Absurcular vs. Genuine Humanism

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when asked why he hasn't abandoned Catholicism, Stephen Dedalus replies 

What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

It seems there can be coherent and incoherent absurdities, but what we really want to know is whether there can be a coherent non-absurdity that describes all of reality, from top to bottom and both inside and out. 

Recall what Hart said yesterday about another coherent absurdity, eliminatvism:

For all its intrinsic absurdity, eliminativism is the only truly consistent physicalism. Or rather, precisely because of its absurdity. 

It reminds us of an aphorism:

Man calls "absurd" what escapes his secret pretensions to omnipotence. 

It also reminds us of Gödel, in that a formal system cannot be both consistent and complete. Trying to force it to be both results in absurdity. 

Hart cites one thinker who promulgated a thoroughly rigid and complete scientism, the result being "a bizarre combination of absolute irrationality and absolute logical consistency."

In this chapter -- called Behaviorism and Epiphenomenalism -- Hart rightly observes that "every materialism must become an eliminativism in the end." And what is eliminated is precisely the most interesting, important, and shocking fact in all of existence, the human subject. 

Nevertheless, just because we eliminate eliminativism, it doesn't automatically provide the coherent non-absurdity we seek. We can easily replace it with another coherent absurdity, i.e., an ideological second reality.

Maybe we just have to face the fact that reality is an irreducible mystery, and 

Mystery is less disturbing than the fatuous attempts to exclude it by stupid explanations.

In the past, I have suggested that we can reverse engineer an argument for God via the following: first, 

Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.

But man is not an absolute insignificance. Therefore God.

This is really just another way of saying that meaning -- significance -- is real, and that it is a top-down phenomenon. As Hart describes it, "meaning exists at another level of agency, distinct from the merely physical, and is therefore irreducible to a physicalist description."

This is very much in Polanyi's wheelhouse, but thus far his name hasn't come up. Indeed, his last book was called Meaning, and its bottom line is that we give meaning to science, rather then vice versa, and why not?

I don't want to get sidetracked, but the main point again is that meaning is conditioned from the top down. It is an irreducibly vertical phenomenon, which is why a purely horizontal and immanent cosmos not only eliminates any possibility of meaning, but tosses out man in the bargain. To repeat what Schuon said the other day,

Without objectivity and transcendence there cannot be man, there is only the human animal; to find man, one must aspire to God.  

Hmm. Yesterday we were wondering what would be the opposite of reductionism. How about humanism? No, not secular (AKA absurcular) humanism, but rather, the human phenomenon and all it entails. I've always felt that Schuon is a true humanist. For example, he writes that

There is a great deal of talk these days about “humanism,” talk which forgets that once man abandons his prerogatives to matter, to machines, to quantitative knowledge, he ceases to be truly “human.”

On the one hand, "nothing is more fundamentally inhuman than the 'purely human,' the illusion of constructing a perfect man starting from the individual and terrestrial." A false humanism

is the reign of horizontality, either naïve or perfidious; and since it is also -- and by that very fact -- the negation of the Absolute, it is a door open to a multitude of sham absolutes, which in addition are often negative, subversive, and destructive. 

But in reality, 

the “human miracle” must have a reason for being that is proportionate to its nature, and it is this that predestines -- or “condemns” -- man to surpass himself; man is totally himself only by transcending himself. 

Quite paradoxically, it is only in transcending himself that man reaches his proper level; and no less paradoxically, by refusing to transcend himself he sinks below the animals.

Bottom line: "What is most profoundly and authentically human rejoins the Divine by definition." 

I think we've arrived at our coherent non-absurdity: a true humanism that doesn't cut itself off from the divine, but rather, is open to it and thereby conditioned from the top down. But let's see if Hart is anywhere near the same attractor. 

Regarding a completely consistent reductionism, he writes that "to deny the evidence of one's own experience on purely doctrinaire, abstractly metaphysical principles... is an abdication of reason." But to then go so far as to 

produce an entirely intentional artifact like a book arguing that intentionality is an illusion isn't merely odd; it's stirringly perverse, almost to the point of a mad heroism.

