How the Non-Physical Influences Physics and Physiology: a proposal

Expanded from talk on July 24 at SSE-PA Connections 2021:

A combined meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration and the Parapsychological Association. 

Prerecorded video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA5ssfmzn90 

The causal closure of the physical world is assumed everywhere in physics but has little empirical support within living organisms. For the spiritual to have effects in nature, and make a difference there, the laws of physical nature would have to be modified or extended. I propose that the renormalized parameters of quantum field theory (masses and charges) are available to be varied locally in order to achieve ends in nature. This is not adding extra forces to nature but rescaling the forces which already exist. We separate metric time in 4 dimensions from process time as the order of actualization of potentialities. This is to allow iterative forward and reverse steps in metric time to influence intermediate variations in the vacuum permittivities to move charged bodies towards achieve specific targets at a later time. Then mental or spiritual influx could have effects in nature, and these should be measurable in biophysics experiments. With this proposal, we see after some centuries how ‘final causes’ could once again be seen active in nature.

PhilPapers link

At ianthompson.org

Details of How Spiritual Influx into the Natural Shows Itself in Physics

A group of us gave a talk on this subject at Bryn Athyn College on Oct 12.

All the talks together can be seen at www.theisticscience.com/talks.htm. 

My two talks, which focused on how the spiritual and mental can affect nature, are:

Expanding the idea of Discrete Degrees

Slides: powerpoint and pdf.

and:

A mechanism for spiritual influx into the physical
Slides: powerpoint (including movies), and pdf (no movies).

A longer article is being written to appear next year.

Can minds have effects in nature? How?

Some questions:

• If you have God and/or our minds acting in nature, as every basic purpose and volition demands in reality, do you think this is directly, or both directly and via intermediates?
• If there are intermediates, then there might be something specific and regular behaviors that science could connect with (at least from one side!).
• For telos and purpose and volition (etc) must have observable effects.
• Do you think that evidence and theories about the influence on the world of spiritual or mental things would help? Could they be intermediates here? 

By ‘intermediates’, I am thinking first of humans, and then all animals and plants as well as each living cell. These are all living creatures, and we presume that they all have at least some primitive kind of mental life: at least some will or motivation or telos, along with instinctual responses that reflect some implicit wisdom for good ways of responding to enhance and continue life.

There may well be spiritual beings of some sort as well, but they would be intermediates between all us living creatures and what is greater than us spiritually, so I should think: angels, saints and all who have lived who want to do what is good and useful (and maybe also those who want the opposite). Direct divine influence is possible as well, of course.

Because these things above are all intermediates, they are ‘riders’ or ‘modulators’ on the pathways of life from the Divine that the Lord uses to enliven and influence us in the world. All the good spiritual beings, for example, would be saying saying ‘not my will but thine’ when they do something.

For intermediates, I just refer to our abilities to feel, think and do things from feeling and thinking. That is, I assume we have minds that do these things, and hence have causal effects on body and world. This applies to all living creatures to varying degrees of fullness and detail. Any plausible account of the world has to take minds in some sense as essential part or being of mental lives. The substance of minds is love/desire, and their form is their thinking. This is just applying Aristotle’s common categories to some things very obvious. The substance gives the mode of its persistence through time, and the form gives its structure at present. Naturalism might want to call these esoteric and unbelievable, but they are really what we are all very close to, namely our minds.

Visible Effects!

I now insist that, in all our bodies, there must be influences from these intermediates that give results not as predicted by the laws of physics. They must be able to have some effect: able to make a difference to physics (otherwise, why bother?). The modulation from intermediates results in a kind of ‘final cause’ in physics, since it directs physical bodies towards some end or target or lure.

And now I think that these differences in physics ought be observable even to physicists. They are much larger than resolving quantum uncertainties or probabilities, since the effects of motivation and telos happen in every minute in our living bodies, and so cannot be just biasing some remote probability. I agree that it might be difficult, since this is to distinguish agency from chance. But it is only the chance of ignorance, not of quantum physics.

Some new ideas 

I even have a more specific idea for what these differences might be in physics, which I will explain more in the next few months when I work out a bit more detail. Sometimes, at least, the patterns should be repeated.

