Acts of Being

I’m still contemplating a few issues raised or brought back to memory by my recent reading of The Meaning of Truth by William James. The ideas of William James put pressure upon my own ideas, a form of updated Thomism, just because he knew how to respect empirical reality without being a reductionist but also, mistakenly in my opinion, without being willing to posit a world of which his empirically observed things and relationships are a part. So it is that I’ve returned to vague thoughts about that precise subject of mathematics. Can we make up a large number simply by writing down some symbolic representation and inventing a name for it? Is it meaningful?

The name googol started as a whimsy of sorts: it’s defined as (10^100) or a 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. It was part of an educational effort, the discussion of the difference between very large and infinite. In that context, the meaningless number acquired a good enough meaning to justify its use. More reasonably, large numbers might fall out of proofs involving questions such as: at what point do prime numbers become as common as they theoretically should be? (In the range of small and readily accessible numbers, prime numbers are too sparse according to number theory.) Large numbers can also fall out of calculations such as time and quantum state calculations involving a number of particles similar to the number believed to exist in our universe.

Some sort of objectivity in naming a large number or writing it out in symbols seems to be required if only for intelligent discussion with other human beings. Otherwise, pure whimsy in the realm of numbers and other matters of cognitive substance could turn certain discussions into playground arguments: “Yeah, well I’ll take your number and multiply it by a million and my number’s a lot bigger.”

I think there has to be some sort of operational meaning to a large number, such as the above example where very large numbers sometimes pop out naturally in various sorts of proofs or explorations in number theory or explorations in theoretical physics. Very large numbers can also arise in studies of computer science and cryptography. An interesting example of large numbers arising in the theory of recursive functions, very important in mathematics and computer science, is the Ackermann function which rapidly produces numbers which are very large by a remarkably simple calculation. The power of this function to generate large numbers is somewhat surprising and has been explored a bit in various modified forms. A reader with even a casual interest can read a little more in the way of background in this article on large numbers.

I return to the more general issue of truth having an experienceable nature as William James claimed in The Meaning of Truth and I discussed in a recent essay, What Can Be Experienced?. This is the issue: if truth is experienceable, if it must have some sort of operational meaning for human beings to grasp it, does sanity require boundaries on our imaginations? I’m most certainly not reducing truth to an operational form, but I am saying that human beings need something to grab hold of for any sort of truth to be such in our sorts of minds. Our minds are relationships and need to have a true relationship to even a number for it to reside in these minds. Put in other terms, we can understand the functional relationships which recursively generate very large numbers even though the sizes of those numbers are far beyond the size of our minds. In a similar way, we can understand entities too complex to hold in our minds, such as a non-symmetric black-hole or a human community or a strand of DNA in a plague bacterium. We can also understand things which don’t happen to exist but maybe could exist in another plausible universe or in our universe if it had developed differently.

We can even picture a Jabberwock, at least with the help of the artist Sir John Tenniel. Though that poem was no more, and no less, than a wonderful piece of whimsy, the strange creatures and even the meaningless words have some meaning to us. They can be experienced in a meaningful way, but maybe words which `fit’ but have no meaning are little different from a large number created by simply piling up exponents? In response, we could point out that many long extinct creatures, and a few discovered deep in the ocean, are as strange and as nasty as the Jabberwock as imagined by Lewis Carroll and his many readers.

That nonsense poem about the non-existent beast began as a different sort of nonsense poem, a parody of sorts:

Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry

Twas bryllyg, and ye slythy toves
Did gyre and gymble in ye wabe:
All mimsy were ye borogoves;
And ye mome raths outgrabe.

It was apparently written to poke a little fun at the efforts of modern English-speakers to read older versions of their own language. It is historically-grounded whimsy, not an effort to shape something allegedly new by using some selected facts of human history to invent some nightmare world, such as a bar in which we can watch the interaction of races which evolved on different star systems and yet can easily communicate, heck! — they can eat the same foods and drink the same intoxicating liquors.

So, can we simply string together exponents: 10^(10^(10^(…))) and call it a number? Can we simply make up other universes or entire infinities of other universes?

There seem to be two requirements to establish the legitimacy of efforts of whimsy, fantasizing or invention if you will. The first is that, like the `Anglo-Saxon Poetry’ of Lewis Carroll, it has to be plausible in some way, even if just by archaic appearance or sound. The second is that it has to be experienceable in some meaningful way, not a way that is fundamentally dishonest. Incompetence in both content and execution should be eliminated, will be eliminated by time alone. Schlock of the sort dominant in science-fiction — there are a few worthwhile works in those piles of strange and smelly things — will prove to be ephemeral in its appeal since it stands in some dreamworld of one generation and not in some objectively accessible understanding of historical and scientific reality.

I don’t think we can simply string together exponents: 10^(10^(10^(…))) and call it a number. Some sort of operational meaning is required.

I don’t think we can simply make up other universes or entire infinities of other universes. Some sort of grounding in historical reality is required.

There are other streams of events which might have occurred in our universe and there are other possible universes, but we have to imaginatively work from the one universe we can directly perceive and explore. Our thoughts about universes and their various narrative streams: astrophysical or biological or historical, should be plausible in light of what we can perceive and explore.

The various confusions about proper use of the human imagination do little harm in mathematics and other fields of science as currently defined because of the forms of disciplined peer-review which tend to dominate, if imperfectly so. This could change. Even mathematics could lose its fortifications against irrationality, as we modern men settle down in that state of barbarian childhood seen and foreseen nearly a century ago by Jose Ortega Y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses which dealt with the failure of the masses of peasants and their urban equivalent to grow into the greater realms of civilization opened to them in the modern era. Ortega was actually most upset by the failure of the cultural and social elites to teach those liberated peoples, to help them to integrate themselves into the civilization of Moses and Plato and St. Paul and Dante and so forth rather than simply becoming part of a mass of consumers and seekers of forms of entertainment appealing to our raw animal desires. In fact, those elites have themselves sunk to that low level of cultural and spiritual vulgarity.

I’ll make one final point about an inconsistency in the thoughts of many fans of so-called science-fiction and fantasy. A book or movie can be criticized for taking too much imaginative liberty with the facts and strongly established theories of physics and chemistry and most other fields, though a great deal of liberty is allowed in the realm of biology. Almost complete liberty is allowed to differ with the human nature we know mostly through history even in this age of neurobiology. History teaches some harsh lessons about the political and social and moral aspects of human nature, the only rational nature we know about. Science-fiction often seems to imagine, in what I’d call a diseased manner, that the developmental and evolutionary processes of this universe could be projected ahead so that we can imagine the sort of creature which could be peaceful in a way which is in contradiction to the nature of such a universe.

We could speak in Christian or Darwinian terms, or even mixed terms as I often do, but it’s hard to sanely imagine a world shaped by evolution being peaceful or orderly in the way we often desire and some think possible to realize just because they desire it and think they can imagine that peaceful world so that it can be realized despite the nasty lessons of human history. This is a mistake being made by not just science-fiction fans but by many Christians including prominent leaders.

I’m currently reading some histories of the ancient world and one lesson of those histories is the tendency of multicultural civilizations to break down into wars of one group against each other even for relatively trivial reasons. The Greeks were a homogeneous people and the Greek colonists in Italy who were descended from Corinthians couldn’t live in peace with Greek colonists in Italy from the island of Samos, but neither could the parent-polities in Greece live in peace. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to form a multicultural society which is peaceful over the long-term but to merely preach that peoples from a variety of alien races can automatically get along so long as they go along with the (undescribed) program is morally irresponsible and intellectually empty. A desirable goal, that of a human race where each loves the other and all groups can co-exist next to each other, isn’t an intelligent plan of action, especially when that goal is probably unreachable in this mortal realm. We should remember the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas about the intentionality which forms human moral nature and, hence, human communities. Intention isn’t some subjective desire or motivation or goal, but rather a growth process, more often than not a slow and sometimes painful growth process.

