Why Physics Does Not Inform the Human Condition, But Its Boundaries Do

Abstract

The science of physics has been extremely successful over the last four centuries, mainly for one reason: It does everything it can to disregard anything that has to do with non-physical parts of reality. Although the human body is a physical body, large parts of what distinguishes human beings, sometimes briefly called the human condition, does not belong to the physical domain. This implies that physics (and other sciences of the material universe) offers nothing more than self-imposed helplessness when it comes to questions as to what it means to be human. Yet it is possible to scrutinize the way in which physics (and other sciences) is delineated from the rest of reality: to reconsider its boundaries as they were set about four centuries ago. In other words, it is possible to look for features within the physical that are related to something outside the physical which physics itself ignores. The key concept to do so is proposed to be meaning, in its two variants of reference and sense. Meaning provides a viable perspective to illuminate the deep structure of reality as it extends beyond physics and across its boundaries.

1 Thinking Substance, Extended Substance

In the night from November 10 to 11, 1619, close to the German city of Ulm, the French soldier René Descartes had a series of dreams nested into one another.¹ According to virtually all biographers of Descartes, these dreams were of key influence for his future philosophical insights and achievements. Waking up the morning of November 11, he was left with the haunting question of how he could ever know for sure whether he was indeed awake or still dreaming. Major parts of his philosophy were motivated by this crucial question of how to reliably distinguish between dream and reality, including the most fundamental issue of the reality of his own existence. Descartes’ solution of the problem is reflected in his famous cogito ergo sum, one of the most-cited quotations of European philosophy.

Roughly speaking, this solution rests on Descartes’ proposal to distinguish material and mental domains of reality, leading to Cartesian dualism as an essential part of his philosophy. Of course, this dualistic stance does not characterize his thinking exhaustively. Descartes’ philosophical writings are very rich, they are partially incoherent, and they cover much more than the split of matter and mind. Nevertheless, it is correct to speak of a “Cartesian" distinction at least insofar as some of Descartes’ successors, notably those who contributed to the development of physics and other natural sciences, compactified and simplified Descartes’ thoughts considerably. For this reason the notion of a Cartesian distinction, or Cartesian cut (Primas, 1993), should be considered as a central notion of Cartesian dualism.

Since Descartes’ time, the mind-matter distinction turned out to be an extremely powerful tool for reducing the arbitrariness inherent in the allegorical and speculative schemes of late scholasticism and neo-Platonism; it provided the possibility of a rational, consistent description of reality. In Descartes’ (1897) terminology, the Cartesian distinction splits the entirety of reality into a material component (res extensa) and a non-material component (res cogitans). These labels, literally translated, characterize the realms of “extended substance" and “thinking substance”. The notion of extension in res extensa refers to the fact that material reality is extended in its spatial location and in its temporal duration (although Descartes himself did not put much emphasis on the latter). The notion of cognition in res cogitans is probably best interpreted as conscious mental activity in general rather than “thinking" in the narrow sense of cognitive capabilities.

Ironically, Descartes’ move to carve out the physical against the mental was a byproduct, as it were, of his primary motivation to find out how to achieve a certain ground of knowledge in a life governed by uncertainty and ambiguity. His solution, expressed by the cogito argument, was that he can doubt everything except the fact that it is him who doubts. (That’s why the cogito should actually be a dubito.) While, in this way, Descartes actually emphasized the primacy of the mental over the physical, today’s mainstream in the philosophy of science posits the opposite. Physicalism, reductive or non-reductive, is the doctrine that “basically” everything in nature depends on its physical substrate: roughly, the idea is that consciousness will be understood as soon as brain activity is understood.

After all, the Cartesian cut is a conceptual boundary between a material and a mental domain of reality. This is of central significance for the worldview Western science and philosophy have developed. On the other hand it is obvious that this cut is actually a conceptual tool—it is itself not an object in the material world. Although Descartes himself may have thought he had discovered the cut as an ontological fact together with the realms it separates, it is today much more appropriate to say that he invented it. So the question arises as to whether there might be alternative frameworks of thinking reducing the significance of the Cartesian distinction, or even avoiding it completely, at least in its rigorous interpretation of a prescribed and impenetrable boundary.

