Looking for a New Meta-Theory

I made a note the other day on the need to have a meta-theory of some sort before any thought is expended on the possible meaning of the life phenomenon on earth. Herewith a brief exploration of that notion.

Modern science begins with an inherently monistic assumption that only tangible or at least measurable physical phenomena may be consulted in seeking an answer. Such phenomena, however, only yield limited meanings, thus answers to questions beginning with when, where, and how. The what question is a matter of experience. The why question is never answered although it is unavoidable when comparing living with non-living nature.

It is unavoidable because living nature has a purposive character. Its ultimate purpose is invisible, but its reproductive behavior is clearly teleological. Its undeniable intent is to maintain very complex physical forms despite the fact that all individual instances of it die and return to the inorganic state. We find no parallels to this behavior in the inorganic realm. Yes. Crystals are formed (and deformed) as particular external conditions change—but no crystal ever produces another crystal, and that one yet another, in a continuous chain. Matter at great scales forms spherical aggregates, but these do no reproduce. Nor do such forms actively struggle to “stay alive” by flight or fight behavior. Life therefore displays a discontinuity with the order from which it seemingly arises. The science-based explanation of this discontinuity is that complexity, as such, produces radically new behavior in matter. But why it should be that linking many different structures made of the same fairly limited number of elemental components should suddenly produce purposive behavior has never been explained. These structures, moreover, are unquestionably purposive themselves, providing “tools” for locomotion, oxygenation, nutrition, digestion, etc., etc. To say that something changes magically is also to say that something, matter, has a tropism toward complexity.

The religious view solves the problem of meaning by supplying it in such a potent form that the actual question of what life is becomes trivial. God made it. But God is too high an explanation because God can do anything. This view produces a problem of another kind.

The problem is that while life exhibits a designed—or perhaps better put a quasi-designed—character, thus revealing purposes, the design also clearly arose in answer to stimuli and has an “any which way so long as it works” appearance—as if a half-blind drive, urge, or intention had been present behind it, nothing even close to waking consciousness, much less omniscience. Life is purposive but is also evolving and evolved. It suggests some agency light-years lower in status than divinity. A popular symbol of this quasi-engineered but catch-as-catch-can process is the panda’s thumb, made famous by Stephen Jay Gould. It’s not a thumb but functions as one. The panda has five fingers; the thumb is a wrist-bone promoted to thumb-status by evolutionary pressures.

If living bodies appear to be purposive structures built by some agency operating intelligently (meaning purposefully) but largely in the dark—rather than divine creations, the why of life would seem to require something more than complexity and something less than divine creation as their explanation. Materialism founders on the undeniable teleology of life, creationism on the quasi-engineering of all living bodies.

This in turn demands, even to start looking at life properly, a new meta-theory. It must accept both meaning in the universe and the presence in it of a secondary agency. So far such a theory is notable for its absence—although some elements of forgotten Gnosticism point in the right direction.

Late Learning

In advancing age come insights almost intended to be private—or to be shared only with one’s life-long mate—not because they shouldn’t be shared but because they require experiences that humanity only achieves in its advancing years. One has to be adequate for such knowledge—and it cannot be shared with those who haven’t gotten there yet.

In this category belongs the notion that conceptual intellection is merely a tool, an artifact, developed principally for practical purposes—and because, within these bodies, we cannot communicate directly with others mind to mind. Another is that all life is intelligent, in the higher sense—but cannot communicate that state to us because it lacks the artifact of conceptual language. Vast aggregations of habit—especially if one has lived largely in a conceptual world—make it almost impossible to believe that one can communicate, not least great complexities, without using abbreviations, tokens, which is what language is.

This came to mind today, again, reading a post on Laudator Temporis Acti (“Almost too Pitiful to Bear”) where one John Buchman hears the anguish of the trees as a grove is felled. We assign that sort of thing to the imagination—but even if we think we know a lot, in advancing age, it is obvious that we have a whole lot more to learn—and that that learning will come when we have passed.

The Soul-Life Link

Among the most interesting cases of out-of-body experience are those where some person spontaneously leaps from the body when anticipating death—as in auto accidents and in mountain-climbing falls. Sometimes the body isn’t even damaged—but the mind evidently thought it would be—and finds the ejection switch. Some kind of linkage must remain, however, because people return to their bodies again and therefore we have these accounts from them.

We do not know what happens in those more drastic case when the body is destroyed—when it doesn’t roll free of the wreckage or the ropes don’t snag on stone and the mountain climber isn’t “caught,” still alive. In those cases, presumably, the last link is broken, and the soul, having made a hasty exit, sees that it’s time to move on.

The body-soul duality is alive in well in ordinary thought. People do not think of themselves as chemical machines—or of the mind as a secondary product of brain function alone. As for what life is, they haven’t a clue. The orthodox scientific explanation is that it arises from chemistry. But let’s suppose that it’s the other way about. Suppose that what we call soul is life—or that life is the most primitive expression of soul. What we certainly know is that a corpse is dead—no soul is manifesting. And that alert people jump out of their bodies occasionally when it looks like the end has arrived.

Aristotle offered us the primitive soul, calling it vegetative. The animal has both a vegetative and an animal soul. Humans have both and, in addition, what Aristotle called the rational soul. Aspects of the same essence in successively developed stages?

Looking at these two concepts, soul and life, our habits of thought blur things. We think of souls as individual, of life as a broad phenomenon. To be sure, each manifestation of life, at whatever scale, is individual. Life, therefore, is a broad generalization of enormously large numbers of individual instances of it. We also think we have a soul—much as we have a body—but what if we are the soul?

