Catch-as-Catch-Can

The moods have their seasons, and sometimes, despite the lovely weather, they are filled with clouds. What’s the right attitude then? When the mood is cloudy and there is no background in events, the state is surely due to the state of the body. So I proceed from there. The right attitude is to remember the hierarchy of things. The heart need not echo the body’s state—nor, for that matter, the state of the world unfolded as I turn the pages of the paper. Our feelings of identification are habitual, and that habit probably has an adaptive purpose. We are actually free agents quite able to counter the natural signaling of our vehicle—which, if it were a dog, would simply curl up and sleep in moody states or, in others, simply follow the stimulus in total innocence. Now it seems that the body is designed to work quite efficiently without consciousness—in which case we would be apes; therefore, as nature has things, consciousness should not interfere much, or possibly not at all, with the “natural.” Identification, consequently, seems to serve a useful purpose. It keeps us “close” to the body’s state at all times, echoing it most of the time. But similarly—since the body cannot understand the abstract stimuli that we do—the body also echoes what is present in the mind; otherwise news coverage could not produce anger, disgust, and so forth; but it does. From the ape’s point of view the paper is just stuff of very little interest. Thus the two systems work together more or less seamlessly—well enough so that in Aquinas’ scheme of things the human—embodied rational being with immortal soul—is God’s own creations and a specific “order” of existence. Alas, that doesn’t sound right to me.

I am on the side of those who view the soul as captured in a body somehow—or entering it when it ought not. This is the great puzzle of this dimension because no one has as yet, so far as I can discover, answered my question. How or why did we take on these bodies? Was that a practical solution to some problem? If yes, the problem is still with us—because babies are still being born.

I ought to spell this out. Summer. Outdoors. I used to speculate at great lengths out here once. No end to such imponderabilities.

The discord or dissonance I feel arises when I contemplate the highly “engineered” character of bodies. This engineering is natural and evolutionary. It displays at the same time purposive arrangements and a kind of trial and error during its historical formation, the errors often corrected after a false start, with traces of those starts still present. Indeed the phenomenon reminds me of old farms—where the farmer solved problems in a catch-as-catch-can way, but once he chanced on a solution that worked, he left it in place. The blood-clotting cycle has all these earmarks. Purposive groping characterizes it, a groping that has over time piled layer on layer on layer, always aiming at—and exploiting—good results. Missing from this are the marks of high intelligence; present in it is a kind of ignorance, a will, and also a vague perception of some desired end. It works. But it’s not what I mean when I think of “creation.” I can think of a higher kind. The body resembles a human creation—drafts, revisions, errors, editings, and on and on. The mind, by contrast, is a marvel: it has multiple functions so seamlessly united that they form an indivisible whole.

This structure then, this body, holds us.

The life process as a whole is a system. All life uses water. At its base are creatures that feed on solar energy (or simply heat) directly, using elements to capture it. Above that level are entities that suck up water and minerals and fix carbon from the air. And all else feeds on other life.

What we see “out there” are the basic raw materials of life: energy and elements. And Something has turned these givens into the most incredibly diversified and form-maintaining (read reproducing) entities—so far as we have yet established, only on the earth; life everywhere is but a theory. Life has all the earmarks of a colonization. But from where? What life doesn’t look like is a “creation”; it’s more like an invasion of matter.

Earlier ages simply didn’t know enough about bodies, chemistry, the solar system (no fly-bys or Mars landers), or the cosmos (no Hubble) to see things the way I do. We still don’t know anything about how life started. Our theories that matter can form life by a chance event—energy and matter meeting in a certain happy conjunction—are inadequate. Where in matter is that mysterious Something that took advantage of (or perhaps arranged) that chance event to fashion reproducing, form-maintaining, indeed evolving entities. That was a radical departure from the norm.

Earlier ages, however, clearly discerned the differences between mind and matter, souls and bodies. And trying to explain this difference, they projected an essentially static cosmos in which Mind writ large created all that we see. Emphasis on static. They knew nothing about the Cambrian explosion. They thought the earth stood still: no satellites. They saw order in the repeating cycles of day and night, the phases of the moon, the succession of the seasons. And all is number.

Our age has produced observations and discoveries so stupendous that the old scheme seems utterly naïve. In the process, however, we have eliminated Mind altogether, whether written small or large. But what hasn’t yet transpired is the proper integration between old and new, an integration in which the truth in both is acknowledged, namely the reality of Mind and the now visible aspects of “body,” including in that word life as a whole, its carriers, and the cosmos in which they reside.

A different view emerges when we make the attempt: life as a colony or as an invasion of matter by Something mysterious present here and proceeding—not quite knowing where it’s headed—by catch-as-catch-can methods and Hail Mary passes.