It maybe can be seen in protein folding, where there has been persistent ignorance of the causes of rapid in-vivo folding for the last 50 years?

I am beginning to see a way to change physics to allow final causes to have effects from causes originally in minds. I will explain (in more detail soon, somewhere) my idea for some of the ways ‘supporting efficient causes’ may assist final causes to operate in nature. The idea is some local modification of specific physical properties in order to reach some kind of target or lure or end from the final causes. If physical properties are changed, then something should be measurably different.

The physical variations needed to reach targets are much larger (by many orders of magnitude) than the range required by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum physics.  Given that, however, I want in reality to work on targeting with quantum fields. So the HUP will be still taken into account.  But in the meantime, Newtonian mechanics will be a very good approximation.

Is the physical world causally closed?

We are admittedly breaking the causal closure of the natural world, and breaking some conservation laws in some particular circumstances, so it’s a bit of a conjecture. Materialists may say that this makes it all impossible, since conservation laws are ‘known to be satisfied to high accuracy’. I reply: have you tested conservation laws where processes like this may well be occurring? That is, testing where we expect volition (etc) to be important?

If course, if you can already see the limits of naturalism, then the failure of the causal closure of the physical will not be a great surprise.

There might not be new energy or matter, but local fluctuations of (say) the unit of charge in specific regions. For the physicist: this amounts to local fluctuations of the permittivity of space in the region where molecular objects need to be guided.

Must the Physical Universe be Causally Closed, or not?

The question has equivalent forms:

• Is the physical universe is causally closed?  
• Does nothing that goes on in the brain violate the predictions of physical science?
• Does every physical event that has a cause have a physical cause?
• Does no natural change violate a prediction (or outcome) in physical formulas?

William Hasker, in a recent book review, discuss why the answer must be 'No' to all these questions, despite what modern scientists (and, more frequently) philosophers claim.

He will be referring to "Premise 1", namely

1.     Nothing that goes on in the brain violates the predictions of physical science.

Hasker at http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-myth-of-an-afterlife-the-case-against-life-after-death/:

"The first point to be made is that, in spite of frequent assertions to the contrary, premise (1) is not known to be true. What is in question is whether an immaterial mind may be exerting a causal influence on what happens in the brain at a micro-level. Influence on this scale is far below the limits of our present capacity to detect. Furthermore, we have only the vaguest notion of what it is we would be trying to detect because we know little about how the brain actually works at this level. I am tempted to say that we don't know the "machine code" for the brain, but this understates the case. We don't even know how the basic hard­ware (rather, wetware) functions with regard to giving rise to particular kinds of conscious experience. We don't know, in spite of many proposals, the neural correlate of consciousness, the minimum neural functioning that is required for any kind of conscious experience to occur. We are roughly in the position of a member of a primitive society who, confronted with a transistor radio, reasons that since there is no human being speaking in the vicinity, the radio must be speaking to him on its own. He simply lacks the equipment that would be required to detect the electromagnetic waves that are carrying the signal to the radio, as well as the knowledge to appreciate their significance. Under these circumstances, the claim that we have experimental verification of premise (1) can't be made out. One might, to be sure, affirm (1) as a plausible extrapolation from the scientific knowledge we do have, in the light of one's own overall (probably naturalistic) worldview. Understood in this way, however, the argument no longer has any compelling force against mind-body dualism. Furthermore there is an important objection to (1) even taken in this non-dogmatic way.

This leads to the second point: there is strong reason to think that premise (1) is false. Here's the argument. We humans are able to engage in conscious rational thought, resulting in a reasonably accurate apprehension of the world in which we live. This can be taken as a datum; clearly, anti-survivalists cannot afford to challenge it, relying as they do on scientific knowledge of many different kinds. This datum, however, is a fact which requires explana­tion. There is, furthermore, one particular sort of explanation which will be accepted by most readers of this review, probably including all anti-survivalists. That expla­nation is found in evolutionary epistemology. The basic idea is familiar: the sorts of mental functioning which lead to a generally accurate apprehension of the world lead thereby to behavior which is conducive to survival and reproduction, and so those sorts of mental functioning tend to prevail over others in the course of evolution. This may or may not be the complete explanation for human rational capabilities (I doubt that it is), but it does seem to be an important part of the explanation.

