Steel Man Arguments for What We Already Believe

It is easier to convince the fool of what is disputable than of what is indisputable. --Davila

I don't know about the book, but I like the title: Materialism is Baloney. However, the endorsement of a shameless baloney merchant like Deepak Chopra is enough to make one suspect the author's anti-materialism is the real baloney.

I'm currently reading another book called The Golden Cord, which includes a garden variety critique of materialist baloney. But as we know, one man's baloney is another man's filet mignon. I have no idea how a materialist survives on a diet of pure baloney, but survive they do. Which is not to say there isn't a surplus of religious baloney out there as well.

Where's the beef?

Since neither side ever vanquishes the other, it makes me wonder if there could ever be a true steel man argument for anything, for it seems that there's always just enough wiggle room to allow the person to embrace his preferred vision of reality. If one wants to be a materialist, there's more then enough evidence for it, likewise for an immaterialist vision.

 Impartiaity is less attractive than the partiality that views itself with irony.

So people just believe what they want and furnish the reasons later?

Yes, except sometimes it's a matter of believing what they can -- in other words, a matter of ability, whether innate or acquired.

Believing that he says what he wants to, the writer only says what he can.

As is the case with any other human ability, there are some people who are spiritually gifted and others who have no gift or talent at all in this area. When these latter types confidently pronounce on religion and spirituality, they are likely to generate baloney, because they don't know what they don't know, and don't want to know. For me, a confident materialist is like someone who boasts of expertise at watching TV.

Vertical Dunning-Krugery.

Correct. More generally, the less you know, the more you think you know, and any field seems easy to the person who has mastered a bit of it. Nevertheless, we are by definition ruled by the mediocretins who occupy the 68% of the middle of the Bell Curve (or 95% if you have a stricter standard of intelligence).

Which is a nice segue into this re-edited old post:

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 of All Things Are Full of Gods 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  shit  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. 

As suggested a few posts back, it relates to ultimacy -- to our ultimate metaphysical situation -- as opposed to ultimate reality per se. We live smack dab in the middle of a dynamic space with immanent matter at one end and the transcendent object at the other, so I always begin in the middle, since that's where we always already are anyway.

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once. -- John Coltrane

Sound advice. 

And not just with respect to sound. 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. 

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 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.

Gemini tried:

Since the direct embedding isn't working, I can describe the image I attempted to generate for you, based on the prompt:

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Image Description

The image I tried to create is a surreal and philosophical abstract piece designed to visually represent the core themes of the text: mind shaping matter and transcendence.

• It features luminous, shimmering wisps of energy in shades of deep blue, cosmic purple, and hints of green. These ethereal forms are meant to represent consciousness and mind.
• These energy wisps are subtly weaving through and transforming solid, geometric structures that symbolize material reality. The idea is to show the mind informing or imprinting upon matter, causing it to subtly change or glow from within.
• In the upper part of the image, there's a faint, ethereal light or a gentle vortex, suggesting transcendence and vertical causality, subtly influencing the entire scene below.
• The overall composition aims to convey a sense of profound mystery and the interconnectedness of all things, avoiding any literal or concrete depictions of brains or physical objects.

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My apologies that you couldn't see the visual representation directly.