I can never be sure of returning to this site. I am unable to access images or MSN and Yahoo, at this time. I will continue to struggle to write. If more than two days pass without a new post, then you may be sure that I am unable to access the Internet from my computer. If that happens, I will be searching for another computer to continue blogging. Spacing of paragraphs has been affected in this essay. The text has been altered, defaced, or damaged on several occasions. Harassment has made posting the work difficult. The primary sources for my discussion of John Searle's and David Chalmer's ideas are listed below:
John R. Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness (New York: NYRB, 1997), pp. 1-18, pp. 135-176.
John R. Searle, Mind, Language and Society (New York: Perseus, 1998), entirety.
John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995).
John R. Searle, "The Storm Over the University," in Paul Berman, ed., Debating P.C. (New York: Dell, 1992), p. 85.
Nick Fotion, John Searle (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 99-175.
David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), chapter 7.
John Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1983), pp. 109-152.
I.
John Searle is a great "explainer" of philosophical topics. I like the word "explainer" because "explainers" are what philosophy needs these days. There is a desperate need for people who can explain what is going on in our most important theoretical discussions to intelligent non-academic readers.
It is difficult to describe Searle's work because there are so many aspects of it. Searle has been called a pragmatist, an analytical thinker, a linguistic philosopher and even a "philosophical journalist" -- a description which he probably regards as a compliment. Philosophers who can write as well as he does are rare.
Searle displays an American fondness for the "bottom line" and getting the philosophical job "done." "Common sense" is a phrase that crops up regularly in his writings. Searle's recent critique of David Chalmers' philosophy is fascinating for what it reveals about both men. Also, it is an instructive example of the ways philosophers often fail to understand one another.
I will examine Searle's critique of Chalmers's view of consciousness which is somewhat -- unintentionally perhaps -- unfair. I will comment on both men's positions.
Searle is usually classified as a "realist" because he is a staunch defender of a "correspondence theory" of truth. He is not the philosopher to quote if you are a relativist about truth, non-cognitivist about ethics, or skeptical about the possibility of developing a successful rational argument dealing with the issue of consciousness.
Before turning to my substantive analysis, however, it should be clear that both Searle and Chalmers disagree with the Churchlands' "mind/brain identity theory." Neither of these philosophers would say that consciousness or mind is an "illusion," something unreal or unimportant, reducible to cerebral functions. There is much less disagreement between Chalmers and Searle than either of them realizes.
The best questions to ask about the single exchange between Searle and Chalmers are: 1) What did they disagree about and why did they not agree on that issue? 2) What do they agree on? 3) Why does what they agree on seem less important to them than their differences?
These questions may well be relevant in today's political climate in the United States of America. There is a danger that Democrats and Republicans will forget all they agree about in the heat of electoral controversies -- which are appropriate in a Democracy -- even as enemies search for divisions within our society that may be exploited.
One thing that we should agree on in America is the impermissibility of torture and censorship. Censorship can become a kind of torture. I hope that there will be no further vandalism of this essay.
Searle understands that a big part of the problem in discussing consciousness is a conceptual vocabulary inherited from modern European thought beginning with Descartes. The terms of the discussion are obsolete, given current scientific knowledge, but the issue of consciousness or the nature of mind/body interaction isn't.
The only way to know that truth or to appreciate the changes which must be made is to study the philosophical tradition. The values and assumptions in the dominant conceptual vocabulary soak into all aspects of our thinking and analysis of consciousness today, especially when such an analysis is done by scientists who mistakenly believe that they are free of philosophical confusions. Even people who have never heard of the great philosophers are echoing their ideas or repeating their blunders. ("Stephen Hawking's Freedom is Determined.")
Science is crucial to this philosophical discussion. We nonscientists need to read many books explaining scientific developments as well as philosophy books. We also need to appreciate the rich phenomenology of "subjectivity" -- that means immersion in aesthetic thinking and experience.
We need to look at paintings and read novels, see good movies, plays, and listen to music, connecting these experiences to political, legal, and social developments. Of course, this is only useful if we have a sense of history, placing developments into a time-frame that makes sense of them. Gee, it looks like we'll have to do a lot of studying and experiencing in order to be "good" at philosophy. Searle begins by defining key terms for readers:
"Traditionally in the philosophy of mind there is supposed to be a basic distinction between dualists, who think there are two fundamentally different kinds of phenomena in the world, minds and bodies, and monists, who think the world is made of only one kind of stuff. Dualists divide into 'substance dualists,' who think that 'mind' and 'body' name two kinds of substances, and 'property dualists,' who think 'mental' and 'physical' name different kinds of property or features in a way that enables the same substance -- a human being, for example -- to have both kinds of property at once. Monists in turn divide into idealists, who think everything is ultimately mental, and materialists who think everything is ultimately physical or material." (p. 135.)
Keep these terms in mind because I will refer to them throughout the essay. Later on things may get a little fancy. We'll need to think again about how to use these terms in light of scientific realities that we must live with now.
We may find that the boundaries between these concepts that seemed so clear and stable only a century ago are now collapsing and disintegrating.
To enter this discussion is to jump into a large swiming pool. There are philosophers and scientists from different periods swimming around in this pool. Large telescopes from the seventeenth century and an old map of the world are also in the water. Darwin is floating on his back. Descartes and Spinoza, Wittgenstein and Turing, Kant and Hegel are splashing each other. After a few centuries, the water is a little murky. Everybody has to get out of the pool so we can clean it out and put in a new up-to-date scientific filter, then we'll refill the pool. After the pool is refilled, we'll all jump in again. It'll be great.
Searle is one of the guys in dungarees and a t-shirt who comes in, cleans-out the pool, and gets everything working properly again. There are a few others in several disciplines doing this job with Searle.
Most contemporary philosophers -- especially in the Anglo-American world -- like to think of themselves as materialists. Philosophers are usually not materialists. However, we live in a "scientific age." (I heard that on the "Discovery" channel.) Everybody in academia wants to think of him- or herself as "scientific." This is particularly true of people in the humanities and law. Such people are under the impression that the scientific attitude prohibits any view other than materialism. Materialism is understood in classical terms.
Obviously, the mind is just "caused" by the brain. This is another way of speaking of what the brain "does." Searle agrees with that much. "There really isn't a mind/body problem," according to many of those who wish to wear lab coats.
Searle would express some reservations at his point since he agrees that there is a "real" mind or consciousness and that it is not reducible to the brain. Mind/brain identity assumes a view of matter and reality that is precisely what has been undermined by modern science.
Would-be "scientifically-minded" types in social science and law, literary studies and some philosophers (the Churchlands), are assuming, Searle would say, an obsolete understanding -- not of the status of relevant scientific disciplines, like brain science (they're usually up-to-date on those) -- but of a worldview mistakenly associated with the current scientific perspective that really belongs to an earlier age. Steven Toulmin, "Facing the Future Again," in Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990), pp. 203-211.
We tend to forget that scientific thinking is only another chapter in the history of ideas. There are such things as scientific "problematics" -- like the mind/body issue -- which also have a history.
The term "problematic" refers to a bunch of related issues dealing with a phenomenon that covers several academic areas. Sometimes ideas from different periods unhappily coincide in a dialectic such as the mind/body problem. The same cluster of issues has several different traditions of reflection from different angles and disciplines.
These hallowed academic traditions have arrived at entirely different destinations, inhabiting different "moments" in their evolution. Each subject -- psychology and philosophy, neuroscience and politics, theology and literary theory -- has a different clock, showing a different time in terms of the progress made in discussing mind/body issues. There are any number of issues in jurisprudence where the same phenomenon and/or complexity is detectable because they arise from the identical metaphysical tradition.
Ironically, I was reminded of this observation concerning the mind/body controversy as I read and admired Brian Greene's summary of the physics of time or the time-space relation in "The Frozen River?: Does Time Flow," in The Fabric of the Cosmos (New York & London: Penguin, 2007), pp. 129-142. ("'Interstellar': A Movie Review.")
The most fascinating aspects of time, as a concept, were untouched by this also intriguing discussion of the scientific content of "time." Much of Professor Greene's discussion is anticipated by F.H. Bradley in the nineteenth century, before Einstein's pioneering work, for example, in "Space and Time," in Appearance and Reality (New York: MacMillan, 1897), pp. 35-43.
Phenomenology and hermeneutics are centrally concerned with time as duration or the phenomenological experience of "now."
As a matter of fact for this currently globally dominant school of philosophy -- Continental thought in the hermeneutic tradition -- human life is defined by the experiencing subject's problematic relation to (or interpretation of) life as duration or the self as a "lived-in-time project." ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch On Freedom of Mind.")
These sources are not recognized by Professor Greene, even in a footnote, as scholars for centuries have struggled to resolve Greene's closing question in the chapter. Professor Greene says that we may "lapse, into habitual, colloquial descriptions that refer to flowing time. But don't confuse language with reality. [!] Human language is far better at capturing human experience than at expressing deep physical laws." (p. 142.)
I have yet to see a thinker escape language of any kind, entirely, in his or her thinking in order to reach the bedrock of "reality."
This need for "representation" of thought in some kind of language does not deprive us of truth or objectivity. I am confident that Professor Greene's book is written in the English language. Furthermore, this linguistic feature is central to his discussion if not to his conclusion. ("Consciousness and Computers" and "Mind and Machine.")
Paul Ricoeur's life-work is concerned with narrativity and time as features of language and reality as well as linguistic-realities.
Human knowing (and spirituality or Being) may be inextricable from our need for narrative and meaning. ("'Ex Machina': A Movie Review" and "Westworld: A Review of the T.V. Series.")
Notions of temporality are structural to the language used by Professor Greene in this very book and chapter, affecting the possibility of communicating or grasping our latest scientific concepts of time. The metaphors found in this rich literary work, Professor Greene's book -- which is a treatise on quantum mechanics and string theory -- forces the reader to reconsider the sharp distinctions between literature, philosophy, and science that are essential in the American academic setting and traditional humanistic thinking. Again: boundaries are collapsing.
