All known SELF-sufficient models of the eternal existence of matter are mathematically erroneous and do not work; all of them inevitably require the introduction of the Creator of our known material world into their formulas.
And here's why in my opinion:
These are the fundamentally possible strictly materialistic models of the purely material origin of universes (including our Universe) without the involvement of spiritual-informational, non-substances in our understanding, intelligent, creative, creative demiurgic entities.
I will give a model of the author of this site, respected Lyubomir Pavlov:
I IMAGINE THE ETERNALLY EXISTING LIMITLESS MATERIAL WORLD AS A LIMITLESS FLUTUATING WORLD, i.e. UNCHANGEABLE, AN OCEAN, WHERE EACH INDIVIDUAL FLUCTUATION - THE UNIVERSE REPRESENTS A CLOSED CYCLE CONSISTED OF AN ASCENDING BRANCH OF EVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENT AND A DESCENDING BRANCH OF DEGRADATION, RETURNING THE UNIVERSE TO THE OCEAN OF THE ORIGINAL STATE RESEARCH OF EQUILIBRIUM CHAOS. AT THIS WAY, ALL HER FORMER INDIVIDUALS ARE ERASED.
In my opinion, only with such an assumption can one substantiate the ETERNAL EXISTENCE OF THE MATERIAL WORLD.
Best regards, Lyubomir
The discovered, absolutely accurately discovered by strict science a number of IRREVERSIBLE VECTOR NON-CYCLIC parameters (entropy, etc.) and the fact that even our Universe (expanding with acceleration) will not return back to the singularity have now put an end to such unconfirmed strictly materialistic models of the entire universe, the entire Universe.
The latest scientific facts known to us indicate the absence of MAGA-static fluctuating matter-substance, which gives birth to fluctuation-universes by the will of blind, unreasonable cases.
Thanks to the predominance of dark energy in it, our Universe will never return “to normal”, will not return to a singularity akin to the one from which it was born.
Both the earlier model of F. Engels in his “Dialectics of Nature” and this one are clearly not confirmed and turned out to be incorrect and inaccurate.
All models of matter without a Creator inevitably turn out to be incomplete and inaccurate, not self-sufficient and leading to logical and mathematical dead ends.
These are the consequences of precisely the exclusion from these narrowly materialistic models of such a component as the Intelligent Creator of the simulated matter.
“The impossibility of recognizing that the great and wondrous world with ourselves as conscious beings arose by chance seems to me to be the main proof of the existence of God!”
Charles Darwin
Our Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.
Moreover, this expansion does not occur anyhow, but is subject to a certain logic. This expansion, as well as the very existence of matter, is subject to a system of 4 fundamental interactions: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong and weak, which are very precisely regulated among themselves.
If they were slightly less regulated, life, or even the existence of the universe in general, would be impossible.
Regarding the rate of expansion of our Universe, astronomer Bernard Lovell said this: “If the Universe expanded one trillionth faster, then by now all matter in the Universe would disappear... And if the expansion occurred one trillionth slower, then already in about the first billion years existence of the Universe, gravitational forces would cause it to shrink.”
What is the anthropic principle?
AP appeared in modern science when, as a result of studies of the structure of the Universe, it was discovered that there is a so-called “fine tuning” of fundamental physical constants, i.e. that even with a slight change in their numerical value, the Universe becomes completely different, unsuitable for the existence of man and the forms of life known to him.
The world is surprisingly attuned to man, if not tailored to him.
TO early XIX century, the assertion that the Universe had no beginning, that is, it did not have a Creator, became widespread in scientific and secular circles. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels actively developed this idea and developed it into the doctrine of dialectical materialism, which, having finally received, “ scientific basis”, increasingly gained influence in the circles of the intelligentsia, and by the 20th century it was already widespread throughout Europe.
Over time, the statement of “the eternity of the existence of the Universe” became one of the cornerstone theses of atheism, because if the Universe was not created and arose by chance, then, therefore, it was not created by God. Let us quote from the book of one of the ardent supporters of the idea of materialism, Georg Politzer, who at the beginning of the 20th century wrote about the impossibility of the existence of God in his book “Principles of the Origin of Philosophy.”
“The universe is not created by anyone. If she was created, then she must have been created by God at a certain point in time from Non-Existence. In order to accept the statement about the creation of the Universe, we first of all need to admit that there was a time when the Universe did not exist, and then it was created by God from Nothingness. But this recognition is unacceptable from a scientific point of view.”
Politzer expressed in this statement the opinion of all the materialists of that time, who believed that science was working for them and that their faith would soon be confirmed by facts. However, very soon science proved what the materialists so stubbornly refused to believe, expressed in the words of Politzer “if it had been created, then ... we will need to admit that there was a time when the Universe did not exist, and then it was created by God from Nothingness.” . Science has proven that the Universe had a strictly defined moment of beginning of existence.
Today, atheists are at an absolute dead end in the face of scientific facts. Here is just one example of their reaction to the facts of the Big Bang theory, published in 1989 in one of the most famous organs of atheism propaganda, in the journal Nature by its editor-in-chief John Maddox. In an article entitled "Down with the Big Bang," Maddox wrote that "the Big Bang theory is philosophically unacceptable, because otherwise, with the acceptance of the facts of the Big Bang, we give powerful support to the ideas of theologians about the Divine creation of life on Earth."
Moreover, he predicted that the Big Bang theory would not last even ten years. However, despite the hopes of materialists expressed by Maddox, the Big Bang theory received more and more evidence from modern science, many discoveries undeniably confirmed the correctness of the theory.
Some materialists behave more logically in the face of these facts. For example, the famous English material physicist H.R. Lipson, “albeit unwillingly,” recognizes the creation of the Universe as a scientific fact:
“It seems to me that after everything discovered by science, we must go further and admit that the only logical explanation for the emergence of life can only be creation. I know that this is difficult for me and many physicists, materialists like me, but if experimental science confirms these facts, we cannot deny it just because we don’t like it.”
As a result, modern astronomy has come to realize the following fact: matter and time were created by the Supreme Creator, independent of these two categories and possessing Infinite Will and Intelligence. The Almighty Creator, who created our Universe, is the Great God, the Lord of all worlds.
Almost all of us have thought about where the objective reality given to us in sensations came from.
Some dark people still naively and blindly believe in its eternity and infinity.
As modern science has firmly established, matter is a secondary, derivative entity.
It definitely arose, happened.
Matter, all, all matter as a whole, all, all, the entire single, integral material world arose as a result of the so-called big bang about 14 billion years ago.
Science believes that matter originated from a complete zero-dimensional vacuum outside of space and time.
And space and time, as properties-attributes of matter, were born along with matter itself.
Scientists also believe that matter arose and materialized from a complete vacuum for a reason, not out of the blue.
Someone really helped her with this.
I will also give out a lot of interesting purely scientific information about this someone and His role below in my article.
Modern scientists have discovered and proven this:
Matter is fundamentally incapable of having primacy and self-sufficiency.
Science has absolutely proven that matter is a secondary, derivative entity.
In the beginning there was no matter.
All matter, the entire material world, as a whole, materialized and arose from “scratch” about 14 billion years ago.
Before this, matter had not yet arisen.
There was no matter - and suddenly it appeared.
Actually, both time and space as inseparable properties-attributes of matter appeared along with matter itself.
Matter, as scientifically established, is most likely generated by our Creator, the Creator, from the so-called NOTHING - that is, from a complete physical vacuum.
A complete physical vacuum outside of space and time is not matter, but a meaningful void.
It is deprived of specific properties and limitations inherent in matter, is not constrained by the framework of physical Laws that our Creator imposed with His Will on matter (to make it capable of generating life and Mind - the seat of the Spirit in the material world), by the framework of the Laws that God gave to matter for its elementary functioning.
In potency, the complete physical vacuum contains everything, everything, everything, and is inexhaustible in its potencies.
But only in potencies.
Without the Creator, the Demiurge, a complete physical vacuum is simply incapable of giving birth to extremely complex worlds of trillions of galaxies (most of which are hundreds of billions of stars) and giving birth to a lot of other things.
Despite the fact that the actual physical vacuum contains nothing, it is actually sterile in itself, it contains everything, everything, everything potentially.
Therefore, due to the greatest commonality, he (along with God) can act as the ontological basis of the entire diversity of objects and phenomena in the world.
In this sense, God and emptiness are the most meaningful and most fundamental entities.
And matter is undoubtedly a secondary, emerging entity.
I want to define the terms as precisely as possible.
Sometimes (not always) in their scientific jargon they call a vacuum a physical vacuum.
Most scientists and I understand the concept of “physical” first of all precisely: NOT SUPERNATURAL.
Theories of the origin of matter from purely supernatural phenomena are already beyond the scope of modern science.
But vacuum as a meaningful emptiness is not matter, but a dialectical opposite, the antithesis of matter.
So matter and its dialectical opposite are sometimes (not always) united under the concept of physical.
That is, they mean that elementary physics, and not just theological and teleological sciences and philosophy, can study the origin of matter itself.
In the broadest sense, GOD, the CREATOR, is material, since HE exists objectively, completely realistically, truly, independently of human consciousness and human opinion about His real existence.
In the broadest sense, God can be called a superintelligent spiritual primary form of matter.
By the term matter, I specifically understand everything, everything, everything that in the Soviet official Diamatovian philosophy was designated as reality, given to us in sensations and well verifiably fixed, amenable to study by our instruments, this same matter Diamatovian philosophers traditionally contrasted with God, Spirit and consciousness in the so-called "The Fundamental Question of Philosophy."
They (Diamatian philosophers) considered this very essence (as opposed to spirit, consciousness and God) to be primary, eternal and infinite.
But it turned out that matter is absolutely SECONDARY and finite in space and time.
Of course, you can clumsily try to “save the situation” by calling anything matter – God, the souls of people, angels, demons, any spirits, and any metaphysical phenomena radically different from matter, and at the same time absolutely any dialectical opposite of matter.
In this article, I personally mean by the term “MATTER” exactly what Marx, Engels and Lenin understood by matter.
And what Marx, Engels and Lenin considered NOT EXISTING phenomena (including supernatural and (or) metaphysical), I now scientifically and conclusively position as creators and co-creators of this very matter.
Complete vacuum as a meaningful emptiness is no longer MATTER, but its dialectical opposite.
And it is primary in relation to matter.
If anyone is too biasedly picky about the concept of “not matter”, I will further explain: then call THIS “not quite matter”, well, for example, angels and demons and spiritual grace - “not quite matter”, “not quite material”, but then they will already be incompatible with Marxism and Marxist materialism (and not only with them), non-canonical, your personal CONVENTIONAL terms.
That is, by “saving matter” with far-fetched terminological tricks, the opponent will inevitably excommunicate himself and fall away from generally accepted Marxist terminology.
So, vacuum as a meaningful emptiness is no longer matter.
This is its dialectical opposite.
Or (according to another philosophically well-founded version) – a counter-dialectal antipode of matter.
In a word - not matter.
Other.
Well, the same thing from which, according to the Bible, God created matter, created the material world.
Vacuum is primary in relation to matter.
But the vacuum is not the most primary essence; it is also, in a certain sense, secondary and derivative in relation to the Superintelligent Creator.
The completely primary and truly absolutely eternal essence in Eternity is only God.
He is the alpha and omega of everything.
No one has ever created God out of anything, He himself is the CREATOR, the Creator, the Demiurge.
It did not arise, did not arise, did not happen, it was and will ALWAYS be!!!
God is the true source of all things.
Let's return to the vacuum.
In itself, a complete absolute zero-dimensional vacuum outside the space and time of material worlds, as a meaningful emptiness, is not matter.
There are simply theories (and I will touch on them shortly) about the origin of matter directly from supernatural or other NON-physical entities.
In order to remain within the framework of natural science, fundamental physics, not entangled in the Divine and supernatural science, I (like many scientists before me) designate the dialectically opposite to matter (and primary in relation to matter. But not to God) meaningful emptiness with the term PHYSICAL VACUUM.
This is just a conventional scientific term.
And some gentlemen, militant atheist-demagogues from among the readers can, have the liberal right in their works to even christen the Lord God himself as matter, nature and nature - this is their copyright.
I will simply modestly prove and scientifically justify that everything, everything, everything that Marx, Engels and Lenin considered the primary essence, in fact (and this has been truly scientifically proven) is a secondary essence, not eternal and finite, and in particular having limited finite mass and energy.
So vacuum is not just emptiness, but meaningful emptiness.
Such a scientific understanding of the physical vacuum forces us to recognize the reality of the existence not only in theory, but also in reality, of “nothing” and “something” in one “bottle” (vacuum) in their inextricable unity - the dialectic of something and nothing.
“Something” actualized (by the Creator), known to us under the philosophical term MATTER, exists as a being manifested (by the Creator from the vacuum) - in the form of a substance-field observable by us physical world, in the form of objectified reality given to us (partly directly, partly through devices) in the sensations of objectified reality, but “nothing”, a potentially pregnant “something” exists as an unmanifested being - in the form of a physical vacuum.
Therefore, unmanifested being, when extending this concept to the physical vacuum, should be considered precisely as an independent physical entity essentially different from MATTER, which needs to be studied.
The physical vacuum is not directly observed, but the manifestation of its mysterious properties is recorded in experiments. Already known vacuum effects include: the creation of an electron-positron pair, the Lamb-Rutherford effect, and the Casimir effect. As a result of vacuum polarization, the electric field of a charged particle differs from the Coulomb field.
This leads to a Lemb shift of energy levels and to the appearance of an anomalous magnetic moment in particles. When a high-energy photon acts on a physical vacuum, material particles - an electron and a positron - appear in the field of the nucleus.
The Casimir effect indicates the occurrence of forces that bring two plates in a vacuum closer together.
These (and many other) effects indicate that the vacuum is a very real existing entity.
The reality is that within the framework of conventional (developed for matter) quantum physics, the theory of the physical vacuum did not take place.
It is becoming more and more obvious that the “life zone” of the theory of physical vacuum should be outside the boundaries of quantum physics and, most likely, precede it.
Apparently, quantum theory should be a consequence and continuation of the theory of physical vacuum, since physical vacuum is assigned the role of the most fundamental physical entity, the role of the basis of the world, the ancestor of matter.
A very important and interesting scientific (and philosophical) question is whether matter arose (was created, was it created) from a PHYSICAL vacuum or from NON-physical entities.
Let's consider this issue in more detail.
Matter appeared along with its properties-attributes - space and time.
The linear counting of time itself began from the moment of the appearance (creation) of this very secondary entity - matter.
Before the appearance of matter, neither the space known to us nor the time known to us simply existed.
At all.
Our Creator was and is outside of time in Eternity.
Which, however, does not at all prevent Him from being superbly pantheistically present in the space-time continuum of the matter He created.
Outside the material Universe, as well as outside other secondary material world-universes, there is absolutely no “empty” space and no “empty” time flows.
I understand that this is a little difficult to visualize (however, just like infinity) - but it is so.
If there are other parallel material worlds, then OTHER spaces are spread out in them and OTHER times flow.
That is why, first of all, we do not observe Parallel Worlds– we simply do not come into contact with them in space-time.
As you know, the inseparable properties-attributes of our material world, our Physical Universe, are space and time - our four-dimensional space-time continuum.
We ourselves are observers within this space-time continuum and therefore observe the physical vacuum precisely through the prism of space and time.
And it is very difficult for our brains to imagine a physical vacuum outside of space and time.
And BEFORE the appearance of matter, the physical vacuum could only be outside the space and time familiar to us.
Either this way or not at all.
There simply could not be and was not any “empty” space or “empty” space (in no way connected with the movement of matter, with moving matter).
Therefore, there is a smart, interesting hypothesis of the talented scientist Andrei Makarov that matter may have arisen not from a physical vacuum, but from NON-physical entities.
This is a completely scientific and very talented hypothesis of Andrei.
Before the appearance of matter, there really could have been (and now they are OUTSIDE matter) NON-physical entities, for example, METAphysical entities, such as divine energies, divine emanations, etc.
But their study, unfortunately, takes us beyond the line modern natural science, beyond ordinary earthly science into the sparkling heights of metaphysics, esotericism and theology.
Therefore, we will modestly try to comprehend the phenomenon of materialization of matter from NOTHING within the strict limited framework of canonical natural science.
In natural science, due to the fact that the physical vacuum claims to have a fundamental status, even the status of the ontological basis of the matter materialized from it, it should have the greatest generality and should not have the particular features inherent in matter, characteristic of many observable material entities - objects and phenomena.
It is known that assigning any additional attribute to an object reduces the universality of this object.
So, for example, a pen is a universal concept. Adding any attribute narrows the range of objects covered by this concept (door handle, ball handle, etc.).
Thus, we come to the conclusion that ontological status can be claimed by an entity that is devoid of any signs, measures, structure and which in principle cannot be modeled, since any modeling involves the use of discrete objects and description using signs and measures.
A physical entity claiming fundamental status need not be a composite, since a composite entity has a secondary status in relation to its constituents.
Thus, the requirement of fundamentality and primacy for a certain entity entails the fulfillment of the following basic conditions:
1. Not to be composite.
2. Have the least number of signs, properties and characteristics.
3. Have the greatest commonality for the entire variety of objects and phenomena.
4. To be potentially everything, but actually nothing.
5. Have no measures.
Not to be compound means not to contain anything other than itself. Regarding the smallest number of signs, properties and characteristics, the ideal requirement should be to not have them at all. To have the greatest generality for the entire variety of objects and phenomena means not to have the characteristics of particular objects, since any specification narrows the generality. To be potentially everything, but actually nothing, means remaining unobservable, but at the same time maintaining the status of a physical object.
To have no measures means to be zero-dimensional.
The original, complete physical vacuum that gave birth to matter must be exactly zero-dimensional and in terms of space-time characteristics too.
It is very difficult to imagine associatively and speculatively – a zero-dimensional complete vacuum outside of space and time.
The physical vacuum is not just zero-dimensional, but also NON-DISCRETE.
The five requirements listed above are not satisfied by any discrete object of the material world and, in particular, by any quantum object of any material field.
It follows that these requirements can only be satisfied by a continuous entity.
Therefore, the physical vacuum, if considered the most fundamental entity, must be continuous. In addition, extending the achievements of mathematics to the field of physics (Cantor's continuum hypothesis), we come to the conclusion that the multiple structure of the physical vacuum is untenable.
This means that the physical vacuum cannot be identified with the ether, with a quantized object, or considered to consist of any discrete particles, even if these particles are virtual and not material.
Vacuum gives birth to virtual particles under appropriate conditions, but does not consist of them at all, is not formed by them.
In my opinion, physical vacuum should be considered as a dialectical antipode of matter. Thus, I view matter and the physical vacuum as dialectical opposites.
The holistic physical world known to us (meaning: not supernatural) is represented by both the physical vacuum and the matter secondary to it, materialized from it.
Vacuum complements and enriches itself with matter as its other.
Matter contains vacuum in a “sublated” form, dialectically denies vacuum and is negated by it (dialectical negation is not just a negation, but at the same time an affirmation).
This approach to these two philosophical entities corresponds to the true essence of dialectics.
And the pseudo-scientific biased dogmatic old Diamatovian myth about the primacy of matter is anti-dialectical, antagonistic to dialectics.
In such relations of mutually complementary dialectical opposites, physical vacuum and matter should be considered.
That is why the Creator-First Cause, for his complete self-realization in something else through something else, needs not only a vacuum, but also matter, and the creation of material worlds by Him too.
And in His tireless creation of more and more material worlds from the primary NOTHING, that is, from the vacuum.
Vacuum is a special, specific universal antipode of matter.
Physics has never encountered this kind of physical object - unobservable, in which no measures can be specified.
Now I’ve finally encountered the last of the Stalinist dogmas refuted by science on the mountain.
It is necessary to overcome this barrier in science and recognize the existence (in addition to matter) of a fundamentally new type of reality - a physical vacuum, which has the property of continuity.