Now, here is the crucial point: If premise (1) is true, that is, if causal closure obtains, then evolutionary epistemology cannot be the explanation for human rationality. The reasoning is simple and compelling. If causal closure is true, then everything that happens in the brain has its complete explanation in prior physical events, no doubt mainly earlier brain-events. But this means that prior mental events play no role in determining the state of a person's brain -- and therefore, they play no role in the organism's behavior. It follows, furthermore, that mental events and processes are irrelevant to behavior and are thus invisible to natural selection, which can only operate on physical structures and physical behavior. So natural selection cannot select for superior mental processes, nor can it play any role in explaining the effectiveness of the mental processes we actually employ in getting to know the world. This enormously important fact -- that we are able to reason about the world and gain know­ledge of it -- is left completely unexplained. I predict, furthermore, that within the generally naturalistic framework that is presupposed in this discussion, it will not be possible to find a promising alternative explanation.
It is sometimes thought that this problem can be surmounted by adopting mind-body identity theory. If the physical brain-event is also a mental event, then the mental event is after all causally relevant to behavior, and natural selection can operate to select superior mental processes. This however is a mistake. We have, it is proposed, a single event, which has both physical characteristics and mental characteristics. Notice, however, that only the physical characteristics of the event are causally effective. The causal consequences of that event will be those, and only those, that flow from it as determined by physical forces, as recognized by the true laws of physics. The mental characteristics of the event, whatever they may be, have no effect whatever in determining the subsequent behavior. Once again, natural selection is unable either to select for superior mental function or to explain the efficacy of the mental processes we actually employ. We are left completely without any explanation for the fact, if it is a fact, that mental events that lead to evolutionarily successful outcomes generally coincide with those that involve an accurate representation of the world. The general effect­iveness of our reasoning processes is still entirely unexplained. I submit that any view of the mind and the self that has this consequence is at a severe disadvantage. The price for accepting premise (1) of the argument is extremely high.

Well put!

I have listed many other papers discussing this issue at http://www.newdualism.org/closure.htm .

Quantum mechanics and consciousness - Part 6/8: Conservation laws and closure

6. Conservation laws and closure

One purported strong indication against mind-body or mental-physical dualism is that the physical world appears to be causally closed. The total of energy and total momentum appear to be conserved whenever they have been measured in modern physics. There does not seem to be any room for minds to make a difference to evolution of the physical world. We should first note, with Meixner [9], that there is little or no experimental evidence to prove this within living bodies and especially within brains. The universal application of conservation laws is an assumption of the physical sciences, not a result as it is commonly presented. Arguments for causal closure have turned out to depend on some assumption that is almost identical to the result to be proved [10] [11].

Suppose that physicists found that energy and momentum were not conserved in some instances. How would they react? First, they would note that the laws apply only to isolated systems, so they would examine whether the object really was isolated or not, and whether they should look for something further (like a hidden planet) that was producing the effects. Secondly, they would generalize the conservation laws so the new law was satisfied but not the old one. It used to be thought, for example, that total mass and total energy were separately conserved, but, after many subatomic experiments showing the annihilation and creation of massive particles, those separate laws were quietly dropped in favor of a general law of conservation of mass-energy in combination. If, therefore, the non-conservation of energy and/or momentum were found in certain biological or psychological processes, science as we know it would not collapse. Either the influence from other kinds of beings would be ascertained, or a further generalization of the conservation laws would be sought. The only novelty in the proposals here, is that these ‘other kinds of beings’ would not be ‘physical’ in the traditional way.

[9] U. Meixner, "Physicalism, Dualism and Intellectual Honesty," Dualism Review, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1-20, 2005.
[10] U. Mohrhoff, "The Physics of Interactionism," J. Consciousness Studies, vol. 6, pp. 165-184, 1999.
[11] W. Hasker, "How Not to be Reductivist," PCID, vol. 2.3.5, pp. 1-16, 2003.