Today’s “grown-up” explanation is a form of physicalist monism. There is no soul independent of bodies—no such thing as jumping out of the bodies. Consciousness is neural functioning. It’s chemistry, stupid. Grow up.

At the pace of a slow snail, this view is changing; but it will probably take another century or more before elite thought will have returned to a more comprehensive view in accord with experience and observation. In the lead are people who have unquestionable standing in the field of science, like Charles S. Sherrington (1857-1952) and John Eccles (1903-1997), both neurophysiologists and Nobel Prize winners. It’s difficult to expel them from the reservation, with such credentials, hence a more polite form of disagreement is noted. They are called dualists. To these I might add Wilder Penfield (1891-1976), a neurosurgeon with significant research achievements in the field. I will conclude with two quotes from him. Other prominent voices are those of Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994), a philosopher of science, and Roger Penrose (1931-), a mathematical physicist. And there are quite a few others.

Herewith then two quotes from Penfield, taken from his The Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain, Princeton University Press, 1975. The quotes suggest that the snail is moving.

Throughout my own scientific career, I, like other scientists, struggled to prove that brain accounts for the mind. But now, perhaps, the time has come when we may profitably consider the evidence as it stands and ask the question: Do brain-mechanisms account for the mind? Can the mind be explained by what is now known about the brain? If not, which is the more reasonable of the two hypotheses: that man's being is based on one element, or on two? (p. xiii)

Since every man must adopt for himself, without the help of science, his way of life and his personal religion, I have long had my own private beliefs. What a thrill it is, then, to discover that the scientist too can legitimately believe in the existence of spirit. (p. 85)

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.

Let Us Start With Phytoplankton

I have problems imagining that the life process had a plan, complete in every detail, before the work of its creation started. But let’s give it a try. For that purpose let me borrow Plato’s Demiurge and imagine what he might have thought. The Demiurge did not create, of course; he merely produced—from preexisting stuff. And having life process in mind— imagined from the outset as ranging from high to low, and how each part would be maintained—the Demiurge, looking around, would have noted that while bodies of water held plenty of good things, a good place to start, and water itself a right handy material, in future, he thought, higher life would need oxygen for its internal combustion—but there was none of it in the atmosphere just then. Oxygen was there, to be sure, but bound up with hydrogen and carbon. So the Demiurge began—the plan already in his head. He said: “Let us start with minute creatures in the ocean. That’ll give us some practice. They’ll feed on carbon dioxide; their wastes will be oxygen; the gas will rise up and enrich the atmosphere; that will serve those other creatures still on my drawing board.” And the phytoplankton came about…

Now the Demiurge is not a communicative sort. This utterance was quite unusual. His ways are right mysterious, and hence we don’t know much about the phytoplankton. Are they, like, people? Or are they machines? Or something in between?

If they are machines, well, so be it. But if they are something in between, how do we picture them? Do they “have a life”? A big problem arises here. “Having a life,” for me, is not merely to have a succession of feeling states. I have them too, to be sure, but the crucial difference is that I am aware of them—while simultaneously being outside the process. If phytoplankton have feeling states yet they are unaware of having them, they lack all thinkable reality for me—except as things. I like to think that they do, too, have a life—but I manage that by projecting something into these creatures for which I have zero proof—except their own end-seeking motions. But those motion are ascribable to unconscious feelings states. Outer life, yes; inner life? No.

Therefore, of course, Descartes saw only automata. So why does that displease me? It shouldn’t. It’s logical. Well, I cannot find any reason whatsoever for an automaton unless it serves some purpose that lies outside of it. We make a mechanical frog that hops across the table. Why? Our own amusement. The Demiurge, if he had a purpose—beyond amusement—must have had the higher animals in mind, one supposes. But for them to be viable at all, a whole ecosystem had to be created. Indeed the whole planet had to be transformed.

But then, what about man? If humans were the end product, the Demiurge was up against it. He could make little machines in which chemical signals (call them feelings) cause different parts to respond to other chemical signals which cause pre-programmed appropriate behavior, much like what we see the mechanical frog doing as it responds to the spring inside—and hops. The Demiurge, to put it mildly, is severely challenged—being only able to use existing materials. How then can he make a human, the only creature we genuinely know to “have a life” as we have it. What is that something? And if it is in us, is it absent in the phytoplankton? So what is life?

I wish the Demiurge would speak. But he is so astonished by what he has made, he has fallen entirely silent. Or was he perhaps merely what his name actually originally meant in Greek, a “public worker,” thus someone out to do a job for a higher authority? He made the machines. But when he was out to lunch, the boss came in and breathed life into them? It’s a hypothesis.

Why The Reverent Music?

I watched a two-hour presentation of Nova’s Finding Life Beyond Earth on PBS. It’s easy to summarize the substance. What we need for life is oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon, liquid water, and a source of heat. Voila! Nova tries to answer the question of whether or not we are alone. Interesting question. It does so by looking at photographs of planets and moons in the solar system searching for water, the right elements, and volcanoes. Now there is nothing particularly new or surprising here. It is the consensus of our times that life is just a natural form of matter that springs forth as soon as the appropriate conditions for it are present. So why use majestic, reverent, grandiose, exalted music when scouring the planets for these grubby particulars?

Although the Nova series began in 1974, I first consciously noticed reverent music and a materialistic thematic fused in a film when I watched Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, created by Carl Sagan in 1980. A thought then arose—and it keeps recurring every time this fusion reappears. The thought was: “Aha! Atheism as religion!” Behind that was the observation that Sagan attempted to reinforce emotions of exaltation by playing that swelling music while showing grand pictures—while his intellectual message was that there’s nothing beyond these wastes of gas and burning orbs and galaxies piled upon galaxies as far as telescopes could see. He was thus hijacking an ancient human reaction—that the wonders of nature are the works of God.

