This is vrey intrestring...

"Dyslexia Varies Across Languages" (HT to my Mom!)

"In English, the alphabetic letters that form visual words are pronounceable, so access to the pronunciation of English words is made possible by using letter-to-sound conversion rules," Siok said. "Written Chinese maps graphic forms––i.e., characters––onto meanings; Chinese characters possess a number of intricate strokes packed into a square configuration, and their pronunciations must be memorized by rote. This characteristic suggests that a fine-grained visuospatial analysis must be performed by the visual system in order to activate the characters' phonological and semantic information. Consequently, disordered phonological processing may commonly coexist with abnormal visuospatial processing in Chinese dyslexia."

Crossing your legs and cutting paper with your tongue...

I've wanted to write about the following topics for some time, so I hope my thoughts are clear without being rambling.

In the past few years I have taken notice of the way women sometimes stand. I'm sure you've seen it: feet crossed, legs like an X. I have tried standing like this before and I find it unnatural and unstable. But time and again I see women waiting at tea stands, at movie theaters, outside restaurants, at school, etc, "like that." I have no recollection of ever seeing a man stand that way and I am aware women do not always stand like that, but the disparity between men and women is remarkable. What accounts for this "odd" stance by women? I have three hypotheses, and please pardon my "bluntness" on at least on of them.

First, it could have to do with the female hip structure. Wider hips might incline their legs toward the center. We can see this in the female stride as their feet step inside a narrower space than men's wider plodding. Indeed, part of a "sexy walk" involves "swishing" the rear end as the feet click-clack on a narrow line. So, the women's wider hips might make it more comfortable for them unconsciously, to stand X-wise.

My second hypothesis is that it has something to do with the female crotch and the hymen especially. Bluntly: maybe virgins or sexually less experienced women are literally tighter and less flexible in the crotch, so that natural tension inclines their legs to criss-cross. By contrast, "looser" women (literally) might find less resistance to taking a wider stance. My "virginal hypothesis" could mean virgins and generally less sexually "open" females subconsciously guard their nether regions by standing X-wise. It's no secret in body language that a lusty man, or a man consciously or unconsciously conveying attraction, will sit with his legs wide open like a cowboy on a bar stool. By contrast, women as a rule sit with their legs tightly crossed and a pair of sprawled legs on a seated woman is extremely suggestive.

My third hypothesis is neurological in nature. Based on what I have read in neuroscience and psychology, women's corpus callosum plays a more active, balanced role in integrating the brain's two hemispheres. This is why women are more "intuitive": they naturally display dual perception and dual reflection in the left and right hemispheres because they are simply in better cross-communication than in men's brains. Another important feature of the brain in this hypothesis is what's called "decussation." Decussation basically means neural "crossing-over." It is what accounts for you using your "right brain" when you use your left hand and vice versa. It is what accounts for right-side paralysis in a left-hemisphere stroke. And so on. Now, decussation, like pretty much all features of the brain, is a plastic neural feature, meaning, we can develop it or see it atrophy. One way to enhance decussation, and "stimulate both sides of the brain," is, predictably enough, to do crossed-over exercises. One crossed-over exercise you can try is weaving your fingers together (with your thumbs down) and rotating them inward (along with complex finger motions). Another decussation drill is to criss-cross your feet and hands while doing a vertical stretch and deep breathing. Now, the significance of decussation vis-à-vis the curious female stance I'm discussing should be clear: women frequently stand X-wise as a natural expression, and perhaps even unconscious enhancement, of their decussated brains.

Obviously, I lack the neurological and/or psychological acumen to pick the right hypothesis (or even to discover if any of them is correct). At the same time, though, any combination of them could be true, so perhaps I don't need to weed out the worst hypothesis. Maybe they are all just facets of a single phenomenon: "X-legs."

****

Now, to introduce my second neurological oddity, let me ask you this: What can I bet you do almost every time you cut a pattern out of a sheet of paper? Stick out your tongue and move it as you cut. Since I started teaching a lot more Small children, I've had to prepare more materials, such as pieces of colored paper, pictures of fruit and animals, paper shapes, etc. So I've had to print a lot of images and then cut them out. I really noticed what my tongue was doing when I cut paper a few weeks ago when I was cutting out the outlines of students' hands which I had traced in class (pattern: "How big is your/my hand?"). The more I focused on cutting closely along the outline, the more my tongue got involved. I thought it was silly for me to act like a child, so I consciously kept my tongue in my mouth... but the more naturally and thoughtlessly I cut, the more my tongue crept out. "How weird!" I thought. Why was my tongue, of all things, so insistent on being involved with my fingers?

Here's my hypothesis: The tongue is one of the most sensitive and neurally articulate organs in the body, rivaled perhaps only by the fingers in sensitivity and precision. I know of a device designed for blind people, which helps them "see" with their tongues. (Here is a long discussion of the device and the benefits of "tongue vision.") The device is like an electronic retainer with a pad of movable "pistons" on it; it's basically an automated Braille reader on your tongue. Over time, patients can learn to navigate the world by "seeing" a tactile representation on their tongues, a representation encoded by optical devices connected to the tongue pad. My hunch is that our tongues move in synchronicity with our fingers as a way of stimulating neural areas used for finger dexterity. Interestingly, I bet it works both ways: the intricate use of our fingers co-activates areas in our brains which stimulates motor action in the tongue.

The soul in some way becomes what it knows...

"For a parcel of matter to take on a form is for it to become a thing of the kind the form is a form of; for example, for it to take on the form of triangularity is just for it to become a triangle. Now for the intellect to grasp the nature of a thing is just for it to take on the form of that thing. And in that case, if the intellect were material, it would become a thing of the kind that it grasps; for instance, it would become triangular when it grasps the form of triangularity. But this is obviously absurd. So the intellect is not material."

-- Edward Feser, "Plato's affinity argument"

Recall that in De veritate q.I a.i St. Thomas says says of the soul (anima): "quae quodammodo est omnia" (it is in some manner all things).

From there to here...

Fourfold Semiotics:
Why We Say What We Say Even When What We Say Isn't What We're Really Saying

by Elliot Bougis

[I didn't intend this to become a "real essay," as it rather forced itself out of me late last night. But in retrospect, especially when I added the title as a coda, it seems substantive enough to join the growing heap of my "real essays," which I hope can make up a couple-three "real books" and earn me a little "real money." Scandalous thought!

Also, I have learned to add footnote links in my HTML. If you want to read the content of a footnote, click on the bracketed number and you will "jump" to the footnote. To go back in the body of the text, just click "back" on your web browser. I'm still working out the kinks.]

A tingle, then an ache. The corpus moves ever so slightly. Wakes. Something called hunger, but without the name. The corpus, now a moving animal, licks its fingers for some nourishment. Comes away empty. Its eyes range over the bush, looking for some nourishment. Looks down at the bare ground. It lets out a small grunt. Others of its kind glance at it. Return to their own morsels. It whimpers again, gazing at what they eat. They snuff in reply and munch on the remnants of roots, grubs, berries. Incipient speech goes begging.

Advance many eons. One of countless of that hungry animal's descendants (it found food after all) feels a tingle, than an ache. Hunger. And the words: "I'm hungry. I would love a steak." The corpus raises itself and exits to find nourishment, eyes awash in a cornucopia of choices. Recalls that steak is above his budget. Settles for soup. And the words: "I would like a bowl of soup and two pieces of bread, please." Satisfaction ensues, hunger disperses. Speech strikes gold. But steak will have to wait till his fate next Friday.

Advance a few generations. One of that man's countless descendants (his date was a success, after all!) feels a tingle, mumbles "I'm hungry" to his coworkers and heads off for some grub (how proud his ancient forebears would be!). He reaches into his duffel bag and wedges his headphones into his ears as he makes his way to the subway. He's learning Spanish with a Pimsleur audio course. "Tell me you're hungry," the voice says. "I'm hungry," he mutters, to no one in particular. Funny thing is, he really is hungry, so the lesson sticks that much better. "Tengo hambre. Yo tengo hambre." Speech flexes its muscles.

Advance an hour. Our man has eaten his fill and is back on the subway. He wants to review the lesson he was in when he sat down for lunch. Soon enough the voice says, "Tell me you're hungry." He smiles at the irony. "Tengo hambre. Yo tengo hambre." Only he doesn't; he just ate. But he still says he's hungry. Speech hallucinates.

++++

This is a meditation on what I will provisionally call the fourfold structure of semiotics. I take it that virtually all sentient beings are also semiotic beings. That is, after all, basically what sensation is: responding to natural signs with natural signs. (For those interested in the esoteric machinations of my presentation here, my term of art for the Thomistotelian "animal nature," or "sensitive soul," is the semiotic capacity.) The objects of desire, as well as the mere objects among which we always find ourselves, with or without a desire or repulsion towards them, are "first-order signs." They are signs waited to be "answered" by second-order signs like gestures, glances, grunts, and so forth.

In the first vignette, a primal ancestor lacked the verbal wherewithal to express his hunger, much less name it for himself. He was stuck at the first level of semiotic competence, namely, grunting and gesturing. Certainly this kind of semiotic skill is a form of "expressing" himself, but it lacks a key aspect of advanced semiotic ability, namely, the ability to refer to things outside the immediate semiotic environment. That ancestor was stuck in what Walker Percy (following Charles S. Peirce) calls a dyadic form of existence. Without an immediate semiotic impulse, the creature was unable to generate signs that transported it beyond its immediate semiotic Umwelt. Even with semiotic input, the creature could only respond in kind: two sign-makers responding dyadically, im-mediately. This is the first level of semiotic ability.

By the second vignette, a hominid descendant had ascended to a marvelous level of semiotic ability: representational verbal speech. Such a man could not only respond dyadically to its immediate semiotic Umwelt (hunger pangs, billboards, smells of cooking food, etc.), but could also go beyond that Umwelt by way of speech. He could, in other words (!), respond mediately to a range of signs beyond his immediate dyadic engagement with the world. He could so to speak (!) put verbal signs between himself and unseen realities; language could function as a bridge from one semiotic realm to the next. This introduces what Percy (à la Peirce) calls a "triadic" existence. The words he uses to navigate immediate and mediate signs can be completely detached from his dyadic responses. This is why he said he wanted a steak, even though it was a mere fancy. As a triadic semiotic creature, the hungry man can juggle his own interior "signs" (hunger, etc.), a range of mediate and immediate signs (the fanciful steak in the sky or the steaming soup behind the counter, etc.), and his own words about all of it ("hungry, steak, soup, etc."). This is the second level of semiotic ability.

Now here's where dyadic and triadic semiotics diverge. If the hungry man had a dog, he could easily train it to respond not only to the sound of a can opener at feeding time (or the tap of a spoon on the bowl, etc.), but also to human speech (e.g., "cookie, dinner, Let's eat, hungry?, etc."). Yet, could the man anywhere near as easily train his dog not to respond dyadically to such cues? Could he, in other words (…), train the dog to ponder "cookie" rather than to look up hopefully, begin drooling, amble over, sit patiently, etc.? It seems he could not. For the only reason he bothered to teach his dog those verbal cues, was so that they were entirely cues for action. Moreover, what means would the owner use to train his dog to dissociate dyadic stimuli from dyadic responses if not dyadic stimuli themselves? Again, dyadic productions are but "second-order signs" linked to "first-order signs."

If, to cite one of Percy's examples, I am with a two-year-old boy and I point to a red balloon, the lad will probably reach out for it in a typical dyadic response. If I then point at the balloon and say "balloon" a few times, I can teach him how to say "balloon" when I point at it, or, in little more time, to reach for the balloon when I merely say "balloon" without pointing. But could I then teach the child to simply reflect on the word in isolation from the immediate semiotic context? If I pointed at the balloon, could I expect him to do anything else than say "balloon" and reach for it? If I said the word "balloon," could I expect him to do anything but mimic the word and look at the balloon for his next cue? If you've ever played with children that small, you know the answer is no. Children at that age, like dogs at any age, are stuck in a dyadic world. The sole function of dyadic speech is to signal desires and trigger responses from hearers.

Now perhaps someone will interject that "baby talk" manifests a crude form of triadic speech, since when babies babble, they are not doing so (dyadically) in response to or in pursuit of objects. Yet, I deny baby talk even belongs to lower-level dyadic semiotics, precisely because baby talk is incoherent for the infants themselves, and still less for procuring certain wants. Indeed, bare howling and crying are superior to babbling as dyadic speech. The whole point of triadic semiotics is to elevate dyadic semiotics into its own self-subsistent world of signing, in which verbal signs can be signs about dyadic signs about first-order signs. This is why infant babbling can't count as triadic signing, though it can count as nascent triadic signing precisely insofar as human infants develop into third-order signers: we know what the baby is "doing"––signing triadically in the enclosure of language itself––even if the baby doesn't, and even if it isn't successful. As far as I know, baby talk is just the overflow of intense neural wiring going on inside young brains as synaptic connections and well formed speech modules are forged. At most, babbling is a floating bridge between a baby's natural aptitude to sign dyadically and its human aptitude to master triadic signing.

Indeed, far from showing the seamless continuity of babbling as a supposed form of triadic semiotics and lower-level dyadic semiotics, baby talk highlights their discontinuity. If there is too much ambiguity about the second-order signs a child (or a dog) produces, she risks not attaining the first-order signs she is after. If, for instance, a verbally precocious toddler kept chanting "not hungry, not hungry" while his mother tried to feed him, he would risk not eating when his body needed nourishment. Because the toddler displays only an incompetent production of third-order verbalism, there is a "disconnect" between what his mother receives as a meaningful dyadic refusal and what his brain produces as inadvertent third-order signing. His brain, in other words, is producing irrelevant third-order signs ("not hungry"), irrelevant because detached from his actual dyadic needs. This hapless play-acting will last only as long as his dyadic system allows. Once he gets hungry enough, the toddler will naturally manifest its genuine dyadic desires by a rumbling stomach, confused moaning, automatic glances at the food, and so on. Thus, far from being an "automatic transition" from dyadic to triadic signing, baby talk is a threat to both dyadic signing and mature triadic signing if the child is not granted "citizenship" in the properly triadic world as a whole.

