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What Is God?

Below is my tongue (only partly) in cheek response to an experiment Kevin Beck is doing at Transmillenial:

There are some concepts that we employ that may or may not successfully refer to realities we cannot otherwise successfully describe. One such concept, God, then, is the conceptual placeholder that many of the English speaking world employ when hoping and acting as if, or while either believing or denying that, it successfully refers to One Whom no one can otherwise
describe even though often supplicated, thanked, blessed, praised and cursed by many for manifold and multiform realities that are generally attributable to no other.

Once we’ve exhausted, for all practical purposes, the truth, beauty, goodness and unity that we can reasonably expect to realize in abundance through our descriptive sciences, normative philosophies and evaluative cultures and interrogate reality wondering if there might be more, a superabundance even, appreciating that reality’s response to that query is incredibly ambiguous for us and terribly ambivalent toward us, this despite our most diligent evidential & empirical investigations, our most dutiful rational arguments and logical formulations, our most clever presuppositional analyses and most sincere existential surrenders and we find ourselves, nevertheless and pretty much in spite of ourselves, very much transcending ourselves, sometimes most ephemerally, at other times surprisingly habitually, inhabiting, or at least trying desperately to inhabit, an interpretive stance toward reality that just so happens to heighten our sense of value-realization, intensifying our experiences of truth, beauty, goodness and unity, we then recognize a dimension of our experience that graciously opens up to us, beyond any thinking and proposing and conceptual map-making, though certainly not without them, engaging more so our imagination and inviting very much more our participation, as we humbly respond to manifold and multiform cues that are robustly performative even if only very weakly informative, cues that have us feeling like Pip in Great Expectations, a beneficiary in search of a Benefactor, have us feeling like characters in search of our Author, whereupon, because of such cues, like Pip, then, suspecting we are in relationship with a putative Benefactor, Whom we’re at a total loss to successfully describe, but Whom we otherwise aspire with all due humility to successfully supplicate when we are hoping against all hope and despite all appearances to the contrary that all may be well, can be well and will be well, knowing with a confident assurance in things hoped for and a conviction of things unseen that all manner of things shall be well, if and only if, when speaking of Whom, we have made a successful reference, we set out on a journey, an adventure, a quest for One Whose conceptual placeholder goes by the word you asked us to define.

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I haven’t been blogging much lately, but this is a good place to preserve some chalk-talk, some passing thoughts awaiting future development (or not).

Intraobjective just means we’re fooling with the same types of STUFF. Intersubjective means that distinctly different persons or agents are fooling with that stuff, from different levels of transcendence even. By same type of stuff one is asserting monism for what God created and not monism for God, which would be pantheism. One might call this stuff creativity, or dynamic playdough, or ad extra God-manifestation stuff, or even a box of God-crayolas. The question that arises is whether or not transcendence involves our subjective agency, only, or whether or not, cosmologically, there is also a plurality of objective stuff.

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This discussion begins with a simple consideration of emergence using it as a metaphor theologically. For the few who may have an interest, it gets progressively more technical, addressing emergence from a scientific and philosophical perspective. (The scientific and philosophical discussion is dense prose that I intend to translate into something more accessible in the future. It has implications for the science & religion interface.) In summary, while very helpful, it is only a heuristic device. Further, it doesn’t lend a great deal of support to such ideas as the anthropic principle or to classical notions like telos (final causation). Those do remain reasonable interpretive stances but they still very much require a good old-fashioned leap of faith and an active analogical imagination.

Emergence – a signal emerging from the noise
Various cohorts in our Christian tradition have articulated and practiced what we might call minority reports. And some such cohorts in different places and at different points in time, and in manifold and multiform ways, have served in the indispensable and vital role of a saving remnant, optimally preserving and propagating the Good News.

It may be that our fallible propagation is never without some distortion (is always variously suboptimal) but who could credibly deny that the signal to noise ratio of the essential Gospel message has been more versus less favorable when propagated by now this cohort or now that one? When I think of emergence, for me, that is precisely what it entails – a signal emerging from the noise.

Another Metaphor

We can drill down into the experiences of our faith journeys to discover the many layers of our religious heritage and we can survey our socio-cultural landscape to explore the many contours of our people’s responses to these riches.  Our great traditions have distilled these riches that they might empower us in many different ways enabling us to travel for many different distances at many different speeds. Early on our journeys, we manage fairly well with the unprocessed crude but, soon enough, we discover that the demands of the journey require a bit more refinement. Notwithstanding all sorts of impurities, most will power along mostly satisfactorily until their lives of faith experience some form of cracking, which will make it, in a manner of speaking, lighter and more, shall we say, aromatic. Some folks actively seek out the more catalytic cracking of the deeply contemplative life (which is experienced via many different spiritualities & pieties). Most respond, instead, to a more involuntary thermal process as life’s crises apply the heat. It is difficult to watch folks spit and sputter along with lower octane fuels that are spoiled with contaminants. Still, ordinary living will eventually provide them further distillation has been my experience and without much intervention from us. Sometimes, though, a community’s distillate spirits and residuum may well be in increasing jeopardy of becoming much more heavy, much more crude, much more contaminated. At those times, the Spirit may indeed light a fire within us to be a voice of prophetic protest and hope. Yes, the Spirit may fire us up to intervene in a local refinement process to serve another person, or even a  community, as a source of purifying heat.

Emergence – as ubiquitous
In the beginning was the Sign … and its propagation by the Great Traditions and every indigenous religion has proceeded with varying levels of success due to various types of noise and interference, characterize them as you will. My lifelong study has been to seek out the emergence of this signal from the noise and many, like Merton and Thoreau, have been my guides, and solitude and silence have been my amplifiers. My question to you is: “Do you hear what I hear?” For everywhere I go, like heaven’s hound or a siren’s sound, the signal thus emerges, sure, sometimes strong, sometimes weak, sometimes clearly, but, way too often, distorted.

What does emergence look like and how might one know it when one sees it? The answer, I truly believe, inevitably involves the full marriage, hence realization, of both the exoteric-mythical & esoteric-mystical. More simply, it involves radicalization or digging deep, because the signal is strongest at our traditions’ roots, not gauged by the biomass of their shoots, but otherwise well revealed in the sweetness of their fruits.

Emergence – implies naturalism?
We adopt a methodological naturalism. This is because we cannot know, a priori, when it is that our knowledge advance is being temporarily thwarted due to methodological constraints, epistemologically, and when it might be that we are otherwise confronted with an aspect of reality that will forever remain unknowable, in principle, ontologically, for whatever reason. For the same reason, however, we must summarily reject a philosophical naturalism. This is to say that we recognize that, if we have lost our keys in the park, we know that we do well to look for those lost keys underneath the lamp post, for there is little hope of finding them elsewhere in the dark. For most of us, that does not, at the same time, suggest that we have a priori decided where those keys may or may not be.

Emergence – as explanation
In the great chain of being there are levels stretching from the quantum to the sociological. There are levels of being within levels of being. There are theories that govern interactions within levels and sometimes between levels, sharing concepts. The concepts concern 1) parts and wholes; 2) properties and 3) natural laws.

There are three ways to look at the possible relationships between these levels. If a lower level completely explains a higher level, then we have reductionism and the strongest relation possible. When speaking in terms of parts & wholes, properties & laws, it is possible that reductionism will not explain a higher level, but we can still maintain supervenience, which is to say that any differences in parts, wholes, properties and laws at a higher level must have corresponding differences at the lower level (covariance without reduction). If a theory explaining higher level properties & laws is, in principle, unpredictable from a theory at a more fundamental level, then we have emergence.

Emergence does not ambition explanatory adequacy; it is only a heuristic device.

Emergence – as predictability

We employ abstractions when talking about systems and their features (parts, interactions, functions & environment). When we invoke different types of causation, they can be thought of in terms of these different system features: material, parts; efficient, interactions including semiotic; final, functions; formal, environment.

What we call information involves the coupling of two systems. Any actualization of information requires a third system, which interprets the causal coupling, which is to say that it exploits the coupling or uses it somehow. We tend to talk about (interpret or actualize) that feature of a system that allows us to most easily predict system behavior or to talk about that feature that most interests us. What we can predict also happens to most interest us.

What we call system levels or hierarchies have no ontological status (necessarily) but result from what so happens to be available to us epistemically, situated where we happen to be within a network of systems.
That system feature which provides better predictability is the one we tend to call emergent. Ordinarily, this will be that autopoietic, or self-organizing, feature that tends to exhibit downward causation. (Self-organizing and self-constitution are two different things.)
These autopoietic features of a system will exhibit an entropy decrease. Entropy decreases interest us precisely because they have adaptive significance. They are significant because we can better exploit spatiotemporal order, or regularities, for vital resources.

Emergence – a free lunch?
The total system entropy will always increase but we tend to ignore those system features that serve as energy sinks. Because we ignore those features, from a folk psychology perspective, we tend to buy into the illusion that semiotic processes are a free lunch energetically, somehow transcending the space-time-energy plenum. Thus, for example, consciousness, while nonalgorithmic, is not contra-causal (at least, not necessarily). It just looks and feels that way.

Actualization of information requires a third system to interpret the causal coupling or exploit the coupling (use it somehow). System levels (hierarchies) have no ontological status (necessarily) but result from what so happens to be available to us epistemically. An autopoietic, or self-organizing, feature exhibits downward causation & entropy decreases but the total system entropy increases. Physical information (like signs) have a non-zero value only in systems at nonequilibrium with their environment.

While prediction requires information in an effect to be computable from information in its cause, unpredictability (unspecifiability) is not the same as indeterminism. Peircean grammar rubrics apply to indeterminacy (re: possibility), which is epistemic in nature & results from methodological constraints, & to unspecifiability (re: probability), which is ontological, or modal, in nature and results from a putative in-principle ontological occulting. One way these would differ is that any ignorance due to unspecifiability would be invincible, while any due to indeterminacy is potentially temporary & could be conquered with future methodological improvements (e.g. technological) or epistemic insights (e.g. abductions, paradigm shifts).

A noncausal reality would be an “apparent” transfer of identical information but this is improbable.

Emergence – a quantum perspective?
Symmetry requirements in quantum mechanics govern information generation. How might this tie into the rubrics and distinctions discussed above? “Physical” reality is probabilistic. The category of the Possible is an “objective” reality, perhaps physical but with a zero-value because it’s in a state at equilibrium with its neuronal net environment, hence the Possible comprises a rather tacit dimension that is nonetheless a robustly telic dimension, clearly causal but in the formal sense insofar as it comprises this structural neuronal environment.

Quantum Theory seems to recognize both epistemological & ontological limits. In Peirce’s recursive triad of abduction, induction & deduction, one type of abduction is retroduction, whereby we reason backward from known predicates to putative subjects. In our brains, we are able to strip properties from known realities & reassign them to unknown realities. When we reassign them to unknown causes of observed effects, this is an inference to the best explanation, sometimes predicting, for example, a new species or element on the periodic table. When we reassign them to mere abstractions, this is fantasy. Superpositioning and wave-function collapse thus involve only such possibilities as would successfully refer to realities that are physically instantiable, hence mediated by probability, which is why Schrödinger didn’t employ a Unicorn Experiment. Peirce’s grammar guides us re: the “logical” import of signs but we need an additional category to grapple with their “vital” import. When we add a 4th category called value-realization (a cashing-out of practical significance), the wave-function becomes a heuristic device not a physical reality (it ain’t real). Possibilities are (at least, most likely?), rather, formal causes, physical signs at rest (equilibrium).

Emergence – telos, a  lost cause?
I’d like to offer a distinction between telos and TELOS, where the former entails a downward causation without violation of physical causal closure, while the latter is nonenergetic. Classical TELOS is a tautological metaphysical “concept” that adds no new info to one’s system & invites causal disjunction paradoxes. Biosemiotic telos has been a helpful theoretic heuristic (conceptual placeholder) that may fast become a rigorous scientific “term.” Conceptual confusion might arise between them because biosemiotic telos relies on but then transcends a formal causation contributed by a system’s environment.

This structural environment (formal cause) may be at rest or in equilibrium in relationship to the rest of the system (material & efficient causes). As a “tacit” dimension it might be assigned a zero value regarding its distance from equilibrium hence would mimic what would be a nonenergetic analogue in TELOS, but it’s in an integral relationship to a thermodynamic system, in other words, a system feature, and thus robustly efficacious, like a river’s bed & banks, like a waterfall’s cliff, like a mind’s neuronal network. Maybe telos is, in part, non-energetic, while TELOS is, more properly, a-energetic, a lost cause, indeed?

Emergence – chance or necessity?
Let’s now consider the dance between continuity & discontinuity, pattern & paradox, order & chaos, random & systematic, causal & noncausal, determinate & indeterminate, specifiable & unspecifiable, predictable & unpredictable, chance & necessity.

