The Idea of Ideas

I am not a trained theologian, just a freelance pneumatologist, suburban shaman, and guerrilla ontologist, so I'm not aware of all the ins & outs, what-have-yous, and loose strands of the discipline. 

Rather, I just like what I like and throw away the rest, but in so doing, I never really know if I am taking a controversial position, or if I'm a fan of two theologians who can't stand each other. Come to think of it, I'm just a...

Country boy?

Yes, Muddy Waters said it best, albeit with an ironic wink:

You know I'm a country boy
And I don't know what's going on

Or in my case, an exurban boy. Which, by the way, is what I was when I somehow fooled my way into grad school --

Not that story again.

I'll spare you, the point being that I come at this -- this being more or less everything -- with a combination of native intelligence and breathtaking presumption. While I know what I know, I often don't know what I don't know, because if I did, I'd probably be paralyzed. 

It is the fearless ignorance or systematic unknowing of the Raccoon that allows us to boldly -- or breezily -- go where no marsupial has gone before. 

For example, in the case of the Trinity there are minefields everywhere, in that there are even Christians who think the whole idea should be jettisoned because it's an atavism that unnecessarily complicates Christian apologetics. Just be like the other religions and say God is one. 

Certainly Muhammad had no use for no steenking Trinity:

Those who say, “Allah is one in a Trinity,” have certainly fallen into disbelief. There is only One God. If they do not stop saying this, those who disbelieve among them will be afflicted with a painful punishment....

Stop! -- for your own good. Allah is only One God. Glory be to Him! He is far above having a son! 

Is this the same Gabriel who announced to Mary that she was pregnant with God? Or is Gabriel a common name among angels?   

According to Gunton, some theologians regard the Trinity as "a dogma to be believed rather than as the living focus of life and thought," or argue that it is "an inherited dogma that is of no interest or relevance to the modern world." 

I remember a priest saying Trinity Sunday was the least favorite among his fellows, because they didn't know how to explain it. Likewise, Gunton speaks of "the hopeless quest for analogies that will somehow make sense of the otherwise illogical." Better to call it Total Mystery and be done with it. Moreover,

if the real God is known as one, the tacking on of his threeness simply appears as an unnecessary complicating of the simple belief in God (ibid).

Besides, if every divine action involves all three persons, then

there appears to be no point in distinguishing between them. All we really need is the action of the one God, so... the Trinity appears as an irrelevance to our actual understanding of the ways of God toward us.... 

[I]t has often been believed that while trinitarian theology might well be of edificatory value to those who already believe, for the outsider it is an unfortunate barrier to belief, which must therefore be facilitated by some non-trinitarian apologetic... 

This ultimately results in God being treated "unpersonally, with his personhood located in his oneness, not his threeness." 

But in reality, "everything looks -- and indeed, is -- different in the light of the Trinity" (ibid.).

Different how?

I mean, c'mon, Petey. We've discussed this subject in so many ways and from so many angles that I'm not surprised readers are bored by my ramblin'. 

I guess I'm at the other extreme, because I say the Trinity must be the mother of all metaphysical ideas -- the Idea of ideas, as it were -- not just about God but about everything. It is a key that unlocks many doors -- a new ontological principle which enables us "to think about God and the world -- about reality -- in a way otherwise impossible."

For example, it seems to me that a trinitarian metaphysic perfectly balances our individuality with our embeddedness in a deeper metacosmic relationality: "God's being is defined as being in relation" or "being in communion," which only changes everything. For in both God and reality "there is no true being, apart from communion." 

"God is indeed one in being," but "this very oneness is not a mathematical oneness," as in Greek theology. Rather -- as we've been saying -- it is a qualitative oneness "consisting in the inseparable relation" of the Persons, AKA substance-in-relation. 

Again, the Idea of ideas:

Communion is the meaning of the world: there is no "being" of God other than this dynamic of persons in relation.

This being the case, we now have a conceptual basis to understand various entailments such as person (that means you and I), relation, otherness, freedom, and truth (which is itself always a relation between knower and known, or intelligence and intelligibility). 

Note that in this new context, person does not mean individual in the modern Lockean sense, which is "defined in terms of separation from other individuals, the person in terms of relations with other persons" (ibid.).

In short, "we cannot understand relation satisfactorily unless we also realise that to be a person is to be related as an other." Otherness is baked into the cake or woven into the cosmic area rug: "To think of persons is to think in terms of relations." And God is 

a communion of three persons -- not individuals -- in mutually constitutive relations with one another. Each is only what he is by virtue of what the three give to and receive from each other... (emphasis mine). 

