Developmental Bio-Cosmology

Next up in our survey of philosophical nonstarters is Thomas Hobbes, who was a thoroughgoing materialist, back when being one could be dangerous to one's health:

The universe, that is the whole mass of things that are, is corporeal, that is to say body; and hath the dimensions of magnitude, namely, length, breadth, and depth (in Magee).

I'll bite: what are the corporeal dimensions of the truth you just uttered? Where is it in space? I'm trying to touch it, but I don't feel anything.

Nevertheless, materialism serves a kind of purpose, analogous to how the development of a strictly monistic monotheism was necessary prior to the revelation of the triune Godhead, otherwise the folks would mistake the latter for a primitive polytheism.

In yesterday's post we highlighted the philosophical problems that ensue from an underemphasis on the empirical/material world. Hobbes obviously indulges in the opposite error, but only gradually did the practice of science completely cleanse it self of the naive projection of the subject into the object, as in primitive animism.

Somewhat ironically, now that the cleansing of the cosmos is more or less complete, it is safe to go back to the view that IT'S ALIVE! Only from a higher and more integral level. As usual, we are now free to return to the beginning and know it for the first time -- i.e., meta-know it.

What do I mean? Well, in his book The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology -- which was a go-to prior to the discovery of Robert Rosen -- he sketches out a theory that for primordial man, everything was alive, death being the Great Exception. Perhaps we were like kittens, who likewise seem to inhabit a world in which everything is alive. 

Clearly, for such a primitive mentality, subjectivity and objectivity are thoroughly conflated. This view isn't wrong, just precritical and prescientific. 

Come to think of it, perhaps it simply results from an underdevelopment of the left cerebral hemisphere, which, to this day (in child development), lags behind the development of the right. At any rate, the Aphorist is not wrong to say that 

Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things. 

Ultimately,

The truth is objective but not impersonal.

But this is a late stage realization known only to Raccoons and fellow vertical travelers. The point is, the personal and impersonal have to be differentiated before they can be reunited at a higher level, where we can truly truly say that

The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason. 

Where indeed,

Truth is a person.

We're not there yet, or rather, let us retrace the steps of how we got here. 

So many possible avenues... Let's begin with Jonas, who writes that

When man first began to interpret the nature of things -- and this he did when he began to be man -- life to him was everywhere, and Being the same as being alive.... Soul flooded the whole of existence and encountered itself in all things. Bare matter, that is, truly inanimate, "dead" matter, was yet to be discovered -- as indeed, its concept, so familiar to us, is anything but obvious.

Thus, 

that the world is alive is really the most natural view, and largely supported by prima-facie evidence. On the terrestrial scene..., life abounds and occupies the whole foreground exposed to man's immediate view. The proportion of manifestly lifeless matter encountered in this primordial field is small, since most of what we now know to be inanimate is so intimately intertwined with the dynamics of life that it seems to share its nature.

Recall yesterday's link to the story about Afro-chemistry, in which matter is confused with primitive identity politics projected into the building blocks of reality. 

Here again, a pathological (or developmentally arrested) subjectivity is thoroughly conflated with objectivity. Suffice it to say this this is not what the Aphorist means by the crack that "there is feeling in many things." Molecules are not racist, not even melanin. 

As for the proper reunion of subject and object, Rosen is again our man. True, we can arrive at the same synthesis via pure intellection, but he does so with bullet-proof math and logic. 

Suffice it to say that -- contra Hobbes -- the world is not a machine, and cannot be a machine. However, there's no harm in viewing it that way, so long as one doesn't elevate this to an ontology. For nothing is that simple, let alone everything. 

Rather, everything is complex, not merely complicated, because machines -- for example, the one I'm typing on -- can be plenty complicated. But they are not complex, a critical distinction that Judith Curry highlights in her excellent Climate Uncertainty and Risk:

Complexity is not the same as complicated. Complicated systems have many parts but simple chains of causation. Complexity of the climate system arises from the chaotic behavior and nonlinearity of the equations for motions in the atmosphere and ocean, and the feedbacks between subsystems for the atmosphere, oceans, land surfaces, and glacier ice.

There are no mechanical models for such complexity. Well, there are, but as they say, All models are wrong, but some are useful: 

The aphorism acknowledges that statistical models always fall short of the complexities of reality but can still be useful nonetheless. The aphorism originally referred just to statistical models, but it is now sometimes used for scientific models in general.

Or, supposing you're better at logic than math, you could just say Gödel. Rosen rightly does so even before the first chapter, in the prelude, reminding those of us who need no reminder that "Gödel effectively demolished the formalist program," showing that

no matter how one tries to formalize a particular part of mathematics, syntactic truth in the formalization does not coincide with (is narrower than) the set of truths about numbers.

In short, no matter how good you are at math,

There is always a semantic residue, that cannot be accommodated by that syntactical scheme (emphasis mine, to highlight the fact that semantics cannot be reduced to syntax, and that's final).

This has many mind-blowing -- and liberating -- implications. One of Rosen's key insights is that we, or reductive scientism, rather, has things upside-down and inside-out, because it regards complexity as the exception, when, come to find out, it is the rule: complexity is more general than the linearity and relative simplicity which physics is capable of handling. 

Suffice it to say, you can't get from matter to life via physics; the world mapped by physics is necessary but not sufficient.

Again, one can, for methodological reasons, regard complex systems as simple, just don't forget that they aren't actually simple systems, and thereby reduce yourself to a simpleton.

This is a complex subject, so to be continued...