I just read an interesting article on Nicola Tesla, the great inventor who gave us the "electrical age" (and, according to some, many other technological marvels that were suppressed by sinister forces). I'm not competent to agree or disagree with those who believe the Federal Government managed to gain exclusive control over Tesla-inspired technologies that have been withheld from the rest of us, but I was struck by the fact that this extraordinary man, so very far ahead of his time in his vision of wireless communications, among many other things, died penniless. The very phrase "ahead of his time" does not seem to pay him adequate tribute; "ahead of his dispensation," a choice of words Latter-Day Saints will appreciate, seems closer to the mark.
And Tesla was not the only man who was "ahead of his dispensation," not by a long shot. Roger Bacon, John Duns Scotus, Thomas Jefferson (and a number of other Founding Fathers), and Charles Sanders Peirce all merit such a characterization. So does the founding "Mormon" prophet Joseph Smith.
There are, after all, geniuses aplenty for whom the world is essentially ready and on whom are showered all the plaudits and honors the world can give. Such were the great "Renaissance men" - Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and their ilk -- and the great physicists -- Planck, Einstein, Dirac, Pauli, and all the rest -- of the 20th Century. So too were many of the great inventors -- Bell, Edison, and Ford -- and the great entrepreneurs -- Sam Walton, Ray Kroc, Steve Jobs, and so on -- who gave the consuming masses things they wanted. Such are the Nobel Laureates, the glitterati, and the overachieving politicians of every age: men and women doing not only what they were born to do but, still more importantly, what their times demanded. Most of these died as they lived, reaping graveside encomia and commemorated in print and song.
But there have been others who gave every appearance of having been born out of time. While some of us know their names, they were less appreciated than admired by their contemporaries. Bacon, one of the first modern scientific minds, lived in the 13th Century, hundreds of years before Newton, Copernicus, Pascal, and the rest of the early modern parade of savants who ushered in the scientific age. Though a devout Franciscan and greatly admired for his learning, he was apparently persecuted for his precocity, and suffered arrest and imprisonment in his later years. Duns Scotus was he who gave the "Dunce cap" its name, yet in his time (he was a rough contemporary of Bacon) was nicknamed "Doctor Subtilis," "the subtle doctor," for his extraordinarily penetrating philosophical insights. After his death, his ideas were brushed aside by followers of William of Occam (he of "Occam's Razor," less a logical than a methodological principle), and the European academy was "cleansed" of his realist heterodoxies.
Thomas Jefferson, the most brilliant and idealistic of all the Founding Fathers, needs no introduction to most Americans; but how many are aware that he died deep in debt, and that most of his property had to be sold off to satisfy his creditors?
Charles Sanders Peirce, the greatest mind ever to be nurtured on American soil, never succeeded in finding a professorial post, although he had substantial connections at the likes of Harvard and Johns Hopkins. So prolific was he as a thinker that the Peirce Edition Project at the University of Indiana has published less than one third of his entire oeuvre, much of which has yet to be sorted and annotated -- yet Peirce never wrote a single book. He died in relative obscurity and virtually penniless in his modest house in northeastern Pennsylvania almost 100 years ago, but it was decades before "mainstream" scholarship discovered him.
Tesla, too, died penniless, with none of the popular recognition of celebrity inventor Edison.
As for Joseph Smith, he not only died deep in debt, he met his end at the hands (or rather, the muzzles) of a lynch-mob, the culminating episode -- when he "sealed his testimony with his own blood" -- of a life that included numerous lynchings, beatings, frivolous lawsuits, and profound betrayals by erstwhile friends and boon companions. Many of the things he taught continue to cause profound discomfort and even embarassment among some modern Latter-Day Saints, who are prone to dismiss some of his musings as products of a "magical world-view" (whatever that might mean!) typical of the early 19th Century American frontier.
To be ahead of one's time is one thing, but to be ahead of one's dispensation is quite another. I happen to believe that Charles Sanders Peirce will be to the science of a dispensation not yet fully gestated, let alone birthed, what Aristotle and Pythagoras are to ours. His ideas now are much in vogue, but only selectively; our age is not ready for post-Cartesian reasoning, it would seem.
In a similar vein, the Founding Fathers, however unwittingly, bequeathed on their posterity the perfect system of Terrestrial (in the LDS sense of the term!) government; small wonder that succeeding generations, in a Telestial age, have managed to apostatize almost completely from the principles they articulated and the documents they produced. No one of any education, not even the rankest of the so-called "liberals," could straight-facedly claim that we enjoy limited Constitutional government anymore, yet very few, aside from a vociferous ten percent or so of "right-wing extremists," seem to mind in the least. And why is this so? Because the Constitution and the American government in their pristine forms (bereft of a few anachronisms, like chattel slavery) are inadequate to the needs of the venal majority, who militantly uphold the workings of Telestial government: government by compulsion.
