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Charles Pinter
MIND AND
COSMIC
THE
ORDER
How the Mind Creates the Features
& Structure of All Things, and
Why this Insight Transforms Physics
Mind and the Cosmic Order
Charles Pinter
Cover Image: Tarantula Nebula in the constellation Dorado. Hubble Space Telescope image heic1206a
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To the memory of my late wife Donna Krewedl Pinter, without whom this book
would not have been written. And to the archetypal muses who gave shape to my
words and thoughts
Contents
1 Introduction 1
3 Gestalt 29
Mental Life Gets Organized 29
Seeing the Whole Picture 32
Thinking It and Speaking It 36
Growing the Tree of Knowledge 39
Are Gestalts Real? 43
Immanuel Kant, Philosopher of Gestalt 45
vii
viii Contents
6 In Search of Reality 89
Facts 89
The Map and the Territory 93
Another Perspective on Facts 94
Facts and Information 96
Facts and the Scientific World Picture 100
References 169
Index 173
1
Introduction
Let’s begin with a thought-experiment: Imagine that all life has vanished from
the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in
space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and
galaxies—but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance
at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in
the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because
shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because
features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early
universe was before the emergence of life—and the way the present universe
is outside the view of any observer.
To living beings, the universe has all the color and detail given by the senses.
Due to biological imperatives, we are made to imagine that objects “really are”
exactly as we experience seeing them. We likewise imagine that when we observe
things, it suffices to cast a glance at them and their structure is immediately
and directly revealed to us: We are not consciously aware of the elaborate
computations that our sensory systems do in the background. Consequently,
we believe that what we discern is already out there, just as we see it. We have
a naïve idea that our eyes simply harvest the bounty of structure and shapes
that exist in the world independently of us, inviting our glance.
Shape and structure are incorrectly believed to be an inherent aspect of solid
matter: Actually, they are produced by the synthesizing effort of observers.
We are misled even though current knowledge explicitly reveals that our naïve
thinking is flawed. In contemporary science we continue to view objects uncrit-
ically in the categories constructed by the senses, and investigate them in terms
of features attributed to them by our organs of sensation. Even hypothetical
entities such as elementary particles and force fields are dressed up to look like
things we’re familiar with.
© The Author(s) 2021 1
C. Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50083-2_1
2 1 Introduction
The honeymoon with the senses, however, is coming to an end, and funda-
mental physics is emerging in a new form. For example, the theory of quanta
has been stalled for a hundred years by what appears to be a paradox. It has been
known for almost a century that when a fundamental particle such as an elec-
tron is not observed, it does not exist in the form of a material particle but as an
abstract wave of probabilities. Yet, the instant the same electron is observed, it
springs into reality as a material particle having a position, speed and direction
of motion. This fact presents a huge dilemma not only for physics, but for our
very concept of how the world works—for it suggests that the conscious mind
has causal power over material phenomena. (It doesn’t). The reason for this
apparent anomaly is that we conflate physical events with the way they appear
to our senses.
The time is now ripe, in science and in philosophy, to undo this tangle. The
advance of science requires us to redraw the boundary between the physical
world and the world as it presents itself to our senses. Our innate model of
reality was designed by nature to promote the survival of our species, not to
probe the cosmos. To understand the universe, the first step is to understand
our senses and how they mold our picture of reality.
For example, the logic of animal vision requires that what we see appear
to be located in the world outside of us. Thus, objects are displayed to the
beholder at varying distances laid out in ambient space—though the visual
image is actually formed in the viewer’s head. This is a necessary deception built
into the brain by nature. In fact, it’s a kind of hallucination. This paradoxical
fact is in the very nature of sensory perception. Everything we perceive is a
“hallucination”—not because what we see is mistaken, but because forms and
features aren’t aspects of brute matter but creations of perception. (See e.g.,
Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty, and Jakob Hohwy, The Predictive Mind).
Moreover, the brain has a specialized module to create the sensation of
motion, and when we have the experience of moving—or watching something
move—the awareness of motion is based on a sensation of visual flow induced
in conscious awareness by the brain. What living beings perceive as motion is
an artifact created by the mind. Physical motion is real but altogether different
from the moving window we perceive.
