musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another.


I’ve never been much on religion; my mother, an immigrant from Britain, was once an Anglican, and my Canadian father a Baptist. The compromise they settled on for my upbringing was the United Church of Canada for some reason. It was a religious choice that, unlike my father’s, allowed dancing, although it still seemed a bit Baptisty to me with its grape juice for the Communion wine, and the universal sliced ham and scalloped potatoes which seemed to be served each month at their meetings in the Hall.

When I was old enough to graduate from Sunday School, I reluctantly agreed to take United Church catechism classes, but when I tripped in front of the whole congregation on the way up to the altar at the induction ceremony, I took it as a sign and never went to any more services.

I did warm to Philosophy in university, however. It seemed to accommodate many different approaches to the mysteries of existence without demanding unquestioning adherence to them; in fact, that seemed to be the point: examining each according to its willingness to accept rational analysis. Some required too much analysis for me, and yet some, like Goldilocks’ choosing of the just-right baby bear’s porridge, seemed to fit like the key in an otherwise mysterious lock.

After considerable investigation though, for some inexplicable reason I found that Panpsychism, as with Cinderella’s glass slipper, was amongst the easiest to wear. I was younger then, of course, and my reality wore many clothes which could hang briefly in the closet…

And what, pray tell, is Panpsychism? There are many iterations I suppose, but the thrust of the philosophical meaning as I understood it at the time, was that consciousness is pervasive; even rocks or subatomic particles (like quarks, leptons, gluons…) possess a rudimentary form of it, and human -or animal- consciousness emerges from these simpler proto-forms like a baby does eventually from a womb. How this might actually happen was difficult to understand to be sure, but then again, so were the fundamental particles…

In the halcyon days of my youth, so much was as yet unknown, and adding consciousness to the list didn’t seem beyond the Pale; although the transmogrification, if it happens at all, still remains shrouded in both mystery and methodology: how in the world could a simple subatomic consciousness blossom into, well, us and our much vaunted intelligence? I mean how much inner life does an electron have? Or need…?

Still, there are crazier notions out there, non-common-sense things: the speed of time changing with changing speeds; in quantum mechanics, particles like electrons having determined measurable positions only when observed (god only knows what happens when we aren’t looking). Anyway, I happened upon an article that perhaps only leapt into existence on my app because I observed it.[i] But with those types of things in mind, it begs a question: ‘Why should we take common sense to be a good guide to how things really are?’

I think that many of us are more willing to accept things if they conform to current scientific knowledge, and would have been hesitant to accept, say, quantum theory (whatever that entails) in the ‘old’ days. And yet, I am reminded of Occam’s theory of Parsimony (The phrase ‘Occam’s razor’ did not appear until a few centuries after William of Ockham’s death in 1347). The way I learned to express the theory was never to postulate more unknowns than are needed to explain something. It’s not just that it explains the evidence, but the fact that it is the best explanation for the evidence; the simplest explanation.

And if you think about it, there is a real simplicity to the argument in favour of panpsychism; and it was defended by, among others, no less a philosopher than Bertrand Russell. He felt that physical science doesn’t tell us what matter is, only what it does. Still, it is one thing to know the behaviour of an electron and quite another to know its intrinsic nature: how the electron is, in and of itself. Physical science gives us rich information about the behaviour of matter but leaves us completely in the dark about its intrinsic nature.

But as the author of the essay, Philip Goff, (a professor of Philosophy at Durham University, UK) wrote, ‘the only thing we know about the intrinsic nature of matter is that some of it – the stuff in brains – involves experience.’ This leaves us with a theoretical choice: ‘We either suppose that the intrinsic nature of fundamental particles involves experience or we suppose that they have some entirely unknown intrinsic nature. On the former supposition, the nature of macroscopic things is continuous with the nature of microscopic things. The latter supposition leads us to complexity, discontinuity and mystery. The theoretical imperative to form as simple and unified a view as is consistent with the data leads us quite straightforwardly in the direction of panpsychism… All we get from physics is this big black-and-white abstract structure, which we must somehow colour in with intrinsic nature. We know how to colour in one bit of it: the brains of organisms are coloured in with experience. How to colour in the rest? The most elegant, simple, sensible option is to colour in the rest of the world with the same pen.’

Whoa! See why I love Philosophy?

I tried to explain this to a friend the other day as we walked along the Seawall that rims Stanley Park; but in so doing, I felt like a miscreant Catholic might, quaking in the confession booth. She listened politely for a while and then suggested we sit on a convenient bench by the sea. “Use your head, G,” she finally yelled over the sound of the waves breaking in front of us. “Are you saying that Nature is sentient?”

“It’s gotta start somewhere, don’t you think?”

She shook her head and watched the fury of the waves for a while. In fact I thought I’d lost her to some inner, more important dialogue. Then, when I’d almost lost hope, she turned to me and yelled, ‘You hungry…?”

I wasn’t, but I nodded anyway, assuming she had decided the idea of Panpsychism was too crazy to think about at any length.

“My stomach’s growling,” she finally confessed, and rolled her eyes at the mistake she may have made… Then she looked out to sea again. “I mean it’s not talking to me, or anything…”

I just smiled, and took her arm. I was hungry now too…

[i] https://aeon.co/ideas/panpsychism-is-crazy-but-its-also-most-probably-true

, , , , , , ,

gozzter

, , , , , , ,

Leave a comment