This question receives additional motivation by the fact that each scientific theory or model is an element of the mental domain of reality which refers to objects in the material domain of concrete and empirical facts. The corresponding relation of reference is crucial for the possibility to check the validity of a theory or a model. Reference relations of this kind express the interpretation or, more colloquially, the meaning of conceptual terms in the mental domain with respect to objects in the material domain. In this sense they are relations across the Cartesian cut.

As will become clear in the following, the present essay points toward a way to go beyond Cartesian dualism using an alternative framework that has been dubbed dual-aspect monism. Dual-aspect monism posits the mental and the physical as two aspects of one underlying domain of reality which is neutral with respect to the distinction of the aspects, i.e. it is psychophysically neutral. A more comprehensive and more detailed account of this approach is due to Atmanspacher and Rickles (2022).

2 Boundaries of the Physical

2.1 The Map Is Not the Territory

If one does not want to join in with hard-core physicalist positions claiming that basically the physical world is all there is, one has to accept other domains of reality which are somehow separate from the physical. Revisiting Descartes again, the mental domain is a primary candidate, even if it is not posited as an ontological reality. Any theory or model of the physical world that the human mind sets up is itself not part of that physical world but consists of elements of mental thoughts, categories, representations, etc. (Needless to say, the mental also contains affects, motivations, wishes, desires, and other non-cognitive faculties.)

Physical theories are maps that describe the territory of the physical world, but they are not to be identified with that world. As Korzybski (1933) stated it illustratively; the map is not the territory. A mental representation of something non-mental is called transparent if the subject working with that representation does not distinguish it from what it represents. This characterizes a kind of “naive” realism that mistakes signs for the designated. If representations are opaque enough, this mistake can be avoided, and self and world are recognized as distinct from one another. And yet they are connected by the relation that the notion of a representation indicates.

Yet they are connected: this is crucial! If they were not, no model or theory would refer to anything in the physical world, and nothing in the physical world could be mentally represented. Take the equations of motion of classical mechanics in their most elegant Hamiltonian form:

$$\begin{aligned}{} & {} {dq\over dt} = {\partial H\over \partial p} = \{q, H\}\\{} & {} {dp\over dt} = - {\partial H\over \partial q} = \{p, H\} \end{aligned}$$

These equations are a model, a mental construct, and their elements refer to something in the physical world; q and p are position and momentum of a rigid body, H is its total (kinetic plus potential) energy, $d \over dt$ is the temporal derivative, $\partial \over \partial p$ the partial derivative with respect to momentum, and ${\partial \over \partial q}$ the partial derivative with respect to position. The brackets on the right hand side are so-called Poisson brackets, expressing deep (and beautiful) symmetry relations between canonically conjugate variables such as position and momentum.²

The relation between (the solutions of) Hamilton’s equations and the mechanical behavior of rigid bodies is a relation across the Cartesian cut, the boundary between the mental and the physical. While the concrete behavior of the bodies is a matter of physical observation, the equations of motion are something that resides in the mental system, as a combination of terms and concepts. That equations and behavior are related to one another in an extremely tight fashion has been confirmed in an overwhelming manner by numerous experiments in laboratories as well as in outer space.

The Hamilton equations themselves belong to the domain of mental concepts. And the way they were discovered exhibits all those historical, cultural, social, and psychological features that are characteristic for this domain and its role for the human condition. The intricate interplay of ideas from Newton over Lagrange to Hamilton and the convoluted pathway to the final result is cut off with almost microsurgical precision in our physics papers and textbooks. As Reichenbach (1938) lucidly pointed out, their context of discovery is left to historians of science, only the context of justification (theoretical rigor and empirical validation) becomes part of science.