Only once a child is old enough––perhaps six years old––can she step back from the frenzy of dyadic semiotics and the neural acrobatics of babbling, and reflect on language itself as higher order of stimulus. The words themselves become semiotic objects. Children below a certain threshold constantly ask, "What's that?" (as apparently I did all the time as a toddler), but once they know a thing's name they don't go on to ask, "What does _____ mean?" Above a certain threshold, however, a child will not only ask "What's that?" but will also proceed to ask, for example, "But what does fire hydrant mean? Why is a fire hydrant called a 'fire hydrant'? Why do we use that word for that thing?" Entry into the world of triadic semiotic ability entails positing words themselves as "mediaries" between one's self and one's dyadic objects. In the triadic world of human speech, words themselves become objects of semiotic engagement, which is why we so easily "argue about words." We are not satisfied to refer to things by mere gestures or even by articulate sounds (as plenty of other species can do); we insist on saying things well, being accurate, not being obscure, and so on. In fact, we can't move onto a dyadic course of action until we first agree, on a triadic level, about what we are saying. Neurologically, poetry and song may just be exalted forms of baby talk (i.e., ways of reinforcing synaptic complexity), but they are certainly more than neural babbling insofar as they are forms of conscious enjoyment of words themselves among triadic agents. (As I stressed above, precisely because baby talk is sheer babbling, it is eo ipso not triadic, whereas poetry and song are triadic babbling, and eo ipso include the intentionality-referentiality of triadic semiotics.) We don't heed baby talk, since it neither refers to a baby's dyadic interests nor demonstrates verbal excellence on her part. By contrast, we heed artistic verbal performances, not because they direct us to dyadic objects, but because they bring us to dwell on words themselves as uniquely human "toys." Once a semiotic creature masters how to navigate between dyadic signing and sheer triadic signing, it no longer (or at least very seldom ^[1]) risks failing to obtain its first-order objects of desire.

Just now I mentioned being obscure, and now I want to expand on the feature of language which motivate objections to obscurity, namely, deceit. Deceit brings us to the third facet of semiotic ability. (Notice that I do not refer to this as the third level of semiotics, since I am still not sure whether deceit is properly considered a form of triadic semiotics. I'm inclined to say that deceit is a form of semiotic behavior that can be done dyadically or triadically, as I will explain presently.) With deceit, semiotic creatures can use their own signs as diversions from other signs. A mother bird's mimicry of being wounded so as to divert a predator from her nest is dyadically deceitful. All she is doing is giving the predator a more enticing dyadic stimulus so as to draw it away from her brood. Humans can do the same thing (such as faking an upset stomach so onlookers ignore an accomplice breaking into a car, pretending to notice something remarkable over someone's shoulder so you can grab the last oyster at a soirée, etc.) on a dyadic level, but can also use articulate verbalization to mask their intentions. As I said, though, verbal prevarication seems to be only a very ornate kind of dyadic deceit, since it puts a verbal "smokescreen" in front of the contested dyadic objects. It reduces triadic signs to diversionary second-order signs.

At the same time, though, I admit prevarication––verbal deception––may just be normal triadic semiotics taken to grotesque levels. For while triadic semiotics inserts words between agents and objects as objects of reflection in their own right, prevarication does so crucially detached from the reality of its referents. In other words (…), the reason we bicker over words is to ensure that the speaker is not misleading us about the referents of speech. There really is no way to prevaricate dyadically, since to so would just be to replace one sign with another (as in the case of the mother bird feigning a broken wing to draw the predator away), and thus no longer count as triadic signing. The threat of prevarication is however endemic to triadic semiotics, since the validity of the "third-order signs" (viz., words) depends on those terms actually referring to the dyadic objects in question.^[2]

In any case, let me proceed to the fourth level––and I do mean level––of semiotic ability. This is what the young office worker was doing on the subway while learning Spanish. Clearly he wasn't using Spanish for dyadic gains. Even if he happened to be hungry when he said "yo tengo hambre," his uttering those words had nothing to do with his the procurement of food. Nor was his response to the Pimsleur narrator a properly triadic form of signing, not the least because the narrator could not respond to the man's "yo tengo hambre." What the man was doing was something which I think is truly unique to human beings: he was using language in a purely fictitious way, yet without being deceitful.

When the Pimsleur narrator said, "Tell me you're hungry," the listener did not respond deceitfully. He didn't say, "Tengo hambre" in order to procure or obscure a dyadic object, nor did he utter the words as mere verbal play. It is one thing to respond dyadically to a dyadic sign, such as when a dog whines for scraps from the table or nudges its bowl to prompt its owner to feed it. It something else to respond triadically to a dyadic sign, such as when we see a Ferrari on the street and say, "Man, I'd love to drive that baby." But in the case of the man on the subway, there seems to be a wholly new level of semiotic performance involved. Dyadically, the man showed his hunger by saying, "I'm hungry" and by heading for food. Triadically, he could sign his hunger by being asked, "Are you hungry?", answering "Yes, I'm hungry," and then consulting his coworkers about what he should eat ("What do you mean by a 'good cheap burger'? etc."). But as he listened to the Pimsleur course he was told, triadically, to pretend to say he was hungry, which suggests that he was being deceitful about being deceitful. It would be easy enough for the man to tell his friend he's hungry, when in fact he isn't, so as to get a chance to speak in private over lunch, but something wholly novel and recursive––and I would say uniquely human––occurs as he plays along with the Pimsleur prompts. It is an exercise in what I will call honest deceit.

The point I am trying to convey is quite subtle and came to me in a flash of intuition under circumstances very similar to those of the man on the subway, so I'm sorry if I'm being obscure (!). Let me just try to blurt out my point and see what sticks: we can imagine a dog responding to the word "hungry" by running to its bowl, and we can (I suppose for the sake of argument) imagine the same dog "acting hungry" so as to draw his owner into the kitchen for some other purpose––but can we possibly imagine a dog being signaled to "act hungry" and then "playing along" without being hungry at all? Again, while dogs and other animals commonly respond to verbal cues like "cookie, cookie," and while they commonly generate signals to obtain cookie-cookie, I know of no non-human behavior which simultaneously and consciously responds to hunger-cues with hunger-signals as a sheer exercise in signaling.^[3] This––the utter gratuity of human language learning––seems to be a wholly unique semiotic capacity of human beings. Like all animals, we can respond to and produce signals relevant to our dyadic ends. Perhaps, also, some species of animals can revel in their form of communication as we do in poetry and song (such as whales and their whale songs). But I know of no other species which emits signals for the sole purpose of generating signals which themselves can be dyadic, triadic, poetic, and ironic all at once.

The whales might sing a certain song to signal a desire for plankton elsewhere in the sea; the whales might also sing songs to mislead other whales about water currents, salinity, a bounty of plankton, etc.; the whales might also sing songs just to elicit harmonic responses from other whales. The whales might––and probably do––perform all these semiotic feats, but I know of no whale behavior in which a song is generated in order to evoke a song which sounds exactly like a dyadic signal for, say, food, but is simultaneously evoked as a false signal for food.^[4] I would say this bizarre stricture, found only at the fourth level of semiotics, applies to all non-human animals.

Lastly, let me say that my reflections in this post are not motivated to establish a unique aspect of human-being. Yet I think my considerations do indicate a unique dimension of human existence. Aside from my fourfold schematization and my fumbling over the fourth semiotic level, my considerations herein are not original with me. Mortimer Adler, Stanley Jaki, Dennis Bonnette, Walker Percy, Charles S. Peirce, Adrian Reimers, et al., have helped me see just how "mysterious" human language is a genuinely biological phenomenon. I hope you can see some of the mystery too.

[1] Even very competent third-order signing can backfire at times, such as when verbal irony is taken to be literal. "That's what you said!" –– "Yes, but you should have known that's not what I meant!" And so on. I experienced a similar backfire once when I worked in a restaurant. The customer ordered a pizza and nonchalantly asked for "everything on it." But that restaurant charged per item, so I asked the customer at least twice, "Are you sure you want everything on it? All these toppings?" He insisted on "the works," whereupon I tapped every single key we had for toppings, until the pizza came out to about $30. The customer was incensed and accused me of overcharging him. So I had to call out my manager to explain that each of "all the toppings" was anywhere from $.25 to $1. He found this absurd, but then settled for a handful of toppings.

[2] Obviously, I'm not settled on how to classify deceit in an ascending model of "the fourfold structure of semiotics," but I will say this: If we imagine the four dimensions of semiotics which I am proposing as steel plates, dyadic signing is the first level of semiotics, triadic signing is the second level, and deceit is a column of steel running through both. So I guess my proposal looks like one side of a vertical barbell with weights stacked on it!

[3] A possible objection might be that "gratuitous signaling" is just an elaborate form of neural exercise, like baby talk and poetry (at one level). I grant that just as poetry has a neural-boosting dimension but still is something else at a higher level, so the "pure signaling" of some human semiotics both includes and surpasses mere neural calisthenics. The pure signaling of someone responding to a Pimsleur course is, as I have said, a strange blend of neural calisthenics, dyadic training (e.g., to obtain food if one is ever hungry in Spain), triadic engagement (i.e., with the narrator and native speakers in the Pimsleur course), and something else, which I have called "honest deceit." Perhaps my analysis is just another way of talking about Wittgensteinian "language games," but I think the difference is that my account is literally about language games as a uniquely human form of semiotics. Certainly other animals play games, and some might even "play with 'words'" (à la whale songs), but does any other animal besides man play with playing with words? It seems not, and that is my point, even if neural calisthenics enter into the picture.

[4] Just imagine it: "Hey, Lenny, I want you to sing that song, you know, the plankton song." –– "Why, Mac? You need plankton?" –– "Nope." –– "You love its melody?" –– "Nope." –– "Well, then, why?" –– "Just to hear you say it when I ask you." –– "You're friggin' weird."

^[NUMBER]

[NUMBER]

Look into your eyes...

Man is a natural entity among natural entities. All human knowledge comes to humans via the senses (images, etc.). Insofar as matter as such is unintelligible to us, and pure essences are inscrutable to us, we must somehow "bridge" our sensory contact with the world and our intellectual descriptions of it. We do this by "abstracting" a thing's nature from our sensory contact with it. We know universals IN particulars, not AS particulars; and we know particulars BY universals, not AS universals.

The problem is this: just because we cannot think without "images" does not mean we think only BY images. The problem is this: can we STOP at our private visualizations (as an adequate grasp of reality)? Thomism insists all thought involves a visual dimension but abstraction is a purely intellectual act, and therefore surpasses total visualization. Just because we can't speak without word doesn't mean we can say all we know IN words. We don't "know" essences themselves; we know things IN their act of existence; and the plenitude of existence endlessly surpasses our verbal or visual description of it.

It's not an "empirical verifiable" fact that "knowledge is a function of empirical verification." What's more, that claim ITSELF cannot be verified empirically. It begs the question. Being a claim ABOUT empirical facts, empirical verificationism is not itself an empirical FACT.

Kant reminds us of the crucial "unity of consciousness," but is such a thing empirically measurable? And what about "now" itself? Can we "touch" or "measure" the present? The present has no extension or duration since it either "just was" or "is about to be" but it exists in a transcendental way. It is the transcendental "dimension" which enables us to have empirical experience at all.

Tell me what is happening RIGHT NOW. You can't, because "now" is already "past." The "now" obviously it exists, but it is not subject to an empirical description at all, nor a direct empirical verification. Can we measure the present? WHEN we do measure it? We only "measure" the duration of "now" on the boundaries of it. It's like trying to look at the inside of your own eyeball.

The collar is to the cat what idols are to man...

Good lyrics, cute video…

Why fertilizer?

Why do farmers use fertilizer? Because it enhances the yield of crops by supplementing nitrogen levels and--here I plead ignorance on the chemistry--maximizes the gains products of photosynthesis. Clearly, fertilizer is used to alter the chemical structures involved in plant life, but it does so in accordance with a certain aim. And while this aim--increased yield--is an anthropic "goal" superimposed on the crops, it is a goal fully cognizant of the crops' natural ends. Fertilizer enhances and accelerates crops' attainment of their natural ends. Farming, as Charles De Koninck points out in "The Lifeless World of Biology", is man's way of working with nature, of helping nature actualize her own potentialities. Certainly we know the chemical interactions involved in fertilization--and the application of pesticides, for that matter--are essential to the production of various ends. But the chemical interactions themselves cannot and do not bring about the natural ends involved. For, if an adequate natural explanation consisted solely in considering the physico-chemical elements and forces in any entity or system, we could bathe the crops in one chemical after another and "let the chemicals do the work." Unfortunately, while the chemicals would do what they do with relentless thoroughness, what they would do for, and to, the crops is an entirely different matter. Some of the chemicals might combine to promote crop yield, thus, of course, allowing the crops to "get what they need," but most likely we would "end up" with fields of dead crops. Why? Because what crops need is not chemical interactions as such, but fitting material "input" to produce their natural "output." Interestingly, finality is intrinsic even to physico-chemical machinations, since all such interactions are explained in roughly the same way: "Beginning with such and such elements under such and such conditions will naturally tend to result in such and such products."

