S…O…_…C…O…O…L…

Look, Ma, no hands!

The interface consists, essentially, of a keyboard displayed on a computer screen. "The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually," says Williams. "And what your brain does is, if you're looking at the 'R' on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the 'R' flashes, your brain says, 'Hey, wait a minute. Something's different about what I was just paying attention to.' And you see a momentary change in brain activity."

Something about this reminds me of Portal turret droids. Standing around all day with nothing to do but focus their attention on moving objects. Gotta love this HUH-larious riff on Portal. Ahh, Portal, how do I love thee? One of the few games I have ever played longer than an hour AND which I have won. That has to be some kind of big endorsement: even non-gamer nerds like it.

Hat tip to Mindful Hack… such a great blog.

Nature makes sense to whom?

"[T]he concept of a law of Nature cannot be made sense of without God. … Laws of Nature are prescriptive, not merely descriptive, and – even stronger – they are supposed to be responsible for what occurs in Nature. … Aristotleanism, can offer a stand-in for laws – natural powers – that satisfies the major requirements on laws without the need to call on God.4 For those who cannot abide powers, I think there are no options left. Without God there cannot be laws of Nature, nor anything else with their crucial characteristics."

This statement is made by a major philosopher of science, Nancy Cartwright. Cartwright prefers to replace the more abstract concept of "natural laws" with the more concrete concept of natural dispositions had by physical entities. Interestingly, she favors the dispositional account of natural order as an explicit return to Aristotelian metaphysics. Dispositions, or "powers" (as the late George Molnar called them), are but Aristotelian final causes warmed over.

Recently, Edward Feser (pronounced "fayzer") posted a description of Baruch Spinoza's rejection of final causes, and noted that natural teleology need not be wedded to theism, since Aristotle himself asserted the existence of natural finality without reference to God (or his "Unmoved Mover") as their explicit source. Nevertheless, admitting final causes back into exact science is a huge step forward in wisdom––ironically enough, by being a big step backwards in time.

The question that has been on my mind is this: To whom do the most fundamental properties of the cosmos make sense?

The goal, and boast, of modern exact science has been progressively to strip away layer after layer of "common sense" about nature in order to reach the most basic truths about the natural world. Its goal and boast have been continuously to reduce one level of phenomena to a more basic, and again more basic, level of physical order. The higher levels, thus, only make sense by virtue of being understood in terms of, and with relation to, the lower natural order. Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that humans at some point reach the most basic natural order possible: we really hit pay dirt, our shovel strikes the foundation, and we see the pristine rudiments of nature, presumably all based on one simple natural process or system or dynamic. At that point, I wonder, how can we account for the most basic system being anything other than a law that controls all higher levels of being and change? If there is one fundamental law of nature from which all higher laws derive, to whom does it make sense? I am having trouble expressing my thought, I apologize, but this is because it is more of an intuition at present than a cogent argument.

Perhaps I should go for broke and say the point is simply this: Insofar as a most-basic law serves as an explanation of higher orders of nature only if it is 1) conceptually coherent as one formal truth and 2) if it illuminates the relation between itself and all subsequent, derivative structures in nature, then who or what has been doing the "coherence recognition" in 1) and the synthetic elaboration in 2)? Since the most basic law is a pristine predictor for all subsequent, derivative systems/events in nature, it would have to be grasped at once, intellectually, in conjunction with those chronologically later developments that just are the entailments of that law. Knowing the most basic law, in other words, just means knowing its exact entailments down the spacetime line. But what sort of mind could really do that, if not God Himself? The most-basic law that we will, ex hypothesi, discover had to have been "making sense" to someone prior to our knowledge of it, otherwise it would not be a prescriptive, law-like facet of nature. If extreme reductionism is determined to find a single most-basic law (or a small cluster of coordinate laws), reductionism seems bound to rediscover the Lawgiver.

Let me close with the reminder that I deny the cogency of my hypothesis about finding the most basic law(s) of nature, for two reasons: first, the nature of science would always render an alleged "final solution" a mere discovery away from falsifiability, and, second, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, as the late Stanley Jaki and Roger Penrose have argued in numerous places, vitiate the hopes of ever finding a formally deductive, and necessarily complete set of formalized laws. In other words, nature will never make sense to us with air-tight logical precision. We will always have to believe there is or are some most-basic law or laws of nature, without ever hoping to know it deductively, and then attribute its coherence to the vision of a higher mind, also known as God.

You are not your brain…

"…'You Are Your Brain!' … has become almost a mainstream notion now. But the subtitle of [Alva Noë's] book begins 'Why you are not your brain.' What's wrong with the 'You are your brain' view?

Noë: It's one thing to say you wouldn't be you if not for your brain, that your brain is critical to what you are. But I could say that about your upbringing and your culture, too. It's another thing entirely to say that you are your brain."

