Between Science and Spirituality

The Chronicle of Higher Education ^ | Nov. 29, 2002 | John Horgan

[beckett]

Between Science and Spirituality

By JOHN HORGAN

Can mystical spirituality be reconciled with science and, more broadly, with reason? To paraphrase the mystical philosopher Ken Wilber, is the East's version of enlightenment compatible with that of the West? If so, what sort of truth would a rational mysticism give us? What sort of consolation?

There are many claimed convergences between science and mysticism. Cognitive psychology supposedly corroborates the Buddhist doctrine that the self is an illusion. Quantum mechanics, which implies that the outcomes of certain microevents depend on how we measure them, is said to confirm the mystical intuition that consciousness is an intrinsic part of reality. Similarly, quantum nonlocality, which Einstein disparaged as "spooky action at a distance," clinches mystics' perception of the interrelatedness, or unity, of all things. I see a different point of convergence between science and mysticism: Each in its own way reveals the miraculousness of our existence.

The more science learns about the origin and history of the cosmos and of life on earth and of Homo sapiens, the more it reveals how staggeringly improbable we are. First there is the fact of existence itself. The big-bang theory represents a profound insight into the history and structure of the cosmos, but it cannot tell us why creation occurred in the first place. Particle physics suggests that empty space is seething with virtual particles, which spring into existence for an instant before vanishing. In the same way, some physicists speculate, the entire universe might have begun as a kind of virtual particle. Honest physicists will admit that they have no idea why there is something rather than nothing. After all, what produced the quantum forces that supposedly made creation possible? "No one is certain what happened before the Big Bang, or even if the question has any meaning," Steven Weinberg, the physicist and Nobel laureate, wrote recently.

Next questions: Why does the universe look this way rather than some other way? Why does it adhere to these laws of nature rather than to some other laws? Altering any of the universe's fundamental parameters would have radically altered reality. For example, if the cosmos had been slightly more dense at its inception, it would have quickly collapsed into a black hole.

A smidgen less dense, and it would have flown apart so fast that there would have been no chance for stars, galaxies, and planets to form. Cosmologists sometimes call this the fine-tuning problem, or, more colorfully, the Goldilocks dilemma: How did the density of the universe turn out not too high, not too low, but just right?

The odds that matter would have precisely its observed density, the physicist Lawrence Krauss has calculated, are as great as the odds of guessing precisely how many atoms there are in the sun. Some physicists are so troubled by the arbitrariness of the cosmos that they espouse a quasi-theological concept known as the anthropic principle. According to this notion, the universe must have the structure we observe, because otherwise we wouldn't be here to observe it. The anthropic principle is cosmology's version of creationism.

The next improbability is life. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins once declared that life "is a mystery no longer," because Darwin solved it with his theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet life is as mysterious as ever, in spite of all the insights provided by evolutionary theory and more-recent biological paradigms, such as genetics and molecular biology. Neither Darwinism nor any other scientific theory tells us why life appeared on earth in the first place, or whether it was probable or a once-in-eternity fluke.

Many scientists have argued that life must be a ubiquitous phenomenon that pervades the universe, but they can offer precious little empirical evidence to support that assertion. After decades of searching, astronomers have found no signs of life elsewhere in the cosmos; a 1996 report of fossilized microbes in a meteorite from Mars turned out to be erroneous. Researchers still cannot make matter animate in the laboratory, even with all the tools of biotechnology. In fact, the more scientists ponder life's origin, the harder it is to imagine how it occurred. Francis Crick once stated that "the origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to be satisfied to get it going." In his book Life Itself, Crick offered the speculation that the seeds of life might have been planted on earth by an alien civilization.

Once life on earth started evolving, many scientists have contended, it was only a matter of time before natural selection produced a species as intelligent as Homo sapiens. But for more than 80 percent of life's 3.5-billion-year history, the earth's biota consisted entirely of single-celled organisms, like bacteria and algae. So not even the simplest multicellular organisms were inevitable. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould has estimated that if the great experiment of life were rerun a million times over, chances are that it would never again give rise to mammals, let alone mammals intelligent enough to invent negative theology and television. Similar reasoning led the eminent evolutionary theorist Ernst Mayr to conclude that the SETI program -- the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which scans the heavens for radio signals from other civilizations -- is futile.