We must distinguish between chance & coincidence. Chance pertains to the future & the epistemically unavailable, while coincidence involves the present or past. Science, is probabilistic and deals with chance not coincidence. Any weak anthropic principle is trivial; a strong anthropic principle deals with coincidence. Only if we knew enough about the initial conditions of the cosmos could we do probabilistic thought experiments to test an anthropic principle. Fast forward to the origins of life and next to the emergence of consciousness where a “design inference” is often invoked; the inference may be logically valid but cannot be demonstrated as logically sound because it eludes probabilistic analysis & thus is not scientific. Reality is intentional, but only in the dictionary sense that it is firmly directional, at least insofar as it is probabilistic. To the extent a bounded probabilistic reality (let’s say human consciousness) presents along a continuum of degrees and exhibits an orderliness, or far from equilibrium decrease in entropy, it might be thought of as virtually free as its intentionality approaches the asymptotes of firm directionality.

INTENT (vs intent), on the other hand, like TELOS (vs telos), would be a metaphysical concept that imagines a platonic-like causation that is absolutely independent of our energetic milieu, confusing an asymptotically far from equilibrium state with a putatively a-energetic reality. This doesn’t demonstrate the anthropic; rather, it demonstrates the anthropocentric.

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This excursus will be facile and brief. It’s not even mostly about Hume, who makes for naught but a good foil in this story.

There’s an old aphorism that suggests, if you really believe that Hume, himself, believed all the stuff he said, then, should you decide to invite Hume to tea, be sure to hide your silver. One of my own biggest philosophical laments has not so much been the Humean (empiricist realist) school but, rather, the Kantian (rationalist idealist) response that it spawned, a transcendentalist perspective that then infiltrated Thomism and other, once fairly respectable, scholastic settings.

There can be no denying that Hume did both Platonism (rationalist realist) and Aristotelianism (empiricist realist) a favor by inoculating them against the rather insidious viral meme we call naivete and ushering in all manner of so-called philosophical turns that, in retrospect, look more like elephants in ballet tutus doing pirouettes.

Many exits were installed on the epistemological expressway after Descartes’ initial turn to the self. The metaphysical highway split, taking rationalist (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) and empiricist foundationalists (Locke, Hume, Berkeley) off in two different directions. Hume had scared the bejesus out of folks (you can take that literally if you want) and Kant had sung them a lullaby and provided a tonic for their skepticism. There were turns to the subject, turns to experience, analytical and linguistic turns, a critical turn to praxis, a hermeneutical or interpretive turn, even a turn to history. Not having any formal education in philosophy, but terribly interested in its subject matter nonetheless, as an autodidact, I drove this highway without a map and, at one time or another, pretty much made each of the turns and discovered all of their epistemic cul-de-sacs. It reminded me of all of the lawsuit pleadings and counter-pleadings I’d read over the years, each spot-on and devastating in its sophistry, only to be soon demolished by some small technical point, for example, like a fact.

Deconstruction followed. It was not a bad thing. Really. Well, that is, except for its radical versions, which tried to establish on foundations too firm that foundations were just not acceptable. They lost a good working theory of truth by conflating it with our various tests for truth. The last turn I made, and I haven’t looked back, was the turn to community with the pragmatic realists. And I don’t mean Rorty’s vulgar pragmatism but that of Peirce and his triadic semeiotic.

Once one encounters a more holistic epistemology, a more naturalized evolutionary epistemology that pays heed to our ecological rationality, the Humean critique loses its punch.  Those who imagine that the Humean critique is still wreaking theological havoc must be engaging either radical fundamentalists (whether from religious fundamentalism or an Enlightenment scientism) or mere caricatures of postmodern critical realisms. Although I don’t personally construct either metaphysics or metanarratives, myself, I don’t really begrudge anyone such attempts as long as they proceed both hypothetically and with a contrite fallibilism, looking over their shoulder at their various leaps.

Don’t get me wrong. For my part, I am very much standing at the ready to do a metaphysic and to write a metanarrative but am waiting for a really good root metaphor – you know – like one that’ll reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics. I reckon: “Til then, why bother?”

I have been working on what I call my Peircean-Nevillean Integral Axiological Epistemology. To be honest, it still reflects my rather ineradicable positivist bent, a celebration of what I hope is weakly truth-indicative even if I’ve otherwise been wholly dispossessed of the robustly truth-conducive. That is to say that I’m an incurable realist, not just in science but also in religion. I’ve accepted that things are rather suboptimal by the old scholastic realist standards but am content to muddle along with a healthy dose of skepticism (it’s only a vaccine; the live virus can kill you!). It’s actually more exciting this way. Who needs theme parks when all of creation is an incredible risk adventure?

I had a saying in banking that profits do not come from taking risks but, instead, from superior skills at managing risks. (I was one of the few in banking, though, who saw it that way. So, I exited way before the crash. I’m big on exit ramp metaphors.) Science has its epistemic risks, as do cultures and philosophies. And we amplify these risks in order to augment the values that are gifted us as their fruit. Faith is a clear amplification of the risks we’ve taken in pursuit of truth, beauty and goodness. Thus it is that through faith, hope and love (the best managed risk-amplifications around) we reap the value-augmentations of creed, cult and code in an existential turn to community that has rewarded me beyond my most realistic expectations.

This turn to community is, more simply put, a turn to love. It is best amplified through a self-emptying kenosis. Any parent knows the value-augmentations that then ensue. Despite my positivist bent and hygienic skepticism, or perhaps I should better say because of them, once all things are otherwise equal empirically, logically, practically and morally, then, relationally, I then leap and thus cash out the pragmatic value of an existential option that James well-described as forced, vital and live. Very many get the forced and vital bit in their very bones but so few seem to pay attention to all that goes into making a particular option live.

None of this is to deny that most of our value-realizations come more so from our participatory imaginations (hometown knowledge) than our propositional cognitions (conceptual map-making), anyway. And our participatory, imaginative and interpretive engagements, collectively, get systematized and with great practical effect. These systems (like our Great Traditions) are truth-laden — not in the manner in which they conceptually describe the ultimate, but rather — in the manner they foster human value-realizations vis a vis our concerns re: ultimacy. One must inhabit the symbol systems of such systems, existentially, to real-ize their value & truth, as they do not readily lend themselves to mere propositional analysis. This approach should prove increasingly fruitful for our inter-religious dialogue and understanding of religious pluralism.

Since Hume came along, there are all sorts of things that get in our way of apodictic certainty regarding, as they say, final things. This largely has to do with some rather intractable problems with which we are faced regarding primal things, problems like Gödel‘s incompleteness theorems, entropic erasure and a host of other epistemic indeterminacies and putative ontological unspecifiabilities. As for the problem of induction, well, we have some pretty good work-arounds.

All this said, we’re not suggesting that, while God is wholly incomprehensible, He is not partly intelligible. But we do need to take heed of just what we are saying about Her, being clear as to what came from special divine revelation and what we have imagined from so-called general revelation in the book of nature. As far as natural theology goes, the book of nature provides us the questions (rather some questions) and a few vague concepts and categories that provide but a heuristic that may help us to successfully refer to Whom we cannot otherwise aspire to describe.  We do gain some descriptive accuracy through apophatic negations (for example, Johnboy is not God) but our kataphatic affirmations are pretty much limited to weak analogical predicates, metaphors, that are gifted through special revelation and faith. I mean, what does the concept cause refer to at T=0, anyway? What we have gathered otherwise through faith is an essential nature that creates, loves and Self-empties. Our theologies of nature are extended allegories of those aspects of an essential nature that have been revealed. No one, nowadays, pretends to call such poetry natural theology. Reality otherwise presents in such a way that is way too ambiguous for us and way too ambivalent toward us for us to draw any coercively compelling inferences regarding its initial, boundary and limit conditions.

What we are left with, epistemically, to put it most succinctly, is love. It is not that I have forsworn my godforsaken positivist bent; rather, I have surrendered to the undeniable and inevitable. Because of my radical finitude and indelibly fallible nature, to put it bluntly: epistemologically, I’m screwed. Thanks, David Hume.  But, you know what? As a result, I see what Scotus meant regarding the primacy of the will over the intellect. And it resonates wonderfully with Neville‘s solution to the One and the many through a recognition of the primacy of God’s will in determining God’s nature.  (Thus we are truly eikons in that regard.)

More and more, then, I believe that the Franciscans have gotten things the most correct, philosophically and theologically.

Thus it is that I wonder if, in fact, there is not something of an inchoate systematic theology, both a ressourcement and aggiornamento, in our emerging church conversation. (See this related conversation.) And it might be grounded in a semiotic realism, which prescinds from any robustly descriptive metaphysic to a more vague phenomenology, that has been, as they say, constant throughout our tradition, even if most often reduced to minority report status. This is to suggest that no given metaphysic, much less autonomous philosophy, has ever been inextricably intertwined with Christianity’s essential message or core praxes. On occasion Christianity has been subverted and co-opted by a culture but the general idea is that it can be successfully inculturated and assimilated to any culture.

This is why I could write to Brian McLaren a few days ago, suggesting:

I’ve been scratching my head questioning how I could interpret your thrust as grounded in and consistent with what I see as a long (and continuous) semiotic tradition in Christianity, dating back to the early church fathers, running through the medieval church and influencing our postmodern outlook (e.g. Origen, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scottus Eriugena, John Duns Scotus, John of St. Thomas /Poinsot, Charles Sanders Peirce, Walker Percy, Robert Cummings Neville, Amos Yong), while others imagine you’re simply reiterating old liberal and neoliberal arguments. You’re much closer to being a medieval Franciscan! I can only reckon that it was my foreknowledge of our kinship with Walker Percy that innoculated me against that rather insidious viral meme that paints you as the reincarnate Adolf von Harnack.

And this is why I’m going to be paying close attention to a Boston U./Claremont scholar, Benjamin Chicka, who will soon be blogging weekly on science and religion HERE at Patheos. He’s got a lot more to say and can say it much better than I could ever aspire.

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Regarding Towards A Responsible Free Will – Stuart Kauffman at NPR below, is a relevant part of my contribution to a conversation:
Clayton’s post-Dennett debate reflection.

I provide more thoughts re: the Mardi Gras debate here: Philip Clayton vs Dan Dennett

I am very sympathetic to Dennett’s conception of consciousness. That is to say that I am inclined to conceive the soul using a physicalist account and I approach the so-called hard problem of consciousness as difficult but maybe not so very hard. Whatever’s going on in human consciousness, in my estimation, will eventually yield to a naturalist explanation.

The hard problem of consciousness stems from our common-sensical notions of wanting to reconcile mental and physical interaction. The eliminativist strategy has been to deny the distinction. The epiphenomenalist strategy has been to deny the interactivity. Both of these stances are a priori positions trying to salvage our a posteriori empirical experiences of an exclusively bottom-up causality. In my view, both the eliminativist and epiphenomenalist positions, at this time, are too strong to defend. While I am not willing to rule either one out, both are “proving too much.”

So, I consider my inclinations to be very much provisional. The problem of consciousness, as I approach it, remains both epistemologically and ontologically open. And these are the necessary and sufficient conditions for any invocation of the heuristic of EMERGENCE. There are insights from both the eliminativist and epiphenomenalist strategies that I find I can reconcile with my own phenomenological perspective, which is inclined toward a nonreductive physicalism. This is not the same thing, though, as reconciling those other positions with each other.

A nonreductive physicalist strategy, to some extent, abstains, or tries to acknowledge both intuitions. In another sense, it seems to suggest, with the eliminativists, that the dynamic constellations of neuronal net physical functionalities, which we might putatively identify as consciousness, are clearly efficacious — thermodynamically, morphodynamically and teleodynamically (which is to recognize a downward causation sans violation of physical causal closure) — and, with the epiphenomenalists, that such efficacies do not otherwise flow from what our common sense suggests is a classical efficient causation but, rather, from minimalist formal and final causations (e.g. tacit dimensions).

In Dennett’s debate with Clayton, as causal layers were explored, Dennett acknowledged the cultural in addition to the mere physical and biological. This acknowledgment is not good enough, however. Because, as is revealed in his and Dawkins’ other writings, they are giving complexity theory a rather short shrift vis a vis genes, memes, symbols, language and coevolutionary dynamics. To equate cognition only with algorithmic or rule-governed computation is the computational fallacy. It is what it is in humans only in relationship to pragmatic and semiotic realities. To characterize genes as active agents or selfish or purposeful is an unhelpful shorthand. They gain their significance only in the context of the same dynamical semiotic and pragmatic realities. To equate memes only with replicators, as if they were analogous to parasites, is to isolate them outside of the dynamical semiotic and pragmatic realities that they should presuppose and is the memetic fallacy. See The trouble with memes (and what to do about it) by Terry Deacon. The practical upshot of Deacon’s critique is that social evolution and human consciousness are much more rich and complex, which is to recognize that they require a more highly nuanced triadic semiotic perspective, which then takes us beyond our classical dyadic formulations, like S –> R in behaviorism.