We should be careful and morally responsible in our use of our imaginations and never assume that our imaginations correspond to reality. In Human Moral Nature: An Overview, I discuss my understanding of the proper way to form abstractions and proper use of imagination is an integral part of this way. Part of that essay presents a sketch of an imaginative journey from the concrete reality of an apish physical creature up into more abstract regions of being where moral paths and Einsteinian spacetime paths are the same sort of entity. This is one way to define proper use of the imagination, you can stray from what has been concretely realized but you must stay in the domain of what is possible when considering the abstract stuff from which that concreteness has been shaped. We must also consider the evolutionary and developmental processes by which that abstract stuff is shaped into concrete things and relationships, including creatures with community lives.

To act as if something is possible just because you can string together words describing some sort of alleged good, can be morally irresponsible. Even to act as if the possible can be directly realized — and by late this afternoon — is just as morally irresponsible.

Respect for empirical knowledge doesn’t determine if one believes or disbelieves in God, though it has generally forced any believers, pagan and pantheist and Christians and others, to see a God of reason. After all, the very term `empirical knowledge’ is meaningful only if it refers to something, some realm of being subject to perception and analysis, which is rational.

To Einstein and perhaps Aristotle, the terms `God’ or `the Old One’ or the like, refer to a seemingly impersonal principle of reason which can be seen in the consistent properties of things and the order and partial predictability of events in this universe or cosmos or whatever. To some such as William Paley and many more recent thinkers, reason necessarily implies the existence of a God with at least some of the characteristics of personhood and some, maybe complete, transcendence to this universe which is His Creation or maybe part of a greater Creation. I feel some sympathy for Paley’s belief that examination of the order found in the natural world is a sign of a Creator but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s nearly a proof in the modern sense, though it might be a proof in the older sense of being a test of coherence, perhaps a test of whether the human mind can make sense of the existence of a God like the God of Jesus Christ. Now, there is a trend for more some more serious scientists, such as Stephen Hawking and some young physicists who blog on the Internet, to make more explicit the belief of Einstein and — maybe — Aristotle that being is self-sustaining and divinity is a name for the order or rationality to be found in that being. Divinity is what brings stuff into some rational order but it’s part of the same realm of being as stuff rather than being transcendent to it.

While we can’t really prove in the modern sense that a Creator exists by examining contingent forms of being such as the stuff of our bodies and the stars of our universe, we can prove it in that older sense, that is, we can test the hypothesis that we can view this universe as a Creation and do so in a way that’s coherent, reasonable, and perhaps convincing in a way that considers the forms of reason which we include as emotions and feelings. Unfortunately to those who wish to score quick victories for God in their debates, that sort of proof is meaningless in the context of a discussion between those holding radically different sorts of beliefs or disbeliefs.

I’ve mentioned “emotions and feelings” not to toss them aside but rather to bring them into our forms of discussion about beliefs as being truly parts of our reasoning processes, part of our rationality. Most human thinkers tend to downgrade emotions and feelings, thinking them to be non-rational when it would appear likely they are part of a greater rationality. See Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain and Looking for Spinoza by Antonio Damasio for discussions of the true nature of human thought, emotions, and feelings and some reasons why emotions and feelings are part of a greater form of human thinking in which reason often plays the dominant role but not always. You can also check out Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World by Gerd Gigerenzer who has shown that we sometimes see irrationality in human thought and behavior because we don’t properly understand the contexts in which human thinking evolved and is still quite effective. For example, the idea that human beings can’t handle probabilistic reasoning is based on tests using the abstractions of percentages when human reasoning evolved to handle frequencies, not 30% but 3 out of 10. I think this implies, consistent with the speculations of Professor Damasio, that emotions and feelings are, at least in part, efficient encodings of the empirical experience of the racial experience of human beings and human ancestors. This isn’t to reduce emotions and feelings to being defective forms of rationality but rather to see them as some sort of deep, racial intellect: a capitalized and communal form of intelligence shaped over millions of years of experience.

This makes for a perfect mess, implying that what we call `reason’ is probably a mutilated and amputated form of a more total form of reasoning which considers vast amounts of empirical experience which has fed into our simple common-sense and also our fanciest theories of mathematics and physics. In fact, Professor Damasio considers these sorts of issues, including their impact on our theological beliefs, in Looking for Spinoza.

Let me confuse matters a little more — I would hope this is a useful and fruitful sort of confusion. I’ll mention another claim regarding our beliefs or disbeliefs about God and their relationship to empirical knowledge. In The Perfectibility of Man, John Passmore, made the quite plausible claim that an all-powerful God can be invoked to explain any possible world. I think this to be true at the level of physics but not at the level of narrative, a distinction of being which I’ve used often but I haven’t been able to find a truly clear way to speak of that distinction succinctly or perhaps even clearly. Please bear with me while I try to pull some strands of thoughts together in a quite preliminary way that is very interesting to me.

I don’t think we can prove God exists by assuming that the order we find in our universe must be a result of design in the way of a human engineer or architect or administrator. I also don’t think it makes much sense when those modern scientists argue that the self-ordering nature of certain physical processes tell us a Creator isn’t necessary.

We can return to the older understanding of prove, to test for coherence. In particular, I would suggest the proper test for a theology or an atheology is: does that system of belief or disbelief combine with empirical knowledge in such a way that the result is a coherent understanding of our experience of our environments as understood by fairly basic understandings. In other words, there is a bootstrapping of sorts which can be seen as necessary by the historical fact that our body of concepts and our other cognitive and narrative tools has increased greatly, at an especially rapid rate in recent centuries. I’ll quickly mention that there might be forms of belief in which there is a radical separation between God and Creation but those lie outside of the mainstream of thought of Western Civilization and largely outside of the stream of any thought human beings could see as rational.

Think about the very concept and term `order’. Paley was right in his day for the same reason that theologians and others were right in conjecturing the existence of a soul to bring mere flesh to life. To my knowledge, no pre-modern thinker, certainly no one who had a major public impact, had proposed a more general understanding of `order’ which would allow for order forming because of the interactions of simple things or mere blobs of matters which engage in well-defined relationships. Darwin accomplished much because he, self-confessed as a man lacking in a talent for abstract thought, honestly confronted evidence that indicated that life had evolved by some sort of processes which are not `random’ as some would say but rather self-directed or self-ordered if we speak in terms of a `self’ which is the totality of an environment and a family line of organisms. Our understanding of such processes and the order which results have to be much broader and even much looser than Platonic or Aristotelian ideas would have it. Even St. Thomas Aquinas, properly acknowledged by some modern thinkers to be a great empirical thinker, knew only what he could in the 13th century and had a quite restricted idea of order and how it can come about. To be sure, the general principles he advocated would have forced any true Thomists to very openly and honestly examine the empirically-founded claims of Galileo and Darwin and Einstein and Heisenberg and Watson. Then they would have gotten to work developing proper concepts and words and maybe even revising grammatical structures.