An interesting case in point is the role of humans for physical experiments. No one doubts that their design, their performance, statistical analysis, and the comparison with theory is all (usually) done by human physicists. However, the fact that these contributions may be of human nature is inconsequential for the way in which the results of experiments are counted in on the body of knowledge that physics is built upon. (This includes the status of human consciousness for quantum measurement, a topic that keeps driving misguided speculations and popular accounts.) The Cartesian cut is designed so “ingeniously” that this is possible without harmful impact on the science itself.³

In recent decades the boundary between the physical and the mental has made its way to a top level problem in the study of consciousness, addressed as what it is like to be in a given conscious state (Nagel, 1974), as the explanatory gap (Levine, 1983) or as the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995). The key point here is that there is nothing in the physical domain that corresponds to or explains the phenomenal quality of the experience of being in a particular conscious mental state. For physicalists, at least those of the reductive brand, this means that they either have to deny any genuine existence of mental states or give up on physicalism.

Giving up on physicalism means to accept that physics has a boundary, however it may look like. In other words, this means that there are relations between elements within the physical domain and elements outside of it, here in the mental domain. These relations are relations across the Cartesian cut, the boundary #1 of physics. Can we say more about them, for instance how to understand them in more detail? Yes we can, and I will come back to this in Sect. 3.

2.2 The Reasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Sciences

On 11 May 1959, Eugene Wigner, one of the eminent mathematical physicists of the 20th century, gave the Richard Courant lecture in mathematical sciences at New York University about “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences” (Wigner 1960). In this lecture Wigner says that “the miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve”. The question of whether we deserve the gift has many aspects, and this is not the place to dwell on them. But let us turn to its understanding. In the tradition of mathematical Platonism,⁴ the mathematical structures and their truthfulness are something that is independent of both their mental representation and their capability of describing physical processes.

Roughly speaking, mathematics provides ordering structures that underlie both their discovery by mathematicians and their applicability to the physical world. Mathematical structures themselves are neither mental nor physical, they are psychophysically neutral. Yet, since they can be represented in both the mental and the physical, there seems to be a relationship to those domains. This relationship can be seen as boundary #2 of the physical: the boundary against the psychophysically neutral domain of mathematical ordering structures.

For instance, the mathematical structure underlying Hamilton’s equations of motion exhibits symmetries, i.e. invariances under transformations, that—in the experience of talented mathematicians—express a high degree of beauty. These structures are outside both the mental and the physical, although they are formulated in the mental domain and refer to the behavior of objects in the physical domain. It is not easy to demonstrate the power of these psychophysically neutral structures to the uninoculated. Let me nevertheless give it a try, and then I’ll stop and move on.

Remember the Poisson brackets governing the time evolution of systems in Hamiltonian mechanics, which yield identity for canonically conjugate variables, such as $\{q, p\} = 1$. Remarkably, the same structure has been found about a hundred years later to underlie quantum mechanics, where Poisson brackets of canonically conjugate variables turn into canonical commutation relations, such as $[Q, P] = i\hbar$. Here, Q and P are operators representing position and momentum in a suitable operator algebra, i is the imaginary unit $\sqrt{-1}$, and $\hbar$ is the Planck action h divided by $2\pi$ (the quantum of action that gave quantum theory its name). It is evident that the mathematical structures underlying classical and quantum models share a strong similarity, yet they refer to very different domains of the physical world.

Where does this fantastic relationship between physics and mathematics come from? And how can it be characterized? Atmanspacher and Rickles (2022, Sect. 7) proposed some arguments against Wigner’s thesis that the relation be miraculous and unreasonably effective, which will be picked up in Sect. 4. At this point, let me just indicate that the discussion of relations across the physical-mental boundary and of relations across the physical-psychophysically neutral boundary have a common denominator. Both of them may be substantiated by meaning, although different versions of meaning. The following section will introduce these different versions.

3 Correlations and Their Substantiation

3.1 Causal and Acausal Correlations

Before talking about meaning itself, however, a brief introduction about relations in general is expedient. Relations between A and B are typically expressed by correlations which, in scientific contexts, can be evaluated statistically. This is possible because, in science generally and in physics in particular, variables are valuated quantitatively, so statistiscs can be applied to the numbers that are results of measurements.

