Coherence
(At some point in the following, you may wish to refer back to Coherence Theory.)
It is remarkable that there are knowers in the world. It is only
slightly less remarkable that there is so much for us to know.
We speak of the knowledge explosion. We speak of the mysterious
comprehensibility of the world and even of a Theory of Everything.
Did the world have to be so knowable and with so much to be known? We
are finding this coherence despite our lack of expectation that there should
be any. Is it just an illusion? Appeal is made to the
controversial Anthropic Principle and to the appearance of a cosmic design, by
way of explanation. Did the world have to be thus? Is all this
just the luck of the draw?
Appeal has also been made to the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
Nothing happens without a reason, or at least without a knowable cause.
When there is an 'accident' we try to ascertain the cause, and seek to avoid
it in the future. When there is sickness, we expect to find a toxic
agent or some malfunction.
In biology there is an almost overwhelmingly pervasive appearance of
teleology. We refer to it as teleonomy, and chalk it up to natural
selection, but there would be no biological science without it.
The still very young science of ecology finds, wherever it looks, an almost
unimaginable relational intricacy in the entire system of nature. The
web of life is a living coherence.
We find similar situations in the human sciences. Linguistic
semantics is a case in point. There was once the expectation that the
meanings of words could be analyzed or reduced to logical atoms and sense
data. After almost fifty years of failure, we realized that meaning is
holistic. This realization spelt the effective end of analytical
philosophy. The repercussions are still being felt. The end of
analysis marks the beginning of postmodernism.
Meaning holism is part of what lies behind the expanding gap between what
we know of natural and artificial intelligence.
It would seem that the very remarkable external coherence is mirrored in
the mysterious coherence and irreducibility of natural intelligence.
This could all just be an accident. But ought we not wonder about the
cause? Some see a cause in natural selection. That may be a
necessary part of it, but is it sufficient? Can it be considered a
natural, scientific cause if there are no known or knowable limits on what its
ultimate power might be. Such indefinable power and potency seems much
closer to what would reasonably be ascribed to a deity. Ascribing it to
nature is only to deify nature. Where then might one draw the line
between natural and supernatural? If there is no longer a logical
distinction, then what is the sense of calling oneself a
naturalist?
Under the aegis of naturalism, coherence is a gratuitous mystery.
With immaterialism it is a logical necessity. With materialism,
everything is alleged to be contained within a space-time receptacle.
With idealism there is no such container. Instead of a container, we
need a glue. Coherence is nothing more nor less than the cosmic
glue.
With materialism, existence is absolute, all or nothing, atoms in the
void. With immaterialism, existence can only be relative or relational.
To exist is to relate. This is just cosmic holism. We have
excellent models for this kind of existence in the holistic domains of
mathematics and language.
Is it any great surprise that the potency of nature is bursting the
arbitrary, artificial seams of materialism and naturalism? Why should
not coherence be considered perfectly natural? It is, just as soon as we
bring God into the picture. With idealism, God is the natural and
logically necessary centerpiece of its attendant coherence. Is God anti-nature? Does not human
nature reflect divine nature? Are we not each just a microcosm?
Are we unnatural?
Idealist coherence certainly violates every Fundamentalist taboo against
our relational intercourse with God. This intercourse culminates in the
ecstatic rapture of the Eschaton. One might think that this would be
right up the Fundamentalists' alley, but any expectations pertaining to
Fundamentalist rationality are wishful indeed.
This segues us to the not insubstantial matter of the Eschaton.
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I'll have to admit that the Eschaton seems to violate every intuition of
what is natural, but I'm going to argue that this is actually the fault of
Nature. Am I not digging myself into a logical hole here?
Is the Eschaton not the rupture of Nature? No, it is the rapture of
Nature.
Please recall that creation implies an act of separation between the
Creator and her Creation. The dualists are right about that. In a
relational cosmos, that separation is very unnatural. What we glibly
call 'Nature' is actually just covering the void of that most unnatural
separation. (Oh good, now I can dig myself even deeper into this
hole.) 'Evil' and ignorance are also the manifestations of the unnatural
separation of Creator and Creature. Our fallen state is the result of,
not the cause of, that separation. That was just a minor theological misconception.
The Eschaton pierces the veil of
Nature, and returns us and the cosmos to its more natural, fully relational
state. The Puritans thought of the wilderness as Godlessness, not as the
Ansel Adams Sierra Club poster, which represents mainly a postindustrial, almost
postmodern, attitude.
