A Response to My Imaginary Critics

Yesterday's posted ended with a rhetorical flourish, but our judges won't allow it: too fluffy and insubstantial, plus you sound like a f*cking hippy:

In this view, individual consciousness isn't a separate entity but rather a temporary expression of a universal, underlying network, much like a mushroom is a temporary expression of the mycelial network. It’s a compelling way to visualize the relationship between the individual and the whole.

If you want to venture down that path, you had better tighten up that loose shirt.

First of all, I didn't say it, Gemini did. Let's give it a chance to respond to the criticism:

That's a valid and common critique. When stripped of its context, the language can certainly sound vague or insubstantial. However, the idea that individual consciousness is an expression of a universal, underlying network is far from new or "fluffy." It is a concept with a long and serious history in philosophy, mysticism, and religion.

So there. It reminds me of something Spencer Klavan wrote this morning:

Few kinds of isolation are worse than isolation in time, that solitary confinement to just those thoughts that happen to be popular now, in which many people live. Like any imprisonment, it’s bound to drive you mad. “We may be sure,” wrote C.S. Lewis, that “the blindness about which posterity will ask -- 'But how could they have thought that?'—lies where we have never suspected it."

Lewis goes on to say that the only way out of this temporal blindness is to read old books. If you did, you would know that -- continuing with Gemini's response -- 

The idea that the individual self is part of a larger, unified consciousness is a core tenet in many major worldviews. It's a way of grappling with the profound questions of existence and the relationship between the part and the whole.

For example, 

The central tenet of Vedanta is the relationship between Brahman (the ultimate, universal reality) and Atman (the individual soul). The a-ha moment of this tradition is the realization that Atman is Brahman -- the individual self is not separate but is, in essence, the universal self.

Likewise western mysticism:

From the Neoplatonists to Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, there's a tradition of seeking a direct, unmediated experience of the divine, in which the individual self is seen as merging with or being a part of the universal Godhead.

As to the vagueness, 

The mushroom/mycelial network analogy is a metaphor, not a literal scientific statement. Its purpose is to provide a way to visualize a relationship that is fundamentally beyond our typical, subject-object way of thinking. It offers a framework for conceiving of our interconnectedness that stands in opposition to the isolated, "sealed-in-a-submarine" view you have critiqued. The "fluffiness," therefore, is in the popular interpretation of the idea, not in the intellectual substance of the concept itself.

One cannot be more precise than the subject allows. After all, even physics ends in a quantum cloud of fuzziness and ambiguity. Sometimes a false precision can be as misleading as a flight of fluffiness: a flight of finite exactitude, as it were. In fact, Whitehead had a name for this: the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, which takes the model for the reality.

For example, supposing we could arrive at a perfect mathematical model of the universe, this would by no means be the universe. Nor would it provide any explanation for how math could generate a cosmos -- for as Stephen Hawking asked, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?"  

That too is a vague and metaphorical way of putting it, unless we posit some fire-breathing dragon who blows the universe out of his piehole. The point is, we know how to get from the immanent cosmos to transcendent models of it. But how to we get from transcendence to immanence?

The doctrine of creation is one answer to this question: that the visible cosmos is ontologically dependent upon a higher principle that cannot be less than intelligent, given the undeniable presence of intelligence in the universe. After all, we're here, we're queer, and we're not going away without a sufficient reason. To say that the principle of intelligence is unintelligence is unintelligible.

This whole line of inquiry reminds me of E.F. Schumacher's Guide for the Perplexed, which has a chapter on the Four Kingdoms that any human being can, and indeed must, recognize and therefore explain: Matter, Life, Consciousness, and Self-awareness. Life, for example, not only has a mysterious power lacking in matter, but

there is nothing in the laws, concepts, and formulae of physics and chemistry to explain or even describe such powers. X [i.e., life] is something quite new and additional, and the more deeply we contemplate it, the clearer it becomes that we are faced here with what might be called an ontological discontinuity or, more simply, a jump in the Level of Being.

Now, contemporary scientism pretends that there are no leaps in nature, and that we should pay no attention to that living and leaping creature behind the static and inanimate material curtain. 