If scientists see a correlation between variables, their immediate reflex is to look for a causal explanation of that correlation. A correlation’s substance is causal if either A causes B,  or B causes A, or A and B have a common cause, or A and B (and possibly more) cause a joint effect.⁵ In these cases we say that the correlation is substantiated by causation, and usually a causal model is developed to account for it. Such causal models require that causes have to precede their effects in time, which is not always easy to realize. For instance complex networks with many nodes and recurrent dynamics often do not permit a clear assignment of what causes what. If no causal model can be found, correlations may still be statistically significant, but they are then declared as accidental or spurious, i.e. as chance correlations.

Now there are situations in which correlations are not diachronic, they do not extend over time, but they are synchronic. In such cases it is pointless to look for causal substantiation because the measured correlation shows no time dependence. For instance, the temperature of some liquid is correlated with the square of the mean kinetic energy of the molecules of the liquid, but this correlation is obviously not one that connects different points in time. Rather, it connects different levels of description in an acausal fashion.

One very special kind of acausal correlation within the same level of description deserves particular attention: the correlation between measurements of variables of an entangled quantum system at different locations. This is a distinctive feature of quantum theory, and it was the target of the 2022 Nobel award in physics to John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger. The acausal and nonlocal character of entanglement correlations is a—if not the—most distinguishing feature of quantum theory. It shows that the local realism pervading the rest of physics does not hold in the quantum domain.

Still, quantum nonlocality can be and has been confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt by statistical correlations between numerical results of sophisticated measurements. By contrast, neither the qualitative experience of phenomenal consciousness nor the psychophysically neutral structures of mathematics can be evaluated quantitatively by numbers. They are both paradigm examples of qualities, even though—admittedly—of a different kind.

3.2 Meaning, Reference, Sense

How can a correlation be substantiated if it is not (purely) quantitative? From a philosophical point of view any concept that is relational by definition might be a candidate. In addition, it has to be designed in such a way that it links the domains between which correlations are found or to be expected. An ideal option for the mental-physical link is the concept of meaning, broadly construed. Meaning always links something that means to something that is meant. For instance, a mental representation refers to what it represents; this is its meaning.

Historically, this relation has been introduced with the term “intentionality” by von Brentano (1874), who thought that such reference, or aboutness, is the hallmark of the mental domain.⁶ It is evidently relational: the intentional content of a mental representation refers to what it represents in the physical world. Frege ’s notion of reference in his influential essay “On Sense and Reference” (Frege, 1892) expresses more or less what Brentano called intentionality. Intentionality as reference is a relation across the Cartesian cut, and thus across the boundary #1 of physics.

The correlations across this boundary are meaningful insofar as they express the kind of meaning that is given by Brentano’s intentionality or Frege’s reference. This is the meaning relation between the mental and physical. Since its mental anchor point is a mental representation, such meaning is usually attributed by the subject whose mental state is at stake. Does this imply that the attribution of meaning, certainly subjective to some extent, is also arbitrary? My position is that it is not, but it will take a little while until I come back to unpack this point below.

Meanwhile, here is the other variant of meaning, as Frege (1892) discusses it: sense. While meaning as reference refers to, or is about, something that is meant, sense is the mode in which that something presents itself. Frege’s well-known example is Venus, the referent of morning star and evening star, whereas morning star and evening star are different modes of its presentation: their sense is different. Sense à la Frege has often been interpreted as linguistic meaning and, thus, a philosophy-of-language topic (Dummett, 1973), which remains unaddressed in this essay. But Frege also intended his notion of sense to open up a metaphysical dimension to the concept of meaning. As a relation to a domain that is “even more objective” than the physical: the psychophysically neutral domain of reality.

