Posted on 06/12/2005 7:27:56 PM PDT by betty boop
LOLOL monkey! This is like the observation, "I'm from Venus, you're from Mars." We do see this sort of thing here at FR from time to time.... But it takes all kinds to make a Universe! :^)
You wrote: "Conscious thought, however, seems different [from brain processing which, as you observe, consists of deconstruction of sensory inputs and reconstruction as perception]. People love to deconstruct (splitting problems into smaller pieces, division of labor), but we seem to be very bad at the constructive part."
Oh, I do agree with you there, monkey! We see this especially in science today, where specialities propagate a seemingly endless line of subspecialities; and so the joke goes: "We know more and more about less and less. At the present rate, sooner or later we will know absolutely everything about nothing at all." The loss of the sense of relatedness between the main scientific branches, together with their specialities does not appear to advance the interests of science. It's getting to be a case of "the right hand not knowing what the left is doing." IMO.
You observed: "despite all the analysis we do of human affairs, we can't answer a simple question like what will be the state of the world in 100 years? What are we moving towards? ... What do you think about that?"
The fact is, not only can we not predict what the state of the world will be in 100 years, but it seems to me we cannot even predict what its state will be tomorrow, or even, say, one minute from now. The fact is human existence is contingent, depending on an astronomical number of variables that are entirely outside of our own control. That is why I think it's so important to get the "big picture" view if at all possible. It provides the context in which individual contingent events unfold, and thus helps us to understand what is going on in the world and in our lives. FWIW
Thanks so much for writing, monkey!
IOW, Whitehead would be underscoring the importance of the fields over the particles. But this is where we start parting company, because Whitehead puts the burden on the process itself whereas I put the burden on the geometry. It's as if he would rather subordinate the geometry (space/time) to the process.
Whitehead’s “prehensions” and “actual occasions” are part of his construing “reality” as a exercise of free-will (on steroids in my view). It has been suggested on prior threads that man is a “co-creator” – but Whitehead seems to take this further, as if God could not exist without man’s free will. On that point I sharply disagree.
Great analysis, Alamo-Girl! As to Whitehead’s suggestion that God could not exist without man’s free will, I also disagree sharply. To me, this is an inversion of the true state of affairs. I think regarding this point Whitehead's conception of a “dualist God” may have forced him into an untenable position.
As to why Whitehead should propose a “dualist God,” I suspect this has everything to do with his insight that Nature and the Universe itself emerge from the tension between that which changes, and that which is unchangeable. Whitehead is, after all, regarded as a “philosopher of flux and permanence,” and in this I think he is following Heraclitus. Heraclitus observed that all things change, but that in order for there to be change, something must remain constant, unchanging. Or to put it another way, in order for a living system to remain what it is, it must change. The most concrete example of this phenomenon is the human body’s complete recycling of all its cells every seven years; for the body to persist as what it is, it must do this.
Thus the way I'm understanding Whitehead’s “dualist God”: The unchanging principle is “the primordial nature of God” – the Realm of Eternal Objects…. The change principle is embodied (sort of like a work in progress, or process) in the Universe as God’s “Consequent Nature.” Whitehead says the former is “unconscious”; the latter is “fully conscious” – God suffering and rejoicing with humankind.
Now this Realm of Eternal Objects actually strikes me as pointing to an underlying universal geometry. For such objects are “eternal,” universal, unchanging. What changes are events, occurrences: but such events, though seemingly random, are actually not really random at all; for ultimately they are contingent on and constrained by the contents of the Realm of Eternal Objects. Though this realm is the source of all fecundity and novelty in the Universe, it is not “random” (which is why it looks geometrical to me). Events and occurrences themselves are only apparently random.
There are infinite possibilities or potentialities in the Universe; but not all are realizable in the Universe. For their actual outcomes are constrained by “the underlying geometry” of the eternal objects. Plus they are also further “conditioned” by all other events past and present. The sum total -- the "Consequent God" or "all that there is" -- has effectively been subjected to constraint by the Eternal Objects by virtue of the fact that the Eternal Objects have conditioned each of its parts. At any given “point” in the evolution of the world, God’s Consequent Nature “records” the progress attained, which signifies the movement of God from the state of unconsciousness (i.e., the eternal objects), to full consciousness of the present state of the Universe. Reality is “real” because it is a process of which God is (or has become) conscious.