Does this mean that the NRA Bambi Bashers are on the side of God? I
hardly think so. But hunting is a rather primitive form of
relationalism, after all.
Are the deep ecologists going to miss the Glory Train? Hardly.
The clouds of glory that we will be rapturously streaming will significantly
comprise their
spiritual regeneration of Nature in the new Heaven and new Earth.
Admittedly this is not a role that they presently envision for themselves, but
we will all have a thing or two to learn over the next thousand years.
There will be no bit parts in that final drama.
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Is everybody happy? Am I making this too easy? Would you like
this exposition to seem more like brain surgery? Have a little
faith. We will each be presented with the appropriate challenge, right
up to our full capacity. If things seem too pedantic now, there will be
days when it will be anything but. And then again, we can always hurry
up and wait.
OK, what is our next loosest end?
[10/30]
What remains most pertinent are the loose ends of reductionism. Has
the failure of reductionism been universally accepted? I see no evidence
to the contrary; however, people are not standing on line to give their
testimonials to this failure. There has been no anti-reductionist
initiative, except in the form of pluralism. With pluralism, it is just
pre-reductionist business as usual, as if nothing had really happened.
For starters, I am advocating an overdue 'postreductionism' which is something
rather different from postmodernism.
First we must highlight the irreducibles. From whence do they
come? A minimalist irreductionist would be a conceptualist. This
would be like the alleged view of Aristotle versus Platonism. However,
as we have seen: Aristotle Gets Real, when push came
to shove, even Aristotle had to confess to a Platonic realism. What
gives?
Is there a difference between a concept and a Platonic Idea? If a
concept is irreducible then every time it comes to mind is it being created
anew, ex nihilo? This does not make sense. Certainly Occam
would not approve.
Conceptualism presupposes mind and an intercourse between minds. Can
we then revert to a nominalist explanation of this intercourse? Is the
concept disassembled in the first mind and reassembled in the next? This
is reversion to reductionism. It is hard to kick the reductionist
reflex.
The only real difference between conceptualism and Platonism is the
unwarranted positing of multiple minds. Occam disapproves. There
is scant evidence and no rationale supporting the atomic mind theory, once we
surrender the brain-mind identity thesis.
Well, there is the slight problem of personal identity with its attendant
Newtonian mechanics of the soul. I'm sympathetic with identity, but I
don't think that we must thereby revert to the atomic thesis of minds swerving
in the void. This was Leibniz' only real sin: monadology. We have
Freud to thank for the overthrow of the 'mind in the void' view. That
void became his Unconscious, and then Jung saw the logical impossibility of
attempting to quantify or enumerate the unperceivable. We are islands of
consciousness in this cosmic ocean, with partially partitioned
memories.
Only thus does even the minimalist irreductionism of conceptualism make
sense.
Show me one irreducible concept, say 'banana', and I will show you the
Cosmic Mind. It's that simple, folks. Why, in Heaven's name, have
we made this so difficult for ourselves? That's just par for Creation,
even for the best possible creation.
Given the cosmic mind, we then have less than zero need for a physical
universe. The concept of a physical, space-time universe becomes an
atavistic addendum to a failed reductionism. Get over it! Just
say, 'No'!
My Kingdom for a horse? No. My Kingdom for a banana!
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While I'm on this hobby-horse, let us reconsider those Platonic
Ideas. Again, aren't we seeing an incipient problem of the void.
Those Ideas cannot just be swerving in the void. Thus must we have recourse
to a plenum of holism and coherence. Holism might seem a rather passive
concept. Coherence is much less so. Nothing can be coherent,
absent a comprehending subject. Holism may be interpreted
objectively. Coherence has no objective measure.
We have gone one step further. You show me a 'banana', and I'll show
you the cosmic Self. The concept of 'banana' cannot exist is a
void. It can exist only in a cosmic mind that coheres upon a cosmic
Self, of which our own selves are intimate reflections or
reverberations.
Is this a leap of logic or of faith? This is hardly more than a baby
step. Consider the prolonged history of reductionism, and contemplate
the logical gymnastics and contortions that we performed, all in the avoidance
of the excruciatingly obvious. What an exercise in self-deception!
What an excursion into sophistry!
This excursion might only begin to make sense as a shadow of the
Eschaton.
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In giving up reductionism we must also give up inductionism.
(N.B. This is not to give up either reduction or induction, only to give
up their globalization.)
