And I would go on to assert that the world of relationships is unbelievably more complicated than the physical workings of the brain; and the world of interpenetrating minds unbelievably more complicated still. Yet all this is ignored in the claim that particle physics will reveal all the secrets of the Universe. Particle physics is the very simplest of the deep mysteries of Nature. It would be better to call it a search for a “unified field theory”.
I would not dream of calling my theory of consciousness by any such name. It is just the first tottering steps in the right direction, I mean towards discovering a theory of thought, and what we can do to influence evolution in the right direction. I am so diffident, because when one considers consciousness one must remember that thought and will influence matter. Of course they do, or we would never get out of bed in the morning. We all learn skills. An advocate’s eloquence is second nature; he only has to think what to say, hardly at all the words to use, save for the crucial points he wants to make. A carpenter’s skill is in his fingers. An amateur may worry over the order of doing things, lest he makes a mistake that spoils the wood, and he has to start again; the tradesman does it as a matter of habit, and things are always done in order. How thought sends impulses along the nervous system to get the muscles into action is, as far as I am aware, a mystery beyond our understanding. But it is a characteristic of thought and will to be able to influence matter, both on the scale of the human body and on the scale of commanding armies; you might call it one of the Laws of the Spiritual World. To deny that they do, is to stand creation on its head.
But this extravagantly pompous title, given to such a comparatively modest objective, does prompt the question why anyone should want to discover that the mechanism of our world is mechanical? Expressing the question in this way, acts as a reminder that those who assume there is a causal explanation for all that happens, are likely to find that there is a causal explanation. Whereas those who assume that freewill is liable at any moment to interrupt the dreary flow of causality, are likely to find that this is exactly how the world works. Of course most truth you can only discover; there is little you know a priori by the light of reason; and the whole of experimental science is based on this belief or assumption. But as Clausewitz wrote, “The first, the grandest, the most decisive act of judgement which the Statesman and General exercises is rightly to understand the War in which he engages, not to take it for something, to wish to make it something, which by the nature of its relations it is impossible for it to be”. He knew that judgement or wisdom has a price above rubies.
I think the most charitable answer to this question, is that people who struggle to find that the world is a mechanical ritual, want to escape the responsibility of making decisions. In particular, why do biologists preach evolution to prove that this is a godless world – with all the fervour of evangelicals?