There are, of course, a few who embrace the vision of the Founding Fathers, and, with the exception of Ron Paul, they are marginalized, reviled, ignored, caricatured, slandered, and systematically excluded from the machinations of the wealthy, powerful, and connected. They are not, and never will be (so long as the present order persists) the Establishment.
So it is too in the academy, where Peirce and his epigones are acknowledged but infrequently recognized. The discipline founded by Peirce, semiotics (to which we have made frequent allusion in this blog) is nowhere in North America offered as an academic major or subject for a postgraduate degree. You cannot get a PhD in semiotics, except in a couple of European universities. There are no job openings for a semiotician; most such must camouflage themselves philosophers, sociologists, or (ahem!) linguists. In spite of admirable work on the subject done by people at the University of Indiana and the University of Toronto, there are no departments of semiotics. Few if any courses are taught, at least on this side of the pond, on Peirce.
Nor is this all. We once had, at our own venerable LDS university in Provo, an extraordinary man, Dr. John Robertson, under whom it was my profound privilege to study linguistics years ago. It was Robertson who introduced me to Peirce, but I suspect I am one of his few students who really "got" Peirce, albeit in a superficial, preliminary way. John holds a Harvard PhD but, unlike some of our LDS celebrity intellectuals, has never sought the admiration of the masses of Latter-Day Saints. His insights -- on language, meaning, semiotics, and many other things -- would make fascinating and edifying reading (every whit the equal of anything Nibley ever wrote, I might add), but, unless John somehow ceases to be the private, unassuming person he has always been, they are never likely to be published. John Robertson, like Peirce, is intellectually a man ahead of his dispensation.
It's hard to see why the Teslas, the Bacons, the Jeffersons, and the Peirces were ordained to traverse this mortal coil when they did, so far before ages that could truly appreciate them. Perhaps what we LDS call the "Elias" principle -- the need for a spiritual forerunner or enunciator, like John the Baptist -- is operative also in the secular world.
As for Joseph Smith, his enormous revelatory output has "withstood the test of time," as we are apt to say. But because he was a man born so far before his dispensation (despite standing at the spiritual head of ours), it will also -- far more importantly -- withstand the test of eternity.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Monday, August 20, 2012
Musings on Section 93
Doctrine and Covenants 93:23: “And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come.” This might seem to some a curious definition, since most of us, if asked to define “truth,” would probably say something like, “things as they really are, etc.” The inclusion of the word “knowledge” is key, because it signifies that truth – the “sum of existence” – is in fact not “stuff” per se, but “stuff as we know it.” “But,” says the materialist-nominalist, “'stuff' is what exists, independent of ourselves and whatever we may think about it. It is not subordinate to human knowledge or perception!” The Lord, however, knows better; the revealed Gospel teaches what Peirce, apparently alone among modern secular philosophers, was able to discern, namely, that “there can be no reality which has not the life of a symbol.”
A symbol or representamen, properly understood, is something (the symbol itself) that stands for some other thing (its object) by means of a second symbol triggered in some cognizing intelligence (the interpretant [symbol]). The process by which a symbol triggers its interpretant is the primordial form of action at a distance, that is to say, non-efficient causation. It will easily be comprehended that all action, at some ultimate level, depends on this process. Imagine, if you will, that the four fundamental forces in the physical universe are mediated – as the physicists claim – by the exchange of vector particles. But even at this fundamental level, we still must suppose a non-material medium in which these particles move, and some kind of non-material action at a distance to explain their movement. And this action at a distance is akin to that mysterious action (semiosis) that takes place with the production of symbols.
Not only that, no object can be cognized except in terms of qualities of one sort or another. But all such cognition is representation and involves the use of symbols. And symbols, as we have seen, beget more symbols, which tend always towards the realization of some new fact. For example, if I, walking down a street, hear an angry barking behind me, I will interpret those sounds and form a cognition that may lead to my turning around to see if there is a dog pursuing me, or to my simply running for it. No matter what choices I make, I cannot help the fact that the sounding of barking will trigger in me a series of cognitions (which are mental symbols) and consequent actions, even if those actions are merely thoughts. This is a pretty crude example, but it serves to illustrate why Peirce would make the following claim (ignored, alas, even by some semioticians, who fail to fully grasp the all-inclusiveness of symbols):
“That the object has at all a character can only consist in a representation that it has so, a representation having power to live down all opposition.... The very entelechy of being lies in being representable. A sign cannot even be false without being a sign and so far as it is a sign it must be true. A symbol is an embryonic reality endowed with power of growth into the very truth, the very entelechy of reality.”