You keep saying the same thing in different ways.

Good catch, because God himself must be THE SAME THING IN DIFFERENT WAYS. We might go so far as to say that sameness is a function of difference and vice versa. Come to think of it, Meister Eckhart said a number of paradoxically annoying things alontg these lines, which we will -- lucky for you -- put off for another post. 

What's the word count, Petey?

Over 1,000, chief. Better wrap it up.

You're right. We've only laid a foundation for the Idea of ideas, but building on it will require a great deal more yada yada, so we'll put the kibosh on this one for now.

Abbasolute and Mamamaya

Probably the oldest philosophical dispute involves the one and the many, or the question of which is prior, unity or diversity. Which by implication entails stasis vs. process, being vs. becoming, eternity vs. time, permanence vs. change, whole vs. part, absolute vs. relative, immanence vs. transcendence, particle vs. wave, boxers vs, briefs, and even mom vs. pop, the latter standing for abbasolute, the former for mamamaya.

Heraclitus (H) is the grand poobah of the All is Flux Club, the motto of which is One can never step twice into the same river, because each moment it's a new river. To the extent that one sees the same river, that's an illusion or appearance, not reality.

Parmenides (P) is the high epopt of the rival gang, the All is One Society, the motto of which is... All is one, I guess. For these votaries of the Immutable, reality is unchanging, eternal, and indivisible, so change becomes the illusion. 

Things would occasionally get heated, P saying to H Flux you!, while P would grab his crotch and retort Change this! Likewise, H would accuse P of flaming homogeneity, P charging H with the privileging of cosmic heteronormativity.   

Bottom line it for us, Gemini: H

believed that change is the fundamental reality, and any appearance of stability is an illusion. He saw the world as a dynamic process, driven by opposing forces that create a harmonious whole. He also believed in a "logos" which is the underlying reason or principle that governs the ever changing world.

Conversely, P

argued that "what is, is," and "what is not, is not." He believed that reality is unchanging, eternal, and indivisible. He rejected the notion of change, arguing that it is logically impossible. He reasoned that for something to change, it would have to come from nothing, which he deemed absurd. 

He distinguished between "the way of truth" (reason) and "the way of opinion" (sense perception), claiming that only reason can reveal the true nature of reality.

This opposition set up a fundamental tension that influenced countless philosophers throughout history, only ending in the early 20th century when Nuncio "Toots" Mondello founded the Benevolent Order of Transdimensional Raccoons, the credo of which is Become what you are, for being is becoming and vice versa.  

For the Raccoon, reality is fundamentally relational, including the relation between the one and many. We root this in the Trinity, in which 1 + 1 = 3, which, as it so happens, is also the basis of creativity. More generally, bring any two people together and they generate a third who is a genuine other. It's another way of saying the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. 

Which is why Paul McCartney's solo work is so banal. In trying to be his own unrelated "one," he deprived himself of the greater oneness that resulted from 1 + 1. 

This post is going nowhere fast.

Agreed. Let me restore some order by methodically flipping through the book that inspired that halfbaked introduction, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. In it Gunton speaks of "the modern crisis of culture -- its fragmentation and decline into subjectivism and relativism," which you could say represents the triumph of Heraclitus, for whom everything is a process going nowhere because it has no telos, and everything is unrelated to everything else. 

But a human being in the image of God "is to be understood relationally," somewhat analogous to how part relates to whole. 

Now, God himself is a part-whole relation, but only in a manner of speaking, because each "part" is somehow the whole, in that the Son lacks nothing of the Father except a different mode of relation. I suppose it would be more accurate to call the Godhead holographic, in which the whole is in each part, and vice versa. 

Obviously there is unity, but it's somewhat like the unity of an organism, which changes in order to stay the same. But that's life.

No, literally, for what is life? It is a process-structure, a matter of flowing organization, so to speak. And any organization is a system of interior relations.

Except in the case of bad organizations, which are wholly rigid, top-down, and authoritarian -- my way or the highway. Apparently, God is not like that. Or so we have heard from the wise. The Father, for example, has "authority," but it is freely recognized, not imposed. Islam notwithstanding

Come to think of it, isn't this how Jesus rolled? He never came right out and said I AM GOD, rather, wanted it to be freely recognized and acknowledged by his interlocutors, most famously Peter, who said You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. My own mother used to say "let others sing your praises." If you sing them yourself, you come across like some desperate narcissist. Which God is not, being holy unnarcissary. 

