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• Wednesday, November 19, 2008 05:54 AM

  All sacredness is local.

  Kaufman is off by a over 5 centuries in his opening remark about the Greeks; some find echoes of credible physics in Heraclitus (born c. 535 bce). A credible brass computer has been unearthed near Crete (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism), dated to 150 bce. No single artifact is as significant as what they each embody: a co-incident love for examining and re-crafting the natural world, using organization and trial-and-error. Not a small point.

  I recognize in Kaufman a familiar urge: to be smart enough, large enough, to bring together a damp, trembling Soul/God belief and the drier world view of science. To infuse wonder and exaltation into the naturalist world view. To have sacred cake and profanely eat it, too, with holy gusto.

  The fly in the blessed ointment remains, tho. Contrary to Kaufman, not all scientists are reductionists, in the dispirited, meaningless sense he cites here. He confuses Reductionism as a philosophical inevitability -- it is where the facts take us -- with a personal nihilism, a blank look at wonder. The scientists and rigorous thinkers of all kinds I have known are filled with an itchy, anxious delight with the world and their work in it.

  So if it is a straw man at the heart of his construction, is Emergence fallacious? Naw, I don't think so. It just isn't so contrast-y, and thus not as grand an idea as he makes out. Agency is real but completely relative, and our intimate level of contact with family dogs -- imbuing them with Values notwithstanding, not mundane urges, desires, preferences -- such a level does not diminish them or elevate them or pertain in any way to the dog. Not to the microbes in their gut nor to the Redwood towering nearby. In the universe, all sacred is local. And disappears when we change scale.

  I love the places Kaufman goes, even if he sees grinning Buddhas behind every tree. To make a statement like "(our) universe is on a unique trajectory" takes a lot of guts. It begs the question: compared to what? the other universe? the normal universes that wear grey flannel suits and live boring lives of quiet desperation?

  And he blurs things to make points worth making, if only to refute. There is no such thing as the evolution of the human heart as he means it, because the heart IS a muscle pump. Our "soul" as such, more to the point, the emotions and sense of the sacred and fears and Great Loves all exist in and are effaced by the grey squishy pulp behind our eyes, and the illusion of whole "soulness" is sustained by incessant flushes of endocrine and serotonin and testosterone and adrenalin. Knowing this does not diminish but rather enhances the indescribable explosion of "sacred" joy i feel at dawn, in the West Elks, as the sun cracks into the high coulee, and a wild sheep lingering over dewy alpine flowers, raises up to catch a brilliant spark of first sun in one large shining eye. Am I "just" a Reductionist because I see no Agency in that?

  But still, apoint worth making, because the idea of Agency as he sees it makes me think in new ways. There IS a real purpose, writ small and large, in what teems around us, even if only seemingly so, even if our pareidoliac obsession puts the human face on the rocks themselves, and ascribes nuance in a dog's irresistible urge to be scratched. Even if not-quite, or sort-of, the profusion of interactive (A)gency is under-discussed, and a great meeting place for all points-of-view.

  My take is this: why can't Agency and apparent Value naturally evolve in polyremic co-operation, leading to a perception of all oars pulling together? why the need for the wearying invocation of the unknowable, of the tired trope of Quantum?

  To his larger point of celebrating "sacred" feelings I say hear! hear! Why cede these wonderful natural feelings to the religious, or to the superstitious past? But let's not replace one unknowable with another. Celebrate knowledge AND the ineffable! There will be plenty of each to contemplate for the next 100,00 years. And I think Kaufman and I agree on this. Gotta love anyone who cites Spinoza with enthusiastic precision. Creativity is (g)od enough for me, too.

  I love his self-deprecating style. I like him. But he makes me a little nervous, clinging with a pinky to the one truly dangerous historical idea: Divinity.

  —smallpkgs Read smallpkgs's other letters
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