A-G the post I submitted which mentioned Mandelbrot's fractals was simply a reply to another poster who asked me to "define spirit." It wasn't an article or anything near as scholarly as BB's work. I have just re-read it, and it's a bit all over the lot and disjointed, but it does offer up a theory something like Grandpierre's, I think.
Here it is, FWIW:
[Other Poster] Before we can talk about 'spirituality' don't we have to define 'spirit?'
On page thirty-one of his new book, The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker makes a remarkable statement. He says, "We now know that cells did not always come from other cells and that the emergence of life did not create a second world where before there was just one. Cells evolved from simpler replicating molecules, a non-living part of the physical world, and may be understood as pieces of molecular machinery --- fantastically complicated machinery, of course, but machinery nonetheless." In the previous 30 pages Pinker uses about 70 footnotes, a pretty high rate, but this rather interesting assertion goes unfootnoted. That's a bit curious, wouldn't you say?
Actually, of course, there is no need to wonder why he did it. Pinker makes a bald, unsupportable assertion about abiogenesis because it's still one of the deepest mysteries in science. Like Darwin, he just wanted to skip over this difficult little patch and get on to the more tractable problems of evolutionary theory itself. I don't fault him for it. But I do think his omission tells us something interesting about the much maligned "God of the gaps." Pinker's omitted footnote is a gap of the kind that can almost make God respectable again.
Imagine: inside, the nerves, in the head --- that is these nerves are there in the brain...(damn them!) there are sort of little tails, the little tails of those nerves, and as soon as they begin quivering...that is you see, I look at something with my eyes and then they begin quivering, those little tails...and when they quiver, then an image appears... doesn't appear at once, but an instant, a second, passes...and then something like a moment appears; that is, not a moment --- devil take the moment! --- but an image; that is, an object, or an action, damn it! That's why I see and then think, because of those tails, not at all because I've got a soul, and that I am some sort of image and likeness. All that is nonsense! Rakitan explained it all to me yesterday, brother, and it simply bowled me over. It's magnificent, Alyosha, this science! A new man's arising --- that I understand...And yet I am sorry to lose God!Dmitri Karamazov to his brother Alyosha
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1880
A hundred billion neurons connected by a trillion synapses. That's what's inside our skull. The software combinations which can emerge from that amount of hardware, if one accepts Pinker's modular, computational theory of mind, can account, some say, for the amazing complexity of human behavior, perhaps even, when one factors in Hofstadter's "strange [recursive] loops," for the crafty "illusion" of free will itself. Despite famed chemist Michael Polanyi's categorical denial that biochemistry can be reduced to chemistry, it is now widely contended that step by creeping step the genome and its issue are giving up their secrets by reduction.
But how important is it, really, to parse out all these steps? By vanquishing the ghost in the machine, do we vanquish the altar too? Has the ghost ever really been in the machine? Or has he been whispering into it from some other dimension? Does Plato's (and BettyBoop's) formidable metaxy have no place in the new paradigm? Or does new knowledge simply move us a little further down a path still jam packed with an unending supply of mysteries that the concepts of metaxy and transcendence have served so well to explain? Pinker notwithstanding, the numinous genome's great leap into Being is hardly well understood. But even if Polanyi is wrong and at some point in the future abiogenesis can be replicated in the laboratory, the mystery of existence itself (why is the something rather than nothing?) has not been solved.
Which brings us to the Big Bang and GUT. Kierkegaard tells us that "God is totally other." The extra-cosmic Absolute, if it exists, is not accessible from this plane --- from these dimensions. No Grand Unified Theory can bridge the chasm. For us, the moment before the Big Bang is eternally silent. We are crucially handicapped by our structure in the physical plane, caught in a strange, paradoxical loop with no exit except death. But here we be, hurled into this mystery without so much as a by your leave from any deity. How did we get here?
Julian Jaynes believed we formed God-consciousness by first worshipping our clan chieftan during the period when the "bicameral mind" was breaking down just before wholly integrated human consciousness arose. The theory is fascinating and powerful, but has few adherents among cognitive scientists today. Apparently his emphasis on weird mass hallucinations and use of an unrealistically tight dating scheme don't hold up. Nevertheless there are plenty of solid theories among evolutionary psychologists to explain the God concept, most of them owing at least some debt to Jaynes. None of them satisfy, however. Some insanely huge piece of the puzzle is missing, and none of the current theories of evolutionary psychology show much promise of finding it. I noted with interest your pejorative use of the term "insane" to describe theists earlier in the thread. Is it so bizarre to be a little insane when presented with the great surprise of life? Is a leap of faith really that irrational? Or, perhaps I should say, is rationality always the proper response to the startling fact of our existence?
Vitalism has long been discredited, supposedly. Hardcore materialists confidently declare that no energy is exchanged between the material and the non-material. Knock on wood and wood is all you hit. Well, my friend, here is where I finally get around to answering your question (remember your question?). I believe they are wrong. I think that somewhere way, way down deep in Mandelbrot's fractals --- way, way down, almost infinitely way down --- there is a leak. That's how the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen might say.
Through the leak comes Spirit.
Indeed, while these evolutionary psychologists charge forward all confident that the spirit and mind is an epiphenomen of the brain ... there is a group of physicists and mathematicians still trying to answer the question, what is life? Biologists do not concern themselves with this question.
I predict the answer to the question will shake the very foundations of the biological sciences, because they are looking at “information” as the difference. In our jargon, that would be soul/spirit, metaxy, nephesh/neshama, etc.
Of course, science must have a politically correct term for it but the properties of information will exclude a naturally induced autonomous biological self-organizing complexity.
My two cents...
I remember your beautiful essay very well, beckett! And yes, I agree that Grandpierre's picture in a certain way resembles the Mandelbrot fractals, about which you wrote: "way, way down, almost infinitely way down -- there is a leak. That's how the light gets in.... Through the leak comes Spirit."
Recently marron wrote here that there is a good deal of "endless complexification of quite simple things" going on in contemporary thought, putatively across disciplines. And he wisely noted that the simple always wins out in the end.
I think that Pinker -- and to name some other names -- Lewontin, Dawkins, Hawking, Ovrut, Singer, Chomsky, and possibly not a few string theorists, et al. -- are burning the midnight oil in the search of plausible reasons to "overcomplexify the simple," just so they will never, ever have to come to grips with "the God problem."
Also thank you so much for your kind words of encouragement. I'll take your advice and write to Pastor Neuhaus, a very good man. I'll send an outline and a word count, and ask if he would have any interest in publishing a piece like this one. My initial thought is the piece is "too Greek" for First Things. But it can't hurt to ask.
I've had suggestions for other potential venues, such as Psyche and Noetic Journal. These, however, are professional, peer-reviewed journals. As I am not a "professional," I would not rate highly my chances of being accepted by such publications.
Anyhoot beckett, yours was a glorious piece when it first went up, and it definitely has staying power. Thank you so much for reprising it here.