An example: writing 20+8 is one way to express 28, one mode of presentation as it were, and writing 1+2+4+7+14 is another. What’s the difference? The second version points to the wonderful structure of perfect numbers in number theory. An integer number is perfect if it is the sum of all its divisors (except itself). 6=3+2+1 is the smallest perfect number, 28 is the next (and the next two are 496 and 8128). The second mode of presentation of 28 given above offers a glimpse into one of the many deep and interconnected mysteries of number theory, for instance the relation of perfect numbers to prime numbers.

The key to a proper understanding of both kinds of meaning, sense and reference, is that they are relational. They do not reside within any of the subdomains of reality discussed but they relate them to one another. Frege’s sense is the meaningful relation between those structures that are neither mental nor physical and their manifestations in the mental as well as in the physical. With respect to the former, sense characterizes relations between mathematics (in the Platonic understanding) and our mental representations of it. With respect to the latter, sense characterizes relations across the boundary #2 of physics. Which makes the appearance of mathematical structures in the physical world totally reasonable yet splendidly surprising whenever one of them gets discovered.

3.3 Fields of Meaning

Meaning as reference and meaning as sense are the relational concepts that connect the physical world with the mental features of the human condition and its basis in the psychophysically neutral. Gabriel (2015) has given us an account of meaning that goes even one step further.⁷ Namely, he conceives of meaning as ontologically prior to the domains of reality that I posited as starting points to look for their connections. For Gabriel all objects and events, be they physical, mental, or even ppsychophysically neutral, are excitations, or manifestations, within pre-existing fields of meaning.

In a way, Gabriel’s account puts the conventional approach to discuss meaning relations downside up. Meaning is always already there, even before any rigid body moves, before any thought is thought, and before any mathematical structure is related to another one. The reason why it feels for us as if we discover the meaning of something is, according to Gabriel, that we access a field of meaning (sense or reference) that we were unaware of before. Now, again, the question arises whether the fields of meaning that we may become aware of, which look for us as if we create the meaning, are constrained or arbitrary.

Gabriel and I agree that they are everything else than arbitrary—existing fields of meaning may lead to appropriate or inappropriate attributions of meaning to experienced correlations. Subjects are potentially fallible when they attribute meaning. In the conventional view where meaning as reference connects the mental and the physical, this is quite easy to understand. As mental and physical events are joint manifestations of elements of the psychophysically neutral, these psychophysically neutral elements constrain the range of possible manifestations. Different neutral elements generate different manifestations. And different manifestations are connected by different meanings, they are meaningful in different ways.⁸

Gabriel’s account of fields of meaning as ontologically prior to any objects or events provides yet another argument against the arbitrariness of meaning attributions. If they were arbitrary in principle, irrespective of where they originate from, we would not be able to correct ourselves and converge on getting it right when we got it wrong before. Meaning attribution may also be ambiguous: different fields of meaning may overlap and the meaning that is attributed by different subjects may therefore differ. But again, such ambiguity could be resolvable by recognizing the overlapping fields of meaning.

4 Neither Mental Nor Physical

After all this the question remains how we should understand the psychophysically neutral domain of reality that is neither mental nor physical. One way to conceive it is in terms of mathematical Platonism, a viewpoint that lost prominence in the philosophy of mathematics in the first half of the 20th century but remains emphasized by many first-rate mathematicians, most recently and explicitly by Alain Connes; see Connes et al. (2001) for very insightful discussion. Most mathematical Platonists are excellent mathematicians who report their experiences of insight as literally making contact with another domain of reality which is neither mental nor physical. See also Penrose (1994) for illuminating remarks.

The example of mathematics also shows that psychophysically neutral does not at all mean structureless. On the contrary, the immensely intricate network of mathematical areas, concepts and relationships is full of fine-tuned subtle structures which constrain one another by generalization and specification, by logical implications and hidden symmetries waiting to be unveiled. Not miraculous at all but sure enough wonderful. And needless to repeat: mathematics is not about quantification; its structures are to be understood as mostly qualitative, yet rigorously determined in mutual dependencies.⁹ Mathematics is way beyond performing numerical calculations that a computer could perform as well.