When we run into problems like the “hard” problem of consciousness, problems that for most philosophers of science would be considered still open, both epistemologically and ontologically, problems that then lend themselves to the heuristic of emergence, we cannot know, a priori, whether our explanatory attempts are being thwarted due only to our methodological constraints, epistemologically, or might otherwise be due to some type of in-principle occulting, ontologically. In the latter instance, the problem would remain irresolute in-principle, while, in the former, the problem might remain rather intractable but could possibly be only temporary, later to be resolved with future technological advances. A methodological naturalism presumes the former and eschews the latter but only because to a priori adopt a stance that any given aspect of reality is in-principle occulted would lead us down an epistemic cul-de-sac, shutting down our research programs, arbitrarily foreclosing on future investigation. On the other hand, a philosophical naturalism is no more defensible in its a priori stance, which is that we are necessarily being thwarted only in the methodological sense due to technological constraints. We do not know that. We cannot know that a priori. And we most especially do not know that when it comes to unraveling reality’s limit questions vis a vis any initial, boundary and limit conditions of the cosmos. The same thing remains true regarding the problem of consciousness and the philosophical promissory notes that some have issued regarding their so-called “explanations.”

If, in the first half of the debate, Clayton and Dennett established that they were both, in fact, methodological and not, rather, philosophical naturalists, then that is quite illuminating because a methodological naturalist cannot coherently self-describe as an atheist regarding reality’s limit questions. Instead, the methodological naturalist must self-describe either as an agnostic, a nontheist or as some type of believer, who is wagering in faith, though not without a confident assurance, in things the believer hopes is true regarding reality’s limit questions and humanity’s ultimate concerns. Such a believer may believe there is a God or even gods or even that there is no God. But such a believer also knows that there was an epistemic and existential leap involved. This differs from the philosophical naturalist, who has conflated the otherwise autonomous methodologies of science and philosophy, concluding empirically, logically, practically and probabilistically that there is no God, denying any substantial leaps of faith were involved, affirming that others are clearly — how do they say it? oh, yeah – deluded.

Archiving my comments at NPR:

This is a fascinating discussion. I’d like to reframe it from another angle.

Essentially, we are asking whether or not there can be downward causation without a violation of physical causal closure, such as via some Cartesian ghost-in-our-machine. In my view, science has already answered with a resounding yes, such as in a putative Baldwinian evolution, such as in Terry Deacon’s account of the possible coevolution of language & brain, such as in Peirce’s triadic semeiotic account of the human employment of symbols.

To a certain extent, the above-listed examples do not aspire to a robustly explanatory account but provide us only some useful heuristic devices or conceptual placeholders. What they have in common is the notion of emergence, the presentation of novelty. So, even from a rather phenomenological perspective, we pretty much have established probabilistically THAT there is downward causation. You have advanced this conversation with a rather compelling account of HOW it may operate at yet another level of emergence?

Very interesting. Compelling, as far as I could follow it, at least.

re: “I think I do not agree with either Ursula or Tom, for despite their nuanced efforts, I feel they remain in a stance in which mind is an epiphenomenon of a deterministic brain.”

Ursula can speak for herself, of course. However, in my experience, she is not one to overreach in her claims but is very circumspect. Neither the eliminativist nor the epiphenomenalist account apply to anything she has written, best I can tell.

The hard problem of consciousness stems from our common-sensical notions of wanting to reconcile mental and physical interaction. The eliminativist strategy has been to deny the distinction. The epiphenomenalist strategy has been to deny the interactivity. Both of these stances are “a priori” positions trying to salvage our “a posteriori” empirical experiences of an exclusively bottom-up causality. Ursula’s account seems more consonant with a nonreductive physicalist stance to me?
I flesh this out here:
Regarding: Towards A Responsible Free Will – Stuart Kauffman at NPR

This is not an over-against anything you’ve written, just a suggestion that your account & Ursula’s, in my view, seem congruent but address different emergent levels.

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Does the same problem really exist if we suppose that classical nerve activity rather than quantum cohering-decohering-recohering are associated with consciousness? Why doesn’t it suffice to otherwise recognize that human ecological adaptations became distinctly sapient via such a novel hardwiring that, instead of being algorithmic, relatively closed-ended & inflexible, became also, in certain parts of the neural net, noncomputational, somewhat open-ended & plastic, gifting us w/fast & frugal heuristics in response to stimuli & co-evolving w/language? This improved modeling power of reality was thus language-dependent. Our phenomenal experiences of the algorithmic parts of our bodies precisely don’t lend themselves to such modeling because they are language-independent, wired differently, and we thus cannot communicate or talk about such subjective experiences like pain intersubjectively w/o using those funny little icons in hospitals w/smiley or frowny faces. As versatile as this new wiring was, still, its heuristics were probabilistic, its behavioral repertoire finite, our range of motion “free enough” but not in any absolute sense. IOW, wouldn’t a structural morphological explanation be more parsimonious?

Sunday, March 28, 2010 4:45:02 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Another reframing issue. I’ve often wondered if the self-brain was a distinction w/o a difference like the old Sorite Paradox, which asks at what point in the addition of grains of sand to other grains of sand does one obtain a “heap” of sand? The paradox dissolves when one distinguishes between logical & efficient causation, in this case, the logical cause being our linguistic definition of a heap, the efficient cause the act of adding sand grains. There may be similar confusion between the dynamic activity of our brains and our naming of the phenomenal experience of same as self. And this is reminiscent of Zen’s affirmation of “first there is a mountain,” as raw phenomenal experience, its prescinding to “then, there is no mountain” in recognition that our naming exercise is logically caused, not efficiently, and its reaffirmation of “then there is” as one returns to reality w/a 2nd naivete that interacts w/the mountain “for all practical purposes.” In philosophic terms, this Zen strategy amounts to an evasion of the essentialism-nominalism conundrum via a pragmatic appeal, a cashing out of value: We recognize that humans will reify & conceptualize but that not all concepts successfully refer & some cause pseudo-riddles.

Sunday, March 28, 2010 5:04:48 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

This is not an over-against, just a qualifier re: the relationship between “the truth of an idea & the consequences of believing in that idea” and a connection between “what’s true and what we might want.”

Not every formal fallacy of logic necessarily renders the critical thinking involved void of use. Human thinking involves a recursive interplay of ongoing abductive hypothesizing, inductive testing & deductive clarifying, inferential processes that are not unaided by other faculties, nonrational even. This is to recognize that most critical thinking is informal. While we want to avoid any vulgar pragmatism as a “theory” of truth, pragmatic utility can otherwise serve as an indispensable “test” of truth, alongside other aesthetic criteria like parsimony, facility, symmetry, elegance, beauty. Such criteria are indeed weakly truth-indicative even if not robustly truth-conducive. They may not have a direct bearing, like the wind at our back & in our sails, but they certainly have a storied history of having an indirect bearing, like a sailor who tacks and jibes and progresses against the wind. If what is true is generally useful, the probability of something useful being true improves (better than that which ain’t helpful at all).

Sunday, March 28, 2010 5:51:55 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Pankaj Seth (sandalwood23) asked:”John, does your view of the brain-mind issue allow for a non-local aspect of consciousness, such as NDEs where persons describe accurately what is happening in the room, while they are without vital signs?”

Neither non-local CSC nor an immaterial (or immortal) soul seem very likely to me. I don’t really have a horse in the philosophy of mind race. I just enjoy trying to figure out the categories and like to disambiguate the concepts best I can. I do not a priori dismiss the paranormal or psychic phenomena. Neither do I dismiss physicalist or naturalist accounts of the soul.

Sunday, March 28, 2010 6:19:17 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Pankaj Seth (sandalwood23) asked:”John, does your view of the brain-mind …?”

To clarify, when I say I’m inclined to a nonreductive physicalism and am affirming a top-down causation, I am drawing a distinction between that and a wholly reductive eliminativist perspective. I don’t hold to a view of consciousness as computational. I am affirming a telic dimension from a semiotic perspective, which recognizes both formal & final causations. This is not the same as the robust telos of theology or classical metaphysics but is, instead, a minimalist telos or a minimalist transcendence. One might think of it in terms of reality’s otherwise tacit dimensions, which can be both ineluctably unobtrusive (hard to see) but still utterly efficacious, like a winding riverbed that redirects the flows of powerful rivers, like cliffs underlying cascading waterfalls, like our own morphological brain-scapes, which might redirect cascading neurotransmitter flows. I suppose this is analogous to what some (Bohm) invoke as an implicate ordering to explain nonlocality and superluminality, but that would be a weak analogue, in my view.

Sunday, March 28, 2010 8:45:38 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

In my view, the best evidence for a noncomputational aspect of the human brain is the fact that we are storytellers or axiom-providers. We know that we are transcending the algorithmic precisely because we propose novel systems with novel axioms in mathematics all the time, because we propose new narratives and metanarratives all the time. Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorems prove that a system’s axioms cannot be proved within that system, hence our systems and metanarratives are necessarily going to be either complete or consistent, never both. Like Hawking says, the good money is on incomplete. Turing-machines cannot halt, reboot, re-axiom-atize or JOTS [jump outside the system]. Darwin-machines can. Still, however powerful these open-ended processors are, equipping the critter w/enhanced modeling power of reality and expanded behavioral repertoire, they remain bounded & finite & not autopoietic or free in any absolute sense, just free-enough for all practical purposes, like moral agency. Correcting Dennett re: our nonalgorithmic brains still doesn’t get us an absolute free will, just a very powerful probabilistic processor. Still, I see no need to exaggerate the practical import of this vs our folk psychology concepts.

Monday, March 29, 2010 10:38:29 AM

Tom Clark (twclark) wrote:

@John: Here’s Dennett from his fascinating review of Penrose, original emphasis: “So even if mathematicians are superb recognizers of mathematical truth, and even if there is no algorithm, practical or otherwise, for recognizing mathematical truth, it *does not follow* that the power of mathematicians to recognize mathematical truth is not entirely explicable in terms of their brains executing an algorithm. Not an algorithm *for* intuiting mathematical truth–we can suppose that Penrose has proved that there could be no such thing. What would the algorithm be for, then? Most plausibly it would be an algorithm–one of very many–for *trying to stay alive*, an algorithm that, by an extraordinarily convoluted and indirect generation of byproducts, “happened” to be a superb (but not foolproof) recognizer of friends, enemies, food, shelter, harbingers of spring, good arguments–and mathematical truths!” http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/penrose.htm

Monday, March 29, 2010 11:39:32 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Tom Perhaps Dennett proves my point and not his. Humans are able to JOTS [Jump Outside The System] of trying to stay alive through suicide, whether self-sacrificial or not. Dennett, Dawkins et al would counter with the sociobiological tautology of selfish genes and memes, adding genetic and memetic fallacies to this computational fallacy. See The trouble with memes (and what to do about it) by Terry Deacon. But there’s a qualitative difference between human kamikazes and bees that die after losing their stingers. Both are biosemiotic realities but the human employs symbols to model reality. It is precisely this symbol manipulation that allows for the reification of a concept of self and self-transcendence. The most stinging critique (pun intended) of Dennett’s stance comes from Peirce’s semeiotic account. [I attempted this post 5 minutes ago & it was rejected for inappropriate language, hence lost. Trying again. Maybe it's the "suicide" reference?]

Monday, March 29, 2010 12:33:33 PM

And now this from Homebrewed Christianity:

John Sobert Sylvest on March 29th, 2010 at 11:52 am:

Ben, this is an excellent recap and faithful to the way I experienced that particular Mardi Gras afternoon (the ONLY person in New Orleans virtually at Claremont and not actually on Bourbon Street; forgive me, Lord.).
I would say that we all need philosophical norms to provide a meta-metaphysical perspective but that essential Christian dogma are not inescapably loaded with any particular scientific, philosophical or metaphysical presuppositions, including such as a soul, metaphysical self or even a wholly autonomous free will. There is a probabilistic middle ground, for example, between absolutely free choices and seemingly free choices that can be established even within a so-called hegemony of the physical. I have imported some of my own reflections on the Clayton-Dennett debate into another discussion we’ve been having at National Public Radio about related matters re: philosophy of mind, where I offer an expanded critique of Dennett that keeps his baby but cleans up his bathwater. Should one go metaphysical, that’s fine as long as it is fallibilist.