Thus our scripture appears to mean something like this: truth is symbolic (which includes, but is not confined to, cognitive) representation of all things, past, present, and future. And inasmuch as all reality has life only qua symbols, we cannot cognize or represent reality except as something which is both cognizable and representable. This is why truth is knowledge.
Doctrine and Covenants 93: 29: “....Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.” Light is elsewhere (Section 88) defined as “the law by which all things are governed.” This definition has reference to the particular sort of light that “proceeds forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space.” As a general notion, we may say that light is (eternal) law. But what is law, if not a manifestation of Thirdness, the third (and most generally overlooked) of the three grand general phenomena of which all reality is constituted. In the physical universe, we see Thirdness manifest as physical laws, whereas in the mental universe (which our science of Time erroneously prescinds from the physical), it is manifest as habit, motive, and the like. In essence, Thirdness is akin to final causation. In any case, we might read our definition of intelligence as “the law/mental habit associated with truth,” or, even more precisely, per Peirce, “the Thirdness of truth.”
“Intelligence” in LDS scripture is often roughly synonymous with “consciousness,” that ultimate spark of being that permits cognition, and which is characteristic of sentient life. Abraham was shown in vision “the intelligences that were organized before the world was” (NB: not “created”!), as well as the hierarchy of understanding and enlightenment among them. But he might have referred instead to the “Thirdnesses of truth that were organized before the world was.” These, we suppose, were our primordial selves; by “organized,” perhaps Abraham has reference to the raising of them from mere primal awareness to clothe them with personalities and other individuating attributes. Regardless, it is profitable to ask what these “intelligences” were in the beginning, and by what principle they existed at all. We have already seen that they were not created or made, and that such is impossible, even for God. Every Self (and therefore every discrete intelligence) is a Symbol, and withal one with the full-fledged capability of representing itself, not merely to some external Other, but to itself as an Other. It is in this that the so-called “stream of consciousness” consists – the present Self representing itself to the past Self for the sake of the future Self. This process, which we might style “autosemiosis,” actually confers on the Self a composite nature; it gives the so-called individual a double identity. A Self may be regarded as the most fully-reified type of Symbol, because, like all symbols (and no other category of existent thing), it possesses the power of self-replication (all symbols, recall, produce interpretant symbols, which are replicas, albeit imperfect ones). But a Self-symbol is capable of doing it purposefully. The most enlightened intelligences/Selves are capable of the most extended, refined, and complex purposeful representation/action. So it would seem that, in some mysterious way, God took certain eternal intelligences and endued them with greater capacity to act purposefully, which capacity may have been bound up with giving them finite contours in the form of spiritual bodies.
Before this took place, they (we!) were primordial intelligences – symbols capable of self-representation. And they existed in the first place because truth needs both to represent and to be represented; otherwise, growth, and (as we shall see below), existence in any form is impossible.
The ancient Hebrews must have understood this principle – I mean the principle that a Self is not a static entity but a symbol constantly representing itself to itself and to some Other. This is why the Savior characterized himself, not as “the great I,” but as “the great I Am,” those two words -- "I Am" -- signifying the primordial act of self-representation.
Many years ago I passed out in a doctor’s office. It was not like falling asleep; it was like being extinguished. When the first glimmerings of consciousness returned, my initial impression was that I was an existent being, but who, what, or where I could not tell. From that followed a rapid-fire chain of inferences culminating in the memory of my name and circumstances, including, finally, the embarassing realization of lying supine on the floor of the doctor's office. We all, I suppose, had something similar happen sometime in the remote past when we became self-aware, or, in other words, when we had perceived enough about the external Other to frame a hypothesis of a Self in which those perceptions and sensations could inhere. And Christ, who was Jehovah, the Firstborn, was the first and greatest “I Am,” the Self-symbol to which all other Self-symbols must be subordinate.
All of this might smack of mystical gibberish, because so few of us learn to reason about symbols, in spite of the fact that symbols are such an essential part of who and what we are. This, thanks to the labors of Peirce building on foundations laid by Scotus, is apodictic reasoning of a different sort than has been in vogue since the age of Descartes (and, Peirce would say, of William of Occam). It cannot be apprehended all at once, this logic of signs (which Peirce called the logic of relatives), but has to grow inside. I happen to think it is worth sharing with the Saints, as inadequate as my understanding of such matters is, because I believe that it is the best way to arrive at an understanding of such doctrines as are to be found in Section 93 (which are typically glozed over in our Sunday School classes). But the Lord would not have instructed his servants to reveal such things if he did not intend for us to try to comprehend them. After all, we must come to know God, and that means, among other things, comprehending his attributes, among which light, intelligence, and truth figure very prominently.
