Saturday, February 23rd
The Alpha and the Omega
Yesterday I made a list of "events" in time from an evolutionary point of view. Now I would like to make a similar list of events from a Judeo/Christian/Islamic point of view:
5. The Omega emerged (or will emerge) from Woman (or something else)
4. Woman emerged from Man
3. Man emerged from the Land
2. The Land emerged from the Deep
1. The Deep emerged from The Alpha
These events are, in fundamentalist theologies, held to be miraculous, outside the natural progression of history. Thus they can be taken to be a creationist account of history, as opposed to an evolutionary account of history. It is worth noting that although we think of the creationist view as embodying a single creative act, this is most definitely not the case. All creationists within the major monotheistic faiths believe in at least the five steps I have outlined above. 1-4 are taken (I believe without my personal prejudice) from the Old Testament, and Jews and Christians (and I'm pretty sure Muslims) agree on them. 5, as can be discerned from my awkward wording, is a point of contention. Christians believe that the Omega is the same as the Alpha in the person of Jesus, the Messiah. Jews are divided into two types: Messianic Jews who believe The Omega is yet to emerge in the person of the Messiah, and other Jews hold that the Omega is the new world that God will establish in the future. Muslims believe that The Omega was the Koran.
All this theology is really a side issue to the fact that for my purposes I'm going to borrow the Alpha/Omega concept (which comes from the book of Revelation in the New Testament) to "complete" my list from the previous day:
9. The Omega Element will evolve from Free Will
8. Free will evolved from Determinism
7. Determinism evolved from the Mind
6. The Mind evolved from the Body
5. The Body evolved from Life
4. Life evolved from Material
3. Material evolved from Space
2. Space evolved from Time
1. Time evolved from The Alpha Element
In the evolutionary view, this list of nine apparently discrete events in the Space/Time continuum are essentially arbitrary. The only reason I chose them is that they seem very interesting to me, and I suspect they are very interesting to other people. There are problems that are more than theoretical about where to draw lines in a continual evolutionary spectrum. Recent (the last 100 years or so) physics suggests that such lines really can be drawn and the "space" between these lines are called "quanta." At this point I'm getting into an area that I know virtually nothing about, so I'd better leave it at that. Suffice it to say that these "lines" are so close together that we can say that evolution as a physical reality is so gradual that it can't really be "seen," any more than anybody can see a quark or an atom.
Before I go on to discuss my evolutionary list, I just want to point out that one can take items 1-6 on the evolutionary list and correspond them to the creationist list. Items 1-3 can be compacted into "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." (This, as we will see, leads to a problem that can be called the "The Beginning/God problem".) Items 4-6 can be compacted into "And the man became a living being." Unfortunately for fundamentalist theologians, but happily for the philosophers, items 7-9 don't seem to correspond to anything concrete in the Biblical account.
Theist believe that they know the name of The Alpha: His/Her/Its name is God. Although I don't understand why, based on Genesis 1:1, the name of The Alpha couldn't be "The Beginning." Evolutionary materialists, on the other hand, see no reason why The Alpha needs to be capitalized, so to speak. Why can't alpha be just another step in an evolutionary chain that extends infinitely backwards? In this sense, the alpha element is always moving: in my evolutionary chain it only represents the limits of human knowledge, the next unknown step backwards from our knowledge of "the beginning time". Omega, on the other hand, represents the next step forward in our knowledge.
Thursday, February 21st
The evolution of problems
As so often happens, after I wrote yesterday's post I immediately found compelling ideas against the idea that there is, after all, no such thing as free will. There are, of course, a great many non-compelling ideas against this idea and it would help before getting to the meat of the problem to spell these out.
We can start with the mind/body problem. How can two things so different as the mind and the body have any influence on each other? One traditional way is dualism: which usually ends up saying that we just don't know, but since body and mind (or perhaps material and spirit) both obviously exist and interact. we must simply accept it. This is unsatisfying intellectually, thus most people don't find it very compelling.
Another traditional way to "solve" the problem is to say that there is a supernatural way in which they interact: God somehow "makes" them interact. I don't think most people find this very compelling any more, even people that believe in God.