No, literally: can you imagine the Father lording it over the Son? Hence the parable of the prodigal son, whose father doesn't say, for example, I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it.

Above we spoke of the Father as standing for absolute, the Mother for relative, or, we could say, Infinitude. We could even say that Infinitude is the maternal mode of Absoluteness, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Well, I'm going to jump ahead anyway. In chapter 5, Gunton reminds us that "in Parmenides' view" there is

only one necessary note of being: that is to say, being which is timeless, unchanging and absolutely unitary. There is no plurality in reality, and therefore plurality is only an appearance, and epiphenomenon, in no way part of the being of things.

Which is to say, all father and no mother. In fact, a note to myself says Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), essentially Joyce's name for the mother principle, connoting plurality and life, not to mention Mary's mother, Saint Anne. According to Campbell, she is 

Eve, Isis, Iseult, a passing cloud, a flowing stream. She is the eternally fructive and love-bearing principle in the world.... the entire book, in fact, is but a dreamlike emanation of [her] "untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest" written (time and place unknown) by ALP herself. 

This implies that creativity itself has something strongly feminine about it.  

But above all, Anna is a river, always changing yet ever the same, the Heraclitean [!] flux which bears all life on its current.

I say ! because it reflects what was said above in paragraph one with Parmenides standing for pop and Heraclitus for mom. 

It is even the role of Anna "to shatter HCE [universal masculinity] as the container of fixed energy.... Anna is the principle of vivid movement, ever setting in motion and keeping in motion the river of time."

But in an act of cosmic misogyny, the All is One Society regards "the ontological status of becoming" as "dubious," at once elevating "unity and intellect" and relegating "to varying degrees of inferiority the plural and material, the deficiency of the latter being so often seen to lie in its manyness."

In short, Platonic transcendentality -- which some of the early Fathers took on board uncritically -- "denies or subverts the rights of plurality," which is "the mark of the finite world" and "a defect of being." This is nothing less than an elevation of "the oneness of God" "over the plurality of the Trinity."

This rejection of the material world is also a rejection of mother, for matter is etymologically related to mater, or at least that's too good to check. But in excessively masculine types like Augustine, there is "an elevating of the one over the many in respect of transcendental status. Unity, but not plurality, is transcendental." 

But if HCE is not a confirmed old bachelor, and indeed if reality is a marriage of love between HCE and ALP, then this post is over, because we've opened a whole new can of words, and this post has already exceeded 1,300 of them. Gemini, what do you make of this digressive, tangential, and chaotic post?

This text is a fascinating, if somewhat chaotic, exploration of the philosophical tension between unity and diversity, as represented by Parmenides and Heraclitus, respectively. The language is highly informal, using slang and humor to convey complex philosophical ideas. The text frequently veers into tangents and digressions, creating a stream-of-consciousness effect.

The Cosmic Junkyard and the Metaphysical Rag-and-Bone Man

T. S. Eliot says: Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images.

Now, the idea that reality is a thunder-sundered heap of broken images -- a kind of cosmic junkyard -- is at antipodes to Heisenberg's remark about those Organizing Forces (OF), the ones responsible for 1) the creation of nature and all its forms; 2) the structure of our soul; and 3) our capacity to think.

The operative words are Creation, Form, Soul, and Think.

Now, if the world is a cosmic junkyard, this means that the best one can aspire to is a metaphysical rag-and-bone man, or ragpicker, old-clothesman, junkman, junk dealer, bone-grubber, bone-picker, chiffonnier, rag-gatherer, bag board, or totter, collecting broken images of the world and futilely trying to reassemble them into something meaningful. 

To back up a bit, I keep thinking about Heisenberg's remark, because in many ways -- or perhaps every way -- it defines the Prime Directive of this blog, which is but an extension of the Prime Directive of my life: how does it all fit together, and how do I fit into it?

I tried to track down the source of that remark, and it's from a book called Physics and Beyond, which, somewhat embarrassingly, I've never actually read, rather, only some excerpts contained in Ken Wilber's Quantum Questions. 

Why be embarrassed? You're not a scholar.

True, but still. Deus diligence and all that.

Let's see what Prof. Wiki has to say about his overall philosophy, which I'm guessing doesn't truly line up with ours, but let's see. First of all, I had assumed he was Jewish, but no: he was a "devout Christian" who also 

admired Eastern philosophy and saw parallels between it and quantum mechanics, describing himself as in "complete agreement" with the book The Tao of Physics.