Previous part 5

Theism has Empirical Effects

I say that theism has empirical effects. It makes predictions about what happens in the world, and these happenings can be observed. The opposing view to that is what is called the Non-overlapping Magisteria view, or NOMA. Stephen J Gould, the evolutionary scientist, produced this name. And this quite common. Another way of putting it is that ‘Science tells us how things happen, and Faith or Religion tells us why’. It is a common way that many people use to divide science from religion, and it has some advantages. It protects science from religion, so if you want a theism or a religion or an idea about God that does not feel threatened by science, then one way of removing that threat is to say that they are not connected with each other. 

But this view, this Non-overlapping Magisteria view, has some serious defects. Because, for example, if we are to know God, then God must be able to influence us, now. And if God is to be involved with the world, as most religions say that God is involved with the world, then it must make a difference. And you can argue that God cannot make a difference, if the world has evolved completely has it has without any [causal connection with God]. Why do you need God [in that case], if you have a complete explanation without God. And so, if we are to have some understanding  or knowledge or even perception of God, then there must be some influence. And furthermore, religion and theism do talk about what is, and not just why things are. For instance, they talk about human nature. We discuss whether we have souls or minds. These things are disputed by science, so that if theism makes predictions about this, then we might be able to understand these things better. We might get a better understanding of psychology, or spiritual psychology, for example. And then, in religious history, revelations have occurred. People have said that God spoke to them, and they told us what [was] said. A dramatic example of that is the incarnation. Someone appears and claims that they are God, or that they and God are one. This is obviously a serious influence of God on the world if that was true.

What I am saying is that there are overlaps between theism and the natural world. And if we are to understand these overlaps properly, we have to think carefully about what religion is on one side, and what science is on the other. And we have to think of them in such a way that they can be combined, without collapsing into one. Because there are some differences as well as connections.

Extracted from Starting Science from God. Part I: Connecting Science and Theism

Religion is not just about meaning, though science may be about causes

One way of reconciling science and religion is to seem them as describing different aspects of reality.  Then, should we not know the difference between physical and spiritual things, we can still make distinctions. The differences can be described, even if they only concern 'perspective', rather than what exists.

John Polkinghorne, a physicist turn theologian, gives a talk in which he says:

Science and religion look at different domains of encounter with reality. Sciences deals with an objective dimension, in which things can be manipulated and events repeated, thereby affording it access to the great weapon of experimental verifiability. 

The gift that religion has to offer to science is not to answer its questions – for we have every reason to expect that scientific questions will receive scientific answers – but to take science’s insights and set them within a broader and deeper context of intelligibility. 

The difference in domains means that science and religion ask different questions of reality: in the former case how things happen; in the latter whether there is meaning, purpose and value in what is happening – issues that science tends to rule out of its discourse. Science and religion, therefore, complement each other, rather than being rivals on the same turf. 

Alister McGrath, another theologian with some background in science, writes:

... science takes things apart to see how they work. But religion puts them back together again to see what they mean. 

If science is about explanation, religion is thus about meaning. Science helps us to appreciate the wonder of individual aspects of the universe; religion to see, however dimly, the "big picture" of which they are part.

This approach was also popularized by biologist Stephen Gould, who in 1997 advocated seeing science and religion as  ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ (NOMA). Here science is concerned with ‘what is’, and religion is concerned with ‘what should be’ (morality, ethics, and metaphysics beyond observations).

These ideas are initially plausible, but all have a fatal defect: they relegate spiritual and religious processes to a ghetto where they can have no effects in nature!! If religion is only about meaning and not about causes, then (as it is not a cause) it can have no effects at all! Any spiritual God would be impotent. That is not what religious thinkers have in mind.

Scientists like Polkinghorne and McGrath prefer this view, as it keeps the 'causal closure of the universe', as I have discussed before. But if mental, spiritual and divine things are to have any practical reality, then they must be able to have effects. At least, they must be able to have effects on us, as otherwise we could never observe or talk about them because of their isolation from the physical. Quite unacceptable.

Better ideas are given by those with some actual experience of mental and spiritual processes! David Benner, for example, talks in a recent interview about those with spiritual experience:

The mystics offer us a number of valuable gifts that I think are tremendously important to contemporary Christians.  Among the most valuable of them is .... their understanding of the fact that all of life is returning to God.  Life, as they point out, is the continuous outflow of the very life of God - a flow that if we follow it, returns us to our Source, the Ground of our Being.  All human becoming involves, therefore, a fuller engagement with this outflowing life of God.

