Downward Causation and the Infinite Distance Between Subjects and Objects

We have often written of the literally infinite distance between man and animal, and it's nice to see someone else literally saying the same thing, because it's not a popular opinion, among neither hardheaded materialists nor softhearted pet lovers (of which I am one). But facts are facts.

Why is this opinion unpopular among our materialist friends and tenured apes? Because to acknowledge a fundamental and ineradicable discontinuity between man and animal is to open the door to no end of immaterial, transcendental, and metaphysical mischief. Better to not let it open even a crack, lest the crackpots rush in -- for example, one of our own commenters.

If natural selection is not a complete, consistent, and final explanation of how we got here, then what is? It reminds me of the Taranto Principle, whereby liberals never learn how to properly argue because the media protects them from having to do so. Therefore, they confidently put forth transparently lame arguments that go completely unchallenged, thus encouraging further lameness (for example, last night).

According to the Taranto Principle, the media's failure to hold left-wingers accountable for bad behavior merely encourages the left's bad behavior to the point that its candidates are repellent to ordinary Americans.

Likewise, it would be difficult to imagine a more philosophically repellant and metaphysically repugnant doctrine than materialism, but here we are. 

Hart calls the Neo-Darwinian model "a partial, local, restricted truth within the embrace of a far larger, more vastly encompassing truth about the origin of life," and he's not wrong. Nor can "a strictly quantitative method"

illuminate a strictly qualitative phenomenon like consciousness, and a strictly third-person method can't illuminate a strictly first-person experience.

Like everyone else, my pronoun is I AM, and no amount of HE IS adds up to the first-person subjective interiority of the former. Indeed, "The sciences don't even have a means of asking the correct questions here," for 

We're talking about merely apparent quantitative associations between totally qualitatively dissimilar phenomena.

Our own private life "is wholly inaccessible to any scrutiny from outside." This first person experience of cosmic interiority may be a qualitative experience, but it is a primordial fact -- even the first fact -- we can know with absolute certitude. No one is going to mispronoun me with I AM NOT.

Give Schopenhauer credit for being on the right track. In Magee's biography, he writes that

Anyone who supposes that if all the perceiving subjects were removed from the world then the objects, as we have any conception of them, could continue in existence all by themselves has radically failed to understand what objects are. 

This is "the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself." Let's not do that. Rather, let us not lose sight of the subject who is correlate to all the objects experienced within its horizon. 

We know that subjects and objects exist. But why leap to the absurd conclusion that the former can be reduced to the latter? That's not an explanation, it's the failure of one, precisely -- an unexplanation.

Hart says something similar to Schopenhauer, that

everything that exists for us does so wholly within consciousness, and that's part of why consciousness isn't some discrete phenomenon among other phenomena..., it's the very ground and possibility of any phenomenon -- phenomenality as such -- the mind's openness both to itself and to the whole of reality.

"We have no world other than the one that comes to us in private awareness, and there's no method, scientific or otherwise, that allows us to get around this fact." 

Nor is this because of some lack of data that will eventually be discovered by science. Rather, we can confidently affirm in principle 

that no purely empirical explanation of the relation of physical to mental events will ever be found.... The problem has nothing to do with the limitations of our current scientific techniques or knowledge; it's entirely one of logic. 

To repeat, there is an infinite gap or "qualitative abyss between the objective and subjective dimensions of reality." One can always posit a mind-matter dualism to paper over the abyss, but the Raccoon finds this metaphysical barbarism to be unacceptable on aesthetic grounds alone. 

Rather, one suspects a deeper order in which these two are seen as complementary poles of a single reality, more on which as we proceed. We might even call these poles -- with Voegelin -- immanence and transcendence, but let's stick with Hart, who rightly affirms that

the notion that first-person experience could be reduced to third-person functions is utterly devoid of rational content. It is like claiming one's height is reducible to one's charisma.

In other words, the naive reification of a category error. In reality, "the logical constraints that govern the sciences absolutely prohibit them from any meaningful empirical or theoretical investigation of the mind's inner states," so stop pretending otherwise.

We're still only in the second chapter, and the rest of the book promises to fill in the details, but Hart previews his conclusion that

mind is the ground of reality and that, moreover, infinite mind -- the mind of God -- is the source and end and encompassing element of every finite mind. 

I would turn this around and say that finite minds are a kind of prolongation of Infinite Mind, but hold in abeyance for the moment whether this is what folks call God. Again, that's too loaded a term, which is why I prefer the empty symbol, or cosmic placeholder, or pneumatological variable O. O simply is. We have plenty of time to determine exactly what it is.

Suffice it to say that "as long as our thinking is confined within that barren paradigm, the presence of mind within this supposedly mindless material order will remain an enigma without solution."

One solution is to "reject the underlying premise that matter is something essentially dead and unthinking." This was Whitehead's organismic approach -- that biology is the study of larger organisms, while physics is the study of the smaller ones. And cosmology is the study of the largest organism of all.

Here at One Cosmos we often talk about vertical causation, AKA (↓), and it is nice to find out that someone else I think is in our tree:

Mind and life -- and language too -- are possible only by way of a kind of "downward" causation that informs their "upward" evolution in particular beings.

Perhaps the whole existentialada is "form descending into matter, matter ascending into form, producing... life... producing everything." 

It's also nice to see our favorite theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen, listed in the index. I don't know if he inspired the following passage, but it sounds like something he'd say:

Why not see the laws of life as primary rather than as the accidental effects of lifeless causes? 

Who says biology can't be our paradigmatic science instead of physics? "It stands to reason, at least, that if life and mind are one, then life is also a kind of rational semantics and syntax," and one of Rosen's main points is that semantics (meaning) can never be reduced to syntax (order).

As for the evolution of language, it "can't simply have been an ascent from 'below,'" but rather "exists primarily as a 'higher' causality informing 'lower' levels of causality..."

Which reminds us of Polanyi, and of how the higher levels use the boundary conditions of the lower, in the way words rely on letters, sentences on words, paragraphs on sentences, story on paragraphs, and meaning on story, all conditioned from the top down.

End of chapter II. Chapter III tomorrow.