Again, this is so radical a humanism that it destroys the human. It is a completely consistent and coherent absurdity, but "Its chief defect, it seems to me, is that it's self-evidently false."

Again, if your theory can't accommodate the phenomenon at issue, eliminate the damned theory, not the phenomenon.

The human phenomenon. Can we explain it without explaining it away? To be continued...

Grandiose Reductionism and Humble Expansionism

What would be the opposite of reductionism? Expansionism? In any event, Schuon is a practitioner of the latter, writing of the

principles that by their nature elude empirical investigations but not pure intellection, intellectual intuition being rooted in the very substance of the human spirit, without which homo would not be sapiens.

So, these nonlocal and timeless principles are not to be found in the horizontal, material, empirical world, but rather, are intuited via a nonlical intellect that is ultimately of the same substance as that which it intuits. Which is not so strange if we are indeed the image and likeness -- or prolongation or reverberation -- of the First Principle. 

Back to Hart, much of the book's dialogue comes down to an argument between a rigid reductionist and a loosey-goosey expansionist, neither one convincing the other, at least so far. Which is not surprising, for reasons Nicolás made plain yesterday:

Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time.

It seems that there is a surface structure to thought that is rooted in a deeper structure of principle, and unless an argument penetrates to the latter, it will be inefficacious.

For example, Hart's materialist claims that

there's no actual mystery to consciousness to begin with, and only our own bad habits of language make us imagine there is.

Clean up your language and the mystery of consciousness is solved? Clean it up by what standard? Presumably the standard of immanence, empiricism, and materiality, so this is a circular argument, or an assumption -- a principle -- masquerading as a conclusion.  

For the reductionist, what we experience as mental properties are just the other side of material properties reducible to the latter: a "brain-state" and a "mental state" are "simply one and the same thing."

But one of these things doesn't seem anything like the other.

Doesn't matter if your first principle is that what we call "mind" is just an epiphenomenon of neurology -- that subjects are just objects in disguise. 

I know where I would go with the argument: if mental states are just a side effect of neurology, isn't your truth claim likewise reducible, and if so, why should we believe it? There can be no such thing as truth, rather, only brain states.

Hart's expansionist argues that the reductionist view "is sheer empty assertion. It answers no questions. It's just yet another restatement of the problem of mind." Surely there is correlation between the two -- brain and mind -- but why assume an identity? 

Hart's reductionist proposes an "eliminativism" whereby our commonsense view of the mind 

must be totally eliminated in favor of a more scientific, wholly impersonal neuroscientific theory, entirely purged of such mythical entities as the personal subject, intentional states, and the like...

To which the expansionist rightly asks, "how can such a view be stated without contradiction?" For "how can one take seriously the belief that there's no such thing as belief?" Is this not just "a kind of cognitive suicide?" 

Can sufficient knowledge of the brain really eliminate the mind? If so, who is the knower of this sublime knowledge?

"By that logic, taken to its end, none of the real sciences other than physics would be sciences at all." That is to say, psychology would be reducible to a neurobiology, further reducible to electrochemistry and on down to "a complete physics."

A brief word from our principial sponsor:

[W]hether he likes it or not, man is "condemned" to transcendence (Schuon).

It's not so easy to eliminate, because any truth we utter is from a transcendent standpoint. Surely matter doesn't know it is material, let alone that everything is material. That's a rather grandiose claim. It may sound modestly "reductive" but is actually insanely expansive.

Humility. We must remember humility.

man ought to show humility in relation to his own Heart-Intellect, the immanent divine spark; the proud man sins against his own immortal essence as well as against God and man (Schuon).

Free advice.

Eliminativism must be at antipodes to genuine humility, so much so that "when the theory doesn't adequately account for the phenomenon," it is the latter that is eliminated. Nevertheless,

For all its intrinsic absurdity, eliminativism is the only truly consistent physicalism. Or rather, precisely because of its absurdity. 

It's easy enough to eliminate eliminativism, but is there something positive -- and rigorous -- we can put in its place? Yes, I think so, but that's the end of this chapter.