Mind you, life may have originated out there somewhere. Scientists whose views I value have asserted such things. One is Fred Hoyle (1915-2001). He was a pioneer theorist on the formation of elements inside stars (stellar nucleosynthesis) and a steady-state cosmologist. He thought that life came from outer space. In a lecture titled, Evolution from Space, given at the Royal Institute in London in 1982, he said:

If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of in pondering this issue over quite a long time seems to me to have anything like as high a possibility of being true.

My own entirely unscientific notions don’t require comet-borne sperm and viruses, but I agree with Hoyle on insisting on design—and disagree with modernity that it arises from a handful of elements, water, and heat by lucky accident. And we’re not alone. But that’s not the reason why.

Finding or Creating?

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. George Bernard Shaw.

This motto is featured for September on the calendar that hangs in our bathroom—and we do have to go, therefore I expect to read this for a few more days yet.

So what’s my take on this? I disagree—and yet I don’t. In my youth GBS—as we affectionately called this famed playwright, an Irishman who made his fame in England—was still riding high for such creations as Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Man and Superman, and many other delightful plays. What survives of him these days is mostly that wondrous film, My Fair Lady, which is the play Pygmalion remade as a musical and filmed. Alas, they changed the ending—but that, folks, is Hollywood. In the 1950s, when I was cutting my teeth as it were, the progressive, ironic, socialist spirit GBS represented still powerfully influenced the young. And, I must say, still lingers on—else my calendar’s publishers would not have used this slogan to, as it were, make my September.

But I disagree. The notion is flattering and resonates with the ethos of the time. It also resonates with youth. With age we tend to, I believe, turn the slogan around. We’re lucky if we manage to emerge from the darkness and the chaos and discover the core of ourselves, which is there all along, created by someone else. Life much more resembles education than creation. The roots of education are “to draw or to lead out,” from dux, the leader or commander, and ex-, out. Something is present—but it must be freed from its shrouding and made visible, made to emerge.

And yet I don’t. I don’t if I closely examine what “creation” really means in the human context. It is definitely not “bringing into existence” something that is not and never has been. Human creation is a kind of discovery, a kind of finding and arranging what is already present. At best we discover a hidden treasure. But we didn’t make it.

Sketch of an Outlandish View

I want to examine the “naturalistic” explanation of life and humanity from yet another angle today. That label, “naturalistic,” is peculiar to my own thought. I’ve explored this notion numerous times on this blog before, most recently touching on it in The Hungry Ghost and, earlier, in On “Teleology” and the “Fall” as well as elsewhere. The gist of the notion is that “life” is an arrangement whereby an “out-of-place” spiritual community is making an attempt at finding its original home or attempting to return to it. I realize that this is an outlandish sort of idea in the West (or elsewhere, for that matter). But in the West particularly both the philosophical development of thought and religious belief (based on the Creation) produce a habit of thought. Some observations about that mode of perception today…

It strikes me that what we call the scientific method is one modern form of rational thought about the things we see about us. It attempts to observe accurately, to define precisely, and then to reason logically. The ancients—and here I’m thinking of Aristotle—had an observational field limited to the earth. They did not have, as we do, genuinely good pictures either of the solar system or of the enormous expanse of the galactic Out There. For them the incommensurability of life and cosmos was not really a visceral experience as it is for me. They had no knowledge or systematized evidence of what we call evolution—albeit a general idea of development was present. They hadn’t explored the immense age of the earth, named its epochs, or assembled the evidence of the Cambrian Explosion. But they did engage in rational thought in a systematic way. Their concept of “substance” as a matter-form duality actually rested, it seems to me, on an observation of life, with examples drawn from human handicrafts: the bronze or stone statue, for example, in which the material is the matter and the statue, as statue, is the form. This separation of form and matter was, in other words, based entirely on the most peculiar and rare phenomenon of cosmic reality, namely living things. This dualism, as it turns out, fits living entities very nicely indeed, but it doesn’t fit the cosmos with any kind of precision at all. Yet it’s the cosmos that is the dominant reality, becomes that when we ponder its size and extent.

It is in life that we encounter something shaping matter (or a subset of its elements) into countlessly many forms the utility of which, the “ends” of which, we can investigate and actually discover to some point. The ends or purposes of hydrogen or helium escape our attempts at discovery altogether; by a vast stretch we can give hydrogen a minor meaning as a necessary component of life—but there is far too much of it out there for life alone to justify its existence; and our bodies don’t use helium; it’s just out there. Plato projected eternal forms by way of rescuing the concept from the ever-changing flux that continuously destroys specific manifestations of them. Plato seems to have thought that forms must somehow exist somewhere, solidly, permanently, as it were, to cause physical manifestations of them to appear and to reappear. But Plato also seems to have reasoned by looking principally at life rather than, say, at clouds of nebulae, stellar collisions, or the great wasteland of our own, local asteroid belt. Would he have arrived at the same theories if he’d had access to the rich photography of the Hubble telescope?

The form-matter duality is much better explained using quite different concepts while retaining the structure of this hypothesis, thus its dualism. Instead of saying form, let’s speak of intention. Instead of speaking of prime matter, a vague sort of unformed material substrate never actually encountered, let’s think of matter simply as inorganic matter. Instead of substance let’s think of life. What we know as life is an intention manifesting in matter, forming it into entities for some kind of purpose or purposes. Of these we can certainly identify the most obvious, the act of enduring over time against all odds in specific and more or less repeating forms. It’s only in life that we encounter genuine reproduction.

