Arthur Stanley Eddington

That statement, you might think, accords with Philip Goff's interpretation (in _Galileo's Error_, 2019) of this public-lectures-based volume by highly accomplished physicist Eddington as developing the neutral monism of Bertrand Russell (_The Analysis of Matter_, 1927) into full-blown panpsychism, which nowadays is sometimes ascribed to the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. But, in the closing chapters where I expected this development to be nailed down, all I see is a woolly miasma of ruminations involving mysticism, religion, spirituality, god-talk, and theology. Yuck. The good part of the book is the first two-thirds of it, which includes insightful accounts of relativity, thermodynamics, and the then-newborn quantum theory of Heisenberg and Schrödinger. Eddington was not as polished a wordsmith as Russell, I'd say, but his writing was similar to Russell's in its old-fashioned male centeredness and restrictive-relative-clause "whichiness".… (more)

This is a tale from one of the most sensational moments in human history. Eddington, a magnificent story teller, is ably placed to tell it. General relativity was barely a decade old; quantum mechanics had just been formulated. Co-incident with the Solvay conference that fixed the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, Eddington gives us a view less dominated by continental philosophy. Indeed this work conveys all the hope, optimism, confusion and misconceptions of this amazing age.

For those with current knowledge, it is intriguing to see how much more we now know about the cosmos; and how prescient some of his conjectures are. Actually the work is best known for the unorthodox views on entropy and a metaphysical substratum beneath a metrical physics. He gives clear reasons for such beliefs.

Hence Eddington suggests that all physical laws will ultimately be shown to be statistical just like thermodynamic laws. In this context he places the inevitable decay of organization as of greatest importance, as the originator of a direction for experienced time.

Furthermore he takes it as given that conscious thoughts are beyond the realm of science which he limits to the jurisdiction of symbols. He asserts the need for a qualitative substratum to underpin both mind and matter. Yet he is uncomfortable using the terminology of neutral monism. The neutral moniker suggests an equal weighting for the qualitative. In his mind, the way to reconcile mind and matter is to accept that everything is in the mind eg even all our perceptions of matter. Furthermore the mind gives us insight in the purpose of being.

Of course the Gifford Lectures are given to promote theology. Thus Eddington asks from where the organization of the cosmos comes and how the laws of nature are set. He suggests the indeterminate nature of quantal measurement supplies an opening for volition. However, he points out that to understand mind, some unity-forming process is missing.… (more)