If you aren't willing to invoke God or dualism to solve the mind/body problem, one thing you can say that the body (as well as the entire material universe) is really just another form or kind of mind. Historically some form of this has been tried a number of times, and such ideas come under the general heading of "idealism." Apparently some people still believe some form of this, although they seem to be pretty rare these days.
David Ray Griffin, whom I alluded to yesterday, claims to have solved the mind/body problem in a position he calls "panexperientialism." He claims that all material beings (including the mindless individual cells of our bodies) and humans share something called "experience." This is why the mind and body can interact, even though not all material beings have a mind: we share a non-physical property called "experience." Probably I am misunderstanding his point, but it seems that it just sets up a different problem: the mind-experience/mindless-experience problem.
Finally you can turn idealism on its head and say that mind is really just another form or kind of what we call the material universe. These sorts of philosophies come under the general heading of "materialism." They are becoming more and more popular as time goes by, and I suppose that I'm leaning strongly in this direction myself. The major problem that another large group of people have with materialistic philosophies (even people who are unwilling to invoke God or dualism) is that they seems to preclude free-will, since the physical universe seems so deterministic.
Yesterday I started reading Freedom Evolves by Daniel Dennet, and he offers what I thought was an ingenious idea that I believe comes closer to solving this problem: that free will is something that did not exist in the past, but evolved out of a deterministic universe. He seems to be claiming that a deterministic universe and free will are not mutually exclusive, and I will be curious to read the rest of the book to find out how he develops that idea. What is interesting for me now is that it sets up another seemingly impossible problem that could be called the Free Will/Determinist problem. This looks somewhat like the Mind/Body problem. So I'm now wondering if all these problems:
4. The Free Will/Determinist problem
3. The Mind/Body problem
2. The Life/Non living material problem
1. Non living material/God problem
have something in common. And using Dennet's idea that the idea evolution is (or should be) a permeating factor throughout all our categories of thinking makes it obvious. Each problem evolved from a preceding problem. But what pops out immediately in this list is that #1 must be phrased wrong. #1 and #2 are linked in that they have "material" in common. On the other hand the progression from 2 to 3 to 4 has no such link. So I want to propose something to take #1's place. To do this I must consider a single thing which, until very recently in history, was considered to be two completely different things. That entity is Space/Time (or Time/Space as some call it).
Why don't people speak of a Space/Time problem? In retrospect, it seems very problematic indeed for two so very different things to interact with each other. For most of human history, everybody has been de facto dualists in this regard, drawing a clear line between the three spacial dimensions and the one temporal dimension. But, very recently in history, we've learned that the two are interconnected in a way that is hard to get a mental picture of, but measurable in mathematical terms. As I understand it, most physicists now believe that both space and time came into being some 14 billion years ago in a cataclysm we know as the big bang.
But what if this is all wrong? What if, in fact space evolved from an earlier entity called time? Then our list of problems looks like this:
4. The Free Will/Determinist problem
3. The Mind/Body problem
2. The Life/Non living material problem
1. The Space/Time (or the Time/Space) problem
Let's decompose our list of evolved problems into their constituent elements:
9. ? evolved from Free Will
8. Free will evolved from Determinism
7. Determinism evolved from the Mind
6. The Mind evolved from the Body
5. The Body evolved from Life
4. Life evolved from Material
3. Material evolved from Space
2. Space evolved from Time
1. Time evolved from ?
6-8 need a little unpacking, and perhaps I will start a future blog by doing that.
Monday, February 18th
Presupposing the obvious
Back in the early days of my Christianity, I was taught that if evolution (as the historical fact believed by over 99% of geologists) were true, Christianity must be false. In those days I read with great interest The Genesis Flood by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris and became convinced that evolution was a religion or philosophy (or maybe both) that was in competition with Christianity. Then I trotted off to college.
I had to take a science course anyway, so I took Geology. I wanted to find out if Morris and Whitcomb were right about the evil evolutionists. Much to my surprise, I found out that evolution wasn't a religion at all, at least not the way it was presented in my college classrooms.
I suppose like a lot of Christians, I chose to simply ignore the problem of evolution. Looking at it was just too painful. I was aware, of course, of folks that claimed to believe in evolution and still be Christians, but my early teachers and Whitcomb and Morris had done their job too well for me to give them serious consideration.
Over the years I suppose that I just came to believe ever more strongly in evolution. With the cry "if evolution is true Christianity is false" ringing in my ears, I had to give up on Christianity. That doesn't keep me from missing it sometimes, though.
