Three Trinities

Christianity has the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son who is the Word, and the Spirit. Buddhism has the Trikaya, meaning the three bodies. These are: the Truth body: the body of mutual bliss: the created body in space and time. I’ve just had reason to return to the earlier work of the brilliant mathematical physicist Roger Penrose. My youngest son who is in his final year of a mathematical physics masters will have the privilege of hearing him lecture next week.(The lecture is on his present focus of Twistor Theory as a pre-cursor to space-time and quantum gravity.) He describes three worlds: Mathematics: The Physical: Mental Consciousness. He is an atheist promoting humanist values, but not one who denies the possibility of God. Indeed, he pours scorn on those who see multiverses as a convenient replacement for the God hypothesis. He sees the mathematical world as always within the scope of reason, if only in principle as he accepts that Gödel has shown that a mathematical system can never explain itself. The entire physical world is governed by the Mathematical world. The mental world is dependent on the physical. He does allow that all these assertions may be subject to exceptions. He particularly believes that consciousness may at its root be quantum mechanical and be non-computable. To this end, he postulates brain structures capable of collapsing the quantum wave.
Those of you who have read my ‘Where’s Sailor Jack’ saga will recognise that as similar to the worlds I’ve tried to create. I am a theist from a Church upbringing which has set my belief system, apparently permanently, as I’ve seen no reason to reject the sense it’s made as I’ve lived a life. Penrose doesn’t think we’ll understand much more of the mental world until the mathematics of the physical has a better, underlying theory. I’m too old, even if he isn’t, to handle the complex Maths of that next stage, if ever I could. I wish him and his successors good luck with that, and hope my son will reach that next level. I’ll have to stick with religion and the arts to see through a glass darkly as far as the grave.