It would have then been the job of an entire community of thinkers to develop what we can call a moral narrative, the foundational work of a civilization, an understanding of what-is, perhaps as a self-contained something divine in its own right or perhaps as a Creation. One of the causes of the decay of the West is the emptiness at the heart of the West, a lack of a purposeful and morally well-ordered understanding of the world, however `world’ is defined. There are some of us who would argue that Western Civilization was its dynamic and forward-moving self just because the traditional Christian understanding of Creation is a narrative centered around the incarnation of the Son of God. In my current understanding, this story is one of an evolving and developing world dedicated to the purpose of forming the Body of Christ. My understanding of this Body and the ways in which it is forming are richer and more complex than the traditional Christian views just because I’ve responded to modern empirical knowledge with its richer and more complex understanding of God’s Creation.

By a somewhat torturous route, I’ve come to the claim that our belief or disbelief in God is the result of our understanding of our world, though in practice most will inherit a greater or lesser understanding from parents or teachers or clergymen rather than developing it on their own. Moreover, I’ve claimed this understanding has to be a story because we are ourselves participants in streams of events, some of which are recorded in books or family stories. The failure, conscious or unconscious, to form a narrative of our lives and the surrounding world will likely result in either disbelief or perhaps a radical and desperate spiritual conversion of a sort which might not result in a rational form of belief.

Now I can return to alleged proofs of the existence or non-existence of God. They aren’t set, and couldn’t possibly be set, in the context of some raw experience of reality. Those proofs are set in a developing or developed understanding of the world, perhaps as a self-sustaining entity or perhaps as a Creation. Most discussions or debates involving mixtures of disbelief and belief will be incoherent because everyone will bring his or her own understanding of the world and then make points from inside of that world. It would make sense if those discussions or debates involved respectful efforts to explore the various understandings rather than engaging in logical analysis, from a stance inside one world, of a dogma existing inside another world. If such discussions or debates could be held more often, then the various sides could not only learn about each other’s understandings of what-is but perhaps learn from each other. I’m constantly amazed by discoveries of the sheer richness and complexity of this world, and though myself a Christian, I’ve found my understanding of the world as part of a Creation to be enriched regularly by insights from non-believers or those struggling with their partial loss of belief.

Empirical knowledge as such, or a proper appreciation of its importance, doesn’t force us to belief or disbelief in any divinity, let alone the God of Jesus Christ. However, any sane human being has to use his empirical knowledge to understand what-is and that understanding will be intertwined with any belief or disbelief. Each will support the other. In a time of rapid change in empirical knowledge, it will be a dynamic dance of sorts rather than a static relationship.

The problem we currently have is we modern men of the West haven’t yet properly integrated empirical knowledge into our various systems of thought. Our discussions have decayed into incoherence. We talk past each other or yell at each other rather than sharing insights and trying to understand each other.

Many thinkers in history, philosophers and others, have imagined they could deal with moral issues by conjecturing a small set of sharply formed assumptions, perhaps a set of virtues which were said to be the building blocks of human moral character. Christians should have known better because the fundamental doctrine of moderate realism, similar to an empirical version of Aristotelian common-sense, tells us that any valid abstractions are drawn from what exists, thing-like being and its various immaterial aspects such as relationships between multiple things.

In line with some earlier thinkers, including Augustine of Hippo, I’ve claimed that virtues and vices can be useful but problems arise such as the unfortunate fact that virtues and vices are differently shaped versions of the same human traits. For example, lust — even of the type leading to rape, is a deformed version of the sexual attraction which is natural and good, which is a foundation of marital relationships and the forming of families.

We need to seriously examine our towering piles of modern empirical knowledge about human beings and other creatures, especially other social creatures, and to figure out a better way to describe and analyze our moral characters. I would expect a good deal of overlap with the descriptions and analyses of virtues and vices to be found in traditional works of moral philosophy and moral theology and political science and so forth. I would also expect some surprises as profound as those which came with the realization that Maxwell’s equations describing electromagnetism didn’t obey the principles of Galilean/Newtonian relativity. That led to Einstein’s proposals which were fully developed into Special Relativity by his subsequent efforts as well as those of a few other mathematicians and physicists. Mass and velocity and acceleration remained as valid descriptive elements but there were some important changes in our understanding of these elements, especially under extreme conditions which Galileo and Newton couldn’t have explored. In a similar way, modern life with its technology as well as the sheer mass and variety of human life, has produced extreme social and political and economic conditions. I would expect these profound surprises about human moral nature to produce understandings which simplify to substantially the earlier understandings under simpler conditions but to produce the true surprises under the extreme conditions which are quite common in our time.

In a recent article, we learn of some work showing that Not All Altruism Is Alike, Says New Study.

Not all acts of altruism are alike, says a new study. From bees and wasps that die defending their nests, to elephants that cooperate to care for young, a new mathematical model pinpoints the environmental conditions that favor one form of altruism over another.

The model predicts that creatures will help each other in different ways depending on whether key resources such as food and habitat are scarce or abundant, say researchers from Indiana University and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina.

There is one complication which seems obvious in retrospect:

For example, some creatures cooperate for the sake of defense, others to find food, and others to care for young, [Michael Wade, a professor at Indiana University and a visiting scholar at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center] explained.

There are some interesting ideas to be explored in this field, some of which may have practical implications for politics, charity work, family life, and who knows what else.

Often do I quote the historian Carrol Quigley:

The truth emerges in time through a communal process.

This is true of truths manifested in purely empirical ways and also of the allegedly grander truths of metaphysics. In fact, a truer and more humble metaphysics would recognize the truths which emerge as men explore empirical reality. A grand and absolute truth may not be so grand nor so absolute if it conflicts with a humble fact drawn from study of creaturely nature.

What do you do with a frozen soul? You could lick it because, speaking in general terms, a Popsicle is as much a piece of frozen soul as a human being is. And so are rattlesnakes and monkeys and rocks hurtling through space. You can also saw frozen soul, beginning the process of making a house for sparrows. That leads to the insight that you can hammer a spike of frozen soul driving it straight so boards of frozen soul are held in place.

Some chunks of soul are less frozen than others. Some are described well by quantum mechanics as being some sort of strange vapor which might condense into a liquid or ice with any of a variety of properties and locations. Frozen soul also interacts with spacetime in ways that make the entire topic still stranger from the viewpoint of embodied creatures who detect something else in their own selves and, perhaps, a lesser something in other sorts of created beings. We’re surrounded by vagueness and strangeness, abstractions and soul-stuff, when we try to understand the more fundamental stuff from which ordinary or concrete stuff was shaped. Stranger and stranger and stranger, surpassed only by outright weirdness.

When God chose to create, He manifested certain truths — perhaps an infinite number of truths — as the raw stuff of Creation. How do I know this? I don’t. I’m speculating, working up a plausible story based upon the evolutionary and developmental nature of this universe as modern empirical knowledge would have it, history and Biblical exegesis as well as physics and biology. I don’t wish to either greatly qualify or excessively constrain any view of the `truth’ value of these great mounds of empirical knowledge, themselves not well-explored in true scientific, that is — systematic, ways. This body of knowledge, partly digested and occasionally plundered and wrongfully exploited by ideologists, is the best knowledge we have outside of a very small body of truths revealed to us — but even those truths were and are revealed through the eyes and ears and brains of the embodied creatures which we human beings are, and ultimately that process of revelation is describable in the terms I’m explaining in this essay.

