Well, this post veered off in an unexpected direction. I'll be thinking about it today, to figure out if I'm on to something, or if it's just a one-off bit of ephemeral bloggerilia...
If both world and self are bottomless mysteries, it is very much as if the structure of being is a pair of mirrors facing each other, like so: OO.
For this reason, history reveals a continuous confusion of the two, albeit more or less intense. In other words, the inside is constantly being projected outside, and then taken to be the actual content of the world.
The further back we go in history, and the more primitive the culture, the more people inhabit a demon-haunted mindscape resembling that of our fearful and hallucinatory progressives.
In recent centuries we see more the opposite movement, as the objectivity of the external world is introjected and taken to eliminate the mystery of subjectivity. Which is in fact quite impossible, for any explanation without the explainer lands one in Oozlumville, straight up one's backside:
Sigmund Freud, for example, applied a hydraulic model to the mind -- as if there is an id-like fluid pressing up from below. His earlier model borrowed more from archeology, as if the unconscious were stratified with geological layers.
The last word in this kind of sterile introjection is behaviorism, which literally regards the mind as a machine, so it's no longer a mind at all. This is like solving your problems by cutting off your head.
Having said that, it is not as if OO are radically separate entities, which leads to its own problems, from Descartes to Kant on down to your local village atheist. Like this guy:
Ultimately they must descend from the same principle, which is precisely why the world is not only intelligible, but never stops yammering about itself. Intelligibility is literally everywhere, since it is a condition of existence. It's another way of saying that being and knowing reflect one another more in manner of a Venn Diagram, like so:
Now, if this diagram doesn't deceive me -- i.e., if it's not just another case of projection or introjection -- then the area in the middle would consist of genuine knowledge; and by knowledge we mean something universal, such that it's true for everyone, for example, laws of aerodynamics.
In any important area of knowledge, you're not (yet) permitted to say, for example, "my truth" of human flight, or of brain surgery, or of bridge construction. You'd think this would apply to genital surgery, but see paragraph 4 above.
If there is something called progress, it would have to correlate with the growth of that middle area. Certainly this used to the the purpose of higher education, to grow our knowledge from the bottom up and middle out. What happened, and venn?
Hmm. I would say that our diagram must look more like this:
Let's call the third circle (A) descending from above metaphysics, or perhaps natural theology. It exerts a controlling influence over the lower circles (B and C), for example, via immutable principles of logic.
More generally, the upper circle would harbor the truths and principles of necessary being -- AKA those principles that cannot not be true on pain of total cosmic absurdity, such as the principles of non-contradiction or of sufficient reason. Violate these, and you know you're wrong without even having to check.
For example, let's say you have a theory of reality that is between the two circles, right where it is and must be. But it falls into the lower area (BC), below the area intersected by the upper circle (ABC). A timely example would be this bit of pernicious nonsense:
And once the impossible is possible, then you're a kind of inverse image of God: in fact, you're literally greater than God, since even (or especially) God can't make the impossible possible -- he cannot, for example, create a square circle, nor a Dylan Mulvaney.
There are no doubt additional applications and implications, but I haven't yet thought of them.
10 comments:
Bob,
Did you see this news making the rounds?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-25-year-old-bet-about-consciousness-has-finally-been-settled/
I'll bet the house the principle of consciousness descends from (A).
Or, better, there's an infinite circle surrounding the others.
Love the ending:
'Koch then doubled down on his bet. Twenty-five years from now, he predicted, when he will be age 91 and Chalmers will be age 82, consciousness researchers will achieve the “clarity” that now eludes them. Chalmers, shaking Koch’s hand, took the bet. “I hope I lose,” Chalmers said, “but I suspect I’ll win.” I suspect so, too. I bet consciousness will be even more baffling in 2048 than it is today. I hope to live long enough to see Koch give Chalmers another case of wine.'
Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will not have explained anything.
The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.
The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician’s rule book.
Randy - agreed. Especially given how much of science that is "known" right now is probably completely wrong. Even if they do manage to somehow "solve" the problem of consciousness, I doubt they will actually have understood anything.
"If there is something called progress, it would have to correlate with the growth of that middle area. Certainly this used to the the purpose of higher education, to grow our knowledge from the bottom up and middle out. What happened, and venn?"
I kant say, not without putting de cart before the... O... never mind.
I have an in-law who came from a mildly above-average intelligence family, produced mildly above-average children, and has never said a single thing to me which I’d consider “brilliant”. For a couple years he struggled to get into med school. Then suddenly as if by magic, he got in, graduated with top honors, interned at the finest medical establishment in the land to then rise to top-ten executive position at his major regional clinic. Yet sis told me he never had to study.
He was all a bit like that undrafted NFL player who rises to Hall of Fame status.
For a time I assumed such success to be the result of endless drive and relentless hard work. Yet in-law is slack as fuck and screws up big on occasion. Sis finally admitted to me that “it’s all who you know”. Strange, my public school system had indoctrinated me otherwise.
Then I looked up a party boy I sat next to in a couple university classes. He’s now a university professor who’d MA’d at Columbia and JD’d at Yale. Strange. The guy I’d known back then never studied either. But his parents were professors themselves.
I then looked up two straight-A geeks I’d sat between in a philosophy logic class. They’d bitched about having to settle for our local state U, having not being accepted into anything Ivy League. Today they both live pretty average lives with average incomes.
I worked at a major engineering firm when our boss told us he’d be naming his replacement. At the meeting we all expected it’d be “Big John”, tall and serious, ethical, more machine than man, producer of excellence and knowledge base supreme. But nope. The promotion went to Steve the Asshole, pompous motormouth blowhard and frequent butt hut visitor.
I have many other stories but this isn’t that kind of blog. So is the system rigged? I guess that all depends on who you know.
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