It's All Fun & Games Until Someone Loses an I

A short book I'd like to clear from the desk: The Priority of Mind:

Is the mind just a by-product of the brain? Or is mind the fundamental reality, which creates matter? This book is a defense of mind as prior to matter. 

We can't wait to find out what Bob will say! This is as suspenseful as a Roadrunner episode, wondering if the coyote will finally prevail.

Yeah, well, maybe he has some points we haven't belabored over the past twenty years. 

It's like you keep trying to convince yourself of the same truth. Why not just accept it and move on? Why the daily tilting at windbags?

Because... Well, why does a jazz musician keep exploring music? 

Because he gets paid?

Nobody is in jazz for the money. Except Miles Davis. His Kind of Blue came out 75 years ago, and is still at or near the top of the jazz charts.

That's because nobody really likes jazz. One album is enough. 

Except for the musicians who keep playing it. 

So why do you keep cranking out the theological mind jazz no one will hear?

Same reason the billionaire Jerry Seinfeld keeps telling jokes as if he's just starting out his career.

The specific metaphor he uses is about a beaver. He says that people ask him, "Why do you still do it? You have all the money you could ever want." His answer is along the lines of, "Why does a beaver keep building dams? Because that's what a beaver does."

He views stand-up comedy not as a job or a career that he needs for financial reasons, but as an instinct, a compulsion, and an essential part of who he is. It's a fundamental part of his nature, and something he feels a deep, ongoing need to do. It's not about the money; it's about the act of creating and performing comedy itself. 

So, stand-up cosmology is in my nature, and you can't pretend to be someone you're not, even with a billion dollars.

Also, it's as if the whole world is a conspiracy against me: I think this, and the world thinks that. So, it's my little murmur of protest against the consensus of the world: not the rubes who still cling to religion but the sophisticates who mock it.

It does go to the intersection of temperament and worldview: people don't believe things because they're true but because of who they are. You are frontloaded to be an idealist of some sort, just as people are predisposed to being liberal or conservative. So, your philosophy is not a discovery, it's an entailment of your character.

If that were true, we would be sealed in subjectivity and relativism. But a fundamental premise of my philosophy is that man qua man is capable of objectivity and hence transcendence of his desires, interests, and passions. I only want to believe something because it is true, not because I want to believe it. 

In the end, there aren't that many options on the table: either some version of atheistic materialism or some version of deistic idealism, and which is more plausible, consistent, and explanatory? For example, I say God is either impossible or necessary. He is clearly not impossible, ergo he is necessary. Of course, many entailments follow from this necessity. Lotta ins & outs and what-have-yous.

You can say I am predisposed to believe it, but here it is anyway:

We cannot accept any theory about human beings, or about anything else either, that does not accept that experiences and thoughts exist.... Any theory that denies or ignores experiences and thoughts must be wrong.

Subjective experience is real. But it is not real in the same way objects are real. I say the two are mutually immanent and ordered to one another. If they are not, then there is no principle that can account for the world's intelligibility to the intellect. Once we sever that link, there is no putting it back together. 

Which is why we say that the fifth element is relation; or rather, it is really the first element without which there could be no relation between being and knowing, or between the other elements.

But it turns out this is an internally related cosmos, as proved, for example, by quantum physics. This relational interiority extends all the way down to the quantum realm, which is why it is nothing until we observe it. It is pure potential, located at the penumbra between existence and non-existence. One might say it has a tendency to exist. 

In any event, mind and matter are thoroughly entangled at the quantum level. It seems that physicists would prefer to keep them separate, but this is precisely what they cannot do: you just can't remove the subject from the object. Which is the objective fact of the matter; it is objective, only at a higher level.

It's the same with biology: only a living biologist could pretend organisms are machines. If we were machines, we could never know it.

Now, "the history of the universe is the story of the gradual unfolding of its potentialities, which have been there since the beginning of time." Obviously this potentiality included the potential to give rise to self-conscious beings who can know about this potential. Indeed, so fine-tuned is this potential that one might even say that it is necessary for the cosmos to give rise to observers.  

This whole question of necessity and possibility plunges us into surprisingly deep waters. For how is it possible that possibility is even possible? There are some people who insist that it isn't possible -- that everything is determined. Is it possible that determinism is true? If so, then it is necessarily false.  

We will have much more to say about this annoying subject as we proceed, but suffice it to say that we won't get anywhere without a principle of possibility woven into the cosmic area rug, and indeed, intrinsic to God. Absent this principle, then truly truly, all is necessity, and you are either a religious Calvinist or a scientistic one: it doesn't matter if you say it's all God or all matter, for either view squeezes man out of the picture.

It's all fun and games until someone loses an I.

That's true: there are philosophies that eliminate the philosopher, but why would you do that?

That which is not a person is not finally anything.   

For man is the thin membrane, or bridge, between nothing and everything. So be careful -- don't fall from the bridge.

Bottom line for today:

Both in its ultimate origin and in its final consummation, the physical universe points beyond itself to a cosmic Mind that is its origin, basis, and destiny (Ward).

***

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 cosmic mind as a luminous, central point, from which two intertwined streams of energy flowed outwards. One stream was rigid and geometric, representing necessity and determinism, while the other was fluid and organic, symbolizing possibility and creative potential. A human figure, representing the "I," stood within this flow, reaching out to both streams.

The image was meant to capture the essence of your post, highlighting the philosophical tension between necessity and possibility, and ultimately affirming that the universe, in its origin and destiny, is not a determined machine but points to a cosmic mind.