Sorry for the long comment, just four thoughts in light of all your posts and the Tim Jackson podcast. Two are coming off what you have written and two from the book.
"Bergson’s criticisms of Einstein’s reduction of duration or living time to measurable clock-time...that is, real time is not a series of simple instantaneous presents that might be marked on a number line but a complex and irreversible flow of creatively differentiating moments"
What is interesting was that until recently "Clock Time" in physics was not even the time displayed by an actual clock. Rather it was as Bergson mentions a sort of abstract Platonic parameter that real world clocks were expected to be in sync with, often through a rather complicated argument if one went into the details of it.
However since the 1970s we've known that some divergences or infinities are related to exactly this Platonic treatment of time. There have been many papers on the topic, such as the Page-Wooters formalism or the recent work of Edward Witten, but the major outcome was to replace this Platonic parameter with correlations with an actual clock. This different account of time contains a weak form of many of Bergson's insights, i.e. there are only durations not "instantaneous slices" of time, the immediate past and the present are not perfectly separated. This has solved for example the issue of Black Hole Entropies coming out as infinite.
I say a weak form of Bergson's insights because of course he discusses the full nature of lived time, which is still not present in the models above, but I think its interesting that once once Clock Time descends into the realm of actual clocks his insights begin to show up.
"The authors criticize the life-as-machine metaphor. Machines are decomposable because they have externally related parts. Organisms are autonomous wholes and so not decomposable. Their parts produce one another for the sake of the whole...Phase spaces are logical constructions. They are not real places out there in nature"
I think this lines up nicely with Whitehead's quote "Biology is the study of the larger organisms; physics is the study of the smaller organisms" and McGilchrist's point in "The Matter with Things" that mechanistic thinking is really only useful at the intermediate scale.
Quantum Physical systems also display holism and lack predefined, or even definable, phase spaces. Holism isn't even some side feature of quantum theory, but in modern presentations an axiom from which the theory can be constructed. From the other side quantum probability has recently been used to better success than classical probability in psychological studies. So we see a common set of traits emerge in the very small and the biological.
With the book itself I shared the same issues as yourself, so I'll only comment on two things particular to physics.
The Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics section was inaccurate in a way I often see. For example "Psi-Ontology (II): Pilot Wave Theories" discusses Bohmian Mechanics, but never mentions that Bohmian Mechanics is not capable of handling any phenomena involving relativistic effects or changing particle number, i.e. basically any phenomena in quantum field theory as opposed to non-relativistic quantum mechanics. There are also issues with how it handles spin and momentum even in the non-relativistic case pointed out by R.F. Streater back in the early 2000s, whether it even has solutions in certain cases, etc. I know this isn't the focus of the book, but I don't agree with the picture painted that it's a genuine alternative to standard QM that was only ignored due to "misconceptions about its meaning and validity" (p.118 in my electronic copy). I find discussions on the meaning of QM are often cluttered by including literally every idea anyone has thought of without any narrowing of the discussion to those ideas that seem to work.
Secondly was the comment about Life being a surprise from the point of view of physics. Even chemistry and "higher physics" is a surprise from the view of fundamental physics, there are unsolved and some have argued unsolvable (e.g. Hans Primas) issues with getting chemistry out of physics reductively, atomic physics out of particle physics and so on. It's not as if physics provides some kind of utterly closed singular account of the inanimate domain. Rather there's a patchwork of models for various domains with arguments about their compatibility (note compatibility, not that one reduces to the other) where the domains overlap. This point is most clearly made in Falkenberg's "Particle Metaphysics". We just have a series of compatible domains, rather than Life as this utterly alien irruption as you were talking about with Timothy Jackson.
I know this will look and sound like hyper-criticism, but what you are writing is exactly what Steiner warned against here in this lecture about the work of the Angels in the human astral body. There are negative forces working in the world that would tear the Angels from their evolutionary task, and relegate them back to working in the etheric body. Ahriman is one of these beings with force.