But if form is intention, how do we explain the rest of the cosmos—indeed almost everything other than life; because life itself appears to be next to nothing in the universe. In life we see forms supporting intentions. In the rest of reality we also see form but no intention whatsoever. A rose bush and an amoeba, very different in size, shape, and appearance, are both nevertheless engaged in an identical project, and this project has an aim. But what is the aim of an enormous cloud of hydrogen out there? Is it to become a sun? What is the aim of suns? Their projected life is to explode in novae and to expel their now heavier elements into yet another cloud of matter or to become super-heavy dwarf stars. There is no discernible meaning in any of this—except, from our point of vantage, perhaps one.

Here I have in mind the sculptor chipping away at that rock to make a statue. All eyes are on the statue or on the sculptor. We don’t consciously, precisely notice the substantial amounts of detritus that have accumulated, and still accumulate as the sculptor works, on the floor and on the statue’s supporting structure. Particles large and small, chips tiny and sizeable, litter all of the surfaces—and at some distance from the work-space itself stand piles awaiting the dust pan…while old accumulations of waste await disposal at a landfill in battered old buckets or barrels. A highly scientific study of that floor, conducted with laser measurements and microscopes, might actually reveal the same random distribution of objects of all sizes we actually see when we look at the depth of light years into outer space. It’s a wasteland out there! It’s beautiful, awesome, full of light. But so also perhaps would the sculptor’s rubble appear to us if we were small enough to see the electrons of that waste shining brightly, each electron the size, relative to us, of a sun…

The cosmic chaos, of course, is not absolutely random. Nor is that pile of chips under the statue. Inorganic matter carries a kind of residual of meaning. We express that meaning by speaking of the laws of nature. Hydrogen is not a carbon. Something constrain matter in the cosmos to spherical and circular forms when certain degrees of density are reached. I’m tempted myself to see in this fact clear evidence that the cosmos really is a waste or residue of something meaningful but not visible to us. And this view is compatible with my naturalistic notion that our community of life may indeed be out of place. In the western religious conception, however, this view finds very little resonance—despite what seems to me obvious proof for it. In our tradition (Genesis, etc.) the cosmos is made—to be what it is—by the will of the divine. It cannot therefore be viewed as the residue of some other divine activity which only leaves, in the cosmos, the faintest of traces of agency, in the form of laws—but nothing else even enough to hint at any kind of meaning.

The Two Faces of Janus

To continue for a little longer on the subject of morality, it strikes me that ethics may be pictured as the Roman god called Janus, a figure with two faces looking in two directions. Janus was the god of gates, of entries (alas, perhaps of border regions too) looking back and ahead. We get our January from this figure because Janus was also the god of endings and beginnings. But my purpose in using the symbol here is to emphasize that the ethical impulse we carry within us is at every step opposed by contrary impulses. Nothing is better known. That is why ethics gets the emphasis it does. No one preaches that we should eat or breathe. That, sire, (as Samuel Johnson might say), you can be sure shall be accomplished.

I concluded the last posting by pointing out that the moral impulse in us indicates a vector, a direction, some place we wish to reach: one face of ethics. Its other face is the resistance to this impulse everywhere manifest and at so deep a level that in the Christian tradition we call it original sin. Janus is a very good symbol for summing up the confusions and contradictions of “being of two minds”; no sooner decided on a path than the other mind has a better idea—and the struggle, therefore, is endemic. As Goethe aptly said:

Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,
One wills to part itself from the other,
One holds fast with savage love-lust
To the world with hard organic force,
The other lifts itself by power from the dust
To the domains of higher ancestors.
[Faust, Act I.]

In the cosmic models I’ve discussed in other posts, the notion of one order entering and becoming entangled in another serves as an explanation of why life as we know it, a purposive striving, exists in a universe where nothing analogous is visible to us. The ethical impulse is thus that which “lifts from the dust” and the “savage love-lust” is the other face of our experience which clings desperately to the world. We may very well have this two-faced duality because we only see the one clearly, the world; and the other one, the domain of our origins, we see very dimly by intuition only. We cling to the familiar; we do so in ordinary life as well; we do so even when it is suboptimal; the new seems dangerous. So we cling. But something in us, a secret knowledge we can’t quite grasp firmly enough, tells to go on. Hence the struggle. The curious aspects of this suspension between two realities, only one of which we clearly see, is that the explanation of our entanglement in matter will probably become known to us only after we’ve managed to escape it.

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Image courtesy of this site concerned with Freemasonry.

The Hindu Model

In the last several postings, I’ve been looking for ways of understanding life as a phenomenon. I proposed that life is best explained as a phenomenon different in kind from matter, that it suggests the existence of a separate “order” of reality where it might be located, and then developed a “weird” theory under which a soul-civilization is pictured as “invading” matter from a soul-dimension.

Today I’d like to examine the Weird Model in light of the traditional Hindu viewpoint on the nature of life and the soul—and to draw out some of the problems and ideas that such a comparison suggests.

To understand soul-civilization, perhaps it might help us to see our own human civilization in functional terms. Our civilization represents a flow of individuals. We might picture its members as in three categories: the unborn, the living, and the departed. In our reality all of the action is centered on the living. We have no idea whether or not the unborn already exist or “come into being,” literally, at some point between conception and birth. The two traditions of the West resolve this phenomenon, this “flow,” in different ways. In the materialistic version, life is simply a function of matter. The unborn don’t exist except as genetic potential in the living. The living are carriers of genes. The departed don’t exist any more except as matter in transformation. The religious concept is that souls do, indeed, “come into being,” created by God at the time of conception or birth; the living are destined to live in another dimension; after death the immortal soul is bound for that realm. At the “end of time” the souls will be once more reunited with their bodies—the doctrine of the resurrection of the body.

