3 Jan 2018

Max Planck on dualism and creation

As a postscript to two-miracles, here is Max Planck on dualism and creation. Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum theory.
He posed the mind-body question in this way in Where is Science Going?:
This is one of man's oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature's laws?
I don’t think he would have agreed with John Searle!

Although he did not believe in a personal God, he seems to have taken a dualist and supernaturalist approach to the creation of the universe, judging by his writing in The New Science:
As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clearheaded science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about the atoms this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. … We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.

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