Despite the fact that the physical vacuum is such a paradoxical object, it is increasingly becoming a subject of study in physics.
At the same time, due to its continuity, the traditional approach based on model representations is inapplicable for vacuum. Therefore, science will have to find fundamentally new methods for studying it.
Clarification of the nature of the physical vacuum allows us to take a different look at many physical phenomena in particle physics and astrophysics.
The entire material Universe (and the familiar matter given to us in sensations, and dark matter, and dark energy) is located in an unobservable, continuous physical vacuum.
The physical vacuum genetically precedes matter, it gave birth to it, therefore the entire material Universe lives not only according to the Laws of Nature known to us given by the Creator directly to matter itself, but also according to the mysterious laws of the physical vacuum, which are not yet fully known to science, almost unknown.
In the chain of problems associated with understanding the nature of the physical vacuum, there is a key link related to the assessment of the entropy of the physical vacuum.
I believe that the physical vacuum has the highest entropy among all known real objects and systems, therefore Boltzmann's H-theorem does not apply to it.
The above five criteria of primacy and fundamentality indicate that only an object with the highest entropy can satisfy such requirements.
And (accordingly) the lowest negentropy.
I believe that the vacuum-matter phase transition is absolutely impossible without the presence of an Intelligent Creator, who gave the nascent matter an unimaginably super-giant initial mega-reserve of negentropy.
I’ll express it directly in Russian: without God, this initial fantastic reserve of negentropy simply has absolutely nowhere to come from.
God not only gave the Laws of Nature to matter, but also such an unimaginably titanic primary resource of negentropy, which simply absolutely could not be taken from any other sources during the creation of matter.
Tell me, can a cold kettle SPONTANEOUSLY heat up and boil spontaneously on a cold gas stove disconnected from the gas?
And all, all, all the teapots of all earthlings at the same time?
Could the Moscow-Novosibirsk train spontaneously grow spontaneously in the field of farmer Sidorov as a result of purely natural processes?
Believe me (and mathematical calculations confirm this well) that all of the above-described SPONTANEOUS purely random phenomena of a spontaneous increase in negentropy in many unimaginable trillions of trillions... trillions of trillions of decillions are incomparably more likely than the sudden purely random purely spontaneous appearance of such an incredible initial resource - touched upon the negentropy that took place during the materialization of our material Universe from the vacuum.
So think about it, pure chance or God gave birth to our unimaginably complex, unimaginably negentropic world from the initial emptiness that lay in complete entropy.
In accordance with the S-theorem of Yu.L. Klimontovich, such a fantastically incredibly mega-huge decrease in the entropy of the vacuum is possible only if it is an OPEN system and it will be brought into an UNEQUILIBRIUM state by an unimaginably powerful EXTERNAL (in relation to both the vacuum and the matter emerging from it) organizational structuring cause.
Only God Himself is fundamentally capable of becoming such a cause.
Only God is able to give birth to the world.
If there were no God, matter, our entire complex, grandiose material world, could not have arisen.
The second law of thermodynamics fatally dooms matter left to itself to inevitable degeneration.
The essence of the S-theorem of Yu.L. Klimontovich, briefly and without formulas that are obscure to the general reader, comes down to exactly the following:
“if we take the “equilibrium state” corresponding to zero values of the control parameters as the starting point for the degree of chaos, then as we move away from the equilibrium state due to a change in the control parameter, the entropy values related to the given value of the average energy decrease.”
In other (everyday) words, that is, without God or another powerful EXTERNAL MANAGER, matter would inevitably always inevitably remain in a state of complete chaos if it were eternal.
And if it were not eternal, then over time it would still inevitably fall into complete and eternal chaos, and would not escape it anywhere.
And not only matter.
And the vacuum would also forever remain in the highest entropy, the lowest negentropy.
And then the vacuum would definitely not be able to generate matter.
It was and only the influence of the EXTERNAL MANAGER on the vacuum that gave birth to matter itself and the intelligent us in it.
According to the S-theorem of Yu.L. Klimontovich, it is exclusively only with the openness of the vacuum to an EXTERNAL organizational structuring super-cause that it is possible to materialize and give birth to both matter itself and such exorbitant reserves of negentropy for its (matter’s) development and generation of life and humanoids for many billions of years. Reason.
The same First Cause gave matter the Laws of its development.
Matter definitely has an EXTERNAL MANAGER!!!
Returning to the question raised by the talented scientist Andrei Makarov about whether matter materialized from a physical vacuum or from NON-physical entities, I will say the following.
Physical here (in relation to the zero-dimensional vacuum) is synonymous with the concept SUPERNATURAL.
For my dear friend Andrei Makarov, it is difficult to visually imagine a zero-dimensional vacuum outside of space and time.
Of course, matter itself will not come from NOTHING; NON-physical, for example, spiritual and rational entities, are also involved in the materialization of matter from NOTHING.
I have already proven above that the emergence and functioning of the material world known to us would be completely impossible without the key role of the EXTERNAL MANAGER.
But the complete absolute NOTHING is either a zero-dimensional vacuum outside of space and time or a very real entity, concealing within itself something more than a complete absolute TOTAL nothing.
Here is the answer for the respected Andrei Makarov: from the TOTAL complete absolute nothing, nothing can ever, is fundamentally incapable of taking on, arising.
But from such a phenomenal NOTHING as a zero-dimensional vacuum outside the space and time of the material worlds, matter by God’s will could well materialize.
After all, a zero-dimensional vacuum outside of space and time is not a sterile absolute nihel, but it is both nothing and something “in one bottle” in their highest inextricable unity.
I’ll give you a more clear example for dear Andrei Makarov.
Dear Andrei Makarov, real-life objects like black holes are well known.
And black holes have such an outer radius - the Schwarzschild radius, which in simple cases approximately coincides with the gravitational radius of the black hole.
So, the event horizon of a black hole passes through there.
For an external observer Andrei Makarov, when I fall into a black hole, I will begin to flatten (to zero) in space and my biorhythms will begin to stretch endlessly in time (well, or the time rhythms of the destruction of my corpse killed by the black hole - these are already details).
And on a sphere of a given horizon radius, space is compressed to zero and time stops for an external observer.
Therefore, this horizon will become the event horizon for Andrey - no information will ever be received by Andrey because of this horizon.
Not a single material carrier of information is able to overcome the exorbitant gravity of a black hole and escape from under the sphere of its event horizon.
But I, falling into a black hole, will quite successfully overcome this horizon.
Despite these relativistic effects, both the fall of stars into black holes and the collision of two black holes can be quite successfully observed from the outside in real finite time.
This was recently recorded and led to the discovery of gravitational waves.
So, for an external observer Andrei Makarov, the vacuum on the surface of the horizon sphere shrinks unimaginably in space and unimaginably stops in time.
And it is precisely in this pale semblance of the primary zero-dimensional vacuum outside (inherent in material worlds) space and time that the most interesting things will begin to happen.
There, on the event horizon, MATERIAL PARTICLES MATERIALIZE from virtual particles of a degenerate space-time vacuum, as if out of nothing, and new matter arises.
Of course, without the active assistance of such a great EXTERNAL MANAGER as God, nothing worthwhile or complex will materialize there or arise.
Only the simplest elementary particles, mainly photons.
My conclusion: in order to materialize something worthwhile from a vacuum, the vacuum must be precisely zero-dimensional and outside of space-time.
It is precisely such a vacuum (zero-dimensional and outside of space-time) that becomes the ideal highest potential for the creative self-realization of the Creator through His creation of matter from the vacuum.
After all, for such an exorbitantly huge superquantum (initially developed into a non-quantum) supersystem like all matter (that is, our material world, our Universe, born in the cradle of the Singularity) to break through quantum potential barriers and other insurmountable restrictions with a tunneling salvo, for this ordinary tunneling effect is absolutely not enough.
It’s the same as dragging not a camel, but the entire galaxy through the eye of a needle.
Of course, God is capable of not such tasks, but why is it unreasonable to create such fantastic unnecessary difficulties for oneself in vain?
It’s one thing to tunnel through an overwhelming potential barrier for a small photo niche, but quite another thing to tunnel all the supergiant substance to build trillions of galaxies (and not only that, because these trillions of galaxies make up only about 4% of the mass of our Universe).
It is by working with the zero-dimensional vacuum outside of space and time that the Creator minimizes the potential barrier and maximizes tunneling underneath it.
He apparently makes this great creative task easier for himself.
Follows the principle of Occam's razor blade - cuts off everything unnecessary, all additional difficulties unnecessary to Him when creating worlds.
He doesn’t run into any unnecessary troubles that he doesn’t need at all.
God needs both worthy self-realization through the creation of matter and the ideal, best, gracious fundamental principle for the optimal implementation of this.
And on the horizon of the sphere of events of a black hole what is happening, in comparison with this great matter of the demiurges-materialization of ALL MATTER, is so... sheer nonsense...
Perhaps the Creator, during His creative work with the vacuum as the initial essence, was also guided by the principle of “cosmic censorship.”
I'll quote Wikipedia a little:
“The principle of “cosmic censorship” was scientifically formulated in 1970 by Roger Penrose in the following figurative form: “Nature abhors naked singularity.” It states that space-time singularities appear in places that, like the interiors of black holes, are hidden from observers."
It is quite possible that the Creator has an antipathy known only to Him towards the more dreary materializing creativity from the ordinary vacuum, completely permeated with the banal Euclidean and non-Euclidean space-time continuums of the material worlds.
Give him the most selective, blessed virgin zero-dimensional vacuum outside the four-dimensional space-time continuums we are accustomed to.
And therefore unimaginable visually, figuratively, and associatively by the brains of modern homo sapiens.
I understand that this will be more difficult than visually imagining a quantum as a particle-wave or the visible appearance of an information wave.
But I assume that this is most likely the case.
God most likely materialized matter precisely from the zero-dimensional vacuum outside space and time.
Space and time arose (were created) along with matter itself.
Matter definitely arose and materialized from a vacuum about 14 billion years ago.
The properties of the vacuum are such that without an EXTERNAL MANAGER our material Universe could not have arisen from it.
It is sometimes very difficult for some older people who were once atheistically brought up to get used to the correct, true idea that the matter given to them in their perception actually did not always exist, not Eternally.
Now on Earth all living beings are generated only by other living beings.
But it wasn’t always like this, not forever.
Life once arose for the first time.
Likewise, material phenomena and entities now arise from other material entities.
Matter does not arise from nothing, but only transforms, moves, develops.
But this was not always the case either.
Science has firmly established that all, all, all matter was created 14 billion years ago by the Supreme Mind through the so-called Big Bang, that it (matter) has a FINITE mass and a FINITE volume, a FINAL energy, develops FINALLY with a number of irreversible moments (such as a steady increase entropy and the steady burning out of hydrogen), that matter is NOT SELF-SUFFICIENT, that it is fundamentally impossible to adequately explain matter from itself, that the material world is INTELLIGENTLY arranged, that MIND-SPIRIT IS PRIMARY, and matter is secondary, derivative!!!
Our material world has a finite mass and a finite volume (this has already been strictly irrefutably proven) and was created by a Higher Power about 14 billion years ago, most likely from the so-called NOTHING - it is also NOTHING (dialectics of something and nothing), namely from a super-energetic complete physical vacuum outside of space and time.
Some isolated backward orthodoxies of the so-called (long historically bankrupt) Diamatism are still illiterately convinced that the physical Universe supposedly (it is not clear why) has always existed.
But science has definitely established that due to the predominance in the Universe of the so-called dark energy, which has ANTI-GRAVITY properties, our physical Universe is expanding with ever-increasing ACCELERATION.
Matter scatters with ACCELERATION.
And, according to modern calculations, it will NEVER COMPRESS INTO A NEW SINGULARITY!!!
The hypothesis of a pulsating Universe, as well as the hypothesis of a stationary Universe, have been completely rejected by modern science.
That is, SCIENCE (SCIENCE, and not priests and not mullahs, and not lamas, not different mahatmas!), SCIENCE has proven that matter is not eternal, matter itself arose about 14 billion years ago (created by someone?), happened together with all your space and time.
Indeed, the physical Universe will most definitely never shrink back again.
There will be no eternal cyclicality.
And it never was.
Matter all happened smoothly.
The biblical hypothesis about the linear directional development of the EMERGING world (and about the SECONDARY importance of cycles and the predominance of the non-cyclical linear vector of development of the universe) turned out to be incomparably more accurate than the misconceptions of some individual ancient Eastern soma-smokers (and having seen enough glitches-fairy tales in a stupid narcotic trance at the demonic instigation) wise about supposedly ETERNAL cyclicity matter.
Dear readers, modern science has precisely found out and calculated that matter absolutely arose and will never shrink again, will not return to its so-called circles.
My opinion: God created matter.
As you know, most famous (and other) scientists also believe in God and at the same time move and develop science well.
Comrade Stalin himself once gave Archbishop Luke (Valentin) Voino-Yasenetsky the first degree large Stalin Prize of 200,000 Soviet rubles for the development of science (surgery).
According to militant atheists, we (believers and those who admit the existence of God) are supposedly ungrateful enemies of science because we are allegedly against the dialectical method, supposedly fundamental in science.
Firstly, the dialectical method in science is not the main one - it is a fact.
It is generally little known in foreign science.
Secondly, the dialectical method of knowledge originates from Hegel’s IDEALISM dialectic and is most beautifully compatible with the presence of the Creator of matter.
God is not a hindrance to the dialectical method.
Thirdly, Marx and Engels were not militant atheists and did not consider believers to be ungrateful pests of science; they adequately assessed the enormous scientific contribution of many believing scientists.
But on the basis of the materialist dialectic of Marx-Engels, in the early 30s, at the ideological order of Comrade Stalin, the so-called Soviet Diamat was created.
Attempts by the Stalinist officialdom to impose this very same thing as a methodology of science led to the persecution of genetics, cybernetics, etc., to such ugly ideological pseudo-scientific harmful phenomena as Lysenkoism, etc.
To the lag of many areas of Soviet science from the West, where diamat was not popular.
Many outstanding Soviet scientists from Vladimir Vernadsky to Ivan Pavlov were then resolutely against Diamatov’s dictatorship in science.
Thousands of scientists, following Academician Vavilov, paid very cruelly for this disagreement with the dominance of Diamatov’s officialdom.
Before Feuerbach and Marx and Engels, atheism was very rare and extremely unpopular among the population.
And militant atheists in general were curiosities from the Red Book in those days, and (to be honest) they were usually mentally unhealthy people in those eras.
Social indignation against the Catholic Church as a human organization was the indignation of people who believed in the existence of a Creator.
Even the Jacobins in France established the cult of the Supreme Reason, the cult of the Supreme Being.
But political prostitutes, commissioned by Stalin’s ideologists, hid and distorted the truth not only about Trotsky and other associates of Stalin, but about this too.
They falsified the long bearded pseudo-history of the supposedly thousand-year struggle of powerful dialectical materialism with idealism invented by the exploiters.
This was a shameless lie from the ideologists of Stalinism.
Long before any classes there was idealism and belief in the existence of supernatural entities, in spirits.
Idealistic views were inherent in our ancestors at the very dawn of humanity, and materialism became widely known only in the 18th century.
The very first to appear on Earth reasonable people already (ALREADY!) believed in the supernatural, were already idealists.
Already Homo Neanderthalis believed in the supernatural.
Archaeologists have discovered in different populations of Neanderthals different types funeral rites, with different orientations of skeletons relative to the cardinal directions, different rituals of funeral use of ocher, related items, etc.
For example, Middle Eastern Neanderthals buried their dead in the fetal position.
It seems that what distinguishes man from ape is not so much work as, first of all, the presence of faith in the supernatural and understanding of one’s biological mortality, and the desire to somehow continue in another existence after earthly death.
And to make primitive tools in wildlife Completely wild chimpanzees can do this too - this has already been precisely proven and captured in detail on film.
Moreover, primitive artificial tools were excavated that were made by chimpanzees several centuries ago, extremely similar to the products of today's modern chimpanzees and in the same places (human Africans then made completely different tools, even bronze and iron).
Chimpanzees even have preconsciousness, but they have no real full-blooded consciousness and no religion.
For example, the Diamatov paid manufacturers of lies first of all enrolled Voltaire among the militant atheists.
As is known (and easy to read, and even on Wikipedia), Voltaire caustically ridiculed the then extremely small number of militant atheists.
To quote Wikipedia:
“Fighting against the church, the clergy and the religions of “revelation,” Voltaire was at the same time an enemy of atheism; Voltaire dedicated a special pamphlet to criticism of atheism (“Hom;lie sur l’ath;isme”). A deist in the spirit of the English bourgeois freethinkers of the 18th century, Voltaire tried with all kinds of arguments to prove the existence of a Deity who created the Universe, in the affairs of which, however, he did not interfere, using evidence: “cosmological” (“Against Atheism”), “teleological” (“Le philosophe ignorant”) and “moral” (article “God” in the Encyclopedia).”
Diamat ideologists thought of declaring even Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev one of the founders of materialism.
The author of “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow,” who was in opposition to the autocracy, was very convenient for them for this role.
Although A.N. himself Radishchev quite definitely wrote (and his manuscripts were preserved and published) about exactly the opposite - that God exists and the human soul, in his opinion, is immortal.
Well, two more words about the so-called Soviet diamat, which failed miserably in 1991-92. As you know, Christianity has existed for more than two thousand years.
Well, and the belief of various Epicureans in the real existence of the Olympian gods, consisting of a special kind of atoms.
But the Epicureans are a marginal and undialectical movement.
The dialectics were precisely the post-Socratic IDEALISTS, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, etc.
Let me also remind you of Hegel’s IDEALISMIC dialectic.
But the materialist dialectic of Marx-Engels has existed only since the 40s of the 19th century.
The Soviet diamat, created by the ideological order of Comrade Stalin, is exactly the same age as my grandmother, he is just a youth.
Moreover, he was already a dilapidated, decrepit youth, refuted by science, almost bent and thrown into the margins of philosophical thought.
Soviet diamatism was based on the axiom: the material world is eternal, has always been.
Science has proven the opposite - MATTER HAS ARISED.
In the beginning there was no matter.
And then it happened.
Our material Universe fundamentally cannot be eternal and self-reproducing, moreover, it is fundamentally finite in its parameters - mass, volume, etc.
As for the general (total) entropy of the physical Universe, it is steadily increasing.
But it fundamentally cannot increase to infinity.
There is a line, a limit.
So draw scientific conclusions.
How could our entire Universe arise from NOTHING?
An absolutely unscientific mistake with a misfortune of the historically bankrupt so-called Diamat created on the ideological order of Comrade Stalin (created personally by Stalin and several of his half-educated zealous lackeys Mitin-Gershkovich and Yudin, half-educated in everything with Stalin (at whose limitations Stalin himself more than once made fun of) on the basis the materialist dialectic of Marx and Engels, already outdated by that time) was Stalin’s failed attempt to establish the whole worldview Soviet people to the preconceived myth about the supposed primacy of matter.
About the primacy of matter, the infallibility of Comrade Stalin and the speedy construction of beautiful communism.
Neither the second, nor the third, and especially the first (the primacy of matter) was confirmed.
By the time the Soviet Diamat was created, by the 30s of the 20th century, the picture of the universe described by F. Engels in his “Dialectics of Nature” had ALREADY been refuted by science.
Real science that searched for the TRUTH.
Science, but not at all based on the dogmas of the eternal infallibility of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin (who crowned their search with the sacred “eternal” diamat) by an artificially specially fabricated quasi-religion - the Soviet diamat.
Diamat, a product of Stalinism, is the most natural dogmatic unscientific pseudo-scientific quasi-religion.
This quasi-religion not only stupidly and violently ignored many millions of solid, serious facts about the presence of supernatural phenomena in the world, but also blatantly contradicted the perfectly verifiable purely scientific truths of the most natural sciences.