Does a book's literary merits enhance (or diminish) its scientific value?
Writing well can only help to promote scientific understanding.
Why do our linguistic-intellectual concerns not deprive us objectivity?
Well, for one thing, there is a reality built into our languages which are social and ancient phenomena. For another, reality serves as the boundary-maker for our linguisitic creativity whose limits are unknowable. This is fortunate since expansion of language is also expansion of knowledge, if not of reality.
I suggest that this mysterious relation between words and things, identity and art is the subject of Gore Vidal's erotic masterpiece, Myra Breckinridge and of much of the literature of the twentieth century:
"Every truth is eternal, even, for instance, such a truth as 'I now have a toothache.' Truth qualifies that which is beyond mere succession and it takes whatever it contains beyond the flux of mere event. To be, it must appear there, but, to be truth it must also transcend that appearance. The same thing holds again without exception of all beauty and goodness, and of everything in short, however mean, which is apprehended as an object. [Immanuel Kant] ... Though revealed in time and in our 'mortal world,' they are not subject to its chance and change, and though in this world they remain something which never is of it."
F.H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), pp. 340-341 (emphasis added). ("We are in the world but not of the world.")
It is not coincidental that Albert Einstein's papers on relativity appeared in 1905, 1915, then 1918 (as I recall).
For an updating of Bradley's theory to coincide with scientific developments which he anticipated, see Philip Ferreira, Bradley and the Structure of Knowledge (New York: SUNY, 1999), pp. 170-173, then Brand Blanshard, "Sanity in Thought and Art," in The Uses of a Liberal Education and Other Talks to Students (Illinois: Open Court, 1973), pp. 225-249.
A recent development of Bradley's ethics and metaphysics in a scientifically respectable theory is found in the work W.J. Mander. W.J. Mander, Idealist Ethics (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2016).
One physical law that surely applies to all of us is that we are capable of experience, including an ever-expansive linguistic experience. The "realities" (American, male or female, father or mother, husband or wife, scientist or humanist, philosopher, New Yorker) created by languages where we must live our meanings make possible all of our knowing and being, including scientific knowledge and the struggle to understand and live with one another in society.
There is cinematic time, a spirituality of the eternal, time as duration (Bergson, Husserl), and these notions of time find their way even into our thinking concerning the physics and mathematics of time conceived, exclusively, mathematically or scientifically.
Professor Greene's discussion of time is really a commentary on one narrow conception of time in the highly specific context of the physics of time.
Martin Heidegger defines human beings (Dasein) in terms of an ambiguous relation to time that is "punctuated" by death. There is something so alarming and sad about the punctuation mark that ends a sentence of written English. The period that closes a sentence of English prose is so unforgiving, like death. I prefer the ambiguous, erotic, daring and feminine ellipsis ... an ellipsis is a symbol of hope, like love. I like to think of women as ellipses ... Sadly, if it is true (as British critics suggest) that Heidegger's Dasein does not eat, it is nevertheless accurate to say that he will die and must live (elliptically?) in relation to that daily process of dying. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
Mathematics is always an engagement with the eternal (Baruch Spinoza) that involves a complex relationship with all temporality: Does 2 + 2 = 4 exist "in" time? Where is the temporal location of this proposition? Errol E. Harris, The Reality of Time (New York: SUNY, 1988), pp. 19-39.
If a mathematical proposition can exist outside of time then why are we surprised if God can do the same? ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
Further explorations of the metaphysics and experience of time may be found in Leszek Kolakowski, "Time and Immobility," in Bergson (Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 2001), pp. 12-23, then Leszek Kolakowski, Husserl and the Search for Certitude (Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 2001), pp. 42-57.
Each of these fields of inquiry focusing on consciousness is connected to all other fields in which the issue of consciousness is studied or is relevant to what is studied in time. Indeed, consciousness is inseparable from time's "passage."
All of these "subjects" are in turn connected by (and to) us. Crane Brinton, The Shaping of the Modern Mind (New York: New American Library, 1953), pp. 83-106 (see also the theme of anti-intellectualism and hostility to science in Brinton's conclusion, pp. 226-241) and J. Bronowski & Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition (New York: Harper, 1960), pp. 3-127 (Leonardo to Galileo 1500-1630). For a survey on consciousness theory, see Daniel N. Robinson, Consciousness and Mental Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), entirety.
The trick is to put all of these traditions together and get everybody in the philosophical "pool" at the same time. That's why we need intellectual maintenance workers, like Searle and Nagel, to do the dirty work. The smart guys and gals went to medical school or have become tax accountants.
When it comes to empirical reality science is boss. Science is the man or woman who calls the shots. What scientists are now telling us about reality suggests that everything is a whole lot weirder than we thought, including uncle Henry and you.
A true scientific perspective on the universe and us will require revising these terms describing fundamental forces and entities, together with the psychology to which they have led, which is deeply ingrained in us by now.
This task of revision is very promising because we begin to see areas where a solution to the mind/body problem may be found.
The same sort of cluster of issues from overlapping academic subject-fields surrounds the question: "What is law?" After all, there are "laws" in science. This is not a coincidence. Evidently, there are astral bodies that have chosen a life of crime. Mind/body issues are everywhere in substantive law. Other metaphysical issues also arise in legal scholarship, as I have noted, and tend to be ignored by judges if they are recognized at all. This is often fortunate, given what judges are likely to write on these subjects. Temporality is all over legal scholarship. For example, much contested recent discussions of "proximate cause" in the law of Torts are muddled attempts to grapple with time in a post-quantum mechanics setting. Ian Stewart, Nature's Numbers: The Unreal Reality of Mathematics (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 145-150 ("Morphomatics").
O.K., let's get back to Searle cleaning out the philosophical pool. Searle admits there are a few substance dualists around. Searle remarks, dismissively: "the only substance dualists I know of are those who have a religious commitment to the existence of a soul, such as the late Sir John Eccles." (p. 136.)
In other words, substance dualism is not a position to bother refuting because it is only "for" religious persons. Religious persons are assumed to be unenlightened and not to be taken seriously in this discussion. I detect a tone of condescension in references to "religious writers." The implication is that such a belief in the soul is somehow irrational or ignorant. ("Law and Literature.")
Most people probably believe in the existence of a soul or something like it. I have discussed the rationality of belief in souls and God. Plenty of philosophers who are as clever as Searle have defended such beliefs. (Read Frederick Copleston on the concept of a "person.")
You have every right to believe in the soul and God. Mind is just as immaterial as soul. Many philosophers who in previous centuries would have spoken of the soul, now speak of minds or consciousness to sound scientific. Same thing; different label. Contrast Colin McGinn, "Could a Machine be Conscious?," in The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. 202-214 with Jonathan Miller, "Artificial Intelligence and the Strategies of Psychological Investigation: A Dialogue With Daniel Dennett," in States of Mind (New York: Methuen, 1983), pp. 66-82.
What talk of the soul (or mind) reflects is a sense that there is something about human beings that is not reducible to the physical or "material" aspect of themselves as traditionally understood.
Searle insists that there are terminal problems with materialism. Materialists have tried, unsuccessfully, to give an account of human subjective reality that gets rid of the mind. George W. Bush?
Accounts of cerebral functions that fail to explain or even recognize the experiential reality of an event become ludicrous. "Mind" and "meaning" are linguistic cousins. When you "get rid" of the mind you better be careful about what else you are tossing out the window.
Equally "absurd" or "circular" (Searle's terms are harsh, pp. 138-140) is the behaviorism to which materialism led in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is simply a huge amount of mental phenomena not accounted for in any purely cerebral explanation of human subjectivity. This will always be true -- regardless of improvements in technology or brain science -- because mental contents are not and never will be material, even if they are made possible (as far as we know) only by a material brain. Furthermore, mental contents ("qualia") will never be reducible to cerebral operations.
A lot of what we do, physically, is only explicable or understandable in terms of subjective mental phenomena -- like intentions or reasons -- which are the opposite of "illusory." Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Semantics and Hermeneutics," in Philosophical Hermeneutics (Los Angeles: University of California, 1976), pp. 82-94.
I have a date on Saturday night. I go and get a haircut and buy some new clothes. I practice what I'll say. I invest in "Antonio" cologne. I plan my evening, meticulously, arranging for different stages of the emotional military campaign to develop, choosing when to use my naval forces ("let's go rowing on the big lake in Central Park"), then shrewd use of air power. ("I thought we'd go over to the amusement park afterwards. There's a ferris wheel.")
My objective is the enemy's total and unconditional surrender signalled by her question at the end of the evening: "Would you like to come in for coffee?"
I suggest that a description of cerebral states of a male person on such an evening would fail to account for the "meaning" of his actions or even to explain events as they are taking place.
Intentionality will be more important in understanding a man's goals and aims on such an occasion, perhaps on most occasions, than observation of brain cells or behavior which may be deceptive.
Women, of course, are beyond philosophical or scientific comprehension -- even to themselves -- at this stage of human learning.
Intentionality, subjectivity of experience, mentalistic language become unavoidable concepts if you want to understand persons.
Yes, I was joking about women. I think. Infuriating the language police and feministas is always a plus. ("Is clarity enough?")
Any behaviorist account will be inaccurate -- or even irrelevant -- to what is happening for both persons on an American "date."
Literalism is a guarantee that you will fail to understand any complex communication in a culturally and otherwise diverse setting. ("Metaphor is Mystery.")
The concept of a "date" is cultural. It does not have an exact counterpart elsewhere. Some part of the American mind is in high school forever. This is evidenced in our politics and elections. (See the film "Election" and the Tom Perrota book by that title.)
Culture is telling us important things about these issues of identity. Naturally, we ignore culture in our discussions in order to be considered "rigorous" and "scientific" thinkers, guaranteeing that we will be unable to answer our philosophical questions. This does not seem very smart. ("Robert Brandom's 'Reason in Philosophy.'")
