Science, Religion, Magic and Consciousness

I retreat from the physical world into my conscious mind, where Science cannot reduce me to mere matter. It is in here that magic is worked; it is in here that my innermost, deepest, truest feelings (qualia) are being experienced.

I hold dear the primacy of the subjective conscious experience - qualia, and memories of qualia. These contain and retain the essence of who I am. They are the purest experience of self, devoid of ego, unshaped by biology - an experience [noun] that I experience [verb] uniquely; no one else may know of it - unless I share it.

Waking from sleep, I have a flash of inspiration, placing consciousness into the context of science, religion and magic.

Science has yet to understand consciousness. Yes, there are those reductionist materialists who argue that consciousness lies exclusively within the brain of higher-order animals; confined within the skull - merely an emergent property of evolution. But there is a growing number of scientists who are turning to panpsychism as a physical possibility - the notion that consciousness, like mass and energy, is a fundamental property of matter. A field - like an electromagnetic field or gravitational field. Consciousness organises and grows together with the sophistication of the life that carries it. It grows in the direction of God - goodness, wholeness, understanding - total awareness of All.

Without a scientific underpinning, the supernatural, metaphysical or paranormal have no frames of reference; they are full of hollow babble. There is but one Universal truth, to which we humans on Planet Earth are edging slowly towards.

Can you manipulate natural forces or alter destiny by conscious thought? That is magic in its purest meaning.

Magic - mind over matter.Willing outcomes to happen. "If you will it, Dude, it is no dream." [Leb. 7:19]. Yet over the years, I have singularly failed to will evil men from high office. My will to remove them is 10³⁸ weaker than their will to remain in power. Or something of that order.

Having said that, I do believe that in our day-to-day lives, it is possible to influence outcomes by conscious thought. Especially when the outcome you seek is ultimately good. The result of prayer. Prayers of gratitude, prayers asking for those most basic of human needs - health, security, companionship. But then what is religion but institutionalised magic? 

"Expect the unexpected" is something I taught the children when they were young. We teeter ever on the edge of chaos; bad events can be warded off by thinking of their happening. I have long held that on board an airliner that crashes there was not one passenger who had consciously contemplated the possibility of that happening. When our train from Kraków to Wrocław was two hours late the other week because a derailed engine had ripped up the points at a junction west of Gliwice, I felt sure that like me, not a single person boarding the train had considered the possibility that it may be delayed so badly.

Walking home the other day I was mindful of the cat, which had not shown up after a night outdoors. Would Felusia be waiting outside for me? Yes she was. But the house key, which over the past few years has three or four times refused to open the door, once again jammed. I hadn't expected that. After looking for neighbours (can of WD40? Cat food?) and walking around the garden, I tried the key again. The door opened as if nothing had ever been wrong. Intermittent faults that randomly occur are, I believe, events that can be prevented by consciousness. 

But can I prove this experimentally? No. Am I aware of this phenomenon over my 63 years? Yes. Magic? If you say so.

Whatever cannot be falsified by science, is. It exists until such time as it can be disproved in multiple experiments which are verified in peer-reviewed papers. Until a team of scientists in a lab at MIT devise an experiment which shows God doesn't exist - an experiment that can be replicated in labs all over the world - God will continue to exist. 

Over the centuries, science has shown that base metals cannot be turned into gold, that phlogiston doesn't exist, that vaccines work better than prayer, but science does not hold all the answers.

The magic, the wonder, in the world is held in our minds. We should be open to the possibilities, but at the same time not expecting miracles. If I were to proclaim that using my mind power, I can swing a needle one way or another - I won't, because the outcome would be meaningless in practical terms, a crude human attempt to try to capture something that's immeasurable in nature.

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By coincidence, I was reading the print version of last week's The Economist and came across a story about China's growth. The headline grabbed me - 'The Thales of Economics'. Thales, the multinational that builds electrical systems for aerospace, defence and transportation? I read the whole piece - no mention of the company. Maybe a play on words? The Economist likes a good pun. If so, it's lost on me. Maybe an song by Bruce Springsteen or David Bowie - favourite songwriters of The Economist's subeditors? No, I know them all too well. This obscure reference to Thales, by the way, is from a magazine that's careful to point out that JP Morgan Chase is a bank and that PwC is a consultancy. I'm left guessing that this Thales is some ancient Greek guy known only to those who studied the Greats at Oxford.

So I check. "Thales of Miletus, 624 –545 BC, a Greek mathematician, recognised for breaking from the use of mythology to explain the world and the universe, and instead explaining natural objects and phenomena by naturalistic hypotheses – a precursor to modern science." So - we can trace back to Thales the human urge to understand the wonder of the Universe in non-magical terms. [I still have no idea what Thales has to do with the article about trade wars and capital controls.] 

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UPDATE 8 December 2022:

I come across this sentence about Thales in a newsletter from the John Templeton Foundation: "Noticing that magnets have the capacity to move iron, Thales of Miletus reasoned that “the world is not divided into animate and inanimate as easily as we might think.” Associating psyche, or soul, with movement, Thales maintained that even inanimate things have a type of “psyche.”  For Thales, the world is alive because “soul is mingled in the whole universe.” "

This time three years ago:
The house on the działka, coming on
(Amazing how much as been done since then!)

This time four years ago:
Autumn comes early

This time five years ago:
Kriegslok passes through Jeziorki

This time nine years ago:
A little way west of Jeziorki

This time ten years ago:
The Old Sailor's Tale - part II 

This time 11 years ago:
Prague-Jeziorki-Moscow

This time 12 years ago:
The passing of Lt. Cmdr. Tadeusz Lesisz 

This time 14 years ago:
Summer ends, autumn begins