Even when biotechnology "perverts" a plant's natural ends, it does so based on a concurrent grasp of how specific plants will react to various chemical changes. If the chemical alterations themselves were adequate to produce the desired changes, such changes could be applied across the board to all plants. But because we tailor our biotechnology to each specific plant, in its specific environment, we thereby recognize and "cooperate with" the plant's specific nature. Why make these changes and not others? Why avoid these changes and not others? In each case, for each aim, we alter a plant's "natural nature" (natura naturata) based on predictions which that nature will make under different conditions. A thing's act of existence--its essence--is the foundation for its reactions in existence. Indeed, prediction itself is based on the fact that plants and animals--and even molecular systems--have various analogous forms of finality. If a farmer predicted a bad harvest on the horizon, he would do so in light of his knowledge of his crops' specific natures. He would recognize where the harvest is "headed" based on how far or near from a certain end the crops are at the time he predicts a poor harvest. His resignation to this fact, and his decision, for example, not to waste fertilizer on trying to "make up for lost time," or helping the crops "catch up," is rooted in his knowledge that a chemical bath just won't be enough to attain the desired end.

I emphasize the connection between finality and prediction in light of some comments Daniel Dennett made in response to two other thinkers concerning natural teleology. He recognized that teleology--directedness or intentionality--is integral to prediction... and yet he denies what I am here calling heuristic finality actually exists in nature. Why? Because our predictions are never fully accurate. Real, heuristic teleology "is too idealized, because of the omnipresent possibility of error." Our predictions, like all ideal mathematical formulae, are idealized and therefore don't really obtain in physical reality. As an instance of an attempt to defend real teleology, Dennett cites Fred Dretske's attempt to naturalize intentionality. "Teleological principles," argues Dretske, "provide a basis for predicting what response to new circumstances a system which conforms to them will produce" (italics not in original). Dennett explains that such a system "would not just happen to track appropriateness; it would do so in a principled way. It would be caused, in Dretske's view, to track meanings in an appropriate way." This seems sensible enough, but Dennett faults it for the following reason: "But there are no such systems, human or otherwise. There are only better and worse approximations of this ideal--which is rather like the ideal of a frictionless bearing, or a perfectly failsafe alarm system." Before I comment on Dennett's "deflation" of natural teleology, I think I should explain the broader context of his views.

Dennett is well known for advocating "the intentional stance", which I have discussed before at FCA. According to the intentional stance we should act "as if" nature displays goal-directedness, since this useful fiction will help us better understand why a certain system or organism does what it does. The intentional stance is the third and highest of three stances Dennett proposes in philosophy, the second and first, respectively, being the mechanical and the physical stances. The physical stance examines the most basic physico-chemical processes of an organism/system; the mechanical examines the internal kinetics and structure that complex organism/system. In a thermostat, for example, the physical stance would help explain why the casing is "plastic," why the coiled spring-lever is "metallic," why the wires are "electroconductive," and so forth. Taking the mechanical stance would help explain why the coiled spring-lever expands or contracts and then why it closes the circuit to activate the theromstat, which, in turn, triggers the boiler to heat the air, etc. Finally, the intentional stance would have us say, tongue in cheek, that the thermostat "wants" to maintain the temperature; putting it like that is not only less cumbersome than explicating all the physical and mechanical intricacies of the contraption, but also "true in a sense" as far as our interactions with the thermostat are concerned. Similarly, a mosquito can be "refracted" by Dennett's the three stances, thus: the physical stance accounts for why its legs and wings are such a hardness, etc.; the mechanical stance accounts for why its wings elevate it at such and such a velocity and its legs help it land, etc.; finally, the intentional stance accounts for why the little demon keeps coming at us and buzzing in our ears (vit., it "wants" to feel warmth), why it extrudes a proboscis into our skin (viz., it "desires" our blood), etc. This is the context for Dennett walking a tightrope between Ringen's more austere anti-teleologism and Bennett's more Aristotelian teleology: Dennett is a teleologist in so far as taking an "intentional stance" in biology is a handy way of speaking.

Now, it should come as little surprise that I find Dennett's deflation of "real" teleology not only feeble; what may not be as obvious is that I also think it is methodologically self-destructive for him as a philosopher of science (and as a 'devout' Darwinist, to boot). In my opinion, Dennett's key argument against heuristic finality is this: "…there are no such ['really' teleological and in-principle predictable] systems, human or otherwise. There are only better and worse approximations of this ideal…" (italics not in original). As far as I understand Dennett's point, if heuristic finality is unreal due to the fact that our predictions of certain outcomes are always idealized and slightly off the mark, then our mathematical descriptions of nature are just as unreal, for they too are idealized and always slightly off the mark. This, the denial of accurate theoretical explanations of physical systems, seems like an incredibly high price to pay for deflating heuristic finality. After all, if no scientific formula is real because we never find perfectly exact manifestations of it in our quantitative observations, then can experimental science even be true in principle? If, due to physical indeterminacy and "the omnipresent risk of [observational] error," the predictive "leverage" provided by heuristic finality is unsound, then how does any other "idealized" scientific prediction hold up? If all idealized scientific theories are only useful predictive fictions, is Dennett's own pet theory of natural selection really true? If it is true merely as a "general principle," or as a researcher's working "rule of thumb" (like a biologist's reliance on the intentional stance), is natural selection accurate enough on a case by case basis to count as exact, quantitative science? If, in other words, natural selection is a logical axiom of scientific exploration, how is it any less a priori and unfalsifiable than the old Aristotelian saw that "Nature never acts without a purpose" or that "Nature abhors a vacuum"? At the same time, if natural selection is true in more than as-if, idealized way, then how does the omnipresent possibility of error and the idealized nature of theoretical prediction cut against a fruitful predictive model––including heuristic finality?

The dilemma is this: if natural selection is adequate for making clear, quantitative predictions of trait inheritance and population variation, then it is at least one instance of a predictively successful scientific theory in physical reality. If this is the case, two consequences emerge. First, the "idealization" argument against heuristic finality loses its force, since clearly at leaser certain "ideal" theories obtain in physical reality. Second, we are brought right back to the provenance of heuristic finality itself, since, if in no other case than in the theory of natural selection, there really is a place for adequate heuristic finality in science. Recall that the value of heuristic finality is that we are able to make natural predictions just because we recognize how and when specific natures act for certain ends rather than others. More generally, heuristic finality enables scientists to make accurate natural predictions based on tendencies––or, composite functions––inherent in nature at large. Interestingly, natural selection seems to provide a solid means for making just that kind of natural predictions based on a recognition that nature "tends to" work in a certain way. It is this dogged recognition of "how nature operates" as a coherently ordered system which motivates and protects experimental science. But, if Dennett is right that "there are no such [in-principle predictable] systems, human or otherwise," then natural selection itself, as a human "system" of heuristic finality, is undercut by the same token.

Unwittingly, then, Dennett seems to be advocating a fourth stance in his philosophy: the nomic stance. The nomic stance, like the intentional stance, is a useful fiction we rely on in order to render an intrinsically non-teleological world more intelligible as far as our interactions with the world are concerned. (Sound familiar?) Just as taking the intentional stance toward a thermostat is easier than doing an exhaustive physical-mechanical inventory of it, so taking the nomic stance toward nature is easier than a tedious empirical inventory of "the story so far." Under the aegis of the intentional stance, we can "play act" with nature's apparent "ends," all the while, of course, recognizing that thermometers don't really act so as to control the temperature and mosquitoes don't really act so as to suck our blood and propagate their species. Likewise, under the aegis--or should I say the spectre?--of the nomic stance, we can "play along" with nature while always reminding ourselves that there aren't really formally actual laws in nature. The nomic stance is a spectre indeed, for, if it were to take hold in the collective scientific mind––as its ancestor, Humean sensationism, never did––then science as such would self-destruct. For if there are no actual laws in nature––no real patterns which commence at X and naturally tend towards Z––then there is nothing to discover in nature. If, in turn, there is nothing to discover in nature, there is nothing for science to do. As much of a devotee of science as Dennett is, he is recklessly incautious about the fact that, if all science can "discover" is its own operational as-if "stances," then real science collapses into sheer constructivism, if not idealism.

My previous post about forms qua functional essences (and the attendant place of finality in natural selection) rather came out of the blue, but I am glad to see that it ties in, from another angle, with two largish essays that I have been working on for the past couple weeks. They deal precisely with what I think Dennett, unwittingly, both sacrifices and invokes. First, his Humean nomic stance subverts the metaphysical conviction in the existence of natural laws as a condition for science. Second, Dennett's worries about the inadequacy of theoretical idealization (or, the underdetermination of theory in general à la the Duhem-Quine thesis) invokes the metaphysical truth that, while, perfectly formal explanations do not appear "without remainder" in physical nature, yet we can and do grasp their truth precisely in a meta-physical way.

The first point is a matter of historical record. Suffice it for now to cite Stanley Jaki's immensely well informed dicta on pages 106, 107, and 109 of The Road of Science and the Ways to God:

"Clearly, Hume's posturing [in Dialogues on Natural Religion] as a champion Copernicus's and Galileo's way of thinking was an imposture. A perusal of Galileo's Dialogue should make it clear… that the creative science of Galileo was anchored in his belief in the full rationality of the universe as the product of the fully rational Creator, whose finest product was the human mind, which shared in the rationality of its Creator. … [Hume] wanted a universe of instincts, devoid of objective laws as well as of objective facts. … Typically enough, among Hume's admirers there have been many philosophers of science and even some scientists, but no great creative scientist has ever been a consistent and persistent Humean."

The second point is a strong vote of support for Thomistotelian metaphysics, anthropology, and epistemology. For if physical reality itself cannot "existentiate" formal mathematical laws, then certainly the brain as a physical organ cannot do so either, in which case the physical human brain either does not existentiate and grasp formal mathematical laws, or the human agent does so by non-physical means.

I hope to substantiate both claims in, as I say, two longish upcoming posts. Stay tuned!

Lost in translation...

I was recently hired to do some freelance translating for a church. I have to translate the key points in a running curriculum. Each key point has a blank space or two in it for students to fill in as they listen to the sermon or complete a lesson. I discovered that while I could translate the words around the blank spaces, I couldn't form a proper English sentence without knowing what belongs in the blank space.

Prima facie I could directly translate the given Chinese phrases and just leave a suitable blank space in the English sentence. But I realized that the meaning of the answer could alter what I directly translated. For example, I initially translated one point as "The Great Commission is not only _______, but also _______." But then I realized the Chinese answer might be a verb or a noun, which would require a very different translation in each case. For example, if the answer were a noun, it might be, "The Great Commission is not only A DUTY, but also A PRIVILEGE." If it were a verb, the sentence might be, "The Great Commission means not only TEACHING but also LEARNING."

I explained this to someone in the church office: I have to know what the sentence means before I can translate what it says. This might seem like a trivial consideration, but I think it highlights some important truths in life. In language, semantics rules syntax; the meaning molds the matter. Or, in a more McLuhanesque way, "The message molds the medium." It should not be hard to discern that, given my broader interest in classical metaphysics, what I am getting at is that translation bespeaks another instance of hylomorphism. Nothing about the particular syntactic elements (matter) of the sentence I was trying to translate could, of itself, manifest the intended meaning. Rather, I had to know what the sentence was "getting at," what its "point" was, in order to modulate the syntax and diction correctly. Thus, the formal "end" of the sentence controlled the material mechanics of the sentence. Indeed, a comical or ironic meaning could very well distort an accepted lexical usage, in which case the intended meaning could radically redefine the strict lexical and syntactic "rules." Thus is why it is significant that I invoked McLuhan: he was a committed Thomist, though few people know it.

The upshot of this meditation is that in so far as language is teleological, and in so far as language is the tool whereby we express ourselves in truth, self-expression is inherently teleological. The proper end of speech is expression of thought (or at least feeling) and the proper end of thought is truth (as the proper end of feeling is goodness and beauty qua two convertible forms of truth).

Latin conjugations! What could be more fun?

Here's a mnemonic I just devised to remember the order of the (five) Latin conjugations and sample verbs for each one.

First, you say, "AH, RAF!" (As in, "Well, the Royal Air Force!") As with all mnemonics, there is a brute amount of arbitrary memorization. Why RAF? No idea, but it works for learning the conjugations.

"AH, RAF!" is the anchor which helps you remember the following five verbs: Amare, Habere, Regere, Audire, Facere.

Each verb is a common verb in each of the five conjugations. Amare means love (as in, amicable); habere means have (as in, "habve" or, perhaps, have a bad habit); regere means rule (as in, regnant, registry or reign); audire means listen (as in, audio); and facere means do or make (as in facility or manufacture). (Facere is also famous because, in classical pronunciation, it sounds rather like "fuck": facio, facis, facit, facimus, facitis, faciunt.)

Now, the entire mnemonic is a little moral instruction on the ascent to power. If you want to be a powerful leader...

First, you must love, for all power is rooted in love, whether the love of glory or the love of others.

Second, you must "have what it takes." You must have the means to take power when you have the chance.

Third, you must rule. To reign is to rule a region.

Fourth, you must listen to the petitions of your subjects and to the auditions of your jesters.

Fifth, you must make a decision for your subjects and do what you say you will do.

As for the problem of remember which A in "AH, RAF!" is amare or audire, just remember that "conjugal love" should be your "first love."

Being in Asia...

It's fun being in Asia because you might have people ask you, "Do you have the MSN?" or have kids tell you about their brother's shoes--"Big they are, yes!" Yoda was a yogi, after all.

Cut me down, shcut me down...

This is a great song (HT to F. Beckwith), but I find it "amusing" that so many ostensible hedonists and secularists were used in this video. As if any of them really cares what the lyrics mean. The confused look on Flea's face behind the crucifix says it all heheh.

Chinese medicine...

I was appalled at dinner last night as I finally saw on TV why the Chinese term for the male member is what it is. It had always seemed a naively apt metaphor, but last night it became graphically clear to me just how accurate a name it is. Just about returned my duck noodles into the bowl. Gotta love culture shock.

Thumbs up...

Sir William Bragg: "Sometimes people ask if religion and science are opposed to one another. They are: in the sense that the thumb and fingers of my hand are opposed to one another. It is an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped."

I found this quotation (cited around page 482 in Stanley Jaki's The Relevance of Physics) especially remarkable since I found it shortly after writing my essay on smoking and drinking and the human opposable thumb.

