Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics

Abstract

In Mind and the Cosmic Order, the mathematician Charles Pinter examines the role mind plays in the construction of reality, ultimately concluding that the mental constructs that give existence its form and structure, while not material, are no less real than the physical world with which the mind interacts. In this brief but wide-ranging book consisting of nine chapters that tackle subjects ranging from the seeing eye to the scientific observer, Pinter takes a synthetic approach to the study of the cosmic order, drawing on such diverse fields as biology, physics, neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy to argue that the sensations and thoughts located in the mind of the perceiver bring to light facets of reality whose very existence depends on the act of perception.Pinter begins his foray into the nature of reality with a discussion of the mechanics of vision. Our assumption that what we see offers a realistic depiction of the external world proves hopelessly naïve in Pinter's account. What exists in what Pinter calls the mind-independent world and what we see in the mind's eye have very different properties. The matter and energy that make up the material world is undifferentiated and featureless until it is observed. Seeing, however, does not simply imprint a visual representation of the external world on the brain. The patches of light and shadow received from the external world reach only as far as the retina. The optic nerve then transforms the information it receives into electrochemical signals, which it then transmits to the brain, where the visual information becomes reconstituted, emerging as a visual image that we understand as a sensation. Our visual world, then, is a constructed reality or Gestalt that we then project back onto the external world through a process called distal attribution.For the purposes of his study, Pinter defines a Gestalt as “a whole, unified single entity when viewed in its entirely from an outside perspective” (44). The ability to see in these Gestalt wholes is supremely adaptive. Although the life of any creature depends on its active engagement with the objects and beings in its orbit, the raw data it receives from its environment is unorganized and chaotic. The ability to segment that data into distinct objects and then to group those objects into a synthetic whole—that is, to create Gestalt images that lend form and structure to undifferentiated matter and energy—allows the creature to select from all the available environmental data the information it most needs to make decisions that will ensure its own survival. What the creature perceives is not the world as it is but a mental model of the world that is adaptive to its needs as a living being.However important for survival the Gestalt wholes we create may be, they do not have material existence; they are mental constructs, the property of perception, not of the mind-independent world. But are they real? Pinter thinks they are, but the answer to this question requires that he draw a distinction, not just between the material world and the immaterial objects of our cognition, but also between the brain and the mind. Although recent trends in cognitive science have emphasized the primacy of the material brain in the processing of information, Pinter takes an alternate approach, highlighting the difference between the electrochemical activity that takes place on the brain's cerebral cortex and the vivid sensations and thoughts produced by the mind. Pinter argues that the brain encodes information that instills a subjective feeling in the mind. Sensations, nonmaterial perceptions produced by material means, are for Pinter “the medium in which all conscious activity unfolds” (58). Sensations are not limited to such physical experiences of pain or color, however; they also encompass thought, because “to have a thought is to experience its meaning” (59). All mental content, then, is grounded in sensations that perceivers group together to form what Pinter calls “Gestalt image-schemas,” combinations of sensations that yield ever more complex meaning.The mind-independent world is pluripotent. Things present in this world are latent and unrealized, becoming actualized only when an observer segments the visual field into Gestalt wholes that give objects form and structure. But the mental activity that plays a constitutive role in the creation of physical reality also has the capacity to bring into being nonmaterial facts and categories. The mind-independent world uncoupled from the observer is nothing more than undifferentiated matter and energy, but it is also a world awaiting interpretation. Facts, too, require observers to bring them into existence, for facts, like objects, are constructed Gestalt wholes. The same is true of categories. Category formation comes about as a process of abstraction as the observer discerns common features in different objects: abstractions that become reified into independent entities that can then be recognized when embedded in other contexts. Form and structure, facts and categories, thus emerge from observation, which means that the mind's ability to construct Gestalt wholes brings into being aspects of reality that would not exist but for the act of observation. We live in a two-tiered universe in which the material world of matter and energy, and the immaterial but very real world of information and knowledge, interact in the person of the living observer.Pinter's approach to epistemology mirrors that of the polymath Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), who argued that our knowledge of the external world is indirect and inferential; we only have immediate knowledge of our own precepts. Although there is an irreducible gap between the mind and a material world that will always remain hidden from us, Pinter contends that we can achieve knowledge of the material world's structure since structure is a Gestalt construction of the mind. This approach to epistemology has real implications for science, some of whose claims to objectivity would seem to preclude the intervention of an active observer. If immaterial Gestalt constructions that exist in the mind are really part of reality, then the concept of “objective science” becomes highly problematic. As Pinter notes, “One can study the material universe while pretending there is no mind, but one cannot study mind while pretending there is no mind” (119). If science is to move forward, then, it will have to accommodate an understanding of reality, which includes the immaterial mental processes that give material reality its form and structure.Pinter acknowledges that those who argue that nonmaterial forms of reality are no less real than the material cannot as yet offer experimental proof that this is so. A scientific account of consciousness has yet to be written; and most cognitive scientists still cling to what Pinter calls the physicalist position that thoughts and sensations are merely epiphenomena, byproducts of brain function with no independent existence of their own. Pinter also acknowledges that claims about mental phenomena cannot be studied with the same kind of objectivity as claims about the material universe, admitting that phenomena that cannot be studied objectively are not material. What he maintains, however, is that because mental constructs are phenomena of a different kind, they must be studied in a different way. The reason is while the realm of Gestalt wholes has the same material content as the realm of the physical