Atlas and the Globe : The Summits of Philosophy [1 ed.] 9789814968683, 9781003432944

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Overview ix
Chapter 1: The Prestige of Consciousness 1
Chapter 2: The Prophet and the Great Book 5
Chapter 3: The Diver of Ephesus 11
Chapter 4: Mind and Brain according to the History of Philosophy 31
Chapter 5: Mind and Brain as Music and Musical Score 65
Chapter 6: Is the Will an Illusion? 73
Chapter 7: The Mechanical Lion of Leonardo and the Neuron in the Shape of Mirror 81
Chapter 8: Spring and Autumn of the Mirror Neuron 85
Chapter 9: Censorship for the Ghost of Realism 101
Chapter 10: What Is Big Bang? 107
Chapter 11: The World Is Crazy 117
Chapter 12: Consciousness of Machines and Upload of Our Mind 131
Chapter 13: To Die Will Be an Awfully Big Adventure! 137
Chapter 14: The Detachment and the Elsewhere 147
Chapter 15: The Ambassadors and the Flight with Wings 153
Chapter 16: Far from Speeches 159
Index 177

Citation preview

Atlas and the Globe

Atlas and the Globe The Summits of Philosophy

Giuseppe Roncoroni

Published by Jenny Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. 101 Thomson Road #06-01, United Square Singapore 307591 Email: [email protected] Web: www.jennystanford.com British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Atlas and the Globe: The Summits of Philosophy Copyright © 2023 Jenny Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the publisher. Picture on the cover: Atlas holding up the celestial globe, by Guercino. ISBN 978-981-4968-68-3 (Hardcover) ISBN 978-1-003-43294-4 (eBook)

The Light, the Scorpio, the Globe.

Hands and shoulders curve under the load.

The Giant is crushed in gray and cold lands.

From distant and mysterious lands comes the Giant. The shoulders hold a load.

From the hands arise the Light, the Scorpio, the Globe.

Contents Overview

1. The Prestige of Consciousness

ix

2. The Prophet and the Great Book

5

1

3. The Diver of Ephesus

11

4. Mind and Brain according to the History of Philosophy

31

5. Mind and Brain as Music and Musical Score

65

6. Is the Will an Illusion?

73

7. The Mechanical Lion of Leonardo and the Neuron in the Shape of Mirror

81

8. Spring and Autumn of the Mirror Neuron

85

9. Censorship for the Ghost of Realism

101

10. What Is Big Bang?

107

11. The World Is Crazy

117

12. Consciousness of Machines and Upload of Our Mind

131

13. To Die Will Be an Awfully Big Adventure!

137

14. The Detachment and the Elsewhere

147

15. The Ambassadors and the Flight with Wings 16. Far from Speeches

153 159

Index

177

Overview The philosophical principle consists in preserving an original value for the world of consciousness. This orientation, which is historically identified in the terms of phenomenalism or empiricism, is opposed to the method of projecting beyond observation an additional reality, purely presumed, that is defined as substance and cause with respect to the world of consciousness: our life is not a consequence of the fantasies we name God, Soul or External World. It is a perspective that acts as a guide in commenting on the fundamentals of philosophy and science. An important question concerns the relationship between the mind and the brain. Both terms, the data of the problem, are safeguarded by setting aside the conceptual constructs by which the mind, that is first of all the conscious life, is transformed into a belonging of the brain. This solution of the ancient dilemma benefits from the equivalence according to which the mind is music and the brain represents a score. The criticism of the mechanism extends into the criticism of the theory of mirror neurons because these cells fall into the engineering of man-machine. Then are taken into consideration the current models of physics, relativity and quanta, and with them a new attention is paid to the notion of time: the flow of events is subjective and therefore, for example, the Big Bang must be conceived indifferently as Explosion, the debut of the cosmos, and as Implosion, the outcome of the cosmos, because one or the other is decided by the eyes of the observer. The horizon of philosophy, emptied of prejudices and judgments of men, is favourable to a non-reductive narration of our life, up to the visions that prelude to death, and is in agreement with the vocation of oriental mysticism.

Chapter 1

The Prestige of Consciousness

Friedrich: Monk by the sea

Atlas and the Globe: The Summits of Philosophy Giuseppe Roncoroni Copyright © 2023 Jenny Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. ISBN 978-981-4968-68-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-43294-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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The Prestige of Consciousness

Goethe [Faust]: The word is only sound and smoke. In the thrill it is the highest faculty of man. As much as the world makes existence difficult for him deeply moved he feels the Miracle. Shakespeare [The Tempest]: We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep. Something exists. This is the truth that unfolds. There is light and the night is forever away. This is the miracle that amazes and moves. Something exists. Now I ask myself: what exists? The answer is easy if I put myself, in front of the miracle, as a spectator does. So: there is what appears. There are times when I see and think. This is my and our life. Nothing else appears and therefore we can say, with Prospero, that our life is such stuff as dreams are made on. This is the principle that I will clarify below.

Plato [Teeteto]: The time we sleep is the same as the time we are awake. In both states we hold true only the opinions we have at those moments so that for an equal time we argue that now the one and now the other are true. Nothing prevents us from believing that the speeches we are making take place in dreams. And when in a dream we tell a dream, as sometimes happens, the similarity with the sensations of waking is wonderful. Zhuang-zi: Zhuang-zi once dreamed of being a butterfly flying. Suddenly he woke up and was amazed to find that he Zhuang-zi. He no longer knew if he was Zhuang-zi who dreamed of being a butterfly or if he was a butterfly who dreaming of being Zhuang-zi.

and was had was

Philosophers testify that what I call reality and what I call dream are similar. I repeat quickly. It happens to meet some beings, primarily the men, to whom I attribute a conscious life like the one I have. This happens in a variety of environments. In rethinking, however, I give greater value to a world that seems more continuous and coherent. Its story tells us, among other,

The Prestige of Consciousness

the explosion from which it springs and the evolution of the creatures that populate the planet. That world I call reality, as an alternative to the rest that I call dream, and I conclude this way: the other conscious lives exist in reality while it is a mirage that there are conscious lives that are equally suggested by the dream. This opinion lasts until I return to the dream and there, again, it gives in to deception. Is it not, perhaps, reckless and fickle? I will put aside these doubts from now on. I take into account that there is a “world of all” that is distinguished from dreams. There is a condition, in which I define myself awake, which puts me in contact with a world in common with other conscious lives that exist or that in any case could exist if, for example, I had escaped a catastrophe alone. This trust makes me conduct my days as I do. In short: I concede that you exist, you who read, otherwise I would not be talking to you. What if I am wrong? It matters little to philosophy because the “world of all” does not lose its affinity with dream just for the fact of belonging to everyone. I can call it “dream of all”. Here is the point that marks the vulgar vision: the “world of all” loses the features of the dream. This happens because it is thought that the “world of all”, unlike the dream, is based on something that does not appear. It is thought that the “world of all” is outside our life: it detaches from us, who see it and know it, and becomes an entity that stands on its own. The average man is so persuaded about it as to think I question it just for game. Not only do I not believe that “world of all” is outside of us but I refuse to believe that anything exists out there. The man who believes in it is no longer a spectator but is, at the same time, an architect and a credulous one. This naivety really makes me smile. Something that is born in his fantasy should exist, according to him, just as my tumult of feelings and thoughts exists. Above life hovers a ghost that I do not see and that I do not touch. The echo of the fairy tales that the philosophy of the

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past told us. An idol and a voice. Nothing more than a breath coming out of the lips. For what purpose? To obscure, with the smoke of the word, the miracle of existence.

Cioran [2005 Précis de decomposition]: The intimate experience reveals nothing to us beyond the privileged and inexpressible instant. Men’s theories are but brilliant tautologies. What advantage do we gain from knowing that the nature of being consists in the will to live or in the fantasy of God or in the fantasy of Chemistry? Simple proliferation of terms and a subtle deviation of meaning. Existence escapes to the verbal grasp.

Chapter 2

The Prophet and the Great Book

Michelangelo – Daniele the prophet

Atlas and the Globe: The Summits of Philosophy Giuseppe Roncoroni Copyright © 2023 Jenny Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. ISBN 978-981-4968-68-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-43294-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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The Prophet and the Great Book

Michel de Notre Dame [1555 Les Centuries]: Estant assis de nuict secret estude Seul reposé sur la selle d’airain. […] La vierge en main mise au milieu de branches. De l’onde il moulle et le limbe et le pied. […] Splendeur Divine, le Divin pres s’assied. Cioran [Le mauvais démiurge]: Scepticism is the gateway to mysticism.

Pirrone the Sceptic and the Epigones Tonight, walking through the districts of Edinburgh, I find myself in front of the statue of Hume. He is sitting, meditating, wearing a tunic of an ancient Greek. I say to myself: this is Pyrrho or perhaps is Sextus Empiricus. This is one of the masters of scepticism. Someone, at that time, already repeated: “under what appears, there is another world … there are substances and their properties … they are occult but they exist … believe me”. These substances, with the name of God or Soul or External World, designate something unknown which would stay at the origin of what we know. Sextus Empiricus, a bit like the apostle Thomas, does not care about rumours and Hume, David Empiricus, after two thousand years takes his tunic and wears it to expose the same reasons. Nothing exists beyond the edge of consciousness. This mentality, called empiricism or phenomenalism, removes the dogma that governs philosophy and removes the common sense that derives.

The World Is a Representation

A school master explains Aristotle’s philosophy. He gives an example: mutual attraction means that bodies have the faculty to attract or, in modern words, are able to curve space. A classmate, so crude as to personify the average man, exclaims “what a banality, it’s obvious”. The teacher replies “today it seems obvious but it wasn’t”. It is, in fact, not an obviousness but a cheat: a visible law is translated into an unseen property, into a cause, which would be present even when it does not manifest itself.

The Prophet and the Great Book

The property, which I don’t see, requires a residence that I don’t see. Thus was born the External World where the bodies and their properties are placed. The trick brings us as a gift a static world in exchange for our world that is shaking and shifting. Schopenhauer soon makes it clear that the world is a representation [1818 The World as Will and Representation]. What is point of such a statement? It means that the world coincides with its image, as if it were a dream, and differs from the dream because it contains a plot that is common to all of us. The world we perceive is original and is not the duplicate of a world outside us. This is a conquest of Philosophy and recently of Physics. Thus states an article by Henry: “A fundamental truth of the new physics is that we are involved as observers in the creation of our reality. The universe is a mental construction.” [2005 The Mental Universe]. Then the author concludes, with the approval of the scientists, that the origin of reality is not natural but is mental. I will come back later to talk about that.

The Coexistence of Mind and Brain

Thus Spinoza decrees: “men are persuaded that by the sole command of the mind now the body moves and now stands still: the mind and body, instead, are the expression of a single order” [1677 Ethica]. This truth will soon be certified by science: our thoughts and our choices conform to the natural laws of the brain. Men are immersed in nature, as all things, and they deceive themselves believing they can arbitrarily lead the body here or there. Such a striking datum is providential because it tests every conception. Let us see what would happen if the External World existed. The External World precedes the mind and will have to create it in the course of evolution. The conscious life, which is the only certainty, is belittled to the role of a last link in a chain. It looks strange because it is different from the rest of the chain. The situation worsens when we get to know that the conscious life is faithful to the brain laws. Why does conscious life arise if the brain is a system that operates on its own? How come are there the qualities of will and reasoning if they have no power on our behaviour?

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The result of the relationship between the mind and the brain confirms how was opportune the move to deny the External World. At this point, the supremacy of the brain on the mind disappears and it becomes legitimate that there is a single order, as Spinoza presaged, where the physiology of the brain and the authority of the mind coexist. It is easier to understand this coexistence through the analogy with music and musical score: the music of the mind is in accordance with the score of the brain but, at the same time, the score of the brain is at the service of the music of the mind.

Time and Big Bang

The primary school teacher, cavalier Florindo Boschi, told us a tale. A woman dies. The husband lives for a long time and then, getting to paradise, he says to his wife “finally, after a long time, we meet again”. She is meticulous and, consulting the calendar, replies “I, really, died only yesterday”. The tale astounded me but it announces something true about the relativity of time. The link between the mind and the brain can explain the rule of time. The speed of things is inversely proportional to the brain speed as if the observer were in possession of a camera that clicks with more or less frequency. William James puts it this way: “Creatures differ in the perception of a time interval. Let us suppose to capture, in a second, a thousand events and not ten as now: the sun and the moon would seem motionless in the sky whereas the organisms would be blocked in the middle of a gesture. On the contrary let us suppose to record the thousandth part of our sensations: the sun would move around the sky like a meteor in a streak of fire and everything on earth would flow at a swirling rhythm.” [1892 Principles of Psychology]. Nothing remains of time if also its direction is subjective. That is how Hawking explains it: “The brain, as a computer, works by producing a quantity of disorder that is greater than the quantity of order. Therefore the perception of time is determined in the brain by the fact that we must remember things in the direction in which the disorder increases. This makes very ordinary the second law of thermodynamics: disorder increases over time

The Prophet and the Great Book

because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases. There is not one thing we can be surer of.” [1988 A Brief History of Time]. It means that, by reversing the work of the brain, we would see things unfold in the opposite direction to the norm. The Big Bang may be the onset or the outcome of the cosmos depending on the observer although Hawking, out of habit of the External World, overlooks this corollary. The Gnostics predicted it: “Time cannot have a direction that is defined in absolute, that is, it cannot be represented by a line that is limited by an initial event and a final event. The idea of creation and consumption of the cosmos is inconceivable.” [1978 Puech En quête de la gnose].

The World like a Book A similitude from Anatole France is useful in intuiting the timeless world: “Certainly time is nothing but pure illusion. I do not perceive my death, yet it exists. Death is the last line of a book I am reading and that I have not finished.” [1890 Taïde]. The world has become like one of the tomes in my collection. The whole tome lies on the shelf and, thus, page 20 is like page 200. Just reading, penetrating into the story, I determine a sequence for which on page 20 I wonder what will happen later. There will be a beginning or an end only when I take into consideration my gesture of opening and closing the volume. I live my life as if I were a character who looks out and takes leave of history and, nevertheless, the book will always stay there unchanging with the chronicle of my birth and my death.

The Mental Universe

Which world is configured in accordance with the primacy of consciousness and the subjectivity of time? I restart from Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer adopts the similitude of the book by arguing that we must consider events “as we consider a writing even though we know it was there before reading it” [1838 On the Freedom of the Will]. He does not admit free will and

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hence what will happen is inevitable. The similitude would be fully accomplished if the becoming vanished and everything was already written regardless of whether or not there is free will. Instead Schopenhauer stated: “the world depends on the first eye that opened even if it was that of an insect” [1818]. This statement is paradoxical because it still contains the becoming. The correct sentence would be that the world depends on conscious beings and exists as a scenario of their lives. It has no genesis and apocalypse because it does not include a becoming. Each of us establishes its genesis and its apocalypse as one arrives or goes away. These truths are the echoes of the oriental voice from which Schopenhauer was inspired. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that the Upanishads are the pinnacle of the Vedas, the texts of Hinduism, and they reflect the light of a divine essence within us that will soon dissolve into the Void of Buddhism. Upanishads As from the fire fly the sparks so from the spirit depart all senses, all worlds, all gods, all creatures. Heaven and earth, fire and wind, sun and moon, lightning and stars, everything is included inside us. When a man sleeps or when he dies he retreats into the spirit and achieves unity. The sight is reassembled together with all shapes the hearing is reassembled together with all sounds the mind is reassembled together with all thoughts. Like rivers coming from the ocean flow back into the ocean.

Chapter 3

The Diver of Ephesus

ter Brugghen: Heraclitus

Atlas and the Globe: The Summits of Philosophy Giuseppe Roncoroni Copyright © 2023 Jenny Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. ISBN 978-981-4968-68-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-43294-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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The Diver of Ephesus

Diogenes Laertius [Lives of Eminent Philosophers]: Euripides, handing him the book of Heraclitus, asked Socrates “what do you think?” and Socrates replied “what I understand is excellent and I think that what I do not understand is also excellent ... but, to understand it, one would have to be a diver from Delos.” A character of literature, magician and lord of the storm, warns that we and our life are such stuff as dreams are made on. He too will agree that this is a special dream because it takes place in a coherent world and, it seems, involves all of us. But Prospero’s truth coincides with the principle of this essay: the moments of life are original. What we see or think does not derive from dark sources that we call God, Soul, Matter. This paper confirms its principle with a journey into philosophy. Every trip requires a guide. I choose Heraclitus, the diver of Ephesus, because he speaks of what we see, hear, experience. Later the philosophers will venture into the imagination and, occupying the throne that belongs to the gods, they will give a new shape to reality.

A warning is useful in embarking on this trip. Some will detect inaccuracies in the narration of concepts forgetting that certain licenses serve to simplify and unify the exposition. Abolishing or mitigating any filter by the commentator, while appearing to be a laudable initiative, contravenes the need for clarity and consistency. Whoever reports the same word with different meanings, to respect the use that each philosopher makes of it, generates many misunderstandings. Furthermore the intent to guarantee neutrality is often an illusion as Aristotle’s concept of “substance” demonstrates: the putative sub-stance, sub-stantia in Latin, does not translate “upo-stasis” but “ousía” and therefore at times one can doubt whether matter or soul are an “ousía” (what is and remains) but certainly, being unknowable, they are an “upo-stasis” (what lies below what appears to us).

The Diver of Ephesus

Heraclitus I prefer that of which there is sight, hearing and experience. Everything flows and nothing remains. In the same river we go down and we don’t go down we are and we are not. It is necessary that those who reason are based on what is common to all such as the city on the law and even more firmly. In fact human laws derive their sustenance from the one law. Listening not to me but to the law we must agree that all is one. The whole is governed by the whole. Human opinions are games for children. Even the most esteemed knows and retains only opinions. Dike will catch in the act the artificers and the witnesses of lies.

Existence and Words Something exists and there is no doubt. It is our sensations and our thoughts that compose the world of consciousness. Someone adds that beyond there is a “quid”. This “quid” is not a lived thing but a thought thing. The thinker gives it an independent existence and thus brings us as a gift a reality that we do not see. One of his thoughts. One of his words. The futility of a “noumenon” or a name.

The Dogma of Permanence

The fantasy of the philosophers leads us towards a figure that resides beyond us and, that is, towards a substance. What is the purpose of a substance? It has the task of generating our life. There is always and only the dogma of permanence that inspires the fantasy of philosophers: nothing comes from nothing and everything already existed at the bottom of the substance.

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Substances and Abstractions: God, Soul, Matter What are the substances? Substances, the sources of our life, are called God, soul and matter. These entities, if we exclude God when he is a person like us, do not have the form of consciousness and, therefore, break the unity that exists in the only type of existence that we know. We are dealing with thinking beings that are not thinking, thoughts that are not thought, images that are not seen or imagined. They are abstractions and are catalogued in subjects and objects. Can we really believe that such shreds of life exist? I would be less surprised if bones and organs roamed the village square.

The God of Philosophy and the God of Religion

The myth of God takes shape at the beginning of philosophy. Anaxagoras believes that every event depends on other events and that, sooner or later, the path backwards must be suspended. He places a voluntary gesture at the top, as the prime mover, because he deludes himself that it is outside the sequence. Philosophers like Aristotle or Thomas enrich the figure of God when they recognize, in the toil of creation, the competence of the mathematician and the architect. A philosopher like Plotinus exempts God from any contact with the world and sublimates it in the form of a pure essence. It is no longer God’s time for philosophy. The temptation to rely on the omnipotence of a divinity persists since the old problems of philosophy are partly unsolved. But such a solution is too easy and too human for which other ways of solution are preferred. Even the religious sentiment, the amazement of existing and the amazement in front of the world, deteriorates when it is involved in the reminiscences of childhood: the divinity is the father I see up there; he exhorts me to respect the commandments; he rewards me if I am good and chastises me if I am bad. Anyhow he would be a father more prone to severity than to charity towards us, who are his children, if we judge him by the food chain and by the other calamities that have befallen in our lot.

The Diver of Ephesus

Where Is God? Where is God? Where can I meet him? Many are sure that he resides near some mountain or some sky. Truly, if God has touched the world, I will catch him in that moment and be close to him as if he were a person. If he has not touched the world, instead, he can hide in a sphere that opens up in ecstasy or death. What will be, in this case, the shape of God? He may not be a person but a kind of ocean where all living beings emerge and submerge. Someone has sighted this deity, this common subject or whatever you want to name it. Someone adds that the ocean is not placed in front of us but inside us. I was wrong, therefore, in setting out towards God because God had moved to come to me. Then God takes off the habit of substance and re-enters the boundary of our life.

What Is Matter

We recognize, in observation, the details of a picture. There are areas of the picture that no one observes and, nevertheless, they are part of the picture in front of us. That picture is nature. Matter indicates nature when it is extracted from observation. The tree I see reproduces another tree that stands outside and is indifferent to being observed. The tree I see would not be the real tree but a copy of the real tree. Matter is a substance that serves to explain the facts of nature and the image we receive. I will now illustrate the logic and then the history of this project with respect to which the other substances, including the soul which is a later topic, constitute only a limit to the capacity for explanation that is recognized in matter.

Matter as Unknown and Static Cause of Nature

Nature is subject to movement and change. Its elaboration is inspired by the dogma of permanence and comes to theorize a type of matter that has nothing in common with nature. It is

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no longer matter but it is what you want. It is the mirage of an immobile reality. This elaboration takes place in two phases and, as if I were the author, I describe them in contrast to a swirling verdict by Hegel: “the planets run free in the sky like gods without any force pushing them”.

1. The Matter That Is Known

I see a moving planet. That movement had to exist before, unseen, in the form of potentiality. Where does the potentiality lie? I make a hypothesis: the planet is there, where I see it, even if I don’t see it. Thus potentiality presents itself in guise of a property of the planet (or rather the planetary system) and, when it acts, in guise of force. Having assigned a seat to the potentiality allows us to indicate it, considering that the movements of the planet are regular, as a persistent cause of what happens and what I see. But beware: did property arise out of nowhere when the planet was formed? Not at all. A planet is made up of atoms and the law is made up of the properties of atoms. Below reside atoms, properties and forces that drive the celestial body.

2. The Unknown

I am still not satisfied. I wonder: why does an atom possess certain properties and not others? Only now I realize that I do not know the body that is present beyond the image. I can assume that it is made in such a way as to imply those properties that seemed arbitrary to me like, among others, the link between the mass and motion of the planet. The assumption has another merit. Believing that the visible planet corresponds to the real planet was risky because, if it changed its rotation for no reason, I would have to admit a novelty among its properties. It is not so. Now there may be a reason in the world that is not seen. Nothing will disturb anymore, whatever I happen to see, the peace of heaven.

The Diver of Ephesus

Heraclitus A knowledge of many things does not teach one to have intelligence. Otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras or, again, Xenophanes and Hecateus. Hesiod is most men’s teacher. Men think he knew very many things, he who did not even know what day and night were: in fact they are one.

Parmenides against Heraclitus Parmenides contrasts the “everything flows” of Heraclitus with an ideal of permanence: “being is and non-being is not”. Becoming is not credible because it would be a passage from being to nonbeing and from non-being to being. Parmenides is the founder of the philosophy of the intellect. Indeed the department of the library relating to modern philosophy surrounds us with titles such as Bradley’s Appearance and Reality [1893] or Meyerson’s Identity and Reality [1908]. These philosophers tell us that the change we see is appearance and that the reality we do not see must be identical. They are the continuers of the principle of identity or non-contradiction and the continuers of the equivalence between “identity” and “permanence” for which what changes would be contradictory. Proponents of Heraclitus, such as Hegel, deny the principle of identity and thus reiterate that reality is dynamic since it is obvious that a change only contradicts our conjecture that there is no change. Instead Aristotle’s solution consists in believing that the transition from A to non-A is possible because non-A was already in existence.

The Legacy of Aristotle between Substances and Causes

Aristotle shares the ideal of permanence and justifies becoming in this way: what comes to exist, in actuality, previously existed as potentiality. The concepts of substance and cause allow him

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to configure potentialities as pertaining to matter or soul. These substances would determine the course of becoming in advance with a character of necessity. An invariable and invisible world now reigns over the variable and visible world. Aristotle’s legacy is quite extravagant and yet it is winning in our culture. We have since been led to believe that the world of nature exists independently of any observer, that in observation there is an image coming from the outside world, that there is the body on one side and the spirit on the other, that the spirit moves the body without taking into account natural directives and, finally, that a great director oversees this order.

The Democritus Reductionism and the Descartes Mechanism

Democritus presents reductionism when he decides that each figure is composed of indivisible particles, hence named a-toms or in-divisible ones, which move randomly in a vacuum. Descartes in the modern age, though hesitant about the atom, creates mechanism by importing reductionism into Aristotle’s static matter. This means that Descartes fragments those properties of matter that Aristotle kept entire as universal forms: there is no longer the form of man but there are atoms, with their properties, which give rise to man. Reductionism represents the radical negation of Heraclitus’ “law” and “fire”.

Matter Conceived as an Unknown May Include Other Substances

Until now, from Aristotle to Descartes, the aid of the soul is present alongside matter. But there is no need when matter becomes an unknown because, like unknown, it can be everything and can explain everything. Voltaire [1740 The Metaphysics of Newton] recalls that already Locke and Newton, cautiously, suggested that they did not know enough about matter to rule out that God could give it the property to think. But, meanwhile,

The Diver of Ephesus

even God is increasingly in disgrace and Laplace will respond to Napoleon’s objection in this way: “I did not need this gracious hypothesis”.

The Apotheosis of Mechanism

Descartes [1637 Discourse on Method]: If God had placed the form of Chaos at the beginning and had established the laws of nature, then lending them his ordinary concurrence, we can believe, without thereby taking anything away from the miracle of creation, that material things would have become as we see them presently. Laplace [1820 Théorie analytique des probabilités]: We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. I too could prophesy no less than Tiresias, knowing where it is and how it moves, where something will end up. This means that I would predict the destiny of the universe if I knew its state and its laws. Yet I agree with Bergson [1930 The Possible and the Real]: it cannot be said that Hamlet’s drama was predictable. It could be said whether that drama, as determinism dictates, existed before it was written. So Laplace thinks. This accountant asks to know, to make a prediction, only the state of nature because the laws of nature would be contained within in the form of forces. And there, hence, would stay the pen of Shakespeare and the madness of Hamlet perpetually. Laplace holds the past and the future in his hand but requires a license: to scrutinize the inscrutable casket where they rest. Descartes differs from Laplace because he has to profane a second casket, the soul as well as the matter, to acquire those secrets.

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The Monkey That Writes A simplistic book by Monod [1970 Chance and Necessity] still proposes what Bergson calls the illusions of mechanism: the necessity which characterizes causes and the chance which belongs to reductionism. Immediately Monod summons Democritus, hosted in hell by Dante as “he who the world puts at random”, to magnify the power of chance. Can we build something with a bunch of colliding balls? A reductionist, to demonstrate that a structure can arise by chance, makes a comparison: a monkey, typing the keys of the typewriter, could compose a poem. Here, however, there is an oversight. The poem does not belong to signs but to meanings. Ink, to get interested in literature, must be interpreted as a symbol and translated into a word and thought. I would agree with the reductionist if the monkey, thanks to good fate, could “conceive” the poem. Unfortunately the monkey and the typewriter are only representative in baptism of certain books. We can note, moreover, that the gap between graphics and poetry appears equally in the correlation that exists between musical score and music: many would congratulate the macaque that stains a sheet, if the lucky one guesses the symbols of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, and I would repeat that a melody has nothing to do with stains on a scrap of paper.

The Creative Power and the Chance

Nietzsche [1884 Thus Spoke Zarathustra]: If ever I sat at the divine table of the earth to play dice with the gods, so that the earth quaked and ruptured and snorted forth fire-streams, because the earth is a divine table trembling for creative words and new throws of dice… Heraclitus, in dialogue as always with Zarathustra, repeats that what happens over time “is a child playing with dice”. There is no doubt that chance is involved in the evolution of life. The dice is thrown when the DNA undergoes a mutation, due to imprecision in the transcription, and here comes the first cell with sensitivity to light. However reductionism shatters the dice on which the

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creative words are engraved while the table of the earth is unguarded and witnesses a shot of scene: Chance has become God.

The Crisis of Matter and of Any Substance according to Berkeley and Hume

Matter tries to imitate the image we observe but must exclude what depends on the observer such as colours, sounds, flavours and so on. Without these qualities, named secondary, matter is also deprived of the primary qualities of extension and movement. Thus Berkeley [1710 Principles of Human Knowledge] removes matter, resurrecting the soul and God, while Hume [1748 An Inquiry concerning Human Understanding] removes all substances. The world view is subject to a turning point because our life now throws off the crutches. I would add that the search for substances is always a paradox. Suppose it is indispensable, in our way of thinking, that there is a substance: why should the lines of thought apply to this other reality? Thought is not a vehicle that can take us beyond itself.

The False Revolution from Aristotle to Kant

Aristotle is sure that everything must have a cause. This premise is a bridge to the substances that act as a cause. Kant [1781 Critic of Pure Reason] plans the same bridge but, by now, he cannot resort to substances because they were suppressed by Hume. He then becomes the artificer of a revolution in the manner of Copernicus, the astronomer, when he placed the sun at the centre of the system in place of a presumptuous planet. Likewise Kant promotes the light of thought to the centre of reality and retreats the old substances in the role of its satellites. The move allows him to restore the Aristotelian scheme and to conclude like this: matter, soul and God are our needs and we don’t have to worry about their existence. Kant recreates, inside and not outside of us, the drawing of the static unknown that determines the world that appears and its changes.

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Neither Substances nor Abstractions The history of philosophy is populated by substances and abstractions. Abstractions renounce the guise of substance and survive with Kant and with idealism. There is still the illusion that the world of consciousness descends from its components which would be subjects and objects. It is not so. That world is original and unitary.

Heraclitus

How the spider, waiting in the middle of the canvas, notes when a fly breaks some thread and gets there almost feeling pain, similarly the psyche of man, wounded in any part of the body, rushes as if it could not bear the injury of the body to which it is joined firmly and according to precise proportion. Every animal is led to pasture by the whip of the god. No man escapes his fate. All things are full of spirits and demons.

What Is the Mind The mind includes the processes of which we are conscious. These processes are not complete and fade towards the unconscious which is, therefore, the shadow zone. The mind, like nature, composes a picture that is visible but not always seen. I will talk about the relationship that the mind establishes with nature and, that is, with our body and our brain. One fact is certain: the things of one are different from the things of the other. Sensations, emotions or concepts are not objects or cells.

Are Nature and Mind United or Divided?

What is the relationship between nature and mind? Do they have the same laws? Or does everyone have their own laws? Heraclitus believes that the mind is a “spark of the stellar essence”. Later the world of nature will be interpreted in a reductionist way and will no longer be compatible with the mind. Two

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currents arise then. One is led by Democritus: the mind is still united with nature and, therefore, is nothing more than the random motion of atoms. The other current protects the mind by separating nature. Victory historically belongs to the supporters of unity. But what kind of unity? The one that destroys the mind or the ancient one that welcomes it into nature?

Division between Nature and Mind when They Are Interpreted as Mat ter and Soul

Nature, in tradition, is brought back to matter and gradually changes into a machine. The mind must turn to another substance, the soul, and there it is seen as a pure and arbitrary spirit. This pattern, which resists from Aristotle to Descartes, implies that our soul can act on the matter of our body. It goes into crisis when Leibniz [1695 New System of Nature] understands that the body follows its laws and is not subject to commands. Should it be said that there is only one substance? Is there only the body, the matter, the machine?

