Mind before chicken before matter before egg?

The Secret History of the World, by Jonathon Black, is a book I’ve been looking at in bookshops for a while, and I picked up a copy to stuff in my pocket for holiday reading since it at 550 odd pages it looked like a book that might last a few days. I think I may like some of it, but in his early discussions about mind and matter and physics and metaphysics he gets a bit tied up in a chicken and egg argument about being and existence and God.

Black points out nicely enough, that in old, religious or pre-modern views of the universe, mind was there before matter, and matter is the product of mind – in this case, the reflection of the mind of God. (Black uses the G word, not me). he points out that in our modern world view, this has been supplanted by a world view in which matter comes before mind – there is no God, the universe comes from the ‘Big Bang’ and consciousness evolves later. Black’s problem with this is that science cannot explain how consciousness evolves, which is fair enough so far but seems to exclude the possibility that science may explain this in the future. In fact, the work on robotics by Kevin Warwick which he does discuss seems to point towards a possible explanation of the evolution of consciousness in the not too distant future, a development which would tie in the the ideas of Singularity advocates like Vernor Vinge or Ray Kurzweil whom Black seems to slide past.

While the mind before matter or matter before mind models which he offers for the two worldviews is very elegant, I have a bigger problem with it. He gives away before it the important point that time is irrelevant before matter exists, since time is simply another dimension for measuring the location of matter in the space-time continuum. Fair enough, so far so good – in fact a great deal of modern physics and ancient metaphysics only make sense if all time is simultaneous anyway. However, if time is irrelevant, why does Black bother arguing about the mind of God coming before matter and creating it? Since it seems his whole book is geared towards advocating a mind before matter metaphysics, this is a bit of a glaring hole right up front, at least to me.

He does have a nice phrase a little farther on, when he says: “Ancient philosophy of the kind we will be exploring in this book explains how our experience of the universe comes to be as it is.” (his italics) I like this, but I would suggest it would run equally well if we had it like this “The humanities disciplines help explain how our experience of the universe comes to be as it is.” My version is very different – Black’s depends solely on ‘Ancient philosophy’ whereas mine allows for the ongoing exploration of the evolving human condition as well as ancient philosophy.

I can see how this book is popular, but I can see myself adding in plenty of marginal criticisms as I go along.