Who Models the Modeler?

Science begins with the material cosmos and theology with God. Except for natural theology, which also begins with the material cosmos. And science can only get off the ground by assuming certain transcendent metaphysical principles that science itself cannot justify. And both begin with the human subject, since neither science nor theology are possible without him.

So, cosmotheandrism: everything has a little of each -- like this Taoist symbol:

Earth, heaven, and man.

Or as we were saying yesterday, O, with center, circumference, and radii, but which comes first in this tri-complementarity? 

Must be heaven, AKA, the circle whose circumference is nowhere and center is everywhere.

Yes, the nonlocal center is implicitly everywhere but explicitly somewhere in each... I was going to say person, but really it is in any living thing, which represents a kind of local centration or ingathering and binding of energy and information. 

Life is the center of the cosmos?

Apparently. Certainly it is the center from which we view things. Nor could we view things unless we transcended them, and life is the dynamic transcendence of matter, precisely. 

Unless we reduce life to matter, but our Taoist symbol forbids that. In other words, only a man can reduce himself to matter. 

It reminds me of what Robert Rosen says about semantics not being reducible to syntax. More generally, it's not that easy to cleanse the cosmos of subjectivity, because only a subject can pretend to do that. This was touched on in the book, if I can find it... There's this quote by Rosen:

[L]ife poses the most serious kinds of challenges to physics itself.... More specifically, the expectation that phenomena of life or mind could be assimilated directly into physics as merely a minor technical bubble, of no conceptual significance, was mistaken.

That is so 19th century. 

Agreed. Get with the times!

Another quote, this one by Richard Spilsbury. I don't even remember reading the book, but he says that "the basic objection" to reductive Darwinism is

that it confers miraculous powers on inappropriate agents. In essence, it is an attempt to supernaturalize nature, to endow unthinking processes with more-than-human powers -- including the power of creating thinkers.... I find it impossible to share this faith that supra-human achievements can be encompassed by sub-human means and sub-rational mechanisms.

As do I. Hence cosmotheandrism. Or biocosmotheandrism, to coin a cumbersome term. At any rate, our old Unknown Friend agrees that

Yes, the miraculous does exist, for life is only a series of miracles, if we understand by "miracle" not the absence of cause..., but rather the visible effect of an invisible cause, or the effect on a lower plane due to a cause on a higher plane.

Life comes from Life.

Yes, it is a radial energy between the (vertical) center and (horizontal) periphery. Hans Jonas talks about "the testimony of life," and of how

It is in the dark stirrings of primeval organic substance that a principle of freedom shines forth for the first time within the vast necessity of the physical universe -- a principle foreign to suns, planets, and atoms.

Unless this is a biotheandric cosmos, in which case suns, planets, and atoms are like the soil from which life and mind emerge. Again, life and mind are implicitly present, otherwise they could never be explicitly so. Here is how I put it in the book:

With Life, existence somehow became experience, and a new world literally came into being, outwardly dependent upon the previous one, but at the same time inwardly transcending it: a universe beyond itself, a restless declaration of subjectivity from the mute algorithms of opaque material repetition.  

I don't always agree with myself, but I find that hard to top. Bottom line: "a universe that contains even the potential for life is utterly different from one that does not, and is different in ways that simply cannot be articulated by science as presently understood."

Sure, there are models of life, but the model is never the thing. It reminds me of something Andrew Klavan says about Irrational Rationality -- which is to say, a presumptuous and tyrannical rationality that has no awareness of its own (Gödelian) limits, as exemplified by those

 “modern science-worshipping would-be despots” who “want to bring the whole world under one system of order and measurement, one perfectly calibrated language of numbers, time, and space that will lock the world into an unchanging order they can control.” 

Jung, writing in 1957 near the end of his life, said this: “Scientific education is based in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge and therefore imparts an unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role. The individual, however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality.” 

In other words, there is something inherent in a scientific -- or even just a rational -- view of the world, that is not only unrealistic, but oppressively antithetical to our humanity. 

This fits in nicely with the view of modern philosopher Iain McGilchrist, who believes the theorizing left hemisphere of the brain has usurped the proper throne of the right hemisphere, which experiences the world as a holistic gestalt.

"It is as if" Jung and McGilchrist "are decrying the mental cage in which we have found ourselves while locked inside the cage themselves." Thus, our "cultural task" involves "teaching the learned to rediscover what any fool could once plainly see."

Which I don't see happening any time soon, because the tenured rejection of common sense is really an irrational, status-driven project to see who can come up with the most nonsensical vision, from physicalism to transgenderism to the 1619 project. Or as I recently put it to a friend,

I suppose it’s the need for distinction, isn't it? Anybody can have common sense, just as anyone can appreciate Van Gogh or Mozart. People want to believe things that set them apart, so crazy ideas have a built in appeal. For which reason Voegelin talked about the essence of modernity being gnosticism, i.e., special ideas known only special people, i.e., uncommon nonsense. 

One common theme in these progressive visions of pseudo-liberation is that they do precisely the opposite, that is, lock us inside their own cramped mental cages. But reality always escapes the model, and any "objective" model excludes the subject who devises the model. Except for my model. After all, a genuine humanism ought to privilege humanness, no? Or at least not reduce it to something less.