This mistake and neglect of the "anomalous" nature of mentality as well as the full scope of human freedom detracts from the discussion in Stephen Hawking's clear essay "Is Everything Determined?" in Black Holes and Baby Universes, and Other Essays (New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 127. By way of comparison, see Phil Gasper, "Is Marxism Deterministic?," In International Socialist Review, March-April, 2008, at p. 21. (A future article focusing on Marx's "Essay on the Jewish Question" examining the early Marx's association of freedom with culture is coming up.)
Is American culture in your brain? Isn't culture crucial to your "mind"? Where is American culture "located"? Isn't American culture now global?
If you are anti-American I suspect that a large part of your problem with the U.S. -- apart from any issue of policy -- is about culture. American culture looks transparent to people, easy-going, clear, understandable -- and it is in a way. However, this clarity is also deceptive. American society contains a culture of layers and levels that interact and separate, flowing together, then colliding and falling apart. The entire culture is malleable to an extent that is incomprehensible to many other people in different countries. There are always -- as there are right now -- reconfigurations of power developing in American culture which have yet to settle into final form. ("Is Truth Dead?" and "'This is totally amazing!' -- Donald J. Trump.")
In the American context people who are placed at opposite ends of the spectrum often fail to realize that they have most in common with the people they are taught to despise. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
An example of this point concerning unsuspected alliances is found in current New York politics where advocacy by African-American and Latino civil rights leaders is often opposed by white blue collar workers -- usually police officers and firefighters -- who happen to be the very people who stand to benefit most from the reformers' proposals.
The American cultural situation is volatile and exciting because something new is being born as we take our first faltering steps into postmodernity. The successful candidacy of then Senator Obama is not unrelated to these cultural phenomena. The self-destruction of the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008 was the result not of any failure by the candidate, but of a total noncomprehension of this cultural moment on the part of Ms. Clinton's so-called advisers. Thankfully, the opposite seems to be true in 2015 where Ms. Clinton seems to be flawless in her campaigning, at least in the early stages of this election cycle, she seems (deservedly) unbeatable. How wrong can one be? ("A Commencement Address by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham-Clinton.")
Stupidity has become a requirement of membership in the inner circles of American politics. Sadly, this may even be true for self-styled radical feminists in the Democratic party's upper echelons. Women cannot afford to be stupid. Stupidity should be an exclusively male territory. As a matter of fact, stupidity usually is masculine turf. (Mr. Cheney? Mr. Trump?) ("C.I.A. Lies and Torture.")
Searle jettisons simplistic materialism, behaviorism and (perhaps) mind/brain identity theory.
Searle accepts the worrisome claim that brain states "cause" mental experience. This seems obvious. The clever psychology major will point out that: "If I shoot you in the head you won't have any mental experiences, duh."
Well, this may be true. However, we are asking philosophical questions: "How do you know whether you will have mental experiences after death? Have you "experienced' your own death?" How is it possible for a material event or process to "cause" non-material phenomena, qualia, assuming that they do? ("Incoherence in 'The New York Times.'")
Searle says: "We don't know, but someday we will."
Why is belief in something that you "do not know" any different from belief in souls or angels?
Belief is simply a choice. Why not believe in God?
"Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith -- namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, [same thing?] maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence."
Paul Davies, "Taking Science on Faith," in The New York Times, November 24, 2007, at p. A17.
If both science and religion require faith -- defined as a willingness to accept uncertainty of beliefs -- then it is clearly rational to believe (or not to believe) in God, scientific method, or to grant tentative belief to scientific and religious ways of knowing things so long as they are compatible. See, for example, Steven Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine, 1999), p. 26 ("Our goal of mutual respect requires mutual understanding most of all.") and Robert C. Solomon, "Spirituality as Cosmic Trust," in Spirituality for the Skeptic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 44-58 ("Trust [faith] is a kind of confidence both in oneself and in the world.")
A.C. Grayling's disappointing and ultimately failed effort to cope with the insight offered by Davies is curious in that, a philosopher, who challenges a distinguished physicist concerning the need for "faith" in science, finds himself concluding (unknowingly) that such faith is indeed necessary. Grayling says:
"Davies does not seem especially clear about what he means by this. He begins by describing scientific faith as 'the assumption [emphasis added] that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way,' but soon shifts to describing it as 'belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like ... an unexplained set of physical laws.' Either way, the failure or refusal to explain the source of physical laws is, he [Davies] says, to regard nature as rooted in reasonless absurdity.' ..."
A.C. Grayling, "Mindfields," in The New Scientist, December 8, 2007, at p. 55.
I happen to agree with Paul Davies about this need for faith -- and so does Professor Grayling. Grayling is under the impression that he disagrees with Davies and has refuted Davies' contention. In fact, Grayling will supply an illustration and argument in support of Davies' conclusion in his purported refutation of it. Read the following statement by Grayling very carefully, as the good professor who wrote it clearly did not:
"Davies could also not be more wrong in describing science's assumption [emphasis added] that the universe is orderly and intelligible as an 'act of faith.' Patterns and regularities are a salient feature of nature" -- yes, Professor Grayling, for creatures capable of detecting them -- "even to casual observation, [provided there is an observer,] and well motivate the assumption [emphasis added] that they hold generally, or that when they fail to hold they do so for likewise orderly reasons."
This is, in fact, Paul Davies' point. Davies does not suggest that our faith in an orderly universe is unwarranted or not very plausible. Davies merely observes, empirically, that the ASSUMPTION is always based on and constitutes an act of faith. The same is true when it comes to belief in God. Indeed, one might well argue that these two faiths are related.
To "assume" is to "take to be true," or to believe something. An assumption is always an act of faith. After all, what could be meant by a necessary observer and guarantor of eternal patterns of change or meanings? Obviously, this could only refer to God. Grayling huffs and puffs:
"The public and repeatable testing of hypotheses distinguishes science as the most successful inquiry ever."
How do you define "success"? By what criteria of success is science "successful"? Were nuclear weapons a "success"? If you say, "yes, because the science 'worked' ..." then the question becomes why build a super bomb in the first place? Don't values and purposes necessarily enter into the scientific "hypothesis" and method? I think so. Success is a value term.
Whether something "succeeds" is a matter of warranted belief based on assumed values:
"... [Science] is not in the business of accepting anything without question, without examining the grounds ..."
Why not question our unwillingness to accept claims without questioning them? Why bother investigating nature unless we are willing to "assume" (faith?) that nature is amenable to comprehension by us and that we should bother to understand nature?
As for the problem of induction, Grayling is curiously unaware of its bite:
"Every time I have been out in the rain without an umbrella in the past I have got wet; but inductive reasoning is fallible, so perhaps this time I will stay dry."
The point, Professor Grayling, is that it is logically undetermined whether you will stay dry or get wet in the future when you go out in the rain without your umbrella regardless of your experiences in the past. Our generalizations about what is likely to occur in the future are always "assumptions" or "acts of faith" until the future arrives.
This has no bearing on necessary truth in logic which has an a priori form. 2 + 2 = 4 is not subject to the criticisms of induction. (Again: "Robert Brandom's 'Reason in Philosophy.'")
Despite Professor Kripke's dazzling intellectual figure eights ("what if we define the number '2' to mean '17'?"), the constraints of arithmetic language are such as to limit the definitional options, as the rules of chess limit moves. To participate meaningfully in the discourse of math is to accept the logic of its concepts and terms. This logic seems to coincide with and describe the order in/of nature in fascinating ways. Maybe any cosmic mirroring-relation is a "coincidence." However, I doubt it. ("Is this atheism's moment?" and "Is the universe only a numbers game?")
There are worse problems for bottom-line tough-minded guys and gals, like Searle. It is increasingly evident to many philosophers, as I have indicated, that we will never connect the precise subjective phenomenology of experience with observable material cerebral processes -- even if cerebral processes are the preconditions for and compatible with those mental experiences -- because each "aspect" (remember that word "aspect") of human being-in-the-world is both interdependent "individually" and "collectively" even as each of these aspects develops in time while being unique and non-reproducible for each "person" (remember that word "person"): Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001), pp. 157-195 and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976). See the discussion at William Hasker, Metaphysics: Constructing a World View (Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1983), pp. 105-114. There are serious problems with Hasker's book, but the final chapter is helpful.
Consciousness- or the mind-brain relation is a Janus-faced phenomenon essential to what is called "a person." A person is an entity that is material and mental; possessing a brain and mind; body with a spiritual life or soul. This is entirely natural. A person is an individual, who can only thrive or flourish socially; a person is an intelligence that can only develop in shared languages, also socially; altering and being altered by others; a person is a system connected to other systems in a "matrix" of culture within a natural ecology. ("The Naked Ape.")
A tradition for thinking about these bizarre creatures ("persons") that is highly relevant to our mind/body puzzle exists, a tradition which is often ignored by philosophers. This is the tradition of theological speculation found in all of the world's great religions, including Judaism (I and Thou), Christianity (The Self as Agent), Islam (see "The Statements of the Theologians" in John Alden Williams, ed., Islam, pp. 173-205), also in Budhism and Hinduism.
All of these religions are brought together as a single human tradition of speculation concerning ultimate matters of human destiny.
The great religions affirm the reality of human spiritual-mental life. Surely, these religious traditions are capturing and expressing something fundamental and true concerning the human condition, the need for (and reality of) a spiritual dimension in a person's life and in human communities. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
Mentality is made possible by and directed at the Other because mental constructs are concerned with MEANINGS; cerebral states that make mentality possible but are insufficient to account for our mental lives are internal biological EVENTS. This distinction depends upon a principle of non-reductivism with regard to consciousness. This is not dualism, but a "dual-aspect" approach to the phenomenon of "human being-in the-world-with-others." Juan Galis-Menendez, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom (North Carolina: Lulu, 2004).
Scientists who wish to dispense with traditional religions while acknowledging our natural spirituality, are directed to: Richard Holloway's Looking in the Distance: The Human Search for Meaning (New York: Canongate, 2004).
