QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

world of our perceptions and feelings, and the external world of mechanical processes which is
so different in character. Most philosophers sought a place where to locate immaterial reality,
God and the human soul in a world of facts that seemed indifferent to man man and his affairs.
The way of thinking adopted by science could not satisfy critical philosophers of the modern age,
who had to face the hopeless problem of deriving psychic phenomena from physical ones in a
way which could preserve the idea of free will and moral responsibility. In attempting to provide
more precise explanations of the basis of both reality and knowledge, thinkers have not,
however, been able to mount a credible challenge to the basic ontological presumptions of a
mechanistic material world that were employed in physics. Philosophy as such lost a significant
amount of its cabability to explain as it had to take seriously into consideration the
presuppositions and facts of natural science. In some respects, the situation can be seen as
analogous to the age of Scholastic philosophy, when thinkers were forced to work within the
confines of Christian dogma.
Even though materialism had a powerful effect on both scientific culture and public opinion,
Dualism was a more popular viewpoint among philosophers. Dualism can be taken as an
auxiliary hypothesis which people leaning on the Christian dogma were infected by when they
wanted to assign themselves some freedom to speculate in the world of matter and time
independent of religious concepts. The development of natural science can in some way be seen
as requiring the ontology of Cartesian dualism, in which the authority of reason could be
defended in relation to the whole of nature, whose laws it investigated and tried to command. 301
Many philosophers actually challenged Dualism even during Descartes' lifetime. Since humans
were neither simply soul or spirit, but had a material body that was subject to natural laws, the
problem was the question of the relationship between these two substances, i.e. how human mind
could have any influence in a completely deterministic material world.
When philosophers paid serious attention to the spiritual side of human beings, their reason and
mental abilities, only a small number of them accepted Materialism. In particular, it was difficult
to explain knowledge, meaning or intention by employing the concept of matter consisting of
separate particles. The birth of knowledge or the spontaneous workings of the mind simply did
not appear to be describable in quantitative and materialistic terms; as changes concerning
particles which moved in space and time. The feeling of free will had to be viewed as an illusion,
based, for example, on each individual’s ability to be aware of their own self. Even though in the
300 Jones 1969,114-117.
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