Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

difficulties of including consciousness in a scientific worldview are probably the chief problem.

Correspondence and Coherence

We noted in Chapter 2 that for a scientific or mathematical theory to be valid it must have some correspondence to the real world that it is trying to describe and it must hang together within itself — so it must cohere. Quantum theory is one that has a problem corresponding to the world — being difficult, if not impossible, to visualise or to model. It is only because the theory, in the abstract, works so well that it is retained as probably giving us some kind of truth.

Mysterianism

Religion — which we’ve looked at over the last couple of chapters — is often seen as a prime example of a meta-narrative. Looking at religious belief introduced the idea of a revealed truth (it could be said, in contrast to a discovered truth) and personal truth. The concern with religion is that its reliance on revelation and personal experience make it difficult to verify. So, we either believe it or we don’t. Mystical traditions often add intuition as a further source of truth. (Knowledge acquired by ‘intuition’ was originally understood to be knowledge of ‘innate’ ideas, or knowledge of the Platonic forms. Now the word intuition is used more to mean sensing something from beyond ourselves — God, Spirit, the universe — so it carries an even more mysterian meaning.) I’ve

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