2,500 Year Argument Resolved by Obscure Blogger

Well, not exactly. Or not yet, anyway, but we're getting closer.

This question of a top-down vs. bottom-up metaphysic reminds me of the famous painting of Plato and Aristotle, the former pointing vertically to the heavens, the latter making a horizontal gesture. 

Is that all this is, the same old argument in new terms?

In his book The Cave and the Light, Herman articulates Plato's "most fundamental idea,"

that man is destined by his creator to find a path from the dark cave of material existence to the light of a higher, purer, and more spiritual truth. It's when we rise above the merely human..., and enter the realm of the "everlasting and immortal and changeless" that we achieve wisdom.

But for Aristotle,

There is no cave; only a world made of facts and things. "The fact is our starting point," he once said...

This is no doubt oversimplifying, but 

For  the next two thousand years Aristotle would become the father of modern science, logic, and technology. Plato, by contrast, is the spokesman for the theologian, the mystic, the poet, the artist.

People tend to choose sides, but as we've been saying, it's not a matter of either-or but both-and. However, as in all primordial complementarities one must be prior, and in this case it's the top-down perspective. As one of Hart's characters puts it,

Direction is all. What from below are untraversable abysses are, from above, merely junctures where ladders must be let down. 

Later in the chapter, the same character -- who seems to stand for Hart's more poetic side -- says that

mind informs life, life informs matter; life is always already mind, rising into fuller consciousness as it's formed from above, and matter is always already life, rising into fuller complexity and vitality and autonomy as it's formed from above.  

Mind cannot in principle arise from the mindless, so the bottom-up view is a metaphysical nonstarter. But placed in the larger context of the top-down perspective, we see that the abysses between matter and life, or life and mind, may "close of their own accord":

Matter intends life, life intends mind, which is to say that life and mind are final causes belonging to the structure of reality from the first.  

Well, good. This certainly echoes the Raccoon perspective. But again, can we tighten it up a little more? Hart's skeptic is uncomfortable with the whole idea of transcendental teleology: "I always find the word 'transcendental' rather murky, to be honest."

To which another character replies that "you shouldn't," because "You couldn't possibly be a rational agent if there weren't a realm" "toward which your intellectual appetites are all naturally oriented."

Here again, very Platonic: the mind by its nature is ordered to a higher level of transcendental truth, and "this infinite purposiveness of your mind is what equips you with finite purposes. Without that index of values, all your acts would be arbitrary, prosecuted without real rational judgments."

So, freedom is a consequence of being a rational agent ordered to teleological ends. The alternative -- the bottom-up view -- only generates contradiction and absurdity, like "a lunatic who denies his own existence or who claims to be dead." For

the very act of affirming mechanism to be true is an admission of a prior directedness toward truth as an ideal, utterly beyond the sphere of the mechanical, and so just another confirmation of antecedent finality. 

The skeptic complains that "just where some dry and sober precision is most needful," we are instead plunged into "metaphysics and mysticism." But

If mind isn't the product of mindless matter -- and it clearly isn't -- then what other narrative of the mind's origin remains?

More arguing back and forth, because it seems the mechanists just won't give up their quest for a bottom-up explanation. Which makes me suspect that perhaps one is a born Platonist. Religiosity more generally is said to be heritable, so why not? Ironically, this would be a bottom-up explanation for top-down people.

The next chapter is called Information and Form, and it is indeed a mystery where all this information comes from. Information is "at the origin," but how? Our poetic character raves that "life is language, and  language is mind, and mind is life" before the skeptic cuts him off. 

Nevertheless, "Information isn't merely mindlike; it subsists only in mind." Keep digging, and we find "a level more fundamental than the physical," a reality that starts to look very much "like infinite mind." 

That's the end of the chapter. The ball's in Aristotle's court. Or in Plato's cave, depending on how you look at it.