If the concept of the Creator of matter received only many new important and interesting indirect confirmations, then objective science completely refuted the most fundamental axioms of diamata and revealed their deepest falsity.
Diamat has not stood the test of time.
Now it is essentially a historical corpse.
A long-smelling dead man, a pitiful ghost who still wanders around Russia, frightens serious scientists and finds dark, ignorant admirers, sectarians and even individual priests, and above all from among the rabid intolerant fanatics of irrational militant hatred of God and the feelings of believing ordinary workers. .
Fortunately, less and less of their diameter finds itself.
Few people already uncritically believe in the cool archaic Stalinist diamatism, in the dilapidated dogmas of this historical relic of a throwaway moment.
All more people, including those who are not churched and not orthodox, believe in the sovereignty of matter by God.
Into the intelligent creation of our world.
Some of the so-called militant atheists believe that their opinion is true, although it is absolutely unfounded and unproven.
They believe that they are not at all obliged to prove that matter is primary.
They believe that it is their opponents who should shoulder the burden of proof that matter is secondary and created by the Creator.
If you please, I (for your sake, my dears) dear readers and opponents) has taken upon herself such a heavy (I’ll tell you) burden and I will now convincingly prove not only the secondary nature of matter, but also that all this (secondary, derivative) matter (and the so-called inanimate matter in particular) is also internally inherent in SPIRIT (its lower levels)!!!
Listen, dear readers, here it is - the naked, killer truth about the undoubted secondary nature of matter and its filling with spirit (its lower levels).
Matter is not only created by the Spirit, not only secondary, derivative, non-eternal and finite.
Matter, it turns out (being generated by divine energies, emanations of the Spirit), contains within itself the spirit as its inseparable intention.
How exactly matter has spirit (its lower levels) in itself, I will now strictly scientifically irrefutably tell you, my dear respected patient readers.
When the blinders of the historically bankrupt (created by the ideological order of Comrade Stalin) Soviet diamat fell, it turned out (to the surprise of the comrades ossified in diamat) that the so-called inanimate matter is not at all the inert moving substance given to us into sensation.
The latest science has discovered: matter most definitely contains SPIRIT.
Below I will tell you how science discovered this phenomenon.
And this is how all matter conceals the spirit within itself.
Matter is not only absolutely certain (and this has been irrefutably proven by modern science!) not eternal and not infinite.
Matter is not only finite in space and time.
The physical Universe not only has finite mass and finite energy, finite negentropy, finite volume and other finite parameters.
But it is also inextricably immanently filled with SPIRIT.
Spirit is the organic, primordial intention of matter, and of all, all, all matter.
As strict modern science has discovered, calculated and proven, all matter is absolutely secondary, derivative.
Matter is not eternal and not infinite.
Matter is a secondary, created entity.
But the latest science has also discovered that matter is also involved in SPIRIT.
All matter contains within itself, contains within itself the very spirit.
That is, she was not only created by an otherworldly superintelligent Creator-Spirit, but she herself is the bearer of lower forms of spirit.
Here are the interesting conclusions of the author of this site, Sergei Bakhmatov, his opinion that matter is not a bare substance, that spirit is a property of matter (I will quote a little from the article of the respected dear Sergei Bakhmatov, “Note to the main question of philosophy”):
“Matter is an objective reality actively reflected on itself.
Spirit is an immanent property of objective reality (an active reflection of objective reality onto itself), which is the reason and law of structuring and development of the material world (microworld, macroworld and megaworld) in part inanimate nature. Since the display is active, it must contain information about the states of matter over the entire history of its existence. The mapping of objective reality onto itself explains all known forces of interaction (gravity, weak, electromagnetic, strong) and the self-development (motion) of matter. Thus, Matter is not a substance, but a manifestation of objective reality (substance) through an active reflection of itself (Spirit).
Consciousness is a product of the active reflection of matter in general and the spirit inextricably linked with it onto its part (highly organized matter or living nature, as you wish), which is a consequence of the development of the material world. Consciousness owes its existence to the emergence in highly organized matter of the ability to store and distinguish between images of the material world, followed by their analysis and synthesis. Highly organized matter, endowed with consciousness, in turn, is actively reflected on the material world around it, changing it. This active reflection and the corresponding changes in the material world receive a new quality due to the presence of consciousness in highly organized matter. Thus, in addition to spirit, the consciousness of highly organized matter is also connected to the development of matter.
The question of the primacy of spirit or matter is illegitimate, since these are two aspects of one existence. The way of existence of objective reality is in its active reflection on itself. Here you can answer the famous question of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Why is there something and not nothing?” Objective reality would be “nothing” without an active reflection on itself, and with it it becomes “something”. This reveals the illusory nature of the distinction between science and religion. For representatives of the former, the active reflection of objective reality onto itself is identified with the impersonal forces of interaction, and for representatives of the latter - with God, that is, the creator and manager of all things. True, in the first case there are signs of a worldview that can lead to pride, since science deals with what is known by humanity (at least so it is believed), and religion also deals with what may yet to be known.
Consciousness is derived from matter and spirit and has freedom (unlike the spirit, in which everything is determined) and for this reason - subjectivity, which can be explained by the fact that the bearer of consciousness (individual) cannot reflect matter and spirit in its entirety, which is required for true knowledge, but displays only part of it. This subjectivity is overcome in time thanks to the collective mind of humanity, based on the experience of existence, and directs the process of knowledge of spirit and matter into infinity. Not only because the process of full knowledge of complex truth is possible only to the limit, but also because the constantly changing material world poses new challenges. Highly organized matter, represented by humanity, is actively reflected on itself both in the literal sense (genetics) and on its consciousness. The reflection on consciousness creates a spiritual product (ethics), which is a reflection of part of the universal Spirit (the law of the universe and its mover) in relation to humanity and its natural environment. Ethics is the science of distinguishing between good and evil. Good is the relationship between people, as well as the attitude of people to nature, which contribute to the self-affirmation of humanity through full and harmonious development in all aspects of human existence, and evil, on the contrary, contributes to self-denial and self-destruction. Self-preservation and development are the universal law of existence of intelligent beings, and deviation from it is an aberration in the reflection of the universal Spirit, which leads to complete self-destruction. The concepts of Spirit and universal Spirit are qualitatively different: the first concept is related to the universal law and the reason for the development of the material world in terms of inanimate nature, the second is related to the material world in general, including highly organized matter endowed with Consciousness by nature.
Consciousness is derived from the universal Spirit and Matter in the sense that its very existence and development is a consequence of the active reflection of the latter two on the former. The process of learning (displaying) them is endless, but it is getting closer to the truth.
With the appearance in the developing material world of highly organized matter endowed with Consciousness, the Spirit receives a new quality: a conscious (subjective) component is added to external necessity as the cause and law of the flow of material processes. Depending on how it fits into the harmony of the universal Spirit, the very fate of highly organized matter, endowed with Consciousness by nature, will be determined.
Matter, the universal Spirit and Consciousness determine the further course of development of all things. The first two, actively reflected on the third, lead to its development, and as a consequence - to a corresponding change in the material world.
Applied to human society and its being can be said that social being is reflected on public consciousness and thus determines it, but it is the reflection of the universal Spirit on the latter that sets both in motion. This reflection is much broader than what can be described within the framework of the development of productive forces and production relations, since it represents the ethics of the existence of humanity as a whole. It follows that a free, just and prosperous society cannot be built through immoral means. Speeding up the pace historical development society occurs due to the fact that the more adequate this reflection is, the more opportunities appear for humanity to reflect the universal Spirit on social consciousness.”
Great scientist Newton, who discovered the laws of motion of celestial bodies, as if exposing the greatest secret of the universe, was a believer and studied theology. When he pronounced the name of God, he stood up reverently every time and took off his hat.
The great Pascal, a genius of mathematics, one of the creators of new physics, was not just a believer, but also one of the greatest religious thinkers in Europe. Pascal said: “All the contradictions that most seem to want to remove me from the position of religion have most of all led to it.”
The great founder of all modern bacteriology, the thinker who penetrated deeper than others into the mystery of organic life, Pasteur says: “The more I study nature, the more I stop in reverent amazement at the works of the Creator.”
Even Darwin, whose teachings were later used by semi-scientists to refute the belief in God, was a very religious man all his life and for many years was a churchwarden in his parish. He never thought that his teaching could contradict faith in God. After Darwin outlined his doctrine of the evolutionary development of the animal world, he was asked where is the beginning of the chain of development of the animal world, where is its first link? Darwin replied: “It is chained to the Throne of the Most High.”
The great geologist Lyell writes: “In every investigation we discover the clearest evidence of the foresight, power and wisdom of the creative mind of God.” The learned historian Müller declares: “It was only with the knowledge of the Lord and through a thorough study of the New Testament that I began to understand the meaning of history.”
The greatest scientist of our century, Max Planck, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918, says: “Religion and science are not at all mutually exclusive, as was previously believed, which is what many of our contemporaries fear; on the contrary, they are consistent and complement each other.”
But among scientists there are also so-called materialists.
But even they admitted that modern science has irrefutably proven:
MATTER IS SECONDARY. MATTER HAS HAPPENED!!!
Now think, dear readers, whether the so intelligently structured material Universe of trillions of galaxies (each large of which has hundreds of billions of stars) could also arise by pure quantum chance as a virtual particle, and not just arise virtually, but materialize for billions of years and give birth to life and mind?
I personally believe that without an intelligent spiritual root cause, without the Creator, without the Demiurge, matter on such a megascale and with such an initial supply of negentropy could not have arisen in any way.
This means that SOMEONE created her from a vacuum and gave her the laws of nature, and in a surprising way, precisely the same laws that allowed matter to give birth to Man.
What modern science doesn't know
Life without mystery is insipid and boring. The presence of mystery is a challenge for us, and the desire to penetrate into it is the strongest stimulus for our actions. Imagine that we know EVERYTHING - how uninteresting it is! The feeling of disappointment from being doomed to an inevitable future, even a very desirable one, was perfectly described by A. and B. Strugatsky in their fairy tale for scientists “Monday Begins on Saturday.” Knowing in advance everything that is going to happen is reminiscent of reading an interesting book from the end, the director of the Research Institute of Witchcraft and Wizardry (he himself lives “from the future to the past”) explains to the main character, wanting to protect his colleague from the heavy burden of inevitability. What makes a mystery so interesting is that it can be revealed. We are lucky: we live in a huge world that we will never fully understand...
The world is not simple, not simple at all
School years. The first lessons of physics, chemistry, biology... If we are lucky with the teachers, then at this time we feel like real magicians, because in the chaos of various phenomena we suddenly begin to see the order given by the laws of nature. And now, with the maximalism characteristic of this age, we believe that all the secrets in the world can be revealed with the help of science...
Time passes. Behind is school and college. The mysteries that we have not revealed now have a different scale: we are no longer so interested in the internal structure of the cockchafer or the laws of motion of a block along an inclined plane. We hear about scientific discoveries in the field of micro- and macrocosm, about new concepts of space and time, about scientific disputes over the origin of life and the laws of evolution. Attempts to understand the intricacies of the scientific view of these problems do not always lead to success: each field of science has developed its own language, not inferior to the language of alchemical treatises, which the uninitiated cannot understand.
But the mystery calls, and you really want to “jump” from ignorance to “knowledge”, to understand, explain, put everything in order - like in the first natural history lessons at school. It would be wonderful to formulate the basic immutable truths, obvious to everyone, and from them, through logical reasoning, determine which statements are correct and which are not! This is how Euclid’s geometry was constructed, and until recently it was precisely in it that the ideal of scientific knowledge was seen.
Unfortunately, and perhaps fortunately, the development of science today leads us to the conclusion that it is impossible to build knowledge about the world in this way. Perhaps this is one of the main achievements of our time - the realization that the world is not at all simple.
What is simplicity? In everyday life, it is often understood as evidence based on our life experience, on the spatial and temporal scales that are familiar to us (mesoscales). However, this evidence contradicts the observed phenomena when trying to explain processes occurring on the scale of space or the microcosm. In fact, can we take it for granted that the speed of light is always constant and does not depend on whether I am approaching or moving away from the source? Our “ordinary” experience, gleaned, for example, from traveling along a river, says that water rushes towards us with greater speed when we go against the flow, and at less speed if we go with the flow. The speed is luminous flux is always the same, whether we move towards it or move away from its source. Here is another example: from experiments with alternating current it is known that the cyclic movement of charges generates electromagnetic radiation. But then, in the microcosm (based on the well-known model of the atom), an electron rotating around the nucleus must also continuously radiate, which means that, losing energy, it will eventually fall onto the nucleus. However, this does not happen.
Many fundamental principles of the modern scientific picture of the world are no longer so obvious, and some people still refuse to believe in the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics and are looking for other explanations.
But the situation with logical reasoning is no less dramatic. In the middle of the 20th century, the Austrian mathematician K. Gödel proved the famous incompleteness theorem. Its meaning is as follows. If we formulate obvious truths that are not subject to doubt and, reasoning according to the laws of logic, try to build an entire system of knowledge from them (as is done, for example, in Euclid’s geometry), then there will definitely be a statement that cannot be refuted (by finding a contradiction) , nor confirm (that is, derive from known truths through formal logical reasoning). Therefore, all knowledge about the world cannot be constructed like geometry, establishing the truth of certain facts either from experience or by formal logical reasoning.
Another ideal of classical physics that has collapsed is the idea of the immutability of the laws of nature. Again, stereotypically, this is understood as the need to repeat the same outcome of an experiment under unchanged conditions: a stone thrown upward always falls to the ground, a magnet always attracts iron filings, etc. But in the microcosm, repeated observations of a system under identical conditions lead to different results! For example, if you “shoot” an electron at a screen with two symmetrical holes, you can with equal probability detect its trace behind both the first and second holes. It is fundamentally impossible to indicate exactly where it will end up as a result of the experiment: the law of nature will determine only the probability of one or another outcome.
To all this it is worth adding that by the beginning of the 20th century, the stage of development of science when “ideal models in ideal conditions” were studied was practically completed. Indeed, Newtonian mechanics describes the motion of material points in inertial frames of reference - but neither material points, nor inertial systems in their pure form are found in nature. Classical thermodynamics, using the concept of closed systems, also idealizes and simplifies reality. The time has come to study the world in all the richness of its interconnections. If the description of the world using the methods of classical science resembled a site plan, now they strive to make the description look like a photograph. The more features and connections we want to take into account, the more complex the model of the system under study turns out to be. Methods for describing complex systems are still in their infancy, but without them the further development of science is difficult to imagine.
Has science really confused itself so much that there is now no place for the simple, the obvious, the logical, the predictable?! Of course this is not true! The thing is that today's ideas about the simple, logical, predictable have changed greatly compared to the 19th century. Instead of the classic ideal of scientific knowledge that has become a thing of the past, a new one is being formed, and in this process there are both its conservatives and its radicals. The latter include two neuroscientists from Chile, authors of the theory of autopoiesis (“self-construction”) U. Maturana and F. Varela. In their book “The Tree of Knowledge” they formulate new criteria for the scientific explanation of phenomena. At the same time, the authors propose to replace indisputable postulates with acceptable hypotheses, logical conclusion - with a method of reasoning acceptable to the majority, and instead of complete predictability, they propose to talk only about the observation of phenomena that are consistent with the hypothesis. One can, of course, criticize this approach, since it does not even hint at how such a “scientific explanation” relates to the truth. But the question of the truth of our knowledge is, rather, not a question of science, but of a worldview. But this is our next section.
Two realities and a picture of the world
A characteristic feature of 20th-century science is the emergence, along with the idea of reality as a truly existing nature, of the concept of “physical reality.” If the natural philosophers of the Enlightenment believed that the laws they discovered directly described the world, then with the development of scientific knowledge such concepts as charge, electric current, electromagnetic wave, electron, etc. appeared, which are a designation of the properties of the world that arise only in physical theory. A natural question arises: what is charge, or mass, or field strength? What do these theories describe – the real world or just our idea of it, distorted by sensory perception? To relieve the severity of this issue, the concept of physical reality was proposed, which is what physics studies. It is understood as the totality of all theories, views, provisions built on the basis of observations, and includes the entire hierarchy - from the most general ideas about space, time and matter to particular laws various areas physics and applied issues related to their use in the creation of household appliances, electronics, machines and mechanisms. Knowledge of physical reality allows one to predict the results of observations under given conditions. And how these predictions agree with the observations made is the main value of scientific knowledge.
However, the question of the connection between “reality in general” and physical reality is not resolved by physics, it relates to philosophy. And it is hardly possible to give a definite answer to it. On the one hand, it seems absolutely true that reality does not depend on any theory that describes it, on the other hand, a person who perceives reality interacts with it in one way or another, and any impact leads to change: nature shapes a person’s consciousness, and his consciousness transforms the world. Therefore, the statement that the process of cognition changes the world and nature cannot be considered meaningless.
What happens: even if we perfectly study all the provisions of science, the question remains about how they relate to reality? After all, physics provides knowledge only about physical reality, biology - about biological reality, etc. Each field of science provides only partial knowledge about the facet of the world that it deals with. But in addition to physical phenomena in the world where we live, there are emotions, feelings, thoughts, and there is also a component associated with deep internal individual experience. In philosophy, these types of reality are called the sensory world, supersensible (metaphysical, not perceived by the senses) and transcendental (inaccessible to theoretical knowledge). The picture of the world arises not only from scientific knowledge - there is also knowledge that has been accumulated in the experience of generations, passed on to us by our parents, enshrined in culture, in the moral principles of religions, in fairy tales and myths. When constructing a unified picture, arbitrariness is inevitable in filling those gaps in knowledge for which there is no unambiguous answer based on a strictly verified scientific approach.
It would be a mistake to think that scientists do not recognize the existence of a “non-scientific way of knowledge.” Science is good not only because it can provide knowledge polished by experience, but also because it is well aware of the limits of applicability of its laws. Thus, quantum physics, for example, clearly indicates that at distances shorter than the Planck length (about 10–33 cm) and at intervals shorter than the Planck time (about 10–44 s), its laws are not applicable due to too large random changes (the so-called quantum fluctuations) of space. These scales are extremely small, but still finite. In the same way, there are limits to the applicability of other sciences.
Other, non-scientific knowledge, in particular religious ideas, can complement the picture of the world and make it holistic. This is stated, for example, by Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Yu. S. Vladimirov, who for many years has headed the seminar “Physics and Spiritual Culture” at the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov. According to his ideas, science is the creator of the known, but there is also the unknown. The role of religion is to complement the cognized into a holistic one. And a holistic picture of the world allows us to live and act in our complex world, where a lot of problems arise, for the solution of which scientific knowledge is sometimes not enough.
Speaking about scientific and non-scientific knowledge, one cannot fail to mention one more phenomenon. IN Lately Many theories have appeared that are usually classified as “parascientific”. Some of them (theories of torsion fields, wave genome, etc.) were created by professionals, but for one reason or another are not accepted by most scientists. Some are more like mystical revelations than scientific theories: the latter, as a rule, have names like “The General Theory of Everything” and claim to be a complete and error-free description of the world. How should we treat them?
It would be reckless to assert that everything that exists in the world is somehow described by already existing scientific theories. Magnetism was once considered mystical - until Faraday conducted his experiments and Maxwell wrote the equations. There was a time when heat was associated with a special substance called caloric, until the molecular kinetic theory was proposed. Science develops, hypotheses and theories arise along its way, some survive, others transform, and some die. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, there are no other ways of verified scientific knowledge other than the difficult work of linking experiment and theory. A flight of thought, imagination, reasoning by analogy is a necessary stage of a scientist’s work, necessary for putting forward hypotheses. But then it is necessary to prove their efficiency not with words, but with practice, only then will they turn into sound scientific theories.
