QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

in biology, psychology and sociology. Polanyi regarded knowing as an active comprehension of
the things known, an action that requires skill. The personal participation of the knower in all
acts of understanding does not make our understanding subjective. Comprehension is neither an
arbitary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such
knowing is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality. 808
Polanyi attempted to understand the position of the mind in physical reality with the help of a
hierarchical model. His proposal is that reality is in some way layered, with the emergence of
certain more-complicated higher-level structures whose properties cannot be reduced to
properties of lower-level components. Polanyi believed that it is as meaningless to represent life
in terms of physics and chemistry as it would be to interpret a grandfather clock or a Shakespeare
sonnet, and that it is likewise meaningless to represent mind in terms of being a machine or as a
neural model. Lower levels, however, do not lack a bearing on the higher levels: they define the
conditions for their success and account for their failures, but cannot account for their successes
because they cannot even define them. 809
In the manner of Polanyi, the Nobel-Prize-winning physiologist Ragnar Granit, born in Finland,
highlighted the birth of hierarchies in the evolutionary process. Hierarchical organisation implies
that at each level, new functional relationships are created which use lower organisational
levels. 810 The principles governing the isolated particulars of a lower level leave indeterminate
conditions to be controlled by a higher principle. For example, the tongue cannot run our speech
but voice production leaves the combination of sounds into words, which is controlled by
vocabulary, largely open. Next, a vocabulary leaves the combination of words to form sentences,
which is controlled by grammar, largely open, and so on. In consequence, the operations of a
higher level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing its particulars at the next lower level.
You cannot derive words from phonetics; you cannot derive grammar from vocabulary; the
correct use of grammar does not account for good style; and good style does not supply the
content for a piece of prose. 811
Granit uses this analogy to show how conscious man makes use of neurophysiological
mechanisms without being governed by them. In an analogous way, a computer makes use of the
807
See for example Popper 1972, the chapter “Clocks and Clouds”, and Popper and Eccles 1977.
808
Polanyi 1958, vii,viii.
809
Polanyi 1958, 382.
810
Granit 1977, 85.
811
Granit 1977, 72-73. Granit quotes Polanyi’s article in Science 160 (1968) 1308-1312.
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