An essential task of the brain is to segment the visual world and present it
to subjects as divided into separate objects and parts. This is an indispensable
aspect of seeing, for if the perceived world were not segmented and the impor-
tant objects highlighted and made to stand out, the visual world would not
be intelligible. When viewing a visual display, it is spontaneously presented
to awareness as a collection of discrete objects—but in fact this division is
an artifact of the visual brain. Every species of animal has its own scheme of
1 Introduction 3
segmentation into those objects that are important in its lifestyle. Contrary to
commonsense realism, the physical world has no pre-existing segmentation.
Far and away the most important and most remarkable attribute of the
animal brain is that all creatures perceive in Gestalt wholes. When you open
your eyes, what you behold is a comprehensive display of the things before
you, and this display is given to you as a single, undivided experience. Vision
would be meaningless, and have no biological function if people and animals
saw anything less than integral scenes.
Common sense leads us to assume that we see in Gestalts because the world
itself is constituted of whole objects and scenes, but this is incorrect. The reason
events of the world appear holistic to animals is that animals perceive them in
Gestalts. The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The
object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside
of itself.
Gestalts do not merely allow you to see whole objects and scenes, but also
to experience events that unfold in time. When listening to music, you hear
more than just the note currently being played: You hear a whole melody.
When someone speaks you hear a whole sentence. Gestalts bring into being an
entire aspect of reality that would not exist otherwise—a reality in which many
things which are separated in space and time are perceived together as a new
combined entity. The new entity did not exist before the parts were perceived
as one.
One of the most ancient dichotomies is that between form and substance.
Intuitively, it seems indisputable that every material thing has two orthogonal
aspects: It has matter and form—and these two things jointly determine what
an object is. This belief is another example of naïve realism—for in actual fact
form cannot exist except in the view of a Gestalt observer. Form does not inhere
in brute matter but emerges in Gestalt observation.
It is not merely the appearance of objects that emerges from observation, but
also their structure. Indeed, the structure of an object is its precise description
in analytic terms: It is an explicit accounting of all the functional parts and the
relations by which they are connected. Such a description rests on a specific
segmentation of the object into parts. If an object is segmented into parts
differently, this of course gives rise to a different description. Thus the structure,
as it is perceived by an observer, is relative to a given segmentation of the
object into parts and relations between parts. This is an important observation,
because it reveals that structure is in the observer, rather than in the object itself.
This fact is strongly counterintuitive, for common sense tells us forcefully that
every object in the world has a unique structure, and its structure is inherent
in the object.
4 1 Introduction
In fact, that’s what the real world is: It is the set of all the restraints and obstacles
imposed on living beings striving to achieve their goals.
For the scientist, the universe consists of matter and incandescent plasma.
These, however, are images invented by the human mind. Behind these images,
and evoking them, are the constraints of nature that channel the scientist’s
thinking and determine the outcomes of experiments.
In fact, what we regard as the physical world is “physical” to us precisely
in the sense that it acts in opposition to our will and constrains our actions.
The aspect of the universe that resists our push and demands muscular effort
on our part is what we consider to be “physical”. On the other hand, since
sensation and thought don’t require overcoming any physical resistance, we
consider them to be outside of material reality. It is shown in the final chapter
that this is an illusory dichotomy, and any complete account of the universe
must allow for the existence of a nonmaterial component which accounts for
its unity and complexity.
2
The Visual World
There is far more to seeing than having eyes. The evolution of animal vision
is one of the great epics of evolutionary development: Starting with photosen-
sitive spots on single-celled animals a billion years ago, gradual changes have
led to the complex eyes of mammals today. But eyes do not suffice in order
for a creature to see. What the eyes capture are patches of light, dark and color
in rapid motion: This raw data must be collected and fed to a brain able to
assemble and interpret it. Finally, in the most difficult step of all, the brain
delivers to a subject’s awareness a coded image. The coded image is experienced
by the subject as a visual scene. In this final step the scene looks like something
to the animal subject—it carries meaning—and this ultimately is the purpose
of vision.
Life on our planet is mostly visual. It could have been otherwise: The earliest
animals might have developed senses responsive to other sources of informa-
tion, such as electromagnetic fields or chemical messages, and any of these
senses might have evolved to be the dominant form of sensation. (In fact,
many species have secondary perceptual systems of these very kinds.)1
What we observe, instead, is that up and down the phylogenetic scale crea-
tures at every level and of every kind evolved with the sense of sight as the
primary source of information for navigation and action. Being able to see is
so very important to living creatures that in many phyla, more than two-thirds
of the brain is dedicated to functions involved in seeing. This is notably true
for man.
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