If Noam Chomsky is a genius linguist, it wouldn't be the first time a gifted intellectual also suffered from delusions -- for example, Isaac Newton and his alchemy fixation, or Gödel and his paranoia, or Tesla and his pigeon obsession.
But let's keep this party polite, and never let truth out of our sight. Truth is true even if it's said by an America-hating terror-supporting utensil.
Spitzer certainly keeps things polite, relying on Chomsky's linguistic theories to build his case for God, with nary a mention of his extracrackpotular political wacktivities.
Do the soulless prove the existence of the soul?
I don't know if I'd put it that way, but privations in general are parasitic on some positive good.
Where there's smoke there's fire, and where there are shadows there is light. In this sense, where there are progressives there is truth lurking nearby.
But is it enough to prove the soul's immaterial capacities to prove the existence of the immaterial soul? In other words, how can we have the capacities but not the thing that has the capacities? Isn't that like the smile without the Cheshire cat?
Whatever we call it, the soul accomplishes things no material entity could, for example, the self-reflection whereby it is both observer and observed. How does the observer emerge from the observed, or rather, how does this immaterial twoness arise from material oneness?
Again, we can teach sign language to primates, but there is no evidence that they can think conceptually or communicate abstract ideas, whereas this is what humans effortlessly do. Similarly, chimps might connect two words that are immediately adjacent to one another, but cannot relate more distant connections, as we are doing in this and every other post.
The question is how to bridge this gap between animal and human: can natural selection do the job, or are we talking about an ontological discontinuity whereby no material entity in no amount of time can accomplish this leap?
We have long since dismissed the latter as a metaphysical impossibility. But just because you've proved how something couldn't have happened, it doesn't mean you've proved how it did happen.
How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
No shit, Sherlock, but how do we know when we've eliminated every impossibility? In other words, there may be hidden variables of which we know nothing.
And yet, these variables, whatever they turn out to be, cannot be material. Of this we can be certain. Only meta-physics can provide the answer, but the very existence of metaphysics implies a cosmos that is conditioned from the top down, from Principle to manifestation.
In a way it reminds me of the expensive doorstop I began making my way through yesterday, Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities. I've only read the first chapter, but it raises a host of fascinating questions about the very possibility of modeling ultimate reality, like, is this something man can even do? And if so, what does this say about man?
From the very beginning, man qua man has been modeling ultimate reality. Indeed, the two -- man and model(s) -- seem to have coarisen: show me a man and I'll show you a religion, whether implicit or explicit. And even when explicit, it is not necessarily reflected upon in a detached and critical manner.
At any rate, man is Homo religiosus, each religion being a kind of spontaneous model of ultimate reality. It doesn't mean the model is accurate, only that this metaphysical model-making is something man does without even consciously thinking about it. We make religious models like beavers make dams. It's what we do.
Until quite recently. It has only been since the 20th century that the majority of philosophers gave up on metaphysical systems, which is to say, constructing the ultimate model of reality.
Religion is the poetry of metaphysics.
Agreed. And just as we can analyze a poem in order to discern what the poet is "really saying," we can do the same with religion. And yet, if the full meaning of the poem could be conveyed via prose, why bother with the poem? Why not just tell the girl she's pretty? Why complicate matters by blathering about summer days and buds of May?
There must be some residue in the poem that cannot be reduced to the wideawake & cutandry. Moreover, I would suggest that this meaning is inward and experiential as opposed to outward, linear, and discursive.
This implies that our model of ultimate reality will have to have something "poetic" about it.
D'oh! That's not really in my skillset. Rather, I was raised to believe that poetry is just gay sentences.
This is my problem with the great metaphysician Guenon, who is all math and no poetry, as it were. Schuon is much more poetic, and in fact, he stopped writing prose altogether toward the end of his life, in favor of composing some 3,500 poems. Maybe I'm not the best judge, but I don't find them particularly moving, rather, too literal and didactic. Poetry tries to express the inexpressible, but Schuon's poems just express his metaphysic in a shorter format.
