Why not consider starting from the side that opens
opportunities for a creative human personal and social
world, rather than from the side that closes down
all opportunities?
As Heraclitus said some 2500 years ago:
So great is the extent of soul,
that you will not find its boundary anywhere.
Of course, the Greek word for "soul" is psyche and this was also their word for butterfly. It's a wonderfully intuitive statement but I'm not sure that it takes us very far. Mind you, the Greeks were not so flippety-jippety as this jaunty philosophical statement might indicate. They were also inventing steam engines in those days . . . and flame throwers, so help us. Aristotle was even cottoning on to the possibility of automation: �masters would not need slaves� . . . �each [inanimate] instrument could do its own work . . . as if a shuttle should weave of itself.� (Aristotle: Politics)
If only the Greeks had consulted with Confucius and his social-engineering pals who were just round the corner, then much of history might have been short-circuited, the Chinese being a great deal more systematic at civilisation than the Greeks. The Greeks are good at starting things like the Olympic Games but not following-through. Mind you, Alexander the Great tried to get to China but, like the Americans, got stuck in Afghanistan. Compared with the latter, though, Alexander was a great deal more constructive and built a few new cities while he was there. He and his soldiers are still fondly remembered (unlike you-know-who will be) especially by some of those young cherubinic-looking Afghanis who insist on retaining genes for blue eyes. However, today, after the recent American visitation which changed the shape of a few of its mountains but little else, the women still wear their veils and are as subjugated as ever, Kabul university is still in ruins, the warlords are far richer than ever before ('cos more poppies are grown for an ever-efficient drugs market in the west) and the only security in the country is within a moving circle of about 500 yards radius around the president and his American security guards.
But back to Heraclitus, yes I agree with him. The mind is not just an epiphenomenon; it's everywhere. There's no real demarcation between lifeforms (and the things of this world that lifeforms imagine to be the all-and-only) and the universe. There's a leakage between them, as the quantum physicists are hinting, and that's where we 're going to find (or, probably, not ever be able to pin down exactly) essences like mind, freewill, consciousness, and so on.
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England