Science is often accused of indecisiveness, painstaking research, and caution in judgment: “When scientists reach the pinnacle of knowledge, they will see a mystic there.” However, there are quite a lot of “mystics” sitting at the “peaks” now, and without research, without real experience, how can you choose the true one among them and understand his teaching? Science provides a concrete path to the top, and the fact that someone climbed it by some other road does not make the path of science less valuable.
What does science not know?
Where is now the border between the known and the unknown, the line where “scientifically based” ends and “adding to the whole” begins? Reasoning on this topic only from the standpoint of science is impossible, since science has not yet developed a clear attitude towards it. And therefore, there are so many scientists, so many opinions. Here we will express only a small part of them. One of the mysteries that has always worried inquiring minds is the mystery of birth. In particular, the secret of the birth of the world.
Until the beginning of the 20th century, it was believed that this question did not relate to natural science. Among scientists there was an opinion about the immutability of the Universe, which was based on the ideas of ancient natural philosophers, who believed that the world existed forever, or on biblical legends about the creation of the world as we see it now. This opinion was so persistent that the first results of the Pulkovo astronomer A. Friedman, who solved Einstein’s equations and discovered the theoretical possibility of compression or expansion of the Universe, were for some time considered as an interesting mathematical curiosity that had no physical meaning. However, the recession of galaxies, experimentally discovered by E. Hubble in the 20s of the 20th century, finally convinced scientists that we live in an expanding Universe. This means that once upon a time the Universe was not so large and about 13 billion years ago had such a small size that the laws of the microworld, that is, quantum laws, were required to describe it. And one of the provisions of quantum physics says that the system does not have certain physical characteristics until it undergoes a process of measurement, or, in other words, interaction with something external to the quantum object. The question arises: what did our Universe interact with “before the beginning of time”? A simple extrapolation of the laws of the microworld allows us to talk about forces “external” to it, whose name in all religious systems is God. Leaving aside the legitimacy of such an approach (naturally, there can be no talk of any scientific validity), let us draw attention to the need to involve “non-scientific” reasoning to create a holistic picture of the world.
The mystery of birth and death is one of the most alluring. Many hypotheses explaining the beginning of life on our planet have parallels with mythological stories, which means that it is too early to rely only on science. The most famous of these hypotheses - the emergence of the first organic substances at the border of the primordial broth with the atmosphere - is reminiscent of the myth of Aphrodite and the “birth of life in the foam of the sea.” Geologists say that life could have originated in the area of underwater volcanoes. Birth from the four elements: Earth, Water, Fire and Air (in this case, gases released during the eruption process) is a purely alchemical plot. The origin of life in clays (there is such a hypothesis) is already the Bible or Sumerian-Akkadian mythology. There are hypotheses about the cosmic origin of life - why not myths about the Creator breathing the soul into earthly matter?
How a living creature was born for the first time is a mystery that is billions of years away. But the mystery of birth occurs constantly - the mystery of the emergence of a living organism from a single seed cell has not yet been resolved, despite the discovery of the structure of DNA, decoding genetic code and advances in the study of the mechanisms of heredity. One of the questions concerns the development of the embryo: according to modern concepts, the embryonic cell is divided into two completely identical cells, no different from one another, each of them is again divided into two identical ones. But at some point, differentiation of functions begins: some cells turn into nerve tissue, others - into the connective, others - into the muscle, etc. Who commands the choice of the further path if the starting cells are the same? This process is so incomprehensible that to explain it, many hypotheses that are unusual for us are used, in particular, about the existence of special “morphogenetic fields” external to the cell, providing an “invisible frame” of the future organism.
The emergence of the mind is the next important stage in the development of the Universe and is equally difficult to explain by modern science. The very understanding of what we call intelligence changes as knowledge develops. Descartes believed that thought and matter are two realities that exist independently and are united only in God and man. The modern approach, born in the already mentioned theory of autopoiesis, is interesting. Its essence is that the development of the world is an expansion of interconnections. It all starts with physical connections between the elements of the world: elementary particles combine into atoms, forming chemical elements, atoms bond, forming chemical substances, etc. Today, thanks to the emergence of human consciousness, connections are established at the conceptual level - we combine various phenomena, finding similarities between them, we propose laws, principles that order the observable world. For example, Coulomb’s law establishes connections between charges and the force of their interaction, and “charge” and “force” here are not only characteristics of physical reality, but also concepts that reflect the properties of the world in our minds. The higher the quality of connections, the higher the level of reason, and reason, thus, acts as an integral property of the world. The development of the world appears in this concept as the development of the mind, expressed in the complication of relationships.
But what is unclear is: how did this property of matter arise - to think in abstract concepts? Natural science associates this with the development of the brain, but the level of understanding of its structure is evidenced by the following statement by Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, scientific director of the Institute of the Human Brain N.P. Bekhtereva: “I have devoted my entire life to the study of the most perfect organ - the human brain. And I came to the conclusion that the occurrence of such a miracle is impossible without the Creator.”
What does modern science not know? A lot. But this ignorance has a “plus” sign: it gives impetus to new searches and leads to new discoveries. Yes, scientific knowledge is limited, but it is obtained in a way confirmed by practice, and is quite clearly understood by specialists in this field. “Unscientific” knowledge is limitless, everyone can interpret it individually, based on their own internal experience, and in practice it is not recognized by everyone. But one should not contrast scientific knowledge with non-scientific knowledge; only dialogue can be productive. Each of us is free to decide for ourselves what and to what extent we should trust. It is important that these decisions do not remain an abstract theory, but rather determine our actions in sometimes difficult life situations and thereby bring us closer to the truth. Otherwise, we will all be like travelers, wandering without a specific goal.
Alexey Chulichkov, Doctor of Physics. – mat. Sciences, Moscow State University
Even in ancient times, people puzzled over the question of why and how language could arise. Scientists of Ancient Greece put forward two opposing theories. According to the first of them, language arose on its own, without conscious human intervention, due to the action of the laws of nature. According to the second theory, language appeared as a result of an agreement between people: let’s call this object like this, and let’s call that object like that.
It is quite clear that the theory of reasonable contract is incorrect. After all, it assumes that people already had consciousness by the time they developed language.
And modern science has clearly established that human consciousness is impossible without language. But in this case, what reasons led to the emergence of language? What did primitive language look like?
Science cannot yet answer these questions with complete confidence. But thanks to the joint work of scientists of different specialties - philosophers and psychologists, anthropologists and ethnographers, archaeologists and linguists - in recent years it has become possible, based on objective scientific facts, to put forward some assumptions regarding the ancient language.
It is known that work created man and that articulate speech arose due to labor activity. In the process of labor, as F. Engels wrote, primitive people developed “the need to say something to each other.”
There is not a single species of animal that does not have its own system of signals used for communication.
For example, in a herd of hamadryas baboons, more than a dozen different sounds are used, each of which causes a completely specific reaction in the hamadryas.
But, unlike people who consciously perceive speech, understanding what they are told, the hamadryas cannot understand anything. This or that behavior in response to a heard signal arises in them thanks to the simplest conditioned reflex.
Say, if a hamadryas hears another hamadryas shouting “Ak! Ak!”, then he will take flight, because in his psyche this sound is associated with the idea of danger. And vice versa, any fear, any feeling of danger causes the hamadryas to involuntarily cry “Ack!” IN In this respect, the sound signals of hamadryas resemble the interjections of human language: you and I cry out “Oh!” regardless of whether we burned our finger, pricked it or pinched it.
Language is also needed so that a person can use it to express his feelings.
These sound signals probably served as the basis for the formation of human language. At first, when the thinking of primitive people was still similar to the reflex behavior of an animal, when a person was not aware of individual objects, their properties, or his actions, these signals probably served only as a regulator of behavior. Where were these signals most needed? Of course, first of all in work, in hunting.
For example, in order to hunt and kill a large animal - a mammoth or a rhinoceros, it is absolutely necessary that the actions of all participants in the hunt be coordinated, so that during the hunt one participant can tell the other what he should do.
Later, when the economy of primitive man and his relationship with other people became more complex, especially when such advanced tools appeared that a person was able to carry out some complex actions alone, and the division of labor appeared, the need arose to designate individual objects, phenomena, actions , condition, quality.
The system of signs regulating street traffic is also a kind of “language”.
This means that the first theory is closer to the truth. Language arose due to the action of natural laws of nature. Only with the advent of man these patterns were refracted in his development in a new way and new ones appeared that did not exist before social patterns that eventually began to determine the development of the human race.
If the hamadryas hears the cry “Ak! Ak!”, he will run away, since with this cry he has an idea of danger.
But why do people speak different languages? Was there ever a language common to all humanity?
Based on our knowledge of modern languages, we cannot reconstruct such a common language. The solution to this question depends on anthropologists. If it is proven that modern man first appeared in one place, then such a common language must have existed. But no matter how this question is decided, it is clear that in the beginning there were fewer languages than now.
Linguists have reconstructed, for example, the so-called common Indo-European language, from which all modern languages foreign Europe (except Finnish, Hungarian and Basque) and most of the languages of the European part of the USSR, and in Asia - Persian, Afghan, Tajik, etc. Why did this happen?
How could it happen that people first spoke one language, and then began to speak different ones? This is best illustrated with the following example. In the 17th century Settlers who spoke Dutch, which was no different from the language of other inhabitants of Holland, sailed to South Africa. Villages were founded, then cities. Various institutions arose, little by little their own culture was created, connected with the Dutch only historically. The settlers even began to call themselves not Dutch, but differently - Boers or Afrikaners.
What happened to their language? Due to the fact that there was virtually no connection with Holland, the Dutch language in South Africa began to change and deviate more and more from the “real” Dutch language. New words appeared, borrowed by the Boers themselves from the languages of the original inhabitants of Africa. The pronunciation of some sounds and grammar have also changed. As a result, there was essentially new language- Boer, or "Afrikaans".
Why didn't all these changes take place in the Dutch language in Holland? Because all the inhabitants of Holland who spoke the Dutch language were connected (like the Boers in South Africa) by political, economic and cultural unity. The government of Holland issued a decree, it spread to its most distant corners, and the burgomaster of some provincial town, writing official documents for his small community, imitated the language of the government decree. And of course, the same books were read by educated people throughout Holland.
The Boers found themselves on another continent, and previously imperceptible deviations were given the opportunity to develop freely. Moreover, from deviations and “irregularities” they became the norm of the new, Boer language.
It also happens the other way around: if tribes or peoples that previously lived separately from each other merge into a single whole, their languages begin to mix. Long-forgotten peoples once lived on the borders of the Russian state - the Em, the Chud, the Torques, and the White Klobuks. They merged with the Russian people, and their languages merged with the Russian language.
But such complete fusion is rare. Most often, when peoples mix, their languages change only partially: some sounds begin to be pronounced differently; some grammatical forms simplified; Instead of some words, others come into use. Before the Norman invasion led by William the Conqueror, Anglo-Saxon was spoken in England. The Normans spoke French, and as a result of the gradual mixing of Anglo-Saxons and Normans, modern English was obtained, which was not similar to either Anglo-Saxon or French.
This was roughly the case with the common Indo-European language. At some point in their history, Indo-European tribes began to roam the Eurasian mainland. Some of them reached India and encountered tribes there speaking the so-called Dravidian languages (they are still spoken in Southern Hindustan).
In subsequent centuries, features characteristic of Dravidian languages began to appear in their speech. And other Indo-European tribes headed to the territory of modern France: some unknown peoples lived there with very unique languages. We can judge their originality by the fact that the Celtic languages formed as a result of mixing with them (for example, Irish) are completely different from other Indo-European languages, for example, Russian, Greek, Lithuanian.
Children's encyclopedia. Volume 7. Man. Page 315.
studying social experience using textbooks, where the necessary information is presented in linguistic form.
Finally, thirdly, language is needed so that a person can use it to express his feelings and emotions. For example, in poetry a person conveys his most intimate thoughts, feelings, and experiences. And all this thanks to language.
Without language there would be no man himself, because everything that is human in him is connected with language, is expressed in language and is fixed in language.
ON THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE
Even in ancient times, people puzzled over the question of why and how language could arise. Scientists ancient Greece put forward two opposing theories. According to the first of them, language arose on its own, without conscious human intervention, due to the action of the laws of nature. According to the second theory, language appeared as a result of an agreement between people: let’s call this object like this, and let’s call that object like that. It is quite clear that the theory of reasonable contract is incorrect. After all, it assumes that people already had consciousness by the time they developed language. And modern science has clearly established that human consciousness is impossible without language.
But in this case, what reasons led to the emergence of language? What did primitive language look like?
Science cannot yet answer these questions with complete confidence. But thanks to the joint work of scientists of different specialties - philosophers and psychologists, anthropologists and ethnographers, archaeologists and linguists - in recent years it has become possible, based on objective scientific facts, to put forward some assumptions regarding the ancient language.
It is known that labor created man and that articulate speech arose thanks to labor activity. In the process of labor, as F. Engels wrote, primitive people developed “the need to say something to each other.” There is not a single species of animal that does not have its own system of signals used for communication. For example, in a herd of hamadryas baboons, more than a dozen different sounds are used, each of which causes a completely specific reaction in the hamadryas.
But, unlike people who consciously perceive speech and understand what is said to them, hamadryas cannot understand anything. This or that behavior in response to a heard signal arises in them thanks to the simplest conditioned reflex.
Let’s say, if a hamadryas hears another hamadryas shouting “ak!”, “ak!”, then he will run away, because in his psyche this sound is associated with the idea of danger. And vice versa, any fear, any feeling of danger causes the hamadryas to involuntarily cry “ack!” In this respect, the sound signals of hamadryas are reminiscent of the interjections of human language: you and I cry out “oh!” in the same way. regardless of whether we burned our finger, pricked it or pinched it.
These sound signals probably served as the basis for the formation of human language. At first, when the thinking of primitive people was still similar to the reflex behavior of an animal, when a person was not aware of individual objects, their properties, or his actions, these signals probably served only as a regulator of behavior. And where were these signals most needed?
Of course, first of all in work, in hunting. For example, in order to hunt and kill a large animal - a mammoth or a rhinoceros, it is absolutely necessary that the actions of all participants in the hunt be coordinated, so that during the hunt one participant can tell the other what he should do.
Later, when the economy of primitive man and his relationship with other people became more complex, especially when such advanced tools appeared that a person was able to carry out some actions alone and the division of labor appeared, it became necessary to designate individual objects, phenomena, actions, states , quality.
This means that the first theory is closer to the truth. Language arose due to the action of natural laws of nature. Only with the advent of man these patterns were refracted in his development in a new way and new social patterns that did not exist before appeared, which ultimately began to determine the development of the human race.
But why do people speak different languages? Was there ever a language common to all humanity?
Based on our knowledge of modern languages, we cannot reconstruct such a common language. The solution to this question depends on anthropologists. If it is proven that modern man first appeared in one place, then such a common language must have existed. But no matter how this issue is resolved, it is clear that in the beginning there were fewer languages than now.
Linguists have restored, for example, the so-called common Indo-European language, from which all modern languages of foreign Europe (except Finnish, Hungarian and Basque) and most of the languages of the European part of the USSR, and in Asia - Persian, Afghan, Hindi, Armenian, Ossetian, Tajik and etc. Why did this happen? How could it happen that people first spoke one language, and then began to speak different ones?
The best way to show this is with this example. In the 17th century Settlers who spoke Dutch, which was no different from the language of other inhabitants of Holland, sailed to South Africa. Villages were founded, then cities. Various institutions arose, and little by little their own culture was created, connected with the Dutch only historically.
The settlers even began to call themselves not Dutch, but Boers or Afrikaners.
What happened to their language? Due to the fact that there was virtually no connection with Holland, the Dutch language in South Africa began to change and deviate more and more from the “real” Dutch language. New words appeared, borrowed from native African languages or created by the Boers themselves. The pronunciation of some sounds and grammar have also changed. The result was essentially a new language - Boer, or "Afrikaans".
Why didn't all these changes take place in the Dutch language in Holland? Because all the inhabitants of Holland who spoke the Dutch language were connected (like the Boers in South Africa) by political, economic and cultural unity. The government of Holland issued a decree, it spread to its most distant corners, and the burgomaster of some provincial town, writing official documents for his small community, imitated the language of the government decree. The same books were read by educated people throughout Holland.
The Boers found themselves on another continent, and previously imperceptible deviations were given the opportunity to develop freely. Moreover, from deviations, from “irregularities,” they became the norm of the new, Boer language.
It also happens the other way around: if tribes or peoples that previously lived separately from each other merge into a single whole, their languages begin to mix. Long-forgotten peoples once lived on the borders of the Russian state - the Em, the Chud, the Torques, and the White Klobuks. They merged with the Russian people, and their languages merged with the Russian language.
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The view of modern science: Does the soul exist, and is Consciousness immortal?
Every person who has encountered the death of a loved one asks the question: is there life after death? Nowadays, this issue is of particular relevance. If several centuries ago the answer to this question was obvious to everyone, now, after a period of atheism, its solution is more difficult. We cannot simply believe hundreds of generations of our ancestors, who, through personal experience, century after century, were convinced that man has an immortal soul. We want to have facts. Moreover, the facts are scientific. From school they tried to convince us that there is no God, there is no immortal soul. At the same time, we were told that science says so. And we believed... Let us note that we BELIEVE that there is no immortal soul, we BELIEVE that science allegedly proved this, we BELIEVE that there is no God. None of us has even tried to figure out what impartial science says about the soul. We simply trusted certain authorities, without particularly going into the details of their worldview, objectivity, and their interpretation of scientific facts.
What is Consciousness?
Scientific research carried out in different countries the world prove that nerve cells, like all other cells of the human body, are capable of regeneration (restoration). Here is what the most serious biological international journal Nature writes: “Employees of the Californian Institute for Biological Research named after. Salk discovered that in the brains of adult mammals, fully functional young cells are born that function on a par with existing neurons. Professor Frederick Gage and his colleagues also concluded that brain tissue renews itself most rapidly in physically active animals.”
For some reason, in our time it is so difficult to prove what was obvious and understandable to the ancients. The Roman Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus, who lived in the 3rd century, wrote: “It is absurd to assume that since none of the parts has life, then life can be created by their totality... moreover, it is completely impossible for life to be produced by a heap of parts, and that the mind was generated by that which is devoid of mind. If anyone objects that this is not so, but that in fact the soul is formed by atoms coming together, that is, bodies indivisible into parts, then he will be refuted by the fact that the atoms themselves only lie one next to the other, not forming a living whole, for unity and joint feeling cannot be obtained from bodies that are insensitive and incapable of unification; but the soul feels itself” (1).
Where did the assumption come from that Consciousness is in the brain? This assumption was put forward in the mid-18th century by the famous electrophysiologist Dubois-Reymond (1818-1896). In his worldview, Dubois-Reymond was one of the brightest representatives of the mechanistic movement. In one of his letters to a friend, he wrote that “exclusively physicochemical laws operate in the body; if not everything can be explained with their help, then it is necessary, using physical and mathematical methods, either to find a way of their action, or to accept that there are new forces of matter, equal in value to physical and chemical forces.”
Professor, Doctor of Medical Sciences Voino-Yasenetsky describes: “I opened a huge abscess (about 50 cubic cm of pus) in a young wounded man, which undoubtedly destroyed the entire left frontal lobe, and I did not observe any mental defects after this operation. I can say the same about another patient who was operated on for a huge cyst of the meninges. Upon wide opening of the skull, I was surprised to see that almost the entire right half of it was empty, and the entire left hemisphere of the brain was compressed, almost to the point of being impossible to distinguish.”(3).
Another argument that is understandable to non-specialists is given by Professor V.F. Voino-Yasenetsky: “In the wars of ants who do not have a brain, intentionality is clearly revealed, and therefore intelligence, no different from human” (4). It's really amazing fact. The ants decide pretty complex tasks for survival, building housing, providing oneself with food, i.e. have a certain intelligence, but have no brain at all. Makes you think, doesn't it?
What is the nature of Consciousness?