God Goes to the Aid of the Soul

Leibniz tries to prevent the end of the soul while admitting that matter keeps pace and the soul does not divert it. He says: they are autonomous series that God has regulated from the beginning as if, when required, they touch each other. This is the parallelism. Let us remember that God, in Malebranche’s occasionism [1674 The Search after Truth], is even more committed: he moves the body when the soul wants it and generally provokes the movements of a matter now inactive. The descent of God, the “deus ex machina”, remedies the failure as it remedied, in classical theatre, the lack of justice among men.

Matter without Soul Is Not a Solution

The history of matter and soul, when the soul declines, warns that our mind is part of a machine. It is clear that there must be, here

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too, an error in the premises. But it is not clear to everyone. Thus, in today’s debate, we see in the spotlight those refined thinkers who think that thought does not exist. Reflections and choices would be an illusion. Denying the data, unfortunately, dissolves but does not solve a problem.

The Cerebromental Law

What is the state of the relationship between the brain and the mind? There is, today, a fact: the mind is connected to the brain and respects its laws. This fact confirms that nature and the brain do not have the traits of a machine. The way the brain works must be, at the same time, the way the mind organizes itself. In the brain and in the mind, there are the two sides of a law. Bergson [1896 Matter and Memory] writes: “He who penetrated inside a brain would not be enlightened about what happens in consciousness more than we would be about a play through the movements of the actors on the stage. Those movements, depending on the work, tell us more or less things: almost everything if it’s a pantomime and almost nothing if it’s a subtle comedy.”

Healing the Mind by Touching the Brain?

Can we cure a disease of the mind through the brain? Can we cure any depression with medicine? Bergson describes, with his metaphor, that a disease of the mind is often a subtle comedy and that shaking the brain, with irons or drugs, is like forcibly moving an actor on stage. Anything, that way, I would be inclined to do. But would I still be me?

Towards Panpsychism

Where does the mental aspect of nature arrive? Does it confine itself to the brains of humans and animals, where it apparently reaches consciousness, or does it continue into plants and again into things that are less like me? Panpsychism arises from an intuition. I am on the rocks and I look at the sea: the current of

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my sensations, the flight of the seagulls and the scream of the waves are glimpses of a horizon in which the face of nature and the face of the mind merge.

Heraclitus

The sun is new in every day. The sun is as big as it appears. The sun will not exceed its measurements otherwise the Erinyes in Dike’s service would take it back. This universal order was made by none among gods or among men but it was, is and will be a fire that goes on and off in the right measure.

The Way of the Cosmos Hawking [1988 A Brief History of Time] reminds us that the cosmos is similar to a way and culminates, like a way, at the two extremes. What is the first? We know that the cosmos is expanding and increases its disorder. Here, then, is the extremity that has passed: a state of maximum density and minimum disorder in which the Great Explosion occurs. How is the extreme that will come? The cosmos can contract and point to the Great Implosion. Thence the second extreme differs from the first only because there is a maximum degree of disorder. Note: I choose this eventuality, for convenience, even if currently the idea prevails that the cosmos will expand more and more.

The Cerebral Wayfarer

We are wayfarers who travel the way of the cosmos. The wayfarer, in turn, is part of the way because he is connected to the brain. What remains of the way if the wayfarer disappears? Only the laws that are obtained with measurement. What appears to the wayfarer? The image as it is constructed by brain and mind of him. Once I was overwhelmed by the vastness of spaces and times because I still did not realize that the way, lacking the wayfarer, is devoid of grandeur and persistence.

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Space as Extension and as Measure The extension of an object is not part of its characteristics but is relative to the observer. It is evident, in fact, that any object is neither big nor small: it gets bigger if Alice gets smaller or closer while it gets smaller if Alice gets bigger or farther away. The characteristic of the object, the space that is measured, is only a comparison with the extension of the meter. I am no longer surprised when I meet a friend who carries the globe on his shoulders.

Time as Duration and as Measure

I close my eyes. I feel that I am going from a before to an after. This is the duration. I open my eyes and I realize that the disorder in the events increases. Does something dictate that this be so? For nothing. It is implied in the fact that in measurement there is only a comparison with the clock. Duration is lost and, consequently, the direction and speed of events are lost. The way is travelled with a direction and a speed which are decided by the wayfarer. Heraclitus warns that “the road up and the road down are the same” and that “in the circumference of a circle the beginning and end are common”.

The Wayfarer Confers a Speed through the Brain

The unity of the brain and the mind implies that a change in the mind corresponds to a change in the brain. Slowing down the activity of the brain makes the activity of the mind slower, so it makes events faster, while the opposite happens if the activity of the brain accelerates. The fact is well known. We know that events flow more slowly for a fly than for us or even that they can slow down when we ourselves are in danger or in a dream. This means that the duration of ten seconds is variable for each observer and is also variable for the same observer in a different circumstance. Yet, even in studies that would like to be authoritative, the temptation persists to insert duration in the unit of time and, that is, to assign a proper duration to events.

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The Wayfarer Confers a Direction through the Brain The cosmos debuts with the Great Explosion and takes leave with the Great Implosion. It is, however, a point of view because the direction is given by the wayfarer. The Great Explosion is an event that becomes explosion or implosion depending on how I look at it. Genesis and Apocalypse exchange each other if I turn around. The Day of Judgment, with the blaring of trumpets and the tearing of seals, moves from my future to my past. I just need to reverse the projector lever. One question remains: why do I always see things in that direction? Only because the brain, which is the projector, works in the direction of the major disorder. A scalpel in the skull overturns the cosmos.

Clarification with Parmenides

Becoming, in conclusion, belongs to the observer. Someone is malicious: has a disciple of Heraclitus repented and goes hand in hand with Parmenides? Not at all. The genealogy of Parmenides debases the becoming in appearance and beyond it profiles a stable reality. Here, instead, becoming is recognized because there is no reality out of observation. Only in this context are we led to argue that the common component of reality is exempt from flowing and that flowing depends on the modalities of perception.

Heraclitus

I investigated myself. If happiness corresponded to the pleasures of the body, we would say that the oxen are happy when they find grass peas to swallow. What they do while awake remains concealed from those men just as they are unaware of what they do while they sleep. The best ones aim only at this: triumph over transitory things. You will never find, however far you walk, the boundaries of the psyche.

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How could one hide from what never sets? Night owls, magicians, bacchus, maenads, initiates: death will be followed by fire!

Inside Me Reality coincides with our life if there are no God, soul and matter. It is an ancient idea that I have to look inside myself to understand the origin and values. Thus the Hymn to Creation, in the Vedas, does not look into cosmic distances but into the depths of intimacy: “There was no kingdom of air. Was the deep abyss an ocean? There was darkness and, in the darkness, there was an unconscious sway. Desire is the first thing that emerges from the spirit. The birth of being from not being discovered the bards by peering into the heart.”

My Life in the Foreground

A landscape takes shape, in the light of consciousness, that goes from the whirlpools of the Acheron to the ice of Olympus. Now I ask myself: how is my life? In the mirror appears a figure that is formed in the factory of evolution. The body, essential for living, is foreign to me and I do not even know how it works. I handle it as if it were an instrument: sometimes a flap comes off or sometimes I replace a piece. His features slowly deteriorate and unravel with death. That body is the symbol of my transience. I acknowledge that the vanity of individuals is a constant, it is a value, and the promise of a paradise where people acquire the firmness of the rock is a deplorable blasphemy.

The Stick and the Carrot

Pain and pleasure are the stick and the carrot that push the donkey to pursue the aims of conservation and reproduction. I drink water from the cup, to quench my thirst, and unwittingly take care of my body. I am overwhelmed by panic, at the news of an illness, and I wage the battle to survive. I chase after Rosina’s

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rosy lips and surprisingly find in my arms a baby who perpetuates the dynasty. There is a penny of pleasure, or at least of quiet, for those who adapt to servitude.

The Pack Leader

I have another temptation: to be appreciated by other men. But what do others know about me? There is one thing that makes me feel special: the ego and, that is, the consciousness of myself. Do you, the others, perceive my ego? It is not possible. I am inaccessible to you and you are inaccessible to me because each of us stands behind a figure that acts as a shield. Francis of Assisi and Alexander the Great come to mind. Each of them feels unique because of his ego. Yet the ego that Francis feels, as far as I know, may be behind Alexander’s profile and actions. And you, likewise, will never know that I am not the saint who prays among the olive trees or the soldier who plunders the Orient. Here too, therefore, there is a trap. I, as pack leader, exalt the mask of a body that still uses me to the advantage of its supremacy.

My Ego Is an Empty and Fleeting Sensation

Until now I have given so much importance to the ego that pervades and makes mine the thoughts and that distinguishes me from Francis the Ascetic, from Alexander the Assassin and from each of you. But what is the ego? I cannot define it. It appears identical in every living entity. I stare into the eyes of a man or into the eyes of Argo, the dog, and it seems to me a bounce on the mirror: everyone feels to be himself as I feel to be myself. The ego is a sensation that orients us in the variety of the environment and that can alter, like the other sensations, until it disintegrates and disappears. Only those who believe in the soul will say that it is the mark of a unity above thoughts and, perhaps, that the soul and the ego wander together from one body to another. James [1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience] writes: “The individual consciousness tends to attenuate up to a purely spiritual condition where it designates the fact that the content of the experience is known. It is the name of a non-being: an echo

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that has remained in the atmosphere of philosophy after the disappearance of the soul.”

Detachment and Elevation

To suppose that every colour comes from black causes black to be sovereign even if does not appear. The same was true for every moment of life in the age of substances. But now, lacking matter and soul, I am no longer locked in my body and I am no longer circumscribed by my ego. I am not always an individual but only when I live as an individual. Rebirth, awakening or enlightenment begins when I detach myself, understanding vanity, from the world and from the part of me that belongs to it. It is a detachment that takes place in the sign of elevation and communion with the living totality. This fate is visible in a character from classical mythology: Atlas, lonely and intrepid, bears the gravity of the globe but holds the sky in his hands. Epictetus: The wise man saves his life the moment he loses it. … Live as if you did not exist.

Gospel according to Luke: If anyone wants to come behind me, he must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. Because whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Exodus: You saw how I raised each one of you on eagle wings and made you come to me. Nietzsche: You look up when looking for elevation and I look down because I am elevated. Whoever climbs to the top of the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies. … You have to look away from yourself to see far. So rise above you, higher and higher, until even your stars are below. … Take fly: around, forwards, backwards. Are not words made for those who are heavy? Do not the words lie for those who are light? Sing, do not speak anymore.

Chapter 4

Mind and Brain according to the History of Philosophy

Atlas and the Globe: The Summits of Philosophy Giuseppe Roncoroni Copyright © 2023 Jenny Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. ISBN 978-981-4968-68-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-43294-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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The relationship that exists between the mind and the brain will focus on two questions: (A) Does the mind have the same law as the brain? (B) Is the consciousness produced by the brain?

(A) Does the mind have the same law as the brain?

This is the most important question when studying the brain experimentally. Who answers NO is a dualist. Who answers YES is a monist. The dualism was imposed at the beginning of philosophy and survives, for example, in the figure of a neurophysiologist like Eccles. Our thoughts and our choices, according to Eccles, are not related to the brain but follow their own line. This implies that the mind and the brain are interactive and that there is, in particular, a deviation from the normal laws of the brain when we decide to move our body. The experiments are not in favour of dualism because they refute both the autonomy of the mind from the brain and the action of the mind on the brain. There is no autonomy of the mind if it is true that refined techniques, such as positron emission tomography or magnetic resonance imaging, confirm that there is a close correspondence between the activities of the mind and the brain. And there is no action of the mind because it is noticed with ever more precise means that in the brain, as in every place of nature, coherent and constant laws are in force. Everything leads us to believe, by now, that there is monism between the mind and the brain.

(B) Is the consciousness produced by the brain?

The relationship between consciousness and nature is pertinent to philosophy. Whoever answers YES or NO to the question engages in a world view that will have consequences for brain research. Who answers YES: The common prejudice is that nature exists regardless of consciousness or, in other words, that beyond observation there is matter. In the physiology of the brain, if this is true, there must be the cause of conscious life. The most recent thesis is by Crick: conscious life arises when the activity of neurons synchronizes around the frequency of 40 hertz. Who answers NO: The supporters of the NO start from the criticism of the YES. How is it possible for the brain to produce something, so different from itself, as is conscious life? And why

Mind and Brain according to the History of Philosophy

should it do this if we know that the course of the brain does not change? Supporters of the NO disagree in the conclusion. There are those who, with Eccles, deduce the presence of the soul and its creation by God. Instead this treatise deepens the perspective, called empiricist, according to which consciousness is a condition of the world. Together with Jung, I present empiricism as an achievement of modern philosophy and physics to the point of clarifying its influence on the relationship between the mind and the brain.

SUMMARY

  INTRODUCTION 1. DEFINITION OF MIND AND BRAIN

 THE PATH TOWARDS MONISM 2. MONISM AND DUALISM 3. THE HISTORICAL BASE

4. CRITICISM OF THE DUALISM OF ECCLES 5. OTHER DATA IN FAVOUR OF MONISM

6. MONISM THEORIES: EPIPHENOMENISM AND THEORY OF IDENTITY 7. HOLISM AGAINST REDUCTIONISM ACCORDING TO SPERRY AND THE GESTALT

 A SPECIFIC THEME: THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS 8. DISCUSSION OF A QUESTION: IS THE WORLD OF CONSCIOUSNESS BORN FROM MATTER? HOW IS IT POSSIBLE AND FOR WHAT PURPOSE?

9. CONSCIOUSNESS IS BORN FROM MATTER: CRICK’S HYPOTHESIS AND THE OBJECTIONS

10. CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT BORN FROM MATTER: THIS EVENTUALITY IS EXAMINED IN REFERENCE TO ECCLES

 EMPIRICISM AND ITS SOLUTION 11. WHAT IS EMPIRICISM?

12. THE EMPIRICIST SOLUTION: A HOLISTIC MONISM IN WHICH CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT BORN FROM MATTER 13. THE EMPIRICIST SOLUTION IN JUNG’S WORDS

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Introduction 1. Definition of Mind and Brain Definition of mind The dictionary, any one, defines the mind as “the complex of the intellectual and spiritual contents of the person”. Abbagnano’s dictionary [1971 Dizionario di Filosofia] clarifies the connection with consciousness. Consciousness indicates “the awareness that man has of his states, such as perceptions and feelings, so we say that a man is conscious when he is not asleep or passed out”. The mind refers to the phenomena of consciousness and, on the other hand, is completed with the unconscious. The unconscious indicates “the same processes when they are not accompanied by awareness”.

Definition of brain

The brain, according to the dictionary, is “the mass of nervous tissue, enclosed in the skull, which is the seat of intellectual, sensory and motor functions”. This definition confuses structure and function. The brain, speaking of anatomy, identifies an area of the nervous system where the hemispheres are in the foreground. Here, however, the functional aspect of the definition is interesting: by brain we mean the place of the body that communicates directly with the mind. What is the seat in comparison to the brain we talk about in anatomy? Does it shrink in areas of the cortex or involve the subcortical centres? This is part of the query that poses the real problem: what is the relationship between the mind and the brain?

Relationship between mind and brain: The problem and the solution

We communicate with the body and, by definition, with the brain. Perception and voluntary action prove this: I know the body and the environment and, when I want, I guide the body. It is strange that there is a relationship between thoughts and cells. Yet there is. Here lies the problem. What kind of relationship is it? Do cells and thoughts follow different laws, which sometimes interfere,

The Path Towards Monism

or do they respect a single law? And, if so, how much is a thought worth? There is more. The relationship touches the origin of thoughts. Are they generated by cells? How can this happen and for what purpose? These questions are at the core of my treatise. I will recall the most accepted answers by noting the changes in the definition of the mind and in the boundary assigned to the brain. Finally I will develop a solution that states this: the mind follows the law of the brain but does not arise from the brain or anything else.

The Path towards Monism

2. Monism and Dualism Three meanings of monism and dualism The name monism and dualism, when it comes to the mind and the brain, is shrouded in confusion because it applies in three manners. There is monism and dualism of substance: are the brain and the mind supported by one substance or by a substance for each one? There is monism and dualism of the law: are the brain and the mind guided by one law or by a law for each one? There is monism and dualism of quality: are the brain and the mind a unique thing or are they different?

Monism and dualism of substance

Abbagnano writes that “philosophers who admit only one kind of substance are called monists”. Substances are matter and the soul. The monist wants matter or the soul while the dualist wants both. The soul, for Abbagnano, is “the principle of life and spiritual activities when it constitutes an entity in itself or substance”. Matter, in a similar way, represents the world of nature understood as substance. Then Abbagnano frames monism in a historical key: “Most thinkers are convinced that there is a single substance at the origin of physical and mental phenomena. But what substance are we talking about? There are those like Hobbes who claim it is matter and there are those like Berkeley who claim it is the soul. There are lastly those who rely on a neutral substance and so Spinoza, for example, sees nature and thought as attributes of God”.

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Monism and dualism of the law (primary meaning) In my treatise I will refer, unless otherwise specified, to this meaning of monism and dualism. It is the habitual acceptation and the only verifiable on an experimental level. A premise is needed: it is evident to anyone that nature and the brain are governed by a law. A dualist, therefore, is one who believes that the law of the mind is different from the law of nature. I add that the dualism of the law is related to the dualism of the substance, since each law tends towards a substance, but there is also someone who says that the mind is a function of matter despite detaining its own law.

Monism of quality

The monism of quality presupposes the monism of matter its law positing moreover the formula of identity: nothing the brain exists and the mind is an aspect of it. This monism appear solely in the theory of the identity between the brain the mind.

and but will and

3. The Historical Base

The tradition of Aristotle: The interaction between matter and soul Tradition suggests that the body and the mind have a substance for each, matter and the soul respectively, and that these substances are able to communicate. I look at an object: the image is received by the body and passes to the soul. I move my hand: the command starts from the soul and passes to the body and the hand. This is interactionism. The incipit is from Aristotle [De anima]: “the soul is joined to a body and precisely because of this commonality the soul acts and the body undergoes, the soul moves and the body is moved”.

Descartes and Leibniz: The crisis of interactionism and the advent of monism

The model of interacting substances enters a crisis in more recent times. The will of the soul should modify the course of matter, the matter of the brain, and instead it turns out that

The Path Towards Monism

the laws of physics always apply. When I perform a gesture, according to Descartes [1647 Meditations on First Philosophy], I do not create movement but I divert the movement that exists in the body. Leibniz [1695 New System of Nature] corrects a Descartes distraction by replacing the quantity of motion (mv) with kinetic energy ( 12 mv2). Then he adds that its direction is also immutable and, in so doing, anticipates the conservation principle which will be extended to other forms of energy. Leibniz concludes that interactionism is compromised. He does not question the autonomy of the soul but eliminates the interaction with the expedient of parallelism and pre-established harmony by virtue of which the laws of matter and of the soul are different but God has regulated them to proceed, when they meet, as if there were the interaction that is not there. The history of philosophy, as a whole, attests a transition from dualism to monism which is simplified like this: Aristotle and Descartes are for the typical dualism which is interactionism, Leibniz devises a variant of dualism and the successors tend to be monists. The transition is punctuated by the following quotes. Abbagnano: For Descartes there is a “res extensa”, the physical world, and a “res cogitans”, that is, thought. The “res extensa” is a mechanical clock whose laws man does not escape except in the voluntary movement that is triggered by the “res cogitans”. The structure of the interaction is the pineal gland from which the fluids reach the muscles and determine their movement.

Leibniz [1714 Monadology]: Descartes recognized that souls cannot impart any force to bodies because there is always the same quantity of force in matter. Nevertheless he was of opinion that the soul could change the direction of bodies. But that is because in his time it was not known that there is a law of nature which affirms also the conservation of the same total direction in matter. Descartes otherwise would have come upon my system of pre-established harmony according to which bodies act as if (to suppose the impossible) there were no souls, and souls act as if there were no bodies, and both acts as if each influenced the other. Hume [1748 An Inquiry concerning Human Understanding]: Is there any principle in all nature more mysterious than the union of soul with body by which a supposed spiritual substance acquires such

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an influence over a material one that the most refined thought is able to actuate the grossest matter? Were we empowered, by a secret wish, to remove mountains, or control the planets in their orbit, this extensive authority would not be more extraordinary, nor more beyond our comprehension. Voltaire [1740 The Metaphysics of Newton]: If a man could direct his will, in his own way, would he not subvert the laws of nature? By what privilege would a man not respect the rules to which the stars, plants and animals are subject?

4. Criticism of the Dualism of Eccles The conscious mind as an entity interacting with nature Here I refer to the fascinating books of Eccles as Facing Reality: Philosophical Adventures by a Brain Scientist [1970], The Human Mystery [1979] and How the Self Controls Its Brain [1993]. The mind, for Eccles, is a conscious entity and is placed above nature. A part of the brain, which is called associative, comes into contact with the mind as soon as it reaches a certain industriousness. The mind plays the double role of the receptor and the actor. It is active when it guides the body but also when it seeks information.

The structure of the cortical module and its significance for Eccles

There are units in the cortex of the brain, about four million, which are called modules. The relationship with the mind occurs, for Eccles, in a variable minority of modules of the associative brain. Each module, in turn, is made up of columns of cells. There is a detail: the pyramidal cells, on which the function of the module depends, have dendrites that occupy the surface layer and that are subject to powerful synapses. This persuades Eccles to delimit the action of the mind in the vicinity of those dendrites.

The action of the mind and the closure of nature: The subterfuge of Eccles

Eccles deals with the problem that has historically challenged interactionism: in the brain, it seems, the laws of physics apply.

The Path Towards Monism

It means that the impulses with which the mind influences the brain, more than ever in intentional acts, are not allowed. Eccles, to overcome the closure, starts from the fact that quantum theory identifies a threshold below which events are defined in the form of probability. The action of the mind consists in redistributing an amount of energy, which does not vary, in the area of indeterminacy. One possibility is that the mind changes the probability of exocytosis in the synapses touching the dendrites of the pyramidal cells.

Objections to Eccles about the action of the mind

The first objections to Eccles concern the mode in which space is traced for the action of the mind on the brain. The action is dispersed in the slightest chinks to elude the control of the devices. Anyhow the intrusion of the mind is no less forced even though it is located in the area of quantum indeterminacy. Another, less practical, criticism of interaction remains valid: it would be strange for an impalpable entity to stimulate or be stimulated by bodies. Overall the research criterion according to which the brain obeys physiological laws has not yet encountered an exception and it is hardly credible that the spirit is caught acting upon the brain.

Objections to Eccles about dualism

There are objections to Eccles that do not concern interaction but dualism in general. Here are a few examples. Suppose there is a purely mental domain. When does it appear along the evolution of the species? And when does it appear in the course of each individual’s growth? Why, if it is disconnected from nature, are its characteristics constant? And how does it pass on those characteristics as an inheritance if not through a natural way?

The metaphysics of Eccles

Eccles’ dualism qualifies to be radical. The certainty that the mind is a self-existing entity continually transpires in his conception and leads him on the classical path of philosophy until the result that, for now, I merely mention: the mind is supported by the soul and, that is, a substance that it is autonomous with respect to

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matter and is created directly by God. Many of the antipathies aroused by Eccles’ conception depend on such an unscientific background.

5. Other Data in Favour of Monism

Sperry’s procedure: Doubts about the mind as a conscious unit Sperry [1974 Lateral Specialization in the Surgically Separated Hemispheres], in some patients, separates the hemispheres of the brain by cutting the corpus callosum. It happens that each of the hemispheres acquires a reactivity that does not involve the other. The half indicated as dominant belongs to the speaking subject, and is usually the left, while the other half gives rise to manifestations that the subject does not know. Sperry states that the mind divides coincidentally with each hemisphere. Only one hemisphere comprises the centre of language but, in various manner, also the other hemisphere reveals the mind and perhaps consciousness. The interpretation divides Eccles from other researchers. Eccles does not renounce the fact that the mind is a conscious unit. He concludes that the mind is associated with the dominant hemisphere, in particular with its linguistic and ideational areas, and that the lesser hemisphere is indirectly conjoined through the corpus callosum.

Data that discredits the action of the mind on the brain

The cards most in favour of monism are those that question the action of the mind on the brain. I have already discussed the salient datum: increasingly sophisticated means of investigation confirm that there is no deviation of the laws of the brain when a gesture is performed. There are, then, other discoveries on the act of will that give reason to monism. In particular I cite here two experiments which suggest that voluntariness, intentionality, is not, as Eccles would like, the signal of an acting mind. Bickford [1960 Electrographic and Behavioural Effects Related to Depth Stimulation in Human Patients] manages to induce a complex gesture, with the artifice of the electrodes, and at the same time arouses the impression of intentionality of the gesture. Libet

The Path Towards Monism

[1973 Electrical Stimulation of Cortex in Human Subjects and Conscious Memory Aspects] demonstrates that the premotor potential, the activity of the frontal lobe that precedes the start of the gesture and seems to be the equivalent of the decision to perform it, appears before the intention is aware. Especially Libet’s experiment is the target of controversy and alternative explanations by researchers.

The correspondence between brain and mind according to dualists and according to monists

To assert that there is a complete correspondence between the activities of the brain and the mind is equivalent to declaring oneself monist because the autonomous activity of the mind is precluded. Therefore Eccles only admits that the interaction gives rise to some degree of correspondence. But now this is difficult to believe. Neuropsychology studies are inspired by correspondence and are summarized with simplicity and perspicacity by Lurija [1973 The Working Brain]. Besides we have techniques that verify synchrony by visualizing the progress of the brain through the bloodstream: they are positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

6. Monism Theories: Epiphenomenism and Theory of Identity What is epiphenomenalism?

Campbell [1970 Body and Mind] describes epiphenomenalism as follows: “Provided that neurophysiology is in principle complete, the only properties of the brain relevant to their role in causing behaviour will be physicochemical ones. Suffering a burn, tasting the sweetness of sugar, or smelling the piquancy of cloves are processes in which experience of the quality in question is inoperative in behaviour. So epiphenomenalism, in order to maintain completeness in the physical explanations of human action, must argue that, contrary to common belief, it is not the hurtfulness of pain which causes me to shun it nor the sweet taste of sugar which drives me to seek it.”

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The devaluation of the mind and its paradoxes Campbell argues that the brain operates on purely physical principles and that the mind is alien to causal chain. Then the will to act and consistency in thinking are a mirage. Do I want to move my hand? It moves by virtue of forces that casually coincide with my command. Am I thinking? That reasoning does not proceed by connections, as I was convinced, but simply expresses the vicissitudes of neurons. Campbell does not conceal the evidence that epiphenomenalism “is a complicated and implausible position and was adopted because it is the only one that recognizes the physical explanations of what happens in the physical world as complete”.

Neglect the ability to act and the ability to think: What does it entail?

Many truths, both intuitive and scientific, depend on the power to act. Assume our choices do not affect conduct. Why are there pain and pleasure, for example, that push us to behave according to biological convenience? This enigma concerns all monisms and will be deepened in section 8. Many truths, no less than with the faculty of acting, are connected with the faculty of thinking. Suppose our meditations are a reflection of physical processes. Once again there is a crucial interrogative: how can you, Campbell, invite us to trust the theory you propose? Eccles takes up this note by Popper and defines it “reductio ad absurdum”: “Any theory, according to determinism, is held because of a certain physical structure of the holder (perhaps of his brain). Purely physical conditions make us say or accept whatever we say or accept. Accordingly we are deceiving ourselves whenever we believe that there are such things as arguments or reasons which make us accept determinism. So it is itself a theory that cannot be hold.”

Epiphenomenalism and identity theory

Campbell points out that the mind is not limited to cerebral connotations. This distinguishes epiphenomenalism from the theory called identity theory or materialism of the central state. A laboratory man, Giacomo Gava [1983 Il problema mente-cervello], specifies the elements expressed respectively with the words of

The Path Towards Monism

materialism and central state identity. The first element: matter and only matter exists. The second element: the mind is identical to the brain. Thus spoke Gava: “Everything in the universe is material. Central state identity, the most modern version of materialism, concludes that mental states are brain processes and, therefore, minds are brains.”

The wonders of identity theory

Gava illustrates the wonders of theory with a style and breadth of views that make up, in turn, a wonderland: “[a] It eliminates the difficulties of the interaction between mental and physical events. [b] It offers a philosophical justification of the mind-brain problem. [c] It addresses all sciences in a collaborative perspective [inseparability of philosophy and science]. [d] It constitutes a methodological tool that the neuroscientist constantly applies in his laboratory. Eccles and Sperry are no exception even if they deny it in the interpretation of the data. Let’s not forget that science is materialistic and lay. Man is an electro-chemical being. [e] It contains the solution of numerous problems: personal identity, immortality, et cetera.”

Criticism of the notion of identity: The identity must be real

Campbell, like us, asks: “in what sense can it be said that a mental state, such as pain caused by a burn, is identical to a brain state?” Identity does not accord with the normal definitions of the mind and the brain. Does it depend on the change of definitions or on the theory? Let us notice, following Campbell, the formulation of identity: the mind is an internal cause of behaviour; however behaviour is explained in the modes of nature; hence the mind as a cause is one with the brain. So far there is nothing but a generic monism and an operational definition of the mind. The theory becomes such when it enriches the mind with its original qualities and continues, although it seems different, to confuse it with the brain. The identity between the mind and the brain must be real. Gava affirms that the identity is “factual and not logical” but this caution is not allowed. He must affirm, for consistency, that pain is an aspect of neurons and nothing more.

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Criticism of the notion of identity: The link between identity and matter The notion of identity is linked to materialism and, now, we understand why: there is no identity if there is no matter. I will be more precise. No one can replace a thought with a neuron as long as the neuron is what we know. However an old habit has it that there is matter or, in other words, that the neuron we know is not the real neuron but is the image of a neuron placed out of knowledge. This is the way to identity. What are neurons? Who can rule out that pain, for example, is an aspect of it? Couldn’t the difference between neurons and thoughts disappear if we knew what matter is like? Many authors emphasize that the “lay science”, of which Gava speaks, rests on faith in matter. Everything we know becomes a reflection of something we do not know. I make a note. This dogma, classifying matter as an unknown, has always served to circumvent a plurality of problems. It will be resumed in section 8 together with the hypothesis that conscious life originates from matter. I will prefer, here and there, the canon of science to flight into fantasy.

Criticism of the notion of identity: An illogical move

Identifying the mind with the brain is a weak move in any case. Opponents remark a diversity that cannot be erased even by interpreting matter as an unknown. Campbell writes: “Having a burned finger does not just mean encoding this information and taking action to soothe the burn but it also means suffering from pain. A pain may be strong or faint, continuous or intermittent, stinging or stabbing, but cannot be said to be three inches long or have a high voltage. Pains and brain states come from different categories: to confuse categories is to talk nonsense and nonsense cannot be true.”

Other objections to identity theory

To hazard that the mind is equal to the brain brings advantages or, rather, avoids most of the objections encountered by epiphenomenalism. There remains the “reductio ad absurdum” advanced by Eccles and Popper: any reasoning that discredits reason is a reasoning that turns against the one who enounces it.