The Hindu conception is quite different. In that model the unborn may be the departed; society, therefore, comes to be seen as a circulation of souls. The departed become the unborn; they see incarnation and become the living; they die and depart and thus become the unborn once again. Ultimate escape from this “wheel of karma” takes the form of departure for Nirvana. “Replenishment” of the supply of souls, as it were, takes place as aspects of the Godhead split off and descend into the lower karmic realms. This model is coherent, self-contained, and well-motivated; I use that term in the way computer people do to mean well-justified. The souls go round and round until they split off and rejoin divinity; new souls rain down, of their own volition. The separation of “sparks” of the divine refulgence from the divine plentitude is motivated by a desire, deep within the Godhead itself, for limited experience. When such limitation turns out, ultimately, to be sorrow—at least as experienced by the spark—its descending motion becomes an upward striving, an ascent toward the Whole again.

It is worth noting here that the Weird Model, at least as pictured thus far, appears to be quite different. But is it? It presents the picture of orders of reality arranged in layers, as it were. The soul-layer is above the material. It exists and holds life of our own kind; it proceeds in equilibrium. One element of it, however, that which is most proximate to the material layer beneath, partially interpenetrates the material and produces what might be called a hybrid form of life. By hybrid I mean a “soul-body” composite, animated matter. That kind of life is unstable; it persist only because the departing souls are either replaced from “above” in the hybrid dimension or return to the hybrid layer once again by taking up bodies after a period of discarnate existence. The two models, thus, while differently conceived, are functionally similar. Both depend on circulation for the simple reason that the hybrid form of life is severely limited: bodies wear out. Both also depend on what seems to be a voluntary fascination with the lower region—with matter for souls in the Weird Model, with limitation in the Hindu model.

The Western Religious conception abandons the idea of circulation but retains one element of the other two models. In this conception, humans are created for life in Paradise. We might picture that as the soul-dimension of the Weird Model and as a kind of heaven beneath the perfection of Nirvana. Buddhism eventually formulated the concept of just such a world, something less perfect than Nirvana but heavenly in its aspects. This was the Pure Land, a perfect world; Pure Land Buddhism is also the most popular form of Buddhism. Buddhism, of course, is one of the Hindu traditions. In the Western view, humanity was destined for life in Paradise; God placed the first humans there, evidently intending Paradise to be their home. But Adam and Eve just couldn’t leave things well enough alone. They had to meddle. And with that comes—not an invasion of the lower realm but, instead, an expulsion into the lower realm. Thereafter, getting back to Paradise becomes Job One.

As this brief survey shows, the great traditions—all except materialism, which just throws up its hands—are intimately linked. They suggests that these models have at least the merit of arising spontaneously as we force our attention to contemplate what reality might actually mean.

Weird Squared

Let me now attempt to sketch how, say, a crocodile, might be explained by the weird theory that an order of intelligence, an order of souls, may have invaded the order of matter. Crocodiles are a neat and also difficult example because they appear (to us) as vicious and ugly creatures that prey on innocent zebras and wildebeests. I think you know where I am going.

Serious problems arise when we contemplate this theory in any kind of detail—indeed the same problems arise no matter how we picture the agency behind living, embodied entities. One is that intelligence seems to be required for the arrangement of matter into effectively functioning and self-reproducing chemical machines. The only alternative explanation we have, if not intelligence, is the operation of sheer chance in a cosmic space where movement is possible. But the complexity of life is so great that the odds against this explanation are impossibly high, the time demanded impossibly long. Quite an extensive literature is available critiquing the theory of evolution based on chance. In popular parlance, this is the problem of a hundred monkeys, pounding a hundred typewriters, accidentally producing the collected works of Shakespeare.

Instead of belaboring an explanation based on probability, let’s assume that intelligence must be at work. The dictionary defines it as a power to apprehend facts and their relationships. If you unpack that definition, you ultimately get consciousness. But what we actually see in nature is end-seeking entities that seem to operate without consciousness, at least as we understand that word. How can these observations be reconciled?

I would propose that seeing things at the right scale might turn out to be helpful. I offer an analogy. Would you say that the City of Detroit is intelligent? Obviously by Detroit I don’t mean any official representative of it—not its mayor or its city council. I mean the city itself. The City of Detroit itself is most definitely real. But it is not, actually, in the category of things usually thought to be possessing or lacking intelligence. Next question. Could the City of Detroit have come into being without intelligence? It is literally made of objects all of which clearly testify to the presence of intelligent agents. I think you also suspect where I am going here.

Now to extend this. I claim to be an intelligent agent, but my effective reach diminishes a great deal away from my immediate surroundings. I’m served by highly developed modern transport and communications systems, but I can only form the vaguest comprehensive consciousness of anything as big as Detroit. If asked what Detroit needs or what may be wrong with it, I’m capable of speculation, but individually I cannot do much about it. And if we enlarge the scope, my already nonexistent powers diminish at each step: Michigan, the United States, the Western civilization… I’m less than a molecule at these scales.

