Many have suggested that consciousness, in some form, must be a fundamental aspect of reality. As a result, during the twentieth century, an ever-increasing number of scientists and thinkers began to give due consideration to the nature and role of consciousness. Quantum theory challenged that paradigm at its very foundation by asserting that consciousness cannot be ignored while investigating matter because it interacts with matter. They promoted the simplistic notion that the mind is what the brain does. Science could not explain consciousness via reductionist biology and mechanistic physics therefore, they either ignored it or explained it away as an illusion or epiphenomenon. I will point out a few of those below.Ĭonsciousness was ignored by the mainstream hard sciences and psychology at the beginning to the twentieth century. Likewise, many people are simply unaware of the increasing number of scientists and thinkers who are breaking out of the pre-twentieth-century, materialist, reductionist box and arguing that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality. They mistakenly assume such a concept necessarily invokes a supernatural divinity akin to those of traditional monotheistic religions. Unfortunately, many people tend to recoil, almost reflexively, from the concept of a conscious cosmos because it entails some form of intelligence that preexists human consciousness. Further, according to Plutarch, Chrysippus asserted, “physical theory turns out to be ‘at once before and behind’ ethics.” As I have written before, the conscious and providential cosmos is the soul of the Stoic philosophical system. Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoa, argued that universal nature is the source of our knowledge of virtue, good and evil, and happiness. More importantly, Stoic practice relies on the interrelated nature of physics and ethics. First, despite the objections offered by those who adhere to the metaphysical assumptions of the current scientific orthodoxy, there is no objective scientific reason to abandon the conscious cosmos of Stoicism. Traditional Stoics, consider the traditionally held theory of a conscious cosmos a necessary element of the holistic Stoic system. Many now suggest consciousness must be a fundamental aspect of the cosmos some refer to a mind-like background in the universe a few boldly claim the universe is conscious, just as the Stoic did more than two thousand years ago. However, numerous modern scientists and philosophers describe the nature of the cosmos in ways which are quite compatible with the intuitions of the ancient Stoics. Some people think the idea of a conscious cosmos is an antiquated relic of the ancient Stoics that must be abandoned to modernize Stoicism. The doctrine that the world is a living being, rational, animate and intelligent, is laid down by Chrysippus in the first book of his treatise On Providence, by Apollodorus in his Physics, and by Posidonius… And it is endowed with soul, as is clear from our several souls being each a fragment of it.
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