Well, nobody's perfect. That book is in many ways ground zero for the new age appropriation of quantum physics for purposes of metaphysical woo woo, yada yada, and aggravated deeepakery.

In a 1974 speech, he argued that although 

scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on. 

Same. Rather, revelation, IMO, is the poetry of metaphysics. 

Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.

Same. I couldn't stop pondering the relationship if I wanted to. 

Moreover, he  

referred to nature as "God's second book" (the first being the Bible) and believed that "Physics is reflection on the divine ideas of Creation.... This was because "God created the world in accordance with his ideas of creation" and humans can understand the world because "Man was created as the spiritual image of God."

Same, except I say nature must be God's first book, the Bible being number two, at least chronologically, but the rest of what he says is perfectly sound. 

Yesterday we spoke of our compulsive quest for unity,  i.e., for the unifying principles that entail no deeper principles, but from which everything else is entailed. Among our candidates are, as mentioned above, Creation, Form, Soul, and Thinking. Can these big four be further reduced?

Whitehead thought creativity was #1, but he made the mistake of subordinating even God to creativity, meaning that God himself must be a kind of creature -- granted, the greatest creature conceivable, but this can't be right. 

Cards on the table: there are Christians who hesitate to conflate the Trinity with metaphysics or ontology, which goes to a very old debate about the economic and the immanent Trinity. Let's let Gemini sort out the differences: the immanent Trinity

refers to the internal, eternal relationships between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit within God's own being. It focuses on what God is like in Himself, apart from His actions in creation, and is essentially about the "inner life" of God.

Conversely, the economic Trinity

refers to the Trinity's actions and manifestations in the world, particularly in relation to creation and salvation history. It focuses on how God reveals Himself to humanity through the Father's creation, the Son's redemption, and the Holy Spirit's sanctification.

So, what's the difference? Well, there are some folks who say that we can only know about the economic trinity, and that this tells us nothing about the immanent Trinity, i.e., the actual nature of God. 

But I suspect the Trinity must indeed be the ultimate metaphysical principle, i.e., the one that has "created nature in all its forms," and is "responsible for the structure of our soul, and likewise our capacity to think."

In short, as above, so below, as reflected in a book I'm currently reading called The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. It contains nothing we haven't discussed on many occasions, but as usual, it's always nice to have some intellectual backup from a venerable source.

If I understand the debate correctly, some folks limit the economic Trinity to telling us everything we need to know herebelow for our own salvation, but hesitate to say it reveals anything about reality per se or  about the Godhead itself thereabove. 

I'm more in the camp that says that if God goes to all the time trouble to reveal the Trinity to us, it's about more than the salvation of our souls, rather, of our minds as well, teaching us how to properly think about both reality and about God, the former truly reflecting the latter.

But I'm going to give us all a break and end this post early, and pick up the thread -- or rags --  tomorrow.

Science and Other Leaps of Faith

This is a very partial -- and not fully cooked -- post that ends in the middle, because I have to take the wife to a medical appointment. She's having sciatica, which makes it difficult to drive.

We left off yesterday's post with a comment by Heisenberg, that The same organizing forces that have created nature in all its forms, are responsible for the structure of our soul, and likewise our capacity to think.

Bold statement. But just what are these Organizing Forces (OF) responsible for the creation of nature, the structure of the soul, and our capacity to think? I don't have time this morning to check out the full context, but maybe it's too good to check anyway. Gemini, whaddya got?

Heisenberg's statement reflects a holistic perspective, suggesting that there's an underlying unity to all of existence. He was expressing that the same fundamental principles that govern the formation of physical structures also govern the formation of our minds. This implies that the universe is not a collection of separate, isolated entities, but rather an interconnected whole.

Bada-bingo.

Heisenberg's statement transcends pure science, hinting at a more profound, perhaps even metaphysical, level of organization. This opens the door to interpretations that resonate with philosophical and even spiritual traditions.

The statement emphasizes the intrinsic connection between the human mind and the natural world. It suggests that our capacity for thought is not something separate from nature, but rather an expression of it.

Okay, now we're really on to something -- a true paradigm shift in our approach to reality. This is the vision I've been attempting to articulate lo these past three or four decades, going all the way back to my doctoral dissertation in 1988.

