Scientism and Heresy

In a comment yesterday I linked to a short book I'm reading called Plato's Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome. It argues that 

At every moment, we owe our lives to a genome that is more than matter, and to an informational source that is immaterial, transcomputational, and beyond space and time.

It is also the story of what happens to a disloyal biologist who makes such a heretical argument: excommunication from the Church of Darwin, even though the real -- which is to say, intrinsic -- intellectual heresy is failure to follow truth where it leads. Mere failure to assent to the dogmas of Darwinism -- or of any other ideology -- is but extrinsic heresy.

The intellect is ordered to truth; or, truth is the telos of the intellect. Truth too is "is immaterial, transcomputational, and beyond space and time," and only one metaphysic accounts for both of these facts, i.e., a genome ordered to biological form and an intellect ordered to truth. Along these lines, Werner Heisenberg was on the right track:

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact these smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed un ambiguously only in mathematical language.

Similarly, Richard Sternberg -- the subject of the book -- alludes to "the concept of a 'structural attractor,'" which is "an unchanging type of final cause that informs... developmental processes." Sounds like a creatively open universe to me:

we can securely infer that purposive design occurred not just once upon a time, but also in the here and now -- a purposive infusion of form as an ongoing activity.

Like Polanyi, Sternberg compares it to language, i.e.,

to letters, composing syllables, composing words and phrases and sentences. What's generating the language? Is ink composing it? No, there has to be a source of agency. There is an end goal, a disembodied telos, that "attracts." says Sternberg. the embryo's development.

In short, "more than mindless matter is required," rather, "an infusion from an immaterial source is needed."

But for understandable reasons -- human nature being what it is -- this "scares a lot of people because we have a commitment to a notion of a closed universe," one "without dimensions or realities that transcend our own." In any event, the fear is rooted in philosophy, not in science; or rather, in commitment to a mythico-religious scientism vs. disinterested metaphysics.

The bottom line is that one surely needn't be a scientist to understand that science itself is only rendered possible with recourse to meta-scientific principles. An ontologically closed material scientism is but another self-licking ice cream cone, as plausible as unicorns or the fountain of youth. 

Coincidentally, the next chapter of All Things... is called Information and Form, and it is indeed a mystery where all this information comes from. Information is "at the origin," but how? Hart's romantic and poetical 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.

***

With regard to the 2,500 year argument clinic that is philosophy, Schuon writes that 

Plato represents the inward dimension, subjective extension, synthesis and reintegration, whereas Aristotle represents the outward dimension, objective extension, analysis and projection....

Elsewhere he suggests that 

Platonism, which is as it were “centripetal” and unitive, opens onto the consciousness of the one and immanent Self; on the contrary, Aristotelianism, which is “centrifugal” and separative, tends to sever the world -- and with it man -- from its divine roots.

So, in one metaphysical corner we have inward, subjective, unitive, synthetic, and centripetal; in the other, outward, objective, separative, analytic, and centrifugal. Or interior Self and exterior World.

Now, seriously, how could we ever really do without a complementary metaphysic that is itself a synthesis of both? Nothing short of this can describe our predicament. We don't want to exclude anything, let alone on an a priori basis.

This next chapter -- Metabolism and Mind -- mainly bats down some apparently eminent contemporary philosophers who try to do what we just said one should never do. Such approaches try to sneak in things like purpose and value through the side door, but come across as fancier modes of the same old reductionism. 

They also yada-yada over some rather important steps along the way, prompting one character to ask

Can we really move that easily from metabolism to consciousness and then to symbolic thought?

The whole scheme "could be taken to mean that life is a purely structural amplification of the laws of physics, and mental agency a purely structural amplification of the laws of life thus generated." 

But again, why even imagine that subjects could ever be reduced to objects, when in reality, this is about the most implausible thing imaginable? The project fails because it cannot overcome "any of the explanatory gaps -- or, rather, abysses" it "sets out to bridge." And why? Same old reason: it stills proceeds "in only one direction: from below to above." 

But in this world there is always (↑) and (↓), am I wrong? For that matter, there is always O, the transcendent object toward which (↑) is ordered. But we still need the immanent horizon (or boundary) as well for a total map of the Real.

"Once again, direction is all." The bottom-up project fails "precisely because it's an attempt to yet again ground the mental in the physical rather than the reverse," thus foundering "on all the same causal aporias that plague the mechanistic model."

If interiority isn't irreducible, than nothing is:

And the interiority of organism proceeds from mind, not the reverse.... mental interiority is the source and rationale, rather than merely the result, of metabolism.

This mystery of interiority is the mystery. How does a universe of pure exterior relations -- of unalloyed outsideness -- suddenly gain an inside view of itself? Not just an interior perspective, but again, interiority as such. Truly truly, WTF?!

The next chapter slaps down another reductionist or three, all of whom "want to suggest that the reflective interiority and self-awareness of mind is just a structural elaboration or continuation" of lower material processes. "We never really come nearer to life or mind" via such reductive belowviating. 

The thing is, "mind isn't actually a structurally spatial interiority," rather, it's immaterial, so it makes no sense to say that some self-organizing physical structure like a whirlpool or tornado just one day developed an inside and decided to go on being. Again, there is a radical discontinuity between any mere dissipative structure and the merest organism.     

No, mind is before all and in all, shaping matter into living organisms; matter is always being raised up into life, and life is always being raised up into mind, and mind is always seeking a transcendental end...

Put conversely,

It can't really be a matter of the miraculous appearance of teleological activity within the originally atelic dynamisms of material processes. 

Again, you can't just yada yada over something as important and fundamental as interiority -- a subjective horizon oriented to a transcendent telos -- as if to say "Something very, very significant happened at this point, but let's not dwell on it." To re-belabor the point, this is "a qualitative abyss that can't be crossed from below." 

Let's hit the pause button and continue tomorrow.