Doctrine and Covenants 93: 30: “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence.” This verse is a death knell for the dogma of determinism that has informed science since the Greeks first postulated atoms. The pre-eminence of Laplace's Demon, in its many guises, has gone essentially unchallenged among men of science until the late 20th Century (and even the philosophers, in the main, embraced the notion that matter behaves ultimately as deterministic and time-neutral cosmic machinery, the Universe-as-Automaton). Lately, however, certain enlightened souls, like the late Prigogine, have noticed that matter, in real-life, complex, far-from equilibrium contexts (so-called "dissipative structures"), behaves probabilistically, and that such behavior is irreducible, even in theory, to the crude determinism of trajectories (and, more recently, quantum waves) of classical physics. To insist upon determinism is to deny the elements their agency and, in the end, their very existence. As Vladimir Nabokov put it, "What can be controlled is never completely real; what is real can never be completely controlled."
Truth and intelligence(s) are symbols; as such they have the power of representation, which is action (Peirce’s “entelechy of being”). More than this, they MUST represent, and that eternally, inasmuch as one symbol begets another ad infinitum.
This, then, is existence: to act as a symbol, and especially, to represent oneself to some Other. And, we would venture to add, there is no other form of being than this (existence), since even pure Nothingness cannot be conceived of; Nothingness, in affording space for representation, as Peirce observed, is therefore itself a species of symbol, albeit a wholly vague one. This is perhaps why the Spirit whispered to the hymnist that “no man hath seen pure space.” Absolute, asemiotic nothingness is impossible. The existent universe is thus pervaded with light (i.e., law, or Thirdness) and populated with an infinity of intelligences, not all of which possess the same degree of sentience, but all of which are essentially semiotic progressions working out their respective lives without end.
A symbol or representamen, properly understood, is something (the symbol itself) that stands for some other thing (its object) by means of a second symbol triggered in some cognizing intelligence (the interpretant [symbol]). The process by which a symbol triggers its interpretant is the primordial form of action at a distance, that is to say, non-efficient causation. It will easily be comprehended that all action, at some ultimate level, depends on this process. Imagine, if you will, that the four fundamental forces in the physical universe are mediated – as the physicists claim – by the exchange of vector particles. But even at this fundamental level, we still must suppose a non-material medium in which these particles move, and some kind of non-material action at a distance to explain their movement. And this action at a distance is akin to that mysterious action (semiosis) that takes place with the production of symbols.
Not only that, no object can be cognized except in terms of qualities of one sort or another. But all such cognition is representation and involves the use of symbols. And symbols, as we have seen, beget more symbols, which tend always towards the realization of some new fact. For example, if I, walking down a street, hear an angry barking behind me, I will interpret those sounds and form a cognition that may lead to my turning around to see if there is a dog pursuing me, or to my simply running for it. No matter what choices I make, I cannot help the fact that the sounding of barking will trigger in me a series of cognitions (which are mental symbols) and consequent actions, even if those actions are merely thoughts. This is a pretty crude example, but it serves to illustrate why Peirce would make the following claim (ignored, alas, even by some semioticians, who fail to fully grasp the all-inclusiveness of symbols):
“That the object has at all a character can only consist in a representation that it has so, a representation having power to live down all opposition.... The very entelechy of being lies in being representable. A sign cannot even be false without being a sign and so far as it is a sign it must be true. A symbol is an embryonic reality endowed with power of growth into the very truth, the very entelechy of reality.”
Thus our scripture appears to mean something like this: truth is symbolic (which includes, but is not confined to, cognitive) representation of all things, past, present, and future. And inasmuch as all reality has life only qua symbols, we cannot cognize or represent reality except as something which is both cognizable and representable. This is why truth is knowledge.
Doctrine and Covenants 93: 29: “....Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.” Light is elsewhere (Section 88) defined as “the law by which all things are governed.” This definition has reference to the particular sort of light that “proceeds forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space.” As a general notion, we may say that light is (eternal) law. But what is law, if not a manifestation of Thirdness, the third (and most generally overlooked) of the three grand general phenomena of which all reality is constituted. In the physical universe, we see Thirdness manifest as physical laws, whereas in the mental universe (which our science of Time erroneously prescinds from the physical), it is manifest as habit, motive, and the like. In essence, Thirdness is akin to final causation. In any case, we might read our definition of intelligence as “the law/mental habit associated with truth,” or, even more precisely, per Peirce, “the Thirdness of truth.”