On this view of mathematics, its psychophysically neutral structures are setting the stage for what is possible (and what is impossible) in the mental and in the physical domain; they are a domain of possibilities. In modal accounts, what is possible is not necessary, so possibilities are not actualized by necessity.¹⁰ Yet possibilities are not “just possible”, they are already part of the greater reality of which the physical and the mental are actualized subdomains. See an article by Lindsay (1922), who cogently emphasizes this in more detail.

In this sense, Kierkegaard (1844), in his Concept of Anxiety, speaks of the reality of the possible, when he discusses “anxiety as the vertigo of freedom,... which looks down into its own possibility and grasps the finite to hold fast on it”. A fascinating philosophical account of what happens when an unstable state with many open possibilities relaxes into a stable state in which one of those possibilities is actualized. Clearly, in modern terms this is all about the making of a decision. Another analogy, mutatis mutandis, would be the measurement of a quantum superposition state, which actualizes the value of some measured variable. Both possibility and actuality are real; they are subdomains of that wider reality.

Kant’s conditions for the possibility of experience are another topic that is worth mentioning in this context. He conceived these conditions as synthetic a priori judgments with respect to time, space and causation. For Kant these judgments were necessary and universal conditions for humans to experience anything at all. Today we know that Kant was arguably wrong with their specific formulation. Nevertheless, the idea of such conditions remains unrestrictedly relevant. In the spirit of this essay, it might be speculated that elements of the psychophysically neutral, which is void of spacetime and has no place for (efficient) causation, might be interesting candidates.

Gibson (1979) was among the first to point out that organisms always have to be regarded together with the environment (hence the notion of “ecological psychology”) in which they are embedded. In order to cover what the environment offers to an organism he developed the concept of affordance referring to the possibilities an organism has for the perception of and action in its environment. With this characterization, affordances clearly are to be located beyond the distinction of (mental) perception and (physical) action. As much work in ecological psychology has been conducted since Gibson, the concept of affordance may be the one among the psychophysically neutral concepts that has least “metaphysical” flavor and is closest to empirical research.¹¹

Another route to the psychophysically neutral relies on the concept of archetypes. This concept goes back to Plato, who refers to archetypes as metaphysical ideas underlying all phenomenal appearances. However, that they are called ideas must not be misunderstood in the sense that they are “only” ideas and, hence, unreal. Plato’s archetypal ideas are meant to be the basis of all reality, in some sense more real than everything in our phenomenal world. Later philosophers such as Descartes and Locke used the notion of archetypes in a similar manner.

The psychiatrist Jung picked up on this together with Wolfgang Pauli with their concept of archetypes as ordering structures that manifest themselves as mental and physical objects and processes, respectively, and organize their appearance. A fairly succinct essay sketching the main ideas is due to Jung (1954). The Jungian account of archetypes locates them in the psychophysically neutral domain of the collective unconscious, which does not distinguish between mental and physical. If an activated archetype manifests itself in both the mental and the physical, it constrains the range of meanings that experiencing subjects can attribute as reference relations between mental representations and their physical referents.

If fields of meaning enjoy ontological priority, as outlined in the preceding section, meaning is always already there, even if just in implicit form. Reference (intentionality) is its explicated version. Meaning as sense, as the relation between the psychophysically neutral and its mental and physical offsprings is likewise an explication of implicit meaning. Meaning has a deep structure that plays a fundamental role in the very fabric of reality. On the surface it is attributed by humans, yes, but this attribution is constrained by its deep structure. It may appear partly subjective but it is surely not arbitrary. For pertinent further discussion see Atmanspacher and Rickles (2022).

The godfather of dual-aspect thinking in modern philosophy, Spinoza, conceives the psychophysically neutral as the realm of the divine. His Ethics (Spinoza 1677) presents an account of how he imagines the divine with infinitely many attributes among which humans are only capable of recognizing two: res cogitans and res extensa, about whose structure and dynamics there is nothing infinite.¹² The way in which Spinoza conceives the human condition could not be less anthropocentric: For him all ethics and morality apply to human beings only insofar as they apply sub specie aeternitatis, from the viewpoint of eternity.