Agnostics should see Anthony Kenney's What I Believe (London & New York: Continuum, 2006).
The state of absolute equilibrium between these aspects of the subject, peace (Islam means "peace") and harmonious functioning of mind and body in an environment with others I will call "love."
Love is a state of being that is always -- like persons -- both individual (within a person) and social (involving a directedness towards others and the world). Love is a language or Covenant binding us together in a community. (Again: "Is it rational to believe in God?")
I understand love as a collective "space" (dialectic) making possible and explaining, also "identical" with, true human flourishing. God? Hence, Pope Benedict's statement: Deus caritas est. ("God is love.")
I will now direct the reader to a philosopher who is much better than I can hope to be in discussing these matters and who is certainly as adept as John Searle. We have not left the subject of consciousness behind. ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism" and "Why I am not an ethical relativist.")
If you are a being from another galaxy who has never experienced what humans call "love," I suggest that you ponder Mozart's Exultate, Jubilate! Then read any of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Any number of other "texts" will do just as well. (For example, Jessye Norman singing Wagner's "love/death" theme as Isolde.)
This is to make clear the evil in denying persons their loves, however different from ourselves those other persons and their feelings may appear. ("Is there a gay marriage right?")
II.
Professor John Finnis of Oxford University -- a town now beautified with several "McDonald's hamburger emporiums" -- discusses the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and the state of "beatitude": "... the happiness of human flourishing [in] caritas, friendship with God." (Natural Law, Natural Rights, pp. 398-399.)
Such a state is the full realization of human possibilities. It is a form of love. It is loving. By loving others, humans participate in divine "love." This is what religious persons describe as the "instantiation of God in us."
Human participation in the divine is heaven. Heaven is possible for you at any time and place. This is not a literal language of empirical descriptions. To speak in such terms is analogical or metaphorical, but relevant and, sometimes, insightful. ("'The American': A Movie Review" and "Incoherence in 'The New Yorker.'")
Moses Maimonedes, physician to the Caliph at Cordoba and defender of the Jewish faith to the "perplexed" saw this "binding" role as the essence of Judaism. Love, as community, is available even in a concentration camp: "The Covenant with God binds the Jewish people to the task of being a corporate priesthood." Arthur Hertzbeg, Judaism (New York: George Brazillier, 1962), p. 22. (This discussion and point concerning the Covenant with Israel is found also in The Guide for the Perplexed.)
In Woody Allen's masterpiece "Crimes and Misdemeanors" one character explains that "without the Law, Judah, there is chaos."
The "Law" is ethics and love. Just as Israel has a geographical location, so love is the spiritual home of the Jewish people. All of this is very distant from the policies of any government or polarized politics in all society(ies).
To enslave or torture another human being is to inflict such evil on God's handiwork, therefore, it is to "crucify" God. Like the Last Judgment, the crucifixion takes place every day. This is Hebrew ethics or Judaism for gentiles. On 9/11, thousands of people in this city were crucified. This is true whatever their religions or ethnicity. My family members and I might easily have been among them. ("Martin Buber and Diet Judaism.")
The solution to this experience of horror is not to do the same to others. ("'This totally amazing!' -- Donald J. Trump.")
We need recognition of our shared pain -- pain that is only enhanced by our current adventure in Iraq, in my opinion.
Concerning metaphysics as a continuing viable intellectual project, see W.H. Walsh, "Metaphysics Without Ontology," in Metaphysics (London: Hutchinson, 1963), pp. 63-83, then James W. Felt, Coming to Be: Towards a Thomistic-Whiteheadian Metaphysics of Becoming (New York: SUNY, 2001), pp. 61-80.
For the Islamic approach to these mysteries, see "The Law," in John Alden Williams, Islam (New York: George Brazillier, 1962), pp. 92-135. Love is the binding element in the universe for ecstatic or mystical Islam within the Sufi tradition: "If men wish to draw near to God they must seek him in the hearts of men [and women,] whether present or absent, ... To bring joy to a single heart is better than to build many shrines for worship, and to enslave [or capture] one soul by kindness is worth more than the setting free of a thousand slaves. ..." Justice begins in the self and only then moves into the world. God's revelation is a self-reflection that is shared with men and women: "Mirror and Beauty am I: Me in Myself behold." (pp. 150-151.)
This presence of God in the self applies to "all people of the book," according to Islam, meaning Jews and Christians, who may not be killed, raped, stolen from, or injured indiscriminately. To do such a thing -- to kill the innocent under Islamic teaching -- is to offend God. Ibid.
No wonder these attacks continue to take place. A message of peace is always dangerous for those who thrive on conflict. For this reason, 9/11-like terrorist actions are profoundly offensive to God/Allah in Islamic moral teachings.
"From the perspective of cosmic history, all scientific questions turn ultimately into narratives. ... Nothing that is human is purely human, and nothing that we see in the sky is purely cosmological. We are embroiled in the cosmos. All roads lead to cosmology, and the higher we can climb, the farther we can see."
Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe(s) Report (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), pp. 21-22. (Please study Roger Penrose's Roads to Reality, the final word in Professor Penrose's title should be plural.)
No wonder my computer is under attack at the moment. These are dangerous thoughts. Spacing may be altered by hackers. Letters may be added to or deleted from my words. Viruses may prevent me from making corrections. I write as an act of faith.
To ignore the complexity of what a human being is -- of the simultaneous unity and division in humanity -- may be convenient for scholars. However, it is the opposite of understanding persons or resolving the mind/body problem. Reductivists want an impossible simplicity in these discussions which can only be achieved by ignoring as opposed to resolving the difficulties concerning mind/body relations. Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry (New York & London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 79-155.
It is insulting and not surprising that so many influential persons in America find it difficult to believe that someone with my last name is writing these essays. Assumptions concerning a lack of intelligence or articulateness, based on ethnicity, reveal some of the limitations due to parochialism and xenophobia which have no place in a globalized culture and economy, nor within our Constitutional system.
I can write this essay and others like it, against a tidal wave of criminal censorship from government, only because of a near-50-year (or more) intense reading habit, passion for cinema, fascination with science, and a "childish" delight in intellectual play. These are grave faults in the eyes of persons for whom intelligence (even such modest intelligence as I may posses) in someone like me is an unforgivable offense justifying my destruction. This is someone else's problem, not mine. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "What is it like to be plagiarized?")
Science is arriving at useful answers to specific questions, often without realizing their philosophical implications, even as philosophers discover that the latest science provides information compatible with religious wisdom.
Each moment or breath I take is a realization of Kierkegaard's insight that life itself is an act of faith. What follows is from the work of a leading physicist, again, not a philosopher or theologian:
"... in recent years physicists have been interested in the subject of quantum cosmology -- the quantum theory of the entire universe. By definition, there can be nothing outside the universe to collapse the whole cosmic panorama into concrete existence (except God, perhaps?). At this level, the universe would seem to be caught in a state of limbo or cosmic schizophrenia. Without a Wigner-type mind [Deus Principle] to integrate it, the universe seems destined to languish as a mere collection of ghosts, a multi-hybrid superposition of overlapping alternative realities, none of them the actual reality. Why, then, [if there is no God,] do we perceive a single, concrete reality?"
Paul Davies, God and the New Physics, p. 116. (See my essay "Michel Foucault and the Authorship Question.") By way of comparison, see Michael Frayn, The Human Touch (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), p. 351.
What is it that "binds" us in one Being? God? Please remember how we got into this mess:
"The Cartesian separation of mind and matter was historically unavoidable in order for science to pursue a free course unshackled by theology. It was necessary to study unconscious matter without theological bias in order to gain an understanding of the mechanics and interactions that shaped all matter; including the living and the conscious. It took almost four hundred years to achieve the relative mastery we now enjoy over these physical forces."
These words were written by a physicist who is an idealist philosopher. More scientists will discover the usefulness of Kant (physics) and Hegel (biology) in the decades to come.
The physics that made Cartesian separations and Newtonian notions of material reality necessary is now archaic. However, the frozen philosophical picture of ontological options and corresponding epistemological dilemmas is still in place:
"In the twentieth century the wind freshened in a new direction for the hero's ship. Planck discovered the quantum, Heisenberg and Schrodinger discovered quantum mechanics, and together these discoveries forever altered the old materialist, separatist course. As Bertrand Russell put it, in twentieth-century science 'matter looked less material and the mind less mental.' The four-hundred-year gap between the two was ready to be bridged: The return of the hero had begun." (emphasis added)
Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material Universe (New York: Penguin, 1995), especially at p. 272.
Professor Goswami cites an important article by Sir John Eccles, "Do Mental Events Cause Neural Events Analogously to the Probability Fields of Quantum Mechanics?," in 47 Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 227:411-28. Now see M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 198-241; and the exposition of Rupert Sheldrake's biological theories in John P. Briggs & F. David Peat, "Rupert Sheldrake Seeks Hidden Forms," in Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness (London: Fontana, 1984), pp. 226-253.
American philosopher and source for process theology, Charles Hartshorne defines our metaphysical challenge in a scientific age:
"A metaphysics of becoming and relativity is the modern task. [Process Theology?] Metaphysics seeks the essential nature of becoming which does not itself become and cannot pass away; or it seeks the universal principle of relativity whose validity is absolute. Nothing is absolute except relativity. [Notice that this is, intentionally, a self-undermining claim, by a defender of God as a concept and of the ontological argument.] ... This metaphysics of becoming and of relativity, this process philosophy, is, moreover, a metaphysics of love. A metaphysics of love, that is, of socially structured, or relative, creative experience is what we need, whether in ethics, religion, or politics -- indeed, in all our basic concerns."
Quoted in Andrew J. Reck, The New American Philosophers (New York: Delta, 1968), p. 291.
If becoming is absolute and relativity is eternal, we have found the principle of transcendence, the guarantor of change that is unchanging. Can you guess Who or what that might be? If you prefer to call "love" a kind of "cooperative evolution" or "symbiosis" that is fine by me.