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

In 2 parts, my ideas re: why CSC appears to be an energy-free lunch

Part 1

We employ abstractions when talking about systems and their features (parts, interactions, functions & environment). When we invoke different types of causation, they can be thought of in terms of these different system features: material, parts; efficient, interactions incl semiotic; final, functions; formal, environment.

What we call information involves the coupling of two systems. Any actualization of information requires a third system, which interprets the causal coupling, which is to say that it exploits the coupling or uses it somehow. We tend to talk about (interpret or actualize) that feature of a system that allows us to most easily predict system behavior or to talk about that feature that most interests us. What we can predict also happens to most interest us.

What we call system levels or hierarchies have no ontological status but result from what so happens to be available to us epistemically, situated where we happen to be within a network of systems.

Monday, March 29, 2010 6:19:26 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Part 2 – or why Emergence isn’t THAT special

That system feature which provides better predictability is the one we tend to call emergent. Ordinarily, this will be that autopoietic, or self-organizing, feature that tends to exhibit downward causation. (Self-organizing and self-constitution are two different things.)

These autopoietic features of a system will exhibit an entropy decrease. Entropy decreases interest us precisely because they have adaptive significance. They are significant because we can better exploit spatiotemporal order, or regularities, for vital resources.

The total system entropy will always increase but we tend to ignore those system features that serve as energy sinks. Because we ignore those features, from a folk psychology perspective, we tend to buy into the illusion that semiotic processes are a free lunch energetically, somehow transcending the space-time-energy plenum.

Thus CSC, while nonalgorithmic, is not contra-causal. It just looks and feels that way.

Monday, March 29, 2010 6:21:38 PM

John Sobert Sylvest on March 29th, 2010 at 4:07 pm:

Ben, another distinction: I tend to lump metaphysics into the same category as natural theology and natural philosophy, where it is useful in framing up our ultimate concerns, disambiguating our concepts, clarifying reality’s putative initial, boundary & limit conditions, maybe even formulating our arguments thru abductive inference but going no further, chastized by past overreaches, attempts to prove too much or to say more than we can possibly know. With a contrite fallibilism, we explore the nature of our questions and the form of our meta-talk. This critique is not the radical apophaticism that’s exhibited by some of those with overly dialectical imaginations; rather, it affirms metaphysical realism but suggests that our deontologies should then be considered as tentative as our ontologies are speculative. IOW, we might severely question how much normative impetus our metaphysics can claim as we move from what we think IS to what we think OUGHT to be.

What I whole-heartedly affirm is the robust engagement of our analogical imaginations, employing analogies and metaphors in what is a essentially poetic rhetoric that has its starting place within the faith and is thus a Theology of Nature. This is how I receive most of the work of Clayton, Bracken, Haught et al. These are elaborate tautologies filled with nature references and even technical scientific jargon that are nevertheless on par with the psalms, St. Francis’ Hymns to nature and such but brought up to date for our postmodern milieu. They have a tremendous amount of interpretive and evaluative significance and the more consonant with what we already know from descriptive science and normative philosophy, the more taut will be the tautology, which means that, while all metaphors eventually collapse, our metaphors can be rather resilient and versatile. IOW, such theologies of nature find their usefulness among those who have already taken the leap of faith, not unaided by reason and not inconsistent with science, but not so much as argumentation for faith, like the classical proofs which were metaphysical. Such a theology of nature-enlivened imagination can, indeed, recursively help further illuminate our understanding of life, in general, as we believe in order to know.

Anyway, that’s my parsing. As for competing metaphysical tautologies, the way I would adjudicate between those is by asking which one might best foster the normalization of gravity and quantum mechanics. Otherwise, they aren’t terribly interesting or helpful. We know that religion as a value-realization approach enjoys epistemic virtue, just like science. But we can’t deny that they otherwise differ in the amount of epistemic risk; we can only suggest that the increased risks have commensurate rewards.

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Kris That sounds right-headed to me. One of the ways we cut through the types of paradox that confront us when logical causes (like concepts) get conflated with efficient causes (like dynamic neural net activity) is to proceed FOR ALL PRACTICAL purposes. As it is, our laws and jurisprudence do recognize different levels of culpability and exculpability and our sentencing guidelines are nuanced to take into account mitigating circumstances. Society writ large has responded to the human sciences and we do take into account formative, deformative and reformative influences and developmental trajectories. I think one practical take-away from discussions like this one is that we could do even better if we can get more citizens educated to a more naturalized humanism and away from their facile folk psychology. IOW, we could advance legislative and judicial reforms much further and much faster and could much more efficaciously treat and reform our prison populations. We don’t need metaphysics to do morality. When people do not agree on basic concepts, those ideas will have very little normative impetus in a pluralistic society anyway.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 11:45:49 AM

John Sobert Sylvest on March 30th, 2010 at 7:29 am:

Well, as Radical Orthodoxy might say, Dennett does have a few rather confessional stances, himself. One way to bust the religious move is to avoid getting so apophatic that one imagines that what is wholly incomprehensible is not, at the same time, partly apprehendable or thinks that a failure to successfully describe a reality necessarily forecloses on one’s ability to successfully refer to it. Each stance has risks and rewards. Perhaps one measure of the amount irony that will attend to any given stance is its risk:reward ratio vis a vis what Lonergan has described in terms of a growth in human authenticity through various conversions?

+++

In my approach to Peirce, I distinguish between 1ns and 3ns in terms of the in/determinate and un/specifiable, respectively. The indeterminacy is epistemic in nature and results from methodological constraints. Any unspecifiability is ontological, or modal, in nature and results from a putative in-principle ontological occulting. One way these would differ is that any ignorance due to unspecifiability would be invincible, while that due to indeterminacy is potentially temporary and could be conquered with future methodological improvements (e.g. technological) or epistemic insights (e.g. aha moments, abductions, paradigm shifts). Our semantical vagueness thus treats the modal possibilities of 1ns such that excluded middle holds while noncontradiction folds (in epistemic indeterminacy) and the modal probabilities of 3ns such that excluded middle folds while noncontradiction holds (in ontological vagueness). Which modal realities will later present as the actualities of 2ns, where EM & NC both hold, remains to be seen because we cannot a priori know when it is that our ignorance is invincible due to an in-principle ontological occulting and when it might otherwise be conquered due to our overcoming of methodological constraints. Of course, we adopt a methodological naturalism precisely because to otherwise presuppose that our ignorance results from an ontological occulting would be to drive into an epistemic cul-de-sac. A philosophical naturalism a priori presupposes that all ignorance results from what is temporarily indeterminable, epistemically speaking, and issues a metaphysical promissory note for future ontological specificity.

I say all of this to provide me a framework for grappling with your directionality distinctions. Stipulating to the indexical nature of human knowledge, it would seem that any intentionality that moves from humans in the world reaching toward what is unknown, which we cannot a priori presuppose as either temporarily indeterminate or invincibly unspecifiable, would entail a fallibilist, speculative metaphysic, which necessarily employs both positivist and philosophic methodologies. And it would seem that any reversal of that claim in Dewey’s notions of intending symbols mediating the world back to humans is also an integral part of the same triadic inferential process as 3ns plays its mediating role in an ongoing recursive interplay with 1ns and 2ns. This would thus correspond to the Peircean rubric that the normative sciences (3ns) mediate between phenomenology (2ns or science) and metaphysics (1ns, incl speculative cosmology and highly theoretical physics). This is to say that it seems that Neville is talking about Peircean 1ns and you are talking about 3ns (vis a vis your reversal). And it is also to suggest that, while your insights are indispensable, they are supplemental and not wholly over against Neville’s account, which would be incomplete per your description.

You appear to be making an additional move, as I see it. I appreciate that the context of Neville’s work hereinabove was theological, but my treatment above prescinded from that theological take to the strictly phenomenological, philosophical and metaphysical. In your treatment of 3ns, you are taking an essentially phenomenological category and coloring it with a theological hue, analogically imagining that the world is mediating to us not only our local environs but also expressions of primal reality (reality’s initial, boundary & limit conditions). Thus you are making a distinctly theological turn and have segued from a natural theology to a theology of nature.

The reason I thus characterize your thrust as a theology of nature is because our natural theology is confronted with what is very likely an immeasurable amount of information erasure due to entropic processes. The deeper we go into the structures of matter and the closer we get to t=0 near the Big Bang, the less information available re: our initial, boundary and limit conditions, much less ultimate reality. The world certainly mediates info to us re: our own horizons but any temporal critical realism looks like it will indeed be methodologically constrained if for no other reason than temporality, itself, collapses, a spatiotemporal reality on which we rely in our common sense notions of causation. The human experience of ultimacy remains fraught with mystery as reality appears terribly ambivalent toward us and incredibly ambiguous to us in the symbols it has intended for us. Thus, if with Blake we do see the world in a grain of sand, heaven in a wildflower, holding Infinity in the palm of our hand and Eternity in an hour, we are doing a theology of nature. And so it is that I call my own theology of nature a pan-semio-entheism. I make that theological turn with you and take that existential leap even while suggesting THAT Ultimacy is mediating Herself back to me through manifold and multiform symbols (physical signs at that) even if I cannot give a robust account of just HOW that may be so. On that front, I prefer to remain ontologically vague, if only to return the favor to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. This indeed supports a robustly pluralistic approach to the world’s Great Traditions and indigenous religions.

BTW, and that’s also why I characterize Dennett’s confessional stance as a(n) (a)theology of nature, also Someone is saying more than one can possibly know, proving too much, taking a leap but not looking over one’s shoulder at the leap and considering its distance and nature.

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Regarding the ontologically real POSSIBLE. One can prescind from a robustly metaphysical account (as in the examples above) to a more vague phenomenological approach (which is what Peirce did).

Peirce’s “modal categories” included the possible, actual and probable. Each category employed its own grammar vis a vis such first principles as noncontradiction [NC] & excluded middle [EM]. As we all know, in the actual, both NC & EM hold. In the possible, NC folds & EM holds. In the probable, NC holds & EM folds. What distinguishes this from metaphysics as usually conceived is that metaphysics employs the modal categories of possible, actual and NECESSARY. And THAT is its fatal error. That is what leads to all sorts of castles in the air and angels dancing on pinheads (like Bill O’Reilly, I suppose?).

By prescinding from the necessary to the probable, we are acknowledging our inescapably fallible nature but honoring, at the same time, our slow but inexorable advance of knowledge. We also avoid the types of paradox that will ensue from our presumptions that the concepts we have employed NECESSARILY successfully refer to reality.

This Peircean rigor supports circumspection & keeps me metaphysically agnostic. Stu’s categories work well.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 4:59:34 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Stuart Kauffman (SAK43) wrote: I just don’t yet see how an emergence, much as I love it, gives answers to the standard philosophy of mind ! questions I posed in a past blog. Do you? And if so, help please! Stu <<<

Emergence is a heuristic device for properties that defy explanation. So, in principle, if one is in possession of an answer to the hard problem, it wouldn’t be emergent (or hard). There are three ways to look at the possible relationships between levels of complexity. If a lower level completely explains a higher level, then we have reductionism and the strongest relation possible. When speaking in terms of parts & wholes, properties & laws, it is possible that reductionism will not explain a higher level, but we can still maintain supervenience, which is to say that any differences in parts, wholes, properties and laws at a higher level must have corresponding differences at the lower level (covariance without reduction). If a theory explaining higher level properties & laws is, in principle, unpredictable from a theory at a more fundamental level, then we have emergence, which is to say, novelty.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 5:22:18 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Just a point of information: The Catholic church considers science & philosophy (hence metaphysics) autonomous disciplines. It thus has no official position on the soul, a metaphysical concept, or the mind, a philosophical construct, or the brain, a scientific term. It only takes dogmatic positions regarding putative theological realities. For those interested, see Theology & Anthropology – body, soul, spirit?

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 4:36:55 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

The Searle quote reminds me of a quote attributed to Jerry Fodor: Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 4:39:37 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

One may wish to add this to favorite mind-body problem quotes; William James wrote: We are thrown back therefore upon the crude evidences of introspection on the one hand, with all its liabilities to deception, and, on the other hand, upon a priori postulates and probabilities. He who loves to balance nice doubts need be in no hurry to decide the point. Like Mephistopheles to Faust, he can say to himself, “dazu hast du noch eine lange Frist” [for that you've got a long wait], for from generation to generation the reasons adduced on both sides will grow more voluminous, and the discussion more refined.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 4:43:30 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

As we consider the dance between continuity & discontinuity, pattern & paradox, chance & necessity, order & chaos, random & systematic, causal & noncausal, determinate & indeterminate, specifiable & unspecifiable, predictable & unpredictable, the grammar of our Peircean rubrics seems to be providing a helpful heuristic?