Well, my interpretation anyway, FWIW. It's a pretty reduced concept of God to be sure. For one thing, it seems to identify God with the Universe (the Eastern view). But if one will not countenance the possibility of a creator God, then it seems there's no place else to "put God" but in the world. I wonder about how there can be "eternal objects" that are eternally valid when God himself is thought to be not omnipotent. Anyhoot, this is pretty wild stuff and fun to wrestle with....
I loved your observation: The trend I am gathering from various sources is that some will entertain the concept of a whole willfulness which is greater than the sum of the wills of its parts. In that view, the will, mind, consciousness, autonomy, object or form of the man actually exists as a "thing" although it transcends to all of the component wills of his body. Thus, there is no Cartesian Split as the whole exists in the parts, and is also greater than the sum.
I wanted to do a comparison of Whitehead's and Pannenberg's respective theologies. But I realized that the sources I want to use for this are at home. :^(
Soooooooooo...hopefully I'll have a chance to work on this tonight! Thank you ever so much, Alamo-Girl, for your excellent post/essay!
But we'll never know that for a fact.
Crucified.
Don't clog up my ping list by including me in your annoying habit of pinging multiple people when you answer someone. You must have some serious self-importance issues if you think that anyone would appreciate being copied, out of the blue, with 2,600 words that you somehow find interesting. It's quite obnoxious and rude.
Thank you for your "courteous note," WHC.
Indeed, Whitehead died too soon - as did Einstein. They would no doubt have many comments about the state of things. LOL!
Whitehead would have pitched the steady state universe model. But along with it he would have thrown away something that would bring him in closer focus with the investigation of "intelligence". You nailed it with this:
It is an alternative to the emergent intelligence model often associated with self-organizing complexity for a "methodologically naturalist" explanation of intelligence.
Who knows, perhaps Whitehead would have endorsed that concept...
I look forward to your comparison of Whitehead and Pannenberg.
Perhaps he would, Alamo-Girl; but the question why he would choose to account for the Universe that way would still (apparently) be insoluable for us today.
Got home from work, instantly got distracted; and then when I had a chance, went digging for the source I particularly needed to give an account of Pannenberg's trinitarian theology of nature. [I was looking for something Voegelin wrote about the three Persons of the One God, after Aquinas. But I haven't found it yet. :^( ]
But then I realized: I don't need that particular cite. Pannenberg's theology directly follows the theology of -- surprise! surprise! -- Sir Isaac Newton, founder of modern mechanics, the very mind that conceived and specified the great physical laws of motion.
So I have had to "rethink" the piece. :^)
Still working on it, hope to be back on that topic soon....
As to whether Whitehead was an adherent of the "steady state" cosmological model -- I don't know how we could really find out. He's been dead now for some 58 years so we can't exactly ask him. And people can read a whole lot into him that maybe he didn't exactly intend.
What I am especially grateful to him for is that he evidently believed that no exhaustive description of the Universe could be made without the helps of philosophy and theology. Certainly Whitehead's was in no way a "doctrinal" theology. It seems to me Whitehead had a sort of primitive intuition of the nature of the "Unknown God" referenced in the Acts of the Apostles. This god it seems was the very god to which Plato referred as the "Beyond," the Epikeina. I think Whitehead was trying to "update the ancients" in the way he decided to present his theology.... But only the Greek ones; not Israel's.
Ruminations before calling it a day. Thank you as always, my dear sister in Christ, for your ever excellent correspondence and companionship.
I must have presumed he was oriented to a "steady state" model for the universe because of his infinite/finite hypothesis. It would certainly be nice if we could have a Q&A with some of these people. LOL!
As cosmologists go, the Postmodernism of Alfred Whitehead contrasts amusingly with the Leftism of Olaf Stapleton but is unrelated to the Americanism of Peter Chambers.
Thanks again!
