Reality Comes in Threes

THE FOLLOWING POST CONTAINS RECYCLED MATERIAL

What else is new?

Well, to paraphrase Harry Truman, there's nothing new in the world except the posts we don't remember, in this case a couple from ten years ago, edited in light of subsequent developments, if any. 

In other words, in this weekly exercise in Looking Back, I'm curious to find out if my overall approach has evolved or progressed. If so, then we will edit accordingly:

Way back in my early twenties I read Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game (AKA Magister Ludi), even though much of it was impenetrable to my only recently activated and mostly content-free mind. I'd begun reading in a random manner, and this book came across my radar because Hesse was a popular author among the hippie set.  

This experimental novel "is set in a 23rd-century utopia in which the intellectual elite have distilled all available knowledge of math, music, science, and art into an elaborately coded game." One reviewer says the book is an intricate bildungsroman--

Bildungwut?

Yes, that's "a novel dealing with one person's formative years or spiritual education." Thus, it played a small part in my own bildungsroman. It is 

about humanity's eternal quest for enlightenment and for synthesis of the intellectual and the participatory life.... Since childhood, [the protagonist] has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and scientific arts, such as mathematics, music, logic, and philosophy. This he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game).

So, the folks who play the game presume that all truth is related, and that this is indeed One Cosmos after all. And although I didn't understand the book, I've been playing the game ever since. It goes like this: take two or more subjects or disciplines that appear to have nothing to do with each other, and then show how they are related.

Along these lines, yesterday I began reading a Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB for short). The book draws upon "a wide range of traditionally independent fields of research," including neurobiology, genetics, memory, attachment, complex systems, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology, in the effort to find a "unity of knowledge, or consilience" of "numerous domains of study into a common language and conceptual framework." 

I've been doing the same thing -- i.e., rummaging around for the multi-undisciplinary Unity of Knowledge -- since my latent cʘʘnvision was activated on March 4, 1985. Most everything I've written since then is a variant of the GB Game.

One thing that motivated me was the suspicion that subjectivity is not reducible to objectivity, but rather, that the former is an irreducible category of being. In reality, the two are complementary, not contrary, so any metaphysic that tries to eliminate the subject or reduce it to something less is a non-starter.

Siegel too writes of how he was motivated to create "a common ground in which to bring science and subjectivity into" a fruitful dialogue. The dialogue revolves around "finding the universal principles across many academic fields," and "discovering the consilience that emerges when usually independent research endeavors are explored together" (emphasis mine).

As we shall see, I have some slight and/or significant differences with Siegel, one of which would be the idea that the consilience only "emerges" as opposed to being an antecedent condition for the unity. But like me, Siegel "longed to find a way to connect the power of objective science with the centrality of our subjective mental lives."

Likewise, he wondered, for example, whether "the molecules I had been studying in the lab that allowed salmon to transition safely from fresh to saltwater" could "be in some way connected to the equally important reality that the way we communicate with another person in crisis can mean life or death" (at the time, he worked on a suicide prevention help line).

Now, seeking a connection between suicide and salmon molecules would be an example of Extreme Glass Bead Gaming. 

Eventually Siegel formed a group of forty scientists from a diversity of disciplines, including "anthropology, molecular biology, cognitive science, education, genetics, linguistics, neuroscience, neurosurgery, physics, psychology, psychiatry, mathematics, computer science, and sociology."

Most scientists won't even try to define the mind, but instead, simply use the word "as a kind of placeholder for the unknown." This is actually not a bad strategy, since it is difficult to know how the mind, utilizing its own resources, could define itself, any more than the eye can see itself, unless we are somehow able to view the mind from a higher, outside perspective, which science naturally excludes.

Siegel writes of how, "when we differentiate concepts from each other and then link them, we integrate knowledge." Not only that, but we integrate the person who has differentiated and then re-integrated the concepts. 

I would say that this is actually a two-way process: that it takes an integrated person to synthesize the diversity, while synthesizing the diversity makes us more integrated. Which is one of the points of life, for who wants to exist as a bunch of incoherent and disconnected fragments?

It seems to me that mental health can be defined along two axes: integration and actualization, the former giving momentum to the latter. As Siegel writes, "when we move energy and information flow toward something called integration, we move toward health." This "makes a stronger, healthier, more flexible, and resilient mind." 

Now, Siegel is at pains to emphasize that human beings are always embodied and embedded. What he means by this is that we have a brain which, via the nervous system (which is just the periphery of the brain), extends throughout the body. Where is the brain? Only partly in the head. It's really "in" the whole body (although it is more accurate to say that the body is in the mind, i.e., a representation of it).

But at the same time, "Our mental lives are profoundly relational," and really take place in the space between our neurology and other persons. Thus, "Embodied and embedded is the fundamental nature of mind."

And guess what this made me think of? Yes, the second person of the Trinity, who indeed becomes "embodied and embedded" with the restavus. We explicitly focus on the embodiment -- incarnation -- but it is for the purpose of embeddedness, i.e., the offer of relatedness. If Christ is God's icon of man (and man's icon of God), this should not surprise us. Rather, shock us.

However, Siegel's ideas are metapsychological but not metaphysical, so no consideration is given to the wider meta-cosmic context in which the mind is situated.

Rather, the cosmos is assumed, as if just any cosmic conditions could give rise to something as strange as persons. Siegel mostly stays within the boundaries of science, but in so doing, expands those boundaries by including the subject in an irreducible way.

For example, read the following, and I'll bet you're thinking what I'm thinking: the triad of mind, brain, and relationships composes "one reality with three independent facets."

As Siegel describes it, "This is not splitting the three aspects." Rather, they "are three aspects of one reality.... With this view, we have one reality with three facets -- not three distinct domains of separate realities."

Siegel is speaking of science, not theology. However, the Raccoon would like to know what kind of cosmos this must be in order for such an irreducibly trinitarian and intersubjective science to exist? 

In any event, within this trinity of mind-brain-intersubjectivity it is as if there are arrows of influence in all directions, such that "the mind is influenced by both relationships and the brain; relationships are influenced by both the mind and brain; the brain is influenced by both mind and relationships." From the IPNB point of view, "this triangle embraces our ground of being."

To which we naturally want to ask, "what came before that?," or "What is beneath this scientific ground?" Which is like asking a physicist, "What came before the big bang?" The physicist cannot answer the question, not because there is no answer, but because his model cannot venture beyond its own horizon. Which is entirely appropriate, since we do not demand that science be religion, nor that stones of tenure turn into the bread of life.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, we'll probably be discussing the Trinity a great deal in forthcoming weeks, because I just ordered a giant book called On Classical Trinitarianism: Retrieving the Nicene Doctrine of the Triune God. I suspect that the doctrine of Trinity furnishes a key to winning the Glass Bead Game, but we'll see. 

In fact, Peter Kreeft has a book called Why Does Everything Come in Threes?: A Short Book about Everything, which I haven't read, but I think I know the answer.