Multiply all of these improbabilities and they spike to infinity. As the psychologist Susan Blackmore has pointed out, we are bad at judging probabilities, hence prone to make too much of chance events; that is why we believe in ESP, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and other miracles. I do not believe in miracles, at least not defined in the conventional religious manner as divine disruptions of the natural order. But if a miracle is defined as an infinitely improbable phenomenon, then our existence is a miracle, which no theory natural or supernatural will ever explain.

Scientists may go much further in plumbing nature's secrets. They may decipher the neural code, the secret language of the brain. They may arrive at a plausible explanation of how life emerged on earth, and they may discover life elsewhere in the cosmos. They may find and verify a unified theory of physics, which will provide a more precise picture of the origin and history of the universe. Although there are good reasons for doubting the likelihood of such scientific advances, they cannot be ruled out. What can be ruled out is that science will answer the ultimate question: How did something come from nothing? Neither superstring theory nor any other of science's so-called theories of everything can resolve that mystery, any more than our supernatural theologies can.

Although we can never solve the riddle of existence, we can never stop trying. We must keep reimagining our relationship to the infinite. Skepticism alone --- and the cold, hard facts of science --- cannot serve as the basis for spirituality. Blackmore, a practicing Zen Buddhist, helped me reach that conclusion. She described Zen as a kind of rubbish-removal system that cleanses the mind of extraneous beliefs and emotions so that we can see reality as it truly is.

I found Blackmore's garbage metaphor appealing at first, because it provided a handy criterion for judging theories and theologies. The worst ones, I decided, distract us from the reality right in front of us by postulating parallel dimensions and universes, heavens and hells, gods and ghosts and demiurges and extraterrestrials. Too much garbage! Viewed this way, skepticism appears to be the ideal spiritual perspective. Skepticism clears away cumbersome beliefs on an intellectual level, just as meditation (ideally) clears away beliefs, emotions, and thoughts on a more experiential level. Skepticism can help us achieve mystical deautomatization, or so I wanted to believe.

My handling of real rather than metaphorical garbage gradually gave me a more complicated view of the matter. In my kitchen, we put garbage in bags that come in boxes of 20. After I yank the last bag from a box, the box itself becomes trash, which I put into the bag. Sometime after I interviewed Blackmore, every time I pulled the last bag from the box and stuffed the box in the bag, I intuited a paradox lurking within this ritual.

I went through more garbage bags than I care to mention before I solved the riddle: Every garbage-removal system generates garbage. Zen apparently works as an efficient garbage-removal system for Susan Blackmore. But as minimalistic as it is, Zen clutters more than it clarifies my mind. Once I started down this line of thinking, it was hard to stop. I began looking askance at skepticism, too. Maybe skepticism, instead of cleansing our vision, just substitutes one type of trash for another. Instead of belief in reincarnation, angels, ESP, extraterrestrials, parallel universes, and the Oedipus complex, the skeptic crams his mind with disbelief in reincarnation, angels, and so on.

The problem is that any truth or antitruth, no matter how initially revelatory and awe-inspiring, sooner or later turns into garbage that occludes our vision of the living world. Ludwig Wittgenstein had this problem in mind when he described his philosophy as a ladder that we should "throw away" after we have climbed it. At its best, art -- by which I mean poetry, literature, music, movies, painting, sculpture -- works in this manner. Art, the lie that tells the truth, is intrinsically ironic. Like Wittgenstein's ladder, it helps us get to another level and then falls away. What better way to approach the mystical, the truth that cannot be told?

