version of Aristotle's solution: that the quantum microworld is one of pure potential, whereas we live in the actual world. Therefore, the quantum world cannot be the foundation of reality, only of potential reality. Reality only occurs with the collapse of the wave function into something definite.

This also implies a vertical cosmos in which the foundation is at the top. Which is, of course, the actual ground of consciousness. It is thereby also at the bottom, but in an attenuated form. This diffuse and nonspecific consciousness could never rise to human consciousness via material means. Indeed, there's not even the hint of a theory of a theory of how this could be possible. One can, like Annika Harris, just assert it, but assertions without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Satchitananda.

Concur: ultimately -- in Vedantic terms -- being is consciousness and consciousness is bliss. Or so we have heard from the wise. But at least these wise guys have undergone the experience, whereas matter cannot by definition have any experience at all. Indeed, prime matter is formless, without intelligibility, until given form by a principle of immaterial intelligence.

In other words, it means nothing to say matter is "conscious" if it is unintelligible. And if it is intelligible, this implies an intelligence somewhere along the line, and again, the intelligence is at the top. A flat cosmos stays flat.

Back to the ghostly world of quantum potential: "the smallest units of matter are, in fact, not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word," rather,

they are forms, structures or -- in Plato's sense -- Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics (Slattery).

Again, like Aristotle's potency, there is "something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality that is just in the middle between possibility and reality." These two dimensions -- potency and actuality -- apply to everything in existence, as two sides to every existent.

Except for God, AKA the Principle.

Yes, only in the principial reality -- the Absolute -- is reality pure act(tuality). And even then, I have my doubts, because I suspect there is something analogous to potency within the Trinity -- as if to say the Second Person is the actualization of the First, only occurring in eternity instead of time. Indeed, I have argued that the generation of the Son also implies a principle of "timeless time," so to speak.  

Slattery actually brings our nonlocal friend Wolfgang Smith into the discussion, in that both potentiality and actuality

are real states of the same reality. Both depend on a movement that transforms them from capacity-for-identity to full existing-at-this-moment identity.

And why not? 

neither the particles nor the waves are real, actually existing things; rather they are "a sub-existential domain." 

Again, -- this according to Heisenberg -- say his name -- quantum particles, or wavicles, are something "mid-way between being and nonbeing," or "in the middle between possibility and reality" (Slattery).

You can't get rid of matter and form, or reduce one to the other. Which is why you also cannot reduce consciousness to matter, or vice versa:

Matter is the primal, undifferentiated dimension from which particular, differentiated, identifiable --that is, having an identity -- realities originate. 

Prime matter is a realm of "unshaped, formless potential realities that become identifiable 'forms' (identifiable things with a recognizable identity in the world around us)."

But what is it that causes potential to attain actual form, or the form of actuality? We say this is a result of top-down, i.e., vertical causation, or in a word (or two), continuous creation, emphasis on both terms. Slattery cites the father of quantum mechanics, Max Planck, who posited "the existence of a conscious and intelligent spirit":

This spirit is the matrix of all matter. Not the visible, transient matter is real, true, manifest... but the invisible, immortal spirit is the real thing!

Now since even spirit-beings cannot exist out of themselves, but have to be created, I do not shy away from calling this mysterious creator the same as all cultures of the earth have called him in previous millennia: God!

Say what you want, but it's a damn sight more coherent and consistent than pretending one can pull conscious rabbit out of a material hat, or even an intelligible form of any kind out of a formless sea of unintelligence. 

That's enough for one morning. To be continued...  

"The image depicts a philosophical concept art piece exploring the intricate relationship between consciousness and matter through a vibrant, abstract visual language. It features swirling, luminous wave functions, entangled particles interacting across distances, and a central figure representing human consciousness within this quantum landscape."