‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God’. St. John, Chapter 1, verse 1. Ascribed to around 100AD, say three hundred years later.
The late Zoltan Torey is described by his publisher, MIT Press, as a clinical psychologist and independent scholar. One of that dying breed of scholars who, having got their crust with some day job – or otherwise – can scoll along, quite happily, without ever needing to set foot on the slippery steps of the ladder of the academic career or to do battle with the bean counters who dish out the grants. Without needing to festoon his work, should he see fit to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, with hundreds of references to all and sundry. To exhibit his family tree, as it were, to all comers. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
I associate here to some bit of Balzac where he goes on about the pernicious results of the carrière getting everywhere, no doubt from somewhere in his ‘La Comédie humaine’.
All this is prompted by my recent reading of what I think is Torey’s last book, ‘The Conscious Mind’, a short and accessible take on this matter as it stood in the early years of the present decade, handsomely produced by the MIT press.
Torey sees the universe in a series of stages.
In the beginning was the big bang, the beginning of matter as we now know it.
Some time later, perhaps a few billion years later, came life, which came to take the form of a cell, a complicated object which pulled off the trick of describing its own self, within itself, by means of a genome. A genome which can be replicated but which can also evolve. The first campaign against the second law of thermodynamics, an early enunciation of which is quoted above.
A few more billion years and we have multi-cellular organisms with nervous systems. Organisms which can exhibit more sophisticated responses to their environments.
A bit later still, perhaps in hundreds of millions of years now rather than billions, we have organisms with brains. Organisms which can exhibit still more sophisticated responses to their environments. Some of which are on the threshold of consciousness.
And then, quite recently, in the last couple of hundred thousand years or so, we have the invention of words. Words which empower consciousness proper and which provide a more up to date way of storing information than the genome. With the consequent invention of free will heralding victory in this second campaign against the second law of thermodynamics.
Which brings us up to the present.
So the preacher was not that far wrong, except that he still went in for God. And St. John was not that far wrong either, except that he did not think to mention the earlier campaigns.
Reference 1: for another mention of the preacher, see http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/sonia-o.html.
Reference 2: or http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=ecclesiastes.
No comments:
Post a Comment