Quantum Conciousness
The hermetic tradition has long been concerned with the relationship between the inner world of our consciousness and the
outer world of nature, between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the below and the above, the material and the spiritual, the
centric and the peripheral. The hermetic world view held by such as Robert Fludd, pictured a great chain of being linking our
inner spark of consciousness with all the facets of the Great World. There was a grand platonic metaphysical clockwork, as it
were, through which our inner world was linked by means of a hierarchy of beings and planes to the highest unity of the Divine.
This view though comforting is philosophically unsound, and the developments in thought since the early 17th century have
made such a hermetic world view untenable and philosophically naive. It is impossible to try to argue the case for such an
hermetic metaphysics with anyone who has had a philosophical training, for they will quickly and mercilessly reveal deep
philosophical contradictions in this world view.
So do we now have to abandon such a beautiful and spiritual world view and adopt the prevailing reductionist materialist
conception of the world which has become accepted in the intellectual tradition of the West ?
I am not so sure. There still remains the problem of our consciousness and its relationship to our material form - the Mind /
Brain problem. Behavioural psychologists such as Skinner tried to reduce this to one level - the material brain - by viewing the
mental or consciousness events from the outside as being merely stimulus-response loops. This simplistic view works fine for
basic reflex actions - "I itch therefore I scratch" - but dissolves into absurdity when applied to any real act of the creative
intellect or artistic imagination. Skinner's determinism collapses when confronted with trying to explain the creative source of
our consciousness revealing itself in an artist at work or a mathematician discovering through his thinking a new property of an
abstract mathematical system. The psychologists' attempts to reduce the mind/brain problem to a merely material one of
neurophysiology obviously failed. The idea that consciousness is merely a secretion or manifestation of a complex net of
electrical impulses working within the mass of cells in our brain, is now discredited. The advocates of this view are strongly
motivated by a desire to reduce the world to one level, to get rid of the necessity for "consciousness", "mind" or "spirit" as a
real facet of the world.