“Intelligence” in LDS scripture is often roughly synonymous with “consciousness,” that ultimate spark of being that permits cognition, and which is characteristic of sentient life. Abraham was shown in vision “the intelligences that were organized before the world was” (NB: not “created”!), as well as the hierarchy of understanding and enlightenment among them. But he might have referred instead to the “Thirdnesses of truth that were organized before the world was.” These, we suppose, were our primordial selves; by “organized,” perhaps Abraham has reference to the raising of them from mere primal awareness to clothe them with personalities and other individuating attributes. Regardless, it is profitable to ask what these “intelligences” were in the beginning, and by what principle they existed at all. We have already seen that they were not created or made, and that such is impossible, even for God. Every Self (and therefore every discrete intelligence) is a Symbol, and withal one with the full-fledged capability of representing itself, not merely to some external Other, but to itself as an Other. It is in this that the so-called “stream of consciousness” consists – the present Self representing itself to the past Self for the sake of the future Self. This process, which we might style “autosemiosis,” actually confers on the Self a composite nature; it gives the so-called individual a double identity. A Self may be regarded as the most fully-reified type of Symbol, because, like all symbols (and no other category of existent thing), it possesses the power of self-replication (all symbols, recall, produce interpretant symbols, which are replicas, albeit imperfect ones). But a Self-symbol is capable of doing it purposefully. The most enlightened intelligences/Selves are capable of the most extended, refined, and complex purposeful representation/action. So it would seem that, in some mysterious way, God took certain eternal intelligences and endued them with greater capacity to act purposefully, which capacity may have been bound up with giving them finite contours in the form of spiritual bodies.
Before this took place, they (we!) were primordial intelligences – symbols capable of self-representation. And they existed in the first place because truth needs both to represent and to be represented; otherwise, growth, and (as we shall see below), existence in any form is impossible.
The ancient Hebrews must have understood this principle – I mean the principle that a Self is not a static entity but a symbol constantly representing itself to itself and to some Other. This is why the Savior characterized himself, not as “the great I,” but as “the great I Am,” those two words -- "I Am" -- signifying the primordial act of self-representation.
Many years ago I passed out in a doctor’s office. It was not like falling asleep; it was like being extinguished. When the first glimmerings of consciousness returned, my initial impression was that I was an existent being, but who, what, or where I could not tell. From that followed a rapid-fire chain of inferences culminating in the memory of my name and circumstances, including, finally, the embarassing realization of lying supine on the floor of the doctor's office. We all, I suppose, had something similar happen sometime in the remote past when we became self-aware, or, in other words, when we had perceived enough about the external Other to frame a hypothesis of a Self in which those perceptions and sensations could inhere. And Christ, who was Jehovah, the Firstborn, was the first and greatest “I Am,” the Self-symbol to which all other Self-symbols must be subordinate.
All of this might smack of mystical gibberish, because so few of us learn to reason about symbols, in spite of the fact that symbols are such an essential part of who and what we are. This, thanks to the labors of Peirce building on foundations laid by Scotus, is apodictic reasoning of a different sort than has been in vogue since the age of Descartes (and, Peirce would say, of William of Occam). It cannot be apprehended all at once, this logic of signs (which Peirce called the logic of relatives), but has to grow inside. I happen to think it is worth sharing with the Saints, as inadequate as my understanding of such matters is, because I believe that it is the best way to arrive at an understanding of such doctrines as are to be found in Section 93 (which are typically glozed over in our Sunday School classes). But the Lord would not have instructed his servants to reveal such things if he did not intend for us to try to comprehend them. After all, we must come to know God, and that means, among other things, comprehending his attributes, among which light, intelligence, and truth figure very prominently.
Doctrine and Covenants 93: 30: “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence.” This verse is a death knell for the dogma of determinism that has informed science since the Greeks first postulated atoms. The pre-eminence of Laplace's Demon, in its many guises, has gone essentially unchallenged among men of science until the late 20th Century (and even the philosophers, in the main, embraced the notion that matter behaves ultimately as deterministic and time-neutral cosmic machinery, the Universe-as-Automaton). Lately, however, certain enlightened souls, like the late Prigogine, have noticed that matter, in real-life, complex, far-from equilibrium contexts (so-called "dissipative structures"), behaves probabilistically, and that such behavior is irreducible, even in theory, to the crude determinism of trajectories (and, more recently, quantum waves) of classical physics. To insist upon determinism is to deny the elements their agency and, in the end, their very existence. As Vladimir Nabokov put it, "What can be controlled is never completely real; what is real can never be completely controlled."
Truth and intelligence(s) are symbols; as such they have the power of representation, which is action (Peirce’s “entelechy of being”). More than this, they MUST represent, and that eternally, inasmuch as one symbol begets another ad infinitum.
This, then, is existence: to act as a symbol, and especially, to represent oneself to some Other. And, we would venture to add, there is no other form of being than this (existence), since even pure Nothingness cannot be conceived of; Nothingness, in affording space for representation, as Peirce observed, is therefore itself a species of symbol, albeit a wholly vague one. This is perhaps why the Spirit whispered to the hymnist that “no man hath seen pure space.” Absolute, asemiotic nothingness is impossible. The existent universe is thus pervaded with light (i.e., law, or Thirdness) and populated with an infinity of intelligences, not all of which possess the same degree of sentience, but all of which are essentially semiotic progressions working out their respective lives without end.