Concluding this section: there are a number of viable options to explore the psychophysically neutral domain beyond the mental and the physical, depending on different points of departure: from mathematical structures to possibilities and instabilities, and further to affordances and archetypal patterns. Not to forget the realm of the divine or, as one might prefer to say in contemporary discussion, of the spiritual. In all these options, the psychophysically neutral hosts implicit meaning that is explicated as sense or as reference through its relationship with the mental and the physical.

5 Where Are We Going?

The separation of the physical world from various aspects of the human condition served an enormous progress of science and engineering, which led to a huge body of knowledge about the physical world and resulting techniques, tools, and so forth that apparently make our lives more convenient and less stressful. On the other hand, the very same separation also led to adverse developments which are currently visible in the form of numerous conflicts and crises: politically, socially, economically, environmentally, you name it. Scrutinizing the boundaries of physics (and other sciences) is essential to recognize that this separation is artificial and can be overcome.

There are some key demands that go along with this project. A particularly obvious one among them is to prioritize qualitative growth over quantitative growth, e.g. to re-assess the dominating status of the gross domestic product as the one and only measure of prosperity. Another one: technical progress often turns out inimical if its effects are only taken into account with an eye on technology alone, not to humanity full scope. For instance, the compulsively pushed urge for ever more digitalization is deeply ambiguous: it brings about benefits, but major mischief is clearly visible as well. In this overall context, a seminal contribution about how to move from a “shallow ecology”, which is (at best) capable of curing symptoms, to a deep ecology that focuses on the causes of the disease is due to Naess (1977).

Under the pressure of an ever-growing trend toward instabilities in our public and private lives that we witness today, it will become increasingly insane to look away and shirk the need of facing them explicitly. Yet the traditional strategy of trying to stabilize unstable situations using tools that actually were instrumental to produce such situations must be recognized as questionable, sometimes perhaps even detrimental. As the scientist and humanist Albert Einstein cautioned us more than 70 years ago, we won’t be able to resolve the significant problems of our times at the same level of awareness we were at when we created them. Future technical gadgets may not always be the best tools of choice to correct technical disasters deriving from the past.

Whatever it is beyond science and engineering that may be meant by the human condition,¹³ I do think that releasing and mobilizing the human potential,¹⁴ the capability of humans to develop novel aptitudes and skills to cope with themselves and their environment, is a most important component of it. It must be regretted that this component is culpably disregarded and understudied as of today. Recognizing meaning as the substance of the relationships that science has across its boundaries—the same boundaries that make it work so successfully—gives us reason to believe that there is a greater reality, ignored by science and engineering, for which an advanced kind of enlightenment becomes possible.

Such enlightenment is significantly shaped by the boundaries of physics (and other sciences) discussed in this essay. They open up fields of metaphysical research without thereby in any way violating the expressive, explanatory and predictive powers of physics. On the contrary, the fact that relations between the mental, the physical, and their underlying psychophysically neutral ground are steeped in meaning and, thus, in the human condition, is crucial for understanding the success of science in the first place

If meaning and its deep structure are fundamental for the very fabric of all reality over and above (and underneath) the physical, then all kinds of values associated with it should be given the same fundamental status. Putting it bluntly, meaning is here, there, and everywhere. It is not just invented by human beings; rather, we have to (allow ourselves to) recognize it. Here is a deliberately selective list of features of the human potential for which meaning is essential: being and belief, self and society, music and morality, courage and charity, reason and respect, intuition and insight, dignity and dedication, humor and humility, love and liberation.

Nedless to say, each one of these features deserves their own treatise, which is obviously beyond the scope of this essay. They apply to all of reality and everything in it, a network of actors who can only survive together if they find suitable ways to conducively cooperate in the great drama of existence. Understanding the deep structure of meaning in this way may provide a viable perspective to better understand this overall reality, so to conceive and perform action in accordance with that understanding.