Reductionism, Materialism, and Other Forms of Magic

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician's rule book. --Dávila

As we've been saying, some things are irreducible to anything less, e.g., consciousness, experience, interiority, and free will, but this hardly stops some thinkers from trying. 

Hart spends a lot of time arguing with these folks, but the arguments can have no traction in the face of an absolute faith-based commitment to reductionism and to a causally closed physical universe. 

I'm also reading a book by Schuon which is about a quarter of the length of All Things Are Full of Gods.  One reason for the comparative brevity is that Schuon can't be bothered to argue with these metaphysical yahoos and their "pseudo-mythologies." Rather, he

distills the quintessence of traditional wisdom without paying sustained attention to all those false and fraudulent philosophies that might hitherto have occluded our view.

Schuon's approach here is more "like that of the poet: to find simple, direct, and resonant statements" of the unchanging truths, recalling what we said the other day about "precision poetry."

In any event, the book is a pleasant diversion from Hart's turgid tome. 

Speaking of a reductively closed universe, Schuon makes precisely the opposite point but doesn't deign to try to persuade the unpersuadable: 

To say that man is endowed with a sensibility capable of objectivity means he possesses a subjectivity not closed in on itself, but open to others and unto Heaven.

Boom. This goes to the conclusion of yesterday's post. As the Aphorist says,

To admit the existence of errors is to confess the reality of free will.

So, if I'm wrong about the existence of free will, it only proves I am right, and it's an open cosmos after all, in which freedom cannot be reduced to anything less. 

In the same essay Schuon puts it out there that

An incontrovertible proof of God is that the human spirit is capable of objectivity and transcendence, transcendence being the sufficient reason of objectivity.

One can try to eliminate transcendence and reduce it to immanence, but out goes man:

Without objectivity and transcendence there cannot be man, there is only the human animal; to find man, one must aspire to God. 

There is an outward man and an inward man, corresponding to horizontal and vertical (or immanence and transcendence) respectively, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it except to accept this truth, regardless of how pleasant.

Back to Hart, those committed to reductionism "speak as if, in principle, all events at higher levels of physical organization must be reducible without remainder to lower" causes. It's just "a preposterous presumption and nothing more," and not even an interesting one. Unless maybe you're on the spectrum. Which is no joke, but let's not get snidetracked.

Hart claims that there exists a "basic, original, natural intentionality of the mind toward" a "transcendent end that makes all other mental actions possible." He also speaks of "that constant natural orientation of the will toward its transcendent horizon," which is certainly consistent with Raccoon orthodoxy. 

The "inner man" alluded to above is ordered to this transcendent (or vertical) horizon, and this is precisely where all the cosmic action takes place. Again, to eliminate it is to eliminate man and clear the way for the human animal.

I'm tempted to bring in Voegelin for back-up, as he talks about the paradoxical structure of "intentionality and luminosity," and of how language participates in this paradox by illuminating the in-between.  

Lots more arguing back and forth in the next chapter, but as the Aphorist says,

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

So, 

Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time.

The Intentional Cosmos

There is "no more conspicuous example of teleology in nature" than in "the directedness of mind and will toward an end" (Hart). 

At least there can no more self-evident example, since it is our moment to moment experience, and who are you gonna believe, some tenured determinist or your own lying I?

They say reason cannot prove the existence of free will. On the other hand, Schuon says "reason becomes an infirmity" when reduced to "abusive speculation by the ignoramus who pretends to knowledge." 

Elsewhere he suggests that "The purpose of freedom is to enable us to choose what we are in the depths of our heart," and why not? 

But let's get back to Hart. Consciousness is always about something, which is the meaning of "intentionality." Now, nothing was about anything in this cosmos until suddenly it was, but how?

[L]ike consciousness, intentionality is either there or it isn't. Where and how was that abyss leapt over? At what point was there suddenly, as there had never before been, mental agency interpreting the world...?

This is really just another way of asking how subjects suddenly appear in a heretofore objective universe, or how exteriority somehow becomes interior to itself. 

Now, language -- the subject of the next chapter -- is shot through with intentionality, as its whole purpose is to be "about" something other than itself. But -- and this is me talking, not Hart -- the whole cosmos itself is permeated with aboutness, in the sense that it never stops communicating to us about itself. 