The intellectual enemies of religious believers and also of some skeptics who believe in something more than this material stuff aren’t those who acknowledge the importance and goodness of matter and physical energy but rather those who talk in such terms but litter their talk with reductionistic words such as `just’ or `only’, most especially when those words are implied rather than stated explicitly. We should remember that many who claimed to be believers in a Creator-God have also spoken in such reductionistic terms of matter while claiming to believe in some sort of a higher world. I’ll leave that thought hanging and go on to deal with the totality of things and relationships and events in this universe. That totality implies a greater scope to created being than does any sort of reductionism. We start with what we can see and touch and explore, but soon enough realize that even the most vulgar entities in this universe show that evidence of something not reducible to pig-flesh nor granite nor ionized hydrogen gas. Something so simple as a journey to somewhere tells us the road, dirt and rock or asphalt, is more than `just’ a road made of one or more of those forms of matter. That journey also tells us the traveler is `more’ than a slave to his genes, more than a `mere’ product of evolutionary forces, biological and cultural, more than even a `mere’ product of his personal development. As the road is that road-stuff but more, so the traveler is his genetic-stuff and his soma-stuff but more. He is a product of various developmental and evolutionary processes. All that stuff and all those processes are more than `mere’, more than `just’.

Extrapolating backward in time is nearly as foolish an endeavor as extrapolating forward in time, but some good can come from it, some ability to understand at least some aspects of Creation and to maybe anticipate potential opportunities or problems. This sort of foolishness can be great fun but it’s also necessary for the founding of a civilization, an activity perhaps possible to conscious intention for the first time in history. We live in an age of not only heightened self-awareness but also an historical self-consciousness which renders some modern communities minded in the way that individuals first became minded at some time during the development of the human race — I’ve conjectured this had happened about the half a millennium before the birth of Christ in some of my writings because of the sudden appearance, or at least sudden recording, of self-aware and abstract reasoning in several regions — Greece and India and Israel and China and perhaps others.

In any case, some modern men have minds allowing for an understanding of abstract forms of being and also events which must be seen as abstract such as the one we refer to as the Big Bang. I call this an abstract event for the simple reason that it left behind some concrete evidence of what happened, but the event itself occurred before mass and energy had settled down to a state where human observation, by way of sight or hearing or touch, could have happened even in principle. Electromagnetic energy was bound up with other sorts of entities in such a way as to exclude even a hypothetical vision of the events in the first few hundreds of thousands of years after that Big Bang.

If we imaginatively travel backward in time toward that Big Bang, we see mass and energy melt down towards strange states which I interpret as being more abstract versions of the various sorts of mass and energy. For example, weak nuclear energy and electromagnetic energy melt into a form of energy labeled `electroweak’. This doesn’t happen because of some approach to a mysterious creation-event but rather because of a compression into a tiny region or, more or less equivalently, because of an unimaginably high temperature. What compresses? What turns up the burner?

Let’s first think of the process in temporal order, from the Big Bang forward. The `stuff’ of this universe expanded out of that very tiny region in an event which can be described as explosive though it was not like an explosion that shatters a seam of coal in a mine-tunnel. It was an explosion in which our spacetime were shaped into a particular form and then participated along with the more palpable stuff which are more particular or more concrete forms of being. That change of state was a great expansion or, equivalently, a cooling down. I often speak in terms of a freezing of more abstract forms of being. I’m only somewhat joking when I say instead: a freezing of soul or soul-stuff. I think this sort of abstract being was the intuited state of created being which was the point of discussions of `soul’ or even `mind’ by the more clearheaded thinkers of ancient and Medieval and modern times. We, and all the other entities of this universe, are shaped from this abstract being, this soul-stuff, but it’s still with us, part of us, as clay is still part of the bricks of our houses and walls.

In fact, we can view the Big Bang as a change of state at least analogically similar to the explosive weather events which occur when warm, moist air moves up the slope of a mountainside and water begins to cool so that the moisture condenses in the form of rain and/or snow.

As I see it, that change of state during the Big Bang was from a more abstract form of being, let’s call it vapor in warm air, into a more concrete form of being, let’s call it condensed water or even ice-crystals. So it is that I say that concrete stuff, water or ice-crystals, is frozen soul, vapor or water in a highly energized state of being. We human beings are frozen from the same soul-stuff as the most humble entities in this universe but we are in a form that makes us capable of exploring Creation, of struggling toward an understanding, even — in principle — of encapsulating in our own being the acts of our Maker in shaping the created being of our universe and of all Creation. Each human being, however humble, is born a potential image of his Maker and can become a better image by actively responding to the opportunities and problems which he encounters when living his humble life.

I’ve written about evidence that we like to live and work with those similar to ourselves, though there is still some substantial uncertainty about the mixture of culture and genes in the understanding of “similar to ourselves.” I’ve also written of my strong belief that this world, our universe seen in light of God’s purposes, is the story of the formation of the Body of Christ. As I see it, that Body is Christ’s brothers and sisters, similar to ourselves and dissimilar, united in an image of the truest community; as God is Father and Son and Holy Spirit in one God, so the Body of Christ will be a multitude of human beings, including the human nature of the Son of God, united in that one Body. In this sort of community, each person or Person retains their individuality while sharing fully in communal acts and thoughts and feelings.

Okay, so that taken care of, there is some more evidence coming in that we can detect those who are genetically similar to us and prefer to cooperate with those most similar to us. In this article, Genetic Similarity Promotes Cooperation: Study of Simple Organisms Reveals Preference for Those Who Resemble Themselves, we read:

In a dog-eat-dog world of ruthless competition and ‘survival of the fittest,’ new research from the University of Leicester reveals that individuals are genetically programmed to work together and cooperate with those who most resemble themselves.

A tendency for similar individuals to cooperate selectively with one another, even if they are not close relatives, can evolve spontaneously in simple organisms. This may help to explain why cooperation is so widespread in nature, the study suggests.

The modern world has had much in the way of education programs and other efforts to suppress that inborn tendency of organisms which evolve under conditions of cooperation so that they cooperate best with those similar to their own selves. I suspect there are a variety of very complex genetic and epigenetic mechanisms to further strengthen this tendency in social animals, such as wolves and men, and those mechanisms would be scattered across a variety of loosely linked genes, hormonal and other biochemical responses of egg-laying or live-bearing mothers, and perhaps other aspects of our reproducing selves. I might claim there has been an ongoing effort by those who have exaggerated our individualistic characteristics, the Liberals — both the intellectually coherent Classical Liberals and the somewhat scatterbrained and improvisational Collectivist Liberals, to suppress such tendencies, nativist or exclusionary or whatever term you wish to use.

At my other blog, no longer active but still existing, I wrote about this issue with regard to the work of a scholar, Robert Putnam, who deals more with the cultural aspects of human social life, though the genetic and cultural aspects aren’t really fully separable, to say the least. In Networks of Public Spaces Rather Than One Square, I wrote back in 2007:

There’s been a buzz of sorts on parts of the Internet because of a major study written by a pro-diversity liberal, Professor Robert Putnam of Harvard. That study indicates there are some serious problems with diversity. He thinks, or maybe hopes, those problems to be of a short-term nature. There might be other ways than a simple choice between a cosmopolitanism that melts down local communities or at least renders them ineffective and a return to tribalism.

There’s an overview article on Putnam’s study at The Downside of Diversity. The article begins:

“It has become increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

“But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for Bowling Alone, his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogeneous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

“`The extent of the effect is shocking,’ says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.

