1. Naturalising the World and the Mind

According to Bertrand Russell, the word ‘physical’, in all preliminary discussions, is to be understood as meaning ‘what is dealt by physics’. Physics (from Greek physis), in plain language, “tells us something about some of the constituents of the actual world; what these constituents are, may be doubtful, but it is that are to be called physical, whatever their nature may prove to be”.¹

Albert Einstein clearly stated that physics deals with events localised in space and in time. Every event has, in addition to its spatial coordinates x, y and z, a temporal value t. In this essay, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is taken for granted, including its limitation of the concept of instantaneity due to having to allow for the speed of light as the necessary link between two separate places. However, the neural events underlying mental functions occur well within a range in which there is little need to invoke relativity. 

The clear proposition is that everything existing in our universe has 4-dimensional coordinates in space and time. This implies that if we propose that the worlds of minds and cultures do actually exist in our universe, then the question is not whether but how the mind and its cultural derivates can be described as part of the physical world. However, to bring all existent phenomena into the same framework, it is necessary to describe suitable levels of physics to cover the complexity of biological, mental and social phenomena. 

In Galileo’s times of the early 1600s, it was still believed, following Aristotelian views, that the universe is divided into a sublunar world of imperfection, materiality and decay, and an ethereal world, beyond the moon, made of heavenly celestial bodies, immutable and eternal. Galileo Galilei building on the pioneering ideas of Nicolaus Copernicus played a critical role in demonstrating that the sublunar and the celestial worlds are part of the same world to which the same physical laws applied. In addition, Galileo demonstrated that the Earth, and thus humans, are not at the centre of the universe. It took another 200 years for similar humble recognition that humans are part of the natural biosphere resulting from a process of evolution of the Darwinian natural selection². 

But even now, we still confront an equivalent challenge in consdering the human mind as part of nature. According to many contemporary religious views, the universe is still considered to be divided into a material world and an immaterial spiritual world, often referred to as a collection of souls. The difficulties of reaching a unification of the external objective world with the inner subjective world of the mind under a single conceptual frame remain surprisingly challenging, despite there no longer being a widely-accepted Church-based authority that establishes dogmatic truths. Indeed, there is still surprisingly strong widespread resistance against attempts to unify the mental (spiritual) world with the rest of the natural world. 

There is little doubt that the science of the physical world (physics and chemistry) together with the science of life on Earth (biology, ecology) already have developed reliable paths to explain many natural events. It is now widely accepted that, like all other life on Earth, humans emerged through evolutionary biological processes based on Darwinian natural selection, as ‘biological machines’ (physiology) which ultimately formed societies of individuals (sociology) with the self-awareness of their experiences in the world (psychology). However, the science of ourselves as living and interacting beings is at its infancy. The history of scientific ideas shows a trend to deal first with simple phenomena of the world, then with more complex ones, followed gradually by the study of humans as subjects themselves. Only relatively recently have humans accepted to be regarded as animals amongst other animals as parts of the biosphere.

Science generally advances in small steps by trial and error, as a kind of ‘bricolage’ with patience its main virtue. Anil Seth says it well: “one of the more beautiful things about the scientific method is that it is cumulative and incremental.”³ We must accept that many answers must wait. Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman once described the quest to understand reality as a bit like watching a game of chess without knowing the rules. By observing the game, we slowly get to grips with what the pieces are and how they are allowed to move and interact. The tendency to assume that the universe in intelligible has probably deep psychological bases with evolutionary advantages.⁴ However, the fundamentally open nature of the world, and thus of human experiences, prevents us from expecting a final, complete description of the universe but rather points to a continuous evolving quest for knowledge. 

I am inclined to follow the principles enunciated by Edward Wilson in his book Consilience⁵ where knowledge involves multiple, converging confirmations from many different fields of research. Some non-scientific disciplines need not be included, either because are remnants of early attempts to develop scientific disciplines or because are patently based on antiscientific principles. These include prescientific medicines, such as the Greco-Roman medicine, the Indian Ayurveda medicine and the Chinese Traditional medicine.⁶ Some prescientific sciences were based fundamentally on magic and some kind of ‘mysticism’. For instance, alchemy, astrology, and herbal medicine, have been replaced by chemistry, astronomy, and pharmacology respectively. More recently pseudosciences based on magical forces, such as osteopathy, chiropractic, naturopathy, and homeopathy, all parts of alternative medicines, cannot belong to a unified map of knowledge except as historical curiosities.⁷ The risk of leaving out some hidden pearls of knowledge is minimal compared to the danger of including too many conceptions that do not meet a minimal requisite of evidence-based critical thinking.

The historical distinction between sciences and humanities criticised, amongst many others, by Isaiah Berlin⁸ is rightly disappearing. Humanity disciplines, such as history, literature, poetry, psychology, sociology, politics, economics etc, are often regarded as ‘soft’ sciences. Yet they are refining their methods of research and are becoming part of verifiable knowledge. 

We should expect the ability to travel across each discipline boundaries with as little impediments as possible. This requires understanding the methods used in each discipline and translating disciplinary jargons in the corresponding terms of other disciplines. Difficulties in doing so are often due to historical boundary disputes between disciplines, each claiming uniqueness, often resulting in unnecessary obscure jargons. 

After this brief introduction we should be ready to address some basic principles of those aspects of physics that help explaining the emerging complexity of the world.

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1. Bertrand Russell: Our Knowledge of the External World (1922) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37090 Click here to download a PDF. ↩︎
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection ↩︎
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_You:_A_New_Science_of_Consciousness   https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571337705-being-you/ ↩︎
4. Percy Bridgman: The Logic of Modern Physics (1927) MacMillan, New York. Click here to download a PDF. ↩︎
5. Edward O. Wilson: Consilience: The unity of knowledge (1998) Alfred A. Knopf, New York. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience_(book) Click here to download PDF. ↩︎
6. For a list of links to Marcello’s articles in The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/au/search?q=marcello+costa ↩︎
7. For extensive reporting and analysis of pseudoscience relating to health and medicine, see Friends of Science in Medicine website: https://www.scienceinmedicine.org.au ↩︎
8. Isaiah Berlin: Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas – Second Edition (2013) Princeton University Press, https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691156101/against-the-current / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Current:_Essays_in_the_History_of_Ideas ↩︎

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