In other words, the cosmos is intelligible to our intelligence. We can learn "about" things because those things are about -- or ordered to -- the intellect. This is very strange. Let's see where Hart goes with it.

Language is "a world alongside the world, so to speak, or a plane of reality continuously hovering above the physical plane, a place in which meaning is generated and shared entirely by meaning." 

Yes, but again, the world is also a linguistic contraption that constantly speaks to us via some kind of language, from math to logic to beauty. So human language "hovers above the physical," while nature's language is embedded in the physical, just waiting for us to unpack it.

An immanent and transcendent Logos?

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Rather, let Schuon do it. The Logos

presents himself either objectively as “Divine Image,” in which case he is transcendent in relation to ordinary men, or subjectively as the Intellect, in which case he is immanent; he is then like the door towards the Divine Self, the immanent Divine Subject in our immortal substance.

So, the intellect is the immanent Divine Image in man, but also the doorway back to God? Hold that thought.

One point that I think needs to be emphasized is the intrinsic "openness" of things at both ends. In other words, we are open to a cosmos that opens itself up to us, in a kind of spiraling movement. Again, very strange.

That was a short chapter. The next one is on Concepts and Reason, which rightly affirms that

a merely mechanical material system could never, out of some pre-conceptual void, produce so much as a single abstract concept. There's no feasible series of steps..., even over vast epochs of time... that could cause conceptual abstractions to arise from concrete sensory encounters.

So, how do abstract and immaterial concepts get into a concrete and material cosmos? 

Here again, they must somehow be implicit in the cosmos, just waiting for intellects to come along and explicate them: "the mind is capable of really interacting with these strictly immaterial entities," e.g., mathematical and logical principles, "none of which can be grounded" in the physical. 

Nevertheless, here they are, various necessary truths that are "true in every possible reality, and would be true if there were no physical reality at all."  The simplest mathematical equation or syllogism is "utterly unlike any kind of physical event." 

I guess we have time for one more chapter, this one on Free Will and Purpose. How did these get into the cosmos?  Free will is always ordered to a purpose, but the skeptic in Hart's dialogue calls this "the oldest illusion of all." 

We say, if man weren't free he could never know it. In other words, supposing we don't have free will, this would constitute knowledge of a truth that transcends physical cause and effect, and thereby prove the existence of free will. Or, expressed more pithily,

If determinism is real, if only that can happen which must happen, then error does not exist.

Thus, 

To admit the existence of errors is to confess the reality of free will.

So, if I'm wrong about the existence of free will, it only proves I am right.

What's with this "arbitrary fundamentalist belief in the causal closure of the physical?" For it is "a purely metaphysical commitment, with no logical or empirical warrant, or any warrant at all other than want of imagination." This takes us into the next chapter, so we'll save it for tomorrow.

Maps, Models, and Blowing Smoke

Concur: "no credible modern scientific model exists that can tell us how the electrochemistry of the brain" can account for the "experience of a particular person's inner phenomenal world" (Hart). 

Except absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You still need to a model that is more credible and convincing than a material one, and which doesn't unexplain what materialism explains.  

Look who's talking. You're not even material.

That's not the point. It's a matter of principle.

This reminds me of college. An introductory psychology course characterized the mind as a black box about which we could only formulate models to account for the phenomena. 

Analogously, imagine if we couldn't open a watch to see what's going in inside, but rather, could only construct models to account for the movement of the hands. We could never know which model was the correct one, only which one was more capable of predicting the phenomena. The inner workings of the watch -- the noumena -- would be unknowable to us in principle.

In that same introductory course we were familiarized with all the most popular models, e.g., behaviorism, Freudian, Jungian, existential, gestalt, humanism, transpersonalism, etc.

Which one is correct? It's a bit like asking which religion is correct, each religion being likewise a map of the unmappable, and no map is ever the territory. Still, it's understandable why someone would want to turn the map into the territory, which is to say, absolutize it. It certainly simplifies life and tames the ambiguity. 

Which model did you go with? 

