Matter-Mind Intercausality:
Wayfarer, many thanks for the welcome. Physicist Lawrence Krauss in The Atlantic in April 2012, in the interview “Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete” (Stenger, Lindsay, and Boghossian: “Physicists Are Philosophers, Too,” Scientific American, May 8, 2015), wrote
As a practicing physicist…I, and most of the colleagues with whom I have discussed this matter, have found that philosophical speculations about physics and the nature of science are not particularly useful, and have had little or impact upon progress in my field.
Furthermore, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, in a Nerdist (May 2014) podcast interview joined the debate: “His overall message was clear: science moves on; philosophy stays mired, useless and effectively dead” (also in Stenger, Lindsay, and Boghossian: “Physicists Are Philosophers, Too,” Scientific American, May 8, 2015).
What I introduce here is an apparently new philosophical line of thought that throws new light on what physics is about, philosophically speaking; and conversely also throws new light on what philosophy is about, physically speaking. Consider the known fact in physics that the gravitational field is energy; and that in Newtonian physics, this energy manifests itself as “force,” while in general relativity this same energy isn’t force, but rather some mysterious “fabric” of spacetime whose substance is unknown. Note also that, ontologically, general relativity supersedes Newtonian physics, so that physicists no longer consider the Newtonian forces in classical physics to be real, but rather are simply a useful model or manner of speaking about matter in motion. The mysterious fabric of spacetime in general relativity is somehow physically more real than the intuitive yet much more empirically tangible forces of Newtonian physics, which in general relativity nevertheless disappear into matter’s equally mysterious “generalized inertia.” How can this be possible? What is going on here?
The overriding question in general relativity ontologically, then, becomes just how does the gravitational field, which actually isn’t force but some quite mysterious spacetime “fabric,” then influence the motion of a gravitating body? Just how does a gravitating body sense the existence of this very mysterious fabric of spacetime, and propel itself internally motivated over said fabric by some equally mysterious generalized inertia? Note that physicists, as scientists, usually are not concerned with such seemingly philosophical issues, but perhaps they should be. Einstein was quite philosophically oriented in his thinking when he came up with the theory of general relativity in the first place. Physicists, concerning the further advance of physics regarding the real, are in their mathematical conjectures clearly “mired, useless and effectively dead” regarding what is reality actually. Their claim that “science moves on” has is not true with regard to understanding what reality is actually. This claim can become true only after scientists – physicists in particular – philosophically reengage in “pure thought” about reality, as both Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein famously did.
Perhaps only then will we know what general relativity is empirically telling us about reality, concerning that gravitational fabric in the spacetime of general relativity over which a gravitating body moves somehow, propelled internally under the force of its generalized inertia. The fabric of spacetime thus does not act as an external force; so what is it, physically, metaphysically even? How does it work? What is its ontology? How is it related functionally to the gravitating body’s “generalized inertia”? These issues demand clear answers, metaphysically speaking, if physics is to pull itself out of the mathematical “mire” in which it currently is empirically entrapped. Until the issues about ontology – in both classical and modern physics – are resolved, physics itself is “useless and effectively dead” concerning “what is” is, in reality. Scientific progress regarding the real, apparently, is not commensurate with the empirical predictability enabled mathematically. Something is missing, which the touted empiricism of science seems incapable of providing without additional “armchair” philosophizing by those dedicated to such.
In working toward a resolution of these issues, starting with general relativity conceptually, I consider that general relativity’s fabric of spacetime ontologically manifests a principle of “energy-intelligence equivalence”; so that the energy of the gravitational field isn’t force, as it is in Newtonian physics, but rather distributed over the universe physically as the fabric of a universal intelligence (not analogically but literally as a physical foundation of the universe)—which intelligence somehow dynamically influences the path followed by bodies gravitating in spacetime over the fabric thereof. This principle as stated is not to be regarded as simply a metaphor, or analogy, but rather a hard-core physical existence to be integrated into Isaac Newton’s laws of motion mathematically. And to interpret this principle otherwise simply misses the point being made.
But how can it be possible for gravitational energy to actually function as the fabric of intelligence in spacetime, to which a gravitating body’s “generalized inertia” (the internal force of intelligence) effectively responds? One answer turns up in a hybrid, matter-mind intercausal “deconstruction” of the mathematical text of Newton’s laws of motion, based on the energy-intelligence “equivalence principle” ontologically postulated for general relativity and mathematically imported into Newtonian physics—a de facto “neo-Greek physics” of matter-mind intercausality; framed in a mathematically deconstructed Newtonian physics that empirically breaks matter’s chain of physical determinism assumed in classical physics to be unbreakable.
The intercausality of matter and mind here proposed in essence constitutes a “neo-Greek physics” of the inner gravitational force (also electric, magnetic and other forces) of intelligence qua generalized inertia for Newtonian physics. According to this neo-Greek physics of matter-mind intercausality, intentionality, volition, and purposivity are potentialities existing but not functionally operational in non-living matter. These potentialities, existent in all physical matter, are thus made functionally operational during biological evolution. In this deconstruction of Newton’s laws of motion, the mathematical formulas deconstructed literally become the texts and narratives of scientific thought by which immanent force can be empirically understood as being truly “present” in nature; which deconstruction both mathematically and empirically thus uncovers in “neo-Greek physics” what currently is “absent,” in nature presently understood as the permissible curriculum of natural science. Neo-Greek physics thus truly is “neoderridean” in character, for it deconstructs the mathematical texts and discourses of natural science in which the energy-intelligence equivalence principle presently is “absent” from nature, according to the prevailing mechanistic curriculum of science.