Let's get back to the post. As we've been arguing for a couple of decades, there is ontological discontinuity if we examine the cosmos from the bottom up, but continuity from the top down. Chomsky & Co. "hypothesize that the gap between humans and nonhumans is fundamentally biological" (Spitzer), but then they would, wouldn't they? Naturalism is a metaphysic (and model) too, just an impoverished one that can't even account for itself.
Now, to even say "bottom up" or "top down" implies a verticality for which your model will need to account. As we always say, if man can explain natural selection, then natural selection cannot explain man (at least without residue).
As the science currently stands, "this is a major problem, which is currently inexplicable through physical-biological processes." I say it cannot in principle be solved via science, because the soul is irreducible to anything less.
But if the soul didn't evolve via natural selection, how and when did it get here? In the book, I suggested that it was a sudden occurrence that happened as recently as 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, whereas Spitzer puts it at 50,000 to 65,000 years ago. No doubt the date of the third Big Bang (into Mind) will be increasingly fine-tuned as more evidence comes to light.
Let me fast forward in the book, as Spitzer presents his evidence for the third bang in an appendix. Again, given the soul's existence, "when did we get it?," i.e., "when did the nonevolutionary, transphysical event of the soul's creation occur for the first time?"
Examining only the biological evidence, we can trace things back to a Miss Mitochondrial Eve and a Mr. Y Chromosome Adam. Although these two lived at roughly the same time and came from a similar neighborhood, there's no way of establishing if they knew each other (in the biblical sense, wink wink). In fact,
Though they may have had acquaintance with each other, it is by no means certain -- and seems quite unlikely (given the large region and time spans involved).
Now, looking at the trans-biological evidence, it hardly matters whether these two ever got together, since they lived some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, whereas evidence of the transphysical soul doesn't burst upon the stage until much later, again, 50 to 65 thousand years ago.
Anthropologists call this "the great leap forward," even though natural selection is a gradual process that doesn't allow for such leaps, much less vertical ones, i.e., a great leap upward.
In short, "Our first ensouled ancestor appeared on the earth." I suppose it's a bit like trying to remember back to when you and I became ensouled. It's something of a blur. I just woke up one day and here I was. What did Churchill say about his birth?
Although present on that occasion, I have no clear recollection of the events leading up to it.
Spitzer, bless his heart, also brings Gödel into the argument, since he proved that "human thinking is not based on a set of prescribed axioms, rules, or programs" and is indeed "beyond any program."
Presumably this includes any genetic program -- I'll have to check with Robert Rosen -- but in any case "human intelligence is indefinitely beyond any axiomatic or program-induced intellect." It is
not only always beyond axioms, rules, and programs (to which artificial intelligence is limited) but also capable of genuinely originative creativity (that is, capable of thinking without deriving from or making recourse to any prior axioms, rules, or programs).
Which is full of implications for our attempt to model ultimate reality. And again implies that poetry -- or something like it -- might be needed to convey the Beyond that can never be contained by the model.
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In short, "Our first ensouled ancestor appeared on the earth." I suppose it's a bit like trying to remember back to when you and I became ensouled.
Huh. Now I wonder if it's possible that some people never do become ensouled, but that seems rather unlikely.
It was said by the wise ones of yore that people always have souls except for extremely rare examples.
It was said by the rishis of Mohenjo Daro that each human soul was of incredible antiquity, far older than 50,000 years, so it raises a question of whether human souls were first created during the time frame discussed in the post, or whether souls spent time doing other things prior to showing up in human bodies during the time frame discussed. The matter is open for debate.
Souls were said to evolve slowly over vast spans of time. It makes sense. God enjoyed lingering for eons inside of stellar masses; He loves stars of any hue, they are an art form for Him. God is gradually enriched by His starry creations, and the stars in turn evolve and develop weird dim sentience.
Each of us may have spent eons experiencing star existence and taking a crack at being everything from plankton on up before donning our first human body on Earth.
So they say. It all depends on whether you trust your sources.
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