On Consciousness (Pt IV) – Lent 2025: Day ten

Today I shall touch on consciousness and inanimate objects; the Ghost in the Machine, and how it  affects entropy. The term 'ghost in the machine' was originally coined by British philosopher Gilbert Ryle* in 1949 to describe the Cartesian dualist account of the mind–body relationship. It came to public attention as the title of a 1967 book by Arthur Koestler, who, like Ryle was of the the view that consciousness is not a separate, ethereal entity; both men were rather materialist monists. 

Below: Google Imagen 3.0 – AI's somewhat literal interpretation of the ghost in the machine.

I see the term rather as an intimation of how our consciousness can affect the everyday things we have around us; ones that have tendencies to demonstrate intermittent faults that cannot be traced back to a root cause, nor rectified, and yet can be overcome with a dose of mind over matter. 

Items in my life that have this tendency: my gas cooker (lights first time one day, takes many clicks the next), SD cards for my Nikon camera (not working one day, fine the next). Can I unscrew the top off my coffee grinder without a pair of pliers? One day no, most days yes.

Obviously, if you care about your material possessions, they will last longer, they will work better, than if you neglect them. But I think there's a metaphysical aspect too.

Entropy reigns. The second law of thermodynamics states that everything winds down, breaks up, rots away; this is entropy – the inexorable change from order to disorder. 

Yet we can also see new life appearing; from insects' eggs to star formation. Plants, animals and humans come into being, they grow, they build, they reproduce; they die but they leave behind them life; new order springs from possibilities becoming actual. Human intelligence gives a this process a new layer – children learn, discover, invent, create new value. Any machine will, over time, break down as its parts wear out. Any biological organism will die, sooner or later. From out of chaotic disorder (random atoms and molecules), creativity brings order (from the mulch of last year's dead plants new seeds grow). And then back into disorder again (things break down, people age and die), and so on – but the net result in the constant war between order and disorder is an overall increase of both entropy and of consciousness.

We observe the arrow of time by noting the effects of the second law of thermodynamics. Left on its own in room temperature, a cup of tea will cool down, an ice cube will melt. An omelette can never return to the state of being an egg. A butterfly cannot become a caterpillar, nor can a dead butterfly become a live one. Quantum processes are reversible (as per Feynman diagrams) but entropy only works one way; we cannot reverse the arrow of time. 

But it could it be that consciousness has opposite properties to entropy? The notion of negative entropy, or negentropy, or most elegantly, syntropy (this is the term I'll stick with), posits that consciousness is not subject to entropy. Neither is the atom; stable atoms (ones not subject to radioactive decay) can theoretically exist indefinitely. 

So here I'd ask: If so, is the total amount of consciousness in the universe finite? Does is it increase in quality over time – does it evolve? Does all of that scattered, distributed 'small-c' consciousness merge with the Divine 'Big-C' Consciousness gradually, one biological death at a time, or in one go at the end of days? Big questions to answer!]

Looking after my most valuable material possession – my body, the biological container for my consciousness, is what I'll write about tomorrow.

* Among Ryle's students was Daniel 'Consciousness is an Illusion' Dennett, the arch-physicalist.

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