By implication — at least to this theistically inclined amateur philosopher — the consciousness religious believers attribute to God likewise turns potentialities into realities on a cosmic scale. This is what I take to be God's creative and sustaining role as founder of the universe. Thus do I arrive at the name I give my metaphysics: genesis by experience, which I abbreviate GBE.
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| David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind |
Chalmers attributes consciousness to "extra" laws of nature that, figuratively speaking — he says he has no particular belief in a divine creator — God put into the mix when he created the world. He takes a pass on the metaphysics of causality after noting that there may be an ineffable link between it and consciousness, preferring not to embrace any notion that leads to conclusions along the lines of "everything is conscious."
My GBE skirts the "everything is conscious" conclusion by virtue of its dualism. Mind and matter are different. Metaphysically, mind precedes matter. By that I mean that mind — consciousness, observation, sight in its purest sense — fixes the incoherent potentialities of matter into coherent actualities, thus making a world.
Thus, causation is consciousness conferring coherence. Philosophically, it's a "twofer." You get explanations for two mysteries for the price of one. The world is a coherent place. In that world, both consciousness and causation are not illusions or figments of the imagination but existentially real. They both stem from the intrinsic coherence of one single divine nature.
Another reason I like my genesis-by-experience metaphysics is that it contradicts both religious skepticism and religious fundamentalism in one fell swoop.
A great many philosophers today are religious skeptics — atheists, agnostics, freethinkers — who are ideological heirs to positivism, which holds that metaphysical propositions that cannot be verified by science are meaningless. They don't even rise to the level of being wrong.
Then there are the religious fundamentalists who seek to oppose atheism by affirming the "literal truth" of the Bible. Fundamentalism has taken the form of creationism, the idea that the stories of God's creating the world that are found in the Book of Genesis alongside the story of Noah's Flood and then the recitation of the generations of man leading up to the writing of the Old Testament are not fraught with poetic license. They are literally true, fundamentalists say, and if science thinks evolution happened, science has another think coming.
GBE metaphysics suggest that "In the beginning" — as in the Bible's assertion in Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" — refers to metaphysical precedence, not temporal precedence. There still could have been — and was — a process of biological evolution on earth over the course of billions of years of time. That poses no problem to religious belief; God exists metaphysically outside time.
GBE is a stereoptic metaphysics that converges the worldview of two separate "eyes" into one solid image. One eye is that by which we see the physical world itself, as if it were all that truly exists, and the other is the one by which we can "see" the metaphysical basis for the physical world: consciousness conferring causal coherence. God's consciousness confers causal coherence, and a world is born. Our consciousness echoes God's in observationally turning incoherent quantum potentialities into coherent concrete realities, and a world is affirmed.
Religious skeptics are accustomed to using just the first eye. Religious fundamentalists are wont to close that first eye in favor of the second one, which gives them "metaphysical vision." GBE humbly asks, "Why close either eye?"
Another way to look at the situation, philosophically speaking, is to ask what "facts" GBE takes for granted. In his book, Chalmers says he bypasses philosophical skepticism about how we know the physical world really exists, when we could just as well be "brains in vats" (p. 75). He does so by "giving myself the physical world for free," by which he means that he takes as given "all the facts about distribution of physical entities in space-time."
Doing that, he says, is tantamount to "fixing all physical facts about the world in the supervenience base" (pp. 75-76). He says facts about consciousness "supervene" on the "microphysical" properties of this world — the "supervenience base," in his way of looking at things — such that if our world lacked conscious beings, it would ipso facto have to be different in some way physically. Different subatomic particles in different arrangements in different force fields in our universe equal, to Chalmers, no consciousness. But, given all the microphysical facts of our universe as they actually exist, plus all the laws of nature including, he says, as yet undiscovered "psychophysical" laws, the universe is bound to have conscious beings in it. That's Chalmers' view in a nutshell.
My basic quarrel with Chalmers is that I don't agree that you can take the microphysical properties of this world as (even conceptually) given or known — "for free," as he characterizes his assumption.
Why not? Because, mainly, of quantum indeterminacy, the apparently necessary incompleteness in the description of a physical system that has become one of the characteristics of the standard description of quantum physics.
I know just enough about quantum theory to get myself in trouble ... so here goes nothing! I relate quantum indeterminacy to the paradox of Schrödinger's cat. Quantum-physics pioneer Erwin Schrödinger proposed a paradoxical thought experiment in which a cat would hypothetically be placed in a sealed box with a device that would release a lethal gas if and only if a radioactive particle decayed. The decay event would or would not occur in the period before the box was opened according to a probability function depending on the half-life of the particle. So, upon opening the box, the observer would find the cat either dead or alive. If the experiment were repeated many times, the ratio of dead cats to live ones would be expected to match that known probability.
The paradox was that, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, the life-death outcomes would remain indeterminate until the concluding acts of observation took place! Neither "the cat died" nor "the cat lives" would be a fact until the box was opened!
Hence, the set of physical facts which Chalmers takes as knowns or givens in his supervenience base has to be thought of as inevitably incomplete ... absent, that is, the requisite acts of observation which serve to "fix" those facts.
My genesis-by-experience metaphysics "fixes" that problem — pun intended — by flipping the "supervenience base" in such a way that physical "facts" now depend on two paired "facts" about God:
- God is conscious
- God observes the world
Chalmers treats consciousness and causality as the two major mysteries about our world, since it is not clear that either logically supervenes on the physical. It would not be totally nonsensical to imagine an alternate world in which consciousness is absent or causality works differently.
Well, in view of quantum indeterminacy and incompleteness, wouldn't coherence itself, at levels of organization above the quantum world, qualify equally as an explanandum in search of an explanation? Couldn't causality then be viewable as supervenient on coherence, with the latter supervenient on consciousness? That's the GBE view in a nutshell.
Oh, and ... does Schrödinger's cat accordingly die, if at all, before the box is opened? God only knows.
I don't mean that (entirely) as a joke. Literally, God, who sees all he wants to see, can know the outcome "in advance," and it would make sense to say that his observation of the cat inside the box "fixes" the outcome prior to our opening the box. On the other hand, how do we know he doesn't avoid "peeking" so as to allow our acts of conscious observation to complete the scenario? Here might begin a deep discussion of how God arranges for us to have free will.
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