PacificRimTackle
Cybernetics and Biochemistry usually appear to be separate branches of modern science , don’t they? Well, due to a philosophical consequence of their results not nearly enough taken into account, they reveal their origin from the same mentality: Both disciplines ignore the borderline between dead and living matter which once had been considered to be obvious. The biochemist is unable to clearly mark the point where the chemical evolution of macromolecules has lead to the first beginnings of a biological evolution, and the cyberneticist copies psychological processes by using electronics.
In other words, we are today about to discover that the line between inorganic, unconscious matter and living, inspired substance as a matter of fact belongs to a grid which we have thrown over nature in order to facilitate the overall view. Biochemistry and cybernetics inform us that the attempt to recover it in reality is as misguided as, let’s say, the endeavor to trace the grid of a map in a landscape.
The “dead” Hydrogen atom already contains all the “informations” which on the conditions of natural law have been necessary to let everything come into being what actually exists. This is probably the greatest perspective of our today’s world view.
Anybody who considers this opinion as too materialistic, becomes easily the victim of a paralogism because we are used to live in time like in a one-way street: Sometime or other everybody asks himself where he will be after death, but nobody asks where he has been before he was born – although both is the same.
Equally, the realization that life and consciousness are already contained as possibilities in the elementary structure of matter, has its reverse side. If we, you see, deny that at a certain point of evolution which has put these possibilities into effect, any in principle new factors had popped up virtually out of the blue which would allow to draw a line between different realms of nature, then we have also to concede the same for the opposite consideration which regards this very development, so to speak, from the other end:
There is no doubt that we possess consciousness. But then there must have been at any point, the further downward we track evolution, preliminary stages of this consciousness. In other words: This consciousness must have been laid out in an infinitely diluted form basically even in the elementary particles of matter. Otherwise the imagined borderline would become clearly visible from this perspective.
Hence the outcome of our efforts to deduce mind from matter is the discovery that matter itself possesses mental qualities. At least in the sense like books have to be classed with the mental domain because of the informations they contain as possibilities.
Unless we insist on defining them as an especially complicated method of woodworking.
