A continuing scientific debate surrounds the idea of mind as an immaterial substance. Ever since Descartes advanced the notion of a radical substance dualism where the mind and body are two fundamentally distinct things, the mind (immaterial) and the body (material), there has been the ongoing argument against the notion that an immaterial mind cannot interact with a material body. The argument has been that it is properly incorrect to expect that the immaterial can have a causal influence on the material, particularly with the Cartesian notion where since there is no unity between mind and the body we have substantively a “ghost in the machine.” In contemporary science, this Cartesian notion is fully rejected in view of a monistic (or physicalist) enterprise that posits literally everything is material. Now dualism of the immaterial and material has been, in some form or the other over the centuries, the default view since people have a strong propensity to see their minds as having some distinction from their bodies, even though it has some form of unity which may not be as radical as that of Descartes. Yet the naturalist objects to any form of dualism, substance or otherwise.
But is the debate here really and truly about the immaterial vs. the material? Is this an argument over semantics? Or are the naturalists simply shortsighted about what precisely defines the “immaterial”? I would argue that it is both, and that there is another way of viewing mind-body interaction that doesn’t constrain us to what I believe is a shortsighted debate on both sides. For a moment, let’s step away from the debate and consider what matter is. In this universe there are really only two “types “of things: the fundamental forces and energy. According to Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2, there is mass-energy equivalence. In other words, the mass of an object is simply a measure of its energy content and they are proportional to one another based on the speed of light squared. So anything we call matter is at core energy. Matter is made up of atoms, which have a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons, surrounded by a cloud of electrons. There is the strong nuclear force, which binds the nucleus, and the weak nuclear force that governs the decay of sub-atomic particles. The electrons are bound to the nucleus by the electromagnetic force. These are three of the four fundamental forces, with the force of gravitation that we all know and love rounding out the four.
In any given atom, the nucleus contains 99.9% of the mass of the entire atom. But its diameter is only 1/100,000th of the surrounding electron cloud. Given that the size of the atom is determined by the orbit of the outermost electron (for our purposes) the atom is thus 99.9999999999999% open space. So though we think we see typical objects in the world as “solid,” they actually are not, and the reason one can’t simply move one object into the same space of another is due to the repulsive electromagnetic forces of electrons in each object. In fact, it is electromagnetic forces that keep us from slipping through a chair when we sit on it. What we see is the aggregate on the macro scale, whereas at the atomic scale, the world looks completely different and behaves completely different (at the quantum level) from what we normally see. Now as this relates to the subject of the material vs. the immaterial, let’s grant that the four fundamental forces we discussed above are indeed “material.” They may be material, but nonetheless, we can’t see them. They are forces operating under (ostensibly) natural laws that are invisible to us. But how can something invisible act on something material? Forces act at a distance, but how do they act at a distance with no “physical” connections between them? Even Newton declined to attempt to explain how gravity worked. He could only describe it with mathematical equations, but he couldn’t say how it worked or why it works the way it does. The same is true today.
Now the four fundamental forces don’t have intelligence. They simply act according to some set of laws and don’t vary. But what if there were otherwise invisible forces that actually do behave intelligently? The four fundamental laws may not be intelligent within and of themselves, but somehow they do exist and the mathematical equations that describe them are often called “beautiful” by physicists not only because of their simplicity but also because of the perceived ability that these fundamental forces have shaped the universe that we call home. So wouldn’t it be reasonable to posit that if we can have unintelligent, invisible forces, then we could also have an intelligent, organizing force also invisible with the creative activity to provide the organizational structure undergirding unintelligent fundamental forces as well as the matter that these forces influence? Thus, that organizational force would be able to interact with matter in the same manner as the four fundamental forces, exerting its will on the universe as it sees fit. It would uphold and support the universe for its own purposes, including the powers it has given to the fundamental forces that do the “grunt” work of dealing with matter based on a set of established laws created by the intelligent force.
The force of gravity, as demonstrated by Einstein in his general theory of relativity, is a geometric property of space and time. He actually didn’t believe gravity was a force at all but is a distortion of space-time (rather, the “fourth dimension”). Gravity influences the passage of time by dilating it, causing observers that are measuring time in regions of gravitational potential to see time advance differently. The closer the observer is to the gravitational potential, the more slowly time passes for that observer. So even if gravity is not a force as Einstein asserted, but is simply a curve in space-time, it adds another dimension to the universe that we experience. It is a dimension that we can’t see, but a dimension that has known effects on us. So again, we have something that is not visible, in a dimension beyond three-dimensional space, having a causal effect in the universe. Therefore, I believe the argument that immaterial substances cannot have a causal effect on material substances is an utterly foolish argument to make because first, we don’t know what it means to be “immaterial” in the first place, and second, whether you believe the fundamental forces are material or immaterial they’re still invisible, have causal powers, and so it makes no fundamental difference whether they are material or not. So if there is an organizing force or dimension, then we can accept that it makes no difference if it is material or not.
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