From Rick Bradford
I suspect the discomfort that most people feel at the notion that they are “just” their physical brain is due to an insufficient respect for matter (30 November, p 30).
Physicists know that matter isn’t the lumpen stuff we usually take it for. The closer you look at matter the more it dissolves before your eyes.
Mass, the quantification of stuff, is actually the field energy generated by the Higgs or gluon fields. And it may be that the fundamental particles will ultimately be understood as purely geometrical entities. Thus physics edges ever closer to idealism, the idea that reality is immaterial in nature.
So people shouldn’t worry that there is no ghost in the machine. The truth is quite the opposite: there is no machine. It’s ghost all the way down.
Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, UK
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