Good question. It was more analogous to a musician who learns and assimilates all the scales in order to express himself musically. The scales aren't the music, but are subordinate to it. In the past I've highlighted this quote by Keith Jarrett:

A master jazz musician goes onto the stage hoping to have a rendezvous with music. He knows the music is there (it always is), but this meeting depends not only on knowledge but openness.... It [music] must be let in, recognized, and revealed to the listener, the first of whom is the musician himself.

Now, the same is true of the psychotherapeutic session. We go into it hoping to have a rendezvous with emotional truth. We know it's there -- it always is -- but will the patient and therapist (for it requires both) be open to it? 

Now do religion. 

This can't help sounding pretentious, but let's imagine that 

A metacosmic blogger goes onto the keyboard hoping to have a rendezvous with the transcendent, which we will symbolize O. He knows O is there (it cannot not be there), but this meeting depends not only on knowledge but openness. O must be let in, recognized, and revealed to the reader, the first of whom is the blogger himself.

One has only to get out of the way -- abandon memory, desire, and understanding -- and hope for the best.

Back to Hart. At the end of the chapter, his alter-ego repeats that "no physical description of the world we inhabit necessarily entails the existence of consciousness." 

Analogously, imagine a scientist studying the electricity that flows through a telephone line. The most complete understanding of electricity would reveal nothing of the conversation taking place, let alone if it were "true." 

Rather, electricity provides only the boundary conditions that are enlisted by a higher level of reality. Truth could never be reduced to the electrical signals being used to convey it. Likewise, 

if you were unaware of the existence of subjective consciousness, no observation of the physical processes of organisms and their world... would apprise you of its existence (Hart).

Or imagine seeing smoke signals without knowing anything about the existence of Indians.

The preferred nomenclature is Native American.   

Anyway, you'd surely be able to deduce the existence of fire from the smoke. But it would never occur to you that a Native American is using smoke to send a message. No observation of smoke tells us anything about the existence of native Americans or what they're saying to one another, let alone if what they're saying is true or if they're just blowing smoke. We are entirely excluded from that loop.

Likewise, no third-person model of the mind could ever "capture the deeper enigma of subjectivity itself." Thus, "the essential question must be whether subjectivity in itself can fit within the prevailing picture of physical reality at all." 

Hart suggests that

the mind is a contraction of some larger reality, so that at its heights it opens out into something more than itself, and in its depths too opens out into the natural world at large.

This checks out, i.e., the mind opening out to transcendence at one end, immanence at the other. 

In the past I've used the analogy of a lampshade with pinprick holes in it, so it looks as if there are many individual lights, when in reality there is just the one source of Light at the center. 

Hart describes something similar. Here is the full passage

It's something anonymous, really -- so anonymous that it doesn't differ from one person to another. And I, of course, believe it's really one and the same in all of us: the same divine spark shedding its light on all that the mind contains -- the single flame burning in the lanterns of all our souls

End of Part Two, Chapter II.

Horizontal Discontinuity Within Vertical Continuity?

Yesterday I ran across a quote attributed to Herbert Spencer, that

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

This Principle of Contempt seals one in an ideological ignorance that can be religious or scientistic or anything in between. It is like a principled but closed mind, which is still closed in principle.  

To his credit, Hart doesn't do this. Rather, one of the benefits of the dialogue format is that alternative points of view are given a full and fair hearing. One of the main characters is a reductive materialist, and his ideas are treated with thoughtful patience and respect.

Unlike around here, where we don't hesitate to sling the insultainment. I'm not a very good arguer. More of a teller. A take-it-or-leave-it kind of guy. Except I am also loathe to even express my opinions in mixed company. I hate conflict. I never recommend my ideas, but may offer them if asked.

Who asked for this blog?

No one did. Except for me. It's just my own internal dialogue, or metaphysical diary, made public. We're always looking for the unity beneath appearances, and new information is always coming to light, which needs to be reconciled with the old. Reality is contradictory and argumentative enough. No need to enlist other people with whom to argue.

So your argument is with reality? That explains a lot. 

That's one way of putting it. I think it's why Voegelin's idea of the In Between appeals to me. In one sense it is the Final Answer, except it's a fluid space where the answers keep changing or evolving. 