Of course, this would not be the first walk through the particle zoo for Peirce’s phenomenological modal categories and sign classes. A few years ago, I came across an intriguing post on a rather obscure complexity listserv. From what I could gather, Terry Deacon had derived ten sign classes from Peirce’s nine sign types and this facilitated the formulation of a quark model of signs by Sungchul Ji, PhD. I have been
unable to retrieve that post today but the original link to this conversation was http://necsi.org:8100/Lists/complex-science/Message/6518.html

I’d like to introduce a few more distinctions to see if they can help. Causation transfers information (incl temporal or spatial nonlocal causation). Types of causation associate w/different system features: material = parts; efficient = interactions incl semiotic; final = functions; formal = environment. Information involves coupling of 2 systems.

cont

Wednesday, March 31, 2010 2:14:55 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Actualization of information requires a third system to interpret the causal coupling or exploit the coupling (use it somehow). System levels (hierarchies) have no ontological status but result from what so happens to be available to us epistemically. An autopoietic, or self-organizing, feature exhibits downward causation & entropy decreases but the total system entropy increases. Physical information (like signs) have a non-zero value only in systems at nonequilibrium with their environment. While prediction requires information in an effect to be computable from information in its cause, unpredictability (unspecifiability) is not the same as indeterminism. Peircean grammar rubrics apply to indeterminacy (re: possibility), which is epistemic in nature & results from methodological constraints, & to unspecifiability (re: probability), which is ontological, or modal, in nature and results from a putative in-principle ontological occulting. One way these would differ is that any ignorance due to unspecifiability would be invincible, while any due to indeterminacy is potentially temporary & could be conquered with future methodological improvements (e.g. technological) or epistemic insights (e.g. abductions, paradigm shifts).

cont

Wednesday, March 31, 2010 2:21:35 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Concluding from the prior 2 posts:

A noncausal reality would be an “apparent” transfer of identical information but this is improbable.

Symmetry requirements in quantum mechanics govern information generation. How might this tie into the rubrics and distinctions I offered in the above posts? “Physical” reality is probabilistic. The category of the Possible is an “objective” reality, perhaps physical but with a zero-value b/c it’s in a state at equilibrium w/its neuronal net environment, hence the Possible comprises a rather tacit dimension that is nonetheless a robustly telic dimension, clearly causal but in the formal sense insofar as it comprises this structural neuronal environment.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010 2:37:40 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Quantum Theory seems to recognize both epistemological & ontological limits. In Peirce’s recursive triad of abduction, induction & deduction, one type of abduction is retroduction, whereby we reason backward from known predicates to putative subjects. In our brains, we are able to strip properties from known realities & reassign them to unknown realities. When we reassign them to unknown causes of observed effects, this is an inference to the best explanation, sometimes predicting, for example, a new species or element on the periodic table. When we reassign them to mere abstractions, this is fantasy. Superpositioning and wave-function collapse thus involve only such possibilities as would successfully refer to realities that are physically instantiable, hence mediated by probability, which is why Schrödinger didn’t employ a Unicorn Experiment. Peirce’s grammar guides us re: the “logical” import of signs but we need an additional category to grapple with their “vital” import. When I add a 4th category called value-realization (a cashing-out of practical significance), the wave-function becomes a heuristic device not a physical reality (it ain’t real). Possibilities are, rather, formal causes, physical signs at rest (equilibrium).

Wednesday, March 31, 2010 3:56:50 PM

Moving on, now, to Telos: a Lost Cause

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

I thank Ursula for inviting Deacon & Sherman. Most all that I shared on Stu’s thread re: The Hard Problem: Consciousness was based on intuitions informed by my rather inchoate grasp of the work of Charles Sanders Peirce [CSP]. I won’t reiterate those comments on this thread but I do want to submit them as a relevant reference HERE. What I am most looking forward to is having someone (Prof. Deacon) with a very firm grasp of Peirce to address what CSP called a “minding of matter and a mattering of mind.” I know this can correct my misunderstandings, clarify my proper understandings and provide me a way to articulate my own perspective in a much more accessible form. Anything I’ve gotten correct, so far, mostly comes from articles co-authored by Deacon & Goodenough re: different orders of emergence (Polanyian), thermo- morpho- & teleo-dynamics and so on. Where I’ve gone astray, well, I managed that all by myself. I am so glad to finally “meet” Prof. Deacon and look forward to his & Dr. Sherman’s contributions.

Thursday, April 01, 2010 11:51:43 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

I’d like to offer a distinction between telos and TELOS, where the former entails a downward causation w/o violation of physical causal closure, while the latter is nonenergetic. Classical TELOS is a tautological metaphysical “concept” that adds no new info to one’s system & invites causal disjunction paradoxes. Biosemiotic telos has been a helpful theoretic heuristic (conceptual placeholder) that may fast become a rigorous scientific “term.” Conceptual confusion might arise between them b/c biosemiotic telos relies on but then transcends a formal causation contributed by a system’s environment. This structural environment (formal cause) may be at rest or in equilibrium in relationship to the rest of the system (material & efficient causes). As a “tacit” dimension it might be assigned a zero value re:its distance fr equilibrium hence would mimic what would be a nonenergetic analogue in TELOS, but it’s in an integral relationship to a thermodynamic system, iow, a system feature, and thus robustly efficacious, like a river’s bed & banks, like a waterfall’s cliff, like a mind’s neuronal network. Maybe telos is, in part, non-energetic, while TELOS is, more properly, a-energetic, a lost cause, indeed? Does this make sense?

Thursday, April 01, 2010 12:31:25 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Another distinction: chance & coincidence, which might have a bearing on intent and INTENT. Chance pertains to the future & the epistemically unavailable, while coincidence involves the present or past. Science, is probabilistic and deals w/chance not coincidence. Any weak anthropic principle is trivial; a strong anthropic principle deals w/coincidence. Only if we knew enough about the initial conditions of the cosmos could we do probabilistic thought experiments to test an anthropic principle. Fast forward to the origins of life and next to the emergence of consciousness where a “design inference” is often invoked; the inference may be logically valid but cannot be demonstrated as logically sound b/c it eludes probabilistic analysis & thus is not scientific. The dictionary definition of intent suffices: firmly directed. Reality is firmly directed, intentional, inasmuch as it is probabilistic. To the extent a bounded probabilistic reality presents along a continuum of degrees and exhibits an orderliness, or far from equilibrium decrease in entropy, it might be thought of as virtually free as its intentionality approaches the asymptotes of firm directionality. So would things go re: human consciousness.

cont

Thursday, April 01, 2010 1:19:56 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

INTENT, otoh, like TELOS, would be a metaphysical concept that imagines a platonic-like causation that is absolutely independent of our energetic milieu, confusing an asymptotically far from equilibrium state with a putatively a-energetic reality. This doesn’t demonstrate the anthropic; rather, it demonstrates the anthropocentric.

Thursday, April 01, 2010 1:25:16 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Pankaj Peirce said that the normative sciences mediate between phenomenology and metaphysics. Let me put forth my own parsing. I say that the normative mediates between the descriptive and interpretive to effect the evaluative. This, in my view, is a naturalized or evolutionary epistemology. So, we might say science = descriptive, asking: What is that? And culture (we are radically social animals) is evaluative asking: What’s that to us? And philosophy is normative, asking: How might we best acquire or avoid that? Worldviews are interpretive, asking: How do we tie all of this back together (or re-ligate = religious)? Jacques Maritain said that we distinguish in order to unite. I thus suggest that science, culture, philosophy & worldviews are different foci of human concerns, or methods, and as such are methodologically-autonomous (asking different questions) but axiologically-integral (all necessary, none sufficient, in every human value-realization). To your points: 1) Buddhism is interpretive, not descriptive. 2) Science is inherently normative. 3) RE: an emergent consciousness, I am saying more than we know, proving too much. I agree & stipulate that what I offer is strictly for argument’s sake. 4) What cool people, here!

Thursday, April 01, 2010 2:04:34 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Erin no non sequitur for me. Heidegger once asked: Why not rather nothing? which also translates as Why is there something rather than nothing? Some protest that “nothing” is a reification & one that does not successfully refer to reality. Still, another question might beg: Why is there something & not rather something else? Questions beg regarding primal reality & we may not even have the categories & concepts to formulate them. For example, what about the concept of a cause? What could that possibly mean in an atemporal reality where t=0? So, those aristotelian causes, which we invoke in this scientific consideration w/in the space-time-mass-energy plenum in a thermodynamic context which admits to a very broad continuum of intentionality, can also be imaginatively conceived in a platonic-like reality independent of temporal features where there may be “things” but NO THING we can describe. We wonder whether this may be Heidegger’s NO-THING, which may or may not successfully refer to reality? Questions DO beg! maybe more so on reality’s perimeters & less so in its gaps. Religious fundamentalists put gods in gaps. Enlightenment fundamentalists issue explanatory promissory notes. Our discussion differs by having a narrower focus.

Thursday, April 01, 2010 2:50:46 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Pankaj yes, yes, yes! I’m a big believer in what I call interpretive pluralism, a radically pluralistic stance toward the values realized by all of the Great Traditions as well as by humanity’s indigenous religions. The different worldviews & religions, as interpretive axes, each an “axiology,” around which our “cosmology” spins when we realize life’s deepest values, have great gifts to offer each other in dialogue. Science, however, tells us what I believe is Everybody’s Story.

Thursday, April 01, 2010 3:03:51 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Indeterminacy (re: possibility) is epistemic & results fr methodological constraints. Unspecifiability (re: probability) is ontological, or modal, & would result fr a putative in-principle ontological occulting. Any ignorance due to unspecifiability would be invincible, while that due to indeterminacy could be temporary & could be conquered w/future methodological improvements (e.g. technological) or epistemic insights (e.g. abductions, paradigm shifts). Which modal reality will later present as an actuality remains to be seen b/c we cannot a priori know when it is that our ignorance is invincible due to an in-principle ontological occulting & when it might otherwise be conquered due to our overcoming of methodological constraints. Of course, we adopt a methodological naturalism precisely because to otherwise presuppose that our ignorance results from an ontological occulting would be to drive into an epistemic cul-de-sac. A philosophical naturalism a priori presupposes that all ignorance results fr what is temporarily indeterminable, epistemically speaking, & issues a metaphysical promissory note for future ontological specificity. It’s a confessional stance, which I begrudge no one (as long as one keeps it to oneself). [smiley]

Thursday, April 01, 2010 7:15:55 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Pankaj, in the philosophy of science, there are a host of criteria we can apply to working hypotheses in addition to internal coherence & pragmatic utility. We also look for external congruence, logical consistency, inferential fecundity, interdisciplinary consilience, hypothetical consonance, symmetry, parsimony, elegance, abductive facility and so on. Energy medicine research in the US is guided by an NIH division devoted to Complementary & Alternative Medicine. It is practiced in many clinical settings. It is not a scientific hegemony that segregates it as complementary or alternative but the fact that it meets fewer scientific criteria than conventional medicine. This has much practical import. For example, we have limited fiscal & technological resources & must prioritize our research funding. Also, for a serious illness, I personally would want to have exhausted conventional options before seeking alternatives, precisely b/c of such meaningful criteria. At the same time, energy medicine has a place, a very legitimate place, in my view.

Thursday, April 01, 2010 7:31:49 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Some paradox we can resolve such as in a dialectical synthesis. Some we can dissolve via a paradigm shift, perspective change or conceptual clarification (dis-ambiguation). Some we can evade practically, ignoring it for all practical purposes. There are different types of paradox incl the veridical, falsidical, conditional & antinomial. Some paradox we can exploit transformatively by nurturing its creative tensions. There’s no single prescription for paradox vis a vis what we are to resolve, dissolve, evade or exploit. It all depends. In our modal ontology, where we consider the categories of possible, actual & probable (& necessary), we precisely employ semantical vagueness as we apply first principles like noncontradiction & excluded middle, as they alternately hold or fold.

Thursday, April 01, 2010 8:06:08 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

In this ongoing discussion, I think of Peirce’s inferential triad of abductive hypothesizing, inductive testing & deductive clarifying. It reminds me that we can get caught up in a nonvirtuous cycle of abduction & deduction w/o the inductive rubber of falsification hitting the epistemic road. And Mike’s right; it’s a muddy road. And Phil well described the difficulty we can have in devising helpful analogies. Our human knowledge advances not only via our cognitive propositions (conceptual map-making) but also thru our participatory imagination (think hometown knowledge). We very well know how to get to the grocer then the pharmacy & back home but can find such knowledge difficult to articulate to an inquiring stranger who’s unfamiliar w/our hometown. Peirce’s triad conveys only LOGICAL import. But we are also biosemiotic INTENDERS & thus attend to what has VITAL import. Peirce thus reminds us to cash-out the practical value of our conceptions, to attend to distinctions that make a difference. He notes that our knowledge gains its strength in a way more like a cable, from the intertwining of strands of different informal arguments, than a chain, from the unbroken linkage of a series of formal syllogisms. IOW, we’re fallible.