At a scholarly meeting on mysticism I attended in Chicago, one speaker warned that if we can't talk about mysticism, we can't whistle about it, either. In other words, all our modes of expression, including art, fall short of mystical truth. But unlike more-literal modes of expression, art comes closer to uttering the unutterable by acknowledging its own insufficiency. It gives us not answers but questions. That does not mean mystical insights cannot be expressed within other modes of knowledge, like science, philosophy, theology -- and, of course, journalism. But we should view even the most fact-laden mystical texts ironically when they turn to ultimate questions. Some mystical writers, notably the psychedelic raconteur Terence McKenna, supply their own irony, but we readers can supply it even if the author intended none. We can read the Upanishads, Genesis, Dionysius the Areopagite, and the neurotheological suppositions of Andrew Newberg just as we read Blake or Borges or Emily Dickinson.

Viewed ironically, even the most fantastical ghost stories, including the old stories of religion, can serve a purpose. Whether they postulate superintelligent clouds of gas, insectoid aliens in hyperspace, a demiurge with multiple-personality disorder, or a loving God who for inscrutable reasons makes us suffer, well-told ghost stories can remind us of the unfathomable mystery at the heart of things. Our creation myths and eschatologies, our imaginings of ultimate beginnings and ends, can also help us discover our deepest fears and desires. But even the most sophisticated theologies and theories should never be mistaken for ultimate truth. What Voltaire said centuries ago still holds, and will always hold: "It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God defined the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one."

ther than art, is there any method particularly suited to evoking mystical awe without the side effects that so often attend it? In Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, first published in 1979, Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar suggested that the chief benefit of psychedelics is "enriching the wonder of normality" -- that is, enhancing our appreciation of ordinary consciousness and ordinary life. That is the spiritual value cited most often by advocates of psychedelics. But those compounds can have the opposite effect. This world may seem drab in comparison to the bizarre virtual realms into which LSD or DMT propel us. Instead of opening our eyes to the miraculousness of everyday reality and consciousness, psychedelics can blind us.

All mystical technologies that induce powerful altered states pose this risk. One mystical expert who has reached this conclusion is Jean Houston. A pioneer of the human-potential movement, she works as a kind of spiritual psychotherapist, usually for large groups rather than individuals. She seeks to rejuvenate her clients' psyches through dance, song, chanting, guided imagery, and role-playing, often with a mythological dimension. She and her husband, the anthropologist Robert Masters, proclaimed in 1966 that investigations of LSD and similar drugs could help human consciousness expand "beyond its present limitations and on towards capacities not yet realized and perhaps undreamed of."

Houston subsequently became quite critical of the via psychedelica. "l am by nature not pro-drug," she told me. Timothy Leary was one of the most charming people she had ever met -- and one of the most irresponsible. Too many people lured onto the psychedelic path by this Pied Piper suffered breakdowns and ended up in mental hospitals, Houston said. "If I were to take the American pragmatic tradition and say, 'By their fruits ye shall know them,' then I'd have to say I haven't seen too much evidence" that psychedelics promote a healthy spirituality. "Some might say it is a shortcut to reality. But the fact is, it doesn't seem to sustain that reality."

Houston's disillusionment with psychedelics led her to seek safer means of self-transcendence. In the early 1970s, she and Masters devised what they called the altered states of consciousness induction device, or ASCID. It consisted of a suspension harness in which blindfolded subjects could spin around in three dimensions. The contraption worked so well that Houston and Masters discontinued its use. "People would get addicted to it and even refuse to explore their inner states without first taking a ride," Houston recalled. The experience reinforced her suspicion that any spiritual practice or path -- particularly those emphasizing altered states -- can become an end in itself, which leads us away from reality rather than toward it.

Anything that helps you see --- really see --- the wondrousness of the world serves a mystical purpose. According to Zen legend, when a visitor asked the 15th-century master Ikkyu to write down a maxim of "the highest wisdom," Ikkyu wrote one word: "Attention." Irritated, the visitor asked, "Is that all?" This time, Ikkyu wrote two words: "Attention. Attention." Fortunately, life itself is so wildly weird and improbable that sooner or later it is bound to get our attention. And if life doesn't grab our attention, death will. Whenever death intrudes upon our lives, we feel the chill of the deep space in which we are suspended.