Monday, August 13, 2012
Technology
With all of the publicity surrounding the latest NASA lander to arrive on the surface of Mars, America is once again in the thrall of our so-called “best and brightest” – the physicists and engineers who have managed to conjure up yet another high-tech miracle. As an amateur aficionado of both astronomy and physics (and who in bygone undergraduate days came within a few courses of achieving a minor in physics), I confess to being as enamored as the next nerd of the high-resolution images now effusing from Mars’ Gale Crater. The possibility of discovering extraterrestrial life – if not on Mars, then perhaps on one of our solar system’s many quirky moons, like Jupiter’s Europa or Saturn’s Enceladus – is exhilarating to me, while the romance of someday launching interstellar probes and starships is intoxicating stuff. Since boyhood, I’ve been waiting for the staples of 20th Century science fiction to arrive on the scene. Space stations are here, but manned interplanetary travel is not. Video telephoning, aka Skype and its imitators, has come of age, but flying cars have not. Computers, though still lacking the precocity of Hal, are ubiquitous, but domestic robots, alas, are not.
In some regards, technology has failed to live up to its promise of a half century ago. When I was born, passenger jets, flying with the same approximate speed as those that still ply the skies, were already in use. Present-day automobiles, while more fuel-efficient and gizmo-laden, are not extraordinarily different from cars in the 60s. And while medical science has certainly advanced, there have been no dramatic advances in the never-ending drive to stave off, or even reverse, aging.
Regardless, modern man’s love affair with technology has been intensifying for more than four hundred years. Because of technology’s undeniable successes, man, or at any event Western man, has adopted a technocentric worldview, according to which the universe is merely a great Machine, and all phenomena therein its myriad moving parts. This accounts for the primacy of physics, which, from a science with the legitimate aim of describing the physical universe, has morphed into a sort of scientific materialist creed.
The other day, I was watching, as I am wont to do, a youtube video of a certain celebrated physicist lecturing to a Caltech audience on the virtues of the late Richard Feynman, generally regarded as one of the greatest physicists who ever lived. It was Feynman who gave physics the theory of quantum chromodynamics and who contributed so many crucial elements to the piecing together of quantum field theory. Like most physicists, Feynman saw his chosen field as the central human intellectual endeavor and its apostles as the world’s deepest thinkers. According to the Caltech lecturer, who had been a colleague and close friend of Feynman, the two of them once met with and debated a couple of philosophers interested in the problem of consciousness. Of them the man of science spoke with undisguised derision. “They [the philosophers] tried to philosophize when they should have been ‘scientifizing’”, he said, calling their discussion of notions like monism “baloney” and “pretension.” While admitting that he could not understand what the philosophers were talking about, the physicist went on to laud Feynman, who reportedly demolished their feeble arguments with pointed and relentless scientific logic.
This tendency to pooh-pooh all domains of thought not encompassed by a differential equation is by no means confined to Sheldon Cooper-esque self-parodies like this particular scientist; it is endemic in the scientific community. “It is we who have built humanity’s great machines – who have conquered flight, split the atom, and peered into the remotest reaches of interstellar space,” say the men of science. “We possess, therefore, the only True Creed, of which all other thought and belief systems are but pallid derivatives.”
A generation or two ago, it was tough to argue with such men and their Universe-as-Machine dogma. After all, had not the twin triumphs of early 20th Century physicists, quantum mechanics and general relativity, given rise to a cornucopia of technological achievements, from silicon chips to moon landings? Thirty years ago, it seemed, the relentless logic of field theoreticians, combined with ever-more-powerful atom smashers and telescopes, would give us a Grand Unified Theory of physics (and therefore a Theory of Everything, or TOE, as many scientists preferred to style it) within a few more years.
Yet here we are in the second decade of the 21st Century, and the pretentiously-named Theory of Everything is proving as elusive as ever. There is, to be sure, a new generation of physicists laboring away on several popular fronts, still looking for this “Holy Grail of physics.” Many of them, the so-called “string theorists,” have created a theory so elaborately complex and counterintuitive that no one – not even other theoretical physicists – outside their arcane subdiscipline can understand it (or at least, the mathematics of it). String theory is impossible to verify experimentally, since it would require levels of energy impossible to create in any earthly laboratory. String theory, in other words, is pure mysticism – a term “hard scientists” routinely invoke to belittle philosophers, psychologists, and intellects of every stripe who do not necessarily subscribe to the Gospel of Scientific Materialism. The protestations of Ed Witten and other celebrated string theorists to the contrary, even many eminent physicists, like Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow, who hail from the not-long-ago day when cutting-edge physics had an empirical component, do not see the point of string theory.