With his colleague, the founder of modern neurosurgery Wilder Penfield, who performed over 10,000 brain operations, Eccles wrote the book “The Mystery of Man” (5). In it, the authors directly state that “there is no doubt that a person is controlled by SOMETHING located outside his body.” “I can confirm experimentally,” writes Eccles, “that the workings of consciousness cannot be explained by the functioning of the brain. Consciousness exists independently of it from the outside.”
Wilder Penfield, as a result of many years of studying the activity of the brain, also came to the conclusion that “the energy of the mind is different from the energy of the brain’s neural impulses” (6).
Academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the Russian Federation, director of the Brain Research Institute (RAMS of the Russian Federation), world-renowned neurophysiologist, professor, doctor of medical sciences. Natalya Petrovna Bekhtereva: “I first heard the hypothesis that the human brain only perceives thoughts from somewhere outside Nobel laureate, Professor John Eccles. Of course, at the time it seemed absurd to me. But then research conducted at our St. Petersburg Brain Research Institute confirmed: we cannot explain the mechanics of the creative process. The brain can only generate very simple thoughts like how to turn pages book to read or stir sugar in a glass. And the creative process is the manifestation of a completely new quality. As a believer, I allow the participation of the Almighty in controlling the thought process.”
Back in 1956, the outstanding leading scientist-surgeon, Doctor of Medical Sciences, Professor V.F. Voino-Yasenetsky believed that our brain is not only not connected with Consciousness, but is not even capable of thinking independently, since the mental process is taken outside its boundaries. In his book, Valentin Feliksovich argues that “the brain is not an organ of thought and feelings,” and that “The Spirit acts beyond the brain, determining its activity, and our entire existence, when the brain works as a transmitter, receiving signals and transmitting them to the organs of the body.” (7).
Natalya Bekhtereva, talking about her meeting with the Bulgarian clairvoyant Vanga Dimitrova, speaks quite definitely about this in one of her interviews: “Vanga’s example absolutely convinced me that there is a phenomenon of contact with the dead” (8), and another quote from her books: “I can’t help but believe what I heard and saw myself. A scientist does not have the right to reject facts (if he is a scientist!) just because they do not fit into dogma or worldview” (9).
The first consistent description of afterlife, based on scientific observations, was given by the Swedish scientist and naturalist Emmanuel Swedenborg. Then this problem was seriously studied by the famous psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler Ross, the equally famous psychiatrist Raymond Moody, conscientious academicians Oliver Lodge (10), William Crookes (11), Alfred Wallace, Alexander Butlerov, Professor Friedrich Myers (12), an American doctor -pediatrician Melvin Morse. Among the serious and systematic researchers of the issue of dying, Dr. Michael Sabom, a professor of medicine at Emory University and a staff physician at the Veterans Hospital in Atlanta, should be mentioned; the systematic research of psychiatrist Kenneth Ring, who studied this problem, was also studied by the doctor of medicine and resuscitator Moritz Rawlings. , our contemporary, thanatopsychologist A.A. Nalchadzhyan. The famous Soviet scientist, a leading specialist in the field of thermodynamic processes, academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Belarus Albert Veinik, worked a lot to understand this problem from the point of view of physics. A significant contribution to the study of near-death experiences was made by the world-famous American psychologist of Czech origin, founder of the transpersonal school psychology doctor Stanislav Grof.
Mikhail Khasminsky
2. N.I.Kobozev. Research in the field of thermodynamics of information and thinking processes.
3.4. V.F. Voino-Yasenetsky. "About spirit, soul and body."
9. N.P. Bekhterev. "The magic of the brain and the labyrinths of life."
12. Myers. Human personality and its survival of bodily death
wakeupnow.info
And now, when the tragedy happened, there is a conflict within us:
We feel that the soul of the deceased is eternal, that it is alive, but on the other hand, the old stereotypes instilled in us that there is no soul drag us into the abyss of despair. This struggle within us is very difficult and very exhausting. We want the truth!
So let's look at the question of the existence of the soul through real, non-ideologized, objective science. Let's hear the opinions of real scientists on this issue and personally evaluate the logical calculations. It is not our FAITH in the existence or non-existence of the soul, but only KNOWLEDGE that can extinguish this internal conflict, preserve our strength, give confidence, look at the tragedy from a different, real point of view.
The article will talk about Consciousness. We will analyze the question of Consciousness from the point of view of science: where is Consciousness located in our body and whether it can cease its life.
What is Consciousness?
First, about what Consciousness is in general. People have thought about this question throughout the history of mankind, but still cannot come to a final decision. We know only some of the properties and possibilities of consciousness. Consciousness is awareness of oneself, one’s personality, it is a great analyzer of all our feelings, emotions, desires, plans. Consciousness is what sets us apart, what makes us feel that we are not objects, but individuals. In other words, Consciousness miraculously reveals our fundamental existence. Consciousness is our awareness of our “I”, but at the same time Consciousness is a great mystery. Consciousness has no dimensions, no form, no color, no smell, no taste; it cannot be touched or turned in your hands. Even though we know very little about consciousness, we know with absolute certainty that we have it.
One of the main questions of humanity is the question of the nature of this very Consciousness (soul, “I”, ego). Materialism and idealism have diametrically opposed views on this issue. From the point of view of materialism, human Consciousness is the substrate of the brain, a product of matter, a product of biochemical processes, a special fusion of nerve cells. From the point of view of idealism, Consciousness is the ego, “I”, spirit, soul - an immaterial, invisible, eternally existing, non-dying energy that spiritualizes the body. Acts of consciousness always involve a subject who is actually aware of everything.
If you are interested in purely religious ideas about the soul, then religion will not provide any evidence of the existence of the soul. The doctrine of the soul is a dogma and is not subject to scientific proof.
There are absolutely no explanations, much less evidence, from materialists who believe that they are impartial scientists (although this is far from the case).
But how do most people, who are equally far from religion, from philosophy, and from science too, imagine this Consciousness, soul, “I”? Let's ask ourselves, what is “I”?
Gender, name, profession and other role functions
The first thing that comes to mind for most is: “I am a person”, “I am a woman (man)”, “I am a businessman (turner, baker)”, “I am Tanya (Katya, Alexey)”, “I am a wife ( husband, daughter)”, etc. These are certainly funny answers. Your individual, unique “I” cannot be defined general concepts. There are a huge number of people in the world with the same characteristics, but they are not your “I”. Half of them are women (men), but they are not “I” either, people with the same professions seem to have their own “I”, not yours, the same can be said about wives (husbands), people of different professions, social status, nationalities, religions, etc. No affiliation with any group will explain to you what your individual “I” represents, because Consciousness is always personal. I am not qualities (qualities only belong to our “I”), because the qualities of the same person can change, but his “I” will remain unchanged.
Mental and physiological characteristics
Some say that their “I” is their reflexes, their behavior, their individual ideas and preferences, their psychological characteristics and so on.
In fact, this cannot be the core of the personality, which is called “I.” Why? Because throughout life, behavior, ideas and preferences change, and even more so psychological characteristics. It cannot be said that if these features were different before, then it was not my “I”.
Realizing this, some people make the following argument: “I am my individual body.” This is already more interesting. Let's examine this assumption as well.
Everyone knows from the school anatomy course that the cells of our body are gradually renewed throughout life. Old ones die (apoptosis), and new ones are born. Some cells (the epithelium of the gastrointestinal tract) are completely renewed almost every day, but there are cells that go through their life cycle much longer. On average, every 5 years all the cells of the body are renewed. If we consider the “I” to be a simple collection of human cells, then the result will be absurd. It turns out that if a person lives, for example, 70 years. During this time, at least 10 times a person will change all the cells in his body (i.e. 10 generations). Could this mean that not one person, but 10 different people lived their 70-year life? Isn't that pretty stupid? We conclude that “I” cannot be a body, because the body is not permanent, but “I” is permanent.
This means that the “I” cannot be either the qualities of cells or their totality.
But here the particularly erudite give a counter-argument: “Okay, with bones and muscles it’s clear, this really cannot be the “I”, but there are nerve cells! And they are alone for the rest of their lives. Maybe “I” is the sum of nerve cells?”
Let's think about this question together...
Does consciousness consist of nerve cells?
Materialism is accustomed to decomposing the entire multidimensional world into mechanical components, “testing harmony with algebra” (A.S. Pushkin). The most naive misconception of militant materialism regarding personality is the idea that personality is a set of biological qualities. However, the combination of impersonal objects, be they even atoms or neurons, cannot give rise to a personality and its core - the “I”.
How can this most complex “I”, feeling, capable of experiences, love, be simply the sum of specific cells of the body along with the ongoing biochemical and bioelectric processes? How can these processes shape the “I”???
Provided that nerve cells constituted our “I”, then we would lose part of our “I” every day. With each dead cell, with each neuron, the “I” would become smaller and smaller. With cell restoration, it would increase in size.
Scientific studies conducted in different countries of the world prove that nerve cells, like all other cells of the human body, are capable of regeneration (restoration). Here is what the most serious biological international journal Nature writes: “Employees of the Californian Institute for Biological Research named after. Salk discovered that in the brains of adult mammals, fully functional young cells are born that function on a par with existing neurons. Professor Frederick Gage and his colleagues also concluded that brain tissue renews itself most rapidly in physically active animals." 1
This is confirmed by a publication in another authoritative, peer-reviewed biological journal - Science: “Over the past two years, researchers have found that nerve and brain cells are renewed, like the rest in human body. The body is capable of repairing disorders related to the nervous tract itself, says scientist Helen M. Blon.”
Thus, even with a complete change of all (including nerve) cells of the body, the “I” of a person remains the same, therefore, it does not belong to the constantly changing material body.
For some reason, in our time it is so difficult to prove what was obvious and understandable to the ancients. The Roman Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus, who lived in the 3rd century, wrote: “It is absurd to assume that since none of the parts has life, then life can be created by their totality... moreover, it is completely impossible for life to be produced by a heap of parts, and that the mind was generated by that which is devoid of mind. If anyone objects that this is not so, but that in fact the soul is formed by atoms coming together, that is, bodies indivisible into parts, then he will be refuted by the fact that the atoms themselves only lie one next to the other, not forming a living whole, for unity and joint feeling cannot be obtained from bodies that are insensitive and incapable of unification; but the soul feels itself” 2.
The “I” is the unchanging core of personality, which includes many variables, but is not itself variable.
A skeptic can put forward a last desperate argument: “Maybe “I” is the brain?”
Is Consciousness a product of brain activity? What does science say?
Many people heard the fairy tale that our Consciousness is the activity of the brain back in school. The idea that the brain is essentially a person with his “I” is extremely widespread. Most people think that it is the brain that perceives information from the world around us, processes it and decides how to act in each specific case; they think that it is the brain that makes us alive and gives us personality. And the body is nothing more than a spacesuit that ensures the activity of the central nervous system.
But this tale has nothing to do with science. The brain is currently being studied in depth. Long and well studied chemical composition, parts of the brain, connections of these parts with human functions. The brain organization of perception, attention, memory, and speech has been studied. Functional blocks of the brain have been studied. A huge number of clinics and research centers are studying human brain more than a hundred years, for which expensive, effective equipment has been developed. But, opening any textbooks, monographs, scientific journals on neurophysiology or neuropsychology, you will not find scientific data about the connection of the brain with Consciousness.
For people far from this area of knowledge, this seems surprising. In fact, there is nothing surprising about this. It’s just that no one has ever discovered the connection between the brain and the very center of our personality, our “I”. Of course, material scientists have always wanted this. Thousands of studies and millions of experiments have been conducted, many billions of dollars have been spent on this. The efforts of scientists were not in vain. Thanks to these studies, the parts of the brain themselves were discovered and studied, their connection with physiological processes was established, a lot was done to understand neurophysiological processes and phenomena, but the most important thing was not achieved. It was not possible to find the place in the brain that is our “I”. It was not possible even, despite extremely active work in this direction, to make a serious assumption about how the brain can be connected with our Consciousness.
Where did the assumption come from that Consciousness is in the brain? This assumption was put forward in the mid-18th century by the famous electrophysiologist Dubois-Reymond (1818-1896). In his worldview, Dubois-Reymond was one of the brightest representatives of the mechanistic movement. In one of his letters to a friend, he wrote that “exclusively physicochemical laws operate in the body; if not everything can be explained with their help, then it is necessary, using physical and mathematical methods, either to find a way of their action, or to accept that there are new forces of matter, equal in value to physical and chemical forces” 3.
But another outstanding physiologist, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig (Ludwig, 1816-1895), who lived at the same time with Reymon, who headed the new Physiological Institute in Leipzig in 1869-1895, which became the world's largest center in the field of experimental physiology, did not agree with him. The founder of the scientific school, Ludwig wrote that none of the existing theories nervous activity, including the electrical theory of nerve currents of Dubois-Reymond, cannot say anything about how acts of sensation become possible as a result of the activity of nerves. Note that here we're talking about not even about the most complex acts of consciousness, but about much simpler sensations. If there is no consciousness, then we cannot feel or experience anything.
Another major physiologist of the 19th century, the outstanding English neurophysiologist Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, Nobel Prize laureate, said that if it is not clear how the psyche arises from the activity of the brain, then, naturally, it is equally unclear how it can have any influence on the behavior of a living creature, which is controlled through the nervous system.
As a result, Dubois-Reymond himself came to the following conclusion: “As we are aware, we do not know and will never know. And no matter how much we delve into the jungle of intracerebral neurodynamics, we will not build a bridge to the kingdom of consciousness.” Raymon came to the conclusion, disappointing for determinism, that it is impossible to explain Consciousness by material causes. He admitted “that here the human mind comes across a “world riddle” that it will never be able to solve” 4.
Professor at Moscow University, philosopher A.I. Vvedensky in 1914 formulated the law of “the absence of objective signs of animation.” The meaning of this law is that the role of the psyche in the system of material processes of behavior regulation is absolutely elusive and there is no conceivable bridge between the activity of the brain and the area of mental or spiritual phenomena, including Consciousness.
The leading experts in neurophysiology, Nobel Prize laureates David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel recognized that in order to establish a connection between the brain and Consciousness, it is necessary to understand what reads and decodes the information that comes from the senses. Scientists have recognized that this is impossible to do.
There is interesting and convincing evidence of the absence of a connection between Consciousness and the functioning of the brain, understandable even to people far from science. Here it is:
Let us assume that the “I” (Consciousness) is the result of the work of the brain. As neurophysiologists know for sure, a person can live even with one hemisphere of the brain. At the same time, he will have Consciousness. A person who lives only with the right hemisphere of the brain certainly has an “I” (Consciousness). Accordingly, we can conclude that the “I” is not in the left, absent, hemisphere. A person with only a functioning left hemisphere also has an “I”, therefore the “I” is not located in the right hemisphere, which is absent in this person. Consciousness remains regardless of which hemisphere is removed. This means that a person does not have an area of the brain responsible for Consciousness, neither in the left nor in the right hemisphere of the brain. We have to conclude that the presence of consciousness in humans is not associated with certain areas of the brain.
Professor, Doctor of Medical Sciences Voino-Yasenetsky describes: “I opened a huge abscess (about 50 cubic cm of pus) in a young wounded man, which undoubtedly destroyed the entire left frontal lobe, and I did not observe any mental defects after this operation. I can say the same about another patient who was operated on for a huge cyst of the meninges. Upon wide opening of the skull, I was surprised to see that almost the entire right half of it was empty, and the entire left hemisphere of the brain was compressed, almost to the point of being impossible to distinguish.”6.
In 1940, Dr. Augustin Iturricha made a sensational statement at the Anthropological Society in Sucre (Bolivia). He and Dr. Ortiz spent a long time studying the medical history of a 14-year-old boy, a patient at Dr. Ortiz's clinic. The teenager was there with a diagnosis of a brain tumor. The young man retained Consciousness until his death, complaining only of a headache. When a pathological autopsy was performed after his death, the doctors were amazed: the entire brain mass was completely separated from the internal cavity of the skull. A large abscess has taken over the cerebellum and part of the brain. It remains completely unclear how the sick boy’s thinking was preserved.
The fact that consciousness exists independently of the brain is also confirmed by studies conducted recently by Dutch physiologists under the leadership of Pim van Lommel. The results of a large-scale experiment were published in the most authoritative English biological journal, The Lancet. “Consciousness exists even after the brain has ceased to function. In other words, Consciousness “lives” on its own, absolutely independently. As for the brain, it is not thinking matter at all, but an organ, like any other, performing strictly defined functions. It may very well be that thinking matter, even in principle, does not exist, said the leader of the study, the famous scientist Pim van Lommel” 7.
Another argument that is understandable to non-specialists is given by Professor V.F. Voino-Yasenetsky: “In the wars of ants who do not have a brain, intentionality is clearly revealed, and therefore intelligence, no different from humans.” 8. This is truly an amazing fact. Ants solve quite complex problems of survival, building housing, providing themselves with food, i.e. have a certain intelligence, but have no brain at all. Makes you think, doesn't it?
Neurophysiology does not stand still, but is one of the most dynamically developing sciences. The success of studying the brain is evidenced by the methods and scale of research. Functions and areas of the brain are being studied, and its composition is being clarified in more and more detail. Despite the titanic work on studying the brain, world science today is still far from understanding what creativity, thinking, memory are and what their connection is with the brain itself.
What is the nature of Consciousness?
Having come to the understanding that Consciousness does not exist inside the body, science draws natural conclusions about the immaterial nature of consciousness.
Academician P.K. Anokhin: “None of the “mental” operations that we attribute to the “mind” have so far been able to be directly associated with any part of the brain. If we, in principle, cannot understand how exactly the psyche arises as a result of the activity of the brain, then isn’t it more logical to think that the psyche is not, in its essence, a function of the brain, but represents the manifestation of some other - immaterial spiritual forces? 9
At the end of the 20th century, the creator quantum mechanics, Nobel Prize laureate E. Schrödinger wrote that the nature of the connection of some physical processes with subjective events (to which Consciousness refers) lies “aside from science and beyond human understanding.”
The greatest modern neurophysiologist, Nobel Prize winner in medicine, J. Eccles, developed the idea that based on the analysis of brain activity it is impossible to find out the origin of mental phenomena, and this fact can easily be interpreted in the sense that the psyche is not a function of the brain at all. According to Eccles, neither physiology nor the theory of evolution can shed light on the origin and nature of consciousness, which is absolutely alien to all material processes in the Universe. The spiritual world of man and the world of physical realities, including brain activity, are completely independent independent worlds that only interact and to some extent influence each other. He is echoed by such prominent specialists as Karl Lashley (an American scientist, director of the laboratory of primate biology in Orange Park (Florida), who studied the mechanisms of brain function) and Harvard University doctor Edward Tolman.
With his colleague, the founder of modern neurosurgery, Wilder Penfield, who performed over 10,000 brain operations, Eccles wrote the book “The Mystery of Man.” 10 In it, the authors explicitly state that “there is no doubt that man is controlled by SOMETHING outside of himself.” bodies." “I can confirm experimentally,” writes Eccles, “that the workings of consciousness cannot be explained by the functioning of the brain. Consciousness exists independently of it from the outside.”
Eccles is deeply convinced that consciousness cannot be the subject of scientific research. In his opinion, the emergence of consciousness, like the emergence of life, is the highest religious mystery. In his report, the Nobel laureate relied on the conclusions of the book “Personality and the Brain,” written jointly with the American philosopher and sociologist Karl Popper.
Wilder Penfield, after many years of studying brain activity, also came to the conclusion that “the energy of the mind is different from the energy of the brain’s neural impulses” 11.
Academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the Russian Federation, director of the Brain Research Institute (RAMS of the Russian Federation), world-renowned neurophysiologist, professor, doctor of medical sciences. Natalya Petrovna Bekhtereva: “I first heard the hypothesis that the human brain only perceives thoughts from somewhere outside from the lips of Nobel laureate, Professor John Eccles. Of course, at the time it seemed absurd to me. But then research conducted at our St. Petersburg Brain Research Institute confirmed: we cannot explain the mechanics of the creative process. The brain can generate only the simplest thoughts, such as turning the pages of a book you are reading or stirring sugar in a glass. And the creative process is the manifestation of a completely new quality. As a believer, I allow the participation of the Almighty in controlling the thought process" 12.