The eyes have it…

Forms as functional essences. The myriad of particular "versions" of a seeing device produced by natural selection all are just that––variations on a theme. The formal essence of an "optical sensory device" transcends the various material instantiations of it known by biologists. The issue of formal causation versus sheer mechanism is very removed from the weight IDers might give the eye, or any other ornate biological apparatus, namely, that it is "too complex" not to be designed by an Intelligent Creator. The issue of form in nature has to do with the simple, twin ideas that the same formal operations can appear under many different material circumstances, and that if they could not, nature would be an unintelligible mishmash of material causal collisions. In other words, formal causality in nature not only orders material causation in organisms themselves but also orders our knowledge of material causation in objects of study.

It is precisely the formal operations in question which give both biological "value" to the organism's matter and theoretical clarity to the scientific inquiry. If there were not formal order in nature, we would not see anything distinct in nature, much as if there were no pattern "in" 3D illusions we would literally stare all day without seeing anything. Even if we were able to "see" patterns in nature, as an automatic confabulation process in our brains, we would have to admit the patterns we see are but illusions of order superimposed on nature by our precocious brains. Once you grasp the definition of an eye as, say, an organ for detecting light, you can immediately grasp that formal coherence in any eye you happen to find in nature. If one day a marine biologist found an unspecified critter in the coral with an unusual protrusion on its back, he could analyze the tissue all day without knowing what the protrusion is (much less what it is for). He might call it an "eye-like protuberance," but unless he understood the functional essence of the protrusion, he could not grasp what it is (nor, again, what it is for). If, however, he later discovered that a fine beam of light shone on the protrusion animated the critter, he would instantly realize the protrusion, innocuous in its material aspects, is an eye. By one stroke of metaphysical coherence, "the form of an eye" both activates the biologist's mind to grasp what the material protrusion is and orders that matter itself into being an actual eye. This is what Michael Polanyi, of whom more presently, meant by arguing the structure of our knowing really corresponds with the structure of the thing(s) known, otherwise our knowledge is falsely so-called.

It should go without saying that the formal (and final) discovery of the critter's eye dynamically includes the material and efficient modes of causality involved in constituting and "triggering" the eye. Indeed, it is the formal coherence of the protrusion which "promotes" merely "eye-like" matter on its back to the status of a genuine eye. This is not suggest that formal causality is mysteriously exempt from material or efficient causality. Far from it, which is why, first, Aristotle considered causation a unified reality albeit with a fourfold structure and, second, he rejected Platonic Forms in favor of saying that forms only exist as actual substances. On page 39 of The Tacit Dimension (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), Michael Polanyi expresses nicely the interrelations of formal and material causality by noting that

a complete physical and chemical topography of an object wold not tell us whether it is a machine, and if so, how it works, and for what purpose. Physical and chemical investigations of a machine are meaningless, unless undertaken with a bearing on the previously established operational principles of the machine. But there is an important feature of the machine which its operational principles do not reveal; they can never account for the failure and ultimate breakdown of the machine. … Only the physical-chemical structure of a machine can explain its failures. Liability to failure is, as it were, the price paid for embodying operational principles in a material the laws of which ignore these principles.

To take a second example: If you saw a lump of dissected organic tissue lying on the floor, nothing about its material structure would clearly indicate that it is an "eye." If, however, I told you I had dropped a fish eye on the floor, the lump of matter would instantly "become" an intelligible object––an eye––even despite the pitiful condition of the matter (having been plucked out of a fish's head and dropped on the floor). It is not because the tissue––the matter––was diseased or deficient that the lowly fish eye is no longer "an eye" qua an active seeing device; it is only because the matter, in itself perfectly sound, is no longer ordered by its formal nature that it is incorrect to call that chunk of organic tissue an eye.

Let me cite some of what Francis Beckwith recently posted about this, not the least because his post was the catalyst for this post of mine:

Although it is true that final causes imply design, the ID movement is a project in which the irreducible or degree of specified complexity of the parts in natural objects are [sic] offered as evidence that these entities are designed. But that is not the same as a final or formal cause, which is something intrinsic to the entity and not detectable by mere empirical observation. For example, if I were to claim that the human intellect’s final cause is to know because the human being’s formal cause is his nature of “rational animal,” I would not be making that claim based on the irreducible or degree of specified complexity of the brain’s parts. Rather, I would be making a claim about the proper end of a power possessed by the human person. That end cannot be strictly observed, since in-principle one can exhaustively describe the efficient and material causes of a person’s brain-function without recourse to its proper end or purpose. Yet, the end or purpose of the human intellect seems in fact to be knowable.

As Beckwith notes, and as I have intimated above, there is a close, perhaps even redundant, connection between formal and final causality. Indeed, to return to my earlier line of thought, the evolved success of versions of any formally coherent organ ("tool" in Greek) is evocative of the close connection between form and finality. The many versions of the eye in nature all "succeed" over time because they all accord with the proper function of an eye: namely to see better than not to see. As Stephen Barr writes:

Some people think that the Darwinian mechanism eliminates final causes in biology. It doesn't; the finality comes in but in a different way. Why does natural selection favor this mutation but not that one? Because this one makes the eye see better in some way, which serves the purpose of helping the creature find food or mates or avoid predators, which in turn serves the purpose of helping the animal to live and reproduce. Why do species that take up residence in caves gradually lose the ability to see? Because seeing serves no purpose for them, and so mutations that harm the faculty of sight are not selected against. … Darwinian explanations can account for very little indeed without bringing intrinsic finality into the explanation.

Love suffers...

"Love suffers what love dispenses."

-- Elliam Fakespeare

U2, "A Man and a Woman"--amazing song.

No other word but the Word...

In my devotional reading in the writings of St. John of the Cross last week, I "happened" to read the following. It ties in nicely with the points I made in an earlier post about "hearing from God." I wrote what I wrote in that post ignorant of St. John's wisdom, which is not to toot my own horn, but to remark on how Catholic wisdom is unified in its depths.

Notice the strong emphasis on the linearity of history and the importance of singular events in the Christian worldview. This kind of concrete facticty and irrevocability was integral to the historical escape from ancient views of eternal circularity and endless repetitive transformations devoid of an actual beginning. The latter point is not, obviously, foremost in St. John's writing here, but comes from my reading lately of Fr. Jaki's compelling Science and Creation. The grounding of concrete, linear history is, as Fr. Donald Keefe's magnificent Covenantal Theology elucidates, fundamental to the Catholic "sacramental-incarnational" revelation, a grounding which Fr. Jaki's scholarship (along with the work of R. Stark, P. Duhem, A. C. Crombie, E. Grant, M. Clagett, et al.) has shown was integral to the birth of exact physical science in medieval Europe. Again, Catholic wisdom is unified in its depths.

"That which God spake of old in the prophets to our fathers, in sundry ways and divers manners, He has now, at last, in these days, spoken to us once and for all in the Son. Herein the Apostle declares that God has become, as it were, dumb, and has no more to say, since that which He spake aforetime, in part to the prophets, He has now spoken altogether in Him, giving us the All, which is His Son.

"Wherefore he that would now enquire of God, or seek any vision or revelation, would not only be acting foolishly, but would be committing an offence against God, by not setting his eyes altogether upon Christ, and seeking no new thing or aught beside. And God might answer him after this manner, saying:

"If I have spoken all things to thee in My Word, Which is My Son, and I have no other word, what answer can I now make to thee, or what can I reveal to thee which is greater than this? Set thine eyes on Him alone, for in Him I have spoken and revealed to thee all things, and in Him thou shalt find yet more than that which thou askest and desirest. For thou askest locutions and revelations, which are the part; but if thou set thine eyes upon Him, thou shalt find the whole; for He is My complete locution and answer, and He is all My vision and all My revelation; so that I have spoken to thee, answered thee, declared to thee and revealed to thee, in giving Him to thee as thy brother, companion and master, as ransom and prize. For since that day when I descended upon Him with My Spirit on Mount Tabor, saying: Hic est filius meus dilectus, in quo mihi bene complacui, ipsum audite (which is to say: This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased; hear ye Him), I have left off all these manners of teaching and answering, and I have entrusted this to Him. Hear Him; for I have no more faith to reveal, neither have I any more things to declare. For, if I spake aforetime, it was to promise Christ; and, if they enquired of Me, their enquiries were directed to petitions for Christ and expectancy concerning Him, in Whom they should find every good thing (as is now set forth in all the teaching of the Evangelists and the Apostles); but now, any who would enquire of Me after that manner, and desire Me to speak to him or reveal aught to him, would in a sense be asking Me for Christ again, and asking Me for more faith, and be lacking in faith, which has already been given in Christ; and therefore he would be committing a great offence against My beloved Son, for not only would he be lacking in faith, but he would be obliging Him again first of all to become incarnate and pass through life and death. Thou shalt find naught to ask Me, or to desire of Me, whether revelations or visions; consider this well, for thou shalt find that all has been done for thee and all has been given to thee — yea, and much more also — in Him.

"If thou desirest Me to answer thee with any word of consolation, consider My Son, Who is subject to Me, and bound by love of Me, and afflicted, and thou shalt see how fully He answers thee. If thou desirest Me to expound to thee secret things, or happenings, set thine eyes on Him alone, and thou shalt find the most secret mysteries, and the wisdom and wondrous things of God, which are hidden in Him, even as My Apostle says: In quo sunt omnes thesauri sapientiae et scientiae Dei absconditi. That is: In this Son of God are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge of God."

-- Ascent of Mt. Carmel, II, xxii, iv-vi.

How should I put this?

Quit quitting quitting!

Stop stopping stopping!

Hör auf aufhören zu aufhören!

+++

It's horrible that it's horrible that it's horrible.

It's wonderful that it's wonderful that it's wonderful.

Then again...

I think it's wonderful that I think it's horrible that I think it's not horrible!

I think it's horrible that I think it's wonderful that I think it's not wonderful!

+++

Everybody, stay calm!!! Keep your voices down!!!

+++

[One side of the phone conversation I just heard in Chinese:]

"..."

"Unh."

"..."

"Unh, unh."

"..."

"Hn, hn."

"..."

"Hn, hn, hn!"

"..."

"Hn."

"Unh. It won't. It won't."

"Hn."

"..."

"Okay."

I would also like to note that the Taiwanese, and I believe all Chinese speakers, say "It's funny!" when they laugh at something and "It hurts!" when they feel pain. Presumably, the laughing sound and painful reactions are not adequate. ;) All kidding aside, I think such behavior underscores the highly social nature of Chinese communication.

I can't get there from here...

The teacher of the earth science class was lecturing on mapreading.

After explaining about latitude, longitude, degrees and minutes the teacher asked, "Suppose I asked you to meet me for lunch at 23 degrees, 4 minutes north latitude and 45 degrees, 15 minutes east longitude...?"

After a confused silence, a voice volunteered, "I guess you'd be eating alone."

Inverse proportion...

Why do those who work most with children tend to be the least childlike?

And why does there seem to be an inverse proportion between the prevalance of "the sitar" and the quality of a song (outside of actual Indian sitar music)? The sitar is the bane of all great bands, the Beatles and U2 as just two examples.

The relevance and irrelevance of physics…

I have selected the following quotations from The Relevance of Physics (Chicago: University Press, 1966), by Stanley L. Jaki, in order to corroborate, or at least elaborate, claims I made in another post to the effect that insofar as the most basic elements of pure geometry do not exist in physical reality, scientific laws ascribed to physical nature do not wholly obtain in nature.

I should note that I cannot say Jaki himself, RIP, would agree with my claims about the "imperfect production" of known natural laws in physical reality, at least the Jaki of The Relevance. I have not transcribed a few quotations which suggest Jaki does believe formal laws do appear in nature, but I am admitting that, so I'm not trying to "cook the book" in my favor. Having said that, I must emphasize how Jaki frequently reminds the reader that, despite how well theoretical laws appear in nature, "what's actually happening" in nature––as exposed by subsequent progress in the vastness, precision, and sheer mathematical abstraction of the physicist's toolkit––is always, elusively just beyond the edge of physical theory.

That qualification is important since it might be the way in which Jaki's and my views on this matter (heheh) align to some extent: physics must always admit that even its best formulas are only approximations of some deeper, actual reality in Creation. As such, physical theory––precisely as theory––will always be idealized and thus always retain a disparity between the empirical and theoretical. I would even go so far as to suggest that, if mankind someday does reach a "final theory" (albeit, as Jaki has argued on countless occasions, but especially in God and the Cosmologists, not a theory absolutely true and conceptually necessary [i.e., in violation Gödelian limitedness and future empirical falsification]), this will only show us that a complete description of nature is not ultimately a mathematical reality. A bizarre claim, perhaps, but all it means is this: insofar, on the one hand, as Gödelian limitedness preempts a complete and apodeictic formalization of nature and, on the other hand, insofar as the "final" theory actually refers to nature, then nature will actually exceed the formal "grasp" of any final mathematical theory (cf. the quotation on p. 136).

But we don't even need to imagine a final theory to see how reality transcends, or at least evades, complete mathematization. At every moment we are faced with an essential dimension of created reality which wholly escapes physico-mathematical analysis, namely, "now." (This is a point made by H. Bergson to A. Einstein which Fr. Jaki refers to in more than one place.) Fr. Jaki is also keen on reminding us that another equally fundamental dimension of reality which physics has no way of "claiming" is the sheer actuality of existence––"is" (cf. the quotation from p. 136). How does one "quantify" the sheer fact of existence?

In any event, apart from some emphases in bold (and perhaps some transcription errors), I will let Jaki and his sources speak for themselves. Then I will offer some concluding thoughts to dovetail with my most recent previous post on this topic.

pp. 66–67 …any past or future configuration of a mechanical system can in principle always be exactly calculated. In this sense there could be no dark corners in a mechanical system: it was by definition an open book, theoretically at least, with no mysteries, paradoxes, or uncertainties.