Paradoxically, there as an Absolute and we can never know it, except implicitly, for it is the ground of our saying or knowing anything at all. This is the luminous but mysterious space where we always find ourselves, i.e., between immanence and transcendence. 

Remember: The quest has no external "object," but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable. 

This is your final (non)answer? That's not very satisfying.

Hart suggests something similar -- that in reality there is a "vertical causality" that operates "upon a realm of potential." It is not "a horizontal relation between two physical things, or a physical transfer of energy that has to cross space," rather, 

a rational specification that's transcendent of time and space, an immediate translation of potency into actuality...

Nor is it inconceivable "that consciousness operates at an oblique angle, so to speak, to the texture of spacetime..., or that mind acts like a formal cause impressing itself instantaneously on the 'fabric' of spacetime in a way that would have no temporal, 'horizontal' physical history."

Here again, we are always situated in this vertical space between immanence and transcendence, and we can be either open or closed to the latter influence. 

This is in contrast to "the narrative of absolute mechanical causality" whereby "the reality we know simply arises from lower realities, giving itself form as the accidental result of mindless force..."

But Hart wants to show that there is "no possible universe at all in which mind is a natural consequence of mechanical physical causes," and that "mind is by its nature unable to inhabit an entirely physical frame of reality." Rather, it "must always already be in some sense 'supernatural' in its origin, orientation, and content."

Or as Schuon says, nature is already supernatural. Certainly it is shot through with transcendence, for example, the immaterial mathematical equations that govern it. More generally it is metaphysically transparent, i.e., intelligible to our intelligence:

I mean precisely what I say when I liken the order of nature to the structure of the mind.... I mean that nature, in its essence, literally is thought (Hart).

Which is why we can think about it: "if mind is real, it can be only because all things have their origin and subsistence in living mind; hence, ultimately, it is matter that must be reducible to an original mental reality."

I'd go so far as to say that material reality is merely a kind of phase, so to speak, of mind... a concrete state or crystallization... the way ice is a phase and state and crystallization of water.

Where have we heard this before? In Chapter 3 of Philosophy of Science in the Light of the Perennial Wisdom, called The Degrees and Modes of Reality: there are "multiple states of being, each corresponding to the objects of a degree of man's faculty of knowledge," from matter on up to the Principial Realm of the Divine Mind. 

Somedivide and sumthelot but the tally turns round the same balifuson. --Joyce

In other words, the whole ball of confusion can be divided and sub-divided in many ways, but we are the ones who do the dividing, for example, between mind and matter:

Some, considering the essential identity of Creation with the Principle, may describe total reality as being one indivisible unity. Some may divide it up into two degrees: the Divine Order, and that of all that is created, namely, Creation. At the other end of the spectrum, some... have proposed forty states.

That's too many. Let's keep it simple. Bina and Ziarani propose five, beginning with "the material world that is in principle knowable to our senses." Now, to some -- for example, Hart's voice of materialism -- this is all there is. But this is again Schopenhauer's philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself. It explains everything but the explainer.

One character of Hart's dialogue doesn't shy away from the insultainment, seeing "the modern mechanistic view of things as a kind of psychological disorder," even a psychosis or at least neurosis that results in "a tragic estrangement from reality." In short,

The modern world created a new concept of matter, one into which the seemingly self-evident phenomena of mind could not be fitted.

Putting mind back into the model "became a task that was simultaneously necessary and impossible. Hence the psychosis." 

And here we are. Nevertheless, our "first-person awareness is a primary datum, the ground of all knowledge, and it simply defies physicalist logic." 

Lots of arguing back and forth, but the problem is how to get from a world of "pure exteriority" or "pure quantitative existence" to one of interiority and "subjective qualitative experience." How can it be that

at some point there was nothing but ubiquitous objectivity and then, an instant later, there was local subjectivity.... Somewhere the threshold was crossed. But how?

"How did that all that mindless quantity suddenly add up to a perceiving mind?" How can matter be "abruptly and fantastically inverted into the very opposite of everything modern orthodoxy tells us matter is?" How to account for the "sudden qualitative transition from pure exteriority to an unprecedented inwardness?"

