Go Meta or Go Om

This post contains partially recycled material, so there is a somewhat abrupt transition between the new and the old, which I have conveniently highlighted with a subheading indicating THE OLD. The transition is not as abrupt as it appears, but I ran out of time to fully pull the two sections together. 

Nevertheless, they really are two sides or entailments of the same argument, which is simply to say that the cosmos is open for isness right down to the ground.

Perhaps this is too good to check, but Spencer Klavan writes that 

If you try to train an AI language model by feeding it the words it has already produced, it goes berserk and starts spewing out gobbledygook. Airtight logic is also airless logic. 

Klavan provides a link, so we can check it out if we are so inclined. But first let the man finish his point:

Sure, from inside any system, whatever’s outside the system looks irrational. But every form of logic has to take things for granted that the logic itself can’t prove. Ethics can’t prove that good is good; arithmetic can’t prove that 1=1. But you can’t put two and two together unless you start from basic principles like this. 

So of course, if you build an imitation mind out of numbers, then every idea or experience that can’t be counted looks “irrational” -- another phantom spook to be broken down into code. But it’s equally predictable that a closed system like that will eventually go insane. In a certain sense, if it’s truly closed, it already is insane (emphasis mine).

Therefore, go meta or go home: "if you want to understand a principle that your theory can’t explain, you need a bigger theory that contains the first one." For it is not that human intelligence is irrational, rather, transrational, i.e., "because we’re bigger than they [AI language models] are. There’s more in us than there is in them." 

Better run this by our artificial friend: what's bigger in principle, Gemini, human intelligence or AI language models?

In principle, human intelligence is significantly bigger and more encompassing than AI language models.

I am intrigued by the idea that a closed system will eventually go insane because in a sense it already is insane; or, we might say it is implicitly insane, but the program must run its course for the insanity to become explicit. 

I suspect this is what is now happening to the left: their ideas and assumptions have always been crazy, but the gradual takeover of the culture meant that they could remain closed from reality. Now the debate within the party is between those who think they just need better messaging for the crazy ideas, vs. those who are beginning to suspect that an actual world exists outside their closed ideological silo. 

Truly truly, this idea of closure applies both horizontally and vertically, for what is a physicalist but someone who is (or imagines he is) vertically closed to the transcendent? Problem is, intelligence can only be horizontally open because it was first vertically open. This is easy enough to prove. 

Easy for Gödel anyway. But it's easy for me as well, because the intellect by definition transcends what it knows. If it didn't, there could be no knowledge, period. We can define things that in no way define us, up to and including the cosmos itself. Supposing we ever arrive at a Theory of Everything, we'll still transcend it, because consciousness will remain open to the transcendent Absolute. 

THE OLD:

Now, 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 (despite the best efforts of physicalists).

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, which is to say, closed systems, 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," which is to say, an unavoidable Meta-realm:

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).

In short, we cannot enclose it because it encloses us. But we can be open to it. In fact, to the extent that we aren't, we just might be insane, for reasons alluded to above. 

The transcendent ground may at once signify 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? Or, created in the image of God?

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, nor is it an open system.

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.