70 [Maxwell's] famous equations, once called by Einstein the most important event in physics since Newton, were in fact stripped in their final form of all the scaffolding of mechanical analogies. Indeed, the gap between physical representation and mathematical formulas was so enormous in these equations that all efforts aimed at their interpretation in terms of mechanical concepts ended in failure.

93 The wave and particle dualism shed further light on the fact that the absolute determinism and precision of which classical physics professed to know so much was not only unattainable but could not even be demonstrated to exist in nature.

101 …Galileo… voiced his astonishment time and again on seeing how closely natural processes follow the patterns of geometry. That he attributed more geometrical patterns to nature than he could demonstrate worried him little. He blamed the discrepancies between mathematically expressed laws of physics and actual observations upon the shortcomings of the calculator, who was unable to eliminate all the “material hindrances” present in physical phenomena. For him there existed a perfect one-to-one correspondence between the abstract world of geometry and the real world of things. … His famous law defining the distance traveled by falling bodies as a function of the square of the time of fall rested more on geometry than on actual experiments. … [His] admiration for the Pythagoreans … [gave him] a robust confidence that all truths incorporated in the universe… were written in the language of mathematics in characters that were “triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it….”

102–103 Berkeley raised the question: “Do not mathematicians submit to authority, take things upon trust, and believe points inconceivable? Have they not their mysteries, and what is more, their repugnances and contradictions?”

105 …an attempt [to determine the role of integral numbers in nature] was the Bode-Titius law giving the relative distances of the planets. It can be written as 4+3X2^(n-2), where n takes on the values 1, 2, 3… starting with n=1 for Mercury, the innermost planet. Although the formula breaks down for Mercury, it gave with surprising accuracy the distances of all other planets known in 1772 and even predicted the mean distance of the asteroids and distances of Uranus. On the other hand the formula failed utterly for Neptune and Pluto.

118–119 …Gibbs felt prompted to offer this little aside: “A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be partially sane.” At the same time, however, … [the] partial differential coefficients Gibbs introduced had no physically realizable notion. In the situation that he investigated, the entropy and volume of a system were supposed to remain constant while the mass of the system was changing. Such a procedure, however, is purely mathematical, for there is no way of adding or subtracting mass from a system without changing its entropy.

119 …an extensive study of stable and unstable phenomena … showed him [Maxwell] that unstable configurations in the physical world, such as a rock on a mountain top, or a match starting a forest fire, were actually flaws in the deterministic picture of physics. … “If … cultivators of physical science… are led in the pursuit of the arcana of science to study the singularities and instabilities, rather than the continuities and stabilities of things, the promotion of natural knowledge may tend to remove that prejudice in favor of determinism which seems to arise from assuming that the physical science of the future is a mere magnified image of the past.”

120 …as W. Heitler notes, “no further conclusions should be derived from this picture and questions of what the 'radius' of such a ball [i.e., an orbital electron] would be, etc., are void of any physical meaning.”

121–122 …Hertz aptly said [about the supposed incorrigibility of mechanics], “that which is derived from experience can be annulled by experience.” … As J. von Neumann noted about quantum mechanics: “One can never say that it has been proved by experience but only that it is the best known summarization of experience.”

124 Einstein: “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” …indicates that out of the large number of mathematical systems, mathematics itself does not have the criterion to choose the simplest one that at the same time would translate perfectly the assumed basic simplicity of the laws of nature. In other words, the confidence that mathematics might find such a criterion can be supported only by a sort of faith in mathematics not by strict arguments.

125–126 As is well known, quantum electrodynamics has to fall back on the technique of renormalization, which, to use the succinct characterization of Dirac, “has defied all the attempts of the mathematicians to make it sound.” Renormalization, to be sure, is a highly successful technique. … Still, it is highly unsatisfactory. It almost amounts to cheating, as it replaces infinite quantities… arrived at by the theory, with the very small quantity established by observation. … Renormalization in quantum electrodynamics is therefore basically an ad hoc procedure, and as such it can offer little in the way of understanding the physical reality.

130–131 The setback suffered by the thoroughgoing formalists [such as Hilbert, Whitehead, and Russell] in the hands of Gödel's theorem should help prevent our forgetting that the mind thrives on sensory experience. … This is why he [Gödel] insisted so emphatically that a decision about the Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometry of the universe could be made ultimately on an experimental basis alone. Again, it was this “sensory” substratum of the geometry physics has to use, that kept suggesting to him that the scientific explanation of physical reality can never be final. … The concreteness of nature… is rich beyond comprehension in aspects in features. This is why even the most bizarre sets of mathematical postulates and geometrical axioms can prove themselves isomorphic with some portion of the observational evidence and useful in systematizing it. … This is why the physicist might even be overcome by a mood of skepticism concerning the uniqueness of coordination between his mathematical tools and the actual features of the universe. … Consequently, the formulation of new mathematical theories useful for physics will very likely go on indefinitely.

134 Dirac: “it is quite unnecessary that any satisfying description of the whole course of the phenomena should be given.” … What is … implied there [by Dirac] is that as mathematics grows more effective in coping with the problems of physics, it also becomes more evident how limited is that aspect of the phenomena that can be grasped, ordered, and correlated by mathematics.

135 Only a limited range of the full reality of things can ever be accommodated in the molds of mathematics…. …even Russell recognized this when he stated that “physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.”

136 Whitehead: “There is no valid inference from mere possibility to matter of fact, or in other words, from mere mathematics to concrete nature.” For contrary to the dreams and hopes of latter-day Pythagoreans, numbers depend on the concreteness of things instead of generating those things.

233 …the saying, “The greater the sphere of our knowledge, the larger is the surface of its contact with the infinity of our ignorance.”

250–252 [Coulomb's] best torsion balance was sensitive enough to measure 1/100,000 of a grain, providing thereby a firm support for the view that the same inverse square law governs all known forces in nature. … Actually this law stood as a symbol for the unification of all branches of physics that nineteenth-century physicists hoped to establish.

259–260 Instances that show how persistent determination to reduce experimental error demanded major revisions of modern physical theories could be listed to no end. …quantum theory runs into infinities that cannot be removed only by ad hoc renormalization techniques, a procedure wholly unsatisfactory, although it yields values in almost perfect agreement with experimental data. Thus the renormalized Dirac theory clearly points beyond itself, for its morass of arbitrarily “tamed” infinities cannot be a satisfactory answer.

266 …Schrödinger had to ignore deliberately certain details of spectroscopic evidence and submit his wave equation as a first approximation.

268 …better vacuums mean the elimination of “obstacles,” of disturbing factors, and a gradual approximation of the “ideal conditions” which a physical experiment should always emulate.

272 The continuous progress in achieving precision then came to be interpreted as an ever more perfect realization of the ideal case of strict determinism. Furthermore, as the gradual approach toward the ideal was a reality, classical physicists, with apparently unassailable logic, assumed the factual existence of the ideal case.

275 What the uncertainty principle means essentially is that the determination of the “state of the world at an instant” is not possible in terms of mechanistic physics. And this limitation holds also for that proverbial “superior spirit” to which Laplace and others liked to refer. …made it abundantly clear that the [sic] mechanical intelligibility does not exhaust the whole range of intelligibility. Therefore one should not conclude on the basis of the indeterminacy principle that “the world is not a world of reason, understandable by the human intellect.” [citing P. W. Bridgman, “The New Visions of Science,” Harper's Magazine 158 (1929): 450.]

280 Pascal: “Truth is so subtle a point that our instruments are too blunt to touch it exactly. When they do reach it, they crush the point and bear down around it, more on the false than on the true.”

Just because all or any natural phenomena can be described mathematically does not mean they are in fact obeying a mathematical formula. To believe otherwise would be to commit a fallacy similar to post hoc ergo propter hoc (i.e., correlation≠causation). And just because a law holds for a range of phenomena does not mean all the phenomena in that range will always manifest the law. The intersection of two laws of nature, as Aristotle argued, result in chance occurrences. Ric Machuga refers to this is a case of per accidens causation resulting from per se causation (cf. "Machuga" parts of these posts for more). As such, the constant interplay of immutable natural laws will not fail to result in chance occurrences, such that, imagining ourselves far, far in the future with a massive database of nearly all past chance intersections recorded for millennia, we could even find a mathematical description of those chances occurrences with universal validity (universal, because the observed 'constituents' of the mathematical description occurred throughout the cosmos). Despite the universality of the law––call it the "normative law of chance" (NLC)––it is absurd to say nature was obeying NLC “all along,” since NLC is patently a sheer construct from a horde of prior data. Yet, to some extent, it seems that all physical law is of this character. To what extent on a case by case basis––aye, there's the rub.

As to the objection that this “normative chance law” is not a real law because it cannot predict later chance occurrences, we can reply two ways: first, by the nature of the case, NLC is already a stochastic law, and so perhaps it could be reformulated into a statistical law, like the laws of quantum mechanics. As a statistical law, NLC would escape the charge of failing to make absolute predictions, for it would be bound to make some correct predictions within its modified statistical range of accuracy. Moreover, its merit as a perfect account of past events would render it as empirically robust "in one direction" as Newtonian mechanics was prior to the advent of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics. After that advent, of course, "in a new direction," Newtonian mechanics lost its validity in any more than a statistical, large-body sense. Such could well be the fate of NLC. Recall the Bode-Titius law (p. 135): while it suffered admitted empirical discrepancies, it perfectly accounted for an impressive range of phenomena and made successful predicitons, to boot. Is the Bode-Titius a law of nature? Is NLC? Why or why not?

Second, the predictive capacity of “normal laws” (as opposed to my beloved but perhaps repugnant NLC) abides only in conjunction with ceteris paribus conditions, that is, only on the condition that the rest of the natural system remains as it was prior to making the prediction. The current fundamental laws of physics, for example, simply break down when applied prior to the Planck threshold. As Templeton-Prize winning physicist-theologian Michael Heller explains in Creative Tension, once we cross the Planck threshold (i.e., theorize above 1 x 10^-33 cm, 1 x10^93 g/cm^3, 1 x 10^-44 sec), we are able to work with points in Poincaré fields, but beneath that threshold, the proto-singularity is atemporal and aspatial, two adjectives which simply have no place in classical, Einsteinian, and quantum physics. Similarly, the laws of Newtonian mechanics are only valid in a certain range of phenomena (namely, those 'smaller' than that which general relativity describes and 'larger' than what quantum mechanics describes). Despite the inability of Newton's laws to make accurate predictions at, say, the quantum level, we don't ipso facto deny the validity of those laws. Likewise, the law of gravitation could very well be decreasing based on the larger expansion or contraction of the cosmos over eons. Therefore, the predictive power of Newton's inverse square law is only good as long as we limit ourselves, anthropocentrically, to the ceteris-peribus status quo as we know it now. Along these lines, my (hypothetical) NLC need not make any novel predictions, because, being a universal law about universal intersections of sub-laws, its surrounding ceteris paribus conditions might change as some new intersection of sub-laws relevantly altered the (past) universal conditions from which the law had been derived.

It's funny cuz it's true…

[This is the third installment of my worrying a certain bone. In the first portion, I presented the claim that the Einsteinian theory of special relativity (ESR) entails certain oddities which compromise either the veracity of truth or the realism of ESR. In the second portion, I elaborated on this position and explained why, in conjunction with Einsteinian general relativity (EGR), I think it presents a major problem for materialism. In this third but––don't get your hopes up––probably not final portion, I revisit some rough spots in my argumentation thus far and sharpen my claim that the universal truth of ESR-EGR undermines materialism or itself in a materialist metaphysics. In short, the speed of truth is faster than the speed of light.]

I am a naïve boy from a reclusive, Stone-Age tribe; you are a scientifically informed child of a leading astronomer in Manhattan. One day we enter that age-old debate: “Does the light stay on inside the refrigerator when we close the door?” In my ignorance, I assert that it does not turn off. After all, right up to the moment we close the door, we see the light shining. We both agree that there is no “gremlin” in the fridge to turn the light on and off. Based on your knowledge of the theory of electricity and switches (ignoring for now, for the sake of analogy, our ability to find the switch and depress it while the door is open), you confidently deny the light turns off when the door closes. I ask you how you know that is true. There is no way, after all, of looking into the fridge while the door is closed; we in one frame of reference are empirically forbidden such vision into another frame of reference. One of us is right and one of us is wrong simply because at the moment we make our respective claims, there are grounding conditions inside (and about) the refrigerator which validate, or invalidate, one of our claims. One of us is actually right only if those grounding conditions (viz., the door is depressing a trigger in the refrigerator which breaks the circuit and deactivates the bulb) are actually the case at the very moment we make our competing claims.

I want to apply this scenario to ESR this way: A naïve observer assumes the Sun we see (the phenomenal Sun, call it p-Sun) just is the Sun itself, das Ding an sich. A scientifically informed observer, however, denies that p-Sun portrays the actual condition of the Sun when we imagine it in outer space (i.e., the objective Sun, or o-Sun). The closed refrigerator door parallels our inability in our frame of reference (frP) to observe directly the o-Sun “up close” in its own frame of reference (frO). The depressed switch and the theory of electrical circuits corresponds to time dilation and ESR.

The grounding conditions for the truth of our deflation of p-Sun in frP (based on our theoretical knowledge of o-Sun in frO) must 'be the case' in both frP and frO––and hence, during a coterminous span of time in relativistically divergent frames of reference––in order for our claim about p-Sun to be true when we assert it. If there is a 'theletic lag', similar to the 'photic lag' which accounts for the empirical divergence between p-Sun and o-Sun, then our deflation of p-Sun would not be true when we assert the truth of p-/o-Sun divergence on ESR. If the grounding conditions for our deflation of p-Sun were not simultaneously 'the case' at the moment of deflation in frP (call this time td-P), then our deflation would be objectively ungrounded, and thus untrue, when we assert it. The grounding conditions cannot be verified empirically, and we can't say they haven't happened “yet” (i.e., outside our frP), for if we had to wait for them to be true when we made our deflation of p-Sun at td-P, then the deflation would be true only once the grounding conditions had so to speak caught up with the grounding conditions for our perceptions in frP; in which case our deflation in frP would be not yet be true when we assert it. Any further revision of our claims about o-Sun, even if serially repeated hundreds of time a second (like a “streaming” online video based on the latest available input), would still not be true at td-P, since there would always be a relativistic lag, or saptiotemporal disparity, between the actual grounding conditions in frO and our description of them in frP.