Friday, April 02, 2010 11:02:00 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

The opening blog post included the following qualifiers: absurd, impossible, unlikely, improbable, chance, impossibly, improbable, probable, tendency, future possibility, predictable & plausible. These correspond to what used to be called scholastic notation, where one designated various assertions as im/possible, im/plausible, im/probable & un/certain. They relate to the modal distinctions I discussed in:
The Hard Problem: Consciousness, where noncontradiction & excluded middle would variously hold or fold. They also speak to the distinctions made between epistemic in/determinacy & ontological un/specifiability. Finally, they also bring to mind the distinctions between chance & coincidence.

Prigogine invites us to consider the giganormous number of bifurcations & permutations that have gone into the universe’s dissipative structures. And while it’s true that the greater this number, the more fragile the structure, it also seems that the more fragile the structure, the more beautiful. This beauty doesn’t seem absurd or implausible, but, w/o knowing the universe’s initial conditions, one can’t really say what’s im/probable.

Friday, April 02, 2010 11:49:49 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

One take-away from my last post is that, while I noted in one of our recent discussions that the weak anthropic principle was trivial and the strong anthropic principle was misguided, our ignorance re: the universe’s initial, boundary & limit conditions also speaks to such an interpretive stance as would disingenuously suggest that, after 13.7 billion years, this world we inhabit is exactly what one should expect! Still, setting aside my confusion re: both cosmic origins & life’s origins & why thermo- & morpho- dynamics present the way they do, once stipulating to the fact of teleo-dynamics, using neo-darwinian evolution as my starting point, it DOES seem to me that Deacon’s account of the co-evolution of language & brain & the emergence of our ROBUST intentionality in consciousness is more than plausible. I’m betting that it “won’t stay a mystery” & is one of the most likely candidates for soon being considered PROBABLE. It already “feels” that way to me, but my grad school focus was neuroendocrinology & I’m thus biased.

Friday, April 02, 2010 12:18:25 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Ergo, I’m inclined to the Copenhagen interpretation. Wave-functions aren’t physical realities. Possibilities, what Peirce called Firstness, in my view, are predicates stripped from subjects & abstracted by our brains. They get applied retroductively (e.g. reasoning backward from known predicates to unknown subjects) & analogically (e.g. metaphors) whenever we encounter the effects of unknown causes, which get ontologically specified, for example, as new species or new elements on the periodic table, or even as a mistaken identity. As neurological correlates, they lie dormant, often “adjacent,” as structures of memory, providing a system environment feature (formal cause) w/a zero-value distance from that local system’s equilibrium, a tacit dimension that is nevertheless utterly efficacious as its nonalgorithmic open-ended processor (material & efficient causes) “works” (i.e. decreasing entropy locally), which is to say, “functions” (final causation) via a telic system feature we call intent, which is variously strong or weak across the phylogenetic spectrum. Symbol employment is novel, gifts us w/the abduction of SELF, a bundle of predicates gathered from others & reassigned to ME, setting us apart as sapiens.

Friday, April 02, 2010 12:45:49 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Pankaj, re: using words correctly, in my view, our transition from algorithmic to non-algorithmic processors resulted when closed circuitry got short-circuited in our brain’s hard-wiring, allowing subject-object cleavage, predicate dissociation from subjects, properties to be abstracted away from entities and mis-assigned. We became, in part, open-ended processors. We then exploited the MIS-TAKE as adaptively significant. That’s what an analogy or metaphor is, in a way, a mistake, a mis-assignment of predicates. But it allowed us to enhance our modeling power of reality, making our tautologies more taut, with story-telling. Boon or bane? A non-virtuous cycle of abductive hypothesizing & deductive clarifying becomes a sterile metaphysic unless interrupted by inductive falsification. Will our bio-semiotic leap to symbol-usage preserve or destroy our species? The evidence in favor of boon or bane is mixed. Conversations like this one are indispensable to our survival, in my view. We lack SELF-understanding to our peril, maybe even doom.

Friday, April 02, 2010 3:41:57 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Jane re:causes, only speaking for me: In a sense, we are exploring the relationship between causation & information in biological systems. I associate aristotelian-like causation w/different system features: material = parts; efficient = interactions incl semiotic; final = functions; formal = environment. Information involves a coupling of 2 systems. Actualization of information requires a third system to interpret this causal coupling (or exploit the coupling or use it, somehow). Intent would be associated w/function. Only if one invokes such causations in a platonic sense would one encounter such paradox as causal disjunctions; these are all situated in a thermodynamic system that is far from equilibrium. It’s the formal cause, it seems, that throws people for a loop. I think this is b/c folks are confusing non-energetic (at equilibrium) with a-energetic (having nothing to do w/our space-time-mass-energy plenum). The formal cause is structural, an environmental milieu that matters, including such as physical signs. Nothing spooky.

Saturday, April 03, 2010 1:20:17 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Irv re: Peirce, the heuristic I described is consistent w/Peirce. A lot of folks apply Peircean categories & grammar in complexity theory, systems theory, info systems theory, artificial intelligence theory & such. It’s not so much explanatory as it is heuristic. As a heuristic, I find it powerful, like emergence. Combine such heuristics as Peirce’s triadic semeiotic & emergence & we get new & exciting ways of looking at what are otherwise intractable problems. A combination of Peirce & Emergence would not thus lead one algorithmically to one philosophy of mind vs another; it just makes it easier for different schools of thought to read off the same sheet of music, clarifying those distinctions that might make for pragmatically “real” differences vs those that make for idle, sterile tautologies. It helps me discern what’s at stake in eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, nonreductive physicalism & so on. It does seem, however, to foreclose on a computational (algorithmic) account of consciousness, making an improvement on Dennett’s approach. I’m willing to admit that some nonenergetic aspects of formal causation could be indistinguishable from putative acausal features, but methodologically approach acausal features as epistemic not ontological in origin (but who knows? No one knows, a priori!).

Saturday, April 03, 2010 3:26:43 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Irv see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics for how the semiotic applies to music, theater, art and so on, where it is necessary but not sufficient. I call my own stance a Peircean-Nevillean integral axiological epistemology [PNIAE], which refers to Robert Cummings Neville, who emphasized axiology or value-realization. It is a naturalized or evolutionary epistemology that recognizes our human encounter with a surplus of meaning. Our signs & symbols include more than words. Our deepest value-realizations transcend the semiotic. A contemplative stance goes beyond our problem-solving, dualistic mindset with its empirical, logical, practical & moral foci of concern (and extrinsic reward systems) with a more nondual, relational approach to reality (and its intrinsic reward systems). Many of us, as naturalists, are also religious (but not all are also theistic).

Saturday, April 03, 2010 9:33:13 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Irv, Stu may not have been explicitly employing peircean categories but you may recall that I thought his modal distinctions were consistent w/Peirce & a semantical vagueness vis a vis the application of 1st principles like noncontradiction & excluded middle. Also, re: emergence, I, myself, consider it to be an epistemic artefact of where we as observers are situated in relationship to a system and its features. As I said, in my view, that system feature which provides better predictability is the one we tend to call emergent. Sometimes we may be dealing with layers of explanation, not ontological levels? and they may be redundant? For example, folks talk of supervenience (re: emergence), which when called strong is trivial, when called weak is question begging. I also consider the quantum acausal in epistemic terms, hence not a suitable ontic structure for contra-causal free will. Nonalgorithmic CSC, while necessary for Stu’s hypothesis, is thus not sufficient, in my view. Peirce & Emergence as heuristics don’t rule out Stu’s hypothesis, which could be consistent w/both. Only my interpretation, or sneaking suspicion, that our semiotic formal causes are nonenergetic & not a-energetic, lead me to that provisional closure.

Saturday, April 03, 2010 10:11:14 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Irv – I call my own stance a Peircean-Nevillean integral axiological epistemology [PNIAE] and it combines “our problem-solving, dualistic mindset with its empirical, logical, practical & moral foci of concern (and extrinsic reward systems) with a more nondual, relational approach to reality (and its intrinsic reward systems).”

The nondual, relational approach = a contemplative stance. It complements other stances, which include descriptive (science or positivist), normative (philosophic), evaluative, interpretive and so. Such stances (each methodologically autonomous, asking different questions of reality) are integrally-related – all necessary, none sufficient – in realizing reality’s values. As in a symphony, one note or instrument or section may enjoy a certain primacy while others rest, but it is only in relationship to the other notes or instruments or sections that it realizes its purpose and meaning. Or, think of notes in a chord. We do not cling to an individual note – not because it isn’t beautiful, but – because we don’t want to miss the symphony.

Saturday, April 03, 2010 11:19:56 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Irv, to the extent the value one is after is an enhanced modeling power of reality, I would turn to the audience, a community of value-realizers, for their opinion. And, in the audience, I would try to spot those maestros who’ve been the most earnest in their inquiry & faithful in their practice. That would be more distinctly Peircean, a turn to community.

I see what you are driving at with your metaphor vis a vis the ego. And it is on the mark, for example, in the way Thomas Merton approached such things. He employed the concept, “false self,” for that aspect of personhood that resulted from our socialization; it roughly maps over the freudian concept of ego. False Self was an unfortunate use of words, though, because it conveys the same type of notion as ego-less. Merton did not mean to suggest that we might travel without the False Self or ego; rather, in my words, we travel BEYOND it and not WITHOUT it. The contemplative stance does transcend or go beyond the problem-solving stances but not without them. The integrality is preserved.

Monday, April 05, 2010 11:01:40 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

This sounds like Peirce’s appeal to a suitably chastised epistemic optimism and a contrite fallibilism. Perhaps we have come to better realize that features like parsimony, elegance, beauty, symmetry and such have never been robustly truth-conducive but, rather, only weakly truth-indicative. Perhaps we have traded in a modal ontology with such categories as possible, actual and NECESSARY for one that employs, instead, the categories possible, actual and probable. Perhaps we have realized with Gödel that our systems can be either consistent or complete but not both, that we cannot prove our system axioms within those systems. No more a prioristic, rationalistic foundations; no more privileged metaphysics. No more gnostic claims to moral imperatives as we reason humbly together from the best IS we can formulate for the moment to the most universally compelling OUGHT we can derive together at the time, all translated into a language that is transparent to human reason and thus given such a normative impetus as would not rely on appeals to revelations or special pleadings grounded in so-called indubitable metaphysics. The sense of sacredness would derive from our radical solidarity with & compassion for nature & each other.

Monday, April 05, 2010 6:24:09 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Adam – I conceive of 2 challenges: 1) how to devise a more universally compelling morality 2) how to proceed in our speculative endeavors, especially regarding our highly theoretical sciences. Peirce said we should speculate boldly in theoretical matters but proceed more cautiously in our vital affairs (roughly speaking). I like to say that our deontologies should be considered at least as tentative as our ontologies are speculative. What I am driving at is that, for the most part, humankind already knows enough from evolutionary biology & our human arts & sciences to “do” morality. Modern philosophers, for the most part, embrace some type of critical realism, even though some are pragmatic realists, others “weak” foundationalists, others coherentists, etc Slowly, but inexorably, we should be able to get radical fundamentalisms on the wane. This is also to say that I don’t think we need to quickly resolve philosophy of mind’s “hard” problems, choose a given quantum interpretation or renormalize gravity w/quantum mechanics. Laws we observe might be as local, for all practical & theoretical purposes, as those of our neighborhood bridge club? Extrapolating them to anywhere NEAR T=0 is likely illicit, much less BEYOND T=0?

Monday, April 05, 2010 11:05:22 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Everywhere in reality it seems that “the necessary” has suggested itself, while nowhere in reality has it been encountered as a physical instantiation. Haldane said that reality is not only stranger than we imagine but stranger than we CAN imagine. Chesterton might’ve countered that we don’t know enough about reality yet to say that it is unknowable. Wittgenstein said it’s not HOW things are but THAT things are which is the mystical. Heidegger asked: Why not rather nothing? But what if ‘nothing” doesn’t successfully refer? Our question becomes: Why is there something rather than something else? Gödel said we couldn’t prove a system’s axioms w/in that system but that doesn’t mean we might not otherwise be able to SEE their truth. How many of us need to travel w/Russell & Whitehead halfway thru the Principia where they prove the axioms that support 2 + 2 = 4 in order to see the truth of those axioms? We don’t a priori know whether the unprovable axioms of a putative TOE will be trivial or interesting, grounded by truths we can taste & see even if not formally prove. We do well to assume we are methodologically constrained, epistemically, rather than occulted-in-principle, ontologically, ever-mindful it’s a pragmatic assumption.