Dear Alamo-Girl, finally.... I have a bias I should disclose: Pannenberg's theology "makes more sense" to me than Whitehead's. As Pannenberg points out [in Toward a Theology of Nature, 1993], he takes his cues from Sir Isaac Newton’s theology. The great elucidator of the mechanical laws of the Universe also had definite ideas about such abstract -- i.e., non-material -- concepts as space (which Newton regarded as absolute and empty); this seems to have been an early anticipation of modern field theory.
Newton was a deeply committed Christian, though it has appeared to many that he was not a strictly doctrinaire or completely orthodox one. (He thought that the mechanical laws would tend to increase disorder in the world, so that it would be necessary for God to "step in and set things right" from time to time....)
I have mixed feelings about undertaking this essay. On the one hand, it deals with a scientific cosmology, which is not a problem. On the other, it deals with God – we are discussing theology after all, and its implications, if any, for other branches of human knowledge. The great difficulty is to not reduce God to humanly-accessible categories in the process....
The divine nature transcends any description of it that the human mind can conceive. St. Anselm of Canterbury makes this crystal clear in Proslogion XV: “O Lord, you are not only that than which a greater cannot be conceived, but you are also greater than what can be conceived.” We “reduce” God to human conceptual frameworks only at the risk of falsifying divine Reality, and everything in the Universe that depends, or is contingent on it. Which is “All that there is.”
Christianity recognizes that God does not belong to physical reality, except for the one single occasion in human history that He chose to become physically incarnate, in a fully human, physical man, Jesus; and then only for a time (about 32 years). God utterly transcends the Universe, and yet paradoxically He is also eternally “immanent in it.”
The doctrine of the immanence of God is pronounced in Eastern metaphysics: God is not “outside” the Universe, but is effectively co-extensive with, or even embedded in, an eternal, uncreated Universe. [To a Christian thinker, this makes God an “accident” of the Universe – something that Christianity does not and cannot accept.] On the Eastern mystical account, God is preeminently recognizable as the “world soul.”
I understand there are many accomplished scientists working today who are drawn to this notion. But Newton rejected it; for him, God was not some sort of esoteric “world soul.” For Newton, God is “God with His creatures.” That is, the sovereign Lord of creation which He Himself produced ex nihilo by His spoken Word “in the beginning,” thereafter eternally “keeping company” with what He has made.
If such statements strike the reader as inexplicable, then maybe we could try a “thought experiment.” Consider a question: Is Michelangelo “inside” (immanent) or “outside” (transcendent) his sublime sculpture, David? We concede that Michelangelo is the artist who created this work, according to intelligence and will (and probably also the copious shedding of blood, sweat, and tears). We’d also probably agree that Michelangelo personally is not “in” the marble out of which the David was “reified,” according to his astonishing creative genius and skill. But he is “in” the design, the concept, without which the marble would still be just a rough block of unworked stone in the back of his workshop. Michelangelo’s “presence” in the completed creation -- the glorious form of David, poised and balanced in his “wind-up” to sling the stone that would hit Goliath in between the eyes and so strike him dead – is eternally recorded. His mind, his vision, his hands fashioned such beauty in humble stone.
The “humble stone” has a complete physical description, once we know its initial and boundary conditions, according to the physico-chemical laws. But where do we find the physical description of the operations of mind, vision, or the work of hands? What initial or boundary conditions apply to such phenomena?
The above thought experiment generally presents the case of transcendence. But to acknowledge divine transcendence would not give the complete description of what Newton apparently had in mind respecting God’s role in the Universe. Newton’s God – the Trinitarian God of Christianity – is an immanent God also. Top extend our David analogy, this would mean that God would be viewed as constantly active in the microscopic activity of the particles comprising the stone, and/or the constant preservation of the idea embodied in the stone.
Newton held that space – “absolute, empty” – is the “form” of the omnipresence of God with His creatures, which he called the sensorium Dei. By sensorium he did not mean a physical organ of sense perception: God, being eternal, omnipresent, and omniscient, doesn’t need a medium for this. The sensorium in human perception, besides being the “route” through which sense data from the outside world is conveyed to our brains, is also the place where we create the “pictures” of the things we observe.