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[Now for those of you who think I never have a “dark night” of the intellect, and am oblivious to difficulties in my own position(s), check out what I wrote a couple days after posting the first two portions of this argument:]

Upon further reflection, I am reluctant to say truths like 'A is A' or 'A is not not-A' are incompatible with materialism, since the ontic identity of any object with itself is, by definition, a material reality; or at least it is a truth which is just as true everywhere in material reality as it is in abstraction. … Does not that, then, allow for analytic truths to be similarly materialized? Hmmm, this might be the Achilles heel of my argument as it stands: any analytic truth can be actualized in material reality––after all, we find them all the time in 4DST––so material reality can and does instantiate such truths at all points in 4DST. Until I sort this out better, I need to stick closely to Adler's and Ross's arguments about the incapacity of the physical exhaustively to instantiate pure functions, universals, and abstract truths. …

[I faced a similar objection in the comment box of the second portion, an objection which led to the quandary above. Granted, this perplexity did not stop me from moving ahead with some adjustments:]

But as I reflect even further, perhaps this is not a decisive problem for my argument. My argument is that certain kinds of truth require 'being the case' and having proper grounding conditions at all points in the spacetime continuum. This means that some grounding conditions in actual 4DST must be the case all at once everywhere, which, however, is an impossibility on a materialist reading of ESR-EGR. The only way for one set of universal grounding conditions to be the case––and thus to validate the spatiotemporal universality of certain truths––is for them to be the case instantaneously in all frames of reference (i.e., wherever the truth could be said to hold and does hold). The universality of some truths requires their being instantiated (actualized by relevant grounding conditions) spatiotemporally as widely and coterminously as they hold propositionally. Some truths, in other words, unify the spatiotemporal prevalence of their grounding conditions with the conceptual breadth of their propositional content.

Let me restate that for emphasis and clarity: I recognize that some truth claims, probably most (?), are propositionally 'one' with the spatiotemporal occurrence of their grounding conditions. My only objection to a wholly materialist theory of truth is that, since there is no way for material grounding conditions to be “everywhere all at once” according to ESR-EGR, while there is obviously a way for some truths to be true everywhere all at once, the universality of truth, and our grasp of it, is universally present in a non-material way. Insofar as the curvature of 4DST is a function of its 'contained' matter, the instantiation of some truths as wholly material realities would require an 'invariant' deformation of 4DST by all matter, which is impossible on ESR-EGR.

[I realize I really need to read R. Nozick's Invariances for a sophisticated look at this very issue. In time, in time, Deo volente…]

For a truth to be the case everywhere in the cosmos requires enveloping the entire cosmos in one ultimate frame of reference frΩ, otherwise it could not be observed as a materially real event in 4DST. We would, in other words, have to be able to step outside the bounds of 4DST in order to view the grounding conditions of certain universal truths as holding throughout all of 4DST. This is of course impossible to accomplish materially. But since we can in fact 'observe' (i.e., conceive of) the universality of grounding conditions for certain universal truths, we manage to step outside the bounds of 4DST in a non-material way. For if matter were able to 'escape' the confines of 4DST, it would no longer be the determinative factor for the curvature of 4DST 'around' it, and thus EGR would be false. Insofar however as some truth––notably, ESR-EGR––is 'observed' in this way, we seem to have access to frΩ, in defiance of our own spatiotemporal finitude. Grasping the truth of ESR-EGR both requires and enables us to transcend its materialistic implications.

Let me present one of the numerous corroborative quotations I am preparing for the fuller, and perhaps some day final, version of this essay. On page 45 of The Quantum Enigma, Wolfgang Smith writes, “If it be the case… that mathematical forms are not existentiated in the physical domain with “absolute fidelity”, it does not follow by any means that they are not existentiated therein at all. … If the physical universe did not somehow embody or reflect mathematical forms, it would be simply unintelligible, and physics would not exist.”

Smith's point here serves as an analogous reply to the objection that immaterial acts and truths cannot be materialized, or, if they are materialized, then such acts and truths are eo ipso material. A controversial but now well recognized feature of physics is that mathematical physics is idealized (cf. Cartwright, Ellis, et al.): matter never wholly or perfectly “performs” mathematical functions, and yet mathematical truth does manifest itself in the physical scope. For example, while it is true that E=mc^2 and F=ma, these functions are never perfectly realized in nature, since a perfect conversion of matter into energy “leaks out” due to entropy and friction retards perfectly smooth acceleration, respectively. Likewise, while the intellect is not wholly materialized, and thus escapes the complete 'grasp' of matter, as idealized laws do, yet it is active in the material world similar to the way the truth of physical laws escape being wholly 'grasped' in 4DST. Indeed, the physically incomplete presence of mathematical truth seems to find its partner, or rather, catalyst, in the physically transcendent agency of intellection. The intellect is thus nothing less than the partially-physical power in human nature by which we wholly grasp the partially-physical immanence of mathematical truth. Were there no such agency, we would have no power to grasp such truth, since, again, matter itself does not perfectly existentiate pure theoretical truth. “The 'thing-in-itself' is for the atomic physicist, if he uses this concept at all, finally a mathematical structure.” (W. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, p. 91, as cited in The Quantum Enigma, p. 72.) I explored this train of thought recently in this post.

Let me close with one more quotation from Smith (Enigma, p. 79):

“With the advent of Einsteinian relativity, … the space-time continuum carries a geometric structure which both affects and is affected by the distribution of matter it is said to contain. Space and time, therefore, prove to be inextricably connected with the material entities and events which make up the physical universe; in short, content and container have lost their independent status, and it now appears that space, time and matter… do but constitute distinguishable aspects of one and the same reality. It follow, moreover, that the reality as such is neither space, time nor matter, nor indeed can it be contained in space or time; for it is ultimately the reality itself that in a sense “contains” space-time––even as a cause may be said to “contain” its effects. … As Henry Stapp has expressed it, “Everything we know about Nature is in accord with the idea that the fundamental process of Nature lies outside space-time… but generates events events that can be located in space-time.” [cf. footnote 4]

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DESIDERATUM:

In the first portion, I alluded to James Ross's essay [PDF!] about the annihilation of the cosmos in St. Thomas Aquinas' doctrine. Ross argues that there could be no “moment” in which the universe was annihilated, since there is no absolute time in which the annihilation of the universe could be chronicled. This does not, however, mean the universe could not be annihilated as a whole, only that such an annihilation would be a non-temporal (and thus non-natural) event. But surely this is just to recall that cosmic annihilation, like cosmic creation, is nothing less than a divine and supernatural action. Just as creation did not take place in tempore, so annihilation will not take place in time, at some single moment. All that the doctrine of eschatological annihilation requires is that every point in 4DST be effected together, under one causal 'heading,' as it were, albeit in a temporally immeasurable manner. For the annihilation of the spacetime continuum means nothing less than the annihilation of time; therefore it could not even in principle afford a temporal measurement, the conditions for temporal quantity being nullified in the very act of supernatural annihilation.

Points, lines, and all that...

[I have revised and expanded this post, so I'm redating it into the present.]

[Also, the posts {as of 4 Nov 09} just below this one that are {currently} in blue, are all redated posts dealing with rationality and faith.]

A point is defined as a geometric 'position' without extension or depth. Do points actually exist in material nature? If so, where? Occupying no extended space, they seem to have no 'foothold' in material reality. By analogy, imagine a wave of zero wavelength: it wouldn't be a wave and therefore wouldn't be. A spatial "location" that lacked any extension whatsoever would not exist in space and would therefore not be a spatial location at all. If geometric points actually exist in material spacetime, then our entire sense of "existence" must be radically overhauled. A Pyrrhic victory, methinks.

On the other hand, if points do not exist in material spacetime, then neither do lines exist in material reality, since a line is but the shortest distance between two points. If one point cannot actually exist, far less can two or more. Nature, being devoid of actual material points, is also devoid of actual material lines. Consequently, material nature is also devoid of perfect triangles, circles, curves, ellipses, squares, parabolas, etc. As such, the perfect, ideal geometric laws of motion do not obtain in material reality. This is basically what Nancy Cartwright means by explaining "how the laws of physics lie." For example, as Lawrence Gage notes, "the Law of Inertia talks about bodies unaffected by outside forces: when was the last time you saw a body isolated from all forces?"

As Maxwell knew all too well, his system of electromagnetic equation was unable to account for heat and motion--a fact which indicates once more that such equations, otherwise perfect in their inner consistency, are idealized out of actual nature. I would suggest that only if reality is understood as being more than a material-energetic system, and recognized to possess a dimension of 'pure formal' functionality qualitatively different from material nature, can such equations obtain in nature. The formal dimensions of nature as I am proposing here do not remove the well known 'signal loss' created by the indeterminateness of matter (i.e., the numerous experimental discrepancies between gritty fact and pristine theory), a loss which Galileo recognized, grudgingly, time and again in order to account for the discrepancies between his equations and observed results.

[I have transcribed most of what I think are the pertinent quotations from my reading of The Relevance of Physics thus far, but rather than inserting them all nice and perty in the body of this post at this juncture (and hour), I'm just presenting them in raw form in another post with prefatory and concluding glosses.]

I should also mention that the extremely counterintuitive nature of this "thought experiment"--remember, FCA is my cognitive palette/lab--depends for any of its validity on two things: 1. the claim that there are no actual geometric points in material space, and 2. just how well natural phenomena obey pure laws of motion. The best move of some objector would be to refute my presentation of the immaterial existence of geometric forms. Failing (or following) that, an objector should refute my claim that nature does not perfectly obey its own laws.

I'd love to be corrected about the second point, but it seems that the entire progress of science has stemmed, in large part, from a theoretic "leap" from the jumble of data to a "perfect" formula which "makes sense of" the otherwise senseless data. In other words, the reason a formula is not just a spare-nothing synthesis of all data, but rather a selective conformation (for want of a better term right now) of the theoretically relevant data, is because numerous cases of observation do not conform to the formal purity of the theory. Indeed, it only makes sense to speak of relevant as opposed to irrelevant (or aberrant) data based on a knowledge--or, rather, an intuition--of how they should "hang together." (I.e., Relevant with respect to what?) Certainly, there are instances of material phenomena which emulate, apparently perfectly, a formula (notably, Newton's inverse square ratio of gravitation), but these are literally the exceptions that prove the rule. If every instance of phenomena conformed exactly to the ideal formula behind it, scientists would only need a handful of empirical cases to "just read off" the law from a formally exhaustive material world. But, as scientists know all too well, the practice of science is riddled with skewed observations and off-the-mark instances of phenomena.

The fact that we can transcend the imperfect emulations observed in physical nature in order to grasp the "ideal" to which they are "striving," suggests two things in line with the Aristhomistic tradition. First, humans possess an organ capable of "manipulating" or "grasping" immaterial, ideal reality in a way not confined to the purely physical. This we call the intellect. Second, nature itself displays a striving for perfection from the indeterminate potentiality of matter towards the determinate actuality of form. This is really all that is meant by "final causality": natural causes tend towards actual effects based on some coherent inner principle (viz., ratio naturae) as a specific class of the broader act-potency dynamic in Creation. These rationes naturae are not self-actualizers--i.e., their actus essendi is crucially distinct from their rationalis essentia, and therefore contingent on some agent in possession of existence not subject to the same "cleft in being"--which accounts for why they cannot always, and perhaps not ever perfectly, overcome the "interference" posed by the potency of their matter, a tendency called "caducity" by the Scholastics.

The evidence for evidence...

[Oringinally posted at Philosophia Perennis]

Consider the following axiom and two corollaries:

“A wise man [A] proportions his belief [Pa] to the evidence [Gc].”

“Corollary #1: A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.”

“Corollary #2: It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” [This is the (in)famous principle expounded by W. K. Clifford contra William James.]

Let us say that A is an agent, Pa is a proportionate action by A, and Gc is the grounding condition (or conditional grounds) for Pa.

Now consider the following statements:

A wise man [A] never plays the lottery [Pa] since the evidence clearly suggests he will not win [Gc].

A good husband [A] adjusts his commitment to his wife [Pa] based on the evident worth of her love [Gc].

A good friend [A] considers someone his friend [Pa] only when he is certain someone will be a great ally [Gc].

A virtuous child [A] bases his attachment to and respect for his parents [Pa] on the evidence that they will raise him well and satisfactorily provide for his success [Gc].

A wise man [A] bases his immediately upcoming decision [Pa] strictly on what he has done before [Gc].

A wise man [A] bases his immediately upcoming decision [Pa] strictly on what the evidence of his senses indicate he will do [Gc].

A wise man [A] bases his adherence to rationality [Pa] on the evidence that it conforms to the reality in which he is immersed [Gc].

A wise man [A] adjusts his commitment to truth [Pa] on the evidence he has for there being such a thing [Gc].

A good man [A] proportions his commitment to his ideals [Pa] to the evidence that they succeed and will be accomplished in his life [Gc].

A good soldier [A] bases his loyalty to his country [Pa] on the evidence that his country will win the conflict at hand [Gc].

I believe you will notice an analogical “soft spot” in all these claims, and, thus, in the original axiom and its corollaries: there is either a distinct circularity in the above claims (e.g., we only see rationality works in reality by rationally applying the fruits of our reasoning to the rationally ordered description of reality) or a crucial non sequitur between them and the goal they describe. After all, on what evidence might we base our assent to the above axiom? And, short of holding that axiom as an evidentially indefatigable proposition, what necessitates that we accept it on purely evidential grounds? Doesn’t it just make good sense to proportion our belief to the evidence for it? If so, however, what sense does it make to say “making good sense” is rooted in evidential certitude? And round and round we go.