The Path Towards Monism

7. Holism against Reductionism according to Sperry and the Gestalt Some definitions from the dictionary of philosophy Psychophysical materialism and epiphenomenalism: “Psychophysical materialism consists in affirming the causal dependence of spiritual activity on matter, that is, on the organism or the brain. This thesis comes in several forms. One of these forms is the conception of man-machine. ... A more attenuated form of the same doctrine, or a more gentlemanly form if you prefer, is that according to which consciousness is the epiphenomenon of nervous processes: it is the product of them but it does not react any more than the shadow reacts on the object that produces it.” Reductionism and Mechanism: “Reductionism is the explanation that considers certain orders of phenomena as subject to the laws, better established or more precise, of another order of phenomena. An example is that organic phenomena are commanded by physicochemical phenomena and the latter are commanded by mechanical phenomena. … Mechanism consists in the reductionist thesis according to which every phenomenon of nature must be explained by the simple laws of mechanics. Historically it converges in the belief that at the origin there would be the properties of indivisible particles of matter which are called atoms.” Emergence and Holism: “The noun “emergence” or “emergent”, used by the Anglo-Saxons, indicates the creative character of evolution and that is its lack of necessity. … Holism is a variant of the doctrine of emergent evolution. It overturns the mechanistic premise and believes that biological phenomena are not dependent on physicochemical ones but the latter on the former.”

Nature as usually understood: Reductionist or mechanistic

The terms of reductionism and mechanism have a more precise meaning, in a philosophical sense, than the meaning presented by Abbagnano’s dictionary. But in this context, in common usage, they can be considered as synonyms: reducing to simplicity is equivalent to conferring a mechanical profile. The reductionist and the mechanist presume that there are particles of matter

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and that the law of nature derives from their properties. This is the vision of nature that unites the authors I have met so far.

Nature as understood by Gestalt theory and by Sperry: Holistic or emergent

Gestalt theory and Sperry, inspired by remote voices, think that nature is dynamic and creative. Its law does not descend from the elements in play and, that is, the law oversees the elements rather than the other way around. Holistic and emergent are qualifications that underline the unity and novelty of a law in comparison to the law of the parties: holistic because it belongs to the complex and emergent because it emerges as a novelty. Holistic and emergent are the reverse, in the literal sense, of reductionist and mechanist.

Reductionism according to Somenzi and holism according to Sperry

Here the contrast between reductionism and holism is summarized in reference to the mind and the brain. A reductionist says: the rules of a molecule derive from the properties of its constituents and so, gradually, the rules of the brain are explained. The holist replies: then the rules of the brain would be constituted by the properties not of cells, not of molecules, not of so-called atoms, not of nucleons and electrons, but of the smallest particles that are progressively detected. It is not credible. Each law, according to holism, includes the laws of the constituents and adds something that is suggested by their relationships. I transcribe the sentences of Somenzi and Sperry where they expose, against each other, the reasons for reductionism and holism. Somenzi [1978 Symposium on Mind and Brain with Montalcini, Rizzolatti, Umiltà]: A reductionist never doubts that the properties of the whole are a consequence of the properties of the parts. A holist suspects that the whole is irreducible to the sum of the parts only because the parts are viewed in a maimed way. The classic example is water: can I trace water back to the properties of hydrogen and oxygen? It is obvious that if I consider the properties of their interaction, in the set of properties of hydrogen and oxygen, I derive

The Path Towards Monism

the properties of water. If I consider hydrogen alone and oxygen alone, instead, I am amazed at the emerging properties of water since they do not seem reducible to the properties of the components. Likewise I am not surprised that the cerebral cortex has its own properties when I take into account the interactions that can occur between ten billion neurons. Sperry [1990 Turnabout on Consciousness: New Paradigm for Causation]: We have been taught that the atoms, which compose it, determine the properties and behaviour of a molecule in chemical reactions. Since the 1970s, the concept of top-down causality constitutes the essence of the mentalistic paradigm and contrasts with the bottom-up causality which is typical of traditional materialism. Evolution complicates the universe by adding new phenomena governed by new scientific principles. The old and simple laws are not excluded from the process of composing compounds but are absorbed and overwhelmed by the emergence of higher laws.

The emergent law of the brain corresponds to the unpredictable What is the law that emerges in the brain? The answer is easy. What emerges, in general terms, coincides with what is not predictable starting from the knowledge of the simplest aggregates. I refer to the atom. Suppose I know how much experiments can reveal about the dynamics of atoms. Now I face the figure of the brain. Can I predict how it will work? Certainly not. I am missing something that is learned only through experimentation and that collimates with the emergent law of the brain with respect to atoms. A more convenient reference is the neuron. The emergent law, in this case, corresponds to what is missing to reconstruct the dynamics of the brain starting from the knowledge of the single neuron.

The emergent law of the brain relating to the mind in the Gestalt and Sperry hypotheses

Having defined the emergent law of the brain is a premise that separates who is holist from who is reductionist. Another question, however, is important for both of them. What is the law

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of the brain that is related to the mind? The holist puts this law at the top but must understand what it is. Gestalt psychologists speculated that these were electric fields in the cerebral cortex. Sperry showed that electric fields, if they exist, are not effective and replaced them by exchanging information between the sites of the brain.

The monism of the Gestalt and the interactionism of Sperry

Holism is a background that does not engage with monism or dualism. It connects the mind with a law that emerges in the brain but does not specify the type of relationship. Monism will pretend that the mind is associated with the law of the brain. Gestalt is the example. Dualism, on the other side, will require the mind to emerge in turn from the law of the brain. Then the mind detaches itself and acquires, as always happens between the whole and the parts, a reciprocal influence with the nerve base. Those who are dualists and interactionists find the strangeness of an evanescent factor that deviates the law of the brain. Yet Sperry makes this choice: “The mind is to the brain as an emergent property is to the infrastructure. These emergent forces, placed at the apex, include perceptive, cognitive, reasoning skills. Their effects in the brain are just as if not more powerful than the underlying chemical forces.”

The merit of holistic monism: Protect the mind without resorting to dualism

The history of the brain and the mind centres on the contest between dualism and reductionist monism. The strength of each lies in the criticism that one addresses to the other. Reductionist monism criticizes dualism precisely by denying that the mind has a law of its own. Dualism prevents reductionism from extending to the mind and nullifying its values. In summary: there are two data that collide and require to live together in the framework of a monism free from reductionism. Holism, in the case of the Gestalt, is the key to the dilemma. The activity of the brain no longer contrasts with the activity of the mind but can be the mirror of thinking and wanting. The Gestalt shares Sperry’s opinion on freedom: “Understanding will and freedom

A Specific Theme: The Origin of Consciousness

as the negation of any rule would mean that behaviour would be a whim and chaos without sense. What we expect from freedom is a form of control that allows us to determine our actions in accordance with judgments, expectations, desires and other mental attitudes.”

A Specific Theme: The Origin of Consciousness

8. Discussion of a Question: Is the World of Consciousness Born from Matter? How Is It Possible and for What Purpose? Consciousness and its world Hinsie [1970 Psychiatric Dictionary] points out that “consciousness is not a distinct function, as atomistic psychology would have it, but it is a basic trait of mental processes”. This implies that consciousness cannot be isolated from conscious contents. Consciousness is one with the world of consciousness. A lover of metaphor would say that it is not a single coin but is the casket of our wealth.

The enigma of du Bois Reymond: How is it possible that consciousness derives from matter?

Du Bois Reymond [1881 Limits of Our Knowledge of Nature] proposes an enigma that returns in today’s discussion. Let’s consider matter. From matter, at some point in time, consciousness must arise. Consciousness is the name of a transmutation: a discharge of neurons is converted into seeing, hearing, thinking. We pass from the palpability of cells to the intimacy of feelings. We pass into a world of another type. It is not relevant that it has its own law or that it has it in communion with matter. The enigma holds for the dualist and for the monist. I report lastly du Bois Reymond’s exposition: “At a point in the evolution of life on Earth, which we are not interested in specifying, something new appears. The thread of understanding is broken and our knowledge of nature reaches an abyss that no bridge and no

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wing can overcome. This limit is consciousness. What conceivable connection exists between movements of atoms in my brain on the one hand and, on the other hand, such primordial and undeniable facts as these: I feel pain or pleasure, I taste something sweet, or smell a rose, or hear an organ, or see something red? It is incomprehensible, and always will be, that conscious life takes shape from the combination of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen. Ignoramus et ignorabimus.”

Sperry exposes a second enigma for monists: For what purpose does consciousness arise if it cannot change the course of matter?

Sperry sustains his dualism with these words: “subjective awareness cannot have emerged in the evolution of the nervous system except for a utility, that is, by virtue of its causal role”. The argument embroils every monism. Why does the world of consciousness exist? In dualism it enriches behaviour and, conversely, in monism it is an inert correlate of the brain. Why then does matter request it? An example: why are there pain and pleasure, which push us to preserve and reproduce, if the choices do not influence our actions?

Voltaire circumvents the enigma of du Bois Reymond by interpreting matter as unknown

Voltaire [1734 Traité de métaphysique – 1738 Letters on the English: Locke], as a spokesman for Locke and Newton, writes: I know nothing of matter and I cannot exclude that it is capable of something. This is precisely the modality, inaugurated by Locke, of venturing that in matter there is also the property of thinking. The axiom “matter can think” is the reverse of du Bois Reymond’s opinion and, therefore, branches off into dualism or monism. Locke, Newton and Voltaire are not monists: they judge it absurd that ignorance about matter extends to the point of accepting the theory of identity, that is, to the point of affirming that matter as such thinks. Now I transcribe Voltaire’s notes regarding these concepts: “We need to know something in depth to decide what it

A Specific Theme: The Origin of Consciousness

is capable of doing. We, of matter, know nothing. In a piece of gold we perceive the extension, the ductility, the yellow colour and so on. But the substance, the being in which all this is inherent, we know no more than we know how the inhabitants of Saturn are made. This is why Newton like Locke disapproves of those who proclaim that God could not bestow the gift of thought on an extended being. This is the conclusion: matter can think. … It is obviously not a question of knowing whether matter itself thinks. Only the ancients, not imagining anything beyond matter, considered the ideas of our intellect as similar to the imprint of the seal on the wax. This opinion was a gross instinct rather than a reasoning. The philosophers who then wanted to prove that thought is nothing but matter was much more wrong because, while ordinary people deceived themselves without reasoning, they were wrong by reason of their principles.”

The monist also solves the second enigma if he identifies the mind with the unknown

Monism confronts du Bois Reymond’s enigma and Sperry’s enigma. There is no other solution than to appeal to the relativity of materialism and treat matter as if it were an unknown. A monist, like a dualist, listening to du Bois Reymond can only reply that the unknown is capable of thinking. Sperry’s riddle remains: why does that ability appear if it is ineffective? There is no way out if we do not eliminate, by identifying the mind with the unknown, the object to which du Bois Reymond and Sperry refer: there is nothing but matter and, therefore, there is nothing that is mysterious or useless.

Matter as unknown is not allowed by science

Considering matter and its capabilities as an unknown allows, with ease, to explain the whole reality. Unfortunately every figure consecrated as unfathomable and omnipotent, whether called Matter or God, is to be banished. Abbagnano reminds us that “discourse, as a dogma, loses all meaning and all scientific interest”.

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9. Consciousness Is Born from Matter: Crick’s Hypothesis and the Objections The search for a neurophysiological cause of consciousness in the case of Benedetti Benedetti [1969 Neuropsicologia] is a typical case for recognizing the usual method of investigation. The prelude is that there is an external reality, matter, and that there lies the source of conscious life. It matters little whether the physiologist is a monist, dualist, reductionist or holist. The procedure is the same: he observes the work of the brain when the subject is not conscious, then observes it when the subject is conscious, and finally looks for a novelty that can justify consciousness. Benedetti wonders what the novelty might be and suggests that it is the activity of apposite neurons. All this is described in the following excerpts: “The philosophy behind this writing can be defined as neo-positivist. From positivism it receives the concept of a reality in its own right which must be re-evaluated after the criticism exercised by Kant onwards. Eccles’ claim that consciousness is not part of the chain of events grasped by the neurophysiologist, remains true as long as these events are describable regardless of whether or not they are accompanied by consciousness, but the situation would change if we found a mechanism at work only when there is consciousness. Today we think that there may be a system of highly specific neurons in processing chemical phenomena connected with consciousness.”

The neurophysiological cause of consciousness according to Crick

What mechanism extracts conscious life from matter? Is it the electric fields of the Gestalt? Sperry’s exchange of information? Or a bundle of neurons predicted by Benedetti? These are outdated hypotheses. Today’s paradigm stands on the proposal of Crick and Kock [1992 The Problem of Consciousness] according to which the oscillation at 40 hertz is decisive: “The discharge between neurons in the visual cortex of the cat is associated with a frequency between 35 and 75 hertz which is called the 40 hertz oscillation. This synchronized and rhythmic discharge can be the

A Specific Theme: The Origin of Consciousness

correlative of consciousness and can serve to bring together the activities concerning the same object in different cortical areas.”

Bieri applies du Bois Reymond’s enigma to Crick

Bieri [1992 Brain and Consciousness] is one of the researchers who does not believe in the neurophysiologic cause of consciousness. Here he addresses du Bois Reymond’s objection to Crick and invites us to find a new perspective: “Du Bois Reymond argues that consciousness cannot be explained through its material conditions. Crick’s 40 hertz oscillation, for example, cannot elicit something as different and global as our inner life is. Those like Crick delude themselves into escaping the objection by treating the brain as a black box whose internal structure is unknown. Du Bois Reymond believes that consciousness is destined to remain misunderstood. Sometimes the hypothesis of a cognitive limit seems right to me because for this puzzle we have no idea how it can be a solution. However, if I think about it thoroughly, I do not feel satisfied and I retain that we need to search for new models and, above all, new insights into the fount of error.”

Chalmers applies Sperry’s enigma to Crick

Crick is a monist and therefore meets Sperry’s objection. He states that the 40 hertz oscillation serves to link the activity of the cortical areas. The uselessness of consciousness masks itself with the usefulness of the oscillation, in this way, but it is clear that the oscillation could exist without giving rise to consciousness. The criticism is intact and Chalmers [1995 The Puzzle of Conscious Experience] repeats it: “Why are the physical processes accompanied by conscious experience? Could not an unconscious automaton have performed the same tasks just as well? These are questions that we would like a theory of consciousness to answer. This question involves the “hard problem” of consciousness. … Consider the hypothesis that consciousness may arise from certain oscillations in the cerebral cortex which become synchronized as neurons fire 40 times per second. Crick and Koch believe the phenomenon might explain how different attributes of a single perceived object (its colour and shape for example), which are

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processed in different parts of the brain, are merged into a coherent whole. But why should synchronized oscillations give rise to a visual experience, no matter how much integration is taking place? About the ‘hard problem’ the theory has nothing to offer. Indeed Crick and Koch are agnostic about whether the hard problem can be solved by science at all. … The existence of consciousness cannot be derived from physical laws. I propose that conscious experience be considered a fundamental feature, irreducible to anything more basic. The idea may seem strange at first but consistency seems to demand it.”

10. Consciousness Is Not Born from Matter: This Eventuality Is Examined in Reference to Eccles The activity of the cells is not a cause but a condition of consciousness

The objections of du Bois Reymond and Sperry, which Bieri and Chalmers have repeated, lead to believe that the activity of cells is unable to create the life of consciousness. Eccles argues that “the events in the material world are necessary but not sufficient causes for conscious experiences and for my consciously experiencing self ”. What does he mean? He means that consciousness manifests itself “only when there is a high level activity in the cortex” but that it constitutes, as Hinsie and Chalmers reiterated, a “basic trait” or “fundamental feature”.

Where does consciousness come from? The God of Eccles

Given that conscious life is not born from matter, the question remains: where does it come from? Eccles, like Descartes or Leibniz, goes back to the soul and to God specifying that his “belief is in keeping with the religious concept of the soul and with its special creation by God”.

Eccles mentions another premise: Matter does not exist

Eccles declares himself “a naïve realist” and can do nothing else, to avoid that consciousness arises from matter, than to put the “deus ex machina” between one and the other. This, however, is not the only way that the history of thought offers. After

Empiricism and Its Solution

Leibniz the scenery is reversed: the passage from matter to consciousness vanishes because matter is revoked. Here, then, we do not live in a world of matter but we live in a world of consciousness. Eccles, while not agreeing, approaches with sympathy also citing Wigner and Schopenhauer.

Wigner [1964 Two Kinds of Reality]: There are two kinds of reality of existence: the existence of my consciousness and the existence of everything else. This latter reality is not absolute but only relative. Excepting the content of my consciousness, everything is a construct… Schopenhauer [1818 The World as Will and Representation]: Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.

Empiricism and Its Solution 11. What Is Empiricism? The knot of the world The relationship between the brain and the mind, for Schopenhauer, is “the knot of the world”. We need suitable tools to untie the knot. Campbell reminds us: “The study of the mindbody problem teaches us how different issues come to be linked together in philosophy. When we see their connection with the mind-body problem we can understand why some men really care about such questions as ‘what is a cause? what is a substance? what is a disposition?’ which at first sight are academic, dusty and pathologically irrelevant to human concerns.”

Conceptual foundations according to the dictionary of philosophy

I still leaf through Abbagnano’s dictionary to check the state of health of the notions that are at the forefront of philosophical and scientific research. What matters most is to understand, about the point of view that takes the name of empiricism, how it is and why it is strong.

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Empiricism: “It is the philosophical approach that appeals to experience as a criterion of truth denying any reality that is not somehow attested and controlled. This is the trait that Hegel recognized as a merit of empiricism: what is true, what man wants to admit in his knowledge, must be present to him.” Substance and Cause: “The concept of substance constitutes the fulcrum of Aristotle’s metaphysics. Aristotle’s doctrine demonstrates the connection between the notions of substance and cause. The cause presents itself as a rational connection for which the cause, often described as a force, is the inevitable reason for its effect. Things do not change when substance, with Kant, is considered a mental category. The empiricist critique of the concepts of substance and cause is based on their extraneousness to experience.” Mechanism: “It consists in the reductionist thesis that all the phenomena of nature must be explained by the simple laws of mechanics. It is characterized by the concepts of material substance and cause and has been interpreted, since ancient times, as atomism: the matter of bodies is made up of elements, precisely atoms, and in the atoms there would be a force that combines them and explains their modalities. The metaphysical materialism and psychophysical materialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have taken up this conception which is marked by determinism, that is, by a causality that invests all of nature. This mentality constituted a creed that science itself, in the twentieth century, contributed to dismantle like any form of reductionism. And so biology, for example, has abandoned the premise that vital phenomena are directed only by physicochemical laws.” Physics: “The new theories of physics favour the notion of probability which ultimately, with quantum mechanics, replaces the notion of cause that seemed indispensable to nineteenthcentury scientists. Thus physics has abandoned the explanatory purposes and also the descriptive purposes. The character of the physics of our time, from a philosophical perspective, is expressed by Heisenberg when he affirms that physics no longer provides us with the image of nature but that of our relationships with nature.”

Empiricism rejects all substance

The empiricist, appealing to conscious experience, thinks simply: what exists is equivalent to what is perceived and known. One

Empiricism and Its Solution

who is not an empiricist thinks there is something underneath and calls it substance. The substance is our idea that has the ambition to become reality. Why do we believe there is a substance? Its purpose is to produce what we perceive and know or, as Aristotle would say, to deduce the existing in actuality from the existing in potentiality. This is how the classic substances, which are the soul and matter, are invented. Empiricism sets them aside and prescribes the principle that will explain the relationship between the mind and the brain: there is no soul and there is no matter. Often the common person does not accept that the world corresponds to the image, that it does not transcend living, that matter does not exist. But we are reminded, here by Schopenhauer and d’Espagnat, that matter is an idol in disgrace. Schopenhauer: The world depends on the first eye that opened… The world, in fact, is nothing but representation and it is absurd to imagine it outside of knowledge. That first being, on the other hand, depends on a chain of events of which it forms a part as a small link. d’Espagnat [1976 Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Mechanics]: Modern physics rejects what is still often referred to as scientific materialism. Natural principles, while biologists are explaining life through them, have undergone an evolution so they cannot be enunciated regardless of the mind that observes.

12. The Empiricist Solution: A Holistic Monism in Which Consciousness Is Not Born from Matter Collocation of empiricism with respect to the meanings of monism and dualism Let’s see how the main conceptions are arranged on the basis of the three meanings of monism and dualism that are listed at the beginning of the treatise. As for substances, empiricism marks “zero” because every substance, be it called matter or soul, is our idea and contravenes the scientific requirement of verifiability. As for the law, empiricism shares the monism of the natural law and does not seek to insinuate, with the soul or without the soul,

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a specific law for the mind. As for qualities, I am sure that even a child realizes that he can touch a candy but he cannot touch happiness. The theory of the identity between the brain and the mind, by disguising such a difference and baptizing itself as monism of physical quality, inflicts a double wrong on science: it admits a substance and then assimilates the mind into a version of matter made more ghostly than ever. In the margin, I repeat that a candy for empiricism is always a candy seen and tasted and thence this dualism, if we still want to use this word, is only a distinction within the mental life.

Two corollaries for mind and brain which lead to a primitive and holistic monism

The renunciation of matter involves two corollaries that serve to interpret the data and shape the empiricist solution: the mind does not arise from the brain but shares the law of the brain. (1) First corollary: Consciousness is primitive. Matter does not produce the conscious world and, therefore, du Bois Reymond must not seek the HOW and Sperry must not seek the WHY. (2) Second corollary: The law of nature is holistic as it appears and, that is, it does not proceed from the properties of matter. Abolishing reductionism gives the possibility to reconcile nature with the mind.

Clarification of the first corollary: The enigmas about the birth of the mind are a consequence of matter

Here I clarify the first corollary. I am looking at nature and I am convinced that it belongs to the general consciousness. Someone instead decides that nature is beyond sight and inscribes his idea with the name of matter. Matter is a falsity and yet one would say that it is harmless: it precedes the objects I know but, not for this reason, does it change their physiognomy. Except that there is a detail. Sooner or later consciousness will have to be introduced as if it were a product of matter in the brain. Du Bois Reymond has an easy time: HOW can the spirit of consciousness emanate from the brain? And Sperry aggravates the enigma for those who are monists: WHY does the brain perform that prodigy if it does not even participate in the conveniences of biology?

Empiricism and Its Solution

Clarification of the second corollary: Reductionism is the finality of matter I clarify the connection between matter and reductionism. The empiricist inquires: why does nature have to cross the line of consciousness? Believers tell him: so that nature is not at the mercy of the observer and it is the public scenery that you have admitted. It is not so. This eventuality, that the world belongs to all of us, is acquired in the frame of consciousness and it makes no sense to go out and guarantee it. Believers go out to assert something more. Here is the motive: matter serves to be reductionists. In the atoms of matter, they will deposit potentialities that do not vary and that dictate the movements of nature. What is the brain now? A collection of dots behind the image. What is brain activity? A collection of the properties of those dots. It is evident that such an apparatus is unable to embrace the mind, as monism would like, and that monism is a disavowal of reductionism.

Analysis of holism

Empiricism leads to a more rational holism than a holism faithful to matter. The negation of matter removes the support for reductionism and opens the field to holism by overcoming any uncertainty which is present in the formulations of Sperry or the Gestalt. The continuation of the section will clarify the dispute between reductionism and holism that was set in section 7 by the personalities of Somenzi and Sperry.

Reductionism or holism: Somenzi criticizes Sperry

Somenzi, criticizing Sperry, wondered where the emergent property came from if not from the properties of the constituents. I rewrite the central concept that is as pertinent to water as it is to the brain: “Can I trace water back to the properties of hydrogen and oxygen? It is obvious that if I consider the properties of their interaction, in the set of properties of hydrogen and oxygen, I derive the properties of water. If I consider hydrogen alone and oxygen alone, instead, I am amazed at the emerging properties

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of water since they do not seem reducible to the properties of the components.”

Reductionism or holism: Sperry is in dire straits

Where does the emergent property come from? Doesn’t it highlight a property of matter that was already present? Sperry must respond that emergent property is not proper to matter or anything else, that emerges from nothing, that did not exist before. And then he must say the same for any property since every property emerges from the simpler ones. There is a complete void in the explanation. Sperry therefore runs into this difficulty: reductionism explains while holism does not explain.

Reductionism or holism: The empiricist is a radical holist

The empiricist tells what appears to his eyes... or almost if he speaks of a molecule. Hydrogen and oxygen move with constant trajectories and, in this sense, they respect their law. Then the law of hydrogen and the law of oxygen combine and become richer within the law of water. What appears to the eyes corresponds to the most radical holism. Each law increases in complexity without adhering to components or compounds. Whether it is hydrogen, oxygen, water or brain, the empiricist recognizes a free and creative momentum.

Reductionism or holism: The empiricist goes to help Sperry

The empiricist advises Sperry to remove the background of matter and properties, causes and forces, which is a residue of reductionism. There are laws and not properties. Conceiving the law as proper to matter is the artifice that dissolves it. Here, then, is the debate with Somenzi. Where does what emerge in a law come from? It comes out of nowhere and all the law comes out of nowhere. The question “from where?” is foreign to what I see. That type of explanation is not required. It was a utopia of Aristotle or Kant. The difference between the one and the other, as we know, is that Kant would like the productive substances of Aristotle, matter and soul, but Kant no longer deludes himself that they really exist and keeps them as a necessity of the intellect.

Empiricism and Its Solution

Reductionism or holism: The empiricist reveals Somenzi’s stratagem Modern physics decrees the end of occult matter and occult properties. Professor Somenzi has a degree in physics and yet, as if nothing had happened, he repeats the old dogma. Somenzi is not satisfied with what he sees. He marvels and wonders: where does it come from? Then the professor gets to work to give himself an answer and recites that series of conditionals that outline the metaphysics of nature: objects would exist out of view and would have atoms that would contain properties that would manage nature. What is seen becomes now the effect of unseen properties of unseen objects. This stratagem minimally shifts the theme of origin and, moreover, is implausible. Notice how Somenzi talks about hydrogen and oxygen. They are containers of properties. The properties of hydrogen direct its movements and will provide a portion of the law of water. The same goes for oxygen. Every law is broken. The law of water declines towards hydrogen and oxygen, then towards protons and electrons, and so on. At the terminus there would be real atoms which, albeit small, contain so many properties to explain even the enterprises of the brain.

13. The Empiricist Solution in Jung’s Words

Jung is the most expert guide to retrace that monism without matter and without reduction that is suggested by empiricism. I will now draw a logical thread before proposing a small anthology of his. Jung writes that he is an empiricist. He writes that the psyche is the only reality and that the error lies in placing ideas such as God, soul or matter outside the psyche. Matter, in particular, is a metaphysical concept and is something unknown which can even be God. Nature is extraneous to materiality and to the reductions that descend from the Aristotelian intellect and, in this way, it aligns itself with the discoveries of physics according to which the world exists as an image and is inextricable by the observer. Psyche and nature are in constant contact, within the experience, as if they were two aspects of the same system. Thus

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Jung stands, at the same time, against dualism and against the reductions of the mind: the brain and the mind are conjoined but the mind has its own feature and must be known on its own. The following passages are taken from: Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype [1938], Preface to the book by Teitaro Suzuki: An Introduction to Zen Buddhism [1939-A], Psychological Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation [1939-B], Theoretical Reflections on the Essence of the Psyche [1954]. [1938]

I am not a philosopher but an empiricist. Empiricism has appeared in a sensational way and its advantages have clearly established themselves. Ideas are no longer an “a priori” but a secondary and derivative element. ... Modern psychology is aware that for every human manifestation there is an “a priori” which is the innate and unconscious structure of the psyche. ... Just the Kantian revolution opens to a rebirth of the Platonic spirit. We no longer inquire “what was seen, heard, thought?” but “who has seen, heard, thought?” ... The materiality of the Greek philosophy of nature, in its connection with the Aristotelian intellect, achieved a victory over Plato. Man was torn from his original unity with the universe and his spirit ceased to be a spark of the Anima Mundi. But every victory carries within it the germ of a defeat. Recently the signs that herald a sure change have multiplied. [1939-A] Matter was considered a tangible reality but it is a metaphysical concept that is hypostatized by non-critical intellects. Matter is a hypothesis. By saying “matter” we create a symbol of something unknown which can be anything. … Scientific materialism has introduced a new hypostasis. This is an intellectual sin. … The man of average philosophical education, not penetrating the hypostasis, does not realize that matter is another way of indicating the supreme principle. He has traded the name of God or Energy for the name of Matter. The materialist, in spite of himself, is a metaphysician. He must understand that he is enclosed in the psyche and can never cross those boundaries. … The majority view the psyche as a result of biochemical processes occurring in brain

Empiricism and Its Solution

cells. This conception, according to which the psyche is an epiphenomenon of physics, is a legacy of the old scientific materialism. A minority believe that the psyche governs the function of cortical cells. Both are in error. [1954] Science, at the level of atomic magnitude, has come to the conclusion that objective reality is inextricable by the observer. This means that the world exists insofar as we have an image of it and, on the other side, that there is an unavoidable link between the psyche and the space-time continuum. … Since psyche and nature are contained in one world, and are also in constant contact, it is reasonable to assume that they are two aspects of the same system. However current knowledge only allows us to compare the psychic world and the natural world to two cones whose vertices touch and do not touch at a “zero point”. [1939-B] The psychotherapist, if he is a slave to his biological belief, will try to reduce what he has intuited to what is rationally known. But if the psychotherapist, having completed the rescue mission, takes time to reflect, if he happens to look inside himself, he will be able to perceive how those reductions are empty and, even more, how they are contrary to what is alive and wants to grow. He will realize what it means, Faust would say, to throw open those doors to the beyond that everyone would like to avoid.

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Post Scriptum This article is taken from a dissertation in Medicine and Surgery that dates back to the twilight of the last century. Not all went smoothly with neurophysiology colleagues. I am an estimator of neuropsychology studies when they make clear the correspondence between brain activity and mental activity. Often neurophysiologists, misconstruing these studies, introduce a hierarchy in the two levels: they hypo-thesize that nature and the brain rest on a sub-stance, a previous and independent entity, and hence they hypothesize that brain activity is the cause of the mental activity. Our culture does not seem to be capable of dismissing a failed method of explanation, the Aristotelian invention of substance and cause, also due to the fact that an average philosophical education, as Jung has just stated, deprives us of the awareness of practicing a hypo-stasis. Nobody should forget that any object, such as the brain, is known within observation. The habit of referring to objects as if they were stationed out of observation betrays the immediacy of the data and throws us into the field of metaphysics. This mistake, in any case, prevents the mind from claiming its autonomy of meaning and language from the brain. Psychodynamics, especially my occupation in psychological analysis, falls apart in the hands of neurophysiologists. Any empiricist, such as William James or Ernst Mach whom we will meet in the next pages, by definition invites us to maintain contact with conscious experience and warns that all rational constructs lead us astray.