“But the Ahrimanic beings too are working to obscure this revelation. They are not at pains to make man particularly spiritual, but rather to kill out in him the consciousness of his own spirituality. They endeavour to instill into him the conviction that he is nothing but a completely developed animal. Ahriman is in truth the teacher par excellence of materialistic Darwinism. He is also the great teacher of all those technical and practical pursuits in Earth-evolution where there is refusal to acknowledge the validity of anything except the external life of the senses, where the only desire is for a widespread technology, so that with somewhat greater refinement, men shall satisfy their hunger, thirst and other needs in the same way as the animal. To kill, to darken in man the consciousness that he is an image of the Godhead—this is what the Ahrimanic beings are endeavouring by subtle scientific means of every kind to achieve in our age of the Spiritual Soul.
In earlier epochs it would have been of no avail to the Ahrimanic beings to obscure the truth from men by theories in this way. And why? Even during the Greco-Latin age, but still more so in the earlier epoch when man still had the pictures of atavistic clairvoyance, how he thought was entirely a matter of indifference: he had his pictures and these pictures were windows through which he looked into the spiritual world. Whatever Ahriman might have insinuated to man concerning his relation to the animals would have had no effect at all upon his way of life. Thought has for the first time become really powerful—one could also say, powerful in its ineptitude—in our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, since the 15th century. Only since then has thinking been competent to bring the Spiritual Soul into the realm of the spirit, but at the same time also to hinder it from entering the spiritual world. Only now are we experiencing the age when a theory or a science, by the path of consciousness, robs man of his divinity, of his knowledge of the Divine. Only in the age of the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul is this possible. Hence the Ahrimanic spirits endeavour to spread teachings which obscure man's divine origin.”
Sorry I genuinely don't understand how I'm writing something that Steiner warned against. Happy to be corrected and maybe I'm not properly familiar with Steiner's meaning here.
I know us physicists don't have stirring prose :), but the presence of technical points in my post is not meant to indicate a technical point of view on the world if that makes sense. It's just to analyse points in the book and say some personal reflections on what Matt wrote.
Matt, you asked a couple of good hypothetical questions:
1) What is the ontology of evolution? Does it have a direction? What are its 'a priori' conditions, if any?
2) What if Whitehead is right that life strives not only to survive but also to thrive and evolve towards greater complexity and sensitivity?
Both Steiner, born the same month and year as Whitehead (1861), and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, born in 1881, came to this kind of complete conviction about human evolution and its future. Father Teilhard is summarized nicely here:
Steiner himself, in the opening paragraph of GA 201, says it all. It is complex all the way with human evolution. It is not just 'a priori', but also 'a posteriori', and even, 'above-below', as the spatial planes that inhere to the human constitution, and eventually thrust out the three perpendiculars for a three-dimensional world conception. This happens pretty early in life; around three years of age, but we have learned to crawl, walk, and even speak by then. Subject-object distinctions have entered the world experience by this age, and the dichotomy of Son of God meets Son of Man. Earthly memory begins.
The idea that philosophy involves books all over the floor is a very ethnocentric view of philosophy. Simply put the love of knowledge requires that we love more kinds of knowledge than just book learning. This is very important here amid the paradigm shift.
“What has knowledge of the world become in the course of the last centuries? In its relation to the Universe, it has become a mere mathematical-mechanical calculation, to which in recent times have been added the results of spectra analysis; these again are purely physical, and even in the physical domain, mechanical-mathematical. Astronomy observes the courses of the stars and calculates; but it notices only those forces which show the Universe, in so far as the Earth is enclosed in it, as a great machine, a great mechanism. It is true to say that this mechanical-mathematical method of observation has come to be regarded simply and solely as the only one that can actually lead to knowledge.