Spiritual seekers have employed mementos mori, like a human skull, to keep themselves mindful of death. An extreme version of this technique, used in certain Buddhist sects, involves sitting next to or on top of a rotting corpse. It seems that this practice may merely desensitize you to death rather than sensitize you to life. Moreover, dwelling on death, the abyss, nothingness, may convince you that it is the only abiding reality, and that all finite, time-bound phenomena, including our mortal selves, are ephemeral and hence, in some sense, unreal. To be enlightened, Ken Wilber once wrote, is "to snap out of the movie of life." This is perhaps the greatest danger posed by mysticism -- that you will be left with a permanent case of derealization and depersonalization.

If you are lucky, your glimpse of the abyss will make this life seem more real, not less. You will feel what Albert Hofmann -- the chemist who, in 1943, discovered the psychotropic properties of LSD -- felt after emerging from the psilocybin trip in which he had found himself all alone in a ghost town inside the earth. When he returned from this hellish solitude, back to the world and his dear friends, he felt "reborn," and he was overcome with gratitude and joy at the "wonderful life we have here."

This is by far the greatest gift that mystical experiences can bestow on us: to see -- really see -- all that is right with the world. Just as believers in a beneficent deity should be haunted by the problem of natural evil, so gnostics, atheists, pessimists, and nihilists should be haunted by the problem of friendship, love, beauty, truth, humor, compassion, fun. Never forget the problem of fun.

John Horgan writes about science. This article is adapted from his book Rational Mysticism: Dispatches From the Border Between Science and Spirituality, to be published in January by Houghton Mifflin. Copyright © 2003 by John Horgan.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your post!

So why insert dragons on the unexplored portions of the map?

Where you see a locked door marked dragons I see a door marked mysteries. Sadly, our difference in worldview cannot be reconciled:

Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind

There are two prominent construals of `material'. First, according to many philosophers, something is material if and only if it is spatial, extended in space. One might thus propose that what it means to say that something is material is that it is extended in space. This construal of `material' is inspired by Descartes's influential characterization of material bodies, in Meditation II. Given this construal, materialism is just the view that everything that exists is extended in space, that nothing nonspatial exists. This portrayal of materialism is attractively simple, but may be unilluminating.

The problem is that the relevant notion of spatial extension may depend on the very notion of material in need of elucidation. If there is such dependence, conceptual circularity hampers the proposed characterization of materialism. The main worry here is that the notion of spatial extension is actually the notion of something's being extended in physical space, or the notion of something's being physically extended. It seems conceivable that something (perhaps a purely spiritual being) has temporal extension, in virtue of extending over time, even though that thing lacks extension in physical space. It does not seem self-contradictory, in other words, to hold that something is temporal (or, temporally extended) but is not a body. If this is so, the proposed characterization of materialism should be qualified to talk of physical space or physical extension. In that case, however, the threat of conceptual circularity is transparent. Even if there is no strict circularity here, the pertinent notion of spatial extension may be too closely related to the notion of material to offer genuine clarification. At a minimum, we need a precise explanation of spatial extension, if talk of such extension aims to elucidate talk of what is material. Perhaps a notion of spatial extension is crucial to an elucidation of materialism, but further explanation, without conceptual circularity, will then be needed. (Cf. Chomsky 1988.)

If there is indeed a coherently conceivable distinction between minds and material bodies, we must reject the view that materialism, understood as entailing mind-body identity, is conceptually, or analytically, true—that is, true just in virtue of the meanings of `mind' and `body'. Given such a coherently conceivable distinction, we can also challenge any version of materialism implying that psychological concepts (for example, the concepts of belief and sensory pain) are defined in terms of the ordinary physical causes of belief states and pain states. (Such materialism has been proposed by D. M. Armstrong 1977, and David Lewis 1966.) If `pain' is defined in terms of the ordinary bodily causes of pain, then it will not be coherently conceivable that there is pain without bodies. The concept of pain will then depend for its semantic significance on the concept of a bodily cause.