The problem is, this vision is quite distinct from the usual new age quantum woo woo, but it is also distinct from a wholly traditionalist view, and equally distinct from revisions of that view. 

In short, it seems we're out here all alone. No one I think is quite in my tree, which implies that someone might be out of his tree. Could it be me? Is there something I just don't get? Am I just oppositional, engaged in a protracted adolescent rebellion? Why can't I play well with the others? How could I be right and everyone else wrong? Supposing this were true, it would be one of the most unlikely developments in all of intellectual history.

No argument here.

To be sure, I have my influences, but none of them align perfectly with the Raccoon sensibility. In many ways Dávila comes closest; Schuon is a pervasive influence, and yet, one suspects he would take great umbrage at my abuse of his ideas; Norris Clarke is certainly top three; can't forget Polanyi, even though I don't mention him as much as the others. Can't forget Thomas.

Speaking of the OFs referenced above, what are they? Put another way, where is the bottom? Where do we start? For it seems that we must begin with a principle that is entailed by no deeper principle, but from which all other principles flow. On what basis do we "choose" this principle, or do we have no choice in the matter?  

In other words, is the first principle truly self-evident and necessary, such that denial of it is self-refuting? Or must we appeal to authority, faith, intuition, custom, probability, etc.?

What is the first truth we can know about reality? Descartes famously tried to get to the bottom of the cosmos, with the undeniable truth that I think therefore I am. 

But why is it undeniable? True, it is obvious, even trivial, but it is not self-standing, for it turns out that it requires a deeper principle, that of noncontradiction, otherwise it would be equally true to say I think therefore I am not, or I don't think therefore I am. 

You get the idea: one's first principle must not rely on any deeper principle. Rather, it must be number one, all other principles being number two or lower. In this case noncontradiction trumps the cogito in terms of ontological priority.

Except some people think the principle of noncontradiction is only epistemological and not ontological, but they are asses. For they are in effect saying that our minds are bound by noncontradiction, but not reality, which can simultaneously be what it is and the opposite of what it is.

But there is a reason why

Because ricin isn't red phosphorous or pseudoephedrine. If you add ricin to your blue meth recipe, you'll only kill your customers, every time. The point is, reality is consistent. It doesn't contradict itself.

In fact, no coherent thought or speech is possible in the absence of noncontradiction, otherwise every statement and its contrary would be true. And if everything is true, everything is false, or at least we have no means of distinguishing which from which.

Another fundamental principle is sufficient reason, which simply means that things have causes, and that your cause better damn well be sufficient to account for the effect. For example, can randomness really be the cause of order? How can it give what it doesn't have? 

Which goes to yesterday's post, in that metaphysical naturalists substitute the Principle of Yada Yada for that of sufficient reason, to hide the fact that their causes in no way account for the effects. Unless the principle that the lesser cannot account for the greater has been repealed.

Which of course many of our tenured primates believe has been repealed, so the greater can indeed emerge from enough yada yada. And besides, in a postmodern world, who's to say what's greater and lesser? Cockroaches will be here long after man exits the stage, so maybe they're the greater.

The truth of the matter is that no one has any idea how life springs from chemistry or subjects from objects. They know these things happen, but can they honestly say they understand how? How even does anatomy result from chemistry?

Says Andrew Klavan, "If you read Jonathan Haidt or Iain McGilchrist -- or simply live life with your eyes open -- you know that much of what we know we know by intuition, then supply the 'reasons' afterward."

So, let's not do that. Certainly we don't want to make a crude appeal to the God of the gaps, whereby God is invoked to account for what we haven't yet discovered. Rather, let's stick with principles, and follow where they lead. Or, let's intuit the reasons, but then reason about the intuitions, not just rationalize them.

I don't begin with God, rather, end with God and then return to the beginning in order to know it for the first time. Which is one reason why the end of my book circles back to the beginning. 

It even alludes to this on p. 264-65, where it says I know this place. Been here before. Where we started. No it this time, "no it" alluding to the fact that the cosmos is not composed of radically individual and atomistic "its," rather, has an I and a We woven into it: it is substance-in-relation.

Be honest.

You're right. I was mainly trying to be funny. But not just funny. Rather, hoping to provoke a guffah-HA!

Is it a contradiction to say God is simultaneously one and three? Again, not if we see these as qualities and not quantities. They are resolved with recourse to a deeper principle, which is to say, irreducible substance-in-relation, our leading candidate for #1 principle.  