“[Michael Jonas, Boston Globe, as published in International Herald Tribune on August 5, 2007]”

It’s not healthy, not in moral nor emotional nor mental terms, to try to fix reality by overriding it. We should be trying to form that Body of Christ, the greater and most inclusive possible human community, by being honest about our instincts and moving on to broaden the scope of our ways of thinking and our ways of acting, not by overriding instincts which are good in a limited way. The overriding of instincts which are good but too limited is more likely to end in moral confusion or even outright moral disorder.

We have to learn how to work towards changes which will take place over generations rather than rushing into rapid reforms within the scope of some 5-year plan of either a Socialist or Collectivist Liberal bureaucrat. Modern do-gooders tend to be a lot like those Californians of the common jokes, somewhat bubble-headed and “wanting it all and wanting it now.” The problem we now face is that objective developments in history and misdirected human efforts have done a lot of damage to the human communities in which our better behaviors and thoughts can develop so that we cooperate well with those like us, leaving open that possibility of expanding the scope of those better behaviors and thoughts. We’ve done damage even to our instincts to do good in limited communal contexts in our self-righteous efforts to mold everyone to be good to everyone.

Math is hard, Barbie, and that goes for you too, Ken. It’s hard like tennis or basketball or baseball, requiring hours of hard work on basic skills when you really have little clue how those skills will really be used. When you have the basic skills of arithmetic or of fielding and throwing the ball, then you learn how to handle symbols in a manner analogous to numbers or you learn how to turn the corner at second-base or how to position yourself for the rebound.

There are many in these United States of American who put in many an hour of practice duffing away before approaching a round of golf at par. There are many who teach their children of the need to work at those skills of skating and slapping away at pucks. There are even some, slightly old-fashioned, who see that Junior practices his latest chord before heading to his next guitar lesson and see that Missie hammers away at the animal-friendly plastic keys on her electronic musical device each every day.

We leave mathematics to the professionals and the best of parents will rarely do more than make sure Junior is getting good grades on his exams and Missie is doing her homework. We leave it to those professionals to set the standards, to decide what Junior should be learning as a freshman and Missie as a junior. My own experience, even during a slightly better period in American education, taught me — eventually — that we’re leaving some important issues to the care of some who themselves never aspired beyond the duffer stage, beyond the stage of banging out Chopsticks. This article tells us my experience might be typical for American students. There are countries which do better: Countries That Best Prepare Math Teachers Share Similarities: Several Key Conditions Generally Lacking in US.

The article tells us:

Countries that best prepare math teachers meet several key conditions generally lacking in the United States, according to the first international study of what teacher preparation programs are able to accomplish.

The IEA study, led by Michigan State University, suggests that in countries such as Taiwan and Singapore, future math teachers are better prepared because the students get rigorous math instruction in high school; university teacher-preparation programs are highly selective and demanding; and the teaching profession is attractive, with excellent pay, benefits and job security.

The key word is `rigorous’. Math is hard, but — as I’ve noted before — so are any subjects when approached properly. Rigorous is painful for a people trained to be the passive victims of canned entertainment or to consider work to be something which can be done according to a short checklist developed by some bureaucracy.

Our English departments in the American school systems aren’t in much better shape than our mathematics departments, perhaps a little better just because we’re generally born with more language skills than mathematics skills and a highly motivated man or woman will find it easier to acquire higher level skills in the nature of composition and textual analysis just by frequenting their local library or the college library even if their formal education was weak. However, just as a talented teenaged furniture maker needs to learn higher levels of skills and discipline from a master, a lover of language also needs to learn from a master to be a truly skilled and self-aware practitioner, at least at a level adequate to serious teaching — we will, of course, always need a lot of teachers who concentrate on rudimentary skills but that sort of teaching can work only if teachers of all levels of skill have a good respect for rigor and are in a system and a culture which also has that good respect.

It’s easier to motivate ourselves in fields where we generally start out with some decent level of talent. We can almost all throw a rock at a target or a ball in the direction of our father as he teaches us some athletic skills. Some of us, certainly not me, have enough coordination of limbs and of eye-hand movements to be able to advance so quickly that learning to play ball can be fun for years of development rather than a chore. Any serious athlete will tell you that even the great ones reach the point where they have to participate in special strength and skill exercises to continue to advance or to maintain very high levels of skill.

In a similar vein, many of us can more or less naturally acquire enough visual skills and enough oral language skills to become at least somewhat literate. Some have great facility with various aspects of language so that learning to recite poetry or write simple poetry or learning how to read serious narrative works is fun for many years of development. Then comes the day when you have to struggle to wrap your mind around the book of Genesis or a poem by Shakespeare or the writings of Thomas Jefferson. Back to the practice field.

One of the problems with mathematics is that there aren’t that many who naturally develop any serious skills and I learned, by experience and years of contemplation upon experience, that most educational systems — certainly the one in my hometown — have not the slightest clue how to nurture even a raw talent such as I had, high-level but not at the level of a truly creative research mathematician. I would have probably become a physicist or engineer but for learning how to hate college after going there poorly prepared in habits and attitude — I’d been able to stay even more securely in my comfort zone than most and went to college as a couch potato of sorts. When I, as a boy, had needed to learn how to work, how to learn and think rigorously, I had been encouraged by the educational system, as well as American culture in general, to stay within my comfort zone, to sit and get good grades by sleeping through class and then browsing the material in study-hall.

I realize there are a multitude of good books out there I’ll never so much as open but sometimes I feel an urge to re-read a particularly good book. So it is that I’ve picked up The House of Intellect copyrighted by Jacques Barzun in 1959. In the first essay, he makes a nice distinction between intelligence and intellect. He draws his specific examples from the United States but is speaking of the entire modern West when he says, on page 4: “Intellect is despised and neglected.” But he’ll tell us on that same page:

We [in the United States] have in fact intelligence in plenty and we use it perhaps more widely than other nations, for we apply it with praiseworthy innocence to parts of life elsewhere ruled by custom or routine. [page 4]

Professor Barzun has his take on a problem similar to one I’ve discussed in some essays, though my terms are different, being those of a Thomism updated to consider modern empirical knowledge. Barzun is perhaps the prime example of a well-educated and highly cultured academic who was born at the end of a period of creative ferment which is hard to even grasp and who lived through a period of consolidation of that creativity which seems to have prematurely turned to a period of decay and increasing moral disorder.

Near the bottom of that same page 4 so dense in insight, Barzun tells us:

Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion—a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter in hand.

Ah, now we see. Barzun is in the tradition of the mainstream of Christian thought in the West. He would probably agree with Quigley’s claim that “Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.” He might disagree with some of the terms because Christian thought, despite the misunderstanding of most historians and most philosophers, theologians, etc., isn’t a specific metaphysical viewpoint in the sense of having a pre-existing schema to used to understand what’s out there. It’s an empirical viewpoint, a baby metaphysics of sorts which can grow so long as we don’t deform it with the oddly shaped clothing of Platonism or Neoplatonism or Kantianism or British Empiricism or Liberalism (in political and economic domains). Creation is the word of a God who works with power and wisdom and freedom. He created what He wished to create and He can bring us along so that this Creation unfolds to our viewpoint in a variety of ways. To have any chance of understanding reality, we need to suspend unconfirmed aspects of our personal or inherited beliefs in the nature of the being which we observe in the pretty little girl growing toward womanhood or the star imploding into a black hole. We need to study what is, to contemplate its meaning, and to make sense of it in terms available to us, terms developed by prior generations supplemented by our discoveries and insights. In theory, past generations could have headed in the wrong direction and we’d then likely be in a position where it would take some number of generations to make it back to the proper path, the proper understanding of God’s work which is Creation.