Science is gradually coming to the conclusion that the brain is not a source of thought and consciousness, but at most a relay of them.
Professor S. Grof talks about it this way: “imagine that your TV is broken and you call a TV technician, who, after turning various knobs, tunes it up. It doesn’t occur to you that all these stations are sitting in this box” 13.
Back in 1956, the outstanding leading scientist-surgeon, Doctor of Medical Sciences, Professor V.F. Voino-Yasenetsky believed that our brain is not only not connected with Consciousness, but is not even capable of thinking independently, since the mental process is taken outside its boundaries. In his book, Valentin Feliksovich argues that “the brain is not an organ of thought and feelings,” and that “The Spirit acts beyond the brain, determining its activity, and our entire existence, when the brain works as a transmitter, receiving signals and transmitting them to the organs of the body.” 14.
English researchers Peter Fenwick from the London Institute of Psychiatry and Sam Parnia from Southampton Central Clinic came to the same conclusions. They examined patients who had returned to life after cardiac arrest and found that some of them accurately recounted the content of conversations that medical staff had while they were in cardiac arrest. clinical death. Others gave an accurate description of the events that occurred during this time period. Sam Parnia argues that the brain, like any other organ of the human body, is composed of cells and is not capable of thinking. However, it can work as a thought detecting device, i.e. like an antenna, with the help of which it becomes possible to receive a signal from the outside. Scientists have suggested that during clinical death, Consciousness operating independently of the brain uses it as a screen. Like a television receiver, which first receives the waves entering it, and then converts them into sound and image.
If we turn off the radio, this does not mean that the radio station stops broadcasting. That is, after the death of the physical body, Consciousness continues to live.
The fact of the continuation of the life of Consciousness after the death of the body is confirmed by Academician of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Director of the Research Institute of the Human Brain, Professor N.P. Bekhterev in her book “The Magic of the Brain and the Labyrinths of Life.” In addition to discussing purely scientific issues, in this book the author also provides his personal experience encounters with post-mortem phenomena.
Natalya Bekhtereva, talking about her meeting with the Bulgarian clairvoyant Vanga Dimitrova, speaks quite definitely about this in one of her interviews: “Vanga’s example absolutely convinced me that there is a phenomenon of contact with the dead,” and another quote from her book: “ I can’t help but believe what I heard and saw myself. A scientist does not have the right to reject facts (if he is a scientist!) just because they do not fit into dogma or worldview” 12.
The first consistent description of afterlife, based on scientific observations, was given by the Swedish scientist and naturalist Emmanuel Swedenborg. Then this problem was seriously studied by the famous psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler Ross, the equally famous psychiatrist Raymond Moody, conscientious academicians Oliver Lodge15,16, William Crooks17, Alfred Wallace, Alexander Butlerov, Professor Friedrich Myers18, and the American pediatrician Melvin Morse. Among the serious and systematic researchers of the issue of dying, Dr. Michael Sabom, a professor of medicine at Emory University and a staff physician at the Veterans Hospital in Atlanta, should be mentioned; the systematic research of psychiatrist Kenneth Ring, who studied this problem, was also studied by the doctor of medicine and resuscitator Moritz Rawlings. , our contemporary, thanatopsychologist A.A. Nalchadzhyan. The famous Soviet scientist, a leading specialist in the field of thermodynamic processes, and corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Belarus, Albert Veinik, worked a lot to understand this problem from the point of view of physics. A significant contribution to the study of near-death experiences was made by the world famous American psychologist of Czech origin, founder of the transpersonal school of psychology, Dr. Stanislav Grof.
The variety of facts accumulated by science undeniably proves that after physical death, each of those living today inherits a different reality, preserving their Consciousness.
Despite the limitations of our ability to understand this reality using material resources, today there are a number of its characteristics obtained through experiments and observations of scientists studying this problem.
These characteristics were listed by A.V. Mikheev, a researcher at the St. Petersburg State Electrotechnical University in his report at the international symposium “Life after death: from faith to knowledge”, which took place on April 8-9, 2005 in St. Petersburg:
"1. There is a so-called “subtle body”, which is the carrier of self-awareness, memory, emotions and the “inner life” of a person. This body exists... after physical death, being, for the duration of the existence of the physical body, its “parallel component”, ensuring the above processes. The physical body is only an intermediary for their manifestation on the physical (earthly) level.
2. The life of an individual does not end with current earthly death. Survival after death is a natural law for humans.
3. The next reality is divided into a large number of levels that differ in the frequency characteristics of their components.
4. A person’s destination during the posthumous transition is determined by his attunement to a certain level, which is the total result of his thoughts, feelings and actions during life on Earth. Just as the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation emitted by a chemical substance depends on its composition, so too a person's posthumous destination is determined by the "composite characteristic" of his inner life.
5. The concepts of “Heaven and Hell” reflect two polarities, possible post-mortem states.
6. In addition to such polar states, there are a number of intermediate ones. The choice of an adequate state is automatically determined by the mental and emotional “pattern” formed by a person during earthly life. That is why negative emotions, violence, the desire for destruction and fanaticism, no matter how they are justified externally, in this regard are extremely destructive for future fate person. This provides a strong foundation for personal responsibility and ethical principles."19
All the above arguments are simply amazingly consistent with the religious knowledge of all traditional religions. This is a reason to cast aside doubts and make a decision. Is not it?
1. Cell polarity: From embryo to axon // Nature Magazine. 27.08. 2003. Vol. 421, N 6926. P 905-906 Melissa M. Rolls and Chris Q. Doe
2. Plotinus. Enneads. Treatises 1-11., “Greco-Latin Cabinet” by Yu. A. Shichalin, Moscow, 2007.
3. Du Bois-Reymond E. Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur allgemeinen Muskel- und Nervenphysik. Bd. 1.
Leipzig: Veit & Co., 1875. P. 102
4. Du Bois-Reymond, E. Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur allgemeinen Muskel- und Nervenphysik. Bd. 1. P. 87
5. Kobozev N.I. Research in the field of thermodynamics of information and thinking processes. M.: Moscow State University Publishing House, 1971. P. 85.
6, Voino-Yasenetsky V. F. Spirit, soul and body. CJSC "Brovary Printing House", 2002. P. 43.
7. Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands; Dr Pirn van Lommel MD, Ruud van Wees PhD, Vincent Meyers PhD, Ingrid Elfferich PhD // The Lancet. Dec 2001 2001. Vol 358. No 9298 P. 2039-2045.
8. Voino-Yasenetsky V. F. Spirit, soul and body. CJSC "Brovary Printing House", 2002 P. 36.
9/ Anokhin P.K. Systemic mechanisms of higher nervous activity. Selected works. Moscow, 1979, p. 455.
10. Eccles J. The human mystery.
Berlin: Springer 1979. P. 176.
11. Penfield W. The mystery of the mind.
Princeton, 1975. pp. 25-27
12..I was blessed to study “Through the Looking Glass”. Interview with N.P. Bekhtereva newspaper “Volzhskaya Pravda”, March 19, 2005.
13. Grof S. Holotropic consciousness. Three levels of human consciousness and their influence on our lives. M.: AST; Ganga, 2002. P. 267.
14. Voino-Yasenetsky V. F. Spirit, soul and body. CJSC "Brovary Printing House", 2002 P.45.
15. Lodge O. Raymond or life and death.
16. Lodge O. The survival of man.
17. Crookes W. Researches in the phenomena of spiritualism.
London, year 1926 P. 24
18. Myers. Human personality and its survival of bodily death.
London, year 1sted.1903 P. 68
19. Mikheev A. V. Life after death: from faith to knowledge
Journal “Consciousness and Physical Reality”, No. 6, 2005 and in the abstracts of the international symposium “Noospheric innovations in culture, education, science, technology, healthcare”, April 8 - 9, 2005, St. Petersburg.
Will I be able to kill "I"? or Where consciousness lives - M.I. Khasminsky
(23 votes: 4.61 out of 5)Mikhail Igorevich Khasminsky
Every potential suicide believes in the possibility of the cessation of consciousness and the onset of some kind of non-existence, emptiness. Suicides dream of this emptiness as peace, tranquility, and absence of pain.
It is clear that it is beneficial for a suicide to believe in the cessation of consciousness. Because if Consciousness continues life after death, religious ideas about heaven, hell and eternal and very severe torment of this very consciousness turn out to be real, on which all major religions agree. And this is absolutely not included in the calculations of a suicide.
Therefore, if you are a thinking person, you will, of course, want to assess the likelihood of success of your enterprise. For you, the answer to the question of what Consciousness is and whether it can be turned off like a light bulb is of enormous importance.
This is the question we will analyze from the point of view of science: where is Consciousness located in our body and whether it can cease its life.
What is Consciousness?
First, about what Consciousness is in general. People have thought about this question throughout the history of mankind, but still cannot come to a final decision. We know only some of the properties and possibilities of consciousness. Consciousness is awareness of oneself, one’s personality, it is a great analyzer of all our feelings, emotions, desires, plans. Consciousness is what sets us apart, what makes us feel that we are not objects, but individuals. In other words, Consciousness miraculously reveals our fundamental existence. Consciousness is our awareness of our “I”, but at the same time Consciousness is a great mystery. Consciousness has no dimensions, no form, no color, no smell, no taste; it cannot be touched or turned in your hands. Even though we know very little about consciousness, we know with absolute certainty that we have it.
One of the main questions of humanity is the question of the nature of this very Consciousness (soul, “I”, ego). Materialism and idealism have diametrically opposed views on this issue. From the point of view of materialism, human Consciousness is the substrate of the brain, a product of matter, a product of biochemical processes, a special fusion of nerve cells. From the point of view of idealism, Consciousness is the ego, “I”, spirit, soul - an immaterial, invisible, eternally existing, non-dying energy that spiritualizes the body. Acts of consciousness always involve a subject who is actually aware of everything.
If you are interested in purely religious ideas about the soul, then religion will not provide any evidence of the existence of the soul. The doctrine of the soul is a dogma and is not subject to scientific proof.
There are absolutely no explanations, much less evidence, from materialists who believe that they are impartial scientists (although this is far from the case).
But how do most people, who are equally far from religion, from philosophy, and from science too, imagine this Consciousness, soul, “I”? Let's ask ourselves, what is your “I”? Since I often ask this question in consultations, I can tell you how people usually answer it.
Gender, name, profession and other role functions
The first thing that comes to mind for most is: “I am a person”, “I am a woman (man)”, “I am a businessman (turner, baker)”, “I am Tanya (Katya, Alexey)”, “I am a wife ( husband, daughter)”, etc. These are certainly funny answers. Your individual, unique “I” cannot be defined in general terms. There are a huge number of people in the world with the same characteristics, but they are not your “I”. Half of them are women (men), but they are not “I” either, people with the same professions seem to have their own “I”, not yours, the same can be said about wives (husbands), people of different professions, social status, nationalities, religions, etc. No affiliation with any group will explain to you what your individual “I” represents, because Consciousness is always personal. I am not qualities, qualities only belong to our “I”, because the qualities of the same person can change, but his “I” will remain unchanged.
Mental and physiological characteristics
Some say that their “I” is their reflexes, their behavior, their individual ideas and preferences, their psychological characteristics, etc.
In fact, this cannot be the core of the personality, which is called “I.” Why? Because throughout life, behavior, ideas and preferences change, and even more so psychological characteristics. It cannot be said that if these features were different before, then it was not my “I”.
Realizing this, some people make the following argument: “I am my individual body.” This is already more interesting. Let's examine this assumption as well.
Everyone knows from the school anatomy course that the cells of our body are gradually renewed throughout life. Old ones die (apoptosis), and new ones are born. Some cells (the epithelium of the gastrointestinal tract) are completely renewed almost every day, but there are cells that go through their life cycle much longer. On average, every 5 years all the cells of the body are renewed. If we consider the “I” to be a simple collection of human cells, then the result will be absurd. It turns out that if a person lives, for example, 70 years. During this time, at least 10 times a person will change all the cells in his body (i.e. 10 generations). Could this mean that not one person, but 10 different people lived their 70-year life? Isn't that pretty stupid? We conclude that “I” cannot be a body, because the body is not permanent, but “I” is permanent.
This means that the “I” cannot be either the qualities of cells or their totality.
But here the particularly erudite give a counter-argument: “Okay, with bones and muscles it’s clear, this really cannot be “I,” but there are nerve cells! And they are alone for the rest of their lives. Maybe “I” is the sum of nerve cells?”
Let's think about this question together...
Does consciousness consist of nerve cells?
Materialism is accustomed to decomposing the entire multidimensional world into mechanical components, “testing harmony with algebra” (A.S. Pushkin). The most naive misconception of militant materialism regarding personality is the idea that personality is a set of biological qualities. However, the combination of impersonal objects, be they even atoms or neurons, cannot give rise to a personality and its core - the “I”.
How can this most complex “I”, feeling, capable of experiences, love, be simply the sum of specific cells of the body along with the ongoing biochemical and bioelectric processes? How can these processes shape the “I”???
Provided that nerve cells constituted our “I”, then we would lose part of our “I” every day. With each dead cell, with each neuron, the “I” would become smaller and smaller. With cell restoration, it would increase in size.
Scientific studies conducted in different countries of the world prove that nerve cells, like all other cells of the human body, are capable of regeneration (restoration). Here is what the most serious biological international journal Nature writes: “Employees of the Californian Institute for Biological Research named after. Salk discovered that in the brains of adult mammals, fully functional young cells are born that function on a par with existing neurons. Professor Frederick Gage and his colleagues also concluded that brain tissue renews itself most rapidly in physically active animals.”
This is confirmed by a publication in another biological journal - Science: “Over the past two years, researchers have found that nerve and brain cells are renewed, like others in the human body. The body is capable of repairing disorders related to the nervous tract itself, says scientist Helen M. Blon.”
Thus, even with a complete change of all (including nerve) cells of the body, the “I” of a person remains the same, therefore, it does not belong to the constantly changing material body.
For some reason, in our time it is so difficult to prove what was obvious and understandable to the ancients. The Roman Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus, who lived in the 3rd century, wrote: “It is absurd to assume that since none of the parts has life, then life can be created by their totality... moreover, it is completely impossible for life to be produced by a heap of parts, and that the mind was generated by that which is devoid of mind. If anyone objects that this is not so, but that in fact the soul is formed by atoms coming together, that is, bodies indivisible into parts, then he will be refuted by the fact that the atoms themselves only lie one next to the other, not forming a living whole, for unity and joint feeling cannot be obtained from bodies that are insensitive and incapable of unification; but the soul feels itself.”
The “I” is the unchanging core of personality, which includes many variables, but is not itself variable.
A skeptic can put forward a last desperate argument: “Maybe “I” is the brain?”
Is Consciousness a product of brain activity? What does science say?
Many people heard the fairy tale that our Consciousness is the activity of the brain back in school. The idea that the brain is essentially a person with his “I” is extremely widespread. Most people think that it is the brain that perceives information from the world around us, processes it and decides how to act in each specific case; they think that it is the brain that makes us alive and gives us personality. And the body is nothing more than a spacesuit that ensures the activity of the central nervous system.
But this tale has nothing to do with science. The brain is currently being studied in depth. The chemical composition, parts of the brain, and the connections of these parts with human functions have been well studied for a long time. The brain organization of perception, attention, memory, and speech has been studied. Functional blocks of the brain have been studied. A huge number of clinics and research centers have been studying the human brain for more than a hundred years, for which expensive, effective equipment has been developed. But if you open any textbook, monograph, scientific journal on neurophysiology or neuropsychology, you will not find scientific data about the connection between the brain and Consciousness.
For people far from this area of knowledge, this seems surprising. In fact, there is nothing surprising about this. It’s just that no one has ever discovered the connection between the brain and the very center of our personality, our “I”. Of course, material scientists have always wanted this. Thousands of studies have been conducted, millions of experiments have been conducted, billions of dollars have been spent. The efforts of scientists were not in vain. Parts of the brain were discovered and studied, their connection with physiological processes was established, much was done to understand many neurophysiological processes and phenomena, but the most important thing was not achieved. It was not possible to find the place in the brain that is our “I”. It was not possible even, despite extremely active work in this direction, to make a serious assumption about how the brain can be connected with our Consciousness.
Where did the assumption come from that Consciousness is in the brain? One of the first to make such an assumption was the greatest electrophysiologist Dubois-Reymond (1818-1896) in the mid-18th century. In his worldview, Dubois-Reymond was one of the brightest representatives of the mechanistic movement. In one of his letters to a friend, he wrote that “exclusively physicochemical laws operate in the body; if not everything can be explained with their help, then it is necessary, using physical and mathematical methods, either to find a way of their action, or to accept that there are new forces of matter, equal in value to physical and chemical forces.”
But another outstanding physiologist, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig (Ludwig, 1816-1895), who lived at the same time with Reymon, who headed the new Physiological Institute in Leipzig in 1869-1895, which became the world's largest center in the field of experimental physiology, did not agree with him. The founder of the scientific school, Ludwig wrote that none of the existing theories of nervous activity, including the electrical theory of nerve currents of Dubois-Reymond, can say anything about how, as a result of the activity of nerves, acts of sensation become possible. Let us note that here we are not even talking about the most complex acts of consciousness, but about much simpler sensations. If there is no consciousness, then we cannot feel or experience anything.
Another major physiologist of the 19th century, the outstanding English neurophysiologist Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, Nobel Prize laureate, said that if it is not clear how the psyche arises from the activity of the brain, then, naturally, it is equally unclear how it can have any influence on the behavior of a living creature, which is controlled through the nervous system.
As a result, Dubois-Reymond himself came to the following conclusion: “As we are aware, we do not know and will never know. And no matter how much we delve into the jungle of intracerebral neurodynamics, we will not build a bridge to the kingdom of consciousness.” Raymon came to the conclusion, disappointing for determinism, that it is impossible to explain Consciousness by material causes. He admitted “that here the human mind encounters a “world riddle” that it will never be able to solve.”
Professor at Moscow University, philosopher A.I. Vvedensky in 1914 formulated the law of “the absence of objective signs of animation.” The meaning of this law is that the role of the psyche in the system of material processes of behavior regulation is absolutely elusive and there is no conceivable bridge between the activity of the brain and the area of mental or spiritual phenomena, including Consciousness.
The leading experts in neurophysiology, Nobel Prize laureates David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel recognized that in order to establish a connection between the brain and Consciousness, it is necessary to understand what reads and decodes the information that comes from the senses. Scientists have recognized that this is impossible to do.
The great scientist, professor of Moscow State University Nikolai Kobozev in his monograph showed that neither cells, nor molecules, nor even atoms can be responsible for the processes of thinking and memory.
There is evidence of the absence of a connection between Consciousness and the functioning of the brain, which is understandable even to people far from science. Here it is.
Let us assume that the “I” (Consciousness) is the result of the work of the brain. As neurophysiologists know for sure, a person can live even with one hemisphere of the brain. Moreover, he has Consciousness. A person who lives only with the right hemisphere of the brain certainly has an “I” (Consciousness). Accordingly, we can conclude that the “I” is not in the left, absent, hemisphere. A person with only a functioning left hemisphere also has an “I”, therefore the “I” is not located in the right hemisphere, which is absent in this person. Consciousness remains regardless of which hemisphere is removed. This means that a person does not have an area of the brain responsible for Consciousness, neither in the left nor in the right hemisphere of the brain. We have to conclude that the presence of consciousness in humans is not associated with certain areas of the brain.
Maybe Consciousness is divisible and with the loss of part of the brain it does not die, but is only damaged? Scientific facts and do not confirm this assumption either.