An irreducible entity will be left dangling on a skyhook if it is not
incorporated into a larger scheme. This larger scheme, no matter how
holistic, must have a deductive aspect. In a purely relational scheme,
the deductive process would logically proceed from the more to the less
relationally entangled nodes.
It seems that the most entangling of relations known or knowable to us is
love. Therefore, any globally deductive scheme would focus on the
concept of 'cosmic' love which in its turn would presumably be focused on the
relation of Creator and Creation. Any hypothetico-deductive scheme must
proceed from some such guesstimated origin. If you have a better guess,
feel free. One would be remiss not to note that the origination of this
particular guesstimation harkens back just about two thousand years. Too
much hypothetico-deductionizing can land one in a heap of trouble, it
seems.
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The principal version of skyhookism is 'emergentism'. Does
emergentism make any more sense than skyhookism? Well, it might if it is
considered in the context of Rupert Sheldrake's theory of Morphogenesis.
On Rupert's hypothesis, the cosmic mind is a blank slate. Evolution
writes on this slate, and the results are propagated non-locally, as the mind
is wont. Thus we have such things as the 'hundredth monkey' syndrome, or
the alleged fact that English school children can learn Japanese nursery
rhymes more readily than similar juxtapositions of nonsense
syllables.
I was once a staunch proponent of Morphogenesis. But that was back in
my days of quantum dualism. Once I graduated from space-time
containerism, I recognized that Morphogenesis was much too dependent on our
very parochial notion of the strict linear directionality of time. Every
Podunk universe that came down the pike would be reinventing this same
wheel. Morphogenesis would get old very quickly and demand habeas
corpus sub specie aeternitas. (Will someone please turn off the
Latin!) This is just about the time for God to get in the act. Morphogenesis
might have played a role in a hypothetical primordial, quantum-like chaos of potentialities
far, far beyond space & time. This might be something for God to be
concerned with, but not for us to bother our pretty, pre-eschatological heads
with.
So, even in its most charitable, Morphogenetic interpretation, any
non-trivial emergentism quickly collapses into a minimal, pre-established
cosmic coherence.
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Then there are the philosophers, bless their hearts, who worry about the 'carburetor'
problem [and a more recent
take]. Is there not a place in Heaven for the Platonic essence of
carburetorhood? Yes and no. There are a lot of other folks in our
little four dimensional world who could not get to temple on Friday to express
their cosmic love were it not for carburetorhoodornament and and other such
essences. It's definitely a part of our pre-eschatological cosmic
ambient holism. Its essentiality differs only in degree from that of a
lung, say. They are both significant parts of the necessary,
level-playing-field, atomo-metabolic schema of our four dimensional best
possible creation. That is saying a mouthful, but we have been over this
metabolic ground before. Will there
be a post-eschaton carburetorhood? I'm thinking, 'Let it be a
surprise!'
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The next topic is looking to be downward
causation. This ought to be relevant to issues of coherence and
theism.
Draft Project Proposal- Self-organization- a conceptual analysis
-- Menno
Hulswit:
My
paper consists of three parts. In the first part, I
will provide an analysis of the concept of downward causation as used in
recent scientific and philosophic literature. I will show that it is a
misleading concept, which entails a disguised reintroduction of the
(Aristotelian) concept of final or formal causation.
Next,
I will argue that self-organization is indeed a teleological concept, and
that it must therefore be explained in terms of final causation.
Finally,
I will argue that, whereas Aristotle’s substance based theory of final
causation is hard to combine with contemporary scientific insights, a (Peircean)
process approach to causation may be useful in explaining what goes on in
self-organization.
I'd like to see the paper.
I should have done my homework on downward causation before launching the
latest foray into reductionism. This topic may be the focus of an actual
anti-reductionist initiative that I was despairing of earlier today.
Looking through the first hundred hits on "downward causation" I
am not seeing anything new that has not been alluded to here in other
contexts. Jaegwon Kim is the principal contender and he defends
physicalism. Instead of an anti-reductionist initiative, I see mainly
the reductionists retrenching at this last line of defense.
Here is a puzzle of evolution: if traits or functions did not entail
downward causation, then on what basis could they be selected? I don't
recall the source for this puzzle, but it is often mentioned with regard to
consciousness: the alleged epiphenomenality of consciousness ought to preclude
its biological selectability.
I recall that 'general systems' theorists, following Bertalanffy (c.1940),
also speak of autonomous levels with downward causation.