As for science's indifference and supposed establishment of humanity's insignificance, revisionist views compatible with religious teachings are available. Furthermore, the implications for the controversy concerning mind and body of these revisionist views have not been explored. I suggest that these metaphysical insights lead to a politics of meaning and an ethics of community:
"The most interesting twist in their presentation, one well suited to their larger goal, is the re-centering of humankind in the story [of the universe.] Our physical size is the almost geometric mean of the largest thing we can imagine, the visible universe, and the smallest thing we can rationally discuss, the Planck scale. We are made of the rarest substance in the universe, atoms beyond helium, which accounts for 0.1% of the universe. Last but not least, the authors replace the heavenly spheres of Ptolemy with the spheres of time, which is appropriate to our isotropic and homogeneous universe, and locate us at the center of time since both our galaxy and the Sun" -- like me! -- "are in their middle ages."
Michael S. Turner, "An Antidote to Cosmic Alienation," in Physics Today, November 2006, at p. 57. (Review of Joel R. Primack & Nancy Ellen Abrams, The View From the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006) and see Lee Smolin's article in that issue of Physics Today.)
For the philosophical foundations of Clinton-Obama-Clinton-Biden politics in America, see Michael Lerner, The Politics of Meaning (MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), pp. 153-285 and Roberto Mangabeira Unger & Cornel West, The Future of American Progressivism: An Initiative for Political and Economic Reform (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), pp. 23-47, then Peter Gabel, The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning (California: Acada Books, 2000), pp. 16-72, pp. 139-184.
Now let us think of physics again:
"Faced with the prospect of an embarrassing plethora of new particle states and also what happened to be an otherwise mathematically untenable theory based on that old-fashioned idea that the fundamental quantum mechanical exitations in nature are manifested as elementary particles, many physicists felt that the strong interaction had to be, at its foundation, a theory of strings."
Lawrence M. Kraus, "Out of Chaos," in Hiding in the Mirror: The Quest for Alternative Realities, From Plato to String Theory (By Way of Alice in Wonderland, Einstein, and The Twilight Zone (New York & London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 132-133.
Holographic thinking in multiple scientific fields suggests that, rather than being made up of "solid matter" (there is no such thing), the physical body -- including the brain! -- is only the "end product, so to speak, of the subtle information fields, which mold our physical body as well as all physical matter. These fields are holograms which change in time (and are) outside the reach of our normal senses. ... "
Michael Talbot, "Seeing Holographically," in The Holographic Universe (New York: Harper Perenial, 1991), pp. 162-193. (Time and space dialectics may be enfolded within an "implicate order" where and part of which we are as a hermeneutics of freedom.)
For religiously-minded thinkers Leonardo Bosh and Gustavo Gutierrez are the immediate scholars to read. Compare Gabriele Veneziano's formula for the strongly interacting particles that had exactly the required duality properties. "If you move, I move ..."
The interesting idea concerning strings is that any single point of a string -- including a string of propositions -- is necessarily connected to all others. Political and legal implications are obvious. Let us pause to consider a term for that fundamental "connectedness" or community. Any thoughts? A short word will do. Love? God? Religion? Political community? No effort has yet been made to connect Sheldrake's work on "morphic fields" (biology) with the physics of holographs and lasers. Michio Kaku's Hyperspace is next for me. (See again: "Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Is this atheism's moment?")
I want to be sure that the reader appreciates the implications of what I am saying. To use a single word is to involve yourself in a language. This is to participate in the human linguistic capacity which is reflected in every language that has ever existed or will exist. Hence, to speak any word is to enter a "community," whose totality is infinite and protean as well as eternal. To ponder the mystery of communication is to be forced to accept the logical necessity of the Other, refuting nihilism, solipsism, possibly atheism. It is also to be forced to accept the reality of connectedness -- connectedness that makes "minds" possible. Connectedness may be another word for "consciousness." ("'Ex Machina': A Movie Review" and "Westworld: A Review of the T.V. Series.")
What term would designate the totality of human or all communicative schemes and what unites them (clearly, something does)? What "essence" contains or expresses the human world-constituting power of logos? Eros? No essence; no connection. ("Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Metaphor is Mystery.")
Many people do not like these arguments. They cannot invalidate them. You may disregard or dislike the argument and its conclusions. However, to use words to "argue" against this argument may be to establish its validity or at least plausibility. Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 144-146. ("Death is the ultimate and final word that takes us to a new language.")
To seek to suppress or destroy expressions of such views is a good way of emphasizing them even more, making these opinions especially attractive to young people. Not so long ago in America one could express respect -- even for religious opinions -- without being censored. Maybe some day the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of expression will apply to religious persons as well as others in society, even to impoverished and tortured minority men with an interest in speculative metaphysics. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory" and "Is Truth Dead?")
It is foolish to ask whether science is making religion "obsolete." It is wiser to wonder whether our increasing understanding of the science of the universe is altering our sense and experience of the numinous, blending beautiful and sublime with appreciation of the awesome complexity that is also, paradoxically, simplicity of the universe. Our understanding of science and religion is changing as each of these human endeavors recognizes its reflection in the other. Please see, Richard Tarnas, "Through the Archetypal Telescope," in Cosmos and Psyche (New York: Plume, 2006), pp. 71-135 and Omar Calabrese, "Complexity and Dissipation," in Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (New Jersey: Princeton, 1992), pp. 144-153. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory" and "Donald Davidson's Anomalous Monism.")
I say all of this as someone who is not regarded as religious in any traditional sense, who always thought of himself as an atheist, who has decided to follow the argument where it leads. This is not overintellectualizing. It is a refusal to accept stupidity passed off as wisdom by my so-called "superiors."
You can recognize your spirituality, by the way, without joining any church or other religious institution. Spirituality is telling you of something within you traditionally called "God." If you prefer to use another word or name for this entity or experience, that's fine by me. Philosophers like Whitehead or Hartshorne support these ideas. No wonder they keep inserting errors in this essay. I must be frightening all of those atheists who thought they had it made. Mark Johnson refers to Hitchens and Dawkins as the "undergraduate atheists." I will be happy to describe myself as an "undergraduate agnostic" (or atheist) saving my adversaries the trouble of coming up with an insult.
I realize now why this essay and my writings infuriate some people. Complexity alone is annoying to simple and brutal people. For many persons a world they cannot fully grasp or difficult thought is somehow threatening or dangerous to their sense of power over others or "things." It is mostly men who want the world to be simple again. This is a wish that is unlikely to be fulfilled in the contemporary world. The inescapable complexity we must deal with today should not frighten us for it is easily captured in our most elegant and beautiful scientific or philosophical interpretations or theories which fill us with joy. Kant's discussion of the "sublime" as compared with the "beautiful" comes to mind.
"We must," former President Bill Clinton said, "make the future our friend and not our enemy."
I am fortunate not to be burned as a witch these days. Maybe I have been burned as a witch. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "What is it like to be tortured?")
"Functionalism" is a final grasping at straws by non-religious persons seeking to cope with the mystery of consciousness. Searle is not an admirer of functionalism, which he correctly sees as a bandaid for materialism: "The word 'functionalism' may be confusing because it means many different things in many different disciplines. In the philosophy of mind, as we have seen, it has a fairly precise meaning. Functionalism, for contemporary philosophers, is the view that mental states are functional states and functional states are physical states; but they are physical states defined as functional states because of their causal relations." (p. 141.)
Functionalism also requires the reducibility of consciousness ("software") to material-cerebral "functions" ("hardware"). Hence, functionalism is unacceptable to those who believe in the nonreducible reality of subjective experience.
I now turn to Searle's disagreement with David Chalmers, who is on to something in my opinion.
III.
Chalmers wants to defend a version of "functionalism" that says your mind is just a "function" of all the complex operations of your brain which is not reducible to your brain. You are a single entity with dual aspects, body and mind.
Chalmers is putting together "property dualism" with his "nonreductive functionalism." Does it work?
Searle says -- "No."
Searle does not like the suggestion that: "... consciousness is additional to and not part of the physical world." (p. 147.)
An important point not discussed by Searle or Chalmers is what is meant today by the "physical world."
Furthermore, notice the essential word in this paragraph by Searle criticizing Chalmers. Both Searle and Chalmers fail to appreciate the significance of this crucial word:
"In the end [Chalmers] says there are really two MEANINGS to 'pain': one a physical, functionalist MEANING, according to which pain is not a conscious state at all, and the other, a MEANING dependent on consciousness, i.e., a meaning in which pains are unpleasant sensations. His problem then is to relate the relation between the two, and he thinks his only hope is to exploit the 'principle of structural coherence.' This principle states that the structure of consciousness is MIRRORED by the structure of functional organization and functional organization is MIRRORED by the structure of consciousness." (p. 149.)
Searle does not want any fuzzy talk of spirits or minds floating around. He's a bottom-line guy. Searle is a scientific thinker who wishes to live in a world of solid objects and steady, highly predictable relationships. Who wouldn't? The problem is that I doubt that we can or do live in such a world, especially when thinking about people. Searle would have done well in most American law schools.
Notice that reflections in a mirror are linked by a kind of non-material "string" to their objects. A reflection is a kind of echo. A reflection allows you to infer the existence of an original captured by that reflection. O.K., now "reflect" on the concept of "representation" in philosophy, science, mathematics and art. All of these disciplines are languages. Speak the word "God" and guess where you are? Community? Perhaps the same is true merely through the use of any word "in" a language. We become members of linguistic communities willingly or not. Order against chaos. Shadow equations. (Ian Stewart will help with this issue.) Paul Davies wonders:
"The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion -- all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?"
The New York Times, November 24, 2007, at p. A17.
