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The Interactive Mind in the Participatory Universe
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10598 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1986 |
8,988 Words |
| Author
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Henry Skolimowski
Henryk Skolimowski is Professor of Philosophy in the
Department of Humanities at the University of Michigan at Ann
Arbor. He is the author of Eco-Philosophy: Designing New
Tactics for Living. This paper was originally presented at
the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences. |
The universe does not exist "out there" independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense this is a participatory universe.
--John Archibald Wheeler
Mind is indeed the source of bondage and is also the source of liberation
--Maitri Upanishad
Reconstructing the Background knowledge Situation
Of the lasting mysteries of the universe, the mind is one. The mind is not the slayer of the real, as some Hindu traditions maintain. It is the creator of the real. Whatever we know, we know through the agency of the mind. The mystery of the mind is thus doubly profound: not only is it an extraordinary creation of nature--exquisite and puzzling in its own right; it is also the shaper and creator of reality. On the way the mind works depends the nature of our knowledge, and (a step further) the shape of the external world. What the mind cannot render, the world cannot bear. And what the world bears is exactly what the mind renders.
During the last fifty years a real revolution has occurred in our outlook on the mind and on the nature of our knowledge, as well as in our outlook of what is reality. Actually the three elements, mind, knowledge and reality, co-define each other. (See Figure 1)
It cannot be otherwise. The world is what our knowledge can describe. Our knowledge does not come deus ex machina. We find in our knowledge only that which our mind can conceive. We have been slow, and often obtuse, in perceiving the fundamental unity of mind, knowledge and reality. Many a time by separating the three elements, we falsified the whole picture. It should not escape our perception that a change in outlook on one of the three elements necessarily implies a change in outlook on the other two. Admittedly it takes time before the adjustment is completed and the three find themselves in coherence and harmony. Let us now see how the interdependence of mind, knowledge and reality manifests itself within western philosophy of the last fifty years. But first a brief historical interlude.
Parmenides knew it well: "No mind, no
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