A thought is popping into my head: the Father is not the Son, nor the Son the Father, so non-contradiction starts at the top. And the Father is the cause or sufficient reason of the Son, even though this cause is eternal. And God's essence is to exist, whereas other essences exist contingently, i.e., they can exist or not exist. I have an essence, but I apparently don't need to be here.

One hesitates to quote the Koran, but it begins with the statement There is no God but God, i.e., the principle of identity or noncontradiction. Genesis begins with In the beginning God created, so, God is the sufficient reason or cause of everything else. The Isha Upanishad says The Lord alone is the reality, i.e., the essence of existence. These are all different views of the First Principle, or the Principle of principles.

Is it possible to chuck this Principle of principles and go it alone? Well, the serpent thought so, and Eve took the bait. 

I suppose it's a question of banking. Everyone spends money with the implicit knowledge that it is a symbol for real wealth that has to exist somewhere. Of course, when the money detaches from the wealth we have inflation, but it's the same with philosophy. When words are detached from reality, we have postmodernism, which is to say, torrents of words with no actual value.

Who was it that said this defines the very crisis of modernity?

George Steiner?

Bingo: "It is this break of the covenant between word and world which constitutes one of the very few revolutions of spirit in Western history and which defines modernity itself."

Steiner maintained that until the late 19th century, "even the most radical of skeptics remained committed to language, to a belief in intelligibility" (Gunton). 

Interesting words there, covenant and commitment, adverting to something sacred, almost like a marriage.

Almost?

That's about it for now. The post has raised a lot of questions, which we will address in the sequel, as they say.

Metaphysical Yada Yada

Continuing with yesterday's meandering stream of thought, it seems our modest crick can flow to, or flee from, the ocean. 

That's a cryptic beginning.

Don't worry. It gets weirder.  

I'm thinking of a book by a metaphysical Darwinian who argued that evolution is like a river that flows uphill, and yet, with no teleological pull. Which is a neat trick, in fact, the greatest trick ever conjured, in that we're only here blogging about it because a river of mud somehow evolved into a torrent of speech.

Poetry fail.

No, I'm being literal. 

How does this defiance of gravity work, exactly? Similar to how one gets rich:

Which sounds like a joke, which it is, but it's no funnier than the story of how the cosmos one day woke up and <yada yada> began blogging about itself:

Life began with simple chemical processes, leading to the formation of self-replicating molecules.

Which reminds me of the famous gag that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind -- in other words, stuff -- in this case, global dominance -- happens. But you can't just yada yada over such a consequential development. Can you?

Over vast periods, through random mutations and gene duplication, organisms became more complex.

Substitute "yada yada" for "over vast periods," and the result is self-reflective and truth-bearing primates. 

As it so happens, my son is taking an introductory psychology class, and was studying last night for today's test. He remarked that he has memorized all the material, even though he has no idea what it means. In other words, he knows the right answers but doesn't understand a thing. 

For example, he knows that a neuron, in a fit of blind electrochemical activity, spits a neurotransmitter into the synaptic cleft, which is in turn sucked up by its neighboring neuron, but how one gets from this to conscious awareness he hasn't a clue. I assured him that this is fine, because no one else has a clue either. 

Rather, just remember the formula: electro-neurochemical activity <yada yada> consciousness. Repeat until, in a fit of absence of mind, you end up with a Ph.D. in psychology. That's how it was for me. I well remember having to memorize all those names for brain parts --amygdala, hypothalamus, prefrontal cortex, etc. -- but naming things isn't the same as understanding them.

Simple nervous systems evolved to allow organisms to respond to their environment. These systems gradually <yada yada> became more complex, enabling more sophisticated behaviors.

But as we said in yesterday's post, behavior is one thing, interiority another thing entirely. You can have the longest spatula in the world, but it won't flip the egg without a hand at the other end.

The brain evolved through a series of incremental changes. <Yada yada>, increases in brain size and complexity provided advantages in processing information, learning, and problem-solving. <Yada yada>, the development of the neocortex allowed for higher level thinking in mammals.

Everyone knows this, but the question is, does anyone understand it? Indeed, does anyone understand understanding? Or only know that it happens?  

Changing environments favored organisms with greater cognitive abilities. <Yada yada>, complex social structures drove the evolution of social intelligence. <Yada yada>, these processes provided the raw material for brain evolution.

And here we are. In all of this there is no teleology, because no teleology is permitted:

No Predetermined Goal: 

Evolution is not guided by a predetermined goal or plan. Complex brains emerged as a result of the accumulation of random variations and natural selection.