The understanding of Creation which we start out with is that intellect of which Barzun speaks, “the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence.” I think that there are diseases which can affect intellect, the capitalized intelligence of some significant community, which are similar to diseases of the individual and his intelligence, such as schizophrenia and various sorts of distortions to perceptions. A healthy intellect, however imperfect it proves to be in some ways, however incomplete it necessarily is, gives us an understanding of our world and a corresponding understanding of the meaning of the created all. An immature intellect can leave us with a distorted understanding of Creation and the corresponding lives not meaningful beyond the animal level. We could then say that we would have diseased intellects.

As Barzun has noted, there is plenty of active intelligence in the modern world. It’s pretty common for me to be in strange conversations with men and sometimes women who have shown good moral order in the ways they’ve led their lives, holding down responsible jobs and maybe responsible positions in a parish or a town government or other public organization. They reason pretty well, I must admit, but they come to strange conclusions about the various messes in southwestern Asia or in our relationships with Russia or the current problems between church (or Church) and state (or Union in Lincoln’s idolatrous terms). I sneaked in that last parenthetical expression to exhibit an idea which may or may not be partially or fully true but it isn’t likely to come to anyone who hasn’t read any works in some particularly important lines of dissident thought in these United States of America.

I’ve read revisionist historians of various sorts, the Southern Agrarian viewpoint being a bit raw but still my favorite but I’ve also done some reading in the Old-Right tradition and the more straightforward libertarian tradition, various leftist traditions and some thinkers who draw from various specific traditions. What’s important is the fact that all of these thinkers were serious and morally well-ordered men and women, drawing themselves upon the traditions of (mostly) the West. Works of historical and cultural criticism are one good food for building up intellect, as are works of poetry and fictional narratives, of science and mathematics, of philosophy and gardening. Good books, good apprenticeship programs — even if just in the form of going into the fields as a friend of a master birdwatcher, provide the stuff of intellect but also the habits and customary usages of that stuff. It teaches us how to identify good wood but also how to make a roll-top desk from it.

As I said, I also often find myself in strange conversations with my fellow-Americans where they pronounce, as if experts on the topic, and then draw conclusions which would be reasonable if what they think they knew were true. The Internet, and maybe a good history or even travel book from the local library would raise the level of their intellects to a level more appropriate to the high level of their intelligence. It would take serious effort for even most Americans with higher degrees to raise their intellects to a level appropriate to the decisions we’ve already made by allowing self-serving scoundrels to control our government and the tremendous firepower of our military.

There are a number of military and intelligence professionals, some are both, who will testify to the rationality and even reasonableness of the Iranians and some will testify to the corruption of American foreign policy to suit the purposes of American domestic politics. American political operatives have made many collateral corpses in Iraq to win elections and now threaten to make Iran glow in the dark because those Iranians can’t be trusted with nuclear weapons, but those American political operators also seem intelligent enough, sometimes even giving some hints of moral intelligence, but only in a very limited sphere, the sphere of individual actors.

As a country, we’ve utterly failed to develop an intellect, that is a morally well-ordered understanding of our world. We don’t really even seem to have done much to take the small, educational steps of developing a rational understanding of our relationships to Mexico or Cuba or even Canada. We’re too smart and too proud to admit we’re poorly educated adolescents — at best. In the sense of individual intelligence, we’re as smart as we think we are, but we’re pretty dumb and very ignorant in the sense of that intellect, that capitalized and communal intelligence, so important to being morally responsible members of these modern communities, so large and complex.

We’ve created those large and complex communities in various realms of human life, political and economic and cultural, but those communities are poorly founded — which is, at least for this discussion, the same as saying we haven’t developed any understanding, any intellect or communal and capitalized intelligence adequate to the tasks of running such complex communities.

I’m finishing up with that profound and profoundly frustrating work by William James, The Meaning of Truth. He claims:

It is between the idea and the object that the truth-relation is to be sought and it involves both terms. [page 165]

No, but, once again, his error carries more insight than the truest thoughts of many serious thinkers, perhaps most. He conjectures that truth lies seen in some sort of blurry space between idea and object. Blur there is, but it’s a blur around and inside that object.

There are no disembodied ideas. There are no disembodied truths accessible to human beings. The same idea can, usually will, arise from more than one object. A multitude of objects can be shaped from the same truths.

Before going on, I’ll make an apology of sorts to William James. He was so dedicated to a sort of agnosticism of religious and metaphysical beliefs that he was prone to not following up on his own insights but it would have been hard for a sane thinker — prior to the forced acceptance of quantum theory and the theories of relativity and the theory of transfinite numbers — to have thought of things and time and space as being shaped from abstractions, hard to have thought of the human mind as being an encapsulation of the world, in those early years of the recent explosive growth of empirical knowledge and of the abstract knowledge drawn from, feeding into, and overlapping with that empirical knowledge. It’s possible that the ancient Pythagoreans had some insights into this possibility but, if so, they quickly and prematurely concretized their insights into some sort of dogmatic and cultic form. Even, or perhaps especially, those of us who think God, or the gods, to have given us special revelations have to be careful to keep our understanding of empirical reality connected to but distinct from those revelations. Those, including likely Einstein, whose one God is Created Being itself, will naturally and legitimately intermingle any revelations and empirical knowledge.

Modern physics has probed thing-like being to find hints of ever-smaller things and also hints of the totality of concrete being we call the universe. For the most part, what they’ve found has been a sort of being eerily similar to the things we can see and touch but different in a way that hints quite strongly of abstraction, of being that’s not quite this or that until specific concrete relationships are formed at the proper level. Similar comments can be made about a number of fields in mathematics.

That should be obscure enough for most inclined to metaphysical thought and I’ll turn to critiquing the language used by James in the above quote.

An idea, in the sense of something formed in the human brain, isn’t something which exists independent of created being. It’s an approximation to some aspect of either abstract or concrete being. I’m pretty sure that James knew this and nearly as sure that he was trying to get at that point but by way of a reaching out into a space of sorts found between the thinker and the object. In this way of thinking, mostly the right way to think when a concrete being grapples with abstractions: an idea of a circle is an approximation of some abstract relationship captured in the various definitions of a circle, a line formed by points equidistant from a single point and now seen as a formalism or abstraction of that relationship. An idea of a tree is an approximation to some very complex relationships between family lines of organisms which are now seem as parts of narratives explored by evolutionary biologists. And so there are some very complex entanglements of abstractions out there in our world.

William James most certainly didn’t think that either truths or ideas exist independently of objects or at least of objective being. Unlike me, he didn’t even seem to accept truths transcendent to empirical reality, though transmitted through that empirical reality. He may have known that those objects, being involved in more or less continuous acts, are entwined in streams of activity which we can roughly label as narrations even before we deal with purpose or with a morally purposeful Creator or morally purposeful actors or observers. Ideas are human approximations to the `truer’, or at least more abstract, nature of objects and of narrative actions, but even the most abstract of ideas are entangled in narrative streams. This is one of the strange lessons of the modern exploration of some very deep abstractions: no matter how abstract and useless a mathematician intends his work, some computer scientist or particle physicist will find a concrete application.

Perhaps William James should have said:

It is inside the object, often very deep inside the object, but also around the object, that the idea is to be found which is an approximation to truth. A human creature can only see the truth in the entanglement of object, the human ideas related to that object, and some prior understanding of the truths from which that object was shaped.