Professor, Doctor of Medical Sciences Voino-Yasenetsky describes: “I opened a huge abscess (about 50 cubic cm of pus) in a young wounded man, which undoubtedly destroyed the entire left frontal lobe, and I did not observe any mental defects after this operation. I can say the same about another patient who was operated on for a huge cyst of the meninges. Upon wide opening of the skull, I was surprised to see that almost the entire right half of it was empty, and the entire left hemisphere of the brain was compressed, almost to the point of being impossible to distinguish.”
In 1940, Dr. Augustin Iturricha made a sensational statement at the Anthropological Society in Sucre (Bolivia). He and Dr. Ortiz spent a long time studying the medical history of a 14-year-old boy, a patient at Dr. Ortiz's clinic. The teenager was there with a diagnosis of a brain tumor. The young man retained Consciousness until his death, complaining only of a headache. When a pathological autopsy was performed after his death, the doctors were amazed: the entire brain mass was completely separated from the internal cavity of the skull. A large abscess has taken over the cerebellum and part of the brain. It remains completely unclear how the sick boy’s thinking was preserved.
The fact that consciousness exists independently of the brain is also confirmed by studies conducted recently by Dutch physiologists under the leadership of Pim van Lommel. The results of a large-scale experiment were published in the most authoritative English biological journal, The Lancet. “Consciousness exists even after the brain has ceased to function. In other words, Consciousness “lives” on its own, absolutely independently. As for the brain, it is not thinking matter at all, but an organ, like any other, performing strictly defined functions. It is very possible that thinking matter does not exist, even in principle, said the leader of the study, the famous scientist Pim van Lommel.”
Another argument that is understandable to non-specialists is given by Professor V.F. Voino-Yasenetsky: “In the wars of ants who do not have a brain, intentionality is clearly revealed, and therefore intelligence, no different from human.” This is truly an amazing fact. Ants solve quite complex problems of survival, building housing, providing themselves with food, i.e. have a certain intelligence, but have no brain at all. Makes you think, doesn't it?
Neurophysiology does not stand still, but is one of the most dynamically developing sciences. The success of studying the brain is evidenced by the methods and scale of research. Functions and areas of the brain are being studied, and its composition is being clarified in more and more detail. Despite the titanic work on studying the brain, world science today is still far from understanding what creativity, thinking, memory are and what their connection is with the brain itself.
So, science has clearly established that Consciousness is not a product of brain activity.
What is the nature of Consciousness?
Having come to the understanding that Consciousness does not exist inside the body, science draws natural conclusions about the immaterial nature of consciousness.
Academician P.K. Anokhin: “None of the “mental” operations that we attribute to the “mind” have so far been able to be directly associated with any part of the brain. If we, in principle, cannot understand how exactly the psyche arises as a result of the activity of the brain, then isn’t it more logical to think that the psyche is not, in its essence, a function of the brain, but represents the manifestation of some other - immaterial spiritual forces?
At the end of the 20th century, the creator of quantum mechanics, Nobel Prize laureate E. Schrödinger wrote that the nature of the connection between some physical processes and subjective events (which include Consciousness) lies “aside from science and beyond human understanding.”
The greatest modern neurophysiologist, Nobel Prize winner in medicine, J. Eccles, developed the idea that based on the analysis of brain activity it is impossible to find out the origin of mental phenomena, and this fact can easily be interpreted in the sense that the psyche is not a function of the brain at all. According to Eccles, neither physiology nor the theory of evolution can shed light on the origin and nature of consciousness, which is absolutely alien to all material processes in the Universe. The spiritual world of man and the world of physical realities, including brain activity, are completely independent independent worlds that only interact and to some extent influence each other. He is echoed by such prominent specialists as Karl Lashley (an American scientist, director of the laboratory of primate biology in Orange Park (Florida), who studied the mechanisms of brain function) and Harvard University doctor Edward Tolman.
With his colleague, the founder of modern neurosurgery Wilder Penfield, who performed over 10,000 brain operations, Eccles wrote the book The Mystery of Man. In it, the authors directly state that “there is no doubt that a person is controlled by SOMETHING located outside his body.” “I can confirm experimentally,” writes Eccles, “that the workings of consciousness cannot be explained by the functioning of the brain. Consciousness exists independently of it from the outside.”
Eccles is deeply convinced that consciousness cannot be the subject of scientific research. In his opinion, the emergence of consciousness, like the emergence of life, is the highest religious mystery. In his report, the Nobel laureate relied on the conclusions of the book “Personality and the Brain,” written jointly with the American philosopher and sociologist Karl Popper.
Wilder Penfield, as a result of many years of studying the activity of the brain, also came to the conclusion that “the energy of the mind is different from the energy of the brain’s neural impulses.”
Academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the Russian Federation, Director of the Brain Research Institute (RAMS of the Russian Federation), world-renowned neurophysiologist, Doctor of Medical Sciences. Natalya Petrovna Bekhtereva: “I first heard the hypothesis that the human brain only perceives thoughts from somewhere outside from the lips of Nobel laureate, Professor John Eccles. Of course, at the time it seemed absurd to me. But then research conducted at our St. Petersburg Brain Research Institute confirmed: we cannot explain the mechanics of the creative process. The brain can generate only the simplest thoughts, such as turning the pages of a book you are reading or stirring sugar in a glass. And the creative process is the manifestation of a completely new quality. As a believer, I allow the participation of the Almighty in controlling the thought process.”
Science comes to the conclusion that the brain is not a source of thought and consciousness, but at most a relay of them.
Professor S. Grof talks about it this way: “imagine that your TV is broken and you call a TV technician, who, after turning various knobs, tunes it up. It doesn’t occur to you that all these stations are sitting in this box.”
Already in 1956, the outstanding leading scientist-surgeon, Doctor of Medical Sciences, Professor V.F. Voino-Yasenetsky believed that our brain is not only not connected with Consciousness, but is not even capable of thinking independently, since the mental process is taken outside its boundaries. In his book, Valentin Feliksovich argues that “the brain is not an organ of thought and feelings,” and that “The Spirit acts beyond the brain, determining its activity, and our entire existence, when the brain works as a transmitter, receiving signals and transmitting them to the organs of the body.” .
English researchers Peter Fenwick from the London Institute of Psychiatry and Sam Parnia from Southampton Central Clinic came to the same conclusions. They examined patients who had come back to life after cardiac arrest and found that some of them accurately recounted the content of conversations that medical staff had while they were in a state of clinical death. Others gave an accurate description of the events that occurred during this time period. Sam Parnia argues that the brain, like any other organ of the human body, is composed of cells and is not capable of thinking. However, it can work as a thought detecting device, i.e. like an antenna, with the help of which it becomes possible to receive a signal from the outside. Scientists have suggested that during clinical death, Consciousness operating independently of the brain uses it as a screen. Like a television receiver, which first receives the waves entering it, and then converts them into sound and image.
If we turn off the radio, this does not mean that the radio station stops broadcasting. That is, after the death of the physical body, Consciousness continues to live.
The fact of the continuation of the life of Consciousness after the death of the body is also confirmed by Academician of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Director of the Research Institute of the Human Brain, world-famous neurophysiologist N.P. Bekhterev in her book “The Magic of the Brain and the Labyrinths of Life.” In addition to discussing purely scientific issues, in this book the author also cites his personal experience of encountering posthumous phenomena.
Natalya Bekhtereva, talking about her meeting with the Bulgarian clairvoyant Vanga Dimitrova, speaks quite definitely about this in one of her interviews: “Vanga’s example absolutely convinced me that there is a phenomenon of contact with the dead,” and another quote from her book: “ I can’t help but believe what I heard and saw myself. A scientist does not have the right to reject facts (if he is a scientist!) just because they do not fit into dogma or worldview.”
The first consistent description of afterlife, based on scientific observations, was given by the Swedish scientist and naturalist Emmanuel Swedenborg. Then this problem was seriously studied by the famous psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler Ross, the equally famous psychiatrist Raymond Moody, conscientious academicians Oliver Lodge, William Crookes, Alfred Wallace, Alexander Butlerov, Professor Friedrich Myers, and the American pediatrician Melvin Morse. Among the serious and systematic researchers of the issue of dying, Dr. Michael Sabom, a professor of medicine at Emory University and a staff physician at the Veterans Hospital in Atlanta, should be mentioned; the systematic research of psychiatrist Kenneth Ring, who studied this problem, was also studied by the doctor of medicine and resuscitator Moritz Rawlings. , our contemporary, thanatopsychologist A.A. Nalchadzhyan. The famous Soviet scientist, a leading specialist in the field of thermodynamic processes, academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Belarus Albert Veinik, worked a lot to understand this problem from the point of view of physics. A significant contribution to the study of near-death experiences was made by the world famous American psychologist of Czech origin, founder of the transpersonal school of psychology, Dr. Stanislav Grof.
The variety of facts accumulated by science undeniably proves that after physical death, each of those living today inherits a different reality, preserving their Consciousness.
Despite the limitations of our ability to understand this reality using material means, today there are a number of its characteristics obtained through experiments and observations of scientists studying this problem.
These characteristics were listed by A.V. Mikheev, a researcher at the St. Petersburg State Electrotechnical University in his report at the international symposium “Life after death: from faith to knowledge”, which took place on April 8-9, 2005 in St. Petersburg:
"1. There is a so-called “subtle body”, which is the carrier of self-awareness, memory, emotions and the “inner life” of a person. This body exists... after physical death, being, for the duration of the existence of the physical body, its “parallel component”, ensuring the above processes. The physical body is only an intermediary for their manifestation on the physical (earthly) level.
2. The life of an individual does not end with current earthly death. Survival after death is a natural law for humans.
3. The next reality is divided into a large number of levels, differing in the frequency characteristics of their components.
4. A person’s destination during the posthumous transition is determined by his attunement to a certain level, which is the total result of his thoughts, feelings and actions during life on Earth. Just as the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation emitted by a chemical substance depends on its composition, so too a person's posthumous destination is determined by the "composite characteristic" of his inner life.
5. The concepts of “Heaven and Hell” reflect two polarities, possible post-mortem states.
6. In addition to such polar states, there are a number of intermediate ones. The choice of an adequate state is automatically determined by the mental and emotional “pattern” formed by a person during earthly life. That is why negative emotions, violence, the desire for destruction and fanaticism, no matter how they are justified externally, in this regard are extremely destructive for the future fate of a person. This provides a strong rationale for personal responsibility and ethical principles."
And again about suicide
Most suicides believe that their Consciousness will cease to exist after death, that it will be peace, a break from life. We got acquainted with the conclusion of world science about what Consciousness is and about the lack of connection between it and the brain, as well as the fact that after the death of the body, a person will begin another, postmortem life. Moreover, Consciousness retains its qualities, memory, and its afterlife is a natural continuation of earthly life.
This means that if here, in earthly life, Consciousness was struck by some kind of pain, illness, grief, liberation from the body will not be liberation from this illness. In the afterlife, the fate of a sick consciousness is even sadder than in earthly life, because in earthly life we can change everything or almost everything - with the participation of our will, the help of other people, new knowledge, changes life situation, - in another world there are no such opportunities, and therefore the state of Consciousness is more stable.
That is, suicide is the preservation of a painful, unbearable state of one’s Consciousness for an indefinite period. Quite possibly - forever. And the lack of hope for improving your condition greatly increases the painfulness of any torment.
If we really want rest and pleasant peaceful rest, then our Consciousness must achieve such a state even in earthly life, then after natural death it will retain it.
The author would like for you, after reading the material, to try to find the truth on your own, double-check the data presented in this article, and read the relevant literature from the field of medicine, psychology and neurophysiology. I hope that, having learned more about this area, you will refuse to attempt suicide or commit it only if you are confident that with the help of it you can really get rid of Consciousness.
1. Dam. "On the immortality of the soul."
2. N.I. Kobozev. Research in the field of thermodynamics of information and thinking processes.
3. V.F. Voino-Yasenetsky. "About spirit, soul and body."
4. V.F. Voino-Yasenetsky. "About spirit, soul and body."
5. J. Eccles, W. Penfield. "The Mystery of Man."
6 W. Penfield. The mystery of the mind.
7. V.F. Voino-Yasenetsky. "About spirit, soul and body."
8. I was blessed to study Through the Looking Glass. Interview with N.P. Bekhtereva newspaper “Volzhskaya Pravda”, March 19, 2005.
9. N.P. Bekhterev. "The magic of the brain and the labyrinths of life."
10. O. Lodge. Raymond or life and death. O. Lodge. The survival of man.
11. W. Crookes. Researches in the phenomena of spiritualism.
12. Myers. Human personality and its survival of bodily death.
azbyka.ru
Does science solve modern problems?
This work is an attempt at a philosophical understanding of the negative phenomena occurring in the world around us, as well as an analysis of the origins of the contradictions that have accumulated in modern scientific constructions and in society. One could even say that the human community today lives in an era of deep systemic crisis.
For such an understanding current state science and society there are good reasons.
We should start with the fact that in many sciences mathematics has become the determining criterion for the truth of a particular theory, model, position, thereby displacing the actual analysis of processes and phenomena. This is based on the general position that mathematics is the language of science. I do not argue with this, but I allow myself to doubt the absoluteness of this thesis.
Mathematics, no matter how perfect and accurate it is in its constructions (and even then not always), gives only the result that the author of a particular mathematical model wanted to obtain.
I'm not at all against using mathematical methods analysis. I am against the use of mathematical methods to conduct research into physical and other processes and phenomena, when mathematics completely displaces the actual processes being studied, the physics of phenomena, and actually replaces the research itself.
No wonder they say: to solve a problem, you need to know the answer. This is the danger of shifting all the “responsibility” to mathematical models.
But the meaning of this paradoxical, at first glance, statement is as follows. Our thoughts, our ideas, our logical constructions describe only our own perceptions, our sensations, and not the world. This is the main difficulty in organizing any research.
What is most difficult for us is the understanding that we perceive our (external) environment only as a complex of our (internal) sensations. And it is for this reason that it should be said once again that it is impossible and impossible to replace reality with mathematics.
It is sensations that are the only reality, the recognition of which we cannot come to terms with or at least reconcile. That is why it is believed that mathematics can give us a tool to overcome this barrier.
But a mathematical model, even being perfect, ideal, gives only the result to which we have previously paved the way based on semantic analysis. Therefore, mathematics has the right to be only an auxiliary tool, but not a method of analysis or, even worse, an argument for proving the correctness of the model.
A striking example of this is the history of the “discoveries” in the seventies of the twentieth century of a continuous series of “elementary” particles. Scientific world and the public was moved by each new “discovery.” I remember how shocked I was by the hype about the “discovery” of anti-sigma-minus-hyperon...
Each “new” particle received its own personal mathematical “support”, although the structure of matter and its “device” did not become clearer from this. On the contrary, everything became even more confused, and a general understanding of the essence of the substance did not arise.
It never occurred to anyone then (and even today) that all these particles were the work of experimenters, and not the constituent elements of matter.
For a modern physicist it is difficult, infinitely difficult, to understand and accept a very simple truth.
There are only five types of elementary particles: photon, electron, positron, neutron and proton, and no antiparticles exist and cannot physically exist (except for the only one - the positron).
For a modern physicist, it is completely incomprehensible to what degree of “kinship” all other particles are with a photon, whether they can mutually transform into each other, and what conditions should be for this. This is a sealed secret for them.
It is difficult for a modern physicist to understand that quarks, hyperons, mesons, etc. are just “fragments” of nuclei or fundamental particles. It is difficult to understand that these are “man-made” creations. This is the remaining "garbage" from truly elementary particles. And no mathematical tricks justify this human delusion.
It makes no sense to develop the theory of elementary particles, going deep into who knows what and who knows in the name of what, but away from the truth. Today, the science of elementary particles must answer a single question: why is the electron, proton and neutron, being outside atomic nucleus, can exist only for a limited time, but within the nucleus these same particles are, as it were, outside of time and can exist almost forever.
The answer to this question will provide a true understanding of the substance.
Consider today's understanding of what we call "matter."
“Matter is a type of matter, a collection of discrete (discontinuous) formations that have a rest mass (atoms, molecules and what is built from them).”
An impeccable, at first glance, definition. But a photon that does not have a rest mass, according to this definition, does not belong to “material” formations. A photon is already a “quantum” electromagnetic field, a neutral elementary particle with zero rest mass and spin 1".
Spin is “the intrinsic angular momentum of a microparticle, which has a quantum nature and is not associated with the movement of the particle as a whole.” In other words, spin is a qualitative characteristic.
We see that the postulate about matter is quite frankly built on our trivial sensory perception of solid, liquid, gaseous matter. We also find in this definition such an unclear characteristic as rest mass. And few people think about the real meaning of this concept.
As a result, we have a natural, but not scientific embodiment of our usual sensations. And if a different approach to explaining the “rest mass” is discovered, then not only will our understanding of matter change, but some basis will also be destroyed modern physics.
Consider the following philosophical definition.
“Matter is a philosophical category to designate objective reality, which is reflected by our sensations, existing independently of them; substance; the substrate (basis) of all properties, connections and forms of movement that actually exist in the world; an infinite number of all objects and systems existing in the world.”
This definition reflects an attempt to describe everything at once. But upon closer examination, certain weaknesses are revealed.
Firstly, what is called substance is also called matter, that is, in this part the definition could be much simpler. But the category of matter also includes that which is not a substance. For example, a photon.
And this could be accepted if it were clear that the photon is material. If this is an “electromagnetic quantum,” then how to separate this quality from motion, which, of course, is not a manifestation of matter, but is a property of matter.
However, a photon cannot be imagined or somehow described in immobility. Maybe the material property of a photon is its ability to somehow pass through some substances that are “transparent” to it? But this is also just a property, an ability, a certain quality. Generally speaking, a property (any) should not be attributed to something material.
A property is a form of manifestation of material. Speaking about the photon, we immediately become confused in applying the concept of matter to it, since all the qualities (properties) inherent in it cannot be separated in any way so that the understanding of the photon does not collapse.
Thus, a confusion of concepts occurred, and properties were designated by matter. Such a generalization is a logical and, as a consequence, a philosophical error. In addition, in the above definition of matter there is a clause that completely negates the possibility of using this definition.
Let us highlight this place: “the substrate (basis) of all properties, connections and forms of movement that actually exist in the world.” Let's return to the photon again. What is the “substrate” in it - the quantum itself, its movement or something else?
Obviously, for a photon, the “substrate” (so to speak) is everything at once, since one is inseparable from the other. Consequently, the concept of matter, when trying to apply it to a photon, dissolved and evaporated, but the photon itself did not change in any way. And this means that we still do not understand at all that there is a photon. But we also do not yet understand the essence of matter itself.
The question involuntarily arises: is it possible to resolve the existing contradiction? Is it necessary to do this at all? After all, for so many millennia humanity has gone without an answer to this philosophical question that it is possible to continue to live without it, that is, without understanding the essence of substance and matter.
But, as development analysis shows modern society, the further existence of humanity without understanding this may become completely impossible.
It is necessary to seek answers to these questions. And answers will become possible if we manage to find new logical chains connecting the world of our sensations with the real external world that exists outside of our perceptions of the world.
In other words, we must try to bypass the substitution that objectively arises every day, which gives rise to the materiality of the world, which really exists only in our sensations.
What is most difficult for us is the understanding that we not only perceive our external environment as a complex of our sensations, but also the understanding that, in principle, nothing can be given to us other than our own sensations.
The only mechanism for overcoming this semantic barrier can only be the logic of semantics, but not the logic of mathematics.
In ancient philosophical systems, the position that only our sensations are accessible to us was quite clearly stated. This is especially clear in philosophy. ancient india. For example, Brahman Chatterjee, being a conductor of the philosophical heritage of India, in his lectures for Europeans in late XIX centuries said the following.
