Reference: Eddington’s 1927 Book
This paper presents Chapter XIII (section 2) from the book THE NATURE OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD by A. S. EDDINGTON. The contents of this book are based on the lectures that Eddington delivered at the University of Edinburgh in January to March 1927.
The paragraphs of original material are accompanied by brief comments in color, based on the present understanding. Feedback on these comments is appreciated.
The heading below links to the original materials.
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Mind-Stuff
I will try to be as definite as I can as to the glimpse of reality which we seem to have reached. Only I am well aware that in committing myself to details I shall probably blunder. Even if the right view has here been taken of the philosophical trend of modern science, it is premature to suggest a cut-and-dried scheme of the nature of things. If the criticism is made that certain aspects are touched on which come more within the province of the expert psychologist, I must admit its pertinence. The recent tendencies of science do, I believe, take us to an eminence from which we can look down into the deep waters of philosophy; and if I rashly plunge into them, it is not because I have confidence in my powers of swimming, but to try to show that the water is really deep.
Reality includes mind-stuff or thought-substance, but its relationship with field-substance and material-substance needs to be sorted out fully.
To put the conclusion crudely—the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by “mind” I do not here exactly mean mind and by “stuff” I do not at all mean stuff. Still this is about as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase. The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to the feelings in our consciousness. The realistic matter and fields of force of former physical theory are altogether irrelevant—except in so far as the mind-stuff has itself spun these imaginings. The symbolic matter and fields of force of present-day theory are more relevant, but they bear to it the same relation that the bursar’s accounts bear to the activity of the college. Having granted this, the mental activity of the part of the world constituting ourselves occasions no surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge, and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be—or, rather, it knows itself to be. It is the physical aspects of the world that we have to explain, presumably by some such method as that set forth in our discussion on world-building. Our bodies are more mysterious than our minds—at least they would be, only that we can set the mystery on one side by the device of the cyclic scheme of physics, which enables us to study their phenomenal behaviour without ever coming to grips with the underlying mystery.
The material-substance and field-substance is put together in proper perspective through thought-substance. Philosophy, logic and mathematics are part of the thought-substance.
The mind-stuff is not spread in space and time; these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived out of it. But we must presume that in some other way or aspect it can be differentiated into parts. Only here and there does it rise to the level of consciousness, but from such islands proceeds all knowledge. Besides the direct knowledge contained in each self-knowing unit, there is inferential knowledge. The latter includes our knowledge of the physical world. It is necessary to keep reminding ourselves that all knowledge of our environment from which the world of physics is constructed, has entered in the form of messages transmitted along the nerves to the seat of consciousness. Obviously the messages travel in code. When messages relating to a table are travelling in the nerves, the nerve-disturbance does not in the least resemble either the external table that originates the mental impression or the conception of the table that arises in consciousness.* In the central clearing station the incoming messages are sorted and decoded, partly by instinctive image-building inherited from the experience of our ancestors, partly by scientific comparison and reasoning. By this very indirect and hypothetical inference all our supposed acquaintance with and our theories of a world outside us have been built up. We are acquainted with an external world because its fibres run into our consciousness; it is only our own ends of the fibres that we actually know; from those ends we more or less successfully reconstruct the rest, as a palaeontologist reconstructs an extinct monster from its footprint.
*I mean, resemble in intrinsic nature. It is true (as Bertrand Russell has emphasised) that the symbolic description of structure will be identical for the table in the external world and for the conception of the table in consciousness if the conception is scientifically correct. If the physicist does not attempt to penetrate beneath the structure he is indifferent as to which of the two we imagine ourselves to be discussing.
The mind-stuff (thought-substance) is part of perception. It is not separate from what it describes. It constitutes the pattern in which field and material substances are arranged. These patterns are knowledge. Combination of these patterns into new patterns is inferential knowledge.