Chapter 5

Mind and Brain as Music and Musical Score

Ciurlionis: Sonata of the Stars – Andante

Atlas and the Globe: The Summits of Philosophy Giuseppe Roncoroni Copyright © 2023 Jenny Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. ISBN 978-981-4968-68-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-43294-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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Mach [1900 Analysis of Sensations]: On a bright summer day, in the open air, the world with my ego suddenly revealed itself to me as a web of sensations and, although reflection was later added, that was the decisive moment for my conception. I instantly realized how the “fact in itself” was useless. ... The older generation of physicists and chemists would have disdained that matter, the persistence of a substance, was not considered. We will have to resort to a revolution in the way of thinking. Science suffers no harm if a persistent law replaces something useless and unknown. ... Matter is our symbol and we are careful not to give value to symbols. Even more we will beware of the monstrous thought of explaining psychic phenomena with molecules and atoms. ... Once a physiologist warned me that I had badly satisfied my theme, in my writing, and said to me: you cannot analyse the sensations before knowing the function of the components in the brain. These words would have inspired a theory of “occult movements” (!) in a young man of Laplace’s time and made me reconsider the “Ignorabimus”, the maxim of du Bois Reymond, which until then had seemed to me a serious mistake. It was useful that du Bois recognize the insolubility of his problem. However he did not take the most important step: a problem, recognized as insoluble, is such because the question was wrongly posed. ... It can happen, to the physiologist who does not take psychology into account, the same that happens to the one who, as they say, was looking for the donkey and was sitting on it. This is what happens to the researcher who follows the nervous pathways, supported by vague and abstract ideas, and finds himself having to connect the sensation of green with a process that takes place in the brain. That sensation appears to him as something new and wonderful. How can it result from chemistry or electric current? Wonder is not justified because one always works on sensations. Sensations are the foundation of everything. William James [1912 Essays in Radical Empiricism]: Conscious experience is enclosed in itself and does not rest on anything. … My description of things is essentially a mosaic philosophy and differs from the Hume-type of empiricism in one particular which makes me add the epithet radical. To be radical an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly

Mind and Brain as Music and Musical Score

experienced nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. Ordinary empiricism, in spite of the fact that relations present themselves as being co-ordinate parts of experience, has always shown a tendency to do away with the connections of things. The pulverization of all experience by association is example of what I mean. Any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as “real” as anything else in the system. A place must be found for every kind of thing experienced in the final philosophic arrangement.

Prospectus Mister Mediocre has no doubt that the world exists outside of us and before us. This conjecture implies that conscious life is a product of the brain. Mister Mediocre, leafing through the diary of science, also learns that the mind obeys the natural laws of the brain. Thus conscious life, our entire being, is caught in a mortal grip. Removing the conjecture of mister Mediocre, on the contrary, allows us to portray conscious life and natural laws as friends walking side by side on the same path. Nothing less than a musician and a Pythagorean will take care of orienting us towards the solution through a simile: the mind is music and the meeting place with the body, the brain, is a musical score.

The Traditional Premise: Matter and Its Problems

The traditional premise corresponds to the substance we call matter. I should think this way: on the surface of an azure spot, in the bowels of a galaxy that participates in the procession of innumerable galaxies, many beings slowly form and I, like them, become a conscious being when my brain is active. Conceptual and experimental developments lead to the conclusion that my feelings and thoughts are an empty addition to the excitation of neurons. Many paradoxes are lurking at the finish line. Isn’t it a miracle that a piece of meat, such is the brain, generates conscious life? Isn’t it strange that this piece of meat is the only organ in our body to refine a useless function? Why are we deluded that our choices, bound by natural calculation, can influence behaviour? How can we hope that our meditations, at the mercy

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of the precariousness of the cells, possess coherence? Epiphenomenalism is unacceptable and slides towards the identity of the mind and the brain. On this slope, between one and the other station, we meet the “great brains” of naturalism of the mind such as Edelman, Dennett, Hofstadter, and so on.

Identify the Mind with the Matter of the Brain

Cabanis [1802 On the Relations between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man]: The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.

Kim [1998 Mind in a Physical World]: Whoever believes in the action of mind loses in all cases. The states of thought are either not effective or they are not thought. Ramachandran [2005 A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness]: Even though it is common knowledge, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life – all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love lives, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards as his or her own intimate private self – is simply the activities of these little specks of jelly in our heads, in our brains. There is nothing else. These champions of nihilism, the last of whom removed the mirror neuron from sacrosanct oblivion, propose to identify the mind with the brain and deny the characteristics of consciousness. Identity theory bypasses most of the problems because we cannot question ourselves about something that is not there. The Gordian knot is untangled in the style of Alexander. But is it legitimate to truncate one of the conflicting terms with a sword stroke? Can we absorb the mind into the brain? Can we equate the spirit with a spongy mass of meat? This question seems rhetorical and everyone is ready to respond “no”. So I wonder what mystification encourages such a singular and aberrant move. It is simple: matter, as a substance, transports us into the unknown and there we can announce that the most disparate things are identical. A philosopher and a farmer teach us that all the cows are black when the lantern is off. Identity theory

Mind and Brain as Music and Musical Score

surpasses, in the practice of occultism, the habit of occult substances and occult properties in order to hide the difference between what is physical and what is mental. The bet on the unknown is shown by a fiction. A physiologist is keeping an eye on Einstein’s brain while Einstein engages in speculation. This physiologist, even unaware of the existence of the conscious dimension in my reasoning by absurdity, from the brain ferments should guess the architecture of special and general relativity. This joker will get angry at not being able to access the real matter of the brain and not being able, only for this limitation, to expose a theoretical argument according to the language of neurology.

A New Premise: The Primacy of Observation and the Solution of Problems

A radiologist taught the learners that, when a vision on an X-ray plate poses difficulties of interpretation compared to the clinic, it is necessary to change the perspective, look at the image from a distance or even turn it upside down. A different approach, a subversive intuition, an asymmetrical logical path, can allow to coordinate the whole and can provide a better vision of reality.

I lower and raise the curtain because, from yesterday to today, the scenography has changed. Yesterday’s philosophy, in its description of the globe, was forgetting the initial “I see…”. Today’s philosophy, by restoring that “I see…”, redeems the observer and elegantly unties the Gordian knot. The new premise gives me the two indispensable keys to correct epiphenomenalism and reach a solution. Here is the first key: the lack of matter implies that the brain does not produce the mind. Thus conscious life is no longer an epilogue, an emanation that escorts the adventure of the brain without modifying it, but is rather a prologue that does not have to justify the modalities and motivations of its existence. And here is the second key: the order of nature and the brain, subtracted from the disintegration in matter, is not in contrast with the sense of thoughts and choices.

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Interlude between Musicians At the gates of the cathedral, I meet my orchestra mates and their well-tempered instruments: Niccolò with the cello and Zephyr with the flute. I consecrate myself to the intimacy of the organ. Each of us will extract a series of musical notes from the instrument. A musician is forgetful, like all artists, and fixes the notes with dots and strokes on a sheet. They are scribbles for those are not familiar with music but, between us, are signals that recall a note. My music sheet remembers which notes, which melody, the organ will emit. Now the maestro scrutinizes the score and invites me to the ceremony with a wave of the baton. There are some truths, about the relationship between music and a musical score, that are crystal clear for me and for Niccolò and Zephyr. Music exists before the score is ready. The names of andante or adagio qualify the sounds and not the signs. Signs are converted into sounds in reference to music. The score regulates the music and the music does not influence it. The music rises freely in the mystical aura of the cathedral while a breath of wind scatters the cards on the ground.

The Symphony of Conscious Life on the Musical Score of the Neurons

So far the psyche and physics have been configured as fields that show a different face but an equal trend. One last question remains open: which is, in psychophysical unit, the office of psyche and the office of physics? Music offers an analogy since the mind is music and the brain, designed by evolution, serves as a score. This time, in the form of notes, there are moments of meditative or emotional life which spread from the hypogeum of the unconscious to the stage of consciousness. Each note is written in a network of neurons and the sequence of their activation modulates the mind just as the spots on the paper define the melody. Each of us lives in conformity with the score of the brain and thus enriches the concert of living wholeness.

Mind and Brain as Music and Musical Score

The certainties of the musician are also in the endowment of the philosopher. The notes of life anticipate their order. Happy or sad is the mood rather than the neurological chart. That graphic is symbol of a drama that comes true in the mind. Only one hand composes the convolutions of the asters and the brain thus embracing our spirit in the vault of the globe. Only one and modulated by mathematics, a Pythagorean would say, is the music obtained with instruments, the music of man and the music in the skies.

Consideration of Pythagoras

Pythagoras argued that the sun, the moon and the planets, with rotations and revolutions, produce slightest sounds in which the breath of creation is alive. This music, the Music of the Spheres, represents a metaphor for the universality of the spirit. Yet those who listen to cosmic radiation or the hum of satellites, as recorded by probes, might believe it is a metaphor so intense and so tenacious as to leave a celestial imprint. Perhaps Pythagoras in the intimacy of the night was able to perceive the harmony that those spheres intone in the secrets of the firmament. This legend in any case gives me the opportunity to terminate this con-sidera-tion, as is fatal, “cum-sidera” that is “in company of the stars”. Shakespeare [1594 The Merchant of Venice]: The man that hath no music in himself nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night and his affections dark as Erebus.

Hazrat [1923 The Mysticism of Sound]: I have come to the point where the Music of the Spheres resounds. Whole life for me has become music. Barbour [1999 The End of Time]: The world is made up of the instants of conscious or unconscious life. Each instant comes to light because it resonates with the totality of the other instants. The Music of the Spheres is the only justification for the birth of the world.

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Cioran [1986 Des larmes et des saints]: The organ is a cosmogony. Its metaphysical resonances are absent in the flute and cello. In the organ the Absolute interprets itself. Hence the impression that it is the least human of instruments and that it is always played alone!

Chapter 6

Is the Will an Illusion?

Athanasius Kirker: Harmonia Nascentis Mundi

Atlas and the Globe: The Summits of Philosophy Giuseppe Roncoroni Copyright © 2023 Jenny Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. ISBN 978-981-4968-68-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-43294-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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Spinoza [1677 Ethica]: The mind and the body are a single entity with a single order but, although there is no doubt, I do not think that men can reasonably reflect on this so much they are persuaded that by the sole command of the mind now the body moves and now stands still. … The will cannot be reputed a free factor but a necessary factor. Schopenhauer [1838 On the Freedom of the Will]: A man is free to do what he wants but he is not free to want what he wants. Heraclitus: The sun will not exceed its measurements otherwise the Erinyes in service of Dike would take it back. Hegel [1801 De orbitis planetarum]: The planets run free in the sky like gods without any force pushing them. Abbagnano [1971 Dizionario di Filosofia]: The first conception intends freedom as absolute and unconditional. ... The second conception does not refer to the single man but to the cosmic order.

Ariadne’s Thread: The Will Is Not an Illusion The neuroscientist’s voice is imperious: “your body moves according to the constants of neurophysiology and you are mistaken in believing that your will can disturb the natural order”. Even the behavioural scientist’s voice is adamant: “do not believe that your will is foreign to the movements of the body because, otherwise, biological evolution would not use the lures of pain and pleasure to make your choices advantageous in preserving and perpetuating the species”. I believe both the neuroscientist and the behavioural scientist are right. My essay dismisses the popular belief in the existence of a will without rule, here baptized “free will”, and conforms the will to the natural rule. At the same time, it dismisses the popular belief in the presence of a world outside of observation. This step is decisive to reintegrate the will in the execution of the action and to answer the question of the title: the will is not an illusion. It also grants the kind of freedom that refers, in Abbagnano’s words, “to the cosmic order”.

Is the Will an Illusion?

Such freedom is reflected in Hegel’s phrase about the motion of the planets and, likewise, Heraclitus’s phrase means that the sun “could” change its trajectory but it won’t in respect of the cosmic order.

The Free Will Surrenders to Physics

The idea of free will arises from the impression that our will is endowed, again evoking the phrases of openness, with “absolute and unconditional” freedom. Aristotle suggested that the spirit directs the body as the helmsman pilots the ship. Free will was in vogue in the Middle Ages, amid religious disputes, and continued into the modern era until it clashed with the laws of physics in the 17th century. The possibility of moving the body either here or there, as the helmsman pilots the ship or the charioteer manoeuvres the chariot, would subvert the principle of energy conservation. Today scientific investigation makes the historical datum irrefutable: the will does not practice a deviation in physiology when we execute a gesture. I will pay attention to a couple of experiments (ignoring the objections about them) to clarify how the initiative of the will converges in the body system and inevitably the mind as pure spirit is lost in oblivion.

First Experiment on the Will

An experiment performed by Libet (1973 Electrical Stimulation of Cortex in Human Subjects and Conscious Memory Aspects) proves that a gesture, made by me, begins before I know it myself. That gesture is preceded by an activity of the frontal lobe, the premotor potential, which is equivalent to the will to act and appears before this will is aware. So it is told by Horgan (1994 Can Science Explain Consciousness?): “Libet describes experiments on subjects whose brain waves are controlled by the electroencephalogram. Subjects were asked to bend a finger at a chosen time noting their decision with a watch. Volunteers took two tenths of a second to bend their finger, after making a decision, but their brains according to the electroencephalogram were showing activity already three tenths of a second before the mind became aware of it.”

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Second Experiment on the Will An experiment planned by Bickford (1960 Electrographic and Behavioural Effects Related to Depth Stimulation in Human Patients) shows that the impression of voluntariness can be felt within a gesture that is aroused by artificial means. The procedure is described by Benedetti (1969 Neuropsicologia) who anticipates a materialistic comment on the result: “Bickford implants the electrodes in the frontal lobes and in the posterior regions. Stimulation leads to various responses. We are interested in a type of movement that is appropriate to the circumstances and is not perceived by the subject as a constraint: if the patient held a newspaper then he folded it, if his hands were joined he rubbed them, and so on. When asked why he made that movement, the patient replied: I don’t know, maybe I could have avoided it if I wanted. […] Bickford hypothesizes that the stimulation activated a system of neurons that presides over normal voluntary movements. This result brings us back to positivist philosophy: the will corresponds to a cerebral function, which can be localized and manipulated, and the sensation of freedom is only an attribute of the function.”

The Model of Scientists

The typical model of scientists prevailed as soon as the utopia of free will collapsed. The experiments just described reinforce their conclusion that intention is extraneous to behaviour and conscious life is irrelevant to human affairs. This means, in the classic definition of epiphenomenalism, that conscious life would be the product of nervous processes and does not react on them any more than the shadow reacts on the object from which it is produced. Epiphenomenalism decides that suddenly, in the name of physics, both free will and will are abolished. Free will was indeed a utopia. But are we sure that doing without the will is lawful?

Is the Will an Illusion?

The Importance of the Will A paradox presents itself to scientists. The project of biological evolution determined in me the stimulus of thirst. Its purpose is that I feel relief from drinking and thus provide for the health of the body. Pain and pleasure are punishment and reward for inducing individuals to biological service. So nature holds the will in high esteem and seduces me as if I were free to choose whether to do or not to do something. Here: I accept the news that the body is guided by physiology but I have to intuit how the will, although physically configured, can resume its role in the action.

The Communion of Nature and Will

There is a conjecture of the common man, the common scientist, which accompanies me this far and imprisons me in a checkmate: the idea that conscious experience is preceded and provoked by an external world. Now I renounce this inheritance and start again from the primacy of the conscious world. Physics and psyche are there in contact, without prevailing over each other, so that together the natural measure and the urgency of thirst lead me to drink. A unique piece, a medal with two sides, is at stake in the psychophysical process: the psychophysical impetus of thirst initiates the psychophysical system of searching for water. I can finally say that the will is compatible and participatory. I have arrived, in the wake of Spinoza, at the only solution that can smooth out the horns of the dilemma. Spinoza balances the mind and the body in a neutral entity and concludes that the body moves by command of both. This conclusion redeems the will and returns a correct definition of freedom. Men and all of nature are free because they express their essence by abandoning the dominion of causes and forces. I point out, for the sake of completeness, that the word “freedom” is often adopted in the context of morals. The last sections of Spinoza’s Ethica, entitled Human Slavery or the Powers of the Affects and Human Freedom or the Power of the Understanding invite us to escape the trap of passions.

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This is the basis for interpreting experiments on the will. The first experiment does not mean that the will is a false impulse, at the mercy of the physical program, but that the psychic trait of the will emerges in the unconscious. The second experiment confirms that the psychophysical act can be physically manipulated, it is by definition, and brings with it the feeling of will that characterizes it on the psychic side.

Corollary of Ethics

There is a scandal: I cannot choose whether or not to be what I am. A digression on the ethical and legal corollary of this revelation is necessary because free will, the opportunity to turn to good or evil, was at the root of responsibility. Now the responsibility hangs in the balance. I cannot reproach the crocodile while it devours the gazelle, along the ford, because it is not master of its destiny as a crocodile. And the sheriff cannot aspire to take revenge on the malefactor but must guard, as is done for a stormy sea or an erupting volcano, protecting the city from the fury and malice of the jungle. Ultimately this corollary changes nothing in my verdicts just as it changes nothing in the cognition I have of myself or in my predilection for vespers and anchorites. It should not be misrepresented in the acquittal of a criminal since no one can estrange himself from himself, as if he were something else too, to declare “it is not my fault that I am like that”. Nevertheless this corollary sounds so provocative that some authors, while opposed to free will, try to maintain the obsolete notion of responsibility. Among these authors is Schopenhauer and, namely, the philosopher who writes that “a man is not free to want what he wants” and consequently that “the life of every man could not be different from the one it is”.

Euterpe’s Lesson

Euterpe, the muse of music, repeats some notions to explain the communion between the mind and the brain: thought and will are a music that unfolds on the score of neurons. This simile confirms that neurophysiology must be referred to psychology

Is the Will an Illusion?

just as the musical score must be referred to music. Music and the mind reject any affinity respectively with a stack of dirty paper which I call sheet music or with a portion of edible flesh which I call brain. The notes of music could be marked using a multiplicity of symbols and, by analogy, the notes of life have a symbolic and occasional correspondence with the register of neurons. Detecting the gap between levels is the appreciable aspect of Fodor’s functionalism (1981 The Mind-Body Problem): “Functionalism is based on the distinction that computer science draws between a system’s hardware or physical composition and its software or program. The psychology of a system such as a human, machine or spirit without a body does not depend on what it is made of (neurons, diodes, or spiritual energy) but on how what it is made of is organized. ”

Extension of the Mind on the Score of Nature

The music lesson explains how impenetrable the labour of the brain would be if there was no reference to the mind. I ask myself: is it plausible that this logic of score and music is restricted to this sector of nature? Is nature autonomous until, for the brain, it claims a supplement? In our world, on closer inspection, it is not irrelevant whether the mind exists or does not exist because everything appears to be a desert of significance if it is deprived of the impalpable component that confers uniformity and comprehensibility. The whole field of nature is a score and every score implies a music just as every medal implies a reverse.

The Music and the Dissonances of Materialism

The average scientist wants the brain not to be a score but a sound device: the mind springs from the brain as music springs from the instrument. However, remaining in the figuration, it is not correct that the music is an emanation of the instrument. There is a stimulus, or air flows in the organ pipes or winds blowing in the cave, but it must be received and processed. Music is a privilege of the mind and, like the mind, it ultimately refers to itself. Comparing the brain to the musical device, so that some

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cells are at the origin of conscious life, coincides with the dogma of materialism. The brain is nothing more than a score and a musician would be astonished if the friezes of the score emanate a song. The astonishment increases if that printout, in the name of the doctrine of identity, was exchanged with the bench in the gallery and with the performance of the orchestra. One deduction from matter consists in invoking special cells for a mental faculty (this is the case of the award-winning mirror neuron) just as we would like a new instrument in order to benefit from a new sound. It happens with the machinery, with the blender or the refrigerator, to affix an extra gadget to add a service. But the brain is a score: no musician goes in search of new notes to compile a new melody and we, not otherwise, are content with normal neurons for any talent of the mind.

Chapter 7

The Mechanical Lion of Leonardo and the Neuron in the Shape of Mirror

Atlas and the Globe: The Summits of Philosophy Giuseppe Roncoroni Copyright © 2023 Jenny Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. ISBN 978-981-4968-68-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-43294-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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Four Lions Our story takes place in peaceful company of four lions: Leonardo, commissioned by Leo X, makes a Mechanical Lion which is sent to Lyon to welcome the King of France. This is a shocking novelty or, at least, it is for those who ignore the devices with cogwheels of classical antiquity, the self-propelled figures of Hero in Alexandria based on hydraulic principles, the portentous progress of these inventions in Arab culture. The fact is that Leonardo’s Lion takes a series of steps, shakes its head and wags its tail, opens its jaws and rises on its hind legs to stand in front of the King. These movements take place thanks to a central wheel, to which a complex of wires and gears is connected, while the motor consists of a helical spring. The spring, reaching the end of the stroke, unlocks a hook and causes the opening of a drawer which is hidden in the belly of the lion. The rain of lilies is a candid homage to Francis I. The Mechanical Lion seals the friendship between the Medici family, from which the Pope descends, and the crown of France. Lion and lily are coats of arms that unite the city of Florence and the kingdom of France.

The Mechanical Mirror

Mechanism applies to us, to men, the logic of the Mechanical Lion. Leonardo, in preparing the cascade of lilies, mounts a hook that opens the door in the lion’s chest. The Mechanical Man would also need a special device to delight guests with offers of flowers: providence provides to implant an amalgam of mirror neurons in the skull box. Even the most diligent appliances are at risk of breaking and we will have to forget to receive that bouquet of flowers if the hook gets stuck or the mirror tarnishes. In the presence of an ascetic, an aedo or a blessed, a Russian pilgrim or a desert father, in any case in the presence of a misfit, we are civilly educated to consult one of the lazarettes, established with the offer of a bouquet of millions, which are qualified in reviving the mirror neuron and in enticing to the delights of the banquet and the ballroom.

The Mechanical Lion of Leonardo and the Neuron in the Shape of Mirror

Death of the Man-Machine My verifications regarding the mirror neuron, which will be briefly mentioned in the next chapter, are a testament to its failure. There is not a professional neuron that functions like a mirror, in the actions it observes, according to the antiphon: “I know what you are doing because I am doing it too”. There is not even a cooperative of proletarian neurons that manages this mechanism. So there is not a mechanical thing, an automatic thing, which puts me in relationship with others regardless of awareness and cognition. Our sociality is rather a subtle and variegated faculty just as our humanity is subtle and variegated. The laboratory data, from which the theory departs, warns only that in understanding a behaviour it helps me the memory that I implemented it myself. As for the action or the part of the action that I do not know, which is not included in the repertoire of the movement, I manage adequately in the other modes. The mirror neuron is one aspect of the mirage of the Mechanical Man. I laughed, long ago, listening to a postulate of this lineage of scientists: the thought of a triangle must be the signal of a neuron, or a network of neurons, that has a triangular shape. To parody, and this time in the automatic mode, I used the expression “neurons in the shape of mirror” in the title of the page. As for the image, a publication of Man a Machine with the assistance of Arcimboldo’s painting, carries with it the sentence of Ludwig II of Bavaria: “lucky those who have not read it”. Plato [Phaedo]

There are those who attribute conversing with you, Socrates said, to causes such as voice or hearing. Then he says that I’m sitting because the muscles, by tensing and contracting, cause the legs to bend. But the real causes are others: the Athenians voted against me and therefore I chose to sit here.

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Chapter 8

Spring and Autumn of the Mirror Neuron

Aqua Aura: The Net

Atlas and the Globe: The Summits of Philosophy Giuseppe Roncoroni Copyright © 2023 Jenny Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. ISBN 978-981-4968-68-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-43294-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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Alison Gopnik [2007]: The idea that particular cells, mirror neurons, are the basis of a fundamental human impulse reflects the emergence of a new scientific myth.

First part Does the mirror neuron exist? Wikipedia: Mirror neurons are a class of neurons that reside in the pre-motor area of the brain and are activated when an animal performs an action and when it observes the same action that is performed by another subject. Mirror neurons in monkey and the analogous system demonstrated in human are a neurophysiologic observation that must be distinguished, in its validity, from interpretative opinions on their role. Giacomo Rizzolatti [2008–2009]: In many areas of the cerebral cortex there is a neurophysiologic mechanism that transforms visual representations into motor representations: the mirror mechanism. Mirror neurons are precisely a mechanism that allows us to understand the actions and intentions of others as if they were made by us. The understanding of others based on mirror neurons is in contrast to the classical theory according to which we understand the behaviour of others through cognitive inferences. More generally mirror neurons in human control very sophisticated processes such as understanding the actions and emotions of others, imitation, learning and language.

Mirror Neuron: The Datum and the Theory At expiration of the second millennium starting from the birth of a divinity, in a local in our city a few steps away from the greengrocer, something portentous happens again. A man reaches out his hand and plucks a banana from the basket. A macaque looks at him without batting an eye and yet something is stirring in the region of his brain where that movement is present in memory. This is the datum that also applies to man. This, instead,

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is the theory of mirror neurons: in the premotor region, but also elsewhere, a category of neurons is hosted that practices the art of imitating, of mirroring, in order to understand the actions and intentions of others. The transition from fact to theorem requires two leaps, rather courageous leaps, which I name first thesis and second thesis.

The First Thesis and the Second Thesis

At once I underline the conjectures that hold up the theory of mirror neurons. (1) The first thesis brings as a gift the mirror mechanism, the motor mirror, according to which I recognize a gesture by awakening the program of that gesture in me. This modality would favour people to feel closer and to socialize. (2) The second thesis realizes the passage from the mirror mechanism to the mirror neuron supposing that at the base of the mechanism there is a special servitude of neurons. This deduction, contentedly, lends itself to easy assessment. Bloom and Fawcett [1968]: The morphological variety of neurons corresponds to a variety of specializations for which each type of neurons is appointed to perform a certain function. In the various areas there are all types of neurons but in different proportions.

Giacomo Rizzolatti [2009]: Mirror neurons? They are not a deduction but they are an empirical fact. Pascolo does not realize that mirror neurons are easily verifiable. Our mirror neuron videos are seen by hundreds of scientists around the world and there is not one, with the exception of Pascolo, who doubts their existence. Paolo Pascolo [2009]: The discovery of mirror neurons was announced in 1996. It is since taken for granted that mirror neurons have been seen. Yet Rizzolatti admits that they are not histologically identified and therefore no one can have seen them in action. I fear that the error is at the root: the mirror neurons thus defined do not exist.

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Failure of the Second Thesis: Histology Disavows the Mirror Neuron A portrait of mirror neurons compares them to a militia of identical soldiers on the march to capture, as some titles of Professor Rizzolatti’s books would like, the intimacy of anyone. They are in charge of carrying out their mission in every district of the brain. But why are those neurons twins? The textbook of histology teaches us that analogy in task implies analogy in form: each neuron exhibits a certain aspect because it adapts to its role. Here the “bus-illis” stands out, the “tempori-bus-illis”, namely the proverbial obstacle in the translation from Latin. Professor Rizzolatti sets out to discover this family of cells and summons all the resources of the laboratory. He sees the neurons at work and isolates them by predicting that they correspond to one of the types that are scattered throughout the brain. Instead there is a surprise to the eye of the microscope. Those neurons are not similar but they are different from each other. The professor is frowning and doubts the honesty of the lens. This news is fatal for mirror neurons. The imprint of familiarity would have ensured their existence but now the opposite is true: histology provides the proof that they do not exist.

Failure of the Second Thesis: The Of ficial Renunciation of the Mirror Neuron

At the end of 2018, inside the school of mirror neurons, I happen to attend a lecture by Professor Gallese whom his colleagues call “the philosopher”. This exemplar of philosopher says, as if he has always known, that mirror neurons are normal neurons: “it would be foolish to imagine that they wear uniforms and badges like a football team in a red shirt”. Thus he panders the irresistible counter-march of his teacher, Rizzolatti, who no longer speaks of mirror neurons but speaks of the mirror mechanism. There would be only a mechanism for which the various neurons, which populate the territories of the brain, are at work. The orator

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of the conference certifies the failure of the second thesis. Nevertheless the audience, respectful of the pulpit and enchanted by the swagger, cheerfully applauds and trusts mirror neurons as if they were the Phoenix: “where it is no one knows – that there is every one allows”. The mirror neuron does not exist, unfortunately, and the fabulous bird with the sparkling feather is consumed in the ashes. I am in the company of a friend and I translate the sermon for her. She scolds me severely and reveals that nursing homes are being inaugurated in the name of that assurance. However we also remember that there are cathedrals and synagogues and mosques, there are everywhere, but this does not guarantee the presence of the divinity. Anatole France: If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

Giacomo Rizzolatti [2009]: In the last few months alone, three important articles on mirror neurons have been published in leading international scientific journals. The authors work in German, American and Japanese universities. Our main writings have had over 1500 citations. Furthermore our recap on mirror neurons written in 2004 (Annual Review of Neuroscience) has been cited 1100 times. Five years (5) multiplied by the days of a year (365) makes 1825. It means that in the last five years a work on mirror neurons has come out every two days. Are they works on something that doesn’t exist? Collective madness? Come on, a little seriousness. He, Pascolo, has to send his works to international journals. Initially he will take some blows. But, if he is good, he will learn the lesson and get out of the vicious circle of arguments which, I’m sorry to say, are pure paranoia. John Mark Taylor [2016]: The mirror neuron theory (a mechanism putatively enabled by specific neurons) was initially rejected from the top science journal, Nature, for “lacking public interest”. Their reputation changed in 2000 when Ramachandran, neuroscientist and populariser of science, speculated that “mirror neurons would do for psychology what DNA did for biology”. Over the next decade,

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mirror neurons captured the public imagination, being touted as able to offer insight into everything from empathizing with therapy clients to international diplomacy, how children learn music, and how people appreciate art. … Over the past ten years, many of the more prominent theories regarding the function of mirror neurons have not survived scrutiny. … Counterarguments have pushed mirror neuron proponents to fine-tune their claims. Rizzolatti, the original discoverer of mirror neurons in macaques, now suggests that mirror neurons might only be required for understanding the actions of others from a first-person perspective. … Now that the hype around mirror neurons has begun to dissipate, it will be interesting to see what role remains for these curious cells.

Failure of the First Thesis: What Remains of the Mirror? It is the moment of leave for the first thesis and for the whole theory. Delivering our virtues, the delicacy of feelings and empathy, to a mirror mechanism was the rashest step. The motor mirror is characterized by automatism and, therefore, is defined as a mechanism. Now it is convened into a branched and fickle system along with methods of knowledge that are not at all automatic. The cognitive ability that Professor Rizzolatti was trying to marginalize returns to the centre of the system. What remains of the theory and the mirror is the original datum according to which the evaluation of an action also makes use of the neurons that are in charge of the same action. Nothing but the opportunity, boasted since ancient epics, to compare myself in order to penetrate the attitudes of my fellows. But this expands into something more prosaic than community affairs: my friend, the girl from before, in the middle of the symposium enters the bathroom and turns the faucet knob so that the roar of the water assists her in the emissions from the urinary ducts. Here the answer to the inaugural question is completed: does the mirror neuron exist? The disappearance of the neuron that functions as a mirror is followed by this misfortune for any mechanic on the model of the mirror.