Now with what does the mentality which finds expression in this mathematical-mechanical construction of the Universe reckon? It reckons with something that is founded to some extent in the nature of Man, but only in a very small part of him. It reckons first with the abstract three dimensions of space. Astronomy reckons with the abstract three dimensions of space; it distinguishes one dimension, a second (drawing on blackboard) and a third, at right angles. It fixes attention on a star in movement, or on the position of a star, by looking at these three dimensions of space. Now man would be unable to speak of three dimensional space if he had not experienced it in his own being. Man experiences three-dimensional space. In the course of his life he experiences first the vertical dimension. As a child he crawls, and then he raises himself upright and experiences thereby the vertical dimension. It would not be possible for man to speak of the vertical dimension if he did not experience it. To think that he could find anything in the Universe other than he finds in himself would be an illusion. Man finds this vertical dimension only by experiencing it himself. By stretching out our hands and arms at right angles to the vertical we obtain the second dimension. In what we experience when breathing or speaking, in the inhaling and exhaling of the air, or in what we experience when we eat, when the food in the body moves from front to back, we experience the third dimension. Only because man experiences these three dimensions within him does he project them into external space. Man can find absolutely nothing in the Universe unless he finds it first in himself. The strange thing is that in this age of abstractions which began in the middle of the fifteenth century, Man has made these three dimensions homogeneous. That is, he has simply left out of his thought the concrete distinction between them. He has left out what makes the three dimensions different to him. If he were to give his real human experience, he would say: My perpendicular line, my operative line, my extensive or extending line. He would have to assume a difference in quality between the three spatial dimensions. Were he to do this, he would no longer be able to conceive of an astronomical cosmogony in the present abstract way. He would obtain a less purely intellectual cosmic picture. For this however he would have to experience in a more concrete way his own relationship to the three dimensions. Today he has no such experience. He does not experience for instance the assuming of the upright position, the being in the vertical; and so he is not aware that he is in a vertical position for the simple reason that he moves together with the Earth in a certain direction which adheres to the vertical. Neither does he know that he makes his breathing movements, his digestive and eating movements as well as other movements, in a direction through which the Earth also moves in a certain line. All this adherence to certain directions of movement implies an adaptation, a fitting into, the movements of the Universe. Today man takes no account whatever of this concrete understanding of the dimensions; hence he cannot define his position in the great cosmic process. He does not know how he stands in it, nor that he is as it were a part and member of it. Steps will have now to be taken whereby man can obtain a knowledge of Man, a self-knowledge, and so a knowledge of how he is placed in the Universe.”
Here is where we can reduce this long paragraph down to its essence:
"Man can find absolutely nothing in the Universe unless he finds it first in himself."
Nature Science vs. Human Science. Maybe the "blind spot" is finally being seen. Steiner had it scoped out as far back as his Weimar period. This was when he 'drew the sword from the stone' in the idyllic setting of Goethe.
Sorry for the long comment, just four thoughts in light of all your posts and the Tim Jackson podcast. Two are coming off what you have written and two from the book.
"Bergson’s criticisms of Einstein’s reduction of duration or living time to measurable clock-time...that is, real time is not a series of simple instantaneous presents that might be marked on a number line but a complex and irreversible flow of creatively differentiating moments"
What is interesting was that until recently "Clock Time" in physics was not even the time displayed by an actual clock. Rather it was as Bergson mentions a sort of abstract Platonic parameter that real world clocks were expected to be in sync with, often through a rather complicated argument if one went into the details of it.
However since the 1970s we've known that some divergences or infinities are related to exactly this Platonic treatment of time. There have been many papers on the topic, such as the Page-Wooters formalism or the recent work of Edward Witten, but the major outcome was to replace this Platonic parameter with correlations with an actual clock. This different account of time contains a weak form of many of Bergson's insights, i.e. there are only durations not "instantaneous slices" of time, the immediate past and the present are not perfectly separated. This has solved for example the issue of Black Hole Entropies coming out as infinite.
I say a weak form of Bergson's insights because of course he discusses the full nature of lived time, which is still not present in the models above, but I think its interesting that once once Clock Time descends into the realm of actual clocks his insights begin to show up.
"The authors criticize the life-as-machine metaphor. Machines are decomposable because they have externally related parts. Organisms are autonomous wholes and so not decomposable. Their parts produce one another for the sake of the whole...Phase spaces are logical constructions. They are not real places out there in nature"
I think this lines up nicely with Whitehead's quote "Biology is the study of the larger organisms; physics is the study of the smaller organisms" and McGilchrist's point in "The Matter with Things" that mechanistic thinking is really only useful at the intermediate scale.
Quantum Physical systems also display holism and lack predefined, or even definable, phase spaces. Holism isn't even some side feature of quantum theory, but in modern presentations an axiom from which the theory can be constructed. From the other side quantum probability has recently been used to better success than classical probability in psychological studies. So we see a common set of traits emerge in the very small and the biological.
With the book itself I shared the same issues as yourself, so I'll only comment on two things particular to physics.
The Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics section was inaccurate in a way I often see. For example "Psi-Ontology (II): Pilot Wave Theories" discusses Bohmian Mechanics, but never mentions that Bohmian Mechanics is not capable of handling any phenomena involving relativistic effects or changing particle number, i.e. basically any phenomena in quantum field theory as opposed to non-relativistic quantum mechanics. There are also issues with how it handles spin and momentum even in the non-relativistic case pointed out by R.F. Streater back in the early 2000s, whether it even has solutions in certain cases, etc. I know this isn't the focus of the book, but I don't agree with the picture painted that it's a genuine alternative to standard QM that was only ignored due to "misconceptions about its meaning and validity" (p.118 in my electronic copy). I find discussions on the meaning of QM are often cluttered by including literally every idea anyone has thought of without any narrowing of the discussion to those ideas that seem to work.
Secondly was the comment about Life being a surprise from the point of view of physics. Even chemistry and "higher physics" is a surprise from the view of fundamental physics, there are unsolved and some have argued unsolvable (e.g. Hans Primas) issues with getting chemistry out of physics reductively, atomic physics out of particle physics and so on. It's not as if physics provides some kind of utterly closed singular account of the inanimate domain. Rather there's a patchwork of models for various domains with arguments about their compatibility (note compatibility, not that one reduces to the other) where the domains overlap. This point is most clearly made in Falkenberg's "Particle Metaphysics". We just have a series of compatible domains, rather than Life as this utterly alien irruption as you were talking about with Timothy Jackson.
Anyway thanks for the detailed posts Matt.
Thanks for this in depth comment, Darran. Very helpful!
Oh lovely to hear Matt. I've learned so much from all your videos and your books, that I'm happy something is useful in return.
Hi Darran,
I know this will look and sound like hyper-criticism, but what you are writing is exactly what Steiner warned against here in this lecture about the work of the Angels in the human astral body. There are negative forces working in the world that would tear the Angels from their evolutionary task, and relegate them back to working in the etheric body. Ahriman is one of these beings with force.
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA182/English/Singles/19181009p01.html
“But the Ahrimanic beings too are working to obscure this revelation. They are not at pains to make man particularly spiritual, but rather to kill out in him the consciousness of his own spirituality. They endeavour to instill into him the conviction that he is nothing but a completely developed animal. Ahriman is in truth the teacher par excellence of materialistic Darwinism. He is also the great teacher of all those technical and practical pursuits in Earth-evolution where there is refusal to acknowledge the validity of anything except the external life of the senses, where the only desire is for a widespread technology, so that with somewhat greater refinement, men shall satisfy their hunger, thirst and other needs in the same way as the animal. To kill, to darken in man the consciousness that he is an image of the Godhead—this is what the Ahrimanic beings are endeavouring by subtle scientific means of every kind to achieve in our age of the Spiritual Soul.
In earlier epochs it would have been of no avail to the Ahrimanic beings to obscure the truth from men by theories in this way. And why? Even during the Greco-Latin age, but still more so in the earlier epoch when man still had the pictures of atavistic clairvoyance, how he thought was entirely a matter of indifference: he had his pictures and these pictures were windows through which he looked into the spiritual world. Whatever Ahriman might have insinuated to man concerning his relation to the animals would have had no effect at all upon his way of life. Thought has for the first time become really powerful—one could also say, powerful in its ineptitude—in our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, since the 15th century. Only since then has thinking been competent to bring the Spiritual Soul into the realm of the spirit, but at the same time also to hinder it from entering the spiritual world. Only now are we experiencing the age when a theory or a science, by the path of consciousness, robs man of his divinity, of his knowledge of the Divine. Only in the age of the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul is this possible. Hence the Ahrimanic spirits endeavour to spread teachings which obscure man's divine origin.”
Hi Steve,
Sorry I genuinely don't understand how I'm writing something that Steiner warned against. Happy to be corrected and maybe I'm not properly familiar with Steiner's meaning here.
I know us physicists don't have stirring prose :), but the presence of technical points in my post is not meant to indicate a technical point of view on the world if that makes sense. It's just to analyse points in the book and say some personal reflections on what Matt wrote.
Matt, you asked a couple of good hypothetical questions:
1) What is the ontology of evolution? Does it have a direction? What are its 'a priori' conditions, if any?
2) What if Whitehead is right that life strives not only to survive but also to thrive and evolve towards greater complexity and sensitivity?