The nerves and brain are also made up of the same thought, field, and material substances. Here the incoming patterns are assimilated into the thought matrix of earlier assimilated patterns. The thought matrix is ever evolving. It imparts meaning to any pattern placed before it. This is consciousness.
There must be laws about how patterns are assimilated to form an ever-evolving thought matrix, and how that thought-matrix provides meaning to the patterns it encounters. Furthermore, laws should specify what happens to unassimilated patterns, how they affect consciousness, and how they are ultimately assimilated. An ideal thought matrix, or consciousness, would not consist of anything unassimilated.
The mind-stuff is the aggregation of relations and relata which form the building material for the physical world. Our account of the building process shows, however, that much that is implied in the relations is dropped as unserviceable for the required building. Our view is practically that urged in 1875 by W. K. Clifford— “The succession of feelings which constitutes a man’s consciousness is the reality which produces in our minds the perception of the motions of his brain.”
That is to say, that which the man himself knows as a succession of feelings is the reality which when probed by the appliances of an outside investigator affects their readings in such a way that it is identified as a configuration of brain-matter. Again Bertrand Russell writes—*
“What the physiologist sees when he examines a brain is in the physiologist, not in the brain he is examining. What is in the brain by the time the physiologist examines it if it is dead, I do not profess to know; but while its owner was alive, part, at least, of the contents of his brain consisted of his percepts, thoughts, and feelings. Since his brain also consisted of electrons, we are compelled to conclude that an electron is a grouping of events, and that if the electron is in a human brain, some of the events composing it are likely to be some of the “mental states” of the man to whom the brain belongs. Or, at any rate, they are likely to be parts of such “mental states”—for it must not be assumed that part of a mental state must be a mental state. I do not wish to discuss what is meant by a “mental state”; the main point for us is that the term must include percepts. Thus a percept is an event or a group of events, each of which belongs to one or more of the groups constituting the electrons in the brain. This, I think, is the most concrete statement that can be made about electrons; everything else that can be said is more or less abstract and mathematical.”
* Analysis of Matter, p. 320.
The mind-stuff may reside in the brain as a complex matrix of assimilated patterns imprinted on field and material stuff of the brain. The incoming patterns of perception is then assimilated and interpreted by this matrix. The matrix itself evolves as it assimilates new perceptions.
I quote this partly for the sake of the remark that it must not be assumed that part of a mental state must necessarily be a mental state. We can no doubt analyse the content of consciousness during a short interval of time into more or less elementary constituent feelings; but it is not suggested that this psychological analysis will reveal the elements out of whose measure-numbers the atoms or electrons are built. The brain-matter is a partial aspect of the whole mental state; but the analysis of the brain-matter by physical investigation does not run at all parallel with the analysis of the mental state by psychological investigation. I assume that Russell meant to warn us that, in speaking of part of a mental state, he was not limiting himself to parts that would be recognised as such psychologically, and he was admitting a more abstract kind of dissection.
This might give rise to some difficulty if we were postulating complete identity of mind-stuff with consciousness. But we know that in the mind there are memories not in consciousness at the moment but capable of being summoned into consciousness. We are vaguely aware that things we cannot recall are lying somewhere about and may come into the mind at any moment. Consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into sub-consciousness; and beyond that we must postulate something indefinite but yet continuous with our mental nature. This I take to be the world-stuff. We liken it to our conscious feelings because, now that we are convinced of the formal and symbolic character of the entities of physics, there is nothing else to liken it to.
Mind-stuff is, more precisely, a matrix of perception of objects derived from the environment. The matrix pattern in the brain may not be easy to identify and decode. Consciousness is based on the activated portions of this matrix at any one time. This matrix could be world-wide. Individual matrices may appear as nodes in this world-wide matrix.