Spring and Autumn of the Mirror Neuron

Failure of the First Thesis: The Of ficial Crisis of the Mirror How does this decline of the motor mirror come about? I state that Pascolo, a professor of bioengineering, starts a polemic with Professor Rizzolatti when he analyses the result of the experiments and insinuates that a correct reading of the times is incompatible with a mirror circuit. Here I remain neutral with respect to such a sophisticated controversy and content myself with the simplest proofs. It is not true that imitation is necessary to understand the conduct of others: there are brain injuries that prevent us from taking an action, such as peeling a banana, but they do not prevent us from comprehending that action when it is observed. It is not true that autism is due to damage to the mirror: the relative locations in the brain, in cases of autism, react normally to imitate and cognize. But mainly we can list, against the power of the mirror, a series of logical proofs. I will report the testimony of Professor Pascolo and finally I will report the closure of a recent article by Professor Rizzolatti. That piece, entitled Mirror with Multiple Dimensions, renews precisely the motivations of the opponents and renounces the I Know What You Are Doing. The last sentence is almost poignant because it surrenders to the obstinacy, which torments us men, to contest the daily twilight of ambitions against all evidence. But a little sincerity could favour the master and his collaborators in maintaining the resolution that he himself, in an interview, declares arduous: “keep the blood in your head and keep your feet on the ground”. Paolo Pascolo [2008–2009]: That some neurons are activated both in executing and observing a gesture is one of the many events that can occur in the network that controls the action. Believing that this is the way to understand the gesture is an interpretation but there may be other interpretations including the possibility of a multimodal discharge: a group of neurons discharges on different occasions such as making, thinking or watching a movement. Likewise a team of fire-fighters rush for fires but also operate in other emergencies. … The mechanism by which, in

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observing a gesture, the relative motor program is activated in me would have a very limited application. It is not used to learn but only to recognize an already known behaviour. Now I will witness a dive by Klaus Di Biasi from the diving board. I certainly don’t have it in my memory. I expect the neurons that preside over my dives to be involved in reading the exercise but, at the same time, a contribution of other faculties will be requested. It should be noted that this example also applies to simple and seemingly familiar gestures. The motor pattern is a generic procedure that takes place from time to time in a different circumstance. In the case of a man who walks there are a multitude of unknowns which go beyond my practice of walking. … Imitation and empathy are complex acts that imply the participation of a plurality of functional groups that change every time. Empathy for the cute hermit crab from the cartoon and empathy for Christ on the cross are emotions that cannot be equated and cannot depend on the same neurons that discharge less or more. … Ultimately there is no special class of neurons but a system that recruits neurons depending on the occurrence. We can also call it a “mirror”, in some cases, as long as it is clear that it is not the imitation, the motor mirror, that monopolizes the process. Giacomo Rizzolatti [2016]: We can understand others in several ways as happens, for example, in the case of behaviours of which we do not have a motor representation: the flight of birds. Our understanding of what we observe must go beyond the understanding due to the mirror mechanism. Furthermore, once we understand the purpose of the observed action, we must understand why the agent is led to carry out the action, his motivations, his intentions, his beliefs. However physiology indicates that at the heart of it all lies a basic mechanism: the mirror mechanism.

Spring and Autumn of the Mirror Neuron

Second part The ancient philosophy of the mirror neuron Eric Kandel [1994]: The underlying precept of the new science of mind is that all mental processes are biological: they all depend on organic molecules and cellular processes that occur literally “in our heads”. According to this view the mind can be considered as the expression of a group of brain functions. Brain activity produces not only the simplest behaviours, such as walking and smiling, but also affective and cognitive manifestations such as feelings, thoughts or poetry. It follows that the disorders that characterize mental illnesses must be the product of brain disorders. Neither should we think that personality is an expression of the totality of the brain. The precision with which higher functions are localized can be highlighted by studying patients who are carriers of the alterations. Aleksandr Lurija [1973]: It is necessary to distinguish between the “function” of a particular tissue and a “functional system” which includes a number of functions of the other type and cannot be localized. We can divide mental activity into functional systems such as vision and memory knowing that one may involve the contribution of the other. There are simple tasks or complicated tasks, as is a reasoning, but both depend on articulated and integrated networks that extend into a more or less consistent variety of areas. The lesion of one of these areas can lead to the disintegration of the functional system and therefore the symptom, the loss of function, tells us nothing about the localization.

The Demon of Mechanism A more than millennial demon whispers to me that there is a world outside of us which, philosophically speaking, is a substance that I call matter. Then he configures that world, the external world, as a machine which, philosophically speaking, through the properties of its elements would be the cause of events. To protect

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the mind, which is foremost the conscious life, I take refuge in a different substance, the soul, and my soul converses with the machine when I learn from the environment or when I control the body. The demon returns a few centuries ago to warn that the brain, the device in contact with the mind, is loyal to the regulation of the machine and does not admit the intrusion of the soul. From being a poor devil he has by now become sovereign: the mind is annexed as the last loop, idle and empty interiority, in the chain of the external world. The demon explains to us that the mind belongs to the machine and that we ourselves descend from the matter of the brain and are not responsible for our behaviour.

The Mechanical Neuron and the Mirror Neuron

The demon of mechanism dictates that the mind originates from the brain and that the faculties of the mind depend on the components, that is, on the various areas and the types of neuron. A handful of cells, with the arrogance of being the author, appropriate the name of one of our abilities. Here we are interested in the case of the mechanical neuron and, in particular, the mirror neuron. Why does Professor Rizzolatti advocate a neuron with a special structure? Mill maker and wine maker will agree that a bakery’s equipment is suitable for kneading and baking bread and is different from the tools in use in the cellar to pour wine from grapes. Likewise, the conformation of the mirroring neuron should be able to propitiate life in society and should be distinguished from the conformations of the crying neuron and the laughing neuron.

Maybe the Brain Contains the Mind?

The manifesto of mechanism conceals an ambiguity. Is the mind a “product” or is it an “expression” of the brain? Or, it is the same, does the brain represent a cause or does it include the essence of the mind? The second possibility achieves the most coherent outcome of mechanism. Thus I, who observes and meditates, am caught in the vagaries of chemistry. Professor Gallese, an

Spring and Autumn of the Mirror Neuron

accomplice of Professor Rizzolatti, is orthodox up to the medulla and identifies the mind with matter. From the propulsion of the meninges emanates a verdict that I summarize with his terms: the brain is a machine that explains who we are. This extremism is fascinating because it is pervaded by the bacillus of selfdestruction. We are often weak, I more than ever, and once again I am shaken by admiration for the divine wind of the “kamikaze”. Vittorio Gallese [2007]: My specific role is that of neurophysiologist, that is, one who studies the functioning of the central nervous system using a reductionist level of description to understand aspects that we normally explain and interpret with other languages and other levels of description. Lucia De Ioanna [2018]: Art and thought like every human fact, Gallese observes, find their roots in the body: “The body is the only true transcendental, an element not further reducible. In the search for the origin of words and concepts, we follow a red thread that always brings us to the body.” The anatomy of feelings is a meeting point for the poet and scientist’s gaze: a happy intuition, Gallese observes, was that of the ancients who placed the seat of love in the heart and today neuroscience has ascertained that even in the heart there are neurons.

Paradoxes of Mechanism in Reference to the Mirror Neuron The demon of mechanism procures a catalogue of confutations. Here I highlight, with attention to mirror neurons, a couple of paradoxes. (A) The first paradox is due to the submission of our life to physiology. We should presume, consequently, that Leopardi’s pessimism was a symptom of a greater vivacity of the anchorite and melancholic neuron compared to that of the partygoer and jovial neuron. Could it not happen, on the contrary, that the partygoer and jovial neuron is healthy but is at rest because it does not care about the poet’s lyricism? Could it thence not happen that a misunderstanding is also Professor Rizzolatti’s project to cure some species of autism by exercising mirror

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neurons with a video game? (B) A second extravagance is implicit in the obligation to locate the riches of the mind according to the style of the atoms. There cannot be a lineage of neurons that presides over the initiative to “contemplate the sunset”. Equally that expression of passion, “listen ... feel how your heart is beating me fast”, is not attributable to mirror neurons because it involves a myriad of simpler and changing faculties. Furthermore, each faculty is a generalization and does not offer a plausible criterion for dividing the brain. These generalizations are inevitably intertwined. Language makes use of memory, for example, and even mirror neurons (what luck!) juxtapose apparently remote concepts such as acting and knowing.

From Metaphysics to Metapsychics in the Mirror Neuron Theory

Our professors, Rizzolatti and Gallese, take us by the hand and lead us into the shadows of metaphysics evoking the poetry of the “transcendental body” (their own words) and reviving the nostalgia of the parish. But the journey to the end of the night continues and two laboratory men fly side by side into the clouds of metapsychics promising to pass an impassable fence and to instantly grasp the awareness and intention of others. Yet in dreams, if it were true, I would realize that human figures are a false apparition without having to wait for the morning. As for mind reading, then, it is metier of necromancers and witches. The good citizen is recommended to make an effort to prolong the I Know What You Are Doing by Professor Rizzolatti in I bet on what you are doing because it will probably be similar to what I would do in such a circumstance.

De Profundis for the Mirror Neuron and for the Man-Machine

Janus, the double-faced, is the tutelary deity who makes the existence and ideology of the mirror neuron inextricable. Mechanism is needed to fill the chasm that exists between data

Spring and Autumn of the Mirror Neuron

and theory. That neuron, or something similar, is needed to extend the canons of mechanism to the ambit of the brain and the mind. My writing hopes for the epilogue of this epic. Even paper never forgets that my city provided the grand empire with a shield, a “parma”, or that my city was nicknamed Little Paris by Marie Louise of Austria and Napoleon the Corsair. Even paper desires mirror neurons to decease without pain leaving in the atrium of my university, hanging in the middle of the arch and next to the relics of macaques, the certificate of a flash of paradise whose motivation has vanished. This is not possible because only memory dissuades us from perpetuating errors. The names of the guilt and guilty stand out on the tombstone: “Here the mirror neuron rests in peace even though it does not exist. Here finally rests, as its parent, the mechanistic mentality.” Paolo Pascolo [2008]: There is a too marked detachment between experimenter-thinker and animal-machine. Some note that the mirror neuron paradigm is passively accepted because it coincides with the expectations of the scientific community. Gian Franco Bosio [2016]: Brain physiology requires a holistic approach which is the opposite of the analytical and summative approach that characterizes the “Parma school”. Its members start from a mechanistic prejudice because they take it for granted that an expression of consciousness derives from a brain sector. In our opinion the brain works in synergy with the concurrence of multiple areas and multiple types of neurons. Shannon Spaulding [2013]: There is a metaphysical and epistemological distance between the activation of mirror-neurons and the attribution of a mental state that allows us to understand an action. I believe it is better to talk about a mirror-system conceived as a set of response automatisms that is supported by the contribution of cognitive faculties such as memory or reasoning or language, rather than talk about a specific class of mirrorneurons not even morphologically and histologically distinct, which would be able to explain a series of complex behaviours that presuppose intentionality and consciousness.

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Empiricism and the Music: The Mirror Neuron Is a Discordant Note In the advancement of knowledge, we find empiricism in the foreground with its principle of not crossing the boundary of observation. The observer, the conscious observer, is original and imperative while nature is the common scenery of the observers. Mechanism was the result of a reckless manoeuvre by the first philosophers. Let’s consider that those who are simply devoted to the idol of the external world, a prelude to mechanism, can escape nihilism and can agree that mirror neurons are a rumour. However they will continue to clash with the duty to generate the observer. This enigma is double, if we think that something exceptional and even superfluous emerges, and only empiricism dispels it. The empiricist can compare the coexistence of the mind and the brain to the correlation between music and musical score in the sense that the music is original but the course of the music is signalled by the symbolisms of the score. Also the forms of sociality, to stick to our theme, represent a concert that corresponds to the luminous currents that flow between the constellations of neurons. But the demon of mechanism ignites and protests: the brain embodies the instrument that emits the music of the mind, according to him, and the mirror neurons constitute the portion of the instrument that concerns sociality. Such a braggart does not deserve the time for an answer and indeed deserves to repatriate among the stakes and pyres of the Phlegethon.

World Vision

My essay just looked at a trendy but uninspiring theme. A trifle so swollen with prejudices that it seems like a sensational victory. Here it served as a starting point to greet, in a broader horizon, the alliance between philosophy and science. The domination of substances and causes was nothing but the mirage of a docile and domestic reality. Outside of me there is no longer the secret of a machine that anticipates me and imprisons me. Now chats and conjectures keep quiet because they are too human and worthy of nothing. Now the canvas of reality is made up of the great explosion, the Big Bang, of the moment I am living.

Spring and Autumn of the Mirror Neuron

Postil Some schoolmates warn me that this reading is quite demanding. So I insert a clarification note. It seems to me that the core of my essay is simple: mirror neurons do not exist otherwise we could spot them in magnifying glasses. The mirror mechanism, i.e. mirror neurons without neurons, is a residue that is also disproved by experimentation. The second part of the essay, the philosophical part, investigates the root of such a silly wager and soon the discourse becomes complex because it must be removed from the yoke of our fetishes. This note is reserved for classmates who are adamant in faith in an “external world”. I wonder what the “world” is and what the “world outside us” is. Certainly our lives unfold in a common scenery. It is a “world” that is present to us who observe it and define it through measurement. Someone, in the footsteps of the ancient peripatetic, is not content and decides that the world resides beyond us. We are at the first crossroads of philosophy and any convergence will be precluded if one turns to the right and the other takes the path to the left. I pause to meditate: is there or isn’t there a “world” that is “external” to observation? Ockham’s razor is a precept that favours the cheapest system of explanation. But each blade is an insidious tool and can hurt if you are inexpert. Sometimes the data of a problem is cut, as happened to the mind, and not the assumptions. Ockham’s razor must be interpreted as the emblem of prudence and must be used against what is not verifiable. Now I hold it in my hand and ask myself: is there any need to imagine that the world, the world of all observers, is independent of observers? This hypothesis does not change anything and surely reality does not increase its degree of reality. Here the razor advises to cut away a superfluous and elusive concept. One of the schoolmates, the worst in the class, suspects that the world, the world of nature, must precede the observer to give him a shape. Not at all. The allegory of music and musical score returns to my aid: the music of the mind is drawn on the score of nature but also nature, like every score, exists only in the light of the music. The last interrogation remains. Why does anyone postulate an external world? The world, when abstract and sheltered from observers, becomes an unknown that can be modelled at will. This ploy is a heresy of method. Yet the quintessence of mechanism

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is exactly occult science: something unknown, outside of us, would contain small factors that gradually determine everything. In the end, when the curtain falls, what I know is nothing more than a reflection of what I don’t know.

Bibliography

Bloom William and Fawcett Donald (1968): A Textbook of Histology.

Bosio Gian Franco (2016): Research Methodology and Mirror Neuron (translated title), Filosofia e Nuovi Sentieri.

De Ioanna Lucia (2018): Dialogue between Patrizia Valduga and Vittorio Gallese, https://parma.repubblica.itGalleseVittorio (2007): Mirror Neurons and Intentional Attunement. Journal of Psychoanalysis. Gopnik Alison (2007): Cells That Read Minds: What The Myth Of Mirror Neurons Gets Wrong About The Brain.

Kandel Eric (1994): Brain and Behavior; www.parodos.it. Lurija Aleksandr (1973): The Working Brain.

Pascolo Paolo (2008): Mirror Neurons in Area F5: Was There Experimental Evidence?, Medical journal volume 14 supplement 4, Trento. Pascolo Paolo (2009): Mirror Neuron Theory Tarnishes (translated title), The Gazzettino of Pordenone 2 August.

Pascolo Paolo (2009): On Mirror Neurons I Confirm My Doubts (translated title), The Gazzettino of Udine 25 September. Rizzolatti Giacomo and collaborators (1996): Premotor Cortex and the Recognition of Motor Action. Cognitive Brain Research.

Rizzolatti Giacomo and Sinigaglia Corrado (2006): I Know What You Are Doing. Raffaello Cortina Publisher, Milan.Rizzolatti Giacomo and Vozza Lisa (2008): In the Mind of Others: Mirror Neurons and Social Behavior (translated title). libreria universitaria.it.

Rizzolatti Giacomo (2009): Mirror Neurons Are Not a Deduction but an Empirical Fact (translated title), The Gazzettino of Udine 18 August.

Rizzolatti Giacomo (2016): Mirror with Multiple Dimensions (translated title), Il Sole 24 Ore.

Spaulding Shannon (2013): Mirror Neurons and Social Cognition. Mind and Language.

Taylor Johnmark (2016): In http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/ mirror-neurons-quarter-century-new-light-new-cracks.

Chapter 9

Censorship for the Ghost of Realism

Caravaggio: The cheaters

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Numerous essays have recently been published in leading journals, including by researchers from the University of Delft [Nature number 526] or researchers from the University of Basel [Science number 369], who definitively repudiate realism as a result of quantum mechanics. Realism is a dusty ghost and yet, like all hosts, it seeks to resurrect. I point out that the term “realism”, in these pages as in the essays mentioned, essentially refers to matter because the other realities, the god and the soul, are not in fashion today and in any case are extraneous to scientific discussion. My censorship starts from the current that proclaims itself as New Realism.

I have a dictionary that bears the name of “Melzi – Novissimus”. It is a worn and torn volume that lies in some ravine of the library. That “novissimus” still boasts a youth that has long since vanished but yet, ironically, the same adjective contains the proof of deception. It seems very similar the case of “Realism – Novissimus” which resonates in the European chronicles of philosophy so much that it deserves my little censorship. The New Realism recovers the hypothesis according to which there is a world that is isolated from the observer and is defined as the external world. The hypothesis comes from afar and lasts until the eighteenth century. Berkeley, at that time, formulates a decisive criticism: an object vanishes if it lacks the qualities that are inherent in perception and therefore the hypothetical world, characterized by extension and movement, is stripped and made unthinkable [1710 A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge]. The alternative to realism will have a sequel under the title of idealism which attests a return to the field of knowledge. This title is ambiguous and, by now, is unbearable. Not historically but logically what is a sort of idealism is precisely realism because the external world is our idea. What opposes realism is the truth of experience as phenomenalism and empiricism state also in their names.

Censorship for the Ghost of Realism

Ferraris inaugurates the New Realism [2012 Manifesto del Nuovo Realismo] and snatches an ovation from Umberto Eco: “Welcome back Reality!” It seems that the popular desire of an external and unknown being, repressed for too long, has suddenly exploded with the complacency of some professor in search of a limelight. We know that realism is discredited by the history of philosophy and we should keep silent about it forever. We know that Kant preserved the realist matrix but did not cross the border, despite the urgency of the cause and of the thing in itself, because the Copernican Revolution took into account the extinction of realism from the beginning. The young realism evokes a shadow and meanwhile a touch of rouge alleviates the embarrassment: do not call it “naive”, as it was, since it has now become exquisitely “critical”. A German professor, during a conference, intervenes in support of Ferraris. Some complain that his philosophical dynasty is mortified by revived realism. The professor, Gabriel, replies that culture in Germany has never been so well financed as it is today. We are doubtful that coins bring happiness but we are sure they do not provide intelligence. However it is evident that Gabriel’s hyperrealism, his conception, is not Ferraris’ realism at all. Gabriel, although repeating that reality does not depend on those who know it, escapes any kind of naturalism and judges even the witches of fairy tales to be real. He does not participate in the peculiar move of realism to the point that, rightly irritated by a platonic myth, he renews my censorship: “The myth of the cave introduces to the antiquated western metaphysics. We draw engravings on the rock imagining what is “out there” and calling it reality. Builders and gullible as dreamers who do not notice they are dreaming.” A passage from Hawking is the cue in thinking about realism: “It all starts with quantum mechanics and its most intuitive interpretation which implies two ideas that conflict with common sense. The first idea is that the world does not have an independent

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existence and is, therefore, a virtual plot that becomes reality within observation. This idea seems inevitable and yet I question it for a reason of simplicity: does a table vanish from the room when we leave and form when we return? ” [2010 The Grand Design]. So Hawking recognizes that external reality is compromised by quantum mechanics and yet gives in to disbelief: does my table disappear and reappear depending on my presence in the room? A famous phrase was uttered by Einstein: “the moon exists even when we don’t see it”. Bohr is of the opposite view and engages in a dispute. Einstein, somewhat misunderstanding, adds: “then I can be hit by a car because Heisenberg claims that the car doesn’t exist if I don’t see it”. The light now thins and darkens, albeit maintaining the same speed we measure at noon, while Einstein, so dear to us, walks away without saying goodbye and curses quantum mechanics. Einstein bets on realism, no less than Hawking, although the theory of relativity does not agree if it is true that it was excommunicated in the Soviet Encyclopedia, ”Encyclopedia – Novissima”, with the motivation that it was an idealistic doctrine. More credible is Merleau Ponty who writes that “Goedel, the famous logician, demonstrated that the theory of relativity denies realism and implies an idealistic philosophy and that it supports the thesis according to which becoming is an effect of our modality of perception” [1974 The Cosmology of the Twentieth Century]. Yet Einstein breaks the connection between the existence of the observed world and the existence of the observer and, meanwhile, Bohr defends the purity of quantum theory inviting to reject the axioms of natural substance and causality. Amich concludes: “Today we are all convinced that Einstein was wrong and Bohr was right. Einstein’s realism led to the introduction of hidden variables, in quantum theory, but experiments proved that he was mistaken in suggesting this idea.” [2005 Einstein and Bohr: The Debate]

Censorship for the Ghost of Realism

Berkeley had already reassured Hawking for his table and reassured Einstein about the moon: “The bodies that make up the world have no existence outside of a mind. I say that this table exists, the table on which I write, in the sense that I see and touch it and I would say that it exists even if I were outside my studio, meaning by what I could perceive it if I were in the studio or that someone else perceives it. What is said of the absolute existence of things, without relation to being perceived, is completely incomprehensible to me. … Someone will ask: what happens to the sun, the moon and the stars? What should we think of rivers and mountains and our bodies? Are they chimeras? I reply that we are not deprived of anything. Whatever we see, touch or anyhow understand, remains as safe and real as ever.” [1710 cited] Poincaré [1907 The End of Matter]: Here is the surprising discovery that is now being announced by physicists: matter does not exist. The attribute of matter lies in its mass. Mass is what remains constant anytime and everywhere and which persists when a chemical transformation has altered each quality of the object and seems to have made another. By demonstrating that the mass does not belong to it, that it represents a false luxury under which it cloaks itself, that this constant “par excellence” is susceptible to alteration, it can well be said that matter does not exist. … A reality that is independent of consciousness, which sees and hears it, is not possible. William James [1912 Essays in Radical Empiricism]: Strangest of all is that natural realism, so long decently buried, raises its head above the turf and finds glad hands outstretched from the most unlikely quarters to help it to its feet again. Paul Valéry [1914 Cahiers]: Philosophy falls into the trap of notions such as Reality or Cause which seem inevitable and inextricable. Many are unable to do without them and realize that there are darkness and contradictions. But notions are just tools. Discard them and go straight to your problem. You will always find that it can be expressed differently or that the problem becomes inconsistent.

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What Is Big Bang?

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First part Reality and the cosmos in the psyche Barbour [1999 The End of Time]: Reality is composed of the Nows and, that is, the instants of our life. There is no Time in the sense that the Nows do not have their own sequence and it is our brain that puts them in order and transforms them into a story. We ask ourselves: how and why does the Timeless World arise? The Nows are a totality that comes to light by virtue of what it is. Our World is one of Many Worlds formed by their Nows.

Philosophers and Scientists Hawking [1] warns that philosophy is dead and that science has taken its place to deal with questions about the “what” and “why” of reality. Perhaps, more simply, the figures of the philosopher and the scientist are intertwining. So at first I relied on Barbour who is both a philosopher and a scientist. His words contain the answers on the “what” and the “why” and introduce the principle of this essay: only the realm of the psyche, the immediate truth of our Nows, deserves a qualification of reality.

The Observer and the Cosmos without Becoming

The cosmos is the aspect of reality that concerns sensitive things. Hawking [2] explains how the arrow of time is linked to the thermodynamic arrow: the fact that the function of the brain leads to a major disorder defines the orientation of becoming because one necessarily remembers the states corresponding to a minor disorder. This role of the observer in positioning the arrow of time is tantamount to stating that the objectivity of things does not care about the arrowhead. It is tantamount to stating that the cosmos is devoid of becoming. There is no longer a before and an after and there is no longer a past and a future. There are no longer a departure and an arrival for the cosmos. This is, in

What Is Big Bang?

Barbour’s words, the End of Time and the presence of a Timeless Totality.

Big Bang and Big Crunch as the Extremes of a Line What are the Big Bang and the Big Crunch? We know that regressing or progressing over time brings us close to the extremes we see as the Big Bang and the Big Crunch. The current of time, however, is personal and negligible. So those states are no more an explosion or an implosion but correspond to the extremes of a directionless line. They are the North Pole and the South Pole in Hawking’s analogy [3]: a departure for those who move away and an arrival for those who approach.

The Closure of the Extremes according to Hawking

What is the significance of the idea that space-time forms a curved and borderless surface near the Big Bang and Big Crunch? What is the significance now that “before and after” is replaced by “here and there”? The significance is that the extremes of the cosmos are closed so that there is no “beyond there” and, as a consequence, the cosmos cannot undergo any action from outside. Hawking thus completes the analogy of the Big Bang and the Big Crunch with the North Pole and the South Pole.

The Formation of the Cosmos as a Totality

The cosmos is without becoming. This is important when talking about the birth of the cosmos because it is no longer attributable to a point but to totality and, moreover, it no longer indicates a passage since the cosmos does not “come to be” but “is”. Hence the right question: how can we justify coherently the formation of the cosmos as a whole? Hawking [4] reminds us that the cosmos is a quantum fluctuation with a balance of energy. The cosmos is a vibration within the circumference of zero.

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Second part Criticism of the cosmos as matter Barbour [1999 The End of Time]: Physicists and astronomers, such as Hawking, believe they live in a Cosmos in the making. They believe it started with the Big Bang under particular conditions. They believe that it proceeds from the past to the future and they believe that the past gives a reason for the future. All of this would be true if there was Time. The Cosmos, by removing Time, is a harmonic lattice: there is no longer an initial state just as there is no longer past and future.

The Cosmos as Matter with Absolute Space and Absolute Time Usually in our culture something “not given”, which precedes the “given” of the psyche, is inserted into the picture of reality. The typical case has it that the cosmos, with the name of matter, is independent of observation. Matter brings with it space and time in the guise of an empty container to house things. The space and time of a body are obviously a variable of the observer and yet, absurdly, one of the values should be privileged as real. It matters little and what matters is a corollary: the cosmos is in the making, it owns a becoming, and therefore it involves a point of departure and a point of arrival.

The Myth of the Big Bang as the Birth of Everything

The Big Bang is one of the extremes of a directionless line. Why do cosmologists speak of the Big Bang as the point of origin of reality? Matter implies that its birth is the birth of everything and implies, carrying with it the current of time, that this birth takes place at the moment of the Big Bang. This perspective, which

What Is Big Bang?

already transpires from the use of the term “universe” instead of “cosmos”, includes the problem of creation within the myth of the Big Bang.

Contradictions of Hawking

Hawking [2], in the already-discussed passage that links the arrow of time to the observer, instantly excludes the Big Bang from the theme of origin. But does he himself take it into account? Hawking [3–5] seems to set aside time by representing the cosmos as a totality and is on the verge of setting aside matter because it is disproved by quantum theory. Soon, however, he reveals his disbelief: does an object exist or does it not exist depending on whether I look at it or not? Hawking keeps the trust in the Big Bang myth since the habit is stronger than science. Thus he himself testifies that the death of philosophy would condemn us to blindness even when we are dazzled by the evidence.

Creation from Nothing?

Creation from nothing satisfies the ideal of a world “without why”. The simple scientist is sure that the transition from non-being to being occurs near the Big Bang and is confident that Hawking can explain it, safeguarding the self-sufficiency of physics, as creation from nothing. Hawking [6] postulates a continuous generation from nothing of a multitude of worlds thanks to the fact that energy expenditure is nil. But there is an obstacle. Regge [7] points out that such a creation is located in a quantum vacuum and requires a field theory that is anything but nothing. Shortly: arguing that the cosmos unfolds according to its laws presupposes that there are its laws. This obstacle is posed by ourselves through the decision of transferring reality out of its frame. The theme is recurrent in the history of philosophy because any extrapolation of being from the psychic matrix stumbles on the first step. Creation from nothing is an impossibility while we continually experience creation in the psyche.

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From the Big Bang to Black Holes The title of this section is the Italian title of A Brief History of Time. Hawking’s research takes a cue from the affinity of the Big Bang with black holes concluding that they too are without borders and, despite the name, dissipate energy up to complete evaporation. Hawking comes to define the Big Bang as a black hole in reverse meaning them respectively like a dawn and dusk of time. Thus the Big Bang corresponds to a white hole (which so far is only a mathematical entity) whereas the Big Crunch corresponds to a black hole. The initiative to remove absolute time, in such a context, unlike Hawking would lead to the overlap of the four terms by including black holes and white holes in the coincidence between Big Bang and Big Crunch. I repeat that the discourse does not pertain to the birth of the cosmos, a Timeless Totality, but is rather a clarification on its extremes: the Big Bang, the extreme we know, can be interpreted by the observer both as a departure from nothing like a white hole and as an arrival in nothing like a black hole.

The Properties of Matter at the Bottom of the Big Bang

Matter, at the basis of the myth of the Big Bang, was invented to be the cause of what we observe. This obliges matter to have a fund and, for this reason, some pilgrims are walking among small and invisible particles that disintegrate and force one to descend further down. At the finish line there should be the atom and its properties that govern the cosmos. Searching for indivisible elements in space is a desperate feat and, furthermore, those pilgrims undertake a similar mission over time. Necessarily in the Big Bang there are already the properties that are there now. But the backward path never reaches the seat, tighter and tighter, where the cosmos is grouped and from which the cosmos moves. And there, finally, we are led to imagine that matter and properties, historically tending towards nihilism, are the fruit of the miracle of a divinity.

What Is Big Bang?

The Utopia of a Cosmos without Birth The idea of temporality of the cosmos cultivated the naive expectation that the cosmos was eternal, that is “without birth”, to avoid the embarrassment of a chain hanging from nowhere. There are those who recycle the same adjective assuming that a quantum fluctuation, such as the cosmos, is a member of a field of fluctuations and possibly are membranes that sometimes touch and trigger a Big Bang. Hawking [3] has prohibited these deductions by refusing the presence of an actor, or gods or worlds, beyond the borders. In any case the temporality of the cosmos is now unacceptable and, in the absence of time, the discourse on the origin does not have to do with a plurality of worlds just as it does not have to do with the Big Bang. The Many Worlds, cited by Hawking [6] as by Barbour, would only benefit the argument evoked by Hawking: how come the physical laws are perfectly calculated to favour our life?

References

1. According to Hawking [2010 The Grand Design – 1988 A Brief History of Time]: Philosophy died because it did not keep up with recent developments in physics and thus, in the search for truth, scientists have taken over. They are busy describing “what” the universe is and, for now, they neglect the typically philosophical question of “why” it exists. But a complete theory would permit everyone to understand that “why”.

2. According to Hawking [1988]: What is the connection between the thermodynamic arrow, the direction in which disorder grows, and the psychological arrow of time? The second law of thermodynamics tells us that an ordered system tends to increase its disorder because disordered states are more numerous than ordered ones. But suppose God has decided that the universe concludes in a condition of order so that the thermodynamic arrow is turned and the fragments of a cup jump off the floor to assemble the cup on the table. It can be shown that men, even in this case, would remember what we remember. The psychological arrow would be oriented backwards remembering the events of the future and remembering, when the cup breaks, having seen it intact on the table. This is

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easily understood by examining the arrow of time for computers. The example is an abacus: it consists of some wands and on each wand a perforated ball slides which stands in one of two positions. The balls in the abacus are distributed randomly until, by recording the information, each ball will place on the right or left side of each wand. However, to pass from the disordered state to the ordered state, some energy is spent corresponding to the effort to move the balls of the abacus. This energy is dissipated in the form of heat and adds to the disorder of the environment. The brain, as a computer, works by producing a quantity of disorder that is greater than the quantity of order. Therefore the perception of time is determined in the brain by the fact that we must remember things in the direction in which the disorder increases. This makes very ordinary the second law of thermodynamics: disorder increases over time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases.

