Last week [first week in July], I listened to an assortment of opinions on the confirmation of the "God particle" (HIggs Boson
), and coincidentally also read this paragraph:
It has occurred to me lately - I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities - that both questions [the origin of life and consciousness] might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality - that stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science-, art-, and technology-making animals. In them the universe begins to know itself. (emphasis mine)
(George Wald, Noble laureate and professor of biology at Harvard University, in “Life and Mind in the Universe” in the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry: Quantum Biology, symposium 11 (1984): 1-15; quoted by Antony Flew in There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, pp 131-132)
Most commentators have made a point of letting us know that "God particle" is a catchy marketing term for a physics concept that has nothing to do with God and everything to do with how elementary particles may get their mass. I had agreed with that assessment going back years since the speculation became popular science.
But I am not so sure now. The Higgs field is omnipresent, exists in a vacuum, and is not necessarily associated with a particle. It is in other words the matrix in which all other things exist.
Is this mind-stuff?
As Stephen Hawking has said in various ways, science doesn't have anything to say about a divine Being.
Silence can speak volumes.
Started: 2012-07-10
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