“Sir Isaac Newton considers the Brain and Organs of Sensation, as the Means by which those Pictures are formed, but not as the Means by which the Mind sees or perceives those pictures, when they are so formed.” [G. W. Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. C. J. Gerhardt (1875-90)]
As Pannenberg points out, Newton means the latter sense of the word sensorium: “God through space creates [not the pictures] but the things themselves. “God constitutes space and time though his eternity and omnipresence: ‘existendo semper et ubique, durationem et spatium constituit’ [Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 3rd edition, (1726)].”
To me, here’s what the Trinitarian theological picture looks like: The God who constitutes space and time through his eternity and omnipresence is God the Father, Creator “with his creatures.” To me, the sensorium may represent (in the language of physics) the primary universal vacuum field. God “spoke” the creation into being by His Word – the Logos, or God the Son. The Word God spoke in the Beginning was of Light: “Let there be Light.” So in my picture (adverting yet again to the language of physics), the Singularity – God’s Word – is rather like a single photon (the incipient primary vacuum?) densely “informed” by the geometry (logos) of God’s creative Will and Mind. Thus were space and time created. This also accounts for why our universe is said to be “finite, yet unbounded”: finite because it has a beginning, and unbounded because the vacuum itself reaches to every point of space and time in our inflationary universe. And it is the source field for the propagation of all the other fields in natural reality, which develop in due course according to the “information” loaded into the singularity of the beginning.
Where Whitehead has a multiplicity of “eternal objects,” the Trinitarian view suggests there is only one “eternal object” in the world (immanence): the Logos/Word of the Beginning, which specifies, like a kind of cosmic blueprint, the order of the Universe and of all its "emergent" potentialities. Whitehead puts God “inside” the Universe; but for Newton/Pannenberg, God the Father is “outside,” transcendent; divine immanence comes by way of the Son (Logos) in the natural or physical Universe; and the Holy Spirit in the supernatural realm of mind and consciousness.
Sometimes Christians are accused of being “polytheistic” on the supposition that we believe there are “three gods.” This is a complete misunderstanding of the Christian concept of One God in three persons. For the Son and the Holy Spirit are consubstantial with the Father; none of the persons is the creation of any other. The Son is begotten of the Father, not made; and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son together. It’s just that one Person – the Father, the “Unknown God” of Acts, Plato’s “Beyond,” the Israelite tetragrammatical god (i.e., YHWH, the “I am That Am”) absolutely transcends the world; the Holy Spirit is God in His immanent “aspect” (if we can say God has “aspects,” which is doubtful; but we have to try to articulate these things in the language/modes of thought we have). The Son is the Way and the Life, Mediator between God and Man, of Whom it is said “No man comes to the Father but by Me.” He transcends creation; but is immanent in human souls. And also immanent in the timeless, ultimate, primary geometry of the Logos that is the foundation of the structure of the Universe and everything in it.
The single greatest event in human history was the incarnation of the Son of God in the flesh of a mortal man, Jesus Christ. The Word, already in the natural creation from the very beginning, enters into the realm of actual human history and eschatology – for our salvation, itself the purpose of a loving, willing God.
This is probably a really good time and place to stop. I am probably going to get my head handed to me here, by atheists and theists alike! Please folks, do remember this is only a speculative, meditative cosmology that just happens to take its inspiration from Genesis and the Gospel of John….
Anyhoot, this speculative cosmology has been on my mind for quite some time by now. I just had to “get it off my chest.” :^) Thank you so very much, Alamo-Girl, for your thoughts and your encouragements.
Of course, also today I received from Amazon an intriguing book that 2ndreconmarine suggested I read: Timothy Ferris' The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report (1997).
Looks like I need to schedule some serious "reading time" in the very near future....
Thanks again, Doc!
Don't bother with Tiller's books. Too much math for New Agers, not enough math for science students. A couple insights to crystallography and materials science.
Though I'm sure I'm curious about Tiller's insights into crystallography. Do you have a "Cliff's Notes" version that you can share?
Thanks for writing, RW!
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