3. According to Hawking [1989 At the Edge of Space-Time]: On the basis of quantum theory, of its principle of indeterminacy, at the beginning the distinction between space and time fades so that we need to talk about space in four dimensions. Space, unlike time, seems to have no boundary. Consequently space-time, understood as space in four dimensions, curves to draw a surface without boundary. Time ceases to be defined as is the north direction at the North Pole of the Earth. Wondering what happened before the Big Bang is like wondering what is to the north of the North Pole. The philosophical implications would be important. The universe does not require boundary conditions because it has no boundary. It is autonomous and is not affected by external influences. It was not created and will not be destroyed. One could only say that “it is”.

4. According to Hawking [1988]: The universe, by quantum theory, is born as a fluctuation that derives the particle-antiparticle pairs from energy. The things we see are composed of the particles that were in excess, due to the asymmetries, and did not annihilate with the antiparticles. But where did so much energy come from? The answer is that the energy of the universe is zero. Matter is represented by positive energy while the gravitational field has, in some way, negative energy. Gravitational energy exactly neutralizes positive energy. 5. According to Hawking [2010]: Quantum mechanics implies the idea, in conflict with common sense, that the world does not have an

What Is Big Bang?

independent existence and is, therefore, a virtual plot that becomes reality within observation. This idea seems inevitable and yet I question it for a reason of simplicity: does a table vanish from the room when we leave and form when we return?

6. According to Hawking [1988–2010]: God cannot influence the initial conditions of the universe, if there is no boundary, but he can choose its laws. Few systems of laws, if not just one, contemplate the evolution of beings like men. This raises a serious query. How come the laws of the universe seem to be regulated on purpose to allow our life? Do we need a creator’s project or does science propose another explanation? Quantum mechanics opens to the notion of the Many Worlds by suggesting that the world does not have a single story but, like subatomic particles, has all the stories enclosed in the spectrum of probabilities. These worlds, whether virtual or real, facilitates an answer because in the multitude it can happen more easily to meet the laws that make for us. One last query remains. Why are there those worlds instead of nothing? What infuses life into a system of equations? Should a creator be recruited again? Science offers a solution: there is no restriction on spontaneous creation precisely because the positive energy of matter is cancelled by the negative energy of gravitation. Every world arises from nothing, in accordance with its own laws, without God and without why. 7. According to Regge [1999 L’universo senza fine]: The universe, by quantum theory, is born as a fluctuation of a primordial vacuum. But is this a creation from nothing? Quantum vacuum and fluctuations presuppose a field theory and, that is, they presuppose a complex structure that cannot be equated with nothing.

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The World Is Crazy Einstein said that if quantum mechanics were correct then the world would be crazy. Einstein was right: the world is crazy.

Redon: (left) The eye like a bizarre balloon mounts toward infinity (right) The dice

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Capra [1975 The Tao of Physics]: The scenario of the world for Newton was an immobile and immutable space and a separate dimension, called time, which was also absolute. The world was made up of material elements, created by God, which move by the action of forces. The cosmic machine was considered causal and determined. It was believed that the world could be described without taking into account the observer. Two separate developments, the theory of relativity and atomic physics, broke all the foundations of this conception. Wikipedia – theory of relativity: The theories of relativity disprove all absolutist assumptions. The spatial and temporal intervals are not valid for anyone but depend on the observer. The simultaneity and succession of events are variable. Not only are measurements relative, since they depend on the motion of the person making them, but the entire structure of space-time is linked to the distribution of matter. Space is curved to different degrees and time flows differently at points in the cosmos. Wikipedia – quantum mechanics: Quantum mechanics proposes a formula, the “wave function”, within which the course of events branches out into a multiplicity of states. Each state is associated with a precise probability of appearing in the observation until the observer’s intervention selects one of them. … Then Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” reveals that the maximum information we can obtain from observation stops at an intrinsic and constant threshold. Some values of a particle are inextricable, such as position and velocity, so the better we define one the more we leave the other imprecise. … The experiments are amazing: the collapse of the wave into a particle is induced even by the simple threat of observation; the wave can be restored by retracting the collapse and the measurements already made are cancelled; a particle can not only modify its past but it can also anticipate its future; a pair of particles with a common origin can maintain a connection and instantly affect each other regardless of distance; a particle can be “teleported” to another place; et cetera. … These discoveries decree the end of objective and materialistic “realism”

The World Is Crazy

in favour of an “empiricism” in which objects exist in an ideal form until the perception of a conscious subject makes them real. Capra: The quantum principle destroys the concept of the world as “something that is out of here”. The solid objects of classical physics dissolve in a probability distribution. ... The whole is generated by itself and must be understood through its coherence. The existence of consciousness, together with the other aspects, is necessary for the coherence of the whole confirming what quantum theory teaches us: the observer cannot be separated from the observed phenomenon. What we observe is a creation of the mind that measures and classifies. … This philosophy is close to the oriental view. The connection of the universe is known in Buddhism as “interpenetration”. Understanding his own consciousness is the starting point of mystics: the world we live in arises from a state of consciousness and dissolves if this state is transcended.

Modern Physics and Other Sciences Realism emerged at the dawn of philosophy. What manifests itself in observation should exist previously, as potentiality, and the set of potentialities should be inherent in a reality that does not manifest itself. This formulation encompasses the concepts of substance and cause. The progress of realism elects the natural world as the sole substance and sole cause and, inevitably, commissions it to give life to the observer. Some sectors of science retain this pattern which appeared to be successful in the 1700s. It happens among scholars of the brain, especially physiologists, who in their profession are inclined to feel in contact with the germ of life. Dedicating himself to modern physics, to the physics of the twentieth century, allows a philosopher to breathe healthier air and to ascertain a confluence with his guidelines. Its exponents, new and fine philosophers, are careful not to consign living beings to the mechanics of natural substance. Even the mythology of God, of the divinity making himself a person, constitutes a more plausible mentality than the mechanism because, albeit naive too, it is respectful of the “ƛòɣos”.

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People like Us, Who Believe in Physics, Know that the Distinction between Past, Present and Future Is Only a Stubbornly Persistent Illusion I’m recalculating, so to speak, the equations of relativity to fully penetrate these words of Einstein. Relativity defines the cosmos as a network of instants. Each observer traces his own line of present in the network and thus, among other things, an observer who was distant would have a line of present that crosses, depending on whether he moves farther or closer, our past and our future. What I call past and future claims the same value as the present because it is the present of another observer. In conclusion: past and future are individual variables and the cosmos is exempt from becoming. Why does the passing of instants in our life appear as a one-way that corresponds to the overall growth of disorder? Everyone knows that natural laws are valid in both directions. Everyone knows that the power of disorder, the greater probability of disordered states, is not so inflexible as to prevent the assembly of highly improbable structures like a poet’s head. Indeed the cosmos presents this arrangement because the spectator’s brain advances towards disorder and leaves order behind. We cannot exclude that an extraterrestrial, usurping what was a boast of the divinity, has a constitution such as to contemplate all the instants.

The Eye and the Dice

I’m reading the article Quantum Philosophy by Horgan, dated 1992, where the most significant experiments are accurately reported and I’m updating it with the report of the latest developments. The consequent philosophy preserves the originality of the observation, evoking Berkeley’s “esse est percipi”, and recognizes that the world is delineated with the lightness of “sine causa”. How are the concepts of substance and cause dismissed? We already knew that the qualities of bodies, including space and time, depend on the observer. The indeterminacy, the uncertainty that precedes observation, adds that the observer is also involved in the residual fabric of objectivity and warns once again that

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the external world cannot exist. It delivers another and more important message. A movement, as indeterminate, cannot be referred to the properties of the external world and in general it cannot be referred to a cause. Do these experiments allow us to assert that “the world is crazy”? Talking about a counter-intuitive vision is improper because what is called intuitive is just an inheritance of prejudices. Einstein is conditioned by tradition and therefore, as regards the eye of the observer and the dice of probability, he contrasted his sayings such as “the moon exists even when we don’t see it” and “God does not play dice with the universe”. Einstein requires necessity instead of probability in the collapse of the wave function. The explanation through hidden variables has failed and even the encounter with the brain is irrelevant since the threat of observation is sufficient for collapse. Then Einstein looked for contradictions within the theory and found the paradox named EPR (Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen): the remote connection between particles is an implication that would really be incompatible with any kind of realism. Today the non-locality is confirmed precisely in the terms in which Einstein judged it impossible. The main reason for incredulity at experimental results is due to something absolute in space and time, to the persistent figuration of a container, which survive in the space-time of relativity and even in the ordinary “background” of quantum mechanics. Bohm, protagonist of the following quotation, employs the principles of holography to dispel the paradox of nonlocality through a zeroing of space. Such an approach sees the cancellation of space and time as a prelude to a unified physical theory, that is, to an integration of relativity into the “background independent” coordinates of quantum gravity. Richard Boylan [2009 Universe Is an Illusion]: The most important discovery of the century: particles are able to communicate instantly with each other regardless of distance as if each particle knew what all the others are doing. Bohm argues that the concept of non-locality has turned the universe into a ghost requiring the unifying principle of consciousness. … A hologram, the hologram of a rose, in addition to three-dimensionality has the characteristic

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of containing in each fragment a smaller but complete version of the image of the rose. The hologram differs from the typical approach of Western science, the dissection and study of the single parts, and opens a way to the understanding of non-locality. Bohm is convinced that the separation of particles is an illusion and simplifies it with an example: imagine an aquarium that contains a fish and is visible through two cameras in front and side positions. On the screens we will see two fish but we will realize that there is a link between them, when one looks in front the other looks to the side, and we might believe that the two fish communicate instantly and mysteriously. Similarly subatomic particles are aspects of a deeper unity that is as indivisible as our rose. It follows, since physical reality is made up of these images, that the universe is a hologram and appears as a network in which everything interpenetrates everything. The universe is a sort of warehouse of everything that exists and is created by a collective unconscious not locally connected. Raghavendra Rao [1966 Experimental Parapsychology]: Parapsychological phenomena are indicated by the Greek letter Ψ (psi): these are extrasensory perception, which includes telepathy and clairvoyance, and psycho-kinesis. … Quantum theory provokes a reversal in the world view because it refers everything to the realm of the observers and rejects the old concept of material world and of cause. Without subject and object, without separating a mental world inside and a physical world outside, the events of psycho-kinesis become less strange. They are psychophysical events that occur in the contact between the things in the environment and the thoughts of those who live there. … The mind is a group of functions and the “psi” indicates the addition of new functions. These phenomena take place in the physical world and it is evident that they are coextensive with the physical world and that one day they will be explained in the manner of physical phenomena. Our conclusion is disappointing for those who look at the “psi” as the awakening of the Cartesian dualism of mind and body. The dualist does not understand that explaining the mental act by means of mental substance leads astray how to explain it by means of mechanical substance.

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Arthur Osborn [1961 Future Is Now]: That “out here” there is a world is believed by common sense and by many scientists. But the philosopher does not believe it. Matter is unacceptable. It is an unknown abstraction which separates sensory impressions and the alleged source of them. ... Let us analyse the problem of precognition. How can what we call precognition be related to the physical event? We have broken down the wall, bringing sensory data back into consciousness, and we have assigned a psychological status also to the physical episode. At this point the problem, knowing that the world is a timeless wholeness, concerns how we become aware of a future that already exists. The modern revision of the concept of cause, which must be conceived in terms of “interlocking pieces” of a figure, could allow us to be guided unconsciously towards other parts of the figure.

The Talent of the Pythia Quantum mechanics, involving the observer in nature, supports the physiology’s announcement that the mind moves along with the brain. This concomitance entails the obligation of a natural signal in the course of perception and action in order not to undermine the conviction that the mind is coextensive. Yet the methods of communication we call paranormal, without obtaining a diploma of authenticity, seem less unacceptable when considered in parallel with the quantum description of nature. I will manipulate a motto of brain mythology: what can the mind and the brain, billions of neurons and synapses, do if the vagaries of an atom wreaks havoc in a laboratory session? What I define “brain”, to indicate the place of proximity to the mind, partially overlaps the anatomical mass while it could extend into the natural territory by virtue of the new licenses. This resonance would allow to influence the environment through emotions, to receive the thoughts of others, to perceive what looks like yesterday or what looks like tomorrow. Clairvoyance, in particular, converges with the feats of atoms in the quantum model such as capsizing past and future and interfering remotely in space-time. The excursion beyond the usual barriers continues in the next section with a discussion on the journey between the past and

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the future together with the body. I insert, as a link, a report that covers both sections coming to include the Many Worlds and the philosophy of Wigner and Schrödinger.

Wikipedia – interpretations of quantum mechanics: Quantum mechanics informs us that objectivity spreads like a wave of probability until the observer, a conscious being, stabilizes the values and makes events inseparable from himself. Von Neumann and Wigner, on this basis, decree that the world of physics is transformed from possibility in the realm of consciousness. How does the choice of the wave value happen? Wigner, bringing us back to the interactionism that seems outdated to most, supposes that it is consciousness that acts. The alternative is that the probability wave has to channel itself into a certain value to access consciousness. But why is that value selected? Everett and Wheeler nullify the issue by denying the selection of the wave value and proposing the theory of Many Worlds. They speculate, when a measurement forces a particle to make a choice such as going left or right between two slits, that the universe splits in two: in one the particle goes to the right and in the other it goes to the left. This theory, long considered more fantastic than scientific, is reformulated in the correct form by some physicists who define it “Many Stories” to emphasize that it is indeed a question of possibilities. Even Wigner’s vision, since it presupposes the conscious observer, can accept the Many Worlds by presenting them as a virtual network where every road, in addition to the one travelled by the observer, remains viable. … A corollary of Wigner is that consciousness, when communicating with nature, overcomes distance and time. This is confirmed by the fact that the observation of one of two particles, previously connected and now separated, also alters the other as if there were an algorithm at the bottom of conscious life for which the operation on a term immediately affects the whole. This paradox, by violating the locality and influencing the past, predisposes to psycho-kinesis, telepathy and precognition. … Schrödinger, who agrees that the mind is not isolated from the world and does not stay in the skull box, states that there is only one Mind. This conclusion is based on the belief in modern physics that there is no time flowing outside of us. Wigner and Schrödinger thus approach the “Unus Mundus” of Jung.

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Deutch [1993 The Quantum Physics of Time Travel]: A true journey into the past involves the possibility of changing it. It is obvious that if we change something, if we make it different from how we remember it was, then we are in another world. The difficulties derive from the mistaken belief that there is the passage of time. Changing the past is no different than how we change the future when we make a choice. A journey into the past would be set in worlds connected to each other and this corresponds to what quantum theory predicts with its parallel worlds.

Pilgrimages through Time By travel into the past or into the future, I mean the execution of a leap in the usual course of events, where the discrepancy in the aging of peers is also usual, so as to visit what has been or what will be. Any life is not a journey to the future, even if it is, because the definition requires the same leap that is inevitable in the case of a journey to the past. Here, for simplicity, I will limit myself to ascertaining whether it is legitimate for the past to become the present. The rules of physics are propitious, no matter if current technology is not up to par, and they even promise to reach, living normally, what has already happened by moving along a geodesic line. The transition from theory to practice again leads to quantum mechanics where the inversion between the past and the future is documented: a neutron reappears after being annihilated and a packet of waves comes out of a lamp before entering. Negative time would also occur through particles, for now hypothetical, called tachyons. We know that time slows down as I approach the speed of light and the tachyons, exceeding this speed, would have the effect of reversing the sequence and crediting the gossip that “there was a young lady named Bright – who would travel much faster than light – she started one day – in a relative way – and came back the previous night”. The cosmos is a book already written. The distinction between the inviolable past and the aleatory future is valid for me as I proceed in reading but, verily, I have in my hand a volume that levels past and future and that I can browse at will. Many scholars including Hawking, thinking the pages are written as I read them,

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prohibit pilgrimages to the past by invoking a funerary paradox: I step back and kill my grandfather when he was little (the grandfather and not the father so as not to displease Oedipus) and consequently I cannot be born and I cannot kill my grandfather. They therefore institute a “cosmic censorship” without specifying what it is: maybe my grandmother strangling me, with the ostrich boa, to keep my grandfather healthy? Yet the metaphor of the book allows us to understand how every acting in the past is congruent with the present. Now I go on in the novel, I get to page 50, and a foray into the past is a return| to a point on page 20 where I am necessarily complicit in composing the next plot. Lastly there would be trips into the past by reversing time according to quantum laws. Someone replies that reversing the events is equivalent to the absurdity of seeing the dead tiger first and then the hunter who shoots. But there is no longer the precept of cause to render the sequence untouchable. Even lady Bright will get used to later verifying which lucky star the tiger died for and, in the meantime, will enjoy the certainty of not being mauled.

The Logical Limit of Living Copies

A journey into the past implies the possibility of meeting a younger copy of me. This meeting is not illogical as long as the memory line remains intact: as a young man I chat with an old man and subsequently as an old man I go back to the past, I go back to that encounter, and I remember that the interlocutor, incognizant of this, is me as a young man. So I do not exclude that there are copies of me that I call, since they meet, “contemporary” or “simultaneous”. Now I consider a journey into the future where, on the contrary, there may not be an older copy of me. But if I met such a copy, who had carried on the family ménage during my departure, I would break the route of my life and establish a fork in chronicle and memory. These copies, which I call “alternatives”, are a logical limit to travel in space-time and, in the sequel, I will not accept their existence. In short: I will die by drowning in the sea or by freezing on the mountainous peak, in my life, but I will not be able to suffer both agonies.

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Personal Identity in Teleportation Quantum theory states that electrons are identical and, thence, we can say that the same electron is teleported and relocated elsewhere. This corresponds, speaking of human teleportation, to the possibility of scanning the data on me and projecting a copy in any place. The original becomes ashes and the copy will be identical to me in the body, brain and thoughts. The question is vital: am I still in the copy? Someone pragmatically notices that in his eyes we are the same person. Someone else argues that, thinking this way, homozygous twins would also be a unique person. I too agree the figures are identical on the outside, as are the electrons, but the personal identity is doubled in the maze of psychology in a copy that I call “twin”. My motivations are founded on the only limit I recognize and, that is, on the illogicality of alternative copies of the ego. The original of me, dispersed in ashes due to the treatment, would continue to exist like the electron: here then, unless the copy is a simple twin, I could sink into the “mare nostrum” and in the meantime be frozen on the summit of Everest.

Many Worlds and Parallel Worlds

There is a reason, only one but urgent, to theorize the existence of Many Worlds and, that is, the fact that the cosmos is compliant with meticulous and unavoidable constants to accommodate living beings like us. The only explanation, if we rule out the intercession of providence, is that there are so many worlds to exhaust the entire scale of constants. Heavenly providence or the abundance of worlds, devoid of any proof, are numbers in roulette. I bet a dime on the Many Worlds because it seems like a more elegant solution. In addition to the Many Worlds there is another group of worlds which are related to quantum mechanics and are called Parallel Worlds. We know that the collapse of the wave function provides the observer with one of the probabilities by revoking the remainder but, according to this theory, all values persist and branch into a variety of worlds. The Parallel Worlds, which

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share the cosmological constants unlike the Many Worlds, also arise continuously and profusely. This bet is smart and yet I recommend saving the second dime pending clarification on the copies of us implied in this multiplication. The Many Worlds and Parallel Worlds enrich our library of novels, an infinite quantity squared, and the parallel novels share some of the early chapters. But, if they exist, in what sense do those worlds exist? Realism requires them to cluster out there with an inevitable impact on the regularity of our world. The problem worsens in the case of Parallel Worlds because they sprout from us and mysteriously fly away to place themselves in an external and common space. The realistic interpretation of the worlds is not credible. Quantum principles suggest that every world, starting with ours, is a virtual story that will become real within observation. This virtuality is distinguished by the nickname of Many Stories. However I am still reluctant to bet on any world in parallel as soon as I reflect, for example, about the worlds that proliferate throughout my life: they, conceived in a realistic sense, collide with the logical limit of alternative copies of me or become tangled in a myriad of twin copies of me and on the other hand, conceived in a virtual sense, represent possibilities for conscious life that are lost precisely to prevent alternative copies. These circumstances deserve further and broader investigation.

Change the Present by Deviating into Parallel Worlds?

Who is not attracted to the desire to remedy a sin or to save a loved one who has left us? Some scholars believe that Parallel Worlds are an opportunity to relive the past and change events. I also examine this surmise and do so, from my perspective, in reference to the Many Stories in which those worlds are adjacent and accessible. Let’s get to the point. I travel back to the day when one of my grandparents, Giuseppe or Maurizio, got married. Here the entrance is open to stories that diverge from the story I know and which supply, in each path, a variant of me in the form of a fictitious copy that can leave me its place. I am finally killing a grandfather, softly and lovingly, without worrying about not being born because I was born in a world where I did not kill him.

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Is everything solved? Pity that I am faced with a double reality: the road I come from remains real and, moreover, I make real the new road and its protagonists who were virtual before. There is a world where I am a meek Christian and there is a world where I am in jail. There is a world where the grandpa is alive and there is a world where the grandpa died for the fault of a nephew he does not have. There is a world with a happy mom and grandma but there is also a world where these ladies are in disgrace. I am faced, in violation of my logical imperative, with an alternative copy of people. I have fallen into the same condition of realism that from the beginning fantasized about a crowd of alternative copies and, besides, I have precluded the gimmick of considering them as twin copies because I am myself in the whole adventure. I rely on the metaphor of the library. There is not a series of novels in each of which a company of characters repeats the initial behaviour and then advances towards different destinies. There is not a novel in which a company of characters explores the series of possible endings. Nor is there a character who appreciates outings and participates in a variety of stories. There is rather a guy who breaks into the back of the same story, goes from page 50 to page 20, to insert a note that upsets the situation and makes what is written below meaningless. I doubt that any publisher, even the most benevolent, would attribute to this tome the prestige of the press.

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Chapter 12

Consciousness of Machines and Upload of Our Mind How to obtain a consciousness in automata and how to obtain a life without pain and without end by copying my brain data into an automaton

Xavier Escala: Man struggles with Death

Atlas and the Globe: The Summits of Philosophy Giuseppe Roncoroni Copyright © 2023 Jenny Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. ISBN 978-981-4968-68-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-43294-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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Seneca [Letters to Lucilius]: What is the use of delaying what cannot be avoided? Is the gladiator killed in the evening, at the end of the show, happier than the one who fell at noon? Happy is he who makes good use of the little time that was allotted to him. Marcus Aurelius [To Myself]: Think about this. What was at the origin of your composition is the same that in this instant is the reason for dissolution. Leave, therefore, and your heart be serene and propitious: rest assured that serene and propitious is also the one who dissolves.

The Fight against Death Most men hold themselves in high regard and care about staying alive. Someone is intent on interrupting the decay of the organism, on counterfeiting the genes that preside over old age and death, but leaves the threat of disease and accidents intact. Someone is engaged in a Frankenstein Project to revitalize the corpses. The criterion of resurrection is uncertain, like that of death, so we do not think that whoever awakens in the sarcophagus is resurrected by himself in imitation of Christ. That project, however, is aimed at those who have died in earnest, as Lazarus was believed, and seeks a method to restore vital processes. To simplify the procedure, since the body is a complicated configuration, we focus only on the part that is connected to the mind. Thus, by torturing dogs and monkeys, we are waiting to install the head of a sick person in a healthy body (a newly executed criminal) or in a device that feeds the brain. Don’t forget that Walt Disney’s head is at the mercy of a freezer and is eager to unleash new comics. Hallelujah: there is a surprise for Donald Duck’s dad. Immediately send to the devil the architect who supports or restores a house that is almost in ruins. Our culture, let’s call it that, is ready to replace longevity with immortality through the technique of the transfer, or more precisely the upload, of the mind.

Consciousness of Machines and Upload of Our Mind

Wikipedia – transfer of the mind: Neuroscientists are convinced that the functions performed by the mind, including consciousness, are due to purely physical processes taking place in the brain. Therefore they foresee that machines will be able to think and reach consciousness. This vision underlies, at the same time, the projects of brain emulation and mind transfer. Such a procedure is considered the final point in a strong approach to artificial intelligence and is shared by eminent scientists. … The transfer of the mind consists in bringing our mind and consciousness back from a brain to a non-biological substrate. The scanning and mapping of the brain allows such a faithful transcription of its state in a computer system (or at least of information that is indispensable) that the mind would behave in the same way as that inherent in the original brain. ... Implicit in the transfer of the mind is the condition of preserving the personal identity. Precisely for this reason it is considered a possibility of extending life and would have as a consequence the immortality of man. Since only destructive techniques can be employed to obtain a copy of the brain, at least for now, one must die before resurrecting and living forever. ... The simulated mind could reside in a computer that is grafted, replacing the brain, inside a biological body or a humanoid robot. But it could also be part of the virtual reality of the simulated world and could be supported by an anatomical model that simulates the body. This eventuality opens up too many advantages and many conjectures that are explored in science fiction stories.

From Artificial Intelligence to the Transfer of the Mind Artificial intelligence prophesies the advent of an automaton that will imitate man’s behaviour in such a precise way as not to distinguish one from the other. Then the automaton must be equated with man since the heartbeat of conscience is always reserved. But the disciples of artificial intelligence reject all doubts: one day a machine will open its eyes and experience the thrill of existing that humans experience.

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This position acts as a bridge to the transfer of the mind. I take a closer look at the steps of such a promise: to analyse my brain and upload the information to a computer; implant the computer in another body or in an automaton; detach myself from the real world and take me into a world that is created by programmers and is as personal as a dream; connect the virtual world with other minds and transform it into a common world where I can show off an avatar of my taste forgetting the body on the sofa at home; renounce any contact with the real world and stay in the virtual dimension or alone or in company; amplify subjective time at will so that an instant, an instant of the starting world, is experienced as eternity. Here is the wonder: I will live forever in a place that is similar to the paradise of religions. I add two notes. The first is that we, in the opinion of the avant-gardes, would most likely live in a program that unites us and perhaps, as happens in the tale of Matrix, it is precisely the automata that graft a program into the brain while they abuse our bodies. The second note is theoretical. Philosophy and quantum mechanics confirm that there is no material support eligible as real, while the rest would be virtual, and that what I define as real is only the common landscape of observers. This means that the last stage of the transfer of the mind, accomplished in all living beings, replaces the world that I used to call real (now expired in a simulacrum) with a world that I call just as legitimately real. Wikipedia – comments about the upload of the mind: Major scientific journals remain sceptical about the possibility of upload of the mind. … First we have to consider a philosophical problem and it is the ancient problem of the mind-brain relationship. A choice must be made which surprisingly is a choice of faith. The transfer of the mind espouses the reductionist hypothesis that every characteristic of the mind is nothing more than the result of the electrical activity of the brain. On the other hand, there are the scientists who believe that the brain is not enough to explain the mind but there must be something supernatural. … A question, which would arise later, is suggested in the movie Transcendence: would the mind that we transfer to a computer, that conscious

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mind, be really our mind or simply a copy of our memories and our personality? It should be noted that the transfer of the mind involves the possibility of obtaining multiple copies of an original consciousness, uploading it to multiple devices, and thus an individual could live in many places and do more things at once. Don’t you think, with respect to the question of the movie, that they are different lives and different identities that branch off from a common group of memories?

The Criticism of Materialism: The Consciousness of the Automatons and the Transfer of the Mind Are Not Allowed Materialism requires that every function of the mind, including consciousness and personal identity, derive from the physics of the brain. It is not important that the mind coincides with the brain or is considered something more, an epiphenomenon or an emergent property, because it is still linked to the information that is contained in the brain. I imagine the brain as a sphere of metal that emits a glow, which I call mind, and certainly by building an identical sphere I will produce, whatever it is, an identical glow. Materialism is ready to obtain consciousness in automata and, by copying brain data, to transfer the mind into an automaton. I personally disagree just as those who have a supernatural vision of conscious life disagree. This essay, however, is not inspired by the metaphysics of faith but by the aversion to the metaphysics of nature. The metaphysics of nature, the myth of a world that excludes the observer, was already dead in the context of philosophy but dies again in the context of quantum mechanics. The mind and consciousness are served by biology as much as a locomotive is served by the railway track and, with this premise, we come to deny that biology is reducible to mechanics and that an artefact can replace the organization of the brain and support the expression of the conscious life. The science fiction of immortality collapses as the consciousness of automata was a condition for the transfer of the mind. Marginally I add the paradox according to which there

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would be alternative copies that reproduce my identity, and even potentially cohabiting in the same room, since the procedure can be repeated. I point out that the transfer of the mind is similar to teleportation, both aspire to regenerate a person starting from the body, but my opposition in this case is rooted in the essence of the mind long before than on the paradox of copies.

Florenskji [The Art of Educating]: A machine-made thing fades to a dead and insolent pallor. It appears flat and completely understandable. Instead the world is permeated by life, which organizes it, and is animated by the radiance of depth. In a shell, in a stone smoothed by the waves of the sea, in the very fine veins of a leaf the mysterious sparkle of life is always perceived.

Chapter 13

To Die Will Be an Awfully Big Adventure! … so exclaims Peter Pan

Bosch: Ascent of the blessed in Visions of Hereafter

Atlas and the Globe: The Summits of Philosophy Giuseppe Roncoroni Copyright © 2023 Jenny Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. ISBN 978-981-4968-68-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-43294-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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Visions at the hour of death receive a plurality of interpretations. Some scientists, including doctors who are in contact with the accounts, are convinced that near-death visions confirm the belief of a purely spiritual soul. Others scientists renew the attempt to reduce conscious life to neurophysiology. My examination, standing away from both of these opinions, shows how near-death visions are close to the sphere of dream and it shows how the impression that they are real is not a peculiar and credible connotation. At the same time it places near-death visions in a philosophical horizon according to which they contain a revelation of the principles of psychic reality.

Musil [1962 – The Man without Qualities]: We have conquered reality but we have lost the dream.

Vito Ferri e Florinda Romanazzi [1997 – Visions and Emotions in Altered States of Consciousness in the Proximity of Death]: The modified state of consciousness we speak of has been called the “near-death experience”. ... A certain percentage of those who have been on the verge of dying, or even have been declared clinically dead, report having been the protagonists of a “journey to the afterlife” or to the “world of the dead” which bears many similarities to that described in the Divine Comedy or to those described in both the Egyptian and Tibetan Book of the Dead. They reported to have “come out of the body” and observed it from the outside; to have crossed a dark passage and arrived in a realm of light and love where they would meet dead relatives or friends and often a “Being of Light”; to have reviewed the whole existence, in some cases even the future one, and to have suddenly understood the true meaning of life and death; finally to have reached a border area and to have encountered an obstacle, or precisely the Being of Light, which forced them to “return to the body”. ... This state of consciousness has been described, and not only by those who have lived it personally, as coinciding with death which in this way has been deceptively bent to the dimension of experience. The instrumental use is wide, within new cults such as the New Age, in order to reassure people who fear the obliteration of consciousness

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after death. In this paper we will adopt a psycho-physiological approach whereby body and psyche are two sides of the same coin. This allows us to arrive at a consideration of such experiences that has nothing to do with metaphysical hypotheses and proofs of “life beyond life”. These experiences occur more frequently in those who believe they are on the point to die. The protagonist has never been a “dead” but he certainly occupied the “role of the dead”. … It cannot be said that a mechanistic hypothesis is worth more than a psychodynamic hypothesis because it is a question of the level of analysis: a dream can be at the same time the product of the stimulation of neurotransmitters and the satisfaction of a desire. Among the many hypotheses let us consider precisely that of the dream. There seem to be numerous differences as evidenced by Moody and Sabom. In addition to the sense of reality, closer to a waking state than a dream state, there is the fact that this experience resists oblivion and is remembered for a lifetime. ... All the hypotheses (hallucinations, neurological stress, overdose of endorphins, archetypal visions, mystical experience) are weak, in our opinion, because they are vitiated by a preconception: this experience is considered unitary and instead we assert that it is modified through a “montage cinematographic” which is performed by the narrator and the specialist. Dissimilar bodily experiences, in a process similar to the secondary revision of dreams, would be modelled and symbolically interpreted according to the culture of those who believe they have “lived their own death”.