Where the laws come from and what keeps them in place in a quantum universe can only be a unifying perspective supplied by an observer:
"Reality as it exists apart from observation is the deterministic expression of Schrodinger's equation for the Wave function." http://www.friesian.com/penrose.htm (a reductio ad absurdum)
Notice where this leads:
"... the wave function is interpreted by Heisenberg and Bohr as the sum of all possible states (Richard Feynman's all possible histories) of the physical system. Observation collapses the wave function into one actual and unique state, but the transition is indeterministic -- any one of the possibilities may become actual. [Again: '''Inception': A Movie Review."] This duality between possibilities and observation, however, sounds like nothing so much as Kant's distinction between things-in-themselves apart from experience and the act of synthesis that brings sensible intuition into consciousness. [Instantiation] Kantian synthesis is, indeed, the act by which a conscious observer experiences the world. Kant never thought of things-in-themselves as the sum of all possible histories, but that is because he didn't know how we could think of them at all." -- Maybe Hegel and Bradley did, as the Absolute! -- "Quantum mechanics serendipitously supplies a clue." (Ibid.)
The following conclusions are offered by a world famous scientist who is not an expert on Kant and is probably unaware that he is paraphrasing the Critique of Pure Reason and key sections of the Upanishads:
" ... in Pribram's view, reality at large is really a frequency domain, and our brain is a kind of lens that converts these frequencies into the objective world of appearances. Although Pribram began by studying the frequencies of our normal sensory world, such as frequencies of sound and light, he now urges the term frequency domain to refer to the interference patterns that compose the implicate order."
The Holographic Universe, p. 164. See also, Karl Pribram, "The Neurophysiology of Remembering," Scientific American 220 (January 1969), pp. 76-78. (See the film Source Code.)
Remembering is a present and constitutive cognitive process or, culturally, recollection is "the creation of interpretive form." This another way of speaking of representation. ("What is memory?")
For recent developments of these ideas that were underappreciated when they first appeared, see the scholarship concerned with ways of "remembering the future." (Quantum physics.) George Greenstein, The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind of the Cosmos (New York: William Morrow, 1988), pp. 117-259 and Roy E. Peacock, A Brief History of Eternity: A Considered Response to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (London: monarch, 1989), pp. 117-153; and Errol E. Harris, "Time and the Transcendental Subject," in The Reality of Time (New York: SUNY, 1988), pp. 87-92 ('Die Zeit is der Begriff der da ist. ... ' Hegel says.) Finally, Stephen Ornes, "Quantum Spookiness Goes Long Distance," in Discovery, January, 2009, p. 47. ("One particle caused alterations in another 11 miles away ...") then Ian Stewart & Martin Golubinsky, Fearful Symmetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).
Is the universe only God's experience, or thought thinking itself?
Thomistic philosophers and process theologians should be consulted on the concept of "instantiation." Scientists John P. Briggs and F. David Peat explain:
"For Bohm there could be various time orders, each unfolding at a different rate, which would not necessarily be the same as the time order unfolded by a clock. For Prigogine, similarly, each dissipative structure [you are a "dissipative structure"] has its own time order, T." Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness (London: Fontana, 1985), p. 189. ("'Interstellar': A Movie Review.")
You are a narrative that is designed to deconstruct itself. Recollection is "rendering into form" in a Proustian effort at extracting meaning from the frozen moment captured in art or thought as "form." ("What is Memory?")
Chalmers wants to be respected by thinkers like Searle. He hopes to sneak in a view of consciousness that allows for what he cannot deny in his own life. Chalmers wants to find some way to articulate, philosophically, the experience of subjectivity. (Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" might have served just as well as Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" in this context.)
I wonder whether Chalmers is attracted to the phenomenological tradition?
Continental thought is out of the question if you wish to be respected by your colleagues in mainstream Anglo-American philosophy. An interest in Continental thought is almost as bad as believing in God or being a Republican. This is unfortunate since by temperament and philosophical inclination Chalmers may find much Continental thought useful and welcoming. I now quote a philosopher from Fordham University -- who was a Jesuit priest -- who could not have been aware of any of this recent fancy scientific theorizing and evidence when he wrote these words:
"... it is not too difficult to understand Hegel's claim that the conceptual movement of coming to grips with reality is the same as the movement of reality in revealing itself if we can remember the 'key' notion that the objective movement of self-revelation is the subjective movement of being-conscious-of, but the burden of sustaining this kind of awareness is not light. Only if we do sustain it, however, can we make sense out of Hegel's contention that his 'idealism' is in no sense 'unrealistic,' even though it must constantly transform the real [the world of empirical reality, events] into the ideal [interpreted ultimate scientific and ontological reality or meaningful experience or action]."
Quentin Lauer, S.J., A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993), p. 9. (Hegel's Phenomenology appeared in 1807, Professor Lauer's book first appeared in 1976.)
There are several sections in Lauer's book that anticipate findings by scientists decades after its initial publication in far too many ways to be coincidental or a fluke.
It is always one world we are discussing. One of the fallacies that makes this epistemology difficult is the confusion that says: "mental contents or ideas cannot affect reality." Ideas are realities. All events may be seen as "instantiations" of (usually pre-existing) ideas and concepts: Amir D. Aczel, Descartes' Secret Notebook (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), pp. 5-9. My study of Descartes' notebooks in this work connects with Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (New York & London: Penguin, 1978), pp. 178-305 ("Mind and its Place in Nature") and Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp.137-146 (Descartes' discovery of the laws of refraction and use of Mersenne's Synopsis Mathematica of 1626 leads straight to the mathematics of Internet networks and manifolds something which Descartes could not have imagined.)
Descartes' mathematics and epistemology may prove to be more successful than his metaphysics of mind/body dualism.
"Mirrors" become an obsession for the baroque era, especially for painters like Velasquez. See again: Omar Calabrese, "Complexity and Dissipation," in Neo-Baroquee: A Sign of the Times (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 144-154. (Freedom and Entropy), then "Instability and Metamorphoses," in Ibid., at pp. 91-117. ("All the great prototypes of the monster in classical mythology ... are both marvelous and enigmatic.")
Finally, Carlos Fuentes sees native Latin American culture as the "buried mirror" that serves as alter for U.S. and Western self-understandings in the new world after Modernity. The U.S. and Latin America are entangled particles. But then, all of us are "entangled." "Wholeness is truth." (Bohm, Pribram, Greene, Randall.)
When Chalmers "experiences" Bach's Brandenburg concerti there is a rich phenomenology that is descriptively distinct from, and not reducible to, synapses firing. Without the synapses, however, there is no show.
Chalmers cobbles together a philosophical Model-T. He unites a fancy recent theory ("functionalism") with a more traditional view of mind called "property dualism."
Searle is a sharp philosopher who dismantles this contraption easily enough. Most of us could do the same. This is irrelevant or incidental to evaluating properly Chalmers' philosophical project which is designed to articulate an important intuition concerning consciousness for which we do not yet have an analytical philosophical vocabulary. Chalmers is creating such a vocabulary in the poetry of philosophical argumentation.
Notice that listeners do not listen for each individual note to experience the music of Bach. Music is the totality of the notes heard by a listener as music.
What is a movie? A set of individual images? Or a totality which you (the viewer) make by determining the meaning of the work?
The resolution of hallowed philosophical dilemmas, such as the "prisoner's dilemma," may be possible only when we step out of the discourse in which the problem has been framed and which has governed, sometimes tragically, all assumptions concerning what is possible. We need new questions and not more of the same answers. ("'The Prisoner': A Review of an AMC Television Series" and "Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")
Hawking's parallel discussion of the free will versus determinism debate is marred by his failure to appreciate the scope of questions of meaning (music) or the limitations on any deterministic (notes) conclusions drawn from an "objective test" that is exclusively naturalistic in calculating probabilities in the symbolic order, that is, within systems of meaning characterizing the human "life-world."
Determining the trajectory of a meteor, Professor Hawking, is a different process from determining whether -- to use your own example -- "Madonna will be on the cover of Vogue." See Stephen Hawking, "Is Everything Determined?," in Black Holes and Baby Universes, and Other Essays (New York: Bantam, 1994), pp. 127-139. (Hawking describes himself as a determinist, who is actually best seen as a compatibilist with -- this was a surprise! -- pragmatist leanings.)
Searle and Chalmers agree that consciousness is something that happens naturally. It is a normal "aspect" of human beings that they are conscious. This is a predictable biological development. The mechanism by which consciousness "arises" from the brain (and maybe other mechanisms someday), working properly -- allowing for learning of languages and other entries into social life -- we do not fully understand.
Both philosophers -- Chalmers and Searle -- accept that there is one entity, a "person," with a body (including a brain) and the experience of consciousness (mind). Hence, the traditional term "property dualism" is misleading because what is "dual" are these attributes (or aspects) of persons, for Chalmers, whereas persons remain singular. If a machine ever becomes conscious then it will also become a "person." ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem" and "Mind and Machine" then "Consciousness and Computers" and "A Doll's Aria.")
Compare the discussion of F.H. Bradley's metaphysics in T.L.S. Sprigge, "The Self and Its World in Bradley and Husserl," in Anthony Manser & Guy Stock, eds., The Metaphysics of F.H. Bradley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 285-302 (especially note 7, then J.N. Findlay's essay on the Absolute) with Paul Franco's discussion of "Idealism," in Michael Oakeshott (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 30-31. The very definition of a person includes the Other. Mind is a social entity and not only a biological one. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freeedom.")
Chalmers appreciates something that, perhaps, Searle has not yet fully taken in. How "immaterial" the "physical world" has become according to the latest science. If the most solid-looking MATERIAL objects are really only particles in motion with a tendency or probability to arrange themselves in certain predictable patterns then perhaps it is not so puzzling that cerebral states have a highly predictable tendency to arrange themselves in such a way as to produce consciousness which then allows for freedom.
Freedom (which implies "mind") is about MEANING, awareness, not about violating the laws of nature. Meanings are concerned with interpretations within contexts. Richard Feldman, "Freedom and Contextualism," in J.K. Campbell, M. O'Rourke, D. Shier, eds., Freedom and Determinism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 255-276.