It is sometimes urged that the basal stuff of the world should be called “neutral stuff” rather than “mind-stuff”, since it is to be such that both mind and matter originate from it. If this is intended to emphasise that only limited islands of it constitute actual minds, and that even in these islands that which is known mentally is not equivalent to a complete inventory of all that may be there, I agree. In fact I should suppose that the self-knowledge of consciousness is mainly or wholly a knowledge which eludes the inventory method of description. The term “mind-stuff” might well be amended; but neutral stuff seems to be the wrong kind of amendment. It implies that we have two avenues of approach to an understanding of its nature. We have only one approach, namely, through our direct knowledge of mind. The supposed approach through the physical world leads only into the cycle of physics, where we run round and round like a kitten chasing its tail and never reach the world-stuff at all.
Mind and matter are part of the continuum of substance. They are connected to each other at a fundamental level. More precisely, it is a continuum of “thought—field of force—matter”.
I assume that we have left the illusion of substance so far behind that the word “stuff” will not cause any misapprehension. I certainly do not intend to materialise or substantialise mind. Mind is—but you know what mind is like, so why should I say more about its nature? The word “stuff” has reference to the function it has to perform as a basis of world-building and does not imply any modified view of its nature.
It is an error to identify substance with matter. That totally ignores the reality of quantization, for the discovery of which Einstein got a Nobel Prize. Anything that one can be aware of is made up of substance.
It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference—inference either intuitive or deliberate. Probably it would never have occurred to us (as a serious hypothesis) that the world could be based on anything else, had we not been under the impression that there was a rival stuff with a more comfortable kind of “concrete” reality—something too inert and stupid to be capable of forging an illusion. The rival turns out to be a schedule of pointer readings; and though a world of symbolic character can well be constructed from it, this is a mere shelving of the inquiry into the nature of the world of experience.
It is not that substratum of everything is of mental character. What is common is that everything has a pattern that can be perceived.
This view of the relation of the material to the spiritual world perhaps relieves to some extent a tension between science and religion. Physical science has seemed to occupy a domain of reality which is self-sufficient, pursuing its course independently of and indifferent to that which a voice within us asserts to be a higher reality. We are jealous of such independence. We are uneasy that there should be an apparently self-contained world in which God becomes an unnecessary hypothesis. We acknowledge that the ways of God are inscrutable; but is there not still in the religious mind something of that feeling of the prophets of old, who called on God to assert his kingship and by sign or miracle proclaim that the forces of Nature are subject to his command? And yet if the scientist were to repent and admit that it was necessary to include among the agents controlling the stars and the electrons an omnipresent spirit to whom we trace the sacred things of consciousness, would there not be even graver apprehension ?
We should suspect an intention to reduce God to a system of differential equations, like the other agents which at various times have been introduced to restore order in the physical scheme. That fiasco at any rate is avoided. For the sphere of the differential equations of physics is the metrical cyclic scheme extracted out of the broader reality. However much the ramifications of the cycles may be extended by further scientific discovery, they cannot from their very nature trench on the background in which they have their being—their actuality. It is in this background that our own mental consciousness lies; and here, if anywhere, we may find a Power greater than but akin to consciousness. It is not possible for the controlling laws of the spiritual substratum, which in so far as it is known to us in consciousness is essentially non-metrical, to be analogous to the differential and other mathematical equations of physics which are meaningless unless they are fed with metrical quantities. So that the
crudest anthropomorphic image of a spiritual deity can scarcely be so wide of the truth as one conceived in terms of metrical equations.
Science and religion are poles apart in their approach to the understanding of reality. Science is detail oriented, whereas, religion is survival oriented. God is an indispensable factor from the viewpoint of survival, since man feels that it cannot survive against the elements on its own.
Science has been patiently striving to understand the elements so it can control them. As it does so it gives more confidence to man that there are greater chances of survival with this knowledge. A gradual shift has been taking place from blind faith in God to knowledge of the elements of the universe.
The last bastion of ignorance is the very consciousness that brings awareness. The science of physics has not focused on consciousness yet; but that day is not far when it will.
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