Which is to say, purely as a result of random yada yada.

As we've been saying in recent weeks, metaphysical Darwinism explains everything so long as you grant it One Free Miracle, or in this case two: the yada yada between simple chemical processes and the formation of self-replicating molecules; and the equally astounding yada yada between simple nervous systems and the development of higher level thinking in human beings.

That's a whole lotta yada yada, but there it is: the evolutionary river that flows uphill. Except to say there can be no up or down in this worldview, rather, only horizontal shuffling. But where there's an up there's -- say its name -- a telos. 

Surely we can come up with a better why. In order to find it, we have to widen our view to a truly cosmic  perspective, since evolution obviously occurs in this particular cosmos. What we need to ask -- and not yada yada over -- is What must the cosmos be like in order for living and self-conscious beings to exist in it? For not just any cosmos will do, rather, only one with specific qualities.

In fact, you could just say qualities, full stop, in the sense that no amount of quantity results in the merest quality. For example, no amount of randomly generated notes results in the aesthetic quality of the symphony. 

Now, we all know that God is one. Some of us believe he is also three, but neither of these terms can be understood quantitatively, for God is not a number, no matter how large. Rather, both God's oneness and threeness are qualities. 

What kind of qualities? Well, for starters, they speak to a dynamic unity in God, as opposed to a static numerical unity. 

Again, God is an event, not a thing. We can even say that God has a telos, only it is internally generated, in that the Son is the eternal telos of the Father, and vice versa. Therefore, when this Trinity creates, we shouldn't be surprised that the resultant creation resembles its triune source. It is everywhere stamped with dynamic wholeness and celestial attraction, AKA teleology. 

A major principle is that this is, and must be, a relational cosmos, or the evolutionary process can never get off the horizontal goround. What this means is that it is a holistic cosmos wherein part is related to whole before we have organisms with part-whole relations, and before we have human beings capable of knowing the whole durn cosmos.

What I want to say is When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit, but Joyce already said it.

More down to earth is Heisenberg's comment that "The same organizing forces that have created nature in all its forms, are responsible for the structure of our soul, and likewise our capacity to think." 

Still, we don't want to yada yada over anything before declaring victory, so to be continued...

A Meandering But Engaging Stream of Thought?

If Nietzsche is a philosopher, what even is philosophy? Whatever else it is, it must involve knowledge of the deeper reality beneath appearances. Although I suppose there are philosophers who argue that deep down, reality is as it appears to be. Nevertheless,

The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality.

In other words, it is important if there is a reality behind its appearance, otherwise its appearance is totally insignificant. For

When things appear to us to be just what they are, they soon seem to be even less.

But I think Plato got the basic idea right: there is intra-cave and extra-cave knowledge, and the latter is philosophy. The cave could be appearances, the senses, science, opinion, journalism, etc., but beneath or above these is reality.

Or maybe what we call reality is a kind of dialectic that takes place in the space between appearance and (upper case) Reality. We can never know the latter per se -- otherwise we would be God -- but we can be closer or farther away. This would be consistent with Voegelin's view that consciousness abides between the ineradicable poles of immanence and transcendence. 

These latter two aren't so much literal "places" as directions, so to speak, like north and south. No matter how far north one goes, there is always a northward pole. 

Unless one is sitting on top of the world looking down on creation, in which case there is wonder in most everything we see. But I won't be surprised if it's a dream, since reality is not a three-dimensional sphere, rather, an inexhaustible n-dimensional plenum, so the dream never ends, although we're always waking to it. 

Jesus was a carpenter.

Shut-up Petey. 

What we've just sketched out reminds me of the distinction between conscious (CS) and unconscious (UCS) minds. Freud conceptualized a bright line between them, like the surface of an ocean. But in reality, these two are always dialectically related to one another: there's a little UCS in every CS experience, much like the symbol of the Tao Te Coon:

Like right now, I'm typing my thoughts, but where are the thoughts coming from? Where are they going? What is their source? To be perfectly honest, no one knows, and if they did, how boring would that be? For there would be no novelty, creativity, or surprisal, just a machine-like inevitability.  

The latter, taken to the extreme, results in something like behaviorism, in which there is no interior mind, rather, just exterior behavior. Or, one might say exteriority with no interiority, which is another name for absurdity -- like a house with no inside. 