At least that’s what I would say, though it would be nice if I could find a more elegant expression. The careful reader will note I’ve complicated matters a little by adding in a touch of what might be called `Bayesian blending’, but don’t worry about that because it’s another way of talking about nurturing and reforming our intellectual inheritance and also our own minds as they grow and mature. But here’s an additional claim which might help to clarify what I mean:

Traditional Realisms or — equivalently — Idealisms have erred in seeing that things and something-like-idea have not fully independent being but even the sublime Plato himself made the mistake of confusing ideas and truths.

I’ve written several times about my opinion that William James held back from the full implications of his teachings or, at least, held back from a viewpoint that would have led him to a plausible conjecture of some sort of fullness of knowledge, however impossible the complete realization of that full knowledge. James saw how a human mind could build up from empirical knowledge to greater structures of knowledge but he shied away from any speculations that this process was one of growing into a world, a process of shaping the mind to encapsulate not just some bottom-up views but an entire world or even an entire Creation.

I agree with the Jamesian pragmatists that we learn about reality by studying reality and building theories from what we can perceive. Our behaviors are formed by, our concepts derived from, thing-like being and from the actions and relationships we can examine in that concrete form of being. I’ve written about going beyond this in terms of understanding the nature of created being, but I’m interested now in the understanding of how it is that a human creature learns from what is around it.

In The Meaning of Truth, William James gives us a rather strong hint of a general viewpoint:

Total conflux of the mind with the reality would be the absolute limit of truth, there could be no better or more satisfying knowledge than that. [page 156]

The 1913 Webster tells us a conflux is “a flowing together; a meeting of currents.” This leads us at least a little astray and, to make my points, I’ll assume that William James intended (in the full Thomistic sense) the error I’ll attribute to him. It would seem he took the mind as something pre-existing its activity, the mind as something pre-existing its responses to reality and its movements in light of those responses. Somehow it exists independently of reality so that it can come together with that reality. By being filled with proper knowledge? Maybe the mind could be envisioned as a pre-existing lump of clay upon which reality makes impressions of greater or lesser clarity and sharpness? There is at least something to this since there are, in a manner of speaking, three layers to the human mind:

1. the species level which has come into being over many generations by processes described by biological evolutionary theories,
2. the social/cultural level which is the result of human communities shaping their thinking- and doing-traditions over some number of generations, and
3. the individual level which is the result of an individual actively shaping his thinking and doing to his environments.

The first item comes to exist by normal biological development, being damaged mostly if the particular human being passes through a window of opportunity without the proper stimuli or with suppression of active responses. An example of such a window is the period during which the human language centers of the brain must be developed or else that human being won’t be able to use language in a human manner.

The second item is largely what came to be during the rise of human cultures and, most importantly for modern men, during the rise of those complex communities we call `civilizations’.

The third item can be taken naively as the raw smarts of a human being. This can be dangerous as I believe Americans are showing because powerful minds can exist as poorly formed and barely socialized. This leads to Americans engaging in rational thought about, say, the situation in Afghanistan without having learned a bit from our greater knowledge of that bloodied country and, even on the part of seemingly devout Christians, without having bothered to have learned a bit about general history or about Christian teachings on war and politics. Don’t rely on the writings of current Christian leaders or their advisers — these creatures are as intelligently ignorant as most Americans are. In other words, active and capable American minds typically work in a vacuum, making up a view of the world and then analyzing that view along with a small scattering of facts and producing the solution for similar problems in a similar, but non-existent, world.

So, what is the mind which comes into conflux with reality, which flows along with reality? I’ve given simple answers in my past writings because my beliefs lead me to try to deal with being first, however inadequate my mind was for doing such. Now I’m starting to ponder better descriptions. But I’m not yet read to settle on much. I’ll move on and say that I’ll start to explore better possibilities in the rest of this essay and I’ve got some other essays started which might lead to better answers than I’ve given in my writings so far. And I will say the answer I’ll arrive at when my work is done will undoubtedly be a little bit of a surprise to me though not as much as the better answers of yet unborn thinkers.

To be able to move on, I’ll return for now to writing in a more naive mode as I address the comment of William James, more explicitly sympathetic to the problems he had in speaking about something where his intuition seemed to be outrunning his explicit knowledge.

A mind isn’t shaped from some raw stuff which could be labeled as mind-stuff. Then again, there are structures in the human brain which give rise to functional abilities and inclinations and which can be spoken about in an as-if manner. Our human ability to learn language looks to be language-stuff inside our skull. The problem with some as-if language is that it leads to a reification of function to be turned into stuff which can then be etherealized once it’s proven that there is no physical mind-stuff, only a bunch of neurons which develop into structures rather than being a set of given structures at birth or conception or whatever. Different thinkers can stop at different points on this journey or even travel this sort of path in different order. The point is that all such journeys lead away from reality, from the empirical world and the totality of Creation in which the world is embedded.

Our brains have some serious amount of structure and a lot of developmental inclinations because of what happened over the past few billion years on earth.

The human brain gave rise to mind, as I use the term. In an upcoming essay, I’ll discuss an insight by Jacques Barzun who uses the term, `mind’, in a more general way, reminiscent to me of Neoplatonic ideas, which makes sense in the general flow of Western thought. I won’t be changing my usage, though I’m not totally opposed to that other way of using `mind’; after all, I consider all created being, including abstract being, to be manifested thoughts of God. We could talk about all of Creation as being a part of God’s mind, but that sort of talk, while possibly useful, can lead to pantheism, to the total identification of God with Creation.

In any case, we can see how useful it is to talk as if there are chunks of clay in the human mind, such as it is, at birth. And there are rocks not to be reshaped though perhaps to be ground to dust. And there’s at least one other sort of non-stuff, though it’s arises from the activity of the human brain as it interacts with, responds to, its entire body and all that lies around it. That other, more mysterious non-stuff becomes more obvious, though no more visible, when that human being speaks and thinks complex concepts, when it tells stories and invents poetry which is sometimes a story and sometimes not. That non-stuff gets us closer to true mind as a useful concept.

The world is the stuff and non-stuff of a story which includes a huge number of characters and subplots, a huge number of props and settings. By `non-stuff’, I mean immaterial aspects such as relationships though those are still mediated through physical means. Other creatures, including human beings of lesser awareness such as children and those with damaged or poorly developed minds, act their roles as characters in these narratives and thus act as-if they had minds, but those aren’t really signs of a true mind, an imitation of the divine thoughts which are manifested in created being. They are the manifested thoughts, the created being, acting according to their nature, a nature given them by the Creator by way of acts-of-being.

I hope to be able to say all of this better in my upcoming essays, but I’ve got to work things out in the way Fred Astaire himself might have moved with some grace but not much obvious purpose as he began to choreograph a new routine with his brain and his feet.

Physics and biology and history and other fields of empirical research and analysis work at two levels. They help us to learn about the stuff of our own human natures and of all other creaturely natures, those of stars and rattlesnakes and electromagnetic fields. They also help us to understand the movements of our own selves and our environments and the entire universe through time, that is, they help us to sketch out a variety of narratives.

There’s a lot more to be said about the nature of being, concrete and abstract, which goes beyond the understanding of concrete being in its thing-like manifestations, but that’s well beyond the scope of this essay. I’ve written about some of that lot-more before and might one day write various overviews. In fact, I’ve made some good progress in writing an overview about the nature of the human mind but even that won’t be finished and published for at least 6 months.