Now I turn to an order of intelligence interfering with, or invading, the order of matter. Suppose that this process began at a very small scale—say at the atomic or subatomic level. Why there? Well, it may have begun there because a very subtle power, the power of immaterial intelligence, may only be strong enough actually to influence matter at its lower manifestations, down there where minute quanta of energy are moving. Let us say that souls, intelligences, encountered matter down there in the tiny, examined it, differentiated this from that, drew inferences, understood this, understood that—and, again at the very small scale, began a process of experimentation. Let’s further assume that they found this environment difficult to work in—too much flux, huge, coarse, violent energies, etc. And let us assume that an entire community of such beings, attempting to get a foothold, messing with matter as best they could, fascinated by it—or, alternatively, unable to escape it—at last succeeded in delimiting the disturbance of the material flux by building a spherical container inside of which the flux is low. Here, inside the proto-cell, they next began to optimize this interesting world. The first problem, of course, would be to continue to maintain the wall that keeps things relatively peaceful inside. If we image the scale in the right way, the agencies would be small compared to the proto-cell. And in the same way in which I barely understand Detroit so they, also, barely understood the cell but, collectively they maintained it for their own purposes.

But how do you get from here to crocodiles? It’s not a very great jump. It strikes us as outrageous to imagine an intelligent order creating a biosphere that is hierarchically organized so that the higher feed on the lower—so that crocodiles waste innocent wildebeests so that the green, ugly, scaly things can laze in the sun satiated. “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” It’s entirely possible that an intelligent order, limited in its ability to perceive, can produce vast structures that live destructively on others, the others also created by other groupings of the same intelligence. The inhabitants may not be aware of what they’re doing. The crocodile, of course, is a later creature, but its machinery, thus its brain, is still quite limited. The information that flows from it to the inhabitants is not very useful.

Another analogy. When our military in the righteous pursuit of that sacred duty, national security, vast distances away, in brightly shining aircraft (don’t they resemble a little the white teeth of the crocodile?) rain death and destruction on villages in the border zones of Afghanistan and Pakistan, hunting some Al Qaida operative, and producing regrettable collateral damage in the process, is the beast that does this, the United States of America, really conscious? Is any collective really conscious? Are there, perhaps, awakening souls inside the crocodile who mildly mourn the wildebeest?

Life: Some "Weird" Speculation

Seriously entertaining really weird ideas has the merit, minimally, of stimulating the mind. The notion that life may be an intrusion into matter from some other order is such an idea. The initial reaction is: “Ridiculous.” We have a powerful pair of feelings: One is that life is precious and must be preserved at all cost; the other is that life can be lost.

That life itself is necessarily linked to living bodies is powerfully reinforced by observing death—and the consequent disappearance of people we know. This is the overwhelming evidence. Where is grandma? Common sense urges us to acknowledge the facts. Anyone attempting to build another case bears a huge burden of proof. The countering indicators are subjective, meaning that unless we have the experience ourselves, we must credit reports. The very strength with which we cling to bodily life supports the skeptical opinion that any belief in surviving death is wishful thinking—laudable, perhaps, engendered in us by evolution itself to make us fight better and longer, but ultimately an illusion.

Having now made the case for the conventional view, we might be safe enough to consider something weird. Suppose reality is much more rationally organized than we think it is. Suppose that at least two orders exist, an order of matter and an order of souls, and that analogous laws govern each. Let’s assume that conservation laws exist in both realms; here it is the conservation of matter, mass, and energy; there it is the conservation, let us say, of life, consciousness, and individual identity. Each of these orders has its appropriate meaning and justification. What these are is knowable, but not necessarily by us. They’re knowable by something that stands above them. This something would ultimately be God, but quite possibly higher intelligences than ours may also be present in a hierarchy of beings and worlds.

Someone might object here and say that such a formulation isn’t very weird. An ordered hierarchy of being can be found in the Aristotelian/Thomistic, in the Neoplatonic, and in other traditions as well. Granted. Let me then introduce a weird element now.

Let’s suppose that one order of reality intrudes into another. This may be possible because in some sense the orders may “touch” … or because a higher order can perceive a lower but not the other way around … or because either one can influence the other in certain ways. In the last case the lower may limit the higher and the higher may enhance the lower. If souls inhabit a realm of relative freedom—whereas matter is governed by relative necessity—it may be possible that souls are either tempted to explore a lower world or may become entangled in it.

Tempted to explore: Let us suppose here that the material world is perceived and while its character is very strange indeed, curiosity draws souls to enter into it even though dangers are sensed. Here the contact is assumed to be entirely voluntary.

Become entangled in: This situation may come about because the arrangement of the different orders produces “border zones” as it were. The lawful behavior of each order may produce what might be labeled naturalistic situations where, from a conscious perspective, “accidents” can happen. Thus, for instances, random events may take place under the influence of the material order or the material order may be temporarily deformed by contact with a conscious order in which collective will may bend the laws of matter. The entanglement may be involuntary. Or it may take place because of carelessness—the absence of attention, the disregard of warning, neglectful behavior.

We need three assumptions to make this weird speculation plausible. The first is that two orders, although different in kind, must nevertheless be able to influence each other. Thus they must have something in common. The second is that one of the orders must be free in some way but limited in others. The third might be put as a constitutional arrangement of the orders such that they are sufficient to themselves and protected each by its own legal framework and internal arrangement.

Let’s put it more concretely. Soul must be able to influence matter, but in so doing it must yield something of itself to matter in order to achieve this influence. Therefore, to govern matter, the soul must accept limitations that it does not otherwise have. When matter is influenced by soul, it is animated. When the soul relinquishes its hold on matter, it can no longer influence it. Matter then returns to its normal state of being—as does the soul.