Tuesday, April 06, 2010 12:13:41 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Adam Let me give some soft push-back re: “We need catagories (classes, constellations of ideas) which can help us wrap our thinking around the irreducibility, primacy and unity of experience.”

Maybe you subvert your own critique of the empirical as you press for yet more conceptual map-making? Instead, you could press your logic to a more radical, but still consistent, conclusion, which would indeed resonate with the Buddhist imagination. Buddhism gifts us via our participatory imagination w/practices not conclusions, w/experiences not systems, w/realizations not arguments, stories of unitary reality not ontologies.

See my thoughts here:
One: Essential Writings in Nonduality – a review, where I wrote: “After all, there is no room to presume that folks — who, self-described, would kill the Buddha — are returning from ineffable experiences only to clearly effable about reality, or that they are telling us tales about, what they claim to hold in-principle as, untellable stories. Something else is going on, which is an invitation into an experience and not an initiation into a philosophical system.”

The East, in my view, has gifted us w/insights re: our mastery of our internal milieu, incl a better awareness of what takes place between sensation & abstraction and incl what we might call our affective attunement to reality. The West, for its part, has gifted us w/insights re: our mastery of our external milieu, incl a better awareness of what takes place between abstraction & judgment and incl what we might call our practical alignment w/reality. Had Einstein & Bohr a better familiarity w/both Eastern & Western philosophy, perhaps they would have realized that, to some extent, they were talking past one another, precisely by committing category errors, Einstein now speaking of the ontic w/the West, Bohr now emphasizing the epistemic w/the East. We thus distinguish between epistemic in/determinacy and ontological un/specifiability. Still, Peirce provided the necessary distinctions, too. Subjective experiences are fine but carry very little NORMATIVE impetus for others until processed in and by community, a turn in religion known as communal discernment, a turn in science involving replication of results & peer review, a turn to community in philosophy we call phenomenology, a Peircean turn to a community of inquiry.

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

re: model & myth

It has always seemed to me that, precisely because of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, any TOE would require both model & narrative. The model would comprise our formal symbol system which describes reality. The narrative would comprise our informal apologetic for why the axioms of our system, even if unprovable, are compelling. Of course, with Tolkien, we’d be searching for True Myth, a story which, not literally true in every way, would nevertheless evoke an appropriate response to “ultimate” reality. One would anticipate a great diversity of expression of such truth, an authentic religious pluralism (vis a vis a constructive pragmatic realism).

Tuesday, April 06, 2010 1:16:39 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Pankaj, re: would you consider Godel’s contribution to be equivalent to that of Nagarjuna?

Considering when Nagarjuna lived compared to Gödel, Derrida, Wittgenstein et al, one can only be astounded at his wisdom. In the same vein, as much as I love Peirce, I only discovered him when someone confused one of my disquisitions as being Peircean, when it was otherwise grounded in Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart & Duns Scotus; my interlocutor then described me as an accidental-Peircean. Many years later, I’m now an on-purpose Peircean. Finally, Nagarjuna addressed more than epistemology and theoretic concerns of logical import, but had much to say about praxis & compassion; those latter contributions had great vital import!

Tuesday, April 06, 2010 2:15:42 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

The Western dualistic conceptions of God generally lack that deeper ontological ground, which would be needed to provide for divine interaction with the world. But there are also problems, both with Western fullness of being conceptions of God, such as in the Perennial Philosophy, Thomistic & Neo-Platonic conceptions, and the Buddhist conception of the fullness of nonbeing, with regard to how novelty might arise other than via negations & limitations insofar as pure negations are as utterly indeterminate as pure being. These are precisely problems related to so-called broken symmetry. To be determinate is to be this rather than that. Neville appeals, instead, to Scotus’ realistic theory of common natures, expressed in modern form by Peirce. This leads to an asymmetrical conception of God. Any novelty arises from a creative act ex nihilo, not from limitations of being, with questions begging as to why the world’s not entirely good, leading us not to aspire to repose but to participation in bringing about an alignment. This doesn’t evoke images of a Fall or broken symmetry or of some ontological rupture located in our past but of a teleological striving oriented toward a future, such as in Jack Haught’s aesthetic teleology.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010 9:09:07 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@ECM who wrote: perhaps we should change our views about God’s aesthetics.

Interesting point, Eric. As a point of information, Robert Cummings Neville (a postmodern) following Peirce and Scotus (a medieval) elaborates an asymmetrical conception of God. See Chapter 12 of his Realism in Religion – A Pragmatist’s Perspective (2009 SUNY Press) where he defends this conception at length.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010 7:42:24 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

I realize that the God’s eye view or God’s mind is being evoked metaphorically here and that this thread is not about exploring the nature of God vis a vis any putative god-concepts. So, I offer my discussions below in the vein of expanding our metaphor & not as a theological argument per se. What we are more directly interested in is how truth-indicative are such features as parsimony, elegance, symmetry, simplicity and such. Is there a feature of reality that might be more heavily nuanced than a/symmetry? What about harmony? Wouldn’t it require the shedding of monotony and the appropriation of novelty? A harnessing of asymmetry in the service of complexity? and of aesthetics? In other words, beauty might continue to guide us but needs to be more broadly conceived beyond mere symmetry.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010 9:33:31 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Pankaj right, there are different Buddhist conceptions of nonbeing & my discussion relates to one developed by Nishitani & perhaps the Kyoto school. As a general rule, I do not take away ontological conclusions from the Buddha, himself, including those regarding one’s so-called authenticity. Any experience of unitary being is merely phenomenal & its nondual take-away is epistemic not ontic.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010 10:00:28 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Pankaj, that was well stated, too. Any putative “ultimate” would very much less lend itself to our conceptual map-making, descriptively, and very much more lend itself to our participatory, imaginative and interpretive engagement.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010 10:57:27 AM

Then, I will press forward a tad (as most have moved on). And our participatory, imaginative and interpretive engagements, collectively, get systematized and with great practical effect. These systems are truth-laden — not in the manner in which they conceptually describe the ultimate, but rather — in the manner they foster human value-realizations vis a vis our concerns re: ultimacy. One must inhabit the symbol systems of such systems, existentially, to real-ize their value & truth, as they do not readily lend themselves to mere propositional analysis. This hermeneutical spiral of imagination, interpretation, systematization & practical application might thus ground such a stance as affirms an authentic religious pluralism (& could be interpreted a/theologically or not).

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Science is inherently normative. The findings of science are indispensable to any moral calculus that aspires to reason from a descriptive IS to a normative OUGHT. There is no need to set aretaic (virtue), deontological (is to ought), teleological (consequentialist, utilitarian, pragmatic) and contractarian ethical approaches at odds. By pulling such threads together, the fabric of our moral fiber can be strengthened. We can recognize, with Sartre, that, since we are similarly-situated in this somewhat universal human condition, the prescriptions (OUGHTS)we devise for this situation we describe (IS) are going to be remarkably consistent, for all practical purposes, even if the interpretations in which we ground them are otherwise very divergent or, sometimes, even relativistic, theoretically speaking. Morality is, then, transparent to human reason. In our increasingly pluralistic society, when different perspectives gather in the public square, and all should be welcome, each has a responsibility to articulate its moral reasoning using concepts and categories that are widely accepted; otherwise, one can hardly expect one’s reasoning to have much normative impetus for others, much less to be universally compelling.

Thursday, April 08, 2010 11:03:31 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@twclark Well said, Tom. While interpretive stances, like various religious & secular ideologies, might assist in augmenting the values to be realized from our moral calculus (a descriptive, normative & evaluative hermeneutical spiral), our moral calculus has all that is necessary & sufficient for moral & prudential judgments even without the “benefit” of special revelations or authoritarian appeals grounded in either god-concepts or atheology. And value-augmentations by interpretive stances rely on an authentic scientific anthropology.

Thursday, April 08, 2010 1:35:40 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

re: Can Science Answer Moral Questions?

Category error.

Science doesn’t ask moral questions. Science is a descriptive method. Moral questions are normative, philosophic. Still, while the descriptive and normative are necessary in answering moral questions, they are insufficient and require, also, a culture with its evaluative posits.

Thursday, April 08, 2010 1:28:00 PM

One might also want to take a look at my post:

Theology & Anthropology – body, soul, spirit?

Send article as PDF to

Why Brian McLaren’s Greco-Roman Narrative is NOT a caricature of modernistic aspects of our religious traditions:

St. Bernard described a developmental trajectory for our relationship with God: 1) love of self for sake of self 2) love of God for sake of self 3) love of God for sake of God and 4) love of self for sake of God.

Thomas Merton described a similar trajectory in our stages of humanization, socialization and transformation. Humanization and socialization help form what he called our False Self. Transformation forms our True Self.

Richard Rohr draws a distinction between our problem-solving, dualistic mindsets and our nondual, contemplative stance toward reality.

Such distinctions describe the faith journeys of all of our great traditions with their various exoteric and esoteric aspects.

The exoteric dimension engages reality in a more propositional way. That is to suggest that it engages reality with empirical, rational, moral and practical methods. It establishes and defends boundaries. When it encounters paradox, it makes an attempt to resolve, dissolve or evade it. It provides answers to many of our most fundamental questions.

The esoteric dimension engages reality in a more participatory and imaginative way. That is to suggest that it engages reality from a more personal, relational perspective. It negotiates and transcends boundaries. When it encounters the paradox in life’s deepest mysteries, as they impact our most profound values, most cherished longings, most insistent urges and most ultimate concerns, it exploits this paradox by nurturing its creative tensions. It abides in trust and ponders life’s ultimate questions with awe, reverence and love.

One might say that the more exoteric aspects of our traditions provide us with the answers to the question of why we should love God, which is to say, for the sake of self. These answers form in us an enlightened self-interest. Early on our journey, our faith is thus more clear but tentative.

The more esoteric aspects of our traditions provide us with the answer to the question of why God loves us, which is to say, because we are fashioned in His image and likeness. This answer transforms us and puts us in touch with our True Self. Later on our journey, our faith is thus more obscure but certain.

The later stages of Bernardian love do not negate the earlier. Our True Self does not annihilate our False Self. Our nondual, contemplative stance goes beyond but not without our problem-solving dualistic mindset. The earlier stages of our journey are necessary but simply not sufficient. They are especially insufficient when our goal is a growth in relationship, in intimacy, whether with people or with God.

Our Greco-Roman Narrative, in very many ways, has everything to do with our love of self for sake of self and love of God for sake of self. It is all about our humanization and socialization. It very much engages our problem-solving, dualistic mindsets with their empirical, rational, moral and practical methods. It very clearly establishes and steadfastly defends all sorts of boundaries. When it encounters paradox, it makes every attempt to resolve, dissolve or evade it. More than anything, this narrative makes an attempt to provide answers toward the end of comprehensively describing and exhaustively norming our engagements with reality. This narrative largely comprises the grand storyline of modern science, philosophy and classical liberal politics. This is a storyline with a great many successes but no too few failures. Some of these failures were of epic proportion and were well chronicled in the writings of Walker Percy, who keenly diagnosed our postmodern malaise.

I have already drawn parallels to McLaren and Percy. See, for example:
Everything That’s Old is New Again – this (McLaren’s “New” Christianity) is truly an old time religion and also the more fleshed-out, tongue-partly-in-cheek version: A New Kind of Christianity? McLaren didn’t make this up. It’s worse than that!.

The parallel I wish to offer here is that McLaren’s invitation simply mirrors that of St. Bernard, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr, Walker Percy and many others in our Christian tradition and, indeed, that of the mystics of all of the Great Traditions. This is an invitation to engage not only the more exoteric but also the more esoteric dimensions of our tradition. And this will have everything to do with our love of God for sake of God and love of self for sake of God! It is all about our transformation and True Self! It will very much engage our nondual, contemplative stance toward reality with its robustly personal and deeply relational approach! When it encounters the paradox in life’s deepest mysteries, it nurtures its creative tensions in abiding trust. With an open mind it negotiates all sorts of boundaries, with an open heart transcends them and with open arms welcomes the marginalized! This is the storyline of creation, liberation and reconciliation. THIS is our story! THIS is our song!

Now, clearly, McLaren’s Greco-Roman Narrative does not describe the best our tradition has had to offer when its exoteric and esoteric dimensions have been properly integrated. Clearly, this integration has indeed been preserved in varying degrees and transmitted to varying extents by manifold and diverse elements of our tradition. To deny this would indeed be a caricaturization. But this is not what I see McLaren doing. Instead, what I take away from his critique is the same lament that’s been heralded in our prophetic tradition since the days of old: God is offering us SO much more! But way too many of us are settling for so much less! That is to say that we need to go deeper and to better integrate the exoteric and esoteric dimensions of our religion.