I am in the midst of reading the essays of Stephen Hawking dealing with freedom, knowledge, and will -- essays suggesting helpful associations with philosophical works (associations often not detected by their author). I expect to analyze and discuss these essays soon. It is important for compatibilists -- Professor Hawking is a reluctant defender of free will who is really a kind of Humean-Kantian-Bradlyean -- to bear in mind the "anomalous" nature of mind and human freedom. ("Donald Davidson's 'Anomalous Monism'" and "Ted Honderich Says: 'You Are Not Free!'")
The reason why philosophers make use of their classifications and categories, Professor Hawking, is the same as the purpose in categorizing illnesses by physicians -- attempts to diagnose and organize a reality that will always transcend our categories in the end. The labels are useful only for as long as we do not take them too seriously since the labels may need to be modified, at any time, as opposed to altering the persons to whom (or to whose views) we seek to apply those labels in order to fit them into our conceptual schemes.
It is almost as though things were working out a kind of logic of probabilities. Reality will say yes or no to our theories. Our theories will create the realities that define their boundaries. We live our selected "narrative options" and so will our universe. ("Hilary Putnam is Keeping it Real.")
What is the meaning of any particular arrangement of particles? Is this a "meaningful" question in the absence of meaning-creating and -perceiving subjects? In order for those subjects to fit into a meaningful order that contains them is there not a logically necessary requirement for an observer to provide the synthesis that yields meaning? If so, Who or what might be that observer? Consciousness? (Haitsch) Mind? (Deutsch) God? (Davies)
Please see: David Deutsch, "'Many Minds' Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics by Michael Lockwood," http://www.qubit.org/people/david/Articles/CommentOnLockwood.html (Mind, necessarily, underlies the universe described by science.) Order? Mind? Reason? "God"? Choose your preferred term:
"... Kant's theory that the mind applies the forms of space and time to intuition in the process of bringing it into consciousness does seem to have a parallel in quantum mechanics. Thanks to John Bell, the Einstein-Podolsky-Paradox has been demonstrated to be true: that the wave Function collapses instantaneously, even across cosmological distances, which violates the postulate of Special Relativity that nothing can travel faster than the velocity of light. Quantum mechanical effects are therefore 'non-local,' i.e., they ignore space, but only, of course, until the Wave Function collapses: after that, we are back in Einstein's universe again. The only theory in the history either of philosophy or science that would explain non-locality is Kant's theory of the transcendental ideality of space." http://www.friesian.com/penrose.htm ("Dialectics, Entanglement, and Special Relativity.")
The point of the interactions detected among sub-atomic entangled particles is that classical notions of space-time may be irrelevant to the relation, so that one particle 11 miles from its entangled partner is "mirrored" in alterations, "simultaneously," with its partner, or that these effects are observed before their causes are detected to "occur." At such levels of reality Newton laws of order are simply inapplicable. However, much of this phenomena is predicted by Immanuel Kant and the idealistic tradition in philosophy. ("A Review of the Television Series 'Alice.'")
Your observations, somehow, make reality understandable and necessary. We live in a "participatory reality," empirically and aesthetically, also psychologically and ethically as well as scientifically. Juan Galis-Menendez, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom (North Carolina: Lulu, 2004).
Who made the movie, "Inception"? You did. Who made the scientific order of the universe that is understandable by us? We did.
This is another way of speaking of what was traditionally called: "God."
Does all of this make science "untrue" or merely "relative"? Is this to transform science into religion? No. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist?" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
The ultimate direction of these arguments is toward a new version of the ontological argument for the existence of God. (Again: "Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Why I am not an ethical relativist.")
This is to suggest that consciousness "mirrors" its other and source in the universe.
I wonder Who that might be?
Use of the word "meaning" as opposed to "description" gives away the game because it is already to postulate a meaning-giving and -appreciating subject for whom meaning exists.
Jung takes up Kant's suggestion by transforming the categories into the archetypes of the collective subconscious as a "language" that is universal. Religion? (Again: "Dialectics, Entanglements, and Special Relativity" and "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
Chalmers says that we can imagine all biological "functions" taking place in a being who is not conscious. There is no naturally mandated reason why people and perhaps other animals have awareness. Only persons, as far as we know, have self-awareness.
Numerous attempts by evolutionary biologists to account for the phenomenon of consciousness have failed to convince anyone -- including themselves -- as evidenced by the continuing industry devoted to churning out such explanations.
Idealism, scientific phenomenology, and hermeneutics -- especially thinkers from Bradley and Peirce to Butler and Sprigge -- have much to contribute to these discussions. To my knowledge, no scholars are making the necessary and important associations between their works and, say, scholarship in Latin America and Asia (Liberation Theology).
Consciousness is indeed strange. Intelligence, self-awareness, capacity for feeling exist in overwhelming abundance in us -- well beyond anything that can be explained in terms of an evolutionary advantage for our early ancestors. ("The Return of Metaphysics.")
Looking down a microscope at brain cells in action will never reveal the moment when consciousness appears in material biological processes. You will not see "consciousness" even if you stare at those brain cells all day.
What do the natural processes mean? Where did consciousness, self-awareness, moral capacity or freedom come from and why do we have it?
When asking these questions, we are in the realm of "meaning" or "evaluation," not "description." These are realms that coexist in a single shared human world. Any adequate explanation (scientific or otherwise) will need to account for what is describable, empirically, and (more importantly) the meaning of the empirically describable which is not and can not be empirically determined.
To speak of a "theology of liberation" is to assign an additional set of compatible meanings or interpretations to what biologists call "cooperative evolution." This is the way out of the "prisoner's dilemma." ("Donald Davidson's Anomalous Monism" and "'The Prisoner': A Review of an AMC Television Series.")
You must select the language in which you will seek to understand these phenomena with the proviso that other languages may be equally good at "capturing" an understanding of these contested reality(ies).
Interpretations and optional hermeneutics need not be incompatible (or conflict) in order to yield a more complete "representation" of our most protean postmodernist reality(ies). Call it the Absolute? God? Multiverse? Here is where Searle goes wrong:
"... it seems to Chalmers that consciousness is something additional to and not part of the physical world. If the physical world could be the same without consciousness, then consciousness is not part of the physical world." (p. 147.)
Chalmers is at pains to explain that what is called the physical world allows for forces and effects that are not understandable in a simple model of solid objects and classical material forces. Most of the so-called physical world is actually "energy." A lot of this energy is the product of, or identical with, interactions between forces, knowers and what is known.
Judgments about where to place boundaries between these forces and what labels to attach to them, questions of "meaning," (or patterns) are themselves acts of consciousness or "functions" of that same energy requiring an observer or subject of meaning.
Interpreters discern interpretive schemes which are plural. Yet these plural schemes may be equally objective and valid. All may be true and consistent. They are narratives. They can only live together whether married or not. Maybe that means that they are married. Hence, the backward-looking error in this statement by Searle: "... dualists always have a hard time with causal relations between the two realms." (p. 150.) ("Where are thoughts located?" and, again, "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
This insight is begging for a new understanding of scientific effort in coping with these processes and shifting realities. We must think not only of physics and biology in new (much more beautiful) ways -- but even of science itself and how science may be pursued by students in many subjects not previously thought of in terms of this revolutionary understanding of science -- all must be reimagined to absorb this more complex, layered, multitemporal reality we inhabit. This includes philosophy.
The objectivity of scientific knowledge implies a guarantor of that objectivity or ultimate knower or ultimate rational pattern. Compare Roy Bashkar, "Explanation and the Laws of Nature," in Plato, Etc.,: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 18-36 and Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (Chicago; Open Court, 1995), pp. 23-41. ("Is the universe only a numbers game?")
At this point chaos theory is useful and so are many discussions of the holographic nature of the universe.
Searle is a careful and sophisticated philosophical reader. Yet Searle has failed to understand that, for Chalmers, there are not two realms. There is one exceedingly strange realm suited for highly bizarre conscious creatures with dual or multiple aspects. Chalmers does his best to be clear and succeeds, in part:
"... the physical structure of the world -- the exact distribution of particles, fields, and forces in spacetime -- is logically consistent with the absence of consciousness, so the presence of consciousness is a further fact about our world. ... So to explain why and how brains support consciousness, an account of the brain is not enough; to bridge the gap, one needs to add independent bridging laws." (pp. 164-165.) See also, Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe, pp. 32-197.
An explanation is only possible for creatures in need of explaining things and understanding their explanations. Explanations provide meanings only for beings who require meanings. The existence of any explanation, however, implies the existence of consciousness capable of constructing and/or deciphering that explanation, and of an objective rational order in which the explanation can make sense. There is a logical necessity or "probable" existence of an objective or rational order in which all explanations are possible and meaningful. Language.
Any ideas concerning what we may call that all-inclusive order? ("Is this atheism's moment?")
What are the preconditions for the possibility of our explanations? What is necessary for any explanations to be constructed and serve our human purposes? What word might be used to describe such an "all-encompassing" order? Again: a short word will do? Notice that you are part of that order. Perhaps Hans-Georg Gadamer will turn out to be one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century. John M. Connolly, S.J., "Applicatio and Explicatio in Gadamer and Eckhart," in J. Malpas, U. Arnswald, J. Kertscher, eds., Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 77-97.
Think of Bernard Haisch and the theory of consciousness as the ultimate source of meaning in the universe. Compare "Is it rational to believe in God?" with The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's Behind it All (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2006), pp. 27-65.
In the Hebrew tradition, useful comparisons may be drawn from Spinoza to Weiss. See, for example, Stuart Hampshire's writings on Spinoza's freedom. My eighteen year-old self underlined this passage: "... man's greatest happiness and peace of mind (acquiescentia animi) comes only from his full philosophical understanding of himself." Spinoza (London: Penguin, 1951), at p. 121, then compare Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza and Spinozism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 175-201 ("Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom"); finally, Paul Weiss sees freedom as a process of instantiation: "... a process by which the indeterminate is made determinate, ... freedom is pointed at possible goals." The New American Philosophers, p. 326.