Here, we see our role as humans to engage with the life that comes from God: to receive, act on and return it in some way. That would be completely impossible of that life were only about meaning, and not about causes!

A similar view is presented by Vincent Torley when he discusses what consequences theism must have for the evolutionary process that has produced all the life on earth:

 ... we live in a cosmos which is made to be manipulated: it’s an inherently incomplete, open system, and the “gaps” are a vital part of Nature, just as the holes are a vital feature of Swiss cheese. I see no reason to believe in the existence of hidden, information-rich laws of the cosmos, especially when all the laws we know are low in information content; moreover, as Dr. Stephen Meyer has pointed out in his book, Signature in the Cell, all the scientific evidence we have points against the idea of “biochemical predestination”: simple chemicals do not naturally arrange themselves into complex information-bearing molecules such as DNA.

...  information can[not] just appear in the cosmos wherever God wants it to appear, without God having to perform any specific act that generates it. 

Here, we see one important role for the causal influence of the life that outflows from God. If God were only to relate to the physical world by 'giving it meaning', that would be too distant to be of any practical use. It certainly would not help during biological evolution, especially for most of its duration where there were not yet rational minds to even imagine that meaning.

In conclusion, we find that mental, spiritual and divine things can not be confined in their influences to be only effective among themselves. They must also have effects in the physical world. Theistic science is the attempt to frame theories which explain in more detail how this happens.

Changes needed for Future Sciences

The principal change needed for science is to give up on assuming the causal closure of the universe, and thereby to admit the likelihood of causal openness for the universe. That is, science should consider seriously the possibility of as-yet-undiscovered dependencies of physical processes on such things as our individual minds, or even on the transcendent mind of God. By ‘seriously’ here, I refer to a determination to intellectually evaluate theories which describe these things, and to experimentally consider the evidence which might possibly confirm such theories, and not to refuse to consider any evidence because of any denial in advance of the very possibility of openness. In the end, admittedly, any actual changes in science will be made only in the light of new theories and new evidence which describe properly and confirm how such influences operate, but at least evidence will not be denied a hearing. Scientists, in this new context, will still retain the ability to examine the regular and law-like behavior of material processes. It is only that, sometimes, the causes of those processes will not always be previous material powers, but something new to be investigated.

Some (perhaps many) scientists may well respond with “Over my dead body! Did not we get rid of occult influences five centuries ago, and look how much we are better for that!” The theistic reply to this, as usual, is “Fear not!” We are not asking for a return to the middle ages, to witchcraft or magic or anything similar, and moreover not to a ‘new age’ in which ‘anything goes’ and in which ‘we make whatever reality we want’. Rather, the civil contract between secular citizens of good will should remain untouched. Any new science should be entirely robust and transparent, and hence subject to public confirmations or disconfirmations. Admittedly we will be advocating immanent theism, rather than the deism in which God does not interact with the world, so the world is not so simple, but the ground is not thereby going to disappear from under our feet. It will not be the end of civilization as we know it.

In fact, it is likely that whole new sciences will be formed as we begin to understand for the first time the interactions between mental and physical. Many present-day scientists currently suspect that such interactions exist, but are reluctant to admit this in public, at least on weekdays, for fear of ridicule. This reluctance is not so much based on evidence against such interactions, it is just that every physical scientist, say, is ‘supposed to assume’ causal closure, in order to belong to that profession.

It seems to me that, at some level, scientists are afraid of something: of the possible incursion into the world (into the world of thought, if not the real world), of new powers which they have traditionally ignored, and over which they have no control. And they fear that even thinking that minds or God may have any influence would be to encourage some such incursion of what they think of as ‘black forces’. Some scientists may be relaxed about the prospect, but they are not a majority in those circles. The theistic response, to assuage these fears, is to emphasize that these new influences of the mind and of God are not arbitrary, or violent, or disruptive. Rather, the opposite. Those influences, we will see in theism, will be regular, will be conditioned in many ways, and will be supportive rather than upsetting. There is in fact nothing to be afraid of within science: these are ‘white’ rather than black forces, and in fact are largely responsible for generating the enormously complicated biological, psychological, sociological and civil structures we see in the world, and certainly not for breaking them down.