Q&A: Matter and Spirit
Matter and Spirit
Question
With God’s help,
Hello Rabbi,
Many times there is a sense of contradiction between deterministic matter and spiritual, volitional consciousness.
But I wanted to ask: isn’t matter at its base some kind of spirit? Just as before the Big Bang there was abstract “energy,” and today, with modern theories like strings and so on, we know that matter is not made up of the fundamental building blocks of atoms that cannot be conceptually split. Rather, they are becoming more and more abstract—massless, and sometimes not even strictly dependent on space in the simple way we experience it.
So I wanted to ask whether the dichotomous division of dualism really does have a basis in reality?
Answer
The microscopic properties of matter are not relevant to its very definition as matter. Spirit is not strings and not quanta. It does not enter the physical picture. Just as light is not spiritual but physically material, because it falls under the laws of physics.
Discussion on Answer
I don’t know how Yakir Shoshani knows how matter was created.
I explained that matter is whatever is subject to the laws of physics. Spirit is whatever is not subject to them. Therefore microscopic explanations regarding the nature of matter do not change this distinction.
I didn’t understand anything. The microscopic properties explain the essence/foundation of matter, don’t they? And therefore they also define its essence.
If we always thought that phenomenon X ended with explanation A, and today we know that at its root the explanation is B, doesn’t that mean that the characterization of X ought to change and become Y?
I think Prof. Yakir Shoshani argues that reality was initially created through a chain-like unfolding of worlds, from simple spirit to matter.