Materialists do not share a uniform view about the nature of psychological properties, such as the properties of being a belief, being a desire, and being a sensory experience. In particular, they do not all hold that every psychological property is equivalent or identical to a conjunction of physical properties. Only proponents of reductive materialism hold the latter view, and they are a small minority among contemporary materialists. Proponents of nonreductive materialism reject the latter view, and affirm that psychological properties can be exemplified even in an immaterial world. Such nonreductive materialists include functionalists about the mind, who hold that psychological properties differ from material properties in virtue of the special causal or functional roles of the former. Functionalists differ from behaviorists in acknowledging the psychological relevance of causal relations among not only stimuli and behavior but internal states as well. A third prominent version of materialism, eliminative materialism, recommends that we eliminate most, if not all, everyday psychological discourse, on the ground that it rests on seriously misguided assumptions about human psychology—assumptions that will disappear with the advance of science.

[beckett]

Cohen: I have torn everyone who reached out to me

cornelis: Very moving and apropos.

Apropos? Have you been talking to any of my old girlfriends, cornelis?

[js1138]

My most frequent recurring dream is of needing to take a final exam, but can't find the room because I haven't attended any classes. This situation, of course is completely divorced from reality.

[js1138]

I see the open door called mysteries and people standing outside saying, you can't go in there. The mysteries I refer to are the unsolved mysteries of the material world.

As VR has pointed out, nearly all of the progress in understanding the mind has come from the study of the material processes of the brain. It is quite obvious from observing people with brain injuries, that bits of the mind can be eliminated by damage to the brain.

I had an uncle who lived 25 years with the kind of amnesia featured in the movie "Memento". Every day he woke up was, to him, the day after his injury. He did learn new habits that made him managable, but he never formed a new permanant conscious memory of anything that happened after his injury.

When someone asserts that materialism can't explain something, my response is our understanding is deficient, not material. I will retract this belief just as soon as the study of the material world ceases to be fruitful. Asserting that materialism can't enter the room of mysteries simply shuts down the most productive form of inquiry ever invented.

[VadeRetro]

My most frequent recurring dream is of needing to take a final exam, but can't find the room because I haven't attended any classes. This situation, of course is completely divorced from reality.

Virtually everyone in my family has had that dream, which is also featured in the 1980s spy spoof Top Secret. It seems to be pretty popular.

I have a favorite theme that not too many others share. I get stuck driving down a road that leads inevitably--no exits--to some dazzlingly high bridge or overpass. I gun the engine and go for it but the higher I get, the nearer to vertical the road gets. I usually wake up in a panic before I get over. Sometimes I start to fall, or stop in the road and scream my refusal to go any further as horns begin honking behind me.

[cornelis]

. . . materialism can't enter the room of mysteries

Czeslaw Milosz: "Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material."

[js1138]

You probably hated this movie

[js1138]

I don't see any justification for the word "mere". For those who think matter is limited in scope or complexity, I would say, come back when it is fully explained.

[cornelis]

That verdict is still out, but some verdicts have come in. One would have to shut and bolt a lot of doors to insist that the best way to study the history of mankind is in the same way as we study the history of material configurations

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your post!

what is the evidence that studies of brain function are headed for a brick wall?

On the materialist end we have Francis Crick (The Astonishing Hypothesis : The Scientific Search for the Soul) and on the physicalist end we have Roger Penrose (Emporer’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind).

Critics find both hypotheses lacking for different reasons. To thoroughly explore the subject and stay up-to-date, I strongly recommend PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness.

From that site, Webster’s review of Crick’s book:

Richard Gregory, a leading visual psychologist, has argued that Crick is outside of his own field here and could be regarded as a "loose cannon" in the field of visual consciousness, and yet Crick's book is both informative and well written. Crick's main goal is to find a neural mechanism that will explain consciousness, particularly in the context of visual awareness...

