As we know, one man’s intellectual baloney — which is English for geschwurbel —can be another man’s filet mignon. I have no idea how materialists subsist on a diet of pure baloney, but they are tenacious survivors. Which is not to say there isn’t a surplus of spiritual baloney out there as well, but where’s the beef?!
Sir, this is not a Wendy’s.
Since neither side ever convinces the other, one might be tempted to conclude that the argument for cosmotheandrism is just another unfalsifiable McThesis. In other words, it seems that there is always just enough wiggle room to allow a person to cling to his preferred ideology, even if he can’t actually be alive or think in it, as is true of materialism. One is free — note the word — to hold to materialism, except materialism cannot account for the freedom to hold it.
As applied to biology, cosmotheandrism affirms that whole process of genetic evolution is subject to Gödel’s theorems, in that there something in the genetic program for which the program cannot account. He would have no doubt regarded genetic determinism as so much geschwurbel.
Don’t abuse Gödel for your own ideological purposes.
Well, let’s think this through. Everyone knows there is a genetic code – which is to say, a complex language responsible for our phenotype. How then do we transcend this formal system? For if we didn’t so escape its linear entailments we could never even know of it.
For Gödel, a mechanistic understanding of biology is pure geschwurbel. Or to be perfectly accurate, “a prejudice of our time” that can be easily disproved via logic. As far as he was concerned, “the formation within geological time of a human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components.”
So, you’re telling me there’s a chance?
Obviously not, because we’re not dealing with statistical probabilities, rather, ineluctable principles, for just as the mind cannot be reduced to a machine, nor can Life Itself be so reduced. Just as a formal system cannot demonstrate its own consistency from within, nor can the genome explain itself from within its own resources. To the extent that it does mean something, this meaning could only be apprehended by something from outside the otherwise closed language of DNA.
The physicist Wolgang Pauli was likewise skeptical of the Darwinian reduction of evolution to accidental mutations. Rather, he proposed a nonlocal order of the Cosmos revolving around archetypes that equally shape both matter and spirit. For example, there are mathematical constraints (i.e., boundary conditions) to which matter dances, just as there are nonlocal archetypes that guide our anthropic journey.
Theoretical biologist Robert Rosen writes that one implication of Gödel’s theorems is that a universe “consisting of pure syntax” is “too poor to do mathematics in.” From this he concludes that “contemporary physics is to biology as Number Theory is to a formalization of it,” which means that there is always more to Life than can be contained in any reductive model: in short, semantics -- meaning -- can never be reduced to biochemical syntax -- order.
Could Life Itself ever be exhaustively expressed in a formal program? Well, “Gödel effectively demolished the formalist program,” so “There is always a purely semantic residue that cannot be accommodated by the syntactical scheme.” Rosen essentially affirms that biological reality is always more complex than the simple formalizations in which we try to enclose it. Again, something always escapes the formal system, model, or quantification. Note that no one could even teach math using only math. Rather, if I recall correctly, my high school algebra teacher used everyday English in order to explain the algebra.
Robert Spitzer too cites Gödel, since he proved that “human thinking is not based on a set of prescribed axioms, rules, or programs” and is indeed “beyond any program,” including our genetic program, for “human intelligence is indefinitely beyond any axiomatic or program-induced intellect.” It is “not only always beyond axioms, rules, and programs (to which artificial intelligence is limited) but also capable of genuinely originative creativity (that is, capable of thinking without deriving from or making recourse to any prior axioms, rules, or programs)” (ibid.).
Moreover, Gödel “wrote extensively on the sudden and instant character of intuition (as opposed to the more laborious process of acquiring knowledge), which seemed to him further proof of the nonmaterial character of the human mind” (Bollore & Bonnassies). Therefore, “If we wish to progress beyond, we have to embrace a different concept of ‘understanding’ from that of rational explanation.” Not only did Gödel speak of “a scientific (exact) philosophy and theology,” but went the whole hog and speculated that mystic experience may “provide the only route beyond the limits to which science and philosophy can take us, the only possible path to the Ultimate” (ibid.).
“Gödel could never reconcile himself to the positivist standpoint that knowledge derives solely from empirical observations of natural phenomena. Mathematical objects and a priori truth were as real to him as anything the senses could directly perceive.” He regarded mathematics as “a search for truth, and more specifically a search for pre-existing truths that inhabited a reality separate from the human mind” (Budansky).
Then -- to the embarrassment of all and sundry -- he went and proved it, i.e., that it is strictly impossible to prove the consistency of system from within its own resources, or in other words, “to define the concept of truth within a formal system itself.” For him this meant that “the human mind can perceive evident axioms of mathematics that can never be reduced to a finite rule -- which means the human mind ‘infinitely surpasses the powers of any finite machine.’”
Infinite. That's pretty far.
Therefore “If the human mind is not a machine, then the human spirit cannot be reduced to the mechanistic operation of the brain, with its finite collection of working parts consisting of neurons and their interconnections.” Supposing the mind were “nothing but a calculating machine,” then it too would be “subject to the limitations of the Incompleteness Theorem,” so we once again escape its presumed completeness. Thus, there is “a whole world which is the set of mathematical truths, into which we gain access only through intelligence, just as there is a world of physical realities.”
Gödel was “committed to accessing the immaterial world of higher philosophical truths through the power of sheer abstract logical reasoning.”
So, Plato wins again?
Yes, because what is this “immaterial world of higher philosophical truths” but the light streaming in from outside the genetic cave?
Problem is, the theorems tell us only what definitely cannot be the case, not necessarily what is the case. They tell us, for example, that “it is impossible to define the concept of truth within a formal system itself,” but they do not tell us what truth is. Likewise, they tell us a formal system cannot be both consistent and complete.
But before he was a logician, mathematician, or anything else, Gödel was a seeker of truth, which already implies a worldview -- one in which truth exists and is accessible to man. He would have rejected the alternative a priori.
On the one hand, a possible interpretation of the theorems is that mathematics -- and by extension, language -- is “a mere game played with symbols according to certain rules.” Again, this would be the postmodern view. But this is not how Gödel saw it; rather, he believed “that the human mind can literally see mathematical realities through a kind of perception, no different from the direct sensory perceptions that the empiricists decreed to be the only valid basis of physical laws.”
Can we ever prove that evolutionary biology is a complete explanation of man? No, because in expressing the explanation we have transcended it. For the same reason, we could never prove that the mind is the product of random evolutionary changes.
We may tie this back to what Voegelin says about the transfinite Anthropos being situated between the poles of immanence and transcendence. Because there is always transcendence, no immanent explanation will ever suffice, for no immanent model can actually map the transcendent in a fully adequate way. But for Voegelin, modernity is characterized by a flight from transcendence and the attempt to enclose the order of the world from within immanence alone, e.g., scientism, metaphysical Darwinism, Marxism, and other earthbound ideologies.
But such attempts are self-refuting, because man qua man can never actually eliminate the transcendence. For the same reason, one cannot eliminate teleology, which is to say, our attraction to the transcendent pole (or of it to us). Absent this vector, there can be no vertical progress, rather, just horizontal wandering.
Rearranging the genetic deck chairs on a human ship lost at sea.
A bridge to nowhere.
An explanation with no explainer.
Language with no speaker.
Geschwurbel with no wurstmacher.
You win. I’m out of similes.
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