Meanwhile, in the heady province of cosmology, scientists like the celebrated Stephen Hawking regularly hold court for the media, expostulating on mini-black holes and inflationary universes, which non-physicists are not in a position to challenge because the language of mathematical physics requires years of postgraduate training to master. Again, no one has ever seen a mini black hole, much less witnessed the alleged inflationary phase in the very early universe, and such are unlikely ever to be recreated in the laboratory. Yet the men of science – Hawking, Weinberg, Dawkins, Sagan, Gould, and many others – are routinely accorded the status of universal sages, entitled to make grand pronunciamentos on theology, moral philosophy, and all of the “great questions.” And, not surprisingly, almost to a man, they have concluded that God does not exist, that human beings are highly evolved, soulless meat machines, and that the great religions of the world are but futile graspings of a remnant of superstitious knuckle-draggers (the revered Feynman at least had the humility to admit not being able to see the point of religious faith, while refraining from deriding those who did not share his views).
But the proponents of cutting-edge science, especially theoretical physics, have grown more and more strident even as the science they venerate has managed to emancipate itself from the fetters of empiricism. With such unreasoning dogma it is impossible to argue, but we must note that the arid and often self-referential equations of string theorists and cosmologists smack every bit of the same pretension and exclusionism that thinkers outside the province of hard science so often use to camouflage shoddy reasoning.
Consider what revealed religion (admittedly, dogma of another flavor, but withal one that does not aspire to replace science) has to say about the universe we live in. We are reliably informed (there can be no voice more authoritative than authentic revelation!) that the universe is composed of both matter and spirit, whereof the latter is a refined version of the former. They both are suffused with a mysterious property, intelligence, which permits them to act with a degree of autonomy in the spheres of existence where they are placed. God the Father and Jesus Christ are literal and tangible beings of flesh and bone, of the same species as us, albeit in immortal form. They, and all who enjoy their level of glory (which we call exaltation or eternal life), can span the cosmos in an instant, in mind or in person, without the aid of starships or satellite phones. They can assemble giant fusion reactors – the stars – without the aid of tokamaks. They extol immaterial things like charity, forgiveness, and faith, while condemning hatred, sloth, and the like. It would seem that, contra the scientific materialists, we live in a moral, spiritual, and intellectual universe, where a particular race more advanced than us has no need of the machines we idolize. Despite what von Daniken, Dione and so many others now seem to believe, God does not drive a flying saucer.
Now here are a few things that modern materialistic science, its many extraordinary achievements notwithstanding, is not capable of explaining: consciousness, loyalty, love, semiosis, near-death experiences, final causation, empathy, aesthetics. We have accorded primacy to the sciences that have given us our machines and the other works of our own hands we so fervently worship – the Science of Time. But there must be another science, far beyond our own – the Science of Eternity -- where the entirety of phenomena, including the universe of consciousness, is taken into account, and where the barriers of physical space-time – the speed of light, the strength of gravity, and the tyranny of distance, among others – are apparently irrelevant.
In some regards, technology has failed to live up to its promise of a half century ago. When I was born, passenger jets, flying with the same approximate speed as those that still ply the skies, were already in use. Present-day automobiles, while more fuel-efficient and gizmo-laden, are not extraordinarily different from cars in the 60s. And while medical science has certainly advanced, there have been no dramatic advances in the never-ending drive to stave off, or even reverse, aging.
Regardless, modern man’s love affair with technology has been intensifying for more than four hundred years. Because of technology’s undeniable successes, man, or at any event Western man, has adopted a technocentric worldview, according to which the universe is merely a great Machine, and all phenomena therein its myriad moving parts. This accounts for the primacy of physics, which, from a science with the legitimate aim of describing the physical universe, has morphed into a sort of scientific materialist creed.
The other day, I was watching, as I am wont to do, a youtube video of a certain celebrated physicist lecturing to a Caltech audience on the virtues of the late Richard Feynman, generally regarded as one of the greatest physicists who ever lived. It was Feynman who gave physics the theory of quantum chromodynamics and who contributed so many crucial elements to the piecing together of quantum field theory. Like most physicists, Feynman saw his chosen field as the central human intellectual endeavor and its apostles as the world’s deepest thinkers. According to the Caltech lecturer, who had been a colleague and close friend of Feynman, the two of them once met with and debated a couple of philosophers interested in the problem of consciousness. Of them the man of science spoke with undisguised derision. “They [the philosophers] tried to philosophize when they should have been ‘scientifizing’”, he said, calling their discussion of notions like monism “baloney” and “pretension.” While admitting that he could not understand what the philosophers were talking about, the physicist went on to laud Feynman, who reportedly demolished their feeble arguments with pointed and relentless scientific logic.
