On the Transfinite Gap Between Anthropos & Animal

We cannot say this gap is infinite, because the Anthropos is situated between the poles of immanence and transcendence, or finitude and infinitude, and thus transfinite. The liminal space we inhabit is what Voegelin, borrowing from Plato, calls the metaxy, and what in psychoanalysis is called the transitional space. Whatever we call it, it is ontologically real, so any attempt to explain it away must presume its existence. The point is, any reductive sociobiological theory of the Anthropos occurs in the transfinite space for which it cannot account, so there.

You’re slammin’ ‘em today! Those guys are dead in the water!

Now, why is this ontological distinction between man and beast so unpopular among our tenured primates and brute factsimians? Because to acknowledge this fundamental and ineradicable discontinuity is to open the door to no end of immaterial, transcendental, and metaphysical mischief. Better to not let it open even a crack, lest the crackpots rush in.

But if natural selection is not a complete, consistent, and final explanation of how we got here, then what is?

I can’t solve your problems, sir.

David Bentley Hart calls the Neo-Darwinian model “a partial, local, restricted truth within the embrace of a far larger, more vastly encompassing truth about the origin of life,” and he’s not wrong. Nor can “a strictly quantitative method shed light on a strictly qualitative phenomenon like consciousness, and a strictly third-person method can’t illuminate a strictly first-person experience.”

The first person was the first person to speak in the first person?

That is correct: like everyone else, my a priori pronouns are I AM and WE ARE, and no amount of third world IT IS adds up to the first-person intersubjective interiority of the former. Indeed, “The sciences don’t even have a means of asking the correct questions here,” for “We’re talking about merely apparent quantitative associations between totally qualitatively dissimilar phenomena” (Hart).

Self-evidently, our own private Idaho “is wholly inaccessible to any scrutiny from outside.” Our first person experience of cosmic interiority may be a qualitative experience, but it is nevertheless an objective fact -- even the first or possibly second fact -- that we can know with absolute certitude (as will be further explained below). This is not an intellectual game of philosophical tag whereby we can be declared IT by some eight year old materialist.

Ontological cootie protection?

Give Schopenhauer credit for pointing to the suicidal philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself and thus paints himself into a coroner. Let’s not do that. Rather, let us keep our eyes on the subjective intellect dynamically engaged with the intelligible objects experienced within its horizon.

We know that subjects and objects exist. But why leap to the absurd conclusion that the former can be reduced to the latter? That’s not an explanation, it is the failure of one: an explaining away, precisely.

Hart says something similar to Schopenhauer, that “everything that exists for us does so wholly within consciousness, and that’s part of why consciousness isn’t some discrete phenomenon among other phenomena…” Rather, it is “the very ground and possibility of any phenomenon -- phenomenality as such -- the mind’s openness both to itself and to the whole of reality.” Hart correctly asserts that “no purely empirical explanation of the relation of physical to mental events will ever be found…” Nor does the problem have anything “to do with the limitations of our current scientific techniques or knowledge,” because it is “entirely one of logic…. the notion that first-person experience could be reduced to third-person functions is utterly devoid of rational content. It is like claiming one’s height is reducible to one’s charisma.”

Forget it, eliminativists, you’re out of your element.

In reality, “the logical constraints that govern the sciences absolutely prohibit them from any meaningful empirical or theoretical investigation of the mind’s inner states,” so stop pretending otherwise. Suffice it to say that “as long as our thinking is confined within that barren paradigm, the presence of mind within this supposedly mindless material order will remain an enigma without solution” (ibid.)

Objectively speaking, there is no view from nobody nowhere, only from somebody somewhere. And what is a somebody? Hart expresses an implicit but nevertheless blatant cosmotheandrism in affirming that “Mind and life -- and language too -- are possible only by way of a kind of ‘downward’ causation that informs their ‘upward’ evolution in particular beings.” Human language “can’t simply have been an ascent from ‘below,’” but rather “exists primarily as a ‘higher’ causality informing ‘lower’ levels of causality...”

Which is entirely consistent with Polanyi’s explanation of how the higher levels enlist the boundary conditions of the lower, in the way words rely on letters, sentences on words, paragraphs on sentences, story on paragraphs, and meaning on story, all conditioned from the top down. No high class level can be reduced the grammar of its lower class neighbor. The most complete understanding of the parts of a machine and of the physical laws that govern it can tell us nothing about its function, even though the machine does not violate any laws of physics. Rather, it enlists those laws in order to transcend them.

No amount of math adds up to the mathematician who understands math. Why pretend otherwise?

That is correct: a transfinite distance can never be bridged by any number of finite booby steps.