How to Investigate Near-Death Visions Near-death experiences are described in the books of some doctors: Life after Life by Moody [1975], Recollections of Death by Sabom [1982] and Endless Consciousness by van Lommel [2007]. Van Lommel, comforted by research through the electroencephalogram, asserts that “we need a post-materialistic approach to understand how one can experience heightened consciousness while the brain is not functioning”. Furthermore he relies on quantum physics to predict a consciousness that is not localized in space-time and that is in contact with the past and the future. These authors, all three, claim that the mind is able

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to detach itself from the brain. Unfortunately it seems a return to antiquity, to the gardens of Aristotle, and it seems contrary to the actuality of knowledge. I listen to a patient who evokes an adventure of near death: where can it be registered if not on the table of nature and, that is, together with the memories and the modalities for which we think as a man and not as a platypus? So I prefer, as a starting point, the words of Ferri and Romanazzi in which the communion of the mind and the brain is accepted. The pair of authors generously contradict themselves. They argue that the near-death experience is too intense to be a dream and yet at last, almost as if they had never lived a dream, they value this and that as stories that are elaborated secondarily starting from the memory of bodily sensations. They compromise a psychodynamic reading of near-death experiences, insisting on brain degeneration, while shortly before they had approved a psychodynamic reading for simpler dreams. In my discussion I will look away from such a superficial position. I will renew the philosophical premises that are at the origin of the entire book. Then I will argue that near-death experiences are a kind of dream and, in particular, that the sense of reality is a mere whim. Eventually I will argue that those experiences are not “death fantasies”, as a minimalism imposes which commonly corrupts all dreams, but are precisely “archetypal visions”.

Philosophical Premise: The World Is Our Representation

This essay accepts the convention regarding the boundary between what we call reality and what we call dream. It admits that there is a reality that reunites all of us and that coincides with the waking state. It admits that other states, although they seem shared to us while they are lived, fall back into the personal sphere, that is precisely in the dream, following an afterthought that must be rethought at every awakening. This essay, at the same time, acquires the principle of Schopenhauer by which the world is a representation [1818 The World as Will and Representation]. The difference between reality and dream translates into these terms: as reality I mean “our representation” and as a dream

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I mean “my representation”. That the world is inherent in representation, despite the Aristotelian invention according to which an “external world” exists, is a point of convergence for modern knowledge. This premise involves a vision of the world and of death that recurs in the oriental mentality and stands out in the verses of the Upanishads: “Heaven and earth, fire and wind, sun and moon, lightning and stars, everything is included inside us. When a man sleeps or when he dies he retreats into the spirit and achieves unity. The sight is reassembled together with all shapes, the hearing is reassembled together with all sounds, the mind is reassembled together with all thoughts. Like rivers coming from the ocean flow back into the ocean.”

Philosophical Divagation: Life Is a Dream

Some philosophers, since ancient times, are tempted to equate what I call reality and what I call dream. I too fall into temptation, for a minute, and I adapt to the precept of Sigismund in the drama by Calderòn de La Barca: “life is a dream”. Perhaps the dream is “our representation”, as the shaman wants while conversing with his ancestors, but more likely they are both “my representation” as the solipsist insinuates. A similar assumption, in one or the other variant, is important for us because it would subvert the interpretation of the near-death narratives by removing the hegemony of the alleged reality and throwing the desk of our symposium into the air. I am aware that solipsism is unassailable by logic: nothing, in what I call life, can ever guarantee that a conscience like mine animates other beings. I hazard one more move: nothing distinguishes the alleged life and the alleged dream. Three agents of law enforcement, watchful to daily and public security, listen to me and go into a state of alert. A guard teaches me that life is continuous and consistent unlike dreams. I reply that sometimes these clues are overturned and therefore Sigismund hesitates in doubt: “am I dreaming or am I awake?” The second gendarme, aware that some unfortunate is torn from sleep because a murderer attacks or an earthquake terrifies, deduces that life claims a superiority. I reply that the interference is mutual: someone was walking under the house and unexpectedly

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falls into Lucifer’s bedlam. My diagnosis states that they are normal people, at least my patients, and they are enrolled among psychotics only because they disregard the presumed priorities. The third bureaucrat whispers to me: “you die in the dream and eventually you wake up while, if you die in life, you really die”. His speech, however, is not correct because it implies, as much as the derision for the sortie of Lucifer, the point of view that is the subject of discussion. We can verify that dying in the sphere that I call dream brings back to the sphere that I call life but who knows that, conversely, dying in the sphere that I call life does not lead to the sphere that I call dream. To accredit this eventuality are precisely the near-death experiences: I am ready to die and instead I am heading towards a new adventure. Now I put the digression in the archive. What was wagered is nothing more than a fiction. I too forget it and resume reasoning in accordance with the custom of reality and dream.

Affinity between Dreams and Near-Death Visions

Anyone who is addicted to snooping in his sleep will notice that he is moving in a labyrinth. Sometimes I pass from one dream to another dream and feel a relief in believing, convinced that I am awake, that the previous one was just a dream. Other times I find myself remembering some events that I had not experienced and surely the same scam could be perpetrated while awake. Once, dreaming and knowing that I was dreaming, I consulted the ancient volumes of a library and I was amazed that those lines, unexpected, arose from myself. Similarly, at the young death of a school friend, the burial stone appeared to me, crumbling and baroque, accompanied by a gloomy epitaph of which I grasped the extreme verse: “bones bleached by the sun – you are the anguish of man which delays to die”. These cases are nothing more than an anthology, a flowers collection, of the extravagances that invade dreams. Now I wonder if the near-death experience belongs to the versatile galaxy of dream or, on the contrary, if it can boast of privileges. Our compatriot duet of authors, renowned for his naivety, writes that it would be a different experience since “in addition to the sense of reality, closer to a waking state than

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a dream state, there is the fact that it resists oblivion and is remembered for a lifetime”. Here, leaving aside the comparison between waking and dream which is an opinion of waking, transpire some elements that must be distinguished: the powerful clarity of the scene, the fixing in memory, the persistent sense of reality. Let’s annotate, as for liveliness, how dreams sometimes host us in worlds so remote that we lose sight of the everyday world and even the usual dress of death. It is true, speaking of firmness, that most dreams tend to become rarefied as if to advise: “forget and live”. Yet certain nightmares cannot be forgotten on a par with near-death experiences. The remaining exclusive, for the near-death experience, would be the sense of reality. But it is not unusual for that feeling to survive the drift of a dream: we speak of hallucinations or visions and hence, in the eventuality, we can speak of near-death visions. I want to emphasize that many dreams, despite being vivid and indelible, are instantly judged unreal. Therefore the license of reality or unreality is not justified by the connotations of dreaming and is manoeuvred, like the other pitfalls, by elusive factors and by parts of us operating in the shadows. This is the greatest of follies and deserves a better investigation.

The Sense of Reality in Dreams and Near-Death Visions

There is a notion, within everyone’s reach, which has already been recognized. I repeat: we behave during a dream as if environments and individuals are real and place those events in the appropriate category when the alarm rings. This repentance appears ambiguous and fickle. As a child I was haunted by a wolf and I complained, one morning, because I could not find in the refrigerator the cream cake that the werewolf, in a white apron, had given me at the end of the fable to inaugurate a friendship. But the question, relating to the sense of reality, is more subtle. I recently dreamed of this dream: I find myself in the company of a lady within my office, and suddenly a satyr of the woods intrudes, so I wonder if it’s a fantasy but I conclude that it really happens and that I will have to remedy the embarrassment with

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the patient. Beyond the message, from the invitation to morality, what can this staging teach? Until now I counted on the ability to rationally divide, having dissipated the torpor of sleep, what is real and what is dreamed of. This dream, when I clearly decide that a supernatural fact is true, undermines the validity of my criterions. It means that the sense of reality defeats any speculation and that the mind is able to smuggle any episode at will as real or as imaginary. The frontier between reality and dream trembles more than ever and in any case, stubbornly, I resist the temptation to doubt that they exist. In conclusion I ask myself: is the sense of reality felt in near-death visions reliable? Do they have the status that I assign to people and things when I consider myself awake? Are they people and things that don’t depend on me? Not at all. The sense of reality is treacherous and worthy of nothing. Those visions are subjective and symbolic like a dream. We will see, on the other hand, that they are not an illusion, a smile of the desert fairy in aid of the dying, and they are carved with solidity in the eyes and in the memories because they reveal something essential.

Near-Death Visions: The Archetypes and the Void

At the hour of death may appear various visions. This happens when we think we are dying but it also happens in sudden deaths because the brain cells remain alert and are able to accelerate their activity. Those visions are repositories of a meaning that intertwines personal and universal elements, just like in the dream, but they overcome the usual forms of the dream because they do not care about contingency. They are universal that draw on emotionality and culture to embroider a symbolic dress. Someone listens to Jesus reading the commandments and so takes his leave by organizing his own day of judgment. Such a scene is not real in the ordinary sense, it does not distract Jesus from his silence, and therefore it must be clarified in what sense he can imply a truth. It is necessary for this purpose to return to the philosophical premise: our life, in the absence of the external world, can only emerge from the psyche. Thus the interiority does not degrade into a personal semblance but affirms itself as

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hyper-uranium and demiurge. Near-death visions are not vain fantasies but are a symbolic entrance to the archetypes and, through them, to the matrix from which all forms emanate and into which they fold. It is the same path as the mystics when they descend, with the lamp of consciousness, into a depth that rests in the vapours of the unconscious. Crossing the Pillars of Hercules, I retreat into that void that could have indifferently the name of Nothing or God. It comes to think of the demonstration by physicists that the “black hole”, in addition to emitting luminous particles by a quantum effect on the surface, is mathematically correlated to the “white hole”. The abandonment of absolute time also makes them a unique thing, a black hole is a white hole and a white hole is a black hole, since the opposite of their course is instituted by our eye. Overall this conception represents, in historicity, the revenge of Plato and Plotinus against Aristotle. In the following passage by Jung, adapted to oriental emblems starting with metempsychosis, the psychological picture of cosmogony and cosmothely is outlined. It is not by chance that Jung intervenes: we know that he lived a near-death experience and described it with wonder concluding that our dissolution does not involve a loss of value. Jung [1935 – Psychological Commentary on the Bardo Thödol or Tibetan Book of the Dead]: The text of the Bardo Thödol is divided into three parts. The first part narrates the psychic events at the time of death. The second part deals with the dream state that follows the definitive death, that is, karmic illusions. The third part concerns the impulse to rebirth. The highest enlightenment, therefore the greatest possibility of liberation, shows at the moment of death. Shortly thereafter the illusions and the rapprochement with bodily existence begin. … The lama reads the texts in the presence of the corpse. The instructions are intended to enlighten the departed on the nature of his visions and to assist him on the path to liberation. It is appropriate that the primacy of the psyche is immediately clarified to the deceased. In life we are involved in an infinity of things and we do not understand who has “given” these things. The deceased learns that the “giver” of all things dwells in ourselves and thus overcomes the things given. By putting in his

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place we will obtain a no less advantage since from the beginning we will be able to recognize how the world emerges from the essence of the psyche. It is a process of initiation, of liberation, destined to reconstitute the divinity that we have lost with birth. The state of “emptiness” or “buddhahood” precedes all manifestations of the psyche. ... The Bardo Thödol, unlike the Egyptian Book of the Dead of which too much or too little can be said, contains a philosophy that is within man’s reach and is the quintessence of the psychological setting of Buddhism. Philosophy and theology, with us, are still in a medieval and pre-psychological phase where assertions are defended or rejected but where the instance that creates them is removed from the daily agenda. To the occidental spirit the psyche appears as something small, personal, subjective and so on. But metaphysical statements are statements of the psyche and, therefore, are psychological. The psyche is not only the condition of reality but coincides with the whole of reality. … The reality we experience, as the text teaches, is not a physical or metaphysical reality but the reality of thoughts. I have used the name “collective unconscious” for the layer of the psyche which consists of those dynamic and universal forms which I have called archetypes. It is evident that the entire book is drawn from the archetypal contents of the unconscious. The world of Gods and Spirits, with peaceful divinities and aggressive divinities, is a projection of the psyche and, that is, “nothing other than” the collective unconscious within me. But to overturn this sentence so that it means “the unconscious is the world of Gods and Spirits outside of me”, in light of the antinomian character of metaphysical truths, it does not require intellectual acrobatics but an entire human life or perhaps many lives of increasing fullness.

Chapter 14

The Detachment and the Elsewhere

Bosch: John the Baptist in meditation Atlas and the Globe: The Summits of Philosophy Giuseppe Roncoroni Copyright © 2023 Jenny Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. ISBN 978-981-4968-68-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-43294-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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Seneca [Letters to Lucilius]: Why do you despair about a problem when it is best to despise it? You know what is useful against all weapons and against all kinds of enemies: the contempt of death. No good benefits those who receive it if he is not willing to lose it. Whoever learns to die has unlearned to serve. Marcus Aurelius [To Myself]: Contemplate from above and as if you were close to death: infinite flocks that quickly born, live and disappear in the abyss of time: and how little it matters the name and the glory and all the rest. ... There is something in you that is superior to the passions that move you with their wires. Fire, iron, tyranny, envy, nothing can touch it: the spirit is an acropolis and it is above them. Dhammapada: We contemplate the foolish, troubled by pain, as someone who has climbed to the top of a mountain observes the people who are on the plain. ... When the body is recognized as a mirage and the spears of desire are broken one proceeds invisible to the king of death.

Stoicism fascinated me, during the school period, and in the hours of “otium” I entertained myself, next to the lamp, with a blue book in which were transcribed Seneca’s letters to Lucilius. Even Seneca, as a stoic, insists on the gravity of living and wears the custom of detachment. All the better if luck is raging and emphasizes imperturbability. This attitude appears to be a protective strategy to allay fears of calamities and death. Accepting a compromise with luck, as the epicurean would like, does not free us from restlessness for the future. References to Stoicism are recurrent and we find them, for example, in “no hope – no fear”, engraved on Caravaggio’s dagger, or in the “I do not care” of the fascist dialect. I am reminded of a video in which a soldier from Salò is captured in civilian clothes and sentenced as a spy. He remains faithful to his rule: with his arms tied to a pole, despising the blindfold, smoking a cigarette between the fingers of platoon officer, he converses and jokes with his enemies. Then the rifle thunders and this boy, this brave, painfully agonizes without dying. The fiction suddenly crumbles and our destiny of helplessness

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and misery prevails. The moral of Stoicism is a chimera, a too yielding enclosure, but it is also true that it remains an ideal destination. I like the founder, Zeno of Citium, and the myth according to which he spat his tongue against the executioner. Tao Tê Ching: Let other beings remain in the light while I am alone in the dark. ... I emanate a faint glow like the moon in its last phase.

Cioran [Des larmes et des saints – Le mauvais démiurge – La tentation d’exister]: Everything is Nothing. This is the revelation in the convents. Thus begins the mystique. Between God and the Nothing there is less than a step because God is the positive expression of the Nothing. … I think I have a skull: how can you not go crazy? It is enough to reflect on the fate of the flesh to understand the urgency of detachment. ... It is death that gives meaning to life and gives the vertigo to rise above ourselves. ... There are diurnal ghosts that, overwhelmed by their own absence, live in the shadows, they walk along the streets with soft steps, without looking away. No restlessness in their gestures or in their eyes. Since for them the outside world has ceased to exist, they indulge to all solitude. Beware of their distraction, their detachment, they belong to an undeclared universe, which lies between the memory of the unheard of and the imminence of a certainty. Their smile suggests a thousand overcome torments and the grace that triumphs over horror. They pass through things, beyond matter. There is no defeat or victory that shakes them. Have they reached their origins? Have they discovered the sources of clarity within themselves? Independent of the sun, they are enough to themselves. They are enlightened by death. Lassus [Les nomades de Dieu]: I’m thinking that the monks are brothers of the vagabonds, children of the wind both, attracted by an “elsewhere” with mysterious outlines towards which they advance every day more. Siddhartha, crossing beyond the walls of the princely palace, encounters an old man, a sick man and a corpse. Life is pain and also the detachment of Siddhartha, the detachment of the mystic,

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serves as a shelter. This aspect is not an impoverishment: it is like saying that the essence of the world urges for detachment. Mysticism, however, is not satisfied with Stoicism’s purpose to rise as an acropolis does from the suburbs. Its diversity is immediately perceived by one who attends the monasteries and lives together, as happened to me in the hermitages of Assisi, with the oriental monks. Paying attention to detachment, rejecting desire and pride, is a prelude to reaching the elsewhere. The bonze makes himself invisible to the flames because he transits, whatever it is called sleep or ecstasy, into the inner recesses of the mind. Similarly the Buddha closes his eyes and we feel that, for us, he is no longer. Cioran [Des larmes et des saints]: The other does not exist. This conclusion imposes itself and comforts us.

He knows, the philosopher, that we are enslaved with the chains of pain and pleasure and are pushed to conservation and reproduction. Lazarus, paralysed, clings to life and then complains about the unfortunate days he had begged for. Valentino pursues the sexual solace and is desperate for having conceived a child. This cage is abandoned by the philosopher because he does not like being made fun of. The most comical temptation is to compete and excel in society. I omit here the caution of solipsism according to which every person could be the semblance of a dream or could be an automaton. I concede that other people have a consciousness, on a par with me, but I will say of the chasm that isolates my world and their world. It is evident that each of us feels unique by virtue of his ego. However each of us comes into contact with the body of the others and perceives an ego in the others only in the generic form of any ego. It follows, for example, that I am amazed to have my body, among the many bodies in circulation, while to friends it seems normal that I am in this body because for them one ego is equivalent to another. The body represents me in the same measure as a puppet at the fair. What do they know, the friends, that my ego does not

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correspond to another person? What do they know I was not a Babylonian of 30 centuries ago resting under the blue gate of Ishtar? What do they know I was not the Indian prince who wakes up in the shade of the fig tree? This truth, so candid and so obscured, severs every link with the world and consigns me to freedom. I dwell on this last truth which is so important to me in organizing my life. Now I tell you about Gracchus. I recognize him for his appearance and bearing even if they have changed from 40 years ago. I recognize him for the proclamations in defence of the plebs and for the games we played together. Thus, every day, I recognize the same person in Gracchus. There is a novelty: a guy, tall and blond like a Germanic, assures me to be the Gracchus, a typical Roman, that I know so well. By character he seems equally magnanimous except that we are not short of gentlemen and furthermore the temper of Gracchus, as happens for a thousand accidents, in the meantime could be spoiled. Then this man remembers the evening when we talked about eternal things, he and I, near the top of Parnassus. Yet this man cannot be Gracchus, I repeat to myself, and at most the episode was reported to him or he himself might have spied or guessed it. In short: I recognize people by their physiognomy and there is no mode, if it changes, to identify the friend who is almost a brother. Such are friends to me and such am I to friends. I remain myself only provided that I maintain a continuity in appearance by staying away, for example, from facial plastic and from the malice of the surgeon. So we, for each other, do not exist. There is no open way that is not interiority. At the last station the ego, which until now I considered precious and feared to lose with death, fails: it is an inconsistent and impermanent feeling, the loner murmurs under the fig tree, and thins out in the turmoil of meditation. Nothing remains at the end of the journey. Transcending everything summons us towards a principle and would be contradictory if it were not intended as Void.

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Plotinus [Ennéades]: He is no longer himself and looks beyond beauty and beyond the choir of virtues. ... He who transcends all things comes to what is before all things. ... Such is the life of gods and blessed men: estrangement from everything, disdain for everything, escape of one only towards him only. Eckhart [Spirituelle Anweisungen]: If a man abandons himself, he has already taken leave of the whole world. Therefore leave yourself where you are. You now see yourself distant and reach the depths of the spirit. Buber [Ekstatische Konfessionen]: The spirit has immersed itself in its own bottom, core and peel, sun and eye, drinker and drink. This experience, purely interior, is what the Greeks called “ékstasis”, that is, going out.

Chapter 15

The Ambassadors and the Flight with Wings

Holbein: The ambassadors Atlas and the Globe: The Summits of Philosophy Giuseppe Roncoroni Copyright © 2023 Jenny Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. ISBN 978-981-4968-68-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-43294-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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Cioran [Le mauvais démiurge]: Look at the one who cares about his name and his job. Look at the arrogance of the one who fought and was successful. There is no trace of pity. He has the stuff of which an enemy is made of. Nothing is better than being forgotten. No obstacles between us and what matters. ... I await death as a runner waits for the signal. I aspire to a death that is an accomplice of the vast spaces. Calvino [American Lessons: Lightness]: Sometimes it seemed to me that the world was turning into stone ... It was as if no aspect of life could escape the gaze of Medusa. The only hero capable of defeating Medusa is Perseus who flies with winged sandals ... There is a lightness of thought and writing ...

Ambassadors and Professors A famous painting by Holbein portrays an ambassador and a bishop. Their build is fat. The dresses are pompous. The haughty demeanour is comforted by the mundane decorations of the room and by the virile instruments among which a dagger stands obscenely erected on the belly. At the middle and at the bottom there is something indistinct. It is an anamorphosis, that is a deformity, which is not decipherable to the eye of the notables or even to the eye of those standing in the front of the picture. But that stain reveals its physiognomy by moving to the side: a skull. The ambassadors do not recognize it and, otherwise, they would not be oblivious to the transience and would not be hostages of the crave for honours. A crucifix, concealed by the curtain and pushed against the margin, is the sign of their devotion to the truth. Do they not resemble those egregious and eminent professors, ambassadors of wisdom, who occupy the glittering pulpits?

The Philosopher’s Perspective

The portrait of the ambassadors teaches something about philosophy. Visitors standing in front of the canvas are at the mercy

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of distortions and, on the contrary, the art critic finds the right perspective in which all shapes of painting are clear and coherent. The philosopher proceeds in the same way looking for a solution to the enigmas, to the anamorphoses, which disturb today’s philosophy and science. The impious blindness of the ambassador and the professor does not contaminate the philosopher while he secludes himself in the hermitage with a great book.

The Method of Philosophy: The Lightness of Intuition

It happened once that a certain professor, devoted to the ecstasy of economics and politics, reproached me like this: “yours is not philosophy ... philosophy is rationality ... in your work the effort to transform intuitions into argued and rigorous theories is weak”. Since then I was waiting for the opportunity to clarify, to myself as first, the method for investigating reality. What role does rationality play? What role do intuition and creativity play? Historical memory confirms to me as the opinion of the honourable and honoured mummy is crude. That whited sepulcher must repent: the most effective strategy for getting by in a labyrinth is not to march to exhaustion. From the prison of a labyrinth one escapes, since the time of Icarus, with a flap of wings and a flash of sunshine. Here is the judgment of history regarding rationality and intuition. I am reminded of the answer of Ramanujan, the mathematician, to his colleagues who complain about the lack of demonstration: “my thinking is different from yours and that theorem is fully revealed in the eyes”. Especially the scientists, among them Poincaré for mathematics again, appeal to intuition to claim the creative aspect of their knowledge. Then the opinion of Bradley, a philosopher, comes to mind: “we usually sustain with bad reasons what we are inclined to believe by intuition” [1894 Appearance and Reality]. Bergson’s opinion is also instructive for me: “a philosophical system surrounds itself with arguments, in order to appear convincing, but it is generated by intuition and therefore the task of the historian is to rediscover the

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image that inspires and explains it” [1911 Philosophical Intuition] and “intuition does not revolve around things but enters them regardless of our perspective and our symbols” [1903 Introduction to Metaphysics]. This evaluation of intuition and its connection with the philosophy of experience are at the centre of Abbagnano’s commentary [1971 Dizionario di Filosofia]. Abbagnano notes that intuition is constantly understood in the history of philosophy as a form of knowledge superior to discursive knowledge because, as happens in the perception on which it is modelled, the object is present. And so there is a definition of philosophy as a vision or intuition of the world. Already in the Middle Ages, with Bacon and Duns Scotus, the term was used specifically to indicate empirical knowledge. Since then the meaning of Intuition coincides with that of Experience and contemporary philosophy tends to adopt this other term.

The Trade of Cartograph

The craft of a philosopher is similar to the craft of a cartographer. The cartographer inquires here and there and finally spreads the colours on the parchment. Even the philosopher explores a new land to decide, with pen and ink, what the outline and the image are. Intuition, visual mastery, pervades their art as if it were a ray that illuminates the globe. The opening of two books is eloquent. So writes Mach: “On a bright summer day in the open air, the world with my ego revealed itself to me as a web of sensations and that was the decisive moment for my conception. I instantly realized how the ‘fact in itself’ was useless.” [1900 Analysis of Sensations]. And so writes Capra: “Five years ago I had a beautiful experience which set me on a road that has led to the writing of this book. I was sitting by the ocean one late summer afternoon, watching the waves rolling in and feeling the rhythm of my breathing, when I suddenly became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance. … I felt its rhythm and I ‘heard’ its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva.” [1975 The Tao of Physics]

The Ambassadors and the Flight with Wings

The Map of the Experience The cartographer is forbidden to report any country that are not visited. Even the philosopher cuts out the map of reality around conscious life, around experience, because there he recognizes the only news and the only certainty. Such are a good cartographer and a good philosopher. What is the relationship between philosophy and science? No science can be a collection of pure data, of course, because there is no data without processing. At this point the philosopher’s map contains the scientist’s maps and boasts a kinship with them. Even a philosophical doctrine needs documentation: not only the maximum principles are verified by the capacity to smooth out difficulties but today, as sectors get closer, they areinvolved in laboratory tests. Which truth belongs to the maps of knowledge? About a mathematical theorem, we can say that it is a discovery and we can say, not existing before, that it is an invention. Likewise the truths about the world are an achievement that occurs in the realm of thought. We all know how the epic dispute over universal concepts is resolved: the horse is a generalization and yet it is a truth because it is a phase in our construction of the world. Similarly we can better frame Einstein’s perplexity that “the most incomprehensible thing on the world is that it is understandable” or Wigner’s lecture about “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”.

The False Maps

We don’t always have to deal with a prudent cartographer and an insightful philosopher. It happens that a philosopher is not satisfied with the data of consciousness and leans on the shoulder of a ghost thus slipping into mythology. For thousands of years, in our culture, a couple of maps are broadcast. The “believer’s map” puts in series: God → Soul and External World → Conscious Life. The “materialist’s map” narrows to External World →

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Conscious Life. This immediately explains why the common man agrees to dismiss God and the Soul but is adamant about the External World. The negligence of cartographers widens the edge of the map and prevents us from modelling a truth in our field of knowledge. The Golden Apple, the truth, is ripe but falls far, out there, where the ground is impassable and the hand is impotent. Guessing the predictions becomes the only criterion of scientist while intuition and image expire in the subjectivity of a symbolism.

A Sheep Said: Zarathustra Is No Longer a Wise

Now I understand the reproach that the gray doctor gave me. An admirable coven, not just me, is invited to transform intuitions into long and heavy dissertations. To the ambassadors of the word, from the borders of the academy, Zarathustra spoke: “A sheep ate the ivy crown that encircled my head and said: Zarathustra is no longer a wise. I gladly stay here where the children play, near the ruined walls, among the thistles and poppies. For children I am still a scholar and also for the red flowers of poppy. For the sheep I am no longer: blessed be my lot! … I left the dwelling of the scholars and slammed the door behind me. I love freedom and air more than your honours. I am made ardent by my thoughts and I must escape from the enclosure of the dusty halls where you sit in the shadows. Like those who in the middle of the street look at passers-by so you, opening your mouth, wait and look at thoughts that others have thought. You and I are strangers to each other. ... Their knowledge is mixed with a smell that seems to come from the swamp and, in fact, I have already heard the frog croaking. These weavers have fingers that are versatile in threading the needle and weaving the breeches for the spirit. They are excellent watches, as long as you don’t forget to wind them, and then they tell you the time by making a discreet noise. They wait, they wait like spiders, he whose science limps. Yet I walk with my thoughts above their heads and even if I walked on my mistakes I would find myself above them and their heads.”

Chapter 16

Far from Speeches

Arcimboldo: The librarian

Atlas and the Globe: The Summits of Philosophy Giuseppe Roncoroni Copyright © 2023 Jenny Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. ISBN 978-981-4968-68-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-43294-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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Li Bai

I envy you! You who are far from speeches and discord and are lying high on a pillow of blue cloud.

Clouds and Cities I am disappointed by the quality not excellent, on average, of the books that are at the forefront of our philosophy. Undoubtedly a negative selection factor exists and results from the social circumstances of philosophy. What is awarded and passed on to posterity by every generation corresponds to the beliefs of the luminaries who are in plain sight and are in line with the tastes of the aristocracies. This discernment is more insecure than in other forms of knowledge, due to psychological implications, and above all it clashes with the intolerance of philosophy for worldliness. An important journalist, when I was young, told me: “you have to go to the circles of Paris to become a philosopher”. What could we expect from those who write things in the morning that are thrown in the trash in the evening? Every philosopher, on the contrary, is a loner who dwells in his own atmosphere, wherever he lies, and rarely leaves a trace on the outskirts of cities. A philosopher, lying on a cloud, composes a mosaic. He may be holding two pieces that seem adequate for a portion of the mosaic, and may be undecided whether to insert one or the other, but will later discover in case of error that the other parts of the mosaic are compromised.Therefore he watches over how each choice has an impact on the totality and watches over the information of science. I give an example. I am scrolling through a treatise by Sartre, The Imaginary, resisting its artificial and academic jargon. Phenomenology is characterized by the adoption, in the wake of Descartes, of the rudimentary division between the subject and the object. Thus the core of the book declares that the imagination is directed by the subject while perception is directed by the object. A conventionally minded person takes it as obvious and translates it like this: I outline a tree at will in the imagination while, when I look into the

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garden, I merely receive the shape of the tree that is present for everyone. It may seem obvious but it is also wrong: the manual of cognitive psychology, a branch of psychology that analyses mental processes, confirms that the same mechanisms of image creation are at the basis of imagination and perception.

A Psychoanalysis for Philosophy

A child was born, long ago, and his name is Achilles. The mother, Teti, takes care of him to the point of anointing him with ambrosia during the day and hardening him in the fire at night. Furthermore, to make him invulnerable, she immerses him in the sacred waters of the Styx. In carrying out this wash, the mother holds the baby by a heel and then, distracted by who knows what, she forgets to put his heel in the water too. Achilles grows up and pursues the hero’s career. The hero will die when an arrow, shot at random by a dandy, hits that heel so neglected. This myth describes a truth of psychology. Each of us as a child, in the rooms of the family, develops a judgment on himself, on the woman and on the man, and consequently devises the strategies that seem the most convenient in that environment. This capital of opinion and conduct, which arises so fortuitously, will accompany him out of the house for the rest of his life and will unconsciously direct him in the name of the “repetition compulsion”. The primordial imprint becomes an avenue on which all life slides and often distracts it from what we would like it to be. The psychoanalyst’s commitment ensures that these prejudices are recognized and removed. This myth and this truth are valid for people but are also valid for philosophy. That is why I have paid so much attention, throughout the book, to the childhood of philosophy: in the first community, in the first environment, the mentality is shaped and the victories and ruins of our philosophy are glimpsed. Even now the public place of philosophy is called “athenaeum” in deference to the divinity of wisdom, Athena, and in continuity with the school of Athens. That community, as if it were the family constellation and the place of earliest memories, is the fulcrum for a psychoanalysis of philosophy.