Let me elaborate on this. What we know about our current reality is (1) that we have free will but (2) its execution always involves mechanical structures—brain-action, muscular-action, and chemical processes. We also know that in a sense we are the prisoners of bodies. We don’t feel like prisoners—unless, of course, we’re experiencing severe pain. But we are prisoners if we assume another world out there which we cannot reach while we’re embodied. In other words, we cannot leave our bodies at will. (There are exceptions to this generalization, but those exceptions are not part of the general consensus.) We can, of course, kill ourselves and thus escape; but we can’t have any certainty about the consequence of such an act. For all we know we might just disappear. While in bodies we cannot see out except through eyes—and what we see is the material realm. If we existed in some other space before, being in bodies now we’ve definitely moved into another order. We’ve become monads relative to our origin, in Leibnitz’s sense of that word: monads have no windows. We can then reasonably assume that life on earth—assuming that another real world-of-the-soul exists—is a mechanically-rendered mirror of that other one, with all the necessary compromises to make a semblance of that other world work reasonably well in the material dimension. To give one example—keeping in mind Swedenborg’s observations of how people move and associate in heaven and in hell—here on earth we cannot move at will and rapidly to join communities of affinity. If we move at all, it requires that we move our bodies. Those have to live somewhere. Joining communities is difficult. We do the next best thing. We associate as we are able. Here we’re obliged to deal with a rigid arrangement of space. Evidently not in heaven—if Swedenborg saw true.

Turned around, we know from the NDE reports that disembodied souls cannot affect matter. They cannot do so because they’re deprived of the necessary vehicle to express themselves in the physical dimension—the one in which the doctors and nurses who attend to their bodies and the relatives who anxiously await the outcome are “imprisoned.” Cut off from our brains, we can neither talk nor gesture.

All this sounds reasonable enough—and not very weird. The weirdness enters if we seriously contemplate that being in bodies is either a choice we made, along with millions if not trillions of others or a cosmic event in which we are involuntary participants. This strange model of reality, however, makes better sense of the known facts than the conventional view.

The modern view is that life is simply a property of matter. Consciousness is an illusion in that, in actuality, we are completely determined by past events and the lawful behavior of matter. Our freedom is also illusory. With death we disappear. Nothing in our life has any stable meaning. Nor does the universe make any sense. To demand that it make sense is part of our illusory mentality. This is an unvarnished but accurate presentation of modern materialism.

Now I would ask the following. Which model would you label weird? The one I label weird or the modern one?

To this people with more traditional views might respond by saying that they don’t believe that atheistic, positivistic, naturalistic nonsense either. They too assert that the cosmos has a meaningful arrangement. Fine. But traditional religious visions are, alas, also weird! Thus I would suggest that a concept like The Fall is entirely consistent with the model I present above—if we assume that souls don’t belong into the order of matter but may have entered it (no doubt advised to avoid it) by voluntary acts. If those acts plunged a vast community of souls into a pit of sorts, one might legitimately talk about original sin. The functional equivalents are there, if, to be sure, in a more secular garb.

We might want to elaborate this model further to see how it might actually work at the level of detail.

Life's Origin: First Steps

When it comes to the origin of life, we seem able only to come up with two theoretical structures, possibly a third if we combine the other two. One is that life emerges from matter spontaneously by chance. The other is that God creates the living by a special act. The combination, favored in Catholicism, for example, is to picture God creating the cosmos in such a way that life is already present in it; thus at the appointed time, life will emerge from matter. Here the absolute sway of chance is mitigated if not entirely removed; it is replaced at the crucial point by an intention hidden in the very structure of physical reality.

The third solution is both elegant and subtle. It leaves science to follow its naturalistic methodology wherever it might lead without the embarrassments that the intrusive correction of Galileo occasioned for the Church. At the same time it preserves the ultimate ground of creation as an act of God.

When I look at this solution in more detail, however, it has a troubling aspect. If life is hidden somewhere inside of matter, its emergence is a change in degree rather than in kind, and I’m persuaded that life is different in kind. My reason is that life displays teleology, thus it displays purpose. The most obvious evidence of this is reproduction. It is the continuation of a very complex arrangement of matter, what might be called an extremely complex form, by an intricate step-wise method, a whole long chain of intricate processes. We do not encounter anything resembling it in inorganic nature. We do encounter various examples of simple structural changes in response to stimuli, thus the formation of crystalline forms, e.g., snowflakes, but we don’t find anything at that level in which a necessary chain of formations takes place and must take place for the end result to emerge.

Purpose is, strictly speaking, associated only with agency. I grant you that this is an intuitive finding. It takes a special effort to deny that agency is present in living entities. It is observable. To explain it away mechanistically is always possible when the entity manifests in physical form. The physical expression of agency will take place using mechanical means. But to assign agency, purpose, strictly to mechanism requires that we willfully ignore that which we really see and feel. It is literally impossible to deny that we feel purpose. It's presumptuous on our part to deny the same feeling to dogs, to plants, indeed even to cells. What we observe is a difference in awareness, not a difference in end-seeking tendency. This is the same-old, same-old battle between two ways of perceiving. I don’t want to waste time on it. But the point I’m after here is that the third solution, given above, namely that life is embedded in the cosmic whole from the start, that it permeates matter so that, in the ripeness of time, it may emerge, that solution doesn’t please me. Even when offered by Catholic thinkers, it still reminds me of panpsychism.