Crick cheerfully admits that the evidence is not strong for his proposal, but claims that it might provide new guidelines for future research.

From the same site, Penrose’s response to critics

Questions to do with "the overlap of states" referred to by Klein do not really resolve the measurement issue, and von Neumann's point about the difficulty of locating exactly where (or when) R takes place just emphasizes the subtlety of the R phenomenon. However Klein is completely right in pointing to the biological difficulties involved in maintaining quantum coherence within microtubules and, more seriously, in allowing this coherence to "leap the synaptic barrier". To see how this might be achieved is a fundamental problem for the type of scheme that I (in conjunction with Stuart Hameroff) have been proposing. Clearly more understanding is needed. (See Section 14 below, for a tentative suggestion in relation to this.) On one of the reviews of Crick’s work which I read but can't seem to find again, it was noted that to truly explore brain functions - researchers would need to remove or nullify specific areas of the brain and see what happens, kind of like the work being done with knock-out genes and mice. Nobody really expects society to going along with that kind of research on human subjects.

[Alamo-Girl]

LOL! This reply was intended for your post 5663 over here! Duh...

Sorry about that! Oh well, at least it is also related to this discussion...

[Alamo-Girl]

Ok, back to your post 344 here… Jeepers!

I see the open door called mysteries and people standing outside saying, you can't go in there.

Truth is not threatened by inquiry; therefore resistance to inquiry is prima facie cause for such inquiry. Stonewalling only increases my sense of urgency.

As VR has pointed out, nearly all of the progress in understanding the mind has come from the study of the material processes of the brain.

I disagree and again point to PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness. IMHO, some of the best ideas are coming from the physics corner – especially Roger Penrose. And that website covers the whole field!

My two cents...

I strongly suspect the brain acts like a transceiver for our non-temporal being, what we normally call consciousness. If the transceiver is damaged, it will not process signals correctly. IOW, it would act the same way as if the entire process were temporal, i.e. the physical brain. I suggest it would be misleading to ignore the transceiver possibility.

We may be able to detect whether our brain is a transceiver. Some researchers already hypothesize this is what underlies NDEs. Also, unrelated work on higher dimensional dynamics or quantum mechanics may open new leads, possibly a means to detect non-spacial or non-temporal messaging.

[LogicWings]

It is a serious mistake to think that a metaphor is an optional thing which poets and orators may put into their work as a decoration and plain speakers can do without.

One of the thing that pains me greatly about these discussions is the mischaracterization of what I said into what I did not say. My statement comes from an English Lit professor acquaintance who said to me once, 'Everything you say is sheer poetry.' To which I replied, 'What do you mean?' and he said, "you say whatever you want to."

I reality, everything we say is metaphor, that is how our minds work. Poetry is not metaphor, it is art. But like art, it doesn't always represent reality. That is what I was saying. Much of many here have to say has no 'real meaning' but is as fantasical as a Unicorn. (my favorite metapor)

The truth is that if we are going to talk at all about things which are not perceived by the senses, we are forced to use language metaphorically.

The truth is if you are going to talk about things that are not ultimately derived from perception by the senses you are talking about Unicorns.

Books on psychology or economics or politics are as continuously metaphorical as books of poetry or devotion. There is no other way of talking, as every philologist is aware. . . . We can make our speech duller; we cannot make it more literal . . .

All symbols are ultimately metaphors, so you have said nothing. You have also used absolute terms 'no other way' 'cannot' that you cannot support. Can't prove these negatives and one 'can' talk in other ways and make it more literal, and be less dull than most of the posers here.

[LogicWings]

The most fruitful work in the contemporary direction of seeing red roses will be the active fancy [ability] against language. Its method will grow out of biology and psychology through poetic use of language itself. Its achievement will be marked by a reduction of language to nature.

There are so many contra-dictions in this post (against language - poetic use of language itself) I don't know where, or care, where to begin. If you cannot see where what you have said speaks against itself, I am not willing to waste the time to enlighten you, since you will just deny it anyway. Logic is a terrible thing to waste.