The problem with the axiom, insofar as it might be employed against a rational faith like Christianity, is thus twofold: first, evidentialism only goes so far in personal relationships and commitments to the good, and, second, Christianity is a transcendentally personal commitment to the good. Further, and more generally, evidentialism can only dimly acknowledge that our assessment of evidence itself is automatically, and properly, correlated with our ethical and “eudomaniacal” instincts for our own good. It is not irrational to opt for some good even when the evidence for its viability is not deductive, but is often eminently rational to opt for a discernible good even when the evidence for it is “shakier” or “riskier” than we might like on purely logical grounds. This is what James Ross (following St. Thomas Aquinas) means by cognitive voluntarism and cognitive finality: reason is perfected in the willing of known goods for the perfection of our nature. This is, of course, but vintage Thomism:

“… The will necessarily desires that which is presented to it as a good that in every way can satisfy desire, but among the many goods that are proposed to it as desirable by a judgment that is subject to change, the will freely chooses. Thus, a choice follows the last practical judgment, and the will makes that judgment into the last one.“

Again, as St. Thomas said in De Veritate 24, 2: Totius libertatis radix est in ratione constituta (Liberty, whole and entire, has its root in reason). As Jesus Himself said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” Our rational grasp of the truth frees us in order to will the good conveyed in the truth.

This harks back to the two counter-axioms I listed above that deal with a man’s evidential basis for his ensuing decision. As Richard Taylor argues in Action and Purpose, you can’t know––that is, you have no evidence that proves––what you will choose to do while you are deliberating about what to do. Nevertheless, you do have reasonable aims and relative knowledge of your means while deliberating. The choices you make are neither deductions from past evidence, nor inductions from current evidence, but instead wholly free acts of the whole man willing a certain good (even misperceived). Much the same could be said for the case of choosing to trust God.

In any event, let me wrap this up by reviewing the corollaries, and seeing how they suffer the same core defect as the axiom from which they hang.

#1: “A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.”

Is this corollary dubitable? If so, on what grounds should I believe it? If not, …?

#2: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

What is the evidence for this claim? What kind and what amount of evidence would suffice to ground this claim? If it requires sufficient evidence, it can’t be a first principle of reason. If it doesn’t require adequate evidence to be credible, it refutes itself as a non-evidential certitude.

Finally, I would ask the reader to consider the following claims and see how evidence fits into them (as well as how they “fit” into the evidence):

Our certitude of the reliability of our memory is based on evidence.

Our certitude of the reliability of our sensory perception is based on evidence.

Our certitude of the reality of other people’s minds is based on evidence.

Our certitude of the passage of time is based on evidence.

Clearly, these matters do not fall out from evidence; on the contrary, evidence falls out from them. In which case, however, evidence clearly isn’t the supreme grounding condition for wisely proportioned belief. If one can ground the above certitudes without resorting to evidence drawn from them, I will be more amenable to the positivistic evidentialism that motivates the axiom and corollaries that opened this post. As it stands, however, I find such an epistemology and metaphysics stiflingly shallow and self-destructive. Perhaps you disagree.

Cognitive finality...

"Often, belief can be complemented by good will and natural desire. E.g., I may not be SURE of my friend’s every intention, but I can complement my hunches into knowledge based on charity towards him. As for natural desire, an intuition may be enhanced into knowledge not only by our natural receptivity to see evidence more attentively, as well as to discount skeptical worries based on a larger fund of natural experience. E.g., I may not be SURE the meat loaf is not poisoned, or is not my old uncle’s thigh, but I can assuage that skepticism with the larger fund of knowledge about how the world generally works (and since meat loaf is a general thing in the world, it gets the same 'general' pass)." -- (quoted from an earlier post)

RELATED POSTS: Facts and Logic, Reasons and Values, Friends and Rationality, The Evidence for Evidence, ...

Logical, factual, actual…

Only yesterday [originally posted on 4 August 2008] I heard it stated from a silver-tongued sage (on Youtube, no less) that, in order for an argument to be logical, you need facts and proof, not just beliefs. Something about the way this definition was stated struck me as odd. The definition is itself an attempt at a logical argument about logic. Its form, I think, is something like this:

Major premise: Logical arguments require demonstrable facts.
Minor premise: Beliefs are not demonstrable facts.
Conclusion: Logical arguments cannot be built on beliefs.

The main thing that bothers me about what the fellow said is that it seems to lack any factual content itself. It seems subject to the same flaws of old-school positivism. Is it an empirical fact that you need facts to make logical conclusions? How can I observe that statement? Or is the stricture itself just a belief about logic? Are facts, in fact, properly objects of logical construction?

The first thing to sort out is what the sage means by "being logical". As any student of logic knows, there can be perfectly valid arguments built upon unreal (i.e., nonfactual) premises, which makes them unsound. For example, "All quagborts are pleth. Merlin is a quagbort. Therefore, Merlin is pleth." Nothing in this (modus ponens) syllogism is based in fact––Merlin and quagborts are fictional, and pleth is an unreal attribute––yet its logical form is entirely valid.[1] Valid, but unsound.

So, what the Youtube sage should be willing to grant in the first place is that a theist could construct a valid logical argument about God, yet only be able to find fault with its soundness based on a squabble about the premises (or, facts) employed in the argument. This is why I am certain an unstated premise of the sage's syllogism is that 'facts' refers to empirical, everyday, uncontested facts, like Kareem Abdul Jabar is taller than Spud Webb. By insinuating this premise into the argument, the sage tacitly canvasses all "rational" people to his side, since only "crazy" religious believe in things no one can "prove". Real facts are just obvious to anyone with open eyes, right? Right? (And the foundationalists went wild with glee!)

Unfortunately, it seems to me that as soon as you lower the argument to one about "whose facts" and "which facts", you've entered a field of discourse much more diaphanous and vast than the tidy, hermetic formalism of logic per se. Is there a purely logical way to parse facts, so that we know whether they are "factual premises" in an argument? What worries me about his position on logic is the minor premise, namely, that beliefs are not facts. It seems impossible to see that premise as anything more that just that––a premise, a belief, about the nature of belief. The minor premise, then, is a belief, built into the fabric of his logical argument, about the uselessness of belief in logical arguments! The basic problem is that his "afactual" belief about the factuality of logic is integral to his critical logic about the illogicality of beliefs.

The larger problem I have with his confusing bifurcation between facts and beliefs is that it ignores the more fundamental role of beliefs, as the girders of a total interpretive matrix, in establishing, or even recognizing, alleged data as facts. Behind any ordinary application of facts there lies an immense field of prior beliefs (viz., about causal order, object permanence, cognitive clarity, temporal succession, etc.). I suppose I am wondering just how a hardcore "factualist", like our midividisage [2], could ever get to the facts he needs without first having some important beliefs that transcend and rationally order the specific facts themselves. I smell a self-destructive Humean quagmire in the fellow's casting hasty aspersions on belief. After all, it was Hume that unwittingly consigned his own writings to the flames, precisely by concluding his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding with these words:

Does it [i.e., any book of metaphysics, theology, etc.] contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Consign it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

But does not Hume's own Enquiry begin to burn with these words? His own narrowness about the bounds of metaphysical reasoning backfires and condemns his own reasoning, about the narrowness of metaphysics, as itself a metaphysical construction. This objection is not original with me. Fr. Stanley Jaki has made it in several of his writings and the short article by Scott Lanser, "Commit it to the Flames", makes the same point thus:

…[S]ince his statement is philosophical and not scientific, it deserves to be treated like all the other religious beliefs, writings and statements he condemns: his philosophy too should be cast to the flames!

I think the fellow, in a well-meaning effort to curb the "fanaticism" of Youtube evangelists, is confusing being rational with being logical. The latter task strikes me as much easier to pull off than the former, even though, paradoxically, its scope is much smaller than that of the former. Anyone can spin out logical finger puzzles in their free time; but it takes a lot of work to be rational, a skill that involves logic without being confined to it. I define rationality, at this juncture, at least, as the exclusively human ability to arrange intentions and means toward certain ends, based on a relatively informed knowledge of the contingencies involved in achieving that end; and an important caveat about "relative knowledgeability" for being rational, is that our beliefs are the only things that can illuminate and, in certain ways, determine what we can rationally accept as facts in the first place. Even my belief that I am here as one conscious person is subject to attacks by a radical phenomenalist, like the kind Bertrand Russell channeled from time to time.

Facts, it seems, are really only as handy and indubitable as you believe them to be. Facts, it seems, depend foremost, for an empiricist, on just how skeptical you are willing to be. Everyone likes to think they've found their halcyon 40 acres of reality. The question is, however, primarily that of which worldview, which matrix of beliefs, gives the best grounding for taking data at factual, face-value and working them into logical operations. In my support of the Christian faith as the only really coherent matrix for recognizing, submitting to, and employing factual reality, I am among the ranks of Gilson, Maritain, Jaki, Plantinga, Wolterstoff, Reid, and, among others, St. Thomas. How can one logically construct an empirical world out of mere empirical sensibilia (or, empiricalia [3])? The Logos is the ground for any logic.

That is all I am able or willing to invest in this quandary at the moment. I believe, however, the facts of the matter will percolate within and generate more logical meanderings somewhere down the road.

[1] Just as reminder, the minor premise of a modus ponens, such as "Merlin is pleth", would not yield a sound conclusion; it introduces the fallacies of affirming the consequent and an undistributed middle.

[2] Yeah, I just made that term up. The three lexical segments in it should be clear enough.

[3] I also just made that term up, I think. Meh. Game on.

Reason or values...

Which is more important: Heeding the "demands of reason" or sticking to your values and ideals even when they demand irrational measures?

It's a false dilemma. For reason itself, that is, rationality as an existential tool, is itself a value. You have to value being rational in order to live consistently rationally. But then for what reason, aside from your basic desire for it, dictates your adherence to reason in the first place?

As Michael Heller notes in Creative Tension, for the Greeks, rationality, logic, etc., were forms of public faith, forms of public piety. Greece became what it became because it, more or less collectively, chose to put reason high in its pantheon of public well-being. The fact that not all societies did likewise, but still flourished, indicates that there is no intrinsic connection between public well-being and Greek rationality. The good man in Greek ethics should be rational. Yet, paradoxically, the good man must first value being good, which then entails being rational. Being good, however, is not a purely rational decision. It is its own category of value, and cannot be adduced from pure reason.

The steps you take are not the steps taking you...

[I still intend to work this into a rough draft of a full essay, so I'm redating it--yes, AGAIN--into the present, so as to remind myself--yes, AGAIN--to complete it.]

Imagine you are walking on a mildly populated sidewalk downtown one afternoon. You walk from your office, to the elevator, then out the doors, along Park Street, turn onto Haven Street, and finally reach Bends (on step #N), a local sub shop. It is a logical necessity, that at every point along your way, you traversed every step along your way. That is to say, each step is an integral part of the event series which brought you from your cubicle to Bends. If, ex hypothesi, "your taking a 99nd step as you walk to Bends" were magically erased from the universe of facts, then when you take step #98, you will stop, never reaching Bends. Even so, is it true to say that the steps you took along the way were what caused you to move along the way? Is it true to say that step 98# caused step 99#?

Imagine further that, in this semi-magical universe (or, for a more mundane reason that I'll stipulate in a moment), just as you are a few steps away from entering Bends, it is suddenly transported across the street. Whereupon, as an accustomed inhabitant of such a universe, you turn on your heel and cross the street to the relocated but happily still nearby Bends. (The more mundane version is that you were under the impression that Bends was at the corner of Haven and Plainview, but in fact it is across the street. Once you see your mistake, you change course.) In this case, can we really say there was something about the physical constitution of your (N-1)th step and its efficent-causal power which caused you to end up at Bends?

On the one hand we must admit that if any or all of the steps were "erased", you would not reach Bends. On the other hand, we cannot reasonably claim any one of the steps caused any of the others, and therefore neither that the steps themselves caused your arrival. As a larger truth, constituent events (such as the steps) which take place in a whole action are causally subsidiary to the whole event.

[I anticipate two classes of objections, but I will stop here in order to see what the cat drags in. Then, if the objections I have in mind do show up, or perhaps others I don't foresee, I'll continue this post.]

So you're saying I should just give up now, right?

"Both Jaki and Hodgson quoted with approval Duhem’s statement that 'in order to speak of questions where science and Catholic theology touch one another, one must have done ten or fifteen years of study in the pure sciences.'"

–– Stephen M. Barr, First Things, in memoriam of Fr. Jaki

I found this gut-check quotation via a somewhat astounding blog I discovered only this evening: The Duhem Society. As they explain: "Founded on April 7, 2009 [viz., the date of Fr. Jaki's passing in Madrid], our purpose is to study the writing of Pierre Duhem and Stanley L. Jaki, two great Catholic historians of science. All who are 'ready to take a serious look at philosophy and history' are welcome to join."

This society was established in response to Jaki's own recurring plea for just such a society to exist (especially so among Catholics with any intention of engaging science in an historically 'informed' manner). As I think some of you know, I founded a Catholic review, inFORM, with much the same intention, namely, to make Fr. Jaki's work more accessible outside of professional circles (where, even then, it is not given the attention it merits), and to engage contemporary concerns, such as science, bioethics, and religious pluralism, from a classically 'informed' Catholic, Thomistic, Jakian (and, in turn, Gilsonian) perspective.

Where have they been all my life! ;) I'm tickled to see one of the Society's bloggers, Angelo, is a "follower" of FCA. And all this time I never even knew! I guess this means I have officially joined The Duhem Society, since I've been waiting to join it for years! And I guess this means the Society had a periodical even before it existed!