–– hat tip to Denyse O'Leary at Mindful Hack

It is heartening to see a leading philosopher of cognition (at UC Berkeley) resisting neuribilistic reductionism (Salon.com, Gordy Slack, 25.3.09). The rising tide of embodied cognition (à la H. Dreyfus, A. Clark, T. Rockwell, F. Varela, D. Melser, et al.) is the death knell for that archaic reductionism, since, gradually, we are (re)discovering that who we are just is who we are as substantial, historically situated beings. Year after year, brain identity theorists have been forced to expand their meaning of "brain", so that now the entire nervous system and our whole array of cognitive/perceptual "tools" (i.e., organs) is viewed as a coherent, integrated agent pursuing rational ends in a dynamic field of intelligible objects. But this concession is just to reintroduce hylomorphic dualism without knowing it (yet). And to do so is, in time, to welcome nature back to the table of our discourse, whereupon it is just a stone's throw from asking Nature herself Who brought her to us, and us out of her.

The ground of goodness in the roots of being...

About a month and a half ago, in response to a thread at Just Thomism, I
wrote about the Christological basis for humanity and moral worth.
Not much later, Ben, an atheist, wrote a somewhat lengthy reply to me at his blog. I finally got around to reading and answering his reply. I post it (in truncated form) here, as always, for form's sake.

1) The point of Catholic Christology is ontological, not merely psychological. It is a revelation of the very ground of our psychological structure of goodness. It is not at all a matter of denying or affirming goodness being present in non-Christians. Rather, it is a claim about who is to be thanked and acknowledged for goodness as such, as humans concretely encounter it. The fecund joy of the Triune perichoresis is the grounding for the analogical human goods of family, social harmony, intersubjectivity, etc. This is hardly amoralism. It is a rejection of Platonism insofar as the Good is made concrete (as opposed to ideal and immaterial) in creation in the person of Jesus Christ, but not a rejection of Platonism insofar as the Good is adored as pervading and orchestrating all particular things. Goodness exists broadly in creation primarily because it was/is ontologically rooted in Christ's concrete life and death, and, secondarily, as it is mediated by humanity made in His likeness. Nature is not "good" without humans, ontologically speaking, and humanity is not good without Christ's paradigmatic humanity, ontologically speaking (not psychologially/ cognitively).

...

3) You also grossly mistake the nature of Christ's suffering as if it were about the quantitative nerve stimuli involved. The Passion is not about what kind of suffering Jesus endured, but about Who endured that suffering. The Fathers state on numerous occasions that Christ did not need to suffer in any way to redeem anyone, but that He did so as an even more dramatic sign of His love for the lost, the concrete way in which God says "I love you." It was only by uniting his divinity with our common, wounded humanity that Christ could offer us, as collectively-formed individuals, to the Father by the Holy Spirit. His suffering was a sign of God's love for us, not a contest for the greatest possible nerve aggravation. (I could lay a hot wire on a rat sciatic nerve until the thing died of exhaustion and shock, and that might involve "more" suffering than Jesus' Passion, but it would not involve a suffering that in any way elevates and heals our nature.) Further, Jesus did not "leave" anyone in hell. We go to hell of our own volition. He died to save us all, but evidently, some of us, perhaps many, choose to reject the light and love that pervades creation. We are each judged by the light we are given. Again, the very grounds for anyone having enough light to seek goodness and truth is rooted in Christ incarnate. He is the light every person knows, even if dimly, and even if a person does not know He is the light.

...

Notice how easily I myself slipped into the cosmological error I was ciritcizing in the thread at Just Thomism. It is an insidious confusion which Catholic theology, as Fr. Keefe argues at great length in Covenantal Theology (cited above), must constantly resist and reform. I said Christ assumed our humanity, but, again, the point is that "our humanity" itself is grounded in its wholeness in the very fact of Christ's Incarnation. "Our humanity" does not exist as some ideal form, waiting for Christ to don it like a cloak on a hook in the foyer to the real world. Rather, simply because the Logos deigned to unify creation to Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, thus our humanity was ratified and created. God's desire to manifest His glory and impart His being to His creatures was and is prior, ontologically, to the concrete forms by which creation enjoys the divine goodness. The Passion is but a second-order volition which the Logos accepted in union with His first-order will to unite creation with God. This is why the Incarnation did not necessarily entail the Passion, though the Passion, of course, required the Incarnation. Our humanity found a seat at the table of existence, in other words, beacuse God deemed it a suitable manner by which to express His goodness in an anthropic creation. Christ is to human nature what humanity is to nature itself.

"Science tells us…"?

Does Science itself as such exist?

Or are there only scientists?

And if only the latter, are they responsible to Science itself?

If the former, does Science itself control scientists in some mysterious super-empirical way?

I think I passed the meaning of life last night…

Meaning and transcendental value are just brain states. They are no less objective facts for being mere neurochemical omelets.

Fortunately, last night I had a bowel movement last night that put me at total peace with the world. It, too, was but a neurochemical state. But no less an objective fact therefore.

One man's turd is another man's meaning in life.

Enjoy the physicalism.

After I passed the meaning of life, I sat to watch a program about General Custer. I wondered if he or his nervous system cared more about the outcome of his battles. If he or his nerve endings reacted more strongly to the perfunctory bright lights and singing howl of mortar fire.