The question Spinoza puts to us is this: "What is it that you become aware of when you become self-aware and know the workings of the universe?" Why does Spinoza speak of freedom as the "intellectual love of God?" Mathew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibnitz, Spinoza and the Fate of God in the Modern World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 183-232 and Ben-Ami Scharfstein, The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 123-209. ("Spinoza begins and ends with God ...")
If Spinoza begins and ends with God then so does modern science.
Chalmers is exasperated by what Searle is not getting:
" ... 'The brain causes consciousness.' Although this mantra (repeated at least ten times) is apparently intended as a source of great wisdom, it settles almost nothing that is at issue. It is entirely compatible with all of my views: we just need to distinguish cause from effect, and to note that it does not imply that only the brain causes consciousness." (p. 167, emphasis added.)
Chalmers failed to say in his response that effects may precede their causes, as in quantum interactions. Thus, consciousness is a precondition for understanding consciousness and, more to the point, a meaning-conferring Being must exist to create and appreciate meaning anywhere -- or to convey such a capacity to another. A universe totally devoid of consciousness, with only material forces and particles engaged in interactions for no discernible reason, could never contain or develop MEANING or EXPLANATIONS.
A fish must "know" (if he knows anything) that he could not have invented the ocean.
Those who are interested in getting the latest fancy theoretical insights in this area should look to the new literature of "causal dynamical triangulations" in physics, mathematics and the philosophy of logic. J. Ambjorn, J. Jurkiewicz, R. Loll, http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-the/0604212 Philosophers should turn to: David P. Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 335-391 ("Derrida's Dissemination of Existence as Differance.")
A wonderful novel about the Chinese experience under the Japanese in Nanking contains a surprising paragraph that illustrates important philosophical wisdom compatible with these highly technical mathematical discussions:
"Maybe all truths are in us at birth. Maybe for years all we do is swim away from what we already know, and maybe only old age and death allow us to swim back, back to something that is pure, something unchanged by the act of surviving." Mo Hayder, The Devil of Nanking (New York & London: Penguin, 2004), p. 187.
Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind, at p. 100: "When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the 'human essence,' the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man and that are inseparable from any critical phase of human existence, personal or social."
I am not aware of efforts to relate this mathematical-linguistic theory to the puzzles of representation in aesthetics or epistemology. A suggestion is: 1) from causal-dynamical triangulations in mathematics; to 2) the triangle of representation in aesthetics; to 3) the hermeneutic circle in the philosophy of politics, legal interpretation, jurisprudence. For a brilliant step in this direction, see Jacques Derrida's spiritualized "Deconstructions" of linear time, orderly space, conventionalized understandings of justice (Drucilla Cornell is a fine interpreter of this material) in his late work: Arkady Plotinsky, "Derrida," in Complementarity (London & Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 37-64 (This section will be the subject of a separate analysis and commentary.) I also like and read years ago Professor Cornell's comments on Roberto Unger's highly compatible work in legal theory. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
Lee Smolin wonders: "How does a classical spacetime geometry that satisfies Einstein's equations emerge from the more fundamental quantum description?" Next he'll be telling us about "loop quantum gravity" and -- if he bumps into Brian Greene -- we'll hear about "mirror symmetries." Now take another look at Chalmers' point. Mark Taylor summarizes my point concerning these new scientific modes of apprehension and thought:
"Through an ambitious program of research and publication, scientists and scholars at SFI are attempting to define new approaches to natural, social, and cultural processes. Some of this work is understandably controversial, but I find the firm commitment to rigorous interdisciplinary research especially promising. Lines of communication among artists, humanists, and scientists, which have been closed far too long, are finally beginning to open."
The Moment of Complexity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 12-13.
Is this statement the reason for continuing sabotage of these writings? Do you not realize that any essay may be suggestive to other thinkers? Productive areas of humane and scientific study may be obstructed, even for one person, by continuing censorship and damaging of my work which would be very sad. Yes, it is work. Notice Searle's confident assertion:
"We know independently that brain processes cause consciousness." (p. 152.)
Adding the italics doesn't get us very far, Professor Searle, because the "issue," as legal eagles say, is how and why do brains do this "causing" of consciousness? After all, my liver also causes my consciousness -- since without that liver, I'd be dead. Dead people, as far as we know, are not conscious. So my liver is just as "causative" of consciousness as is my brain.
How is Searle using the concept of "cause"? Is he relying on an antiquated conception of "causality"? My liver does not EXPLAIN consciousness. My brain cannot fully explain the contents of my mind -- memories, experiences, sensations and what they mean for me are as much cultural or social and linguistic as cerebral.
We live in a universe in which an electron may appear at point B, based on an observer looking for it at point A; but the same electron will then reappear at point A when another observer searches for it at point B. (See the book and film, "The Prestige.")
Anyway, Searle goes off like a shotgun because Chalmers says consciousness is "superflous" to the empirical "explanation" of behavior. (p. 154.)
Notice that Chalmers did not say that consciousness is irrelevant to the justification of behavior. I can explain lifting my right arm in strictly biological terms, as a physical process, without reference to consciousness; I cannot justify raising my arm to hit you -- or fully explain why I did so! -- without deploying the language of intentionality or consciousness while assuming the voluntary nature of my "actions."
There are different kinds of explanations for different and, sometimes, compatible purposes.
I need both kinds of overlapping explanations to account for human meanings and subjectivity. Try thinking about the universe from both perspectives at once, dual aspects, see where it takes you.
Concerning the mysteries of human malice and motivation, the subtleties of freedom and goodness, the impossibility of "determining" the human symbolic and meaning realm, Professor Hawking's innocence and genius-like simplicity will not be all that helpful to the task of interpretation. Perhaps Stuart Hampshire may help Professor Hawking to understand a different kind of "black hole," the abyss of human evil which is found in the same life-world that contains goodness:
"... I am interested in deceit. These conflicts of feeling not only seem natural, they also are often useful. Enjoying the spectacle of duplicity and deceit in secret intelligence during the war, I did not doubt there is a black hole of duplicity and intrigue into which the plans of politicians and intelligence officers may altogether disappear, because they may forget what they are supposed to be doing, lost in the intricacies of political manouvre."
Innocence and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 11 (emphasis added). ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch On Freedom of Mind.")
Many persons are seduced by the unexpected delights of hideous cruelty until there is nothing left of their capacity for goodness. Diana? Alex? I will take Professor Hawking to a local prison to visit a "black hole" that he will not forget. Bearing in mind that the necessity of conflict and evil is explicable and understandable only in light of the equally necessary existence of the opposite quality(ies). There is no evil without goodness. I am afraid that it is not "all relative" or arbitrary in light of Bohm's "Wholeness." Nihilism is a lie. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
Given traditional notions of feminine roles and thinking, this flexible and dual-aspect approach may be seen as a more "feminist" perspective on the mind/body controversy. It is both more scientific and more philosophical, incorporating analytical as well as Continental insights. Maybe this suggestion is one more reason for the hatred directed at me and these writings.
Machismo will not take us far in philosophy or science in the twenty-first century. It is especially distressing when women are guilty of this form of idiocy. You cannot prevail in philosophical or scientific controversy by declaring war against those who disagree or beating up someone you think is powerless and, thus, easily destroyed. You cannot "beat up" ideas. This reasoning is compatible with a phenomenological form of feminist socialism that I defend.
Is that a problem for you? Don't like it? Too bad. (Oliver Stone's "W." is beyond my ability to describe.)
Why does such a suggestion infuriate powerful people in this society?
The evils that we face in today's complex world are unforgiving of stupidity and of the absence of creativity or "feminine" imagination in our thinking. Does this make a thinker a "sissy"? "Not tough enough" in your judgment? If so, then I will be proud to embrace the label.
The boundaries between these early modern concepts, realms of fact and value, are collapsing -- not just for weird Latinos who read many strange books and are unwilling to be instructed by less well-read, self-styled social "superiors" -- but for everyone, that is, if contemporary science is to be believed.
Do we have a choice about accepting science? Sure we do. When science seeks to prescribe our meanings, we have a choice. This is because meanings are necessarily the products of freedom and plural. This does not mean -- not at all -- that we can dispense with science or that science is unimportant. Furthermore, I suggest that we will discover choice and meaning-creation also in the sciences.
"But surely there is something a little strange, even foolish, about this flight from consciousness. Is the consciousness of another person something that we should reasonably expect to see? And should we therefore find it questionable and doubtful if we cannot isolate it in any single sense datum? We are plentifully aware of the minds of other people, but in another and more engulfing way. We share them."
William Barrett, Death of the Soul, at pp. xii-xiii.
What is that "sharing"? What is that ocean of meanings in which we swim? God? Love? Same thing?
Those I love are part of me. I do not need to speculate about whether they are conscious or, say, suffering because I feel that other's reality affecting and altering me every day. We need a field theory of human subjectivity or a theology of liberation and process. Someone should have answered Descartes' pronouncement: "I think, therefore, I am!" with the question: "What is it for you to be and doesn't Being involve others?" (Gadamer) What is this Cartesian "I"? Is every "I" Plural? Is it just "fields"? ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
Persons loving one another are entangled particles. I suffer when my loved-ones do. Consciousness has a liquid-like tendency to seek its other, unifying with that other, forming larger conglomerates -- like families, tribes, nations and species. Maybe consciousness always seeks its source. Please refer to Roberto Mangabeira Unger's discussion of organic groups and his concluding prayer in Knowledge and Politics (New York: Free Press, 1975), pp. 236-296. ("... Speak God.")
"Poets, musicians and artists" -- as well as scientists -- "have, throughout the ages, expressed the vision that the whole of the world is MIRRORED in each grain of sand or blade of grass or sequence of musical notes." (Briggs & Peat, p. 301.) (See the film "In America.")
The world is mirrored in you.