Smokin', drankin', and gamblin' too!

[The following is the first draft of an essay I "blurted out" last night in one sitting. Having been copied from a document into Blogger, it has lost all italics, etc., but I would appreciate any constructive feedback. I'm hoping to submit this piece to a "real" periodical, maybe even First Things. With notes, it's about 2,850 words.]

On the Perverse Excellence of Smoking and Drinking

by Elliot Bougis

Is there any species besides Homo sapiens which purposely generates fire and fermented fruit? It seems not, and so might Homo sapiens equally well be called Homo ignis**. I know of one beetle which can expel a stream of scalding chemicals from its posterior to ward off predators. I also know of elephants getting drunk by eating fallen, rotting fruit from the ground. But I know of no other species that willfully, much less gleefully, produces fire or harnesses the obscure powers of decay to produce wine and strong spirits.

Thus it seems highly ironic that secularists and atheists take Prometheus as their patron.[#1] For it was Prometheus who asserted his humanity despite the gods by stealing fire, that is, making fire into a human possession. Only slightly less ironic is it for leading secularists to champion classical polytheism against regnant theism, insofar as Bacchus is among the classical gods of antiquity; and if Bacchus inspires one thing, it is the suppression of reason, supposedly a pagan and secularist value par excellence, under the sway of inebriation.

Nevertheless, Old Man Tobacco and the Spirit of Spirits persist as perverse human diversions. And their staying power, despite their prima facie perversity, stems from the connection they have with our sense of ourselves as “value-driven” beings. “Part of what it means to value some activities,” writes Gary Watson, “is this: we judge that to cease to have such appetites is to lose something of worth.” He goes on, “It would be impossible for a non-erotic being or a person who lacked the appetite for food and drink fully to understand the value most of us attach to sex and dining. … Or consider an appetite that is in fact 'unnatural' (i.e. acquired): the craving for tobacco.” Watson explains, “To a person who has never known the enticement of Lady Nicotine, what could be more incomprehensible than the filthy practice of consummating a fine meal by drawing into one's lungs the noxious fumes of a burning weed?”[#2] What does this tell us about ourselves? Poetically, a cigarette is nothing less than the hand-held mastery of fire, as, likewise, a goblet of wine or a fifth of whisky are nothing less than hand-held signs of power over the exigencies of decay in our entropic world.

These totems of human mastery are no less trinkets of humankind's hard-won and ever-evolving mastery of exact physical science, and thus signs––nay, “wonders” (semeion)**, akin to the sense of the word St. John's Gospel––of the reign of Homo sapiens qua Homo faber. Modern humans thus express their hominid “wisdom” principally in their hominid “fabrication.” From the cultivation and breeding of the finest tobacco and the cultivation of the finest vineyards, to the harvesting and manufacturing of that fine weed and the processing and distillation of that fine drink to the packing and bottling and shipping and selling of those small diversions––all along the way humankind demonstrates its scientific mastery over unruly nature. What greater sign of a man's transcendence over nature could there be than converting a weed, normally a scourge to agriculture, into a hallowed, domesticated habit called smoking? Likewise, what more clever way could there be for man to flout the wiles of corruption than to convert the imperfection of decay into the perfection of strong drink?

Certainly much of the lasting appeal of tobacco, despite the by now nearly global anti-smoking crusade, lies in the physiologically addictive character of nicotine, as much of the enduring attraction of liquor lies in the addictive power of alcohol. Yet there is more to both smoking and drinking than mere physiology. Otherwise we would have long ago switched to direct infusions of nicotine and alcohol by injection or something similar. Intrinsic to the enjoyment of smoking and drinking is the psychological pleasure of manually holding fire tamed and manually holding a glass of wine rescued from the claws of decay. This manual absorption in smoking and drinking is all of a piece with one other feature which might be said to separate man from other animals, namely, our fabulous hands with their even more fabulous opposable thumbs. It is those beautifully thumbed hands which make exact science possible––the construction and calibration of scientific instruments like telescopes and spectroscopes––and which, thus, make the very holding of cigars and shot glasses possible on a large scale.

And yet, we all know smoking is bad for us and that, in the long run, drinking in any more than a “cultured” way (“Red wine is good for your heart”) is detrimental to our longevity. Nevertheless we continue to smoke and drink, if not like there is no tomorrow, then at least like there is no yesterday, like there was never a time in which humans were subject to the vagaries of rampant weeds and rotting fruit. Tobacco (as well as marijuana) may both be “natural” in the sense of being found in nature, but cigarettes (and any joint) are natural products only by the defiantly unnatural intervention of human technology. Wine may be the fruit of the vine, but only because humans carefully, craftily make it so. Actual fruit of the vine is much less thrilling (hence, we give children grape juice as a substitute for wine) and certainly much less intoxicating and only lasts so long before decay sets in.

Thus, smoking and drinking persist as two of the most perverse “anti-sacramentals” of modern human life.[#3] It is not simply an assertion of one's “individuality” or “personal rights” to keep smoking no matter how stringently society poo-poos it and to keep drinking no matter how scrupulously Medicine and Fitness scold drinkers. A more basic impulse behind the perverse persistence of smoking and drinking is surely the desire to assert one's humanity as such. To make fire and wine are two exclusively human powers––akin to the long-sought quest of alchemists––and so to indulge in smoking and drinking is to indulge in one's exclusively human prerogatives, good sense or natural longevity be damned. What a properly human marvel it is to ignite fire in one's hand with the mere flick of one's precious opposable thumb, and then willfully to inhale the acrid, chemically saturated smoke of a tiny roll of paper––only then, even more audaciously, to flick one of nature's most elemental forces, fire, away like a god after a feast! What a marvel it is to walk into an ordinary convenient store and clutch with one's articulate hands a six-pack of perfected decay, and then guzzle its contents without being poisoned––adding, in some cases, an equally godlike flair by pouring a mouthful of the wondrous fluid onto the ground “for my homies”! To be Homo faber is not necessarily to be Homo sapiens––which is, paradoxically, an integral feature of being Homo sapiens. From that feature of our human nature arises what I call the perverse excellence conveyed by cigarettes and spirits: we demonstrate our excellence in the animal kingdom by harnessing nature's weak points for our own degradation and diversion.

Despite the tone of my exposition so far, I must admit that I am not in principle opposed to drinking and smoking, two diversions I myself have enjoyed on more than one occasion. Yet I think the word diversion is very telling in this context. To the apparently unique features of humans, such as firecraft and “moonshineology,” we might just as well add our perverse dread of boredom, that is, our incurable taste for diversions. Some drink to escape, others to strengthen social bonds; some smoke to blow off steam, others just to pass the time. In every case, though, drinking and smoking are things we do to divert ourselves from something more mundane. Why do we divert ourselves? What might we find if we strictly avoided diversions, of which smoking and drinking are only two of the most colorful examples? I once had a youth pastor who said that “only boring people get bored.” I have found him to be right ever since I internalized his dictum. If you are feeling bored, certainly you can “relieve your boredom” by drinking it off or taking a few drags, but at bottom it is because you can't find anything within yourself to make existence more enjoyable that you are bored in the first place. This is why prayer is considered by so many to be “boring”––for one thing, in prayer we aren't “doing” anything and, and for another, we are stuck with ourselves. Prayer forces us into reality, free of diversions, and more often than not illustrates to ourselves just how boring, how shallow and lifeless, we are on the inside. Far easier is it to divert our attention from this inner secret about ourselves with the must of tobacco and the warmth of wine.

Humans' pathetic flight from boredom may seem flippant, or trivial, but I believe it signals an important truth about ourselves. We exult in the diversions which Science, our greatest invention to date, and certainly our age's chief diversion, delivers us precisely because they deliver us from ourselves. Video games, notably also dependent on opposable thumbs, is probably the latest instance of our obsession with technological diversions. Indeed, the ultimate hope of most gamers would be to don a “virtual reality” helmet and immerse themselves in the gaming world––which is to say, out of this world. Is it any wonder that The Matrix trilogy seized the popular consciousness with a spiritual gravitas for transcendence?[#4] Such a helmet would, interestingly, allow us to transcend even the archaic limits of our hands, hand-held controllers being notoriously clunky instruments for “leet” gaming. In any case, the impulse remains the same––transcendence by diversions––and it attains almost mystical dimensions when combined with the other two diversions I have mentioned: gaming while drinking and smoking with buddies, in, say, a “LAN party,” ranks among the highest pleasures of the technologically minded.

It is hardly my goal in this essay to “cure” the invert human desire for diversions, merely to diagnose it, and, if possible, suggest a contrary “therapeutic” practice. Assuming the perverse excellence of our modern diversions is a form of transcendence, perhaps there is a way to channel, nay, hallow, our “urge to diverge” into something truly transcendental. As a Catholic, I would say “the way” is nothing less than sacramental spirituality as the great Christian Tradition has always presented it. Surely it is not insignificant that both fire and smoke, wine and spirits, are integral to Catholic devotion and properly human pleasure. To the Catholic eye, it should seem no less a technological marvel that fire is harnessed at every Mass and in every chapel by the lighting––and then godlike dousing––of candles around the altar, or for prayer intentions at the base of an icon. (The use of “sacral fire” is especially evidence in the “candle light” vigil Masses at Easter and Christmas.) In related fashion do we see fire harnessed for the glory of God at solemn Masses in the form of incense smoke wafting upwards as marvelously as that from any ordinary cigarette.[#5]

Similarly does the Church recall the technological marvels of winemaking and agriculture in its liturgy when, just before consecrating the Holy Gifts, the priests thanks God: “Through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us the bread of life. … Through your goodness we have this wine to offer, fruit of the vine and work of human hands. It will become our spiritual drink.”[#6] Here, then, we find the ordinary human diversions of smoke and alcohol elevated to a truly transcendent level. Unlike cigarettes and booze and video games in the consumerist world, fire and wine and bread are not treated as merely human trinkets, since, in the Catholic faith, humans are not merely human trinkets. Humans, each one and altogether, are signs of their divine origin, and as such, the highest act they can offer is the offering of their greatest signs of earthly supremacy to Him Who is truly supreme in all the earth. Notably, at no Mass (but at every Black Mass) is enough wine consumed by anyone to deliver them over to Bacchus or out of “the ordinary world.” Nor at any Mass (though at many a Black Mass, as in the burning of animals, feces, and infants) is fire generated for human consumption, or merely to pass the time, but rather for human inspiration, and radically to hallow the time.

As in the Kingdom of God swords shall be beaten into plowshares, so in the Liturgy of the Lamb the smoke of cigarettes, the savor of bread, and the glint of liquor are transformed into the scent of transcendence and the signs of divine love given for all humanity. This is a marvel––to wit, a transubstantiation––that outstrips any marvel of natural science insofar as it is a pure gift of divine wisdom. If more Homo sapiens could see this, perhaps they would put away their cigarettes and cigars, shelve their fifths and shot glasses, shut off their game consoles and PCs––and come to drink from the wine that never ages, to eat the bread that never spoils, and to enjoy the game of eternal life. Perhaps the best gift the Catholic Church can offer the world is the conversion of diversion.

NOTES

[#1] There is a meaningful distinction between the two, insofar as atheists positively deny the real existence of God, while secularists might refrain, agnostically, from the answer about His existence, and maintain that if He does exist, He should not be allowed to intrude on the autonomy of human concerns qua purely human.

[#2] “Free Agency,” as cited in Free Will (Oxford: University Press, [2nd ed.] 2003), ed. by Gary Watson, pp. 344–345.

[#3] As sacred as they may be many people, I insist smoking and drinking are but “anti-sacramentals,” and not “anti-sacraments,” since I believe the anti-sacraments of Homo faber are the Faustian harnessing of fire in warfare and the pouring of wine in the bloody slaughter of others, inside and outside the womb. It is hard to imagine a more flagrant perversion of the death of Christ, in which water and blood flowed forth from His pierced side, than the death of the innocents at the hands of “health care workers,” in which amniotic fluid and infant blood pour forth from pierced bodies that see no light in this world but surely shall in the next. In this sense, contraception and abortion are just two more related examples of humanity's scientific glee over against nature. We can thwart the fundamental process of sexual procreation with the mere ingestion of a pill, or the slightly less mere intrusion into the womb, thus enjoying the spoils of sex without actually having to tend its fruit.

[#4] The techno-spiritual transcendence portrayed by The Matrix must, of course, be qualified by the fact that future humanity's gnosis consisted in breaking free from the illusions spun by its robotic masters. I believer, however, that this anti-technological message was lost, paradoxically, by the breakthrough CGI technology which made films' fabled “slow-motion fighting” such a landmark diversion. Surely The Matrix phenomenon is a case of the medium muddling the message.

[#5] I realize that incense and candles are not exclusive to Catholic piety; indeed, they seem to be universal elements of religious practice, as in Buddhism and Hinduism and even paganism. This does not detract from my argument, however, since the every universality of fire in religiosity seems but a fitting correspondence to the equally human thirst for the universality of the divine. It suffices to show that “sacral fire” is a key part of Catholic

[#6] “Liturgy of the Eucharist,” as cited in Daily Roman Missal (Huntington, IN: Our Daily Visitor, 2003), pp. 689, 91. Let it also be noted that the link between the fruits of science and the worship of God is no mere coincidence in Christian theology. For, as the work of Pierre Duhem, Stanley Jaki, Thomas Torrance, Thomas Woods, Reijer Hookyaas**, Rodney Stark, and James Hannam, among others, has shown, it was precisely in the theological matrix of Catholic civilization that modern exact science was born. The rationality of Creation, as the work of the Divine Reason (Logos), is integral to the axiomatic scientific belief that nature is a proper object of human reason (or, conversely, that human reason is a proper instrument for exploring natural reality). As Fr. Jaki argued many times, only insofar as this belief––this cult––was maintained and generalized to become the Zeitgeist of medieval European civilization could science emerge as a mainstay of modern praxis––or culture.

1 November 2009