From the article:
This argument presses us to the conclusion that there must be more to physical entities than what they do: physical things must also have an ‘intrinsic nature’, as philosophers tend to put it. However, given that physics is restricted to telling us only about the behaviour of physical entities ¬– electrons, quarks and indeed spacetime itself – it leaves us completely in the dark about their intrinsic nature. Physics tells us what matter does, but not what it is.
What then is the intrinsic nature of matter? Panpsychism offers an answer: consciousness. Physics describes matter ‘from the outside’, that is to say, physics gives us rich information about the behaviour brought about by mass, spin, charge, etc. But there must be more to what something is than what it does; and according to panpsychism, mass, spin, charge, etc, are, in their intrinsic nature, forms of consciousness.
Plato spoke of matter as we see it as expressions of the “good” Plotinus speaks of it as expressions of the “One.”
The rise of secularism and the assumed authority of secular intolerance has made it seem that contemplating the intrinsic nature of the process of existence as having a conscious purpose cannot lead to anything but iron age superstition. As a result only a minority remain to value the process and not just record it. The majority have fallen victim to metaphysical repression.
http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.ph ... /view/1183
Abstract
American philosopher Jacob Needleman once noted, “we live in a time of metaphysical repression and this repression must be lifted.” Symptomatic of this repression is the reduction of nature from physis to mere 'environment', about which he opines, “one cannot stand in wonder in front of the environment, one can only worry.” Were he seeking an able pair of hands to aid in the lifting of this repression, he might well look to those of Australian ecophilosopher Freya Mathews, whose book, For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism (2003, SUNY Press) aims a dart to the heart of this repression. Mathews adds that the environment is not something we can encounter in a fully personal way either, it betokens a world that has been rendered mere backdrop, rather than the lodestar for human meanings and purposes. To breathe life back into the corpse that modern metaphysical repression has made of nature will require nothing less than a “metaphysics of reanimation” of a panpsychist bent that can allow again for enchanted encounter to occur.
Simone Weil describes algebra as one of the chief causes of the dominance of quantity over quality. The loss of the third direction of thought is the loss of “meaning.” Simone wrote as recorded in “Science, Necessity, and the Love of God:
What makes the abyss between twentieth-century science and that of previous centuries is the different role of algebra. In physics algebra was at first simply a process for summarizing the relations, established by reasoning based on experiment, between the ideas of physics; an extremely convenient process for the numerical calculations necessary for their verification and application. But its role has continually increased in importance until finally, whereas algebra was once the auxiliary language and words the essential one, it is now exactly the other way round. There are even some physicists who tend to make algebra the sole language, or almost, so that in the end, an unattainable end of course, there would be nothing except figures derived form experimental measurements, and letters, combined in formulae. Now, ordinary language and algebraic language are not subject to the same logical requirement; relations between ideas are not fully represented by relations between letters; and, in particular, incompatible assertions may have equational equivalents which are by no means incompatible. When some relations between ideas have been translated into algebra and the formulae have been manipulated solely according to the numerical data of the experiment and the laws proper to algebra, results may be obtained which, when retranslated into spoken language, are a violent contradiction of common sense…………….
…………… If the algebra of physicists gives the impression of profundity it is because it is entirely flat; the third dimension of thought is missing..
There may be some students reading this wondering what this third direction of thought is and can become open to consciously contemplate its meaning and how it is a beginning to the relevation of universal meaning and purpose of which Panpsychism is an expression.
Dr. Basarab Nicolescu is advancing knowledge of this third direction. He recently wrote the book “The Hidden Third.” If you need and are open to a mind stretch, contemplate this interview.
https://parabola.org/2017/07/30/the-hidden-third/
“The greatest responsibility of all: the transmission of the mystery.”
—Basarab Nicolescu
This is true but the modern flat secular world rejects all attempts in favor of what it calls educated opinions.
In response to this call, physicist and author Basarab Nicolescu’s recent fragmentary text offers a view of humanity’s current spiritual situation. In thirteen sections, items as brief as a few words are linked to delineate the cosmic obligation, at the same time respecting the silence of the sacred. Following suggestions of Maurice Blanchot, the fragments remind us that the whole is never given and that the beginning of understanding is always imminent. Fragmentation also mirrors a prime discovery that Nicolescu draws from his own area of scientific expertise, broken symmetry. Physicists now believe that a breakdown in laws of symmetry supplied the initial condition of the Big Bang. Thirdly, humans’ relation to God (or “Absolute Evidence” in Nicolescu’s account) and to the celestial order has ruptured. The holy reconciling force has withdrawn and the pathway once illuminated by it, is no longer visible. While we now pray for divine support, no reply is forthcoming.
The call, moreover, is blocked from our ears by deep habits of thought and language. Inherited from the ancient Greek world, their source lies in binary logic: either this or that but not both. Nicolescu’s rejection of binary-ism is strong: “The fiendish dialectics of binary thought have the redoubtable yet subtle force of being able to kill in the name of ideas.” The death consists in foreclosing the middle, the “third not given”: what is there before and remains there after the division into two. Yet that death preserves in hiding the excluded element, which allows a direct perception of multiple levels of reality, up to that of Absolute Evidence. Fear of confronting a many-dimensioned cosmos lies behind the embrace of the binary. We opt for ready knowledge and survival of the status quo rather than participation in a work of co-creation. Because we fail to see the ambiguity in “yes or no,” our spirit is blinded and put in shackles.
Quantum physics recognizes the milieu, the interval between, as the null space. It is pregnant with mystery. Similarly, “quantum imagination is the energizing circulation between two or more levels of reality linked by discontinuity.” Thus, poetry provides the precise means of recovering access to our work. The French edition of The Hidden Third bears the title Theorems Poetiques. Poetically honed words can take a quantum leap into meaning. With them, it is possible to engage the work bequeathed to the human place in the cosmos: to combat entropy with “anthropy,” involution with evolution. That way, the divine expenditure of creation is restored through a human search for consciousness. “Human” must be understood as both the species and the individual. Degraded as it descends from the galactic to the molecular, consciousness needs replenishment if the cosmoses are not to flounder. The need speaks to humanity’s place in the universe and at the same time directly addresses our responsibility with respect to the mysterium tremendum.
It does seem that the dominance of binary logic in matters of science and religion may lessen as explorations of the “hidden third” allow us to value universalism as initiating a human perspective including objective human meaning and purpose within a conscious universe over secularism which holds that visible human society is the ultimate form of consciousness.