[betty boop]

I would have to argue that until we can understand what we can see, we should refrain from inventing things and processes that we can't see. In short, we should not put dragons on the map in places we haven't explored.

I’m not sure I’m following you here, js1138. Certainly consciousness and will are not inventions of mine. And I think it’s abundantly clear that they are things that exist, though they cannot be seen – that is they are real but non-physical. My use of the term “software side” is perhaps unfortunate, because grossly reductionist. I do agree with you that the digital metaphor or model is the wrong model. A better model would recognize that what we are looking for here is the manner in which the immaterial and the material are brought into contact such that they can function together. It has been suggested that, however this occurs, it happens at the level of the neural synapse, in the “in between” of the neurons as distinguished from in the neurons themselves. In other words, the neurons would be mediators of the phenomenon of consciousness, though not its cause.

I really don’t know. Maybe I’ll have a better idea when I read Penrose. Thanks for writing!

[Phaedrus]

On those occasions when I am not a bird on a wire, I am, you guessed it, a drunk in a midnight choir.

You make it seem a very desireable place to be -- with apologies for my redneck sense of humor ... ;-}. I am liking Cohen, too, very much. I will have to go find more. If we as a race, the race of Man, ever lose that sense of humility as expressed by self-effacing humor, we're lost and, as to being lost, we're working on it.

[betty boop]

...we can also challenge any version of materialism implying that psychological concepts (for example, the concepts of belief and sensory pain) are defined in terms of the ordinary physical causes of belief states and pain states.... If `pain' is defined in terms of the ordinary bodily causes of pain, then it will not be coherently conceivable that there is pain without bodies. The concept of pain will then depend for its semantic significance on the concept of a bodily cause.

But it seems that this concept of pain -- as dependent on bodily causation -- will not be able to understand or explain what might be called psychic pain -- e.g., guilt, regret, the anguish of losing a loved one, anxiety, loneliness.... These kinds of pain are real, too, though they do not appear to have a bodily cause. But they are so real, in fact, that they can themselves be the causes of bodily effects.

[cornelis]

The most fruitful work in the contemporary direction of seeing green roses will be the active fancy [ability] against language. Its method will grow out of biology and psychology through poetic use of language itself. Its achievement will be marked by a reduction of language to nature.

While your concern wanes, there are very many others who spend a lot of their energy and concern to persuade human persons that language is just a material configuration. And they do it with metaphors.

[cornelis]

The Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man is very well-written and a succinct picture of a willful imagination against the burden of a finite mind. It is often read in collegiate courses.

[cornelis]

Here's a nice passage from Ortega's "Preface to the Germans" in Phenomenology and Art

I realize there are those who believe they have shown that truth does not exist, that what goes by the name is only a product of the individual or "collective" will. Nietzsche felt this way, if I remember correctly: "das Leben will Taüschung, es lebt Taüschung" (life requires fiction, lives on fiction). As for this opinion, I can respect it without sharing it. For I believe that only now have we finally managed to see clearly how truth is an essential ingredient in man's makeup. Although it seems incredible, until now it had remianed unexplained why man must seek truth. Truth seemed an obsession, a luxurious, almost ornamental concern, a game or a pointless curiosity, perhaps an added convenience, or, as Aristotle thought, the expression of a natural tendency to exercise certain faculties. All these views presuppose that man can, after all, live without truth. His relation to truth was therefore extrinsic and fortuitous. This is why the Socratic expression that . . ."man cannot sustain a life where there is no longing for truth" had always seemed mere words. But now we understand to what extent it is literally so. Life without truth is unlivable. Truth exists in such a way as to be man's reciprocal. Without man there is no truth, but by the same token without truth man is not man. He can be defined as the being who has an absolute need for truth and conversely, the only thing that man needs absolutely, his only unconditioinal need, is truth. All other needs, even food , are necessary on condition that there also be truth, that is, that it make sense to live. Zoologically speaking, then, one would have to classify man as a Wahrheitsfresser (a veridivore) and not a carnivore.