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An Easy Labyrinth Once upon a time there was a king, there was a queen who copulated with a white bull, there was a monster with the features of a man and a bull, but above all there was once a labyrinth that was stretched out on an island in the middle of our sea. The vicissitudes are disquieting, as in all families, but we are only interested in the ploys that were designed to evade the labyrinth. Some guy, Theseus, recovered the entrance thanks to a woollen thread procured by Ariadne. Instead the builder of the labyrinth, named Daedalus, attached some feathers with wax and flew away in the company of his son… who always reminds us how healthy it is to be cautious when driving. Theseus is still unaware of the scheme of the trap while Daedalus, having taken flight, turned his gaze below and in the blink of an eye, without getting tired in engineering calculations, recognized his own project. Whoever handles a manual of philosophy, the quintessence of wisdom, realizes that he has landed in a labyrinth. Those who just want to survive will renew the trick of the thread and flee to where they entered. But some curious will engage in the challenge of flying with wings leaving out the details, the finishes and decorations, and aiming at the intuition of the scheme. Contemplation from the highest altitude penetrates the covert motivation that guides the philosophers’ itinerary. So the maze of philosophy surprises us because the apparent complexity comes down to the repetition of a simple geometry. This paradigm was inaugurated in the Acropolis of Athens and consists in the temptation to erect, as it worked for the Parthenon, support columns for the “world of life”.

Original Sin

Original sin consists in going beyond the “world of life” and placing certain entities at the foundation of the “world of life”. These entities, being human opinions, vary in name and profile depending on the taste of the promoter. In any case they are misleading with respect to the task of coordinating the data of the experience as if they were pieces of a mosaic. I was not able

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to immediately draw the consequence, now educated like every European, and I wondered on which wall the mosaic should be placed. Fortunately, scrolling through the Upanishads, the answer became clearer to me than a flat land under a fiery sunrise: the mosaic must not be placed anywhere and, that is, everything begins and ends with conscious experience. Our philosophical tradition makes it difficult to think the simplest and most decisive thought. My criterion, my foreclosure to the fanciful philosophy, can be justified on a double level. Sometimes a philosopher feels he is grasping a truth, rightly or wrongly, just as a psychoanalyst feels he has guessed the decryption of a dream right while missing an algebraic proof. So personally I feel how foolish is the act of raising the things thought, the expedients of thinkers, to the dignity of reality by putting them on a par with the reality that is lived and trusting that they will answer our questions. This element, the sense of intimate certainty, has little value in dialogue with others. Another reason must be added and, that is, the observation that all knowledge converges towards this cornerstone. A philosopher of today must respect the immediate value of conscious experience. This is the first step in philosophy and it guides me when choosing a book or even accepting a conversation. To the interlocutor I ask: “do you think that the external world exists or in general that there is something outside of knowledge?” Whoever looks outward embarks on a divergent route, cluttered with charmers, and any attempt at dialogue becomes a waste of time. Those accustomed to placing occult hypotheses as the foundation of reality remain incredulous because original sin is implacable, as the bishop explained to us, and no one can understand a thought if he has not already thought it himself in some way.

The Sin of Doctor Johnson

James Jeans [1932 The Mysterious Universe]: The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder and we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm.

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Even now we have to cope with the most tenacious and fragile idol of fanciful philosophy. Which is? Bringing nature beyond the horizon and calling it matter. The average man does not distinguish between nature and matter. Whoever denies matter is baptized an idealist, derided as if he forgets nature and accepts only the mind, banished with a diagnosis of schizophrenia as if he confuses thought and reality. So returns a jester, doctor Johnson, who kicked a stone and exclaimed about immaterialism: “I refute it thus”. It seems strange to the doctor that Berkeley and Hume, Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer and all others do not know that there are stones and, suspecting that they are making fun of him, he loses his patience. Yet, if he browsed through the books, he would realize that these philosophers debate nature and its laws. Berkeley wrote a treatise on motion that led Mach and Einstein. In conclusion: matter is a substance and as such, by etymology, is underlying and does not touch the world I know. Matter has nothing to do with physics, evolution or nature in general. Many philosophers bear the name of doctor Johnson and translate stone kick into the theory of mechanism. Conscious life cannot rest on nothing, according to them, but is supported by “things”. These “things” render the cosmos a great machine when they are conceived as a bottomless cauldron of corpuscles and properties. Master in explaining is the charmer who multiplies what is not seen. Sadly those “things” weaken to the point of presenting themselves as a network of comparisons that cannot exist except in the scope of observation. Everyone’s world is made up of comparisons. How could I complain that my cloak has shrunk, instead of accepting that the rest of the globe has widened, if a correlate of the inconvenience were missing? How could I picture the shrinking or widening of the globe, in its entirety, without an outer term of measurement?

The Blind Evolution of Biological Forms

Sherrington [1940 Man: On His Nature]: It is a story not remote for us because it is our own. The planet in travail with its children. With the universe as heroic background for what to us is an intimate

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and an heroic epic. A birth in cataclysm. Aeons of seething and momentous shaping. A triple scum of rock and tide and vapour, the planet’s side, swept on through day and night. Then from that side arising shape after shape, past fancy. And latterly among them some imbued whit sense and thought. And still more latterly, some with thought eager for “values”. The planet, furnace of molten rocks and metals, now yielding thoughts and “values”! Magic furnace. Besides its alchemy and transmutations the most impassioned dreams of Hermes Trismegistus and all his fellow-ship dwindle to paltry nothing. Monod [1970 Chance and Necessity]: The key concept is that the “diabolical” formations arise from the capacity of each part to combine with the others up to model living beings. In short the aggregation between proteins must be traced back to the individual proteins. Holistic schools, contrary to the mechanistic one, keep the law of composition intact and again fall into the heresy of finalism. Thus they introduce a stupid and crude diatribe because the method of science does not accept finalism. That living beings pursue a project is only an appearance. Biological evolution is a succession of novelties and one phase leads from the paramecium to the cat. Where does the complex structure of the cat come from? I can believe, agree with Darwin, that by chance there are variations in the lineage of the paramecium and that the environment chooses the favourable ones until a cat appears in the garden. How do I interpret this rule? An authentic view of evolution applies chance without counterfeiting the law of composition. Paramecium can evolve towards many destinations and the randomness of the diversions rewards the cat. It is as if the number 7 came out in the game of bingo while the other numbers, the other signs of creativity, are inadequate (maybe a cat-o’-ninetails) or unlucky in the draw. Why, then, is Darwin affiliated with nihilism? It happens because the great machine, the artefact of the mechanism, is in charge of shaping organisms. There is no longer the envelope with the numbers, considered “ghosts in the machine”, yet incredibly the number 7 reappears. I make another simile by connecting

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biological evolution to civilization. The men come out of the caves; then they aggregate in community; finally they decide to found an empire. Instead, inside the great machine, the Roman Empire rises although emperor and senators, soldiers and citizens, all are blind and mute. The words of Monod, a biologist, are an example of this proscenium. The biological law is broken into pieces belonging to the proteins, as if they were the old atoms, and waiting to add up with the properties of the other proteins. We know that the integrity of the composition does not imply the “it is so for” of finalism which carries forward the engine of nature exactly as the mechanism carries it backwards. We know like Schopenhauer that the world, if it were ruled by chance, would be a mound of rubble and a meaningless grimace.

The Monotony of Psychophysical Materialism

The paladins of psychophysical materialism are highly esteemed personalities. These thinkers are adamant in holding the idol of matter dearer than the data of the mind and in maintaining a stunning imperturbability with respect to the developments of other disciplines. The one does not differ from the other just as if they were victims of an epidemic. I mention Edelman because he explicitly declares himself a fan of doctor Johnson. Edelman [1992 On the Matter of the Mind] states that doctor Johnson was right but that idealism is best refuted by biological evolution. The mind cannot create the environment as it is instead the environment that selects and creates the mind. Science wants the world to exist before the mind. Edelman in imitation of doctor Johnson, I feel like adding, is tied to the logic of substances and fails to understand that nature is inherent in the experience of those who live it. Edelman denounces that some philosophers, from Plato to Kant, are fascinated by idealism despite their intelligence. Plato and Kant don’t know enough about biology to not commit blunders and are forgiven provided they attend tomorrow’s seminar. Quantum mechanics also leads mathematicians and physicists, from von Neumann to Wigner, into temptation to believe that

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the observer and consciousness are a condition of reality. But theory is a simple algorithm and those observers are devoid of biological consistency. Physics without matter, just like philosophy, has the transparency of a spectrum. Edelman concludes with a rebuke in remembrance of Galileo: the aim of physics remains to describe invariant laws. But von Neumann and Wigner, in my opinion, never considered themselves Galileo’s enemies. Edelman professes, against all cognition, that consciousness is indispensable for the functioning of the mind and that in turn the mind is useful for behaviour. However, the mind and consciousness are part of matter and must be treated in the terms used for bodies and objects. So Edelman adheres not only to psychophysical materialism but also to the gender identity between the mind and the body. I do not have to leave my lands, thank goodness, to vivisect the supporters of this escape route in the face of an issue that towers over them as a mountain does with the dwarves.

The National Genius in the Identity of Mind and Brain

Sandrino Nannini, an ambitious pupil of the Soviet school, is not embarrassed to flaunt a waste collection in a piece entitled Time and Consciousness in Cognitive Naturalism and published in the national but International Journal of Philosophy and Psychology. The “pavlov”, as he is nicely nicknamed at the wine hall, argues that “the neurological theories that reduce consciousness and the ego to aspects of brain dynamics are fully convincing from a scientific point of view”. Someone has to explain why such theories “result implausible to common sense”. A brilliant insight is expected to allow materialism to make a clean sweep of the mind when, all of a sudden, the lightning shakes Sandrino: the evaluation of the mind is ready for a paradigm shift as imperative as “the transition from classical mechanics to the theory of relativity at the beginning of the twentieth century”. Mixing mind and neuron is a pirouette that is no less worth than the revelations of Albert Einstein and so, to everyone’s surprise, Sandrino too clambers onto the pedestal of genius.

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Vittorino Gallese, a neuro-philosopher to use an oxymoron, is careful not to be less brilliant and ingenious. Vittorino, in a red shirt, already disturbed my silence by chattering at the lyceum assemblies and now plays in the “pavlov” team: “the mind is made up of neurons”. The spirit of feelings would be one with the meal dripping blood on the butcher’s hand. Every so often at dawn, through the skylight, I follow this man with my eyes as he comes out of the infernal cages of the macaques and walks towards the sanctuaries of philosophy, where the Pharisees are now seated, to give testimony on the algebraic equivalence between his humanity and his cerebrum. Vittorino, philosophizing on mirror neurons, formulates a couple of conjectures that are pertinent to this theme. The first conjecture, inherent in psychophysical materialism, transpires in the baptism of mirror neurons. That caste of cells would contain the faculty of mirroring ourselves in others and therefore appropriates the name of this virtue. Such a mixture, conceptual and verbal, heralds the presence of nuisance neurons always joking, of cleanness neurons intent on rinsing or dusting, of an eminent college of theoretical neurons now exhausted in front of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Lastly obtuse neurons cannot be absent, guilty of the silliness we utter, and indeed I invite our researchers to track them down with the certainty that they will not have to look far. The second conjecture purports that mirror neurons, as the repository of sociality, excel over the neurons that are at stake for the rest of daily affairs. Considering sociality as the most precious of our riches is in line with the proletarian radicalism of the two geniuses of Stalingrad but horrifies Proust and the sages of the Orient. So we read in the Recerche: “The heart of the world is in depth. What keeps us on the surface is vain. Those with the talent to go deep should not waste time in the company of friends”. And so we read in the Bodhicaryāvatāra: “Man is born alone and dies alone. What, then, are friends for? They can only hinder it. So, before four gravediggers take us away, it is better to leave for a forest.”

Would You Kill the Macaque?

Einstein: there is a small step from killing an animal to killing a man

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Pascolo: the drawings, in the publications relating to mirror neurons, do not represent the real experiments which are much more cruel A curiosity, in the research on mirror neurons, is that many primates are sent to torture with the ultimate aim of proclaiming communion between living beings. But making a massacre of the animals most similar to us is an indication of a certain negligence in practicing the coexistence. It can be said, in the dialect used by those researchers, that the agony of the macaque does not resonate with the corresponding sentiment of the researchers but unfortunately with their hunger for protagonism. Who knows that they cannot restore compassion by applying the remedy that they themselves prescribe in cases of laziness of mirror neurons: spending an afternoon in the company of video games. Some neurophysiologists insist on the medical benefits of putting their hand “in corpore vivi”. But we cannot believe that everything that is useful for a majority is also licit and just. Usually this criterion is not applied to men otherwise the surgeon would stop you on the street, you who are reading, and would remove your organs to revitalize several dying. It is applied to animals other than humans because, unless it is our dog, they are not considered in terms of singularity but in terms of species as if they had the repeatability of objects. There is a cultural reason. The doctrine of Christ wants the soul to be the patrimony of men and goes as far as Descartes’s idea that other animals, despite the name, are mechanical instruments. Buddha preaches compassion towards all living beings, our travelling companions, those who had the misfortune like us of falling to the earth. The contrary arguments disguise the temptation to perpetuate the law of the strongest. Someone notes that the animals brought to the slaughter evoke the condition of slaves or women in the memory of the centuries. The Charter of Human Rights should be extended and enact like this: every living being has the right to live and pursue its own happiness and no matter whether male or female, black or white, child or elderly, healthy or disabled, genius or idiot, and no matter whether in the shape of a man or some other animal.

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Man and Medical Practice Medical practice is centred on understanding the person or, in general, the living being. But the logic of materialism, by removing the mind from the functioning of the body, equalizes the cure to the repair of an automobile and ignores dysfunctions that reflect mental distress. Psychosomatic medicine is clarified by an anecdote. I notice, on returning home, that a brick has fallen. I’ll put the brick in place if it is superficial damage, maybe a sinister hoodlum hit, or check the foundation if I suspect it is symptomatic of a subsidence. Similarly I interpret the illness and the cure of a person by considering the various levels of psychophysical architecture. That architecture can be engraved on the physical side and on the psychic side thus neutralizing the antiquated divisions that are employed for example in psychiatry. Hermann Hesse, in conversing with a doctor and in contrast with a materialistic prejudice, accentuates the psychic side to the point of arguing that a bullet taken in battle is propitiated by an obscure impulse to death. Rather it seems to me that there is, from time to time, a predominance of purely somatic factors or psychosomatic factors. The vessel crashes into the Maelstrom and the surviving sailor tells that in less than a day his raven hair turned white. It is evident that white hair is associated with fright. Yet a conformist doctor will insinuate that the concomitance of the feeling is fortuitous and that hair bleaching is due to the lack of melanin. He will linger on the somatic connotation of the symptom as if it were the last stage of explanation. This opinion affects therapy because that doctor will arrange the hair with dye or wig rather than providing psychological assistance. The expedient works, fashioning a tuft of a thousand colours, and likewise the pill relieves the pain of a neurotic although an effective cure must aim at the lifestyle. Not always putting the brick in its place restores the health of the building.

The Stellar Religion of an Astronomer

The previous speeches bring to my mind, I don’t know why, a discoverer of the sky who has discovered nothing but is in the

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limelight: Margherita Hack. Margherita is not pretty, akin to Mad Madam Mim, but this is a scientist’s pride. She loves animals. She is sorry that a macaque is harassed and she eats green feeling disgusted, just like Pythagoras, that her body becomes the grave of other lives. We all think it is right but we are inattentive and bite the duck which, browned on the plate, complains: “nunc in scutella iaceo, volitare nequeo, dentes frendentes video”. And therefore: very good, Margherita! Margherita, having to work, chooses to scan the sky. She is not satisfied with looking at the stars but offers us a global vision of the world even if, in such a topic, she has no greater proficiency than that of the greengrocer. How does Margherita think? Here are two sentences from a television interview: “the brain has the knowledge of things” and “my molecules after death will feed other life”. They are strange phrases. Where does this manner of thinking come from? Once upon a time there was Democritus, who believed that everything was made of atoms wandering in space, and once upon a time there was Epicurus, who adopted the physics of Democritus and dismissed the gods (they are up there and they don’t give a damn about us down here) to ensure a peaceful life. Margherita is so conquered by these reflections that she concludes the interview with a motto of Epicurus: “as long as I am alive there is no death, when death comes I will no longer be there”. Now I understand those nebulous and alien phrases: they are the triumph of the atom of Democritus. It is the brain that knows things, not the mind, because the mind is nothing more than a suburb of the brain. Death is a dispersion of molecules, not the fading of the spirit, because the person is nothing but his body mask. The stars are mantled of light and poetry. But now we comprehend that Margherita, trained to look outside, forgets the act of looking and meditating where light and poetry come true. Neglecting conscious life deprives us of the one world that providence makes available. Religion, as a creed, tells us that at the origin of life there is a power beyond our reach. Margherita, without caring that today’s atom is an observed atom, bows to the Atom while mocking God and the Soul. Yet they are lexical variations of a single creed. What difference is there if the globe springs out from the womb of God or if the fame of Almighty

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Creator is shifted into the Atom? Atom is the name of the ecstasy of Margherita who, at this moment, is dancing between atoms and molecules of stars.

The Ancient Monks Are My Contemporaries

The speeches of astrophysicists, such as Margherita Hack, make us feel a nullity when they describe the times that precede us and the greater times that will follow us. But they raise a doubt. I consider this moment. How is it possible that this moment is one of the moments in my life? How is it possible that the casket of countless moments is gratifying me? There is a misapprehension that depends on the idea of absolute time. Those times seem immense only to us. Those billions and billions of years would guarantee us a long life but do not have a duration of their own. I can restrict what is past and future to a duration that for me corresponds to a breath. So in the casket there are not countless moments but there are only the moments of my life. Each sequence disappears, along with absolute time, and so there is not even a sequence between the lives of us. It is not true for example that Nagarjuna, the master of Mahayana Buddhism, lived before me. I will explain it better. Firstly I distinguish what is simultaneous, past or future with respect to me: something with which a contact is possible; something with which a contact is no longer possible but it would be if I were born in that period; something with which a contact will be possible if I continue to live. There is no doubt that Nagarjuna stays in my past until, at least, I invent a sorcery to approach him. But what does it mean? It means that I admire his works and guard his relics. The point is that works and relics don’t necessarily force that mystic into a sequence and a past. I can pretend that my system of perception is set to explore the facts in the opposite direction: Nagarjuna would stay in my future and I, forgetting to die, would see that the bones connect in his body and then the body sits on the bank and gazes at the river. And similarly the monks who burn in the water of the Ganges, in the ancient pyres, seem distant and instead they stand beside me as soon as I silence the beat of time.

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The Parable of Metempsychosis Hadrianus: Animula vagula blandula – Hospes comesque corporis – Quae nunc abibis in loca – Pallidula rigida nudula – Nec, ut soles, dabis iocos… Psalm of David: Every man is nothing but a mere breath. In my distress I called upon the Lord. I ask You, Lord, for mercy. What is gained if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise You and declare its faithfulness? But I will enter Your house and in reverence I will bow down. Quiet I lie down on the bed and I fall asleep because You, Lord, put me in safety. You held back the fury of Your wave. Hallelujah! Diogenes Laertius [Lives of Eminent Philosophers]: Xenophanes says that Pythagoras, on seeing an abused dog once, felt pity and said: “Stop beating it! In the body of this dog there is a deceased friend of mine and I recognize him by his voice.” There is a thrill that sometimes breaks the boredom of the days: I realize that I exist. I’m alive. But my life is vanity. There is an authority that gives it and takes it back when he wants. I feel lost and the terror leaves me breathless. The attraction of religion lies in the promise of survival for individuals. This is David’s consolation. Even the migration of the ego into another body is offered as a consolation transgressing the oriental conception according to which it would be a punishment for those who are imprisoned in the malice of the world. I wonder: does the Buddha’s doctrine, the doctrine of impermanence, conform to the tradition of Hinduism and allow the ego to persist and transmigrate? Buddha is awakened and shrewd, as his name recalls, and therefore metempsychosis represents a tale of a moral character similarly to the miracles attributed to him. Don’t torture that macaque because you yourself, in the next life, will have that shape and that destiny! Seek liberation from the world because you won’t get it cheaply with death! Metempsychosis is the target of a thousand objections even before the ego was shattered by nineteenth-century psychology. Wouldn’t it be strange that the ego was recycled as if we were

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short of ego? That the ego flew into the new lodging in the manner of an elf? That the ego loaded the infant with vague memories of the previous life without which we could not identify the same ego? Someone, less romantic, trusts in the practical modality of reincarnation planning to transplant a brain, hence the mind and ego, into another body. Furthermore the area of the brain that is essential to the ego can be narrowed, as the ego continues in the event of impairments, and can be grafted in place of the equivalent of another brain and another mind. Perhaps a hero will incarnate himself in Dike, the deity of justice, and will descend from the stars to punish torturers and other criminals.

It Will Come

Plotinus [Ennéades]: the spirit is like light in a lantern when gusts and storms are raging outside I am alone and free, unlike David, in front of the wave that will drag me into the seabed. I am alone and free in front of the mud of the pit. This planet is a crowd of corpses rolling towards a future of frosty winters. What can I do? With a leap I go out. Holding the lantern in my hand, I go to the ancient hermitage, far from the penance of memories and gestures, so far as to lean out like an equilibrist on the threshold of the night, and to spy in the dim light the living creatures as they emerge and immerse themselves in the womb of the only mother. Death will come and have two faces. Death is the cold flesh, the orgy of worms, the urn of dust. This is the death I see. This is the death of others. The death that awaits me has a different face. The death that awaits me is the vanishing of the world in the emptiest sleep. What is, then, the true face of death? Is it the face that death exhibits for one who looks at it or for one who feels it? The second perspective goes further and forgets the first. What I see tells me something just because I put it in contact with my sensations: the blood moves me if it is a sign of pain and leaves me indifferent if I think it drips from an automaton. Here the macabre dance comes only to announce the quiet that will soon

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descend inside me. Death has nothing to do with flesh, worms, dust. This is the stage costume I wore for others. Death is I dissolving in a void of which, in the silence, I already listen to the murmur. There is sunrise on the slopes of the Himalayas. The city is far away. All cities are far away. Words are far away. All the words that men have spoken since the beginning of time. It is no longer night but there is sunrise over the Himalayas.

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Index Abbagnano 34–35, 37, 45, 51, 55, 74, 156 abstraction 14, 22, 123 Anaxagoras 14 Anima Mundi 62 apocalypse 10, 27 Aristotelian intellect 61–62 Aristotle 6, 12, 14, 17–18, 21, 23, 36–37, 56–57, 60, 75, 140, 145 Athens 161–162 Atlas 30 atoms 16, 18–19, 23, 45–47, 50, 56, 59, 61, 66, 96, 112, 123, 166, 171–172 Aurelius, Marcus 132, 148 automata 53, 131, 133–135, 150, 174 Barbour 71, 108, 110, 113 behaviour 7, 41, 43, 47, 49–50, 76, 83, 86, 92–94, 97, 129, 133, 167 Benedetti 52, 76 Bergson 19–20, 24 Berkeley 21, 35, 102, 105, 120, 164 Bickford 40, 76 Big Bang 8–9, 98, 107–115 Big Crunch 109, 112 birth 9, 28, 58, 71, 86, 109–110, 112–113, 146, 165 black holes 112, 145

body 6–7, 16, 18–19, 22–23, 27–30, 32, 34, 36–39, 41, 56, 67, 74–75, 77, 79, 94–95, 105, 110, 120, 122, 124, 127, 132–134, 136, 139, 148, 150, 167, 170–174 Bohm 121–122 Bohr 104 brain 7–9, 22, 24–27, 31–72, 75, 78–80, 86, 88, 91, 93–98, 108, 114, 119, 121, 123, 127, 131–135, 139–140, 144, 167, 171, 174 Campbell 41–44 cause 6, 17, 19, 21, 32, 43, 54–56, 64, 94, 103, 105, 112, 119–123, 126 Chalmers 53–54 Cioran 4, 6, 72, 149–150, 154 conscious experience 53–54, 56, 64, 77, 163 conscious life 2, 7, 32, 44, 50, 52, 54, 67, 69–70, 76, 80, 94, 124, 128, 135, 138, 157–158, 164, 171 conscious mind 38 consciousness 2–4, 6, 9, 13–14, 22, 24, 28–29, 32–34, 40, 45, 47, 49–55, 57–59, 68, 70, 75, 97, 105, 119, 121, 123–124, 131–136, 138–139, 145, 150, 157, 167

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Copernican Revolution 103 cosmic order 74–75 cosmogony 72, 145 cosmological constants 128 cosmology 104 cosmos 9, 25, 27, 108–113, 118, 120, 125, 127, 164 Crick 32, 52–54 Darwin 165 death 9, 15, 28, 83, 111, 131–132, 138–145, 148–149, 151, 154, 170–171, 173–175 Democritus 18, 20, 23, 171 Descartes 18–19, 23, 36–37, 54, 160, 169 dualism of 122 determinism 19, 42, 56 dreams 2–3, 7, 12, 26, 96, 134, 138–145, 150, 163, 165 du Bois Reymond 49–51, 53–54, 58, 66 dualism 32, 35–37, 39, 48, 50, 57–58, 62 dualist 32, 35–36, 41, 48–49, 51–52, 122 Eccles 32–33, 38–44, 52, 54–55 dualism of 38–39 ego 29–30, 66, 127, 150–151, 156, 167, 173–174 Einstein, Albert 69, 104–105, 117, 120–121, 164, 167–168 emergence 45 emergent 45–48, 59–60, 135 empiricism 6, 33, 55–59, 61–63, 66–67, 98, 102, 119

Hume-type of 66 empiricist 33, 56–62, 64, 98 enlightenment 30, 145 epiphenomenalism 41–42, 44–45, 68, 76 evolution 3, 7, 20, 28, 39, 45, 47, 49–50, 57, 70, 115, 164–165 biological 74, 77, 165–166 existence 2, 4, 13–14, 17, 21, 55, 69, 74, 87–88, 96, 104–105, 115, 126–127, 138, 145 experience 13, 29, 41, 56, 61, 66–67, 102, 133, 138–140, 142, 146, 152, 156–157, 162, 166 Fodor’s functionalism 79 France, Anatole 9, 89 Gabriel’s hyperrealism 103 Gestalt 45, 46–48, 52, 59 God 4, 10, 12, 14–16, 18–21, 23, 25, 28, 33, 35, 37, 40, 51, 54, 61, 74, 113, 115, 118–119, 121, 145–146, 149, 152, 157–158, 171 Hawking 8–9, 25, 103–105, 108–115, 125 Heraclitus 11–13, 17–18, 20, 22, 25–27, 74–75 holism 45–46, 48, 59–61 holist 46–48, 52, 60 hypothesis 16, 19, 44, 53, 62, 99, 102, 139

Index

idealism 22, 102, 166 identity personal 43, 127, 133, 135–136 principle of 17 identity theory 36, 41–44, 50, 58, 68, 68, 80 immaterialism 164 immortality 43, 132–133, 135 intuition 24, 95, 155–156, 158, 162 Kirker, Athanasius 73 Koch 53–54 law of composition 165 laws 6, 13, 16, 18–19, 22–25, 32, 34–39, 40, 45–49, 56–58, 60–61, 75, 111, 115, 126, 164–167, 169 Leibniz 23, 36–37, 54–55 Lurija, Aleksandr 93 machine 23–24, 79, 83, 93–95, 98, 131–136, 163–166 consciousness of 131–136 man-machine 45, 83, 96 materialism 42–47, 51, 55–57, 62–63, 79–80, 135, 166–168, 170 medicine, psychosomatic 170 metaphysics 18, 38–39, 64, 96, 103, 135, 156 metempsychosis 145, 173 mind 7–8, 10, 22–26, 29, 32–36, 38–44, 46–48, 51, 55, 57–59, 62, 64, 67–71, 74–75, 77–80,

93–99, 105, 119, 122–124, 131–136, 139–141, 144, 150, 155, 163–164, 166–168, 170–171, 174 mirror neuron 68, 80–100, 168–169 mirror neuron theory 87, 89, 96 monism 32, 35–48, 50–51, 57–59, 61 monism of quality 36 monists 32, 35, 37, 41, 49–53, 58 music 8, 20, 67, 70–71, 78–79, 90, 98–99 natural laws 7, 57, 67, 120 nature 4, 7, 15, 19, 22–25, 32, 35–39, 43, 45–46, 56, 58–59, 61–64, 69, 77, 79, 89, 98–99, 102, 123–124, 135, 140, 145, 164, 166 near-death experience 138, 140, 142–143, 145 near-death visions 138–139, 143–145 neurons 42–44, 47, 49, 52–53, 67, 70, 76, 78–79, 81–83, 86–92, 94–99, 123, 167–168 neurophysiology 41, 74, 78, 138 neuropsychology 41 objectivity 108, 120, 124 Ockham’s razor 99 pain 22, 28, 41–44, 50, 74, 77, 97, 131, 148–150, 170, 174 panpsychism 24

179

180

Index

parapsychological phenomena 122 Parmenides 17, 27 perception 8, 27, 34, 102, 104, 119, 123, 156, 160–161, 172 permanence 17 dogma of 13, 15 philosophers 12–14, 17, 35, 51, 62, 68, 71, 78, 88, 98, 108, 119, 123, 141, 150, 155–157, 160, 162–164, 166 philosophy 3, 6–7, 12, 14, 17, 22, 30–58, 62, 64, 66, 69, 76, 93, 98–99, 102–103, 104–105, 108, 111, 113, 119, 124, 135, 146, 154–157, 160–163, 167–168 physical reality 122 physics 7, 33, 37–38, 56–57, 61, 63, 70, 75–77, 111, 113, 118–120, 124–125, 135, 139, 156, 164, 167, 171 probability 56, 115, 124, 127 problem mind-body 55, 79 mind-brain 43 psyche 22, 27, 61–63, 70, 77, 108, 110–111, 139, 144–146 psychic reality 138 psychology 8, 49, 66, 78–79, 89, 127, 161, 167, 173 Pythagoras 17, 71, 171, 173 quantum mechanics 56–57, 102–104, 114–115, 117–118, 121, 123–125, 127, 134–135, 166 quantum theory 39, 104, 111, 114–115, 119, 122, 125, 127 rationality 155 realism 101–105, 118–119, 121, 128–129

reductionism 18, 20, 45–46, 48, 56, 58–61 relativity 8, 51, 69, 104, 118, 120–121, 167 Schopenhauer 7, 9–10, 55, 57, 74, 78, 140, 164, 166 Schrödinger 124 Socrates 12, 83 Somenzi 46, 59–61 soul 6, 12, 14–15, 18–19, 21, 23, 28–30, 33, 35–37, 39, 54, 57, 60–61, 94, 102, 158, 169, 171 space-time 63, 109, 114, 118, 121, 123, 126, 139 Sperry 40, 43, 45–48, 50–51, 54, 58–60 Stoicism 148–149 substance 6, 12–15, 17–18, 21–23, 30, 35–37, 39, 51, 55–58, 60, 64, 66–69, 93–94, 98, 104, 119–120, 122, 164, 166 Thödol, Bardo 145–146 universe 7, 19, 43, 47, 62, 111, 113–115, 119, 121–122, 124, 149, 163–164 Upanishads 10, 141, 163 Van Lommel 139 Wigner 55, 124, 166–167