It seems our thoughts are prior to the thinker, or rather, these two are always in relation. And who is the thinker? Just a guy trying to organize his unbidden thoughts, I suppose.

Now, if God is not a thing but an "event," then we shouldn't be surprised that we are too. I like "event" over "process," because it implies a kind of singular entity, although not in a completely atemporal way. Analogously, World War II was a singular event, but it took six years for it to play out. 

This adverts to the two sides of creation, which I suppose from Godsend is a single episode but from mansend is an unfolding... something. The point is that it unfolds, the "it" being the event of creation. And apparently this event isn't over. Indeed, we are participating in it as we speak, and cannot not participate in it. 

For the ancients, philosophy was not so much a doctrine as a way of life. And this way of life -- alluding to the paragraph above -- seems to be a conscious participation in reality, whereas the non-philosopher participates in reality in an unreflective manner, much like any other animal. Our thought can never be in perfect conformity to the Real, but it's fun to try. 

Again, the alternative is eternal boredom:

Happily, the world is inexplicable. (What kind of world would it be if it could be explained by man?)

Correct: a boring world. Supposing we could know it all, that would be the end of the game, likewise if we couldn't know reality at all. We're always in this ambiguous in-between state, hence the fun -- the metaphysical adventure. Have we gotten anywhere over these last twenty years of blogging? Yes and no, for they say that to travel well is better than to arrive:

Watts in the pipe, Alan? But even without pot, philosophy is alive; it is the very life of the mind, no? Call it the metabolism of reality, which can't be swallowed in a single bite or smoked in a single bowl. 

So, philosophy is thinking about reality. Is Dávila a philosopher? Yes, if painters are philosophers, and why not?:

My brief sentences are touches of color in a pointillist composition. 

Now, can an atheist be a philosopher? For it seems that atheism is not a theory, rather, a necessary consequence of some prior ontological commitment such as metaphysical naturalism. It's not even a belief (or unbelief), just the entailment of a prior principle. 

The question is, how did you come up with this principle, and why are you committed to it? For the first seems arbitrary, the second subjective. And arbitrary + subjective = crazy in most any other context. 

It also ignores the question of why there should be metaphysical principles from which entailments logically follow, and how man could ever know them, supposing he is a wholly immanent and naturalistic being. 

In other words, if man were a wholly material phenomenon, then by definition he could never know it. Whatever else a principle is, it isn't material. Nor is the one who knows and accedes to the principle. 

In short, we can know we are material, which means we can't be. That is to say, there is something that transcends materiality in the merest knowledge of matter. Immanence can deny transcendence, but in so doing affirms it.

Atheists like to pretend they are rational, but reason cannot furnish the premises upon which it operates. Rather, we must choose the premises on some other nonrational -- which is not to say irrational -- basis. It can be intuition, or authority, or some kind of tacit knowing a la Polanyi, etc. 

Take the classic example: all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, ergo Socrates is mortal. The form of the syllogism is prior to what we plug into it. Now, what if man has an immortal soul? Obviously the syllogism can't tell us one way or the other. 

But if the human soul is immaterial and the immaterial isn't subject to decay or decomposition, then we've used another syllogism to disprove the first, and prove that Socrates isn't mortal after all.

Besides, he didn't think so -- he believed in the soul's immortality -- so he would be the first to disagree with the conclusion of any syllogism that uses logic to deny his transcendental slack. 

But in olden times, an atheist was someone who didn't believe in and honor the local gods. By this criteria I am am atheist, since I don't believe in climate change, transgenderism, or Saint George Floyd.  

Certainly atheism supposes a godlike ability to pronounce on the nature of reality. But in the end it's just the same old immanence denying transcendence, or thoughts denying the thinker -- the thinker again being situated between immanence and transcendence.

Well, once again a post that has gone nowhere, but it was fun to get there. Was it fun for you, Gemini?

This text presents a meandering, yet engaging, exploration of philosophy, reality, and the human condition.

I'll take that: meandering yet engaging.  

The text is a philosophical exploration that embraces ambiguity and mystery. It challenges conventional assumptions about reality, knowledge, and the human condition. 

The author employs a conversational and introspective style, inviting the reader to engage in their own philosophical reflections. The frequent use of metaphors and analogies enhances the text's evocative power. 

The author's critique of atheism and materialism reveals a leaning towards a more transcendent and spiritual worldview. The text is very much a stream of thought, and does not try to hide that.

Pay no attention to the stream, so long as it flows toward the ocean.