This tendency to pooh-pooh all domains of thought not encompassed by a differential equation is by no means confined to Sheldon Cooper-esque self-parodies like this particular scientist; it is endemic in the scientific community. “It is we who have built humanity’s great machines – who have conquered flight, split the atom, and peered into the remotest reaches of interstellar space,” say the men of science. “We possess, therefore, the only True Creed, of which all other thought and belief systems are but pallid derivatives.”
A generation or two ago, it was tough to argue with such men and their Universe-as-Machine dogma. After all, had not the twin triumphs of early 20th Century physicists, quantum mechanics and general relativity, given rise to a cornucopia of technological achievements, from silicon chips to moon landings? Thirty years ago, it seemed, the relentless logic of field theoreticians, combined with ever-more-powerful atom smashers and telescopes, would give us a Grand Unified Theory of physics (and therefore a Theory of Everything, or TOE, as many scientists preferred to style it) within a few more years.
Yet here we are in the second decade of the 21st Century, and the pretentiously-named Theory of Everything is proving as elusive as ever. There is, to be sure, a new generation of physicists laboring away on several popular fronts, still looking for this “Holy Grail of physics.” Many of them, the so-called “string theorists,” have created a theory so elaborately complex and counterintuitive that no one – not even other theoretical physicists – outside their arcane subdiscipline can understand it (or at least, the mathematics of it). String theory is impossible to verify experimentally, since it would require levels of energy impossible to create in any earthly laboratory. String theory, in other words, is pure mysticism – a term “hard scientists” routinely invoke to belittle philosophers, psychologists, and intellects of every stripe who do not necessarily subscribe to the Gospel of Scientific Materialism. The protestations of Ed Witten and other celebrated string theorists to the contrary, even many eminent physicists, like Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow, who hail from the not-long-ago day when cutting-edge physics had an empirical component, do not see the point of string theory.
Meanwhile, in the heady province of cosmology, scientists like the celebrated Stephen Hawking regularly hold court for the media, expostulating on mini-black holes and inflationary universes, which non-physicists are not in a position to challenge because the language of mathematical physics requires years of postgraduate training to master. Again, no one has ever seen a mini black hole, much less witnessed the alleged inflationary phase in the very early universe, and such are unlikely ever to be recreated in the laboratory. Yet the men of science – Hawking, Weinberg, Dawkins, Sagan, Gould, and many others – are routinely accorded the status of universal sages, entitled to make grand pronunciamentos on theology, moral philosophy, and all of the “great questions.” And, not surprisingly, almost to a man, they have concluded that God does not exist, that human beings are highly evolved, soulless meat machines, and that the great religions of the world are but futile graspings of a remnant of superstitious knuckle-draggers (the revered Feynman at least had the humility to admit not being able to see the point of religious faith, while refraining from deriding those who did not share his views).
But the proponents of cutting-edge science, especially theoretical physics, have grown more and more strident even as the science they venerate has managed to emancipate itself from the fetters of empiricism. With such unreasoning dogma it is impossible to argue, but we must note that the arid and often self-referential equations of string theorists and cosmologists smack every bit of the same pretension and exclusionism that thinkers outside the province of hard science so often use to camouflage shoddy reasoning.
Consider what revealed religion (admittedly, dogma of another flavor, but withal one that does not aspire to replace science) has to say about the universe we live in. We are reliably informed (there can be no voice more authoritative than authentic revelation!) that the universe is composed of both matter and spirit, whereof the latter is a refined version of the former. They both are suffused with a mysterious property, intelligence, which permits them to act with a degree of autonomy in the spheres of existence where they are placed. God the Father and Jesus Christ are literal and tangible beings of flesh and bone, of the same species as us, albeit in immortal form. They, and all who enjoy their level of glory (which we call exaltation or eternal life), can span the cosmos in an instant, in mind or in person, without the aid of starships or satellite phones. They can assemble giant fusion reactors – the stars – without the aid of tokamaks. They extol immaterial things like charity, forgiveness, and faith, while condemning hatred, sloth, and the like. It would seem that, contra the scientific materialists, we live in a moral, spiritual, and intellectual universe, where a particular race more advanced than us has no need of the machines we idolize. Despite what von Daniken, Dione and so many others now seem to believe, God does not drive a flying saucer.
Now here are a few things that modern materialistic science, its many extraordinary achievements notwithstanding, is not capable of explaining: consciousness, loyalty, love, semiosis, near-death experiences, final causation, empathy, aesthetics. We have accorded primacy to the sciences that have given us our machines and the other works of our own hands we so fervently worship – the Science of Time. But there must be another science, far beyond our own – the Science of Eternity -- where the entirety of phenomena, including the universe of consciousness, is taken into account, and where the barriers of physical space-time – the speed of light, the strength of gravity, and the tyranny of distance, among others – are apparently irrelevant.
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