I know how I did it. It's why the chapters of my book begin and end in mid-sentence, to suggest the local discontinuity within a nonlocal (or vertical) continuity that operates from the top-down, or via formal and final causality. 

Looked at this way, the inexplicable transition described by Hart -- from exteriority to interiority, quantity to quality, existence to experience, matter to mind, objects to subjects, etc. -- suddenly becomes un-inexplicable. 

Not to say the mystery is solved. Only that we have a sufficient reason for the mysterious space in which we live, i.e., between immanence and transcendence, but ordered to the latter in a dynamic and open communion.

So We Have Heard from the Wise

Chapter IV of All Things are Full of Gods simply defines some terms which everyone already understands -- such as consciousness -- so we'll skip ahead to chapter V, The Rise of Mechanism.

Slow your roll, son. Everyone already agrees on the meaning of consciousness?

I know what I mean by it, but it is -- like the word "experience" -- impossible to define without assuming it: to define something is already to objectify it, but subjects are precisely what can never be reduced to objects. Subjects can define objects, but objects can never define the subject.

For Hart, consciousness is "subjective experience, immediate awareness, existing in an entirely private and incommunicable way." 

For me it's much more primordial, something like luminous interiority, the crack in the cosmos where everything gets in. It is not and cannot be derived from anything less than itself. 

I would add that it is intrinsically intersubjective, so it is not private, full stop; if it were, we could never enter and share in the intersubjective space where humanness takes place, so to speak. Rather, we would be isolated monads cut off from one another. (This feature of intersubjectivity is grounded in the Trinity, but we'll leave that aside for now.)

The Kena Upanishad speaks for me: call it what you want, but there is an "ear of the ear, mind of the mind, speech of the speech," also a "breath of the breath, and eye of the eye":

Him the eye does not see, nor the tongue express, nor the mind grasp.... Different is he from the known, and also different is he from the unknown. So we have heard from the wise.

Or, put it this way: "That which is not heard by the ear but by which the ear hears -- know that to be Brahman." And if you think you know what that is, well, "know that you know little":

He among us knows him best who understands the spirit of the words: "Nor do I know that I know him not."

"He who truly knows Brahman" 

knows him as beyond knowledge; he who thinks that he knows, knows not. The ignorant think that Brahman is known, but the wise know him to be beyond knowledge.  

For Brahman one could substitute Tao, and both can be easily trancelighted into Eckhart's Ground, which would require a whole post to describe, but for now let's just say it is

the protean term everywhere at the center of Eckhart's mysticism, which, paradoxically, vanishes from our grasp when we try to contain it in a definable scheme, or circumference, of speculation (McGinn).

It is simultaneously employed to indicate origin, cause, beginning, reason, and "what is inmost, hidden, most proper to a being -- that is, its essence." It is both "the innermost of the soul" and "the hidden depths of God."

Atman is Brahman?

Close enough for blogging. McGinn suggests that

We are indeed "like" God insofar as God bears his "like" in me (i.e., the Son).

If the Father is in the Son and the Son assumes human nature, do the myth.

Now, to think that a mechanistic metaphysic is adequate to the task of conceptualizing the Ground is a blunderstatement. But 

our metaphysics is often nothing other than our method, mistaken for the very truth it's supposed to help us seek (Hart).  

In short, it is a rookie move to conflate method and ontology. The body and even mind can be treated like machines. But this is not to say they are literally machines. Again, rookie error. Or so we have heard from the wise.

A machine has only exterior relations, i.e., it is composed of parts that are externally related to one one another. 

Not so for organisms, which feature interior relations, not to mention the mind, which is intersubjective right down to its (triune) ground. Let those with ears hear: I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. 

Or in the words of John, I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

"For the truly inquiring scientific intellect, any ultimate ground of explanation must be one that unites all dimensions of being in a simpler, more conceptually parsimonious principle" (Hart).

"[T]he object of knowledge and the mind itself both together belong to one and the same source of intelligibility and being underlying all things, so that the knowing mind and the known are, at their ground, always already one (ibid.).