The reality of our reality has shown us matter as a part that occupies a space, a volume made up of parts that interact with each other, but do not feel. The philosopher Christian de Quincey comes to say the opposite in his latest essay.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Einstein formulated an equation that showed us that energy can be obtained from matter. E=mc². Beautiful, simple and symmetrical in its interpretation, the aforementioned formula presents matter as the rebellion of nothing against itself, that is, a ghostly empty space that, taken in very small quantities, can give large amounts of energy, which leads to open the gates of hell with the use of the atomic bomb.
With Einstein’s formula, matter begins to be understood in a different way, no longer as a thing but as an energetic event, a fluid of energy that maintains its apparently solid appearance. The latter is important, since its solid appearance is due to the stability of the energy pattern it contains, and its instability is due to the degree of disorder. With these things, the doctor of philosophy Christian de Quincey presents us with an essay entitled essential nature (Atalanta), a book that is a journey through the centuries and where science and philosophy complement each other.
His reflections, always accurate, do not remain in the macrocosm, but reach microscopic dimensions, let’s say invisible, to demonstrate that relativity and quantum theory are not as antagonistic as Einstein suggested, but that both handle the common attribute of the verb, of action. Because both the matter that is identified with energy in the visible world and the elementary particles of the atomic world are events, relationships of events in continuous expansion.
Matter, for Christian de Quincey, has a soul and, for this reason, it is inconceivable that consciousness originated from something inert and impenetrable, something that only has qualities that can be observed from the outside. To illustrate that matter is sentient, Christian de Quincey gives as an example the theories of the North American philosopher Ken Wilber, who manages to reconcile Hegelian philosophical cosmology and all its idealistic content with the scientific theory of chaos.
For Wilber, the fundamental unit of all reality has little or nothing to do with the exposure to which physics has accustomed us with its elementary particles, but rather it is a structure formed from relationships between what he himself has called like holon. This structure is, in turn, a whole and a part, that is, on the one hand it participates in a larger whole while, on the other hand, it is a whole made up of smaller holons. In this way, reality has a structure of graded levels, a hierarchy of sentient realities that shape the reality of the world.
It is pleasant to immerse oneself in the pages of an essay of this type where the cosmic journey is assured since it leaves behind the Cartesian definition of matter as an extension in space and internalizes it until it expresses the flesh of the world and its heartbeat, following a invisible thread that links Tales of Miletus and his experience of electromagnetic attraction with lodestone and amber, and that reaches our days with the aforementioned Wilber or with the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead whose philosophy of the process teaches us that the mind thrives on change.
We live in times of mental malnutrition and books like this help us to stay well fed, as they remind us that sentience is a metaphysical quality of matter and that is something that is not eaten every day.
the stone ax it is a section where Montero Glez, with prose will, exerts his particular siege on scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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