The Verticality of Intellect

We continue our series of posts reviewing Dr Wolfgang Smith's 2019 monumental monograph: Physics & Vertical Causation, the End of Quantum Reality. (Angelico Press, 2019, also available on Amazon Kindle)

For further reading on this and related material, see the Philos-Sophia Initiative website.

The last section of Chapter 4 moves from visual perception to the intellect, the so-called ''eye of the soul'' by which we see. Recalling that Descartes proposed a world consisting of res extensae and res cogitantes, Smith notes how disciples of this Cartesian bifurcation viewed the world as a single gigantic mechanism. It was for them a natural progression to assume that man too is also a mechanism, whose intellectual capacities must result from cerebral machinery.

He then presents a history of the development of this assumption.

c. 1900 : Ramón y Cajal identifies the neuron. (1852-1934, Nobel Prize in 1906)

Alan Turing aged 16 [Public Domain]

1936 : Alan Turing (1912-1954) conceives the ''Turing machine'', capable of executing every conceivable algorithm by means of a ''program'' in the ''software'' part of the machine.


Scientists assume that the human brain functions like a computer and that human intelligence is consequently algorithmic.




Smith then produces his surprise witness.

1933 : Kurt Gödel disproved the above assumption ''with mathematical rigour'' by proving the existence of true but unprovable propositions. I refer readers interested in the technical details of this proof to the relevant section of Chapter 4. The intelligence which enables us to see or understand the proof, for example, of a theorem, is non-algorithmic. The intellect ''sees the point'' instantaneously. The intellect is a power of the soul, it operates beyond the temporal and spatial domains; the intellectual or cognitive act is in Smith's sense, therefore, a vertical act.

To be continued.

In our next post, we reveal how Dr Smith calls on us to jettison Galilean, Cartesian and Newtonian assumptions, so as to become philosophically literate once again...