[Draft as of 2016/10/03. Hoping for publication on Internet before end of 2016.]
Human being isn’t merely quantifiable but many components or aspects of human being are quantifiable. Other components are more describable by the term `qualitative’, but this shouldn’t be taken as connoting `irrational’ or `mystical’. Our understanding of the qualitative aspects of being, human and other, should be as orderly as our understanding of the quantitative aspects of being.
If the above be true, how are we to see our human beings as unified, even if only in principle. Are the quantitative and the qualitative to be “the new dualism”? Some Medieval Scholastics rejected the concept of `soul’ or `mind’ because it’s not clear if it be at all possible to unite two different sorts of substances to make a single human being. Aquinas took a different route and posited a mind as described by Hannah Arendt thus:
My soul [in Thomas the organ for thought] is not I; and if only souls are saved, I am not saved, nor is any man. [From the Commentary to 1 Corinthians 15 by St. Thomas Aquinas as quoted by Hannah Arendt in The Life of the Mind, page 43.]
In other words, the Thomistic soul (or mind), said by Hannah Arendt to be something you would not wish to be, was a non-human entity attached to a human being as a cochlear implant is attached. You could almost joke Aquinas was the first prophet of cyborgs. It was clear that all that was human to Aquinas was enfleshed, embodied. This made sense given Aquinas’ difficulty in seeing how the `inert’ matter of the brain could engage in conceptual thought. We know now much more.
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The matter of the brain, indeed all matter, is a very dynamic sort of stuff, a partially frozen form of energy which constantly interacts with hotter forms of stuff, hot energy and fields.
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The brain is the result of evolutionary and developmental processes of a complex and sometimes nasty sort.
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The entire universe is the result of a variety of processes which can be roughly and accurately classified as evolutionary and developmental.
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Matter forms, in some sense, by what has been described as a collapse of a quantum wavefunction.
This last item is disturbing, even if the term `collapse’ is rejected as some philosophers and scientists recommend. How can matter be made from some form of being describable as a `wavefunction’, a mathematical equation?
Thinking in usefully simplistic terms: Existing theories of gravity combine space and time into a single structure of spacetime in which time is added as a fourth dimension to the three-dimensional Euclidean structure of space. Then we find that space and time can be deformed by interactions with matter describable in terms of the quantum mechanical wavefunction. Yet, many physicists and at least some others who think deeply on these matters are convinced that all this can be combined into some sort of unified theory of physical stuff or theory of truly everything for those willing to define everything as what can be described in terms of physics. All sorts of entities of different stuff and even non-stuff are combined in an as-yet unconstructed grand—or perhaps grandiose—theory of `everything’ or TOE\@. This may well prove to be a scientific version of the mistake often made by generals and politicians: preparing to fight the previous war. Those physicists see TOE as a culmination of the extraordinarily successful efforts to construct a standard model of physical particles and most of the forces between those particles, but gravity has remained resistant to such efforts.
In any case, I’ve proposed a principle in past writings: Being is being is…
I’ve shortened the principle for poetic reasons; being in that claim is actually “created being”. The whole issue of God’s being is immensely complex for intelligent discussions by atheologians as well as Christian and Jewish theologians. (Although, I do think a limited but intelligent sort of conversation can be held on the basis of a simple faith or lack of faith.)
I think this created being stuff and non-stuff alike can be tied together into a coherent understanding by way of modern mathematics which has developed some powerful tools which are useful in dealing with various concrete situations, engineering and scientific, and can also be used for understanding quantitative and qualitative aspects of what I call abstract being—the non-stuff, or at least non-thing stuff, of modern algebra and topology and category theory and so on, as well as the non-thing stuff of moral character or soul or some aspects of mind and just the general feeling of order and goodness which often emanates from what lies around us. Can we somehow use these tools to provide an understanding of human being which gives proper room and respect to the various aspects of human being, qualitative and quantitative, individual and communal? I think so and am writing this book as an experiment of sorts.
Will I be providing some hi-tech answer to the question, “What is a human being?” No.
Will I be providing even a tentative model of human being which allows prediction of the future or at least accurate and precise modeling of the past? No.
I will be drawing upon some basic ideas from mostly differential geometry and topology in this book to provide a set of concepts and words which allow us, in one important case, to discuss human being as a coherent entity with quantitative and qualitative parts and aspects. I have tentative plans for future books which will use algebra and other mathematical fields to improve my discussions by further enriching and complexifying my understanding of created being. Those books might well be written by some younger thinkers with greater knowledge of modern mathematics than I have.