EDDINGTON'S BECOMING** AND DUALISM

Sir Arthur Eddington's chapter V on 'Becoming' is all steeped in dualism, something that reaches its climax in his enthusiastic praise of 19th century scientists who have created the concept of Entropy, hence shifting the center of their interest from "entities reached by customary analysis (atoms, electric potentials, etc) to the qualities possessed by whole systems which cannot be split up and located a little bit here, a little bit there".  But his dual approach is directed by no means just to the relation between Entropy and Becoming, since the author professes also a clear dualistic perspective when approaching the mind-body problem.

This  perspective implies a gap between microscopic and macroscopic events. Going further, Eddington attributes to such cleavage a "real" counterpart  which ought to belong to the outside world, because Nature is "honest" and gives us the ability to capture the true existence of its own split. And from this comes a reason to despise those physicists who denies any the reality to the outer existence of such gap.

Nevertheless, his conclusion on the "existence" of such a split in the outside world does not seem  sufficiently grounded on his arguments. Using a work of art as example, he stresses the redundant obviousness that from an artist's point of view it must be a grotesque idea to imagine 'his paintings as a huge amount of subatomic particles in a peculiar arrangement within space-time'. 

To defy that assumption, we may invoke Kant's argument that such a dichotomy is imposed previously by our minds to all sensory data. This means that we approach an artistic painting, as in the example, with two different methods available to our quest of knowledge of other beings, either things or humans. The first method uses our eyes, always so influenced by aesthetic sensibility, to capture the painting's beauty and its meaning.

The second method corresponds to the rational view of the physical sciences with its tools.

But such a duality might be regarded as emanating from our own minds, not from the world in itself! At least nobody can say it is necessarily inherent to the objective world, i.e., to things in themselves.

** Chapter V of "The Nature of the Physical World", by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, Cambridge University Press, 1928.