Metaphysical Humanism and the Laws of Being, part XXI—What is Thought?

What is Thought?

Before we move on to an examination of the second order of laws, it’s worth considering something that crossed my mind at 5:30 a.m. this morning as I walked out into the marsh in Piermont, NY. 

The sun was still well below the horizon. I was pondering the conditions of inherency and whether or not, as I maintain, it’s possible that the universe (and, by the way, all of reality) has inherent or inalienable properties of intelligence and feeling. 

Why should we think that these properties are accidental, secondary arisings and ephemeral (i.e., meaningless) phenomena not essentially connected to the random, accidental formations produced by the mindless action of unintelligent, unfeeling laws? 

Let’s remember first that physical laws themselves have no actual physical properties. They exist only in human minds, as concepts, which describe the behavior of matter using another human-thought-dependent discipline called mathematics. These concepts could not possibly exist without human minds to think of them; and we know this simply because our conception of them undergoes constant evolution as we understand more about them. There is, in other words, a dependent reciprocity between intelligence and law.

Secondly—and this is what I thought about this morning, which fascinated me—the mind itself, this erratic, incalculably complex set of electrochemical reactions in the form of waves propagating through quanta—is producing thought itself. 

Somehow, through an impossible-to-understand set of interrelationships [I thought to myself] I am thinking. 

This thought itself, with its order and meaning—its emergent nature, intentions, and purposes—is a direct result of quantum interactions which are currently taking place. So thought, like all other visible or tangible phenomena, is wholly integrated into the quantum state, and expresses itself as an emergent property. When we think and feel, we may fairly say that the universe thinks and feels—because we are an inextractable part of it. If even a small part of the universe thinks and feels, then the universe does have the property of thinking and feeling, even if it's not expressed at all times and everywhere (so far as we can see, anyway.)

The quantum state, furthermore, precisely contains the potential for thought within itself as a pre-existing condition. The ability to reach such a state is already present in the existence of the quantum state itself—so it's in fact inherent.

As such, the properties of thinking and feeling, and the qualities that they impart, are both implicit and universal. And while thought and feeling, like the laws they perceive, have no visible physical substance to document their existence, they do nonetheless exist. To extend that, consider this: even if we were able to record and describe a set of electromagnetic interactions representing the fact that Debbie loves Richard, nothing about that recording or description of the energies involved would de facto indicate that Debbie loves Richard; yet Debbie does love Richard. It's thought; it's feeling. Those attributes can’t be intuited, imparted or predicted by mechanistic rationalism; but they're accepted as defaults in metaphysical humanism. 

Thought and feeling exist, furthermore, as something much greater than their wave forms propagating through energy fields; they produce order. They display emergent properties and impart meaning (intention and purpose.) 

All of these things thought and feeling do as inevitably and invisibly as the physical laws do; yet they impose these properties, which are just as equally lawful as the physical laws, without touching anything. That is to say, thought and feeling need no physical expression of action to express their existence. And while they may be associated with physical matter, they're not of physical matter; they're rather (like the matter itself) also of wave forms, the movement of energies in relationship.   

This movement of energy in relationship is the sum of it.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.