The challenge, as I discern it, is for our institutional structures and non-institutional vehicles to better foster ongoing intellectual, affective, moral, sociopolitical and religious development and conversion (cf. Lonergan & Donald Gelpi). As created co-creators, our work is to foster True Self-realization and authentic transformation of individuals and society, liberating and reconciling all.

Yes, progress has been made.

But, if anyone imagines that the critiques of modernistic religion by such as Thomas Merton and Walker Percy, now Richard Rohr and Brain McLaren, are mere caricatures, where MOST religious practitioners are concerned, they are incredibly naive. (Keep in mind, no one is judging the disposition of anyone’s soul; this is a conversation regarding developmental stages of the journey.) Are we robustly engaging our esoteric dimensions? Rather, do we bog down in the exoteric and render our religion, then, moralistic, legalistic, ritualistic, rationalistic? Take a look around. Listen to the rhetoric – not just in the pews, but – from our pulpits! What are we mostly talking about? What best describes our predominant way of engaging our God?

A few comments prompted by an NPR story and forum:

Jesus, Reconsidered. Book Sparks Evangelical Debate

Julie Lambert (JulieDLRE) wrote: “What McLaren is describing is Universalism, the doctrine that all are saved through God’s love, that blood atonement was not necessary for salvation.”

Julie, what McLaren describes comes close to that but, in my view, requires more nuance. Some early church fathers & mothers did advocate what was called apokatastasis or apocatastasis, which does speak to the utter efficacy of God’s love and incredible benevolence of God’s salvific will.

There may be three related dynamics involved here:

1) Duns Scotus and many (most?) of his fellow Franciscans believed that the Incarnation did not result from God’s response to some ontological rupture (big word for our being separated, cut-off or alienated) located in the past, what some call the Fall or a felix culpa (happy fault), but rather was dealt into the cards from the cosmic get-go as a teleological striving oriented toward the future (big word for the universe unfolding as it should in one great act of giving birth and w/no small amount of moaning and groaning). IOW, the Incarnation was God’s longing to be One with us and creation from the start = at-ONE-ment as opposed to the view of penal substitutionary atonement.

2) It is not heterodox to believe that Hell is an indispensable “theoretical” construct if only to serve the purpose of ensuring that no one would ever be coerced into a relationship with God but that for all “practical” purposes His love will be utterly efficacious and appealing. IOW, God respects our freedom which is an indispensable element in any authentic love relationship.

3) Finally, there is a difference between universalism and what is otherwise known as an inclusivistic Christianity, which believes that nonbelievers and nonChristians can be saved and that God’s Spirit has a salvific effect even in other traditions. What McLaren advocates is that folks should abandon their ecclesiocentric exclusivisms (big word for thinking that the Spirit only operates in their church).

So, McLaren is in line w/Scotus & Franciscans re: the purpose of atonement, w/early church fathers re: probability of universal salvation and w/inclusivistic versions of Christianity. None of this is heterodox, for example, in Roman or Anglican Catholicism or w/ the Orthodox or mainline progressive Protestantism.

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See my story: Christian Nonduality – Postmodern Conservative Catholic Pentecostal

John Sobert Sylvest will not be tweeting, blogging or FB peeping this Lent but will be checking e-mail infrequently. Have a holy time ✝ See you at Sonrise ☼

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Emerson said that God arrives when the half-gods depart. Dennett has spent recent years tilting at the windmills of half-gods and imagines himself as Don Quixote. The fact of the matter is that I am largely in agreement with Dennett in that ALL of the gods he’s been dispatching are not worthy of anyone’s belief.

To some extent, it is a matter of two ships passing in the night. We all inhabit elaborate tautologies wherein our syllogistic conclusions are often hidden in the very terms we employ in our premises. So, the first problem will always be the proper disambiguation of terms.

If we do employ the same terms, then I think believers must concede that science, philosophy and culture, without religion, can realize truth, beauty and goodness in abundance, even. (At least this is a fundamental premise of anyone who holds a radically incarnational view. Life is good. Living a good and moral life is transparent to human reason.) So, it is not like religion even introduces a new horizon of concern vis a vis values. Values are already in place. Science, then, is descriptive. Philosophy is normative. Culture is evaluative.

Religion introduces a question re: truth, beauty and goodness. Even abundance. That question is: Might there be more? Might there be superabundance? Then, in an effort to augment these values, it amplifies the epistemic and existential risks we have already taken (such as in our falsifiable science, provisional closures in philosophy) by venturing forth to further wager with faith, hope and love. We then cash out the pragmatic value of these wagers by seeing if we have indeed fostered human growth: intellectually, affectively, morally, socio-politically and religiously.

There is no question that the life of religious faith, hope and love is riskier. That’s why it is called FAITH and HOPE. No one is being intellectually dishonest, here. No one is claiming that the Object of our worship can be empirically measured, logically demonstrated or practically proved. We are not saying that our cosmology of descriptive science, normative philosophy or evaluative culture differs one iota from Dennett’s such that WHAT we see when we engage reality is going to be any different. (If someone put a gun to my head, I’d say consciousness is an emergent phenomenon vis a vis a nonreductive physicalism. But I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep if it were wholly reductive. My bets are on a physicalist account of the soul but, if it ended up being a radically Cartesian dualism, it wouldn’t bother me a bit.)

We do say that HOW we see this cosmology through an axiology, or via our religious interpretive axis, does differ when we imagine that reality has more in store than meets the eye and when we participate together with others in this imaginative vision. While we don’t adjudicate our claims, finally, evidentially, it doesn’t mean there is no evidence. While we do not demonstrate them conclusively, rationally, it doesn’t mean that we have no good reasons.

Dennett will point out that all of this behavior has adaptive significance. Who would not disagree with this rather trivial grasp of the obvious?

His tautology quits processing reality at this point. No problem.

Ours does not.

He might invoke Occam’s Razor. But one can only wield that weapon when one has already achieved explanatory adequacy and is choosing between two equally good explanations. Last time I checked, we have no Theory of Everything and, furthermore, it has just recently dawned on Hawking what others of us have known for decades, which is that Godel-like constraints (incompleteness theorems) will apply to any and all closed formal symbol systems aspiring to a TOE. It is, ergo, a stalemate.

The only enduring question where the 4 Horsemen are concerned is whether or not they are familiar with the work of Judith Martin?!?

There is a fundamental misunderstanding if anyone thinks people like Phil, Jack Haught, Joe Bracken et al are making religion look scientific or are conflating the autonomous methodologies of science and theology. What they are doing is what is called a Theology of Nature which begins within the faith. It is very much akin to St. Francis’ hymns to nature and to the parables of nature found in scripture even though it is employing analogies and metaphors that are derived from the theory of evolution, speculative cosmology and the heuristic of emergence, for example. In this regard, they are not only not doing science, they are not even doing philosophy or what might be considered a natural theology.

When these gentlemen do begin within philosophy, a natural philosophy or natural theology, their excursion is brief and for the purpose of disambiguating concepts, clarifying categories, formulating arguments or, in other words, framing up valid questions, which we might consider to be reality’s “limit questions.” They do not then aspire to answer these questions such as through formal syllogistic reasoning as if there could be proofs for God’s existence or final explanations for reality. All a philosophy of nature demonstrates is the reasonableness of our limit questions, questions which cohere with our ultimate concerns.

Contrastingly, this is precisely where Dennett et al go astray in that they do claim to have answered such limit questions and to have eliminated the ultimate as a matter of concern. In doing so, it is Dennett who has conflated the otherwise autonomous methods of science and philosophy in what is known as a scientism, a label Dawkins apparently accepts but which Dennett claims is but a caricature of his naturalism, which is not philosophical but, rather, methodological (or so he protested to Jack Haught, when they last debated). This leaves a question left begging, however, for Dennett, which is that – if he is truly a methodological naturalist, then, – doesn’t that mean that, vis a vis reality’s limit questions, he must either remain, in principle, agnostic or otherwise transparently admit that his position, at bottom, is essentially one of faith, which is what Phil would also admit?

The only thing that Dennett will typically counter is that he goes no further than his empirical science and rationalist philosophy warrant, which he manifestly has!

What he must admit is that his is a type of faith, too, and that it is warranted. He might also claim that his position has more warrant than that of a believer in God. And our counter might be that our stance, epistemically, is indeed riskier, but that, existentially, this amplification of risks has huge rewards in terms of augmented human values; this value-augmentation is, itself, truth-indicative. And we must reassert, here, that our stance does not refer to the caricatures of belief that Dennett habitually engages as strawgods.

And thus would commence a whole other debate regarding the nature of justification and warrant.

But I doubt seriously Dennett can escape the tautology he’s trapped in, which ironically, is the same mindset that snares his fundamentalist counterparts. By conflating philosophy and science, both the religious fundamentalists and Enlightenment fundamentalists are committing HUGE category errors and, ergo, represent the obverse sides of the same epistemic coin — fideism and scientism — neither which has a purchase on reality.

Most of all, I really feel sorry for their poor horses …

Their riders are giving horse manure a bad name.

Below is a relevant Tweet Archive:

pdclayton7

Okay, so a New Atheist and a Christian Theologian walk into a bar… thoughts on the Tues. debate with Dan Dennett at http://ow.ly/17mNf 8:49 PM Feb 14th

@pdclayton7 Dennett told Jack Haught he’s NOT scientistic but a methodological naturalist. He’s agnostic, not atheistic, re: cosmic origins? 10:31 PM Feb 12th from web in reply to pdclayton7

@pdclayton7 Wim Drees’ critique http://bit.ly/9vy00P keeps gods out of gaps, which is fine; but doesn’t it validate our limit questions? 11:28 PM Feb 12th from web in reply to pdclayton7

@pdclayton7 Does Dennett lose sleep b/c Popperian falsification & solipsism are not falsifiable or b/c logical positivism is incoherent? 11:32 PM Feb 12th from web in reply to pdclayton7

@pdclayton7 re: God, world’s BRIGHTest philosophers tender Scottish verdict = unproven & not dis/proved. Do Dan’s peers think he’s bright? 11:36 PM Feb 12th from web in reply to pdclayton7

@Cathlimergent — Thanks for the great suggestions — I’ll keep you posted! — Philip

Below is a bibliography I put together the first time I lost interest in Dan Dennett’s work. Click below to continue >>>

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I will cut to the chase, folks. I’ve read most everything Brian McLaren’s written. Most recently, A New Kind of Christianity. And, while I don’t go looking for them, it’s hard to ignore McLaren’s detractors, whose chief complaint has been that, when it comes to Christianity, he’s not just coloring outside the lines, he’s actually making stuff up!

Now, being very familiar with his body of work and having slowly discerned just what this so-called heretic has been up to, I’m afraid the problem with McLaren is really worse than one might first imagine. It seems that few of his critics are even remotely aware of a rather disturbing pattern in his writings, speeches and blogging, a pattern that most egregiously rises to the surface in his answering of the Ten Questions that are Transforming the Faith, which is the subtitle of A New Kind of Christianity.

The not so plain fact of the matter is that Brian McLaren manifestly ain’t making all this stuff up. I say “not so plain” because, even when I tell you what’s really going on, I’m going to have to rather carefully make my case below. The plain deal is, gentle reader, that McLaren ain’t fabricating a danged thang. He stole all this stuff!

You heard me right. This ain’t McLaren’s work.

Now, I can already imagine what you Emergent loyalists are thinking and can even empathize with how you must feel. I’ve been there before. My Sweet Lord! It was 1976. No, this ain’t no exclamation invoking God in vain. I’m talking, rather, about the first solo Beatles single to hit number one. George Harrison wrote My Sweet Lord in December 1969. A US District Court judge in New York ruled in 1976 that Harrison had subconsciously infringed on the copyright of The Chiffons, who had recorded He’s So Fine. So, that’s all I’m saying about McLaren. While he didn’t manufacture his version of Christianity out of thin air, as his detractors claim, it is quite possible that he lifted a good bit of his material, some mindfully, some inadvertently, straight out of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Fortunately, for McLaren, no royalties are due because the Holy Spirit doesn’t go around charging folks with copyright infringements. If no one picked up on this before, well, that’s likely due to the fact that much of the material that McLaren has, shall we say, re-articulated, is found in the more esoteric (not to be confused with heterodox) aspects of the tradition.

Further below, I commence a rather rigorous and technical analysis of the McLaren case. Before I do that, let me direct you to some materials that are much more accessible and intended for a general audience. Click on the link, below, to access 20 Good Online Resources to Help You Understand Brian McLaren’s new book: A New Kind of Christianity —>

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