Both Steiner, born the same month and year as Whitehead (1861), and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, born in 1881, came to this kind of complete conviction about human evolution and its future. Father Teilhard is summarized nicely here:
https://ia800703.us.archive.org/1/items/TheFutureOfMan/Future_of_Man.pdf
Steiner himself, in the opening paragraph of GA 201, says it all. It is complex all the way with human evolution. It is not just 'a priori', but also 'a posteriori', and even, 'above-below', as the spatial planes that inhere to the human constitution, and eventually thrust out the three perpendiculars for a three-dimensional world conception. This happens pretty early in life; around three years of age, but we have learned to crawl, walk, and even speak by then. Subject-object distinctions have entered the world experience by this age, and the dichotomy of Son of God meets Son of Man. Earthly memory begins.
The idea that philosophy involves books all over the floor is a very ethnocentric view of philosophy. Simply put the love of knowledge requires that we love more kinds of knowledge than just book learning. This is very important here amid the paradigm shift.
“What has knowledge of the world become in the course of the last centuries? In its relation to the Universe, it has become a mere mathematical-mechanical calculation, to which in recent times have been added the results of spectra analysis; these again are purely physical, and even in the physical domain, mechanical-mathematical. Astronomy observes the courses of the stars and calculates; but it notices only those forces which show the Universe, in so far as the Earth is enclosed in it, as a great machine, a great mechanism. It is true to say that this mechanical-mathematical method of observation has come to be regarded simply and solely as the only one that can actually lead to knowledge.
Now with what does the mentality which finds expression in this mathematical-mechanical construction of the Universe reckon? It reckons with something that is founded to some extent in the nature of Man, but only in a very small part of him. It reckons first with the abstract three dimensions of space. Astronomy reckons with the abstract three dimensions of space; it distinguishes one dimension, a second (drawing on blackboard) and a third, at right angles. It fixes attention on a star in movement, or on the position of a star, by looking at these three dimensions of space. Now man would be unable to speak of three dimensional space if he had not experienced it in his own being. Man experiences three-dimensional space. In the course of his life he experiences first the vertical dimension. As a child he crawls, and then he raises himself upright and experiences thereby the vertical dimension. It would not be possible for man to speak of the vertical dimension if he did not experience it. To think that he could find anything in the Universe other than he finds in himself would be an illusion. Man finds this vertical dimension only by experiencing it himself. By stretching out our hands and arms at right angles to the vertical we obtain the second dimension. In what we experience when breathing or speaking, in the inhaling and exhaling of the air, or in what we experience when we eat, when the food in the body moves from front to back, we experience the third dimension. Only because man experiences these three dimensions within him does he project them into external space. Man can find absolutely nothing in the Universe unless he finds it first in himself. The strange thing is that in this age of abstractions which began in the middle of the fifteenth century, Man has made these three dimensions homogeneous. That is, he has simply left out of his thought the concrete distinction between them. He has left out what makes the three dimensions different to him. If he were to give his real human experience, he would say: My perpendicular line, my operative line, my extensive or extending line. He would have to assume a difference in quality between the three spatial dimensions. Were he to do this, he would no longer be able to conceive of an astronomical cosmogony in the present abstract way. He would obtain a less purely intellectual cosmic picture. For this however he would have to experience in a more concrete way his own relationship to the three dimensions. Today he has no such experience. He does not experience for instance the assuming of the upright position, the being in the vertical; and so he is not aware that he is in a vertical position for the simple reason that he moves together with the Earth in a certain direction which adheres to the vertical. Neither does he know that he makes his breathing movements, his digestive and eating movements as well as other movements, in a direction through which the Earth also moves in a certain line. All this adherence to certain directions of movement implies an adaptation, a fitting into, the movements of the Universe. Today man takes no account whatever of this concrete understanding of the dimensions; hence he cannot define his position in the great cosmic process. He does not know how he stands in it, nor that he is as it were a part and member of it. Steps will have now to be taken whereby man can obtain a knowledge of Man, a self-knowledge, and so a knowledge of how he is placed in the Universe.”
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA201/English/RSP1972/19200409a01.html
Here is where we can reduce this long paragraph down to its essence:
"Man can find absolutely nothing in the Universe unless he finds it first in himself."
Nature Science vs. Human Science. Maybe the "blind spot" is finally being seen. Steiner had it scoped out as far back as his Weimar period. This was when he 'drew the sword from the stone' in the idyllic setting of Goethe.