There is a version of this mode of thought that I find much less troubling. It is that two (or at least two) orders of reality are present in the cosmos. David Bohm, the physicist, formulated this conception as the presence in the Whole of a conditioned and an unconditioned order. You can find this idea in Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, 1996. Another way to put this is that an order of agencies or souls exists and so does an order of matter. There may be many other mansions in the Lord’s house as well, but here I’m pondering two. This sort of concept can be imagined as two orders that coexist and possibly also interpenetrate—and under certain circumstances the unconditioned order may, in fact, act upon the conditioned order where circumstances permit such interactions. Both, however, exist independently. As for their origin, my view is simply that if agency exists at all, its origin must be God. The unconditioned order, of course, has both consciousness and freedom; that freedom is clearly delimited, as we see from our circumstances. It isn’t, in us, omnipotence. But it has freedom as the order of matter does not.

The difference I see in this position, call it 3A for convenience, is that it keeps separate what are, in my view, two orders, separate in kind, not one rising from the other. I can thus imagine a community of spirits becoming entangled in matter, seduced by it, as it were, and, over long periods of time, building a strange intermediate world of incarnation just because it’s possible. In my science-fiction role I’ve named this chemical civilization. Thus all of life is a construct by spiritual agencies, working on their own. They don’t originate life—because they are life. But they cause it to manifest in matter, where it does not properly belong. This notion first arose in me when studying biology as a grown man with three children. It has long intrigued me because it fits in many ways that which I see displayed in biology. What it requires is that we also imagine the possibility of many grades of consciousness—upward and down. We find no difficulty imagining higher beings—we even have names form them: angels, whole choirs of them. We find it difficult to imagine spirits operating in vast choirs of their own at levels way lower than ours.

This conceptualization demands a cosmology different from the Aristotelian/Thomistic which builds its hierarchy from unformed matter to absolute act. Thus I’m challenging a tradition vastly more grown-up than I am. But I find that hierarchy difficult in spots. Since it goes on into orders of spirit, ever higher, it does not seem to have a proper justification for matter—unless it is to make sense of man. But what if man is just trespassing on matter? What if original sin has another meaning yet? What if matter has a different explanation?

Obviously there is more to say here, but these posts shouldn’t get too long.

Views on "Life"

If a self continues to exist after the body fails, what do we call the surviving state? Is it “life”? Common usage seems to think so. We speak of life everlasting, life in the hereafter, and survival of death. But we seem to have two things in mind. We also have a down-home definition; it involves breathing, warmth, movement, and the ability to pick up signals. When the body stirs and we cry out, “Oh, thank God! He’s still alive,” we’re not talking about souls. We’re talking about bodies. Can definitions help us sort out this seeming dualism in our own conceptions?

Merriam-Webster produces a number of key words; they have one thing in common; they’re intangible in character. Life is a quality, per Webster; it is a principle or force; and it is a capacity. The definition using that last word comes closest to identifying life with bodies: “an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction.” If we try to determine what the word capacity itself means, we get “facility or power to produce, perform, or deploy.” And if we seek out the definition of a principle, the most suitable definition the dictionary gives is “an underlying faculty or endowment.” A faculty is a capacity; an endowment is a form of energy or, ahem, capacity.

Life thus seems to be force; power has the same meaning; capacity carries the sense of potential awaiting actualization. Next question: What originates this force? Humanity provides two answers.

One is that life manifests as matter and is therefore one aspect of the material world. Its force is different only in degree and application from (say) the force exerted by the sun in holding planets in their orbits or of the earth in throwing magma up into the air.

The other answer is dualistic. The life-force isn’t physical but something transcending the material order. It is spirit. This view develops into various alternative formulations: one spirit manifests in countless entities; many individual spirits exist and have always done so; their “descent” into matter is what we call life; one God made and continues to create many individual entities; they are endowed with spiritual powers but these ultimately come from and are maintained in force by one agency, God.

But, it seems, bodies get their energy from food and oxygen; life-force is a burning process; no invisible spirit need be invoked in producing that, surely. The dualist answers: Yes, true. The life-force is not the ordinary energy of bodies; bodies are material in composition and must be moved by energies appropriate to them. But the life-force is the constituting and maintaining force; it causes bodies to cohere in highly organized wholes. This may be understood if we think of the soul as giving life to bodies and the soul’s departure as depriving bodies of life. We normally think of this relationship in reverse. Souls exist because bodies do. When bodies die the soul disappears (materialism) or the soul becomes homeless, so-to-speak (transcendentalism).

The soul as a “constituting/maintaining” agency corresponds to the dictionary definition of life as a principle—in the sense defined above. It is the enabling overlord. An analogy. Let’s take a very small woman (to emphasize her relative physical weakness); she decides to build a mansion on a distant, hilly, rocky stretch of land. She has the means to do this, the money and the will. Money is a good analogy; it is an invisible force in that confidence alone gives those dirty dollar bills or that printed check its real value. Machines do the heavy work of land-clearing and digging out the basement; the heavy work of lifting stone and timber; other, able, brawny men do the rest. All of these “tools” operate off a plan drawn up by the architect, but the tiny lady approved images of the structure and of the layout within it. At last, roads having been built to the place, everything connected, she walks into her house. She lacked the capacity to accomplish most of the actual labor involved, yet here she is, the real owner. No, I couldn’t tell you how my liver really works…

It is of course legitimate enough to label this as a fanciful metaphor with no necessary relationship to actuality. But the metaphor gains plausibility when we contemplate the evidence provided by near-death experiences. They suggest that, indeed, we go somewhere; they suggests that, without some kind of material machinery, we are unable to affect matter. They suggest further that, on the other side, in another order, something more naturally accessible to us—without the very coarse space-suit that we are obliged to wear in this dimension—actually exists. Alas, we don’t have equivalent accounts of people recounting their births. If we did, we could be even more certain.