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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Hegelian dialectics: the most robust philosophical enterprise ever launched to account for the endurance of meaning and desire in a world comprehended and shaped by scientific ("reductive") reason.
Hegel speaks of reason's instincts, of the cunning of reason. We would do well to take these paradoxes seriously again.
The "good enough for me God" indicated by Kauffman used to go by the name of "Geist" or World-Spirit, and has been taken quite seriously (ie, you study it in High School) in pretty much every part of the world except North America.
What is needed is a serious attempt by biologists and philosophers to square Hegel with Darwin, and to see if it's possible to preserve a liberal respect for accident and radical contingency in the nature of things (a sensitivity which is very much intact in Hegel but emphatically dislodged by Marx, who had his reasons) with the traditional dialectical materialist model of purposiveness in creation and meaning in history that we associate with theological and Marxian traditions.
Consciousness cannot be apprehended by anything other than consciousness.
Studying Hegel changes your Everything.
I love where you live and fear not, soon the yuppies won't be able to heat and maintain their fortresses of solitude. Then it won't take long for the plants and critters to retake their territory, just as it doesn't take long for the Earth to retake us. I fish up your way quite a bit. Last summer, I fished a lake where I caught 350 smallies the first day and the same number the second day. After that, it was just 100 fish per day. I use Google Earth to both locate logging roads and to tell me where not to go: if there's a cabin on a lake, I ain't going there.
It's cool that you already know your grave and that's a pretty cool grave, both literally and figuratively.
My first post in this series pointed out that reductionism is a straw man when attacking atheism. This whole article is based on it. We have to account for motion, and dialectics accounts for that - in human society at least.
The struggle between religion (and other idealisms) and atheism reflects material conditions in this society - a struggle of material classes really. The rulers of society love to promote either idealism or crass 'reductionist' materialism - both of which do not account for change. Change is what they abhor most of all, because they will lose control.
The Pirate pointed this out.
Atheism is an intelletual weapon of the working classes - even if they do not see it that way. I do not see an exclusive intellectual content to this debate, but at bottom it is actually apologists for the status quo versus those who want to grasp reality in all its HUMAN dimensions. Religion, of whatever kind, devalues actual life and humanity, in favor of 'something else', a 'higher' stuff. As such, it spits on the real and limited life we all have. And betrays reality, which is the essential thing to grasp, and in grasping it, allows us to change it.
This interview seems full of speculation with the only real science being based on pop science.
In computer science, I would suggest that the field is pretty evenly split on whether or not strong AI is possible. Personally I think that Godel's incompleteness theorems make it practically, if not logically, impossible.
Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind" is referenced by Kauffman (although notably not the much more expansive "Shadows of the Mind").
Quantum coherence is just one hypothetical explanation for consciousness that Penrose posits. His general thrust is that there are hitherto undiscovered conceptual fields of physics/science that could potentially allow us to explain consciousness, but that currently we barely know where to start.
Kurt Godel similarly suggested the same (as well as suggesting we might eventually understand death and afterlife), basing his optimism on our ability to perceive vastly more a priori knowledge than we are currently aware of.
Personally I don't really buy into the quantum coherence thing. Its based on the probabilistic model of quantum mechanics, which I think is a fudge to cover up failings in boolean logic as applied to quantum mechanics. When quantum physics is eventually shown to be deterministic it will render this theory obsolete.
It's nice to have a biologist attempting to abandon positivism/materialism, and seeming to move slightly towards a more Platonistic perspective, but unfortunately Kauffman's attempts seem a little bit ham-fisted.
Think Ken Wilber's "Integral Spirituality" explains all this very well!
Or space aliens or afterlife or purpose or order. You die alone, there's no bigger reward. We are absolutely alone in the indifferent unaware universe.
The Universe, life, evolution, and everything in its natural order is a manifestation of the transcendent. This continual manifestation can be described as a transcendent emanation where every thing that comes forth has a source. The transcendent is beyond being and non-being; it is asymptotically beyond human comprehension. Science is the study of this manifestation. Spirituality is the acceptance of the transcendent nature of emanation. Science and Spirituality are two parallel paths to discovering the nature of reality. Its as simple as that.
Great post.
I think nearly everyone is an unbeliever. There is so much to suggest unfaith. Christian hospitals and their Christian patients are an example. Why would one prolong the time away from their God? The standard explanation is that Earth is a gift and one shouldn't walk away from a gift, but isn't Heaven supposed to be the greater gift? How many car aficionados would stay and play with their Yugo when their promised fleet of Ferraris is a short walk away?
Perhaps, there is no practical need to "invoke natures wonders" in the first place.
It seems to me that nature consists of "ceaseless creativity" and "ceaseless destruction" in equal measure.
I remember a few years ago I gave my seven-year old some amazingly beautiful microscopic photos of actual snowflakes for a class "show and tell". One of the parents of a child in my daughter's class noticed them and asked how anyone could possibly look at these photos and not believe in God.
Oddly enough, that very morning, before I delivered the snowflake images, I had been reading some on-line accounts of the Iraqi civilian casualty figures, as they stood back two or three years ago.
Included in that piece were some indescribably horrible images of wounded Iraqi children. I also remember the first thought that occurred to me after seeing the first photo. I wondered how can it be possible, that human beings continue to believe in God and a "loving" one at that, in the face of such misery and destruction.
Some of you may suggest that atrocities committed by humans are somehow apart from or outside the realm of nature. We convieniently like say that some things appear in nature, while others are "man-made". The actual fact of the matter is that we are part of the natural world and by logical extension everything that we do is in every sense "natural". From atomic bombs to plastic-surgery...it's all nature.
It's time to stop believing in the grown-up version of the Tooth-Fairy. It really doesn't have to be as lonely and frightening as you might imagine.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