With time on my hands since I don't go to church anymore, I've been finding books to read. Perhaps not so unconsciously, I've been picking up books on evolution. I really enjoyed reading The Panda's Thumb by Stephen Jay Gould. He has a style a non-scientist can latch on to. I just finished up The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins which was a bit harder to get through. I expected it to be more philosophical than it was.
Speaking of philosophy, I've been plodding through Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts by David Ray Griffin. There seems to be something harsh about naturalism: the human mind just can't seem to latch on to it entirely. At least mine can't. I really wish that there were such a thing as spirits, whether they be gods or fairies. But on the other hand, I just can't see any evidence to believe in them. I was hoping that Griffin could actually overcome the gap as his book's title promised, but so far he isn't doing a great job. Here is his central argument:
We have ample reason, furthermore, to conclude that materialism must be false, because it cannot do justice to our hard-core commonsense assumptions about the reality, the efficacy, and the freedom of consciousness. This threefold failure, it must be stressed, means that materialism is inadequate not only for morality and religion, but also for science, because scientists, precisely in their scientific activities, presuppose all of these beliefs. No worldview can be adequate for "science" that has no room for the activities of scientists!
This of course assumes that no one will ever be able to explain consciousness in materialistic terms. Some people have already assumed this is the case and are already talking as if consciousness isn't "real", it is only an illusion that we have. This seems very strange to me, but if reflect a bit I realize it may not be so off the mark. I can better accept that there is no such thing as free will, than there is no such thing as consciousness. Perhaps this is because the idea that free will is an illusion has been around a heck of a lot longer than the idea that consciousness is an illusion.
But the main problem that I have with the quote is that Griffin doesn't explain a "scientific activity." There is certainly a gap between our scientific knowledge and our activity. Although I know perfectly well that the earth is a sphere, I completely ignore this knowledge in my day to day activities. Indeed I have to presuppose that the earth is flat. It does me no good to worry about slipping off the sides of a sphere while walking around. People assumed that the earth was flat for tens of thousands of years. It was only when they started sailing around on oceans that they had to change their "hard-core commonsense assumptions" about the shape of the earth.
Nor do I worry much about the scientific fact that objects don't have color. I know full well that a banana peel isn't "really" yellow- that this is just the way my brain processes the effects of the light bouncing off of it. I remember when I was much younger that I was really troubled to think that a collage of yellow and blue ping-pong balls would appear green if I were a sufficient distance away. Surely this couldn't make sense since there weren't "really" any green objects in the collage! But eventually I got used to the idea that colors are all in my head. That doesn't keep me from presupposing that they exist in my day to day activities.
It's not that great a leap from these examples to the idea that free will and consciousness are all in one's head. Perhaps someday someone will explain the mechanisms that produce them, in the same way we now understand how colors come about.
Thursday, February 7th
August Rush and dualism
Sunday Nancy and I saw August Rush, the story of a musical prodigy. I already knew that the critics hated it, but of course how could I, a musician, resist seeing such a movie? After having seen it, I understand the critic's reaction. But it's really all a great shame. The movie had such potential to be so great.
After seeing August Rush I actually read some of the reviews. None of them mentioned what I thought was the most interesting symbolism of the movie: the mating, literally, of classical music and popular music. The main character, August Rush, is the product of a love affair between a classical cellist and a rock star. The rock star, of course, is the male: representing strength. The classical cellist is the female: representing wisdom.
At birth August Rush is separated from his mother and is raised as an orphan. His musical prowess is evident from the fact that he hears music everywhere. This sets up the metaphysical underpinning of the story: music is everywhere, and we just have to listen. Where does the music come from? August Rush simply looks upward when asked this question.
The story of August's musical education in a nutshell is this: first he learns popular music, then classical. In short, he is the fusion of his two parents.
And the ending? He directs the composition he created while at Juliard, somehow mysteriously drawing both of his parents to him.
So the theme I found most interesting; the male/female rock/classical dualism; went completely unmentioned (and, I suppose, unnoticed) by the critics. Secondarily, I sensed a holy family theme, with August as the holy child.
Ironically, music, being sound, is essentially dualistic, being the combination of positive and negative pressure waves in the air.
|