Back to Schumacher: if we symbolize matter (m), then life is (m) + some mysterious and inexplicable power we shall call (x). Similarly, animals would be (m) + (x) + (y), while humans are (m) + (x) + (y) + (z). This last variable is defined as the ability to both think and to be aware of thinking; or, one might say, it is thinking about thinking, or self-awareness:

Consciousness and intelligence, as it were, recoil upon themselves.... There is something able to say "I" and to direct consciousness in accordance with its own purposes, a master or controller, a power at a higher level than consciousness itself. This power z, consciousness recoiling upon itself, opens up unlimited possibilities of purposeful learning, investigating, exploring, and of formulating and accumulating knowledge.

We can invent a word to point at (z), but we must again remember that it is only a word, not the thing itself. I believe it was Wittgenstein who said that philosophy is a way to avoid being bewitched by language. Well, here is a perfect example. We have words for everyday, irreducible mysteries such as being, life, and consciousness, without having any idea what these actually are.

In Turner's Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something "Alive" and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, he says that one reason we lack any "Darwinian explanation for the origin of life" is that we lack "a good Darwinian explanation for what life is in the first place" (emphasis mine). For that matter, "Darwinism is also having a rather hard time explaining what an organism is," and before that, what a gene is, or how it could ever be.

Now, all of these mysteries presuppose a very specific kind of cosmos in which such mysteries can exist, for it is axiomatic that what is actual must be possible. But possible by virtue of what principle? What kind of cosmos must this be in order to give rise to m, z, y, and z? A cosmos reducible to pure (m) could never get off the ground and transcend its own dumb materiality, nor could it ever know about itself. 

But we know damn well this is a cosmos, which is to say, a total order, or ordered totality. 

Schumacher is not the least bit fluffy and insubstantial in his solution to this enigma. He ultimately solves the problem not by positing Life as (m) plus (x), but rather, by turning the cosmos right-side up and starting at the top. We begin with the highest principle, which immediately remedies the fallacy of trying to derive the greater (x, y, and z) from the lesser (m) -- or by trying to derive fire from the cold ashes of matter.

One can begin with precise mathematical models of material reality, but if one ends there, one has simply used one's own intelligence to render oneself stupid. And not just temporarily. 

A simple solution is to introduce a principle of verticality, for 

In a hierarchical structure, the higher does not merely possess powers that are additional to and exceed those possessed by the lower; it has the power to organize the lower and use it for its own purposes.... Are there powers that are higher than self-awareness?

That question is directed at our judges who ruled yesterday's post out of bounds, for nothing that essentially defines man can be derived from the bottom, but can only be explained as a prolongation from the top, e.g., freedom, interiority, truth, beauty, unity, goodness, love, etc.

Just about out of time, so we'll leave off with a couple observations by Schuon:

those who seek to enclose the Universe within their shortsighted logic fail to see, at least in principle, that the sum of possible phenomenal knowledge is inexhaustible and, consequently, that the present "scientific" knowledge represents a total nothingness beside our ignorance.... 

In this desire to to accumulate knowledge of relative things, the metaphysical dimension -- which alone takes us out of the [vicious circle] of the phenomenal and the absurd -- is expressly put aside; it is as if a man were to be endowed with all possible faculties of perception minus intelligence; or again, it is as if one believed that an animal endowed with sight were more capable than a blind man of understanding the mysteries of the world.

Quite simply, it is as if cosmos minus (x), (y), and (z) can somehow explain the cosmos. Then who is speaking? And to whom? For (m) + (m) is just more (m).

I apologize once again. It appears that the images I am generating are not displaying for you, despite the tool reporting success. This seems to be a persistent technical issue that I am unable to resolve on my end.

The image I generated was a symbolic representation of the ideas in your latest post. It depicted a vertical hierarchy of four distinct levels of being:

• At the bottom, a dense, inert layer of matter.

• Above that, a vibrant, flowing layer representing life.

• Above that, a luminous, cerebral layer representing consciousness.

• At the very top, a brilliant, singular point of light representing self-awareness.

The image was a visual attempt to capture the essence of your post, specifically the idea of "ontological jumps" and the fact that the higher principles cannot be reduced to, or explained by, the lower ones. It was meant to show that the cosmos is a vertical, hierarchical structure, with the higher levels organizing and giving purpose to the lower ones.