To return to William James: its a little surprising, given his own literary bent and that of other members of his family, that he seems to have shied away from thinking up into the story levels of greater parts of the universe, let alone Creation. And that is the more neutral way to describe this world: this universe seen as a true narrative. A narrative gives us a moral ordering of some sort, however much some narratives might repel us. In my Christian way of viewing this world, it’s but a part of Creation, a part we can label concrete. This concreteness isn’t for its own sake. Rocks and rabbits don’t exist as mere objects. These concrete entities, things and living creatures, are part of stories which are in turn part of a complex narrative, a huge story being told by God. Relationships are primary and relationships in this universe are dynamic and lead to a huge variety and far huger number of stories.

Stuff and its fundamental physical relationships exist to participate in various stories or, rather, the stories are relationships and shape the raw stuff of this universe so entities arise to play roles in those stories. Even in an amoral or pre-moral way of speaking, that is the purpose of stuff and its relationships because, after all, that’s what stuff does, though imperfectly and transiently. The purpose of life is survival, though survival is ultimately defined differently for an elk, for a virtuous pagan believing this world to be all there is, and for a Christian who believes in a greater Creation which includes the possibility of surviving on the other side of the grave. Survival of the fittest, never-ending memories (in some sense) of the most noble, survival of those best able to share the life of God. Human beings survive, or fail to, in these various senses and probably others.

There’s much to be done in this area and I don’t claim to have done much more than point in the general direction of some possibilities. I’d like to develop some ways of talking about stuff and relationships and how stories develop when relationships, primary in being, create stuff, secondary but still essential to our existence, and events start popping up, often to our surprise. This is very important because those all important relationships which carry moral import lead to these stories but then further develop within these stories. When we’ve reached this narrative level, we’re in Darwin’s territory (and eventually that of Homer and Moses and the Evangelists) rather than that of Einstein, though it has to be conceded that Einstein’s work has been very useful in describing a physical universe which develops in the way of a strange story rather than being some mechanical development of given and unchanging objects.

As I’ve noted before in Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality, Einstein himself was inclined to see objects as existing independently of their relationships, capable of engaging in relationships but not being changed by them. Bohr saw more clearly and was the one who was closer to the ways of thought of Christian tradition — see Until We Know What Truth and Freedom Are, We Should Be More Modest In Our Claims for an overview of those traditions.

We need ways of talking about stuff and relationships, those coming from those realms of raw being also those secondary relationships which develop in relatively more concrete realms of being and which include what we would recognize as moral relationships. William James provided his followers with part of the vocabulary and concepts necessary to engage in such discussions but neither he, nor any of his disciples I know about, have moved on to engage in philosophical or scientific versions of the discussions that the other James brother, Henry, put into the form of moral fictions.

The best possible human knowledge shouldn’t be viewed as William James did as a free-standing human mind learning to flow along with created being. A proper human mind is the physical human being as an encapsulation of this world and that requires us to encapsulate also the abstract realms of being from which things are shaped. Our minds come into being as manifestations of that perfect knowledge which James wrote about. Our minds are not entities which exist apart from that knowledge and somehow acquire it by coming together with the things of this universe.

If William James had been willing to conjecture a world, he could have seen this.

In The End of the Twentieth Century, the Hungarian-American — and Catholic — historian John Lukacs points out:

[A]t the end of the twentieth century, many people respect religion as well as science, together; but the respect is faint. (This has to do with the fact that we have descended to a stage lower than hypocrisy, the problem being no longer the difference between what people say and what they believe; now the difference seems to be between what people think they believe and what they really believe.) [page 224]

I’d agree heartily and even add that there are many who think themselves to be Christians, Catholic or otherwise, because of a formal adherence to what we might label `Biblical teachings’ while their more deeply held beliefs seem to be paganistic, perhaps a regression toward the baptized form of paganism the Church tolerated, maybe unwisely, during the centuries of bringing the Good News of Christ to the European peoples. I think Professor Lukacs was speaking more of another group, those who have fallen into weak, liberalized forms of Christianity — Unitarians at Mass in a manner of speaking, but I think most Christians willing to publicly call themselves such are pagans, moving along with the herd as Christianity is repaganized. Given the strong religious instincts of human beings and the laziness leading to the acceptance of easily understood ideas, I suspect the repaganized Christians will soon be dominant over atheists, unitarians, and also Christians who adhere to a coherent set of beliefs.

As I see things, a coherent form of Christianity necessarily is allied with that family of philosophical beliefs we can call `moderate realism’. This is the belief that we live in a Creation and we learn about that Creation and about any absolute or transcendental truths not divinely revealed by “examining God’s creatures” in the profound words of St. Thomas Aquinas in his commentary on 1 Corinthians. Even God’s own revelations are given to a human being by way of physical environments and the sensory organs which deal with those environments. As soon as we bring our favored absolute beliefs, immune from any empirical evidence, to the task of understanding God’s Creation, we have fallen away from that foundation of Christian belief — moderate realism.

Earlier in The End of the Twentieth Century, Professor Lukacs had stated we need to give up Darwinism if we are to recover our faith in the uniqueness and value of human life. I think he was talking about Darwinism as an ideology rather than a scientific theory. (I personally don’t feel any worse for being descended from an apish creature than I would for being descended from a man shaped from the slime of the earth.) Even at that, I think he was a little off because I think the repaganized Christians are the greater danger to the Church and to the Western Civilization built by earlier generations of Christians. Those repaganized Christians tend rather strongly to be anti-Darwinist and often anti-science, though they do tend to like technology. They also tend to pick up their understanding of history from rather strange attempts to literalistically understand the Bible or from the words of strange seers who have visions of the Mother of God or maybe visions of Satan. They don’t tend towards hardheaded understandings of the books given to us by prophets who seem to have been blessed as God’s interpreters of the Almighty’s acts in human history: Isaiah and Jeremiah. I guess those prophets didn’t pay enough respect to the powers of angels and demons. In any case, I don’t value highly the human nature which those repaganized Christians would defend.

Amongst those who have turned parts of modern science into ideologies, there are many who would blur the distinction between those two radically different sets of beliefs labeled as `Darwinism’, confusing the words of a biologist who is an aggressive proselyte of atheism with a hardheaded evolutionary theorist who might hold any religious or anti-religious beliefs, but he holds them in abeyance during his working hours as a biologist. This isn’t because there’s a true wall between God and His Creation. It is because human beings are specialists and need to work together as members of communities, right up to those complex communities we know as civilizations. Most biologists shouldn’t try to be amateur metaphysicians or theologians and most metaphysicians and theologians should accept mainstream scientific ideas, cleansed of obvious corruptions by those who can work in both fields.

Our Christian beliefs, at least in that tradition of moderate realism as developed by St. Paul through St. Augustine and on through St. Thomas Aquinas, teach a trust in God as Creator, a willingness to accept what God has accomplished as Creator and has given to us. We ignore what is contained in the best of modern science, history, literature, and other fields of empirical knowledge at the peril of turning away from He who shaped us from a line of apish primates and He who — as Isaiah and Jeremiah taught us — is the driving force of our lives and the events of our communities. (Note that God is Subject even when grammatically an object.) God is God even when His Creation involves volcanoes and man-eating tigers and genocidal madmen. We retreat from the appropriately honest understandings of Creation only by — at the very least — compromising our faith in an all-powerful God. We seek to justify a belief in a gentler God, one who tried to do well if only Satan hadn’t (temporarily) conquered Creation, only by giving up the core of our Christian beliefs. We might profess a strong faith but we hold a severely compromised form of Christian faith, either unitarian or neo-paganistic.