The more a learn, the more I agree with Max Planck, the originator of quantum theory, ‘I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness’. Planck M. Consciousness matters. The Observer, January 25, 1931, as cited in Radin, 2013, p. 311.
Not that uncommon at times, back then.
Erwin Schrodinger:
"The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence." --
What is Life? Mind and Matter
Well into the first half of the 20th century there were physicists and other researchers still influenced by the positivist and Neo-Kantian movements which developed in philosophy of science during the 19th century (with Comte's and Mach's strains eventually overtaken by logical positivism). These earlier assorted thinkers and scientists were "materialists" [quote1a below] in the sense of accepting the mechanistic relationships and causal interdependence of experienced phenomena, and the appearance of empirical objects as being bodies extended in space and changing through time. But they were not materialists in the transcendent sense, and this is the "ideological treason" which Lenin [quote2 below] disparaged in connection to Marxists who were heavily influenced by Ernst Mach. They were not "proper" materialists who firmly believed that the characteristics of "physical stuff" extended beyond the qualitative experiences and the ideas / abstractions of thought.
The Copenhagen Interpretation, as a product of that era, is often regarded as an attempt to avoid a metaphysical stance or realism about ontological claims concerning quantum physics. But this changed with the collapse of logical positivism in the 1950s and 1960s, and its replacement by seemingly polar opposite rivals like postmodernism and scientific realism. After that, doors accordingly opened better for other QM interpretations and an influx of mathematically concocted items like string theory, holographic principle, etc.
Both David Hume's [quote 1b] and Ernst Mach's later version of "phenomenalism" were epistemological attempts to be "philosophically neutral" [or dodge pretended knowledge] about any transcendent existence that was minus the representations and organizing principles of consciousness and intellect. Rather than the occasionally misconstrued, additional endorsement of a purely experiential existence devouring everything or a certainty that "things in themselves" were not the case.
Note that Hermann Helmholtz [quote 3], a forefather of Neo-Kantianism, like so many others, misunderstood Kant's "noumenal world" / things-in-themselves as referring to the "external world" (as if the one of perception and commonsense, investigated by science, is not already that). As Kant writes in the
Critique of Pure Reason, there are two usages for "outside us": One referring to the transcendent and the other to the exhibited environment of extrospection (or outer sense). Only the latter [in the context of Kant's empirical realism] is made real by it being verifiable / presented in space and time. IOW, it is the phenomenal / empirical world which actually received the "real" status, the one we live in consciousness-wise. Aside from that, Helmholtz did nail that a domain of "things in themselves" is only necessitated by our principle of causation, extended to where it may not be applicable. Ernst Mach dismissed the former as "superfluous" for scientific explanation (since in that methodology phenomena are internally used as explanations for each other in the widest and complex system of self-referencing circularity perhaps imaginable: the universe, or nature).
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[1a] EDWARD S. REED:
[Thomas Henry] Huxley, like all the other scientists in the group--and like almost all scientists in Europe or America at the that time--was not a [metaphysical] materialist, despite his belief in the progress of mechanistic physiology. He argued in two directions: one from the external phenomena of science (say, the data of physiology) and the other from introspective phenomena (for example, our belief in free will). He was inclined to believe that most (or all) introspectively revealed phenomena would prove to be caused by externally revealed ones. But in any event he was a phenomenalist, arguing that what is real is phenomena. If the soul (or the unconscious) is not real, it is because it is not part of the phenomenal world.
This panphenomenalism was widely labeled positivism when it was propounded by scientists. In the loosely defined meandering of the term, positivism dominated the European intellectual scene from approximately 1870 to 1890. Yet that type of positivism is inherently unstable when applied to psychology. The externalist (physiological) analysis of behavior and mind attributes all psychological states to antecedent causes. Introspective analysis reveals both intuitions of freedom and the appearance of autonomous psychological states. The two seem irreconcilable.
Matter for Huxley was just what it was for Mach or Hertz: a set of phenomenal observations made by scientists. It is thus remarkable but true that the most reviled "materialists" of the 1880s--Huxley, Tyndall, and Clifford--were all phenomenalists of sort or another and not materialists at all.
The positivist impulse gave new life to a variety of panphenomenalism, one whose adherents were surprisingly uncritical about the analysis of those allegedly basic mental phenomena, sensations. Thus, thinkers as different in outlook and interests as Huxley and Mach, Taine and Spencer, Wundt and Lewes all agreed that the basic "data" on which all science was to built were sensations. --
From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology
[1b]
Panphenomenalism: David Hume (1711-1776) formulated the theory of Panphenomenalism. He denied the existence of all ultimate reality (metaphysical reality), accepting as valid data only those things experienced as sense impressions; in other words, he asserted that existence is limited to phenomena, which are objects, not of reason, but of experience. By rejecting the idea of cause and soul as substances, he eliminated the entire problem of interaction. Hume concluded that events depend upon merely repetitious or sequential activities; that nothing in the universe is ever created, or caused to act, by anything else; and that reality consists only of a series of phenomena appearing in a temporal order. --
Ideas of the Great Philosophers; by William S. Sahakian & Mabel Lewis Sahakian
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[2] V.I. Lenin:
"That Ernst Mach is the most popular representative of empirio-criticism today is universally acknowledged in philosophical literature . . . . The materialists, we are told, recognise something unthinkable and unknowable -- "things-in-themselves" -- matter "outside of experience" and outside of our knowledge. They lapse into genuine mysticism by admitting the existence of something beyond, something transcending the bounds of "experience" and knowledge. When they say that matter, by acting upon our sense-organs, produces sensations, the materialists take as their basis the "unknown," nothingness; for do they not themselves declare our sensations to be the only source of knowledge? The materialists lapse into "Kantianism" (Plekhanov, by recognising the existence of "things-in-themselves," i.e., things outside of our consciousness); they "double" the world and preach "dualism," for the materialists hold that beyond the appearance there is the thing-in-itself; beyond the immediate sense data there is something else, some fetish, an "idol," an absolute, a source of "metaphysics," a double of religion ("holy matter," as Bazarov says). Such are the arguments levelled by the Machians against materialism, as repeated and retold in varying keys by the afore-mentioned writers. --
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
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[3] Nadeem J. Z. Hussain:
Thus, “what the recent physiology of the senses has shown by the way of experience is what Kant had tried to show for the representations of the human mind in general when he laid out the participation of the particular, built-in rules of the mind, the organization of the mind as it were, in our representations” (Helmholtz 1855, 58). Helmholtz thinks the confirmation of Kant goes further. The only way to get from the “world of sensations” to the “world of reality”, the “external world”, is through an inference. We infer that there is an external world because there has to be a “cause of our nerve excitations because there can be no effect without cause.” But, Helmholtz asks, “How do we know that there is no effect without a cause?” This is not a principle we could learn from experience since it is the principle we need in place before we can come to any conclusions about the world including the conclusion that cause follows effect. Thus, “the investigation of sensory perception also leads us to what Kant had already recognized, namely that the principle, ‘No effect without cause’, is a law of our thought given before all experience” (Helmholtz 1855, 77). --
Friedrich Albert Lange; SEP entry