“You perceive it (the atom - O. Yu.) in a fatal way, still under the guise of color, smell, density, in general under the guise of quality. And we just saw that all these qualities are the consequences of movement, and nothing more. Where is your atom "In the dreams of a physicist... Everything disappears in motion. Those who have never focused on these issues will not understand me.
But if their thoughts follow my instructions, if they think deeper, they will be convinced of the deep truth in the statement that the Universe as an object of our perception is nothing more than movement. All the great teachers of antiquity taught this way. Objects, as such, do not exist absolutely, but only relatively: in the consciousness that we have about them...
Your own conscious being is the only power which you can know in a real way" (Brahman Chatterjee, The Secret Religious Philosophy of India, Lectures delivered at Brussels in 1898, preface and translation from the 3rd French edition by H.P., S. -Petersburg, August 17, 1905, Kaluga, Printing house of the provincial zemstvo government, 1905, obtained from the JAPANserver website).
It seems that everything in this statement quite accurately describes the true reality at the semantic level. But this is so contrary to the historically established European ideas about the surrounding world, the historically accepted model of the essence of matter, that we involuntarily persist in accepting such a judgment as a genuine conclusion.
If even for a moment we assume that Chatterjee spoke in a semantic sense with sufficient completeness and accuracy, then for that same moment we must accept that the current logic of constructions (philosophical, mathematical and other) is collapsing.
Consequently, we will need to create a new model of the world. At this very moment of our acceptance of the ideas of ancient India, we will have to abandon the usual European understanding of matter as such and substance as well. These concepts will require completely new semantic content.
But in order for this to become possible, we will need a new logical bridge between what is objective reality and our consciousness. This is not an easy task and requires a certain strength spirit to recognize that natural science and, in general, the scientific heritage of past centuries, must be revised from the very foundations.
Natural science is a modern system of sciences about the nature of the surrounding physical and biological world. In this system, physics occupies a special, fundamental place. Physics is a science of nature that studies the basis of the properties of the material world. These properties, on the other hand, are the most general and serve as the foundation of the rest of the natural sciences. It follows that if some provisions of physics are revised, a revision of other natural sciences will be required.
Thus, succumbing to the temptation to momentarily accept a different philosophical doctrine, we subject the system of natural sciences to a qualitative reworking, a complete revision. Therefore, one should ask the question: is it really necessary to revise the foundations of natural science? This question is not easy, and it does not have a clear answer.
There are a number of indirect signs that the development of physics as a theoretical science, if not stopped, then at least significantly slowed down. For example, in last years There has clearly been a tendency to increase the statute of limitations for the creation of works for which prestigious Nobel Prizes in the field of physics are awarded.
Twenty years ago, these prizes were awarded for works created twenty to twenty-five years before the prizes were awarded. Today, the “age” of such works has increased to forty-five to fifty years. Consequently, all the works for which these prizes have been awarded in recent decades were created approximately in the same period of time and a very long time ago. Consequently, there are no breakthrough ideas in modern physics today.
At the same time, the number of problems that should be dealt with not only by applied, but also by fundamental science is increasing every year. I will cite here only those that are widely heard, but which, nevertheless, are not only not resolved, but are also becoming more and more aggravated.
Problems affecting all of humanity include, for example:
The most pressing energy problem;
Global problem disposal of human waste and industrial waste, especially metallurgical and chemical;
World shortage problem drinking water;
The problem of creating fundamentally new, environmentally friendly and economical modes of transport;
Problems of creating new methods for treating numerous and ever-increasing diseases of people and the living world;
Problems of creating new types of materials with unique parameters;
Problems of disruption of the ecological balance of nature on a global scale, leading to a reduction in the zones of safe existence of humans and the living world in general.
It is not difficult to see that most of these problems are interconnected. Therefore, having solved some of them, you can significantly facilitate the solution of others. But modern science not only does not solve these problems radically, but also often offers solutions that are far from the truth.
All that has been said allows us to draw a conclusion. Natural science, as a system of sciences, is undoubtedly experiencing an acute systemic crisis. Physics, as the foundation of the natural sciences, having stopped in its development, does not create the prerequisites for overcoming the destructive effects of this crisis.
One could limit ourselves to stating this fact, but this is completely insufficient to understand the depth and severity of the systemic crisis in natural science. The fact is that humanity is continuously increasing the forms, methods and volumes of technical saturation of the life of modern society.
This is what creates the apparent progress of science and technology. But it is precisely this same “progress” in modern conditions entails an exponential increase in energy consumption. This could be at least somehow justified if energy resources were used to the required extent and efficiently.
It is necessary to calculate the total energy costs required to extract energy resources (gas, oil, coal, hydro resources) from the subsoil. Then it is necessary to add here the energy costs for transporting and processing these energy resources (to the point of obtaining the required type of energy - electrical and/or thermal).
Next, it is necessary to add up the costs of transporting this energy (electrical and/or thermal) to the place of its consumption. As a result, we will immediately discover the extremely low efficiency of the described technological chain.
But this is not all the costs. To the wasted energy should be added the costs in the technological chain of obtaining the product itself (industrial or agricultural) or consumer product.
In this chain, one should also take into account the fact that for the final product one should have (in final product includes) a large number of “auxiliary” products, which, after processing, will be included as components in the consumer product.
It can be assumed that no one has made such an assessment of real energy costs. And if you make such an assessment along the entire technological chain of converting energy into a production product, then, I think, such calculations will horrify anyone.
We will almost certainly find that for one or two kilowatts of energy embodied in the final product, today we need to spend about 98-99 kilowatts, or even significantly more. It is this ratio that will characterize the real efficiency modern technologies.
Moreover, the main losses will fall precisely on those links of the technological chain that relate to the stages of production of energy resources and their transportation. Almost all energy in the process of its successive transformations is converted into thermal “garbage”, which negatively affects the planet’s climate.
With such a technological policy, there should be a chronic shortage of energy resources. Moreover, this shortage will continuously increase. I would not like to exaggerate, but the fact is that scientists are trying to solve this problem using a traditional, but technologically more dangerous method - by creating a controlled thermonuclear reaction.
Speaking to the point, forgetting about the great and fundamental potential environmental danger of this path, then absolutely nothing changes in the previous technological chain of obtaining and converting energy. Therefore, the chosen academic science the strategy for solving the problem of energy shortages will not only not solve, but will also aggravate the problem.
Let's try to mentally grasp this tangle of contradictions. To do this, you need to imagine millions of hectares of land filled with mirrors of reservoirs of hydroelectric power stations, thermal power plants and nuclear power plants. Let’s try to imagine millions of hectares of land in the right of way of power lines, thousands and thousands of hectares of land alienated next to transport arteries (not only mechanical alienation, but also chemical - due to chemical poisoning emissions of gases into the atmosphere of nearby strips of land).
We will try to see the lands alienated due to acid rain from emissions from combined heat and power plants (CHP) and various boiler houses for industrial and domestic purposes. Thermal clogging should also be taken into account. environment from operating nuclear power plants and metallurgical plants.
If we imagine all this and correlate it together with the described technological chain of energy conversion with the scheme for obtaining energy through a controlled thermonuclear reaction, then we will see that in the described chain, when thermonuclear fusion is used, absolutely nothing will change, but this chain itself will become significantly more dangerous.
The problem of energy resources can be looked at from a completely different angle. Today man thinks that he has begun to explore space. This is certainly a naive misconception. The traditional approach to solving the energy problems of space launches will end the exploration of space at the point at which this process is now: the matter will not advance beyond near-Earth orbits.
If nothing changes in the energy chain, then sooner or later humanity will abandon the idea of space exploration and stop the practice altogether space research, since every rocket launch affects the ecological health of our planet.
If fundamentally new sources of energy are not created, which can be called “inexhaustible” or at least “conditionally inexhaustible,” then the exploration of not only space, but also the moon will have to be forgotten. But if such sources are created, energy problems not only in space exploration, but also on Earth will be left behind.
These problems require an unconditional solution. However, with the previous philosophical doctrine this is impossible to do. If these problems are not resolved, then the growing level of these problems will inevitably lead to a global environmental disaster.
As a result, life on planet Earth, if not disappear, will at least degenerate to a primitive level. Consequently, a new worldview is no longer a simple and not only a philosophical task, but a task of preserving reason on Earth.
In ancient times, the main and only method of studying the world around us was philosophy. This means that in those days, all knowledge about the world around us, one way or another, fit into the Procrustean bed of a single ideological system, into a single semantic model. This continued until Newton, with whom it began new story Sciences. It is from Newton that a fundamentally new approach to organizing and conducting physical research can be seen.
A feature of early science (before Newton) was the use of philosophy as the main tool of research. Philosophy translated from Greek means the love of wisdom. In those years, this meant that the main tools of any research were observations, contemplation, logic, semantics (reasoning, or logical analysis).
On this basis, the worldview was formed as a system of views on the world around us. Therefore, it should be said that in those days the worldview developed as a single whole. And it cannot be said that this gave bad results.
Previously acquired knowledge was included as constituent elements into a unified philosophical system. Therefore, the philosophical system (good or bad) described the surrounding world as a whole, as a single whole. However, it was impossible to keep the accumulating knowledge within the framework of a single ideological system.
Moreover, the new knowledge obtained made it possible to qualitatively change subsequent research methods, became, as it were, the “self-propulsion” of science, and influenced the subsequent content and methods of research. In other words, at this stage new knowledge began to break away, as it were, from the tutelage of philosophy. Philosophy under these conditions began to lose its status as a science of sciences.
In this sense, Newton's introduction of mathematical methods to describe physical processes and phenomena was the first step towards weakening the position of philosophy. After Newton, philosophy gradually degenerated into a speculative and rather abstract science of knowledge as such. As a result, this caused damage to the entire body of science.
Physics, having lost its status as a branch of philosophy thanks to Newton, gradually acquired the status of a formalized, mathematical science. This expanded the general horizons of physics due to the emergence of opportunities to more accurately predict the development and course of physical processes. On the other hand, there was a certain self-isolation of physics from philosophy, which gave rise to the systemic crisis of natural science discussed above.
One of the main reasons for this crisis should be called precisely the process of formalization of science due to its increased mathematization, which often negates the semantic basis of new knowledge. This formalization created certain “blinders on the eyes” of science, deprived it of some of the romance of reasoning, and as a result stopped its continuous development.
It seems to me that the reason for this is largely the refusal at a certain stage of the development of science to recognize the existence of some substance that fills everything around.
A certain understanding of the presence of this substance - the substance of ether - came from ancient times. The reason for the formal rejection of the concept of ether was the legendary Michelson-Morley experiment, thanks to which scientists tried to discover the action (influence) of the so-called “ethereal wind”. Now I will only note that it was the “failure” of this experiment that led to the creation of the theory of relativity by Einstein.
Not physics, but mathematics formed the basis of the theory of relativity both as an argument and as a method of proving some physical properties. It was through Einstein's efforts that mathematics ultimately became a tool for physical research, as it became the main arbiter in the consideration of most physical models of our time.
Thus, mathematical constructions replaced the essence of phenomena in many cases. As a result, the essence of inanimate matter remained practically unknown.
I will give an example of the depth of the general misunderstanding of matter as such. We find such a pattern, for example, in the statement of Academician Ya. B. Zeldovich.
"The Universe is huge. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is 150 million kilometers. The distance from the Solar system to the center of the Galaxy is 2 billion times greater than the distance from the Earth to the Sun. In turn, the size of the observable Universe is a million times greater than the distance from the Sun to the center of our Galaxy And all this huge space is filled unimaginably big amount substances... Only in the observable region of the Universe the total mass is about ten to the 22nd power of the mass of the Sun. The whole vast vastness of space and the fabulously huge amount of matter in it amazes the imagination."
Initially, I would like to contrast the words of the academician with the following.
The universe can only be huge if it is finite. But this assumption is based on the version of the birth of the Universe due to the Big Bang. Therefore, a certain a priori predetermination of the academician’s thought is striking. In fact, the Universe is not just huge. She is endless.
And even in this case (with the reality of the Big Bang), it seems that the almost complete emptiness of this space should amaze us, since the mass of celestial bodies is concentrated in microscopic volumes in comparison with the overall dimensions of the Universe. But Zeldovich’s thought focuses our attention on the fact that the entire Universe (without gaps) is filled with matter.
Therefore, the question involuntarily arises: what kind of invisible and intangible substance fills the space of the Universe? And here the first paradox of modern physics becomes clear. The fact is, as modern physics believes, that all this huge and unlimited space is filled with plasma. This is the definition of plasma that exists in modern physics.
“Plasma is an ionized gas in which the concentrations of positive and negative charges are equal (quasi-neutrality). The vast majority of the matter of the Universe is in the state of plasma: stars, galactic nebulae and the interstellar medium. Near the Earth, plasma exists in the form solar wind and the ionosphere..."
Such an idea of the presence of ionized gas in the spaces of the Universe is historically apparently associated with two hypotheses.
The first hypothesis, basically stated in 1644 by Descartes, is related to the explanation of the origin of the Solar system from a primary nebula, which had the shape of a disk and consisted of gas and dust (monistic theory). Nothing prevents this model from being extended to the rest of the Universe, explaining the origin of other star systems.
However, a miracle does not cease to be a miracle, since the question of the primary origin of dust and gas in such a model remains open. One can, of course, assume that these forms of matter have always existed. But then what brought some matter (or some substance) into a gaseous or dusty state?
After all, we are surrounded by solid, liquid, and gaseous matter. In addition, in the monistic model there is no attempt to explain the initial reason for the onset of rotation of these gaseous-dust formations, which led (according to this model) to the formation of solid and liquid phases of matter.
The second hypothesis, which seems to explain the conditions for the birth of matter, is called the Big Bang theory. The birth of this model is due to the provisions general theory relativity. But there are also contradictions in this model. Now let's just give general position Big Bang theory.
According to this theory, the modern Universe was born from a certain point (zone, region) as a result of an explosive expansion process of the original matter, initially compressed into a state in which no physical laws apply (from the so-called singular state).
According to this model, the Universe is a continuously expanding sphere, in which infinity is determined by spherically curved space. At the same time, the Universe, according to this model, remains a completely closed sphere from which not a single photon can escape.
This model creates even more questions that cannot be answered. Such fundamental questions include, for example, the question of the primary causes of the emergence (beginning of the process) of the Big Bang.
Another question is related to the misunderstanding of the initial state of primordial matter, from which the birth of the Universe began. The fact is that a miracle never ceases to be a miracle, no matter how much we push it away. starting point the emergence of this wonderful process. And the Big Bang theory is, in essence, a method of moving back into time the moment of the occurrence of this “miracle”. In addition, the Big Bang theory also does not answer the question of the reasons that led to the general twisting of matter in the Universe.
The question of the size of the initial volume from which the “outflow” of all the matter of the Universe, formed during the explosion, occurred cannot be considered important or fundamental. It could be a speck of dust, or an area with a diameter of several million light years: the essence of the problem does not change.
If we find answers to the main questions, then the answer to this question will become clear. True, then the Big Bang model may have to be abandoned, and this model will disappear by itself.
Modern theoretical physics is like an athlete who definitely wants to be a winner, but does not have the strength and resources. Today there is no explanation for the phenomenon of electricity. The modern model of heat, heat transfer and many other models do not answer many questions that life practice poses.
This means that modern physics is fundamentally incorrect and must be revised from the very beginning. Indeed, there are so many criticisms of modern physics that one cannot help but wonder: is everything all right in the Danish kingdom?
However, modern theoretical physics, like a weak boxer, has taken up an all-round defense and avoids considering criticism addressed to it. If physicists could look back on the path they have traveled, they would see that the twentieth century was lost for theoretical physics. The reason for this is the theory of relativity, which physicists want to preserve at all costs. But if you walk away from the fight, then sooner or later you will lose and be overthrown.
Therefore, we can ask the question: should we not look back and, having critically reflected on the path traveled in the twentieth century, return to the beginnings of Faraday and Maxwell and begin anew the construction of modern natural science on a new philosophical basis?
Science is a specific activity of people, main goal which is the acquisition of knowledge about reality.
Knowledge is the main product scientific activity, but not the only one. The products of science include the scientific style of rationality, which extends to all spheres of human activity; and various devices, installations, techniques used outside science, primarily in production. Scientific activity is also a source of moral values.
Although science is focused on obtaining true knowledge about reality, science and truth are not identical. True knowledge can also be unscientific. It can be obtained in a variety of areas of human activity: in everyday life, economics, politics, art, and engineering. Unlike science, obtaining knowledge about reality is not the main, defining goal of these areas of activity (in art, for example, such a main goal is new artistic values, in engineering - technology, inventions, in economics - efficiency, etc.) .
It is important to emphasize that the definition of “unscientific” does not imply a negative assessment. Scientific activity is specific. Other spheres of human activity - everyday life, art, economics, politics, etc. - each have their own purpose, their own goals. The role of science in the life of society is growing, but scientific justification is not always and not always possible or appropriate.
The history of science shows that scientific knowledge is not always true. The term "scientific" is often used in situations that do not guarantee true knowledge, especially when it comes to theories. Many scientific theories have been refuted. It is sometimes argued (for example, Karl Popper) that any theoretical statement always has a chance of being refuted in the future.
Science does not recognize parascientific concepts - astrology, parapsychology, ufology, etc. It does not recognize these concepts not because it does not want to, but because it cannot, because, as T. Huxley put it, “by taking anything for granted, science commits suicide.” But there are no reliable, precisely established facts in such concepts. Possible coincidences.
Regarding this kind of problem, F. Bacon wrote this: “And therefore the one who answered correctly was the one who, when they showed him the image of those who had escaped shipwreck by taking a vow displayed in the temple and at the same time sought an answer whether he now recognizes the power of the gods, asked in turn: “Where is the image of those who died after making a vow?" This is the basis of almost all superstitions - in astrology, in beliefs, in predictions and the like. People who delight themselves with this kind of vanity, celebrate the event that has come true, even without attention is passed by the one who deceived, although the latter happens much more often.”
Important features of the appearance of modern science are related to the fact that today it is a profession.
Until recently, science was a free activity of individual scientists. It was not a profession and was not specially funded in any way. Typically, scientists supported their living by paying for their teaching jobs at universities. However, today a scientist is a special profession. In the 20th century, the concept of “scientist” appeared. Now in the world about 5 million people are professionally engaged in science.
The development of science is characterized by opposition between different directions. New ideas and theories are established in intense struggle. M. Planck said on this occasion: “Usually new scientific truths win not in such a way that their opponents are convinced and they admit they are wrong, but for the most part in such a way that these opponents gradually die out, and the younger generation assimilates the truth immediately.”
Life in science is a constant struggle of different opinions, directions, a struggle for the recognition of ideas.
One of the important distinctive qualities of scientific knowledge is its systematization. It is one of the criteria of scientific character.
But knowledge can be systematized not only in science. cookbook, telephone directory, road atlas, etc. and so on. - everywhere knowledge is classified and systematized. Scientific systematization is specific. It is characterized by a desire for completeness, consistency, and clear grounds for systematization. Scientific knowledge as a system has a certain structure, the elements of which are facts, laws, theories, pictures of the world. Separate scientific disciplines interconnected and interdependent.
The desire for validity and evidence of knowledge is an important criterion for scientific character.
Justification of knowledge, bringing it into unified system has always been characteristic of science. The very emergence of science is sometimes associated with the desire to prove knowledge. Various methods of substantiating scientific knowledge are used. To justify empirical knowledge multiple checks, access to statistical data, etc. are used. When substantiating theoretical concepts, their consistency, compliance with empirical data, and ability to describe and predict phenomena are checked.
In science, original, “crazy” ideas are valued. But its focus on innovation is combined with the desire to eliminate from the results of scientific activity everything subjective related to the specifics of the scientist himself. This is one of the differences between science and art. If the artist had not created his creation, it simply would not have existed. But if a scientist, even a great one, had not created a theory, it would still have been created, because it represents a necessary stage in the development of science and is intersubjective.
