magdes12

The implications that unfold from Parmenides' simple
point that 'what is is and what is not is not' constitute
a logical swamp of contradictions, paradoxes and
strangeness. Neither Parmenides himself, nor Plato,
nor Plotinus, nor any philosopher, up to and including
the philosophers of quantum physics (who have had to
treat quantum implications about reality in some of
the same terms) have solved the logical difficulties.
They agree that the human mind plays an important
role in shaping the world. They disagree about what
the world, or reality, actually consists of - in the same
way that most readers of this essay, at this very
moment of reading, are disagreeing with or muddled
by the propositions about "reality" bobbing up and
down in these pages.
We quite naturally, in this situation, expect science to
help us keep our heads above water. For the past 400
years it has instructed us that reality is constituted by
objects composed of matter or, in a more refined
version, energy. The intangible things of the
unconscious mind, like emotions and thoughts, and
even life itself, result from complex chemical reactions
and exchanges of energy. Invisible and untestable
notions like "the spirit" or "God" do not, in
conventional scientific terms, exist and are not
normally investigated by reputable scientists. In a
sense science has tacitly followed Parmenides' advice
by excluding from its range of investigation what
scientists believe is not.
"Nature will respond in accordance with the theory
with which it is approached," noted the physicist
David Bohm in 1980. If we theorize that the physical
world is real and God is not real, then the physical
universe will seem real to us, whether it is or not. If we
theorize further that the physical world is a
concatenation of essentially inert, lifeless objects, and
that the objects themselves are concatenations of
smaller lifeless objects, and the small objects are
further concatenations of even smaller objects, where
the smallest of all the objects are merely whirling and
creating by their energy, motion and association the
illusion of larger objects, then it will seem that the
universe is essentially a concatenation of inert, lifeless,
meaningless objects. According to Bohm's principle, if
we approach the world as a collection of lifeless
objects, then the universe will respond as a
concatenation of lifeless objects.
This is exactly what modern science, as it is
commonly practiced and understood, has found.
According to one highly refined mathematical
understanding of the physical nature of the universe
which accounts for the properties of matter and
antimatter and the universal law of the conservation of
energy, the total energy in the universe is zero. Or
more tangibly, every object, with only one or two
exceptions, that astronomers have studied in space has
been assumed or proven to be inert and lifeless. Even
the Viking biology experiments on the surface of Mars,
which were very hopefully designed, ended up to be at
best ambiguous, but in the judgment of most
scientists, nearly conclusively negative: most agree
that there is no evidence of anything alive on Mars.

We assume Mars is, like the rest of the extraterrestrial
universe, lifeless. Maybe there will be evidence of life
on Titan, but given the scientific assumption that the
universe is composed of lifelessness, the prospects are
not good. More likely, the robot space probes will find
nothing on Titan, either.
It begins to look like conventional science has not
really followed Parmenides' advice. Parmenides said
that" to think and to be are one and the same." What
comes into being and goes out of being - in other
words prakriti, nature, material reality - is not what is.
Science's objects of study, the concatenations of the
material universe, are the fluctuating components of
the world of becoming. Science is engaged, from this
point of view, in the massive analysis of an illusion.
Some eminent scientists have addressed this
proposition obliquely, by suggesting that science's
range might be limited. Arthur Eddington pointed out
that science examines only one aspect - the material
aspect - of all that exists, and that other aspects of
existence cannot be understood or even approached
with scientific methods. He gives the lucid example of
the impossibility of science ever explaining what is
funny in a joke. His point is that in some unknown
way, reality does not inhere solely in material
substance. There is another range of reality.
But scientists like Eddington have not set the main
course for science as it is popularly understood,
practiced and utilized. We commonly think of science
as the answer to all our troubles and questions, which
we in turn think of as primarily material. Your
intuition that God might exist is, for example, a
psychological impulse; your psychology is a product of
complex, highly-evolved chemical and electrical
actions in your brain. That is to say, your intuition,
like your whole existence, is an illusion. It is not what
is, and since what is not cannot be, it is essentially
nothing.
Parmenides flatly states:

That Nothingness exists will never break through.
Withhold your mind from that way of inquiry.
But don't let fashion force you to travel
the empirical road either
using the blind eye for instrument
the ringing ear and the tongue*

To Parmenides, reality is your intuition and thought,
not the illusions of sight and sound and crafty verbal
manipulation. Parmenides' advice was to approach
nature with the theory that what is is. Maya and
prakriti are only appearances; the timeless qualities
which manifest themselves as thought or mind, shape
the world as we perceive it. Nature responds in
accordance with the theory with which it is
approached. If the material world is all, then all is
nothing. This cannot be. No information comes back
from this way.
* * *
(*Quotations of Parmenides are from Parmenides and Empedocles: The Fragments in
Verse Translation, Stanley Lombardo, trans., Grey Fox Press, 1982.)