universe, it presents itself differently.Mental constructs present themselves differently. This is the real crux of Pinter's argument, for it suggests that our understanding of reality is a function not of what reality really is but how reality presents itself to us. And reality, even material reality, can present itself to us in different ways. Nowhere is this truer than in the world of quantum mechanics, the subdiscipline of physics that seeks to describe the matter on a subatomic level. The subatomic world behaves according to laws that are very different from the laws that govern what Pinter calls midlevel region, the reality of our everyday experience that exists between the subatomic and the cosmic. In the midlevel region, Newtonian laws of matter in motion prevail: knowledge of a body's mass and position, coupled with a knowledge of the forces impinging on that body, allows the observer to predict the body's behavior with remarkable accuracy. Newtonian laws are therefore deterministic because the motion of the body in space is the inevitable result of what has happened in the past. Particles at the subatomic level, however, are more unpredictable, behaving not according to deterministic laws but according to something called a wave function, a mathematical equation that gives the probability of finding a particular particle at a given place and at a given time. The quantum state of a particle changes when an observer takes a measurement, at which point the wave function that gave a range of probabilities collapses into the particle located at one particular place and one particular time.Pinter suggests that the act of observation central to the study of quantum physics is not unlike the interaction between the material universe and the mind capable of constructing Gestalt wholes. The pluripotent material universe can be segmented into any number of distinct objects and then reconstructed into any number of Gestalt states depending on the mind of the individual perceiver. The choice to organize the environmental data into any particular Gestalt whole, however, collapses those various possibilities into what Pinter calls “the notional world of the observer” (86). Just as an electron that is not observed does not exist as a particle but only as a wave function of possibilities, so too the physical universe remains featureless until an observer ascribes form and structure to the material world through the creation of Gestalt wholes. The Gestalt observer and the quantum physicist are not all that different; and the words of one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), surely apply to both. “We have to remember,” said Heisenberg in 1958 in his seminal Physics and Philosophy: Revolution in Modern Science, “that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning” (58).Pinter's book sends the reader on the path toward Quantum Bayesianism or QBism, the subject of his last chapter. QBism denies the material reality of quantum states, arguing that they exist only as belief states the physicist has about the probable outcomes of measurements. Although a quantum state changes as the wave function collapses into the particle when an observer takes a measurement, QBism claims that the change does not occur in the physical world, but in the mind of the scientist. Taking measurements does not affect reality, and experimental data say nothing about the external world; taking measurements provides new information only about the degree of belief the scientist has in the hypothesis. QBism is itself part of a larger scientific movement known as participatory realism. In asserting that the traditional third-person, so-called objective approach to scientific inquiry is far too limiting, the movement attempts to inject human agency into the study of physics. If reality is not limited to the physical universe but also includes an organizing mind that creates the objects of its study, then in addition to focusing its attention on the material world and on the mind as objects of study, science should explore the boundary line—the mutual interaction—between the two.One of the throughlines in Pinter's book is the question of intentionality. We organize the perceptual field into synthetic Gestalt wholes according to our own interests and needs, often as a consequence of a process of natural selection designed to advance the survival of the fittest. Observers always perceive with a purpose. But purposeful observation may also require that we think analytically in order to focus our attention, not on the whole, but on the parts in order to gain more detailed information about a small item of interest. Analytical thinking is itself a creative constructive pursuit, often requiring that the observer break the Gestalt wholes held in the mind into their component parts in order to build new understanding. These parts can then be recombined into new Gestalt images, which can themselves be analytically deconstructed and recombined, thus creating an increasingly more complex mental world model with which we perceive external reality. But what purpose does this kind of complex thinking serve? For Pinter, the answer is at once simple and awe-inspiring: “[T]he cosmic function of life is to be the vehicle of experiential existence, and to be the repository of Gestalt multiplicity whose purpose is to bring into existence newly minted and highly complex organized structures” (156). To understand the complexity of the universe is to understand the mind.Pinter has a distinct point of view, one that is not shared by all physicists and cognitive scientists. Many, if not most, continue to maintain that science should eschew metaphysical questions about the relationship between mind and matter and limit itself to the exploration of strictly empirical problems through experiment. One of the strengths of Pinter's book, nevertheless, is that he is not afraid to engage with those who hold different views. He acknowledges that the question of the reality of mental states, such as sensations and thoughts, is still an open question for physicists and philosophers alike. Contrasting his appreciation for the mind's ability to construct Gestalt wholes with the computational theory of mind espoused by many contemporary psychologists and cognitive scientists, for example, Pinter takes the reader through a thorough discussion of the difference between information coded as data characteristic of computer memory and the cognitive structures constructed by living beings. He concludes that, because the computer can only take into account one bit of data at a time, the method it uses to process information cannot provide an adequate model for the operations of a mind capable of organizing the chaotic data it receives from the environment into complex wholes.And it is here that Pinter makes a real contribution to the debate about the relationship between the material and the immaterial. Not content merely to subscribe to the notion that subjectivity has a role to play in the apprehension of reality, Pinter advances a theory about how mind does this work. In applying the psychological concept of Gestalt to the physical problem of perception, Pinter enters into a philosophical debate about the nature of reality itself. To the argument that reality is only material, Pinter responds that observation is a creative endeavor yielding immaterial but nevertheless real mental constructs that bring more complexity to the world in which we live. The processes that bring these mental constructs into being are Gestalt's enduring contributions to the world of mind and matter.