This page should be studied in conjunction with that exploring the destitution of the Physicalist/Reductionist Weltbild upon which the entire Scientific/Empirical enterprise is grounded
The depth of the bankruptcy of the present weltanschauung is sobering indeed when squarely faced. The meagerness of its resources in meeting the challenge posed by the ‘Great Questions" assures us that little could be accomplished. There is nothing within the canon of the Lex Naturalis upon which it is based that addresses questions of value, meaning and purpose, nor of consciousness or of the personal agency of which it is a leading attribute. The formalisms upon which physics –and its satellite disciplines- are grounded simply do not address the modalities and categories within which matters of the Agency, subjectivity, explicit consciousness, values and ‘meaning’ in general reside; they address only the extrinsics of matter, form and motion, and cannot –out of their own resources- provide any hint of meaning for themselves or the domain that they underwrite. For that matter, many of the questions are no longer being addressed at all, or are being trivialized out of serious consideration. Regardless, its spokesmen have managed to establish themselves as the ultimate authorities on all matters –in particular those lying totally outside its legitimate domain –and many the answers that they have come up with are perverse and surrealist; and are responsible of much of the alienation that infects -and so disfigures- the times in which we live. Viktor Frankl goes so far as to lay much of the blame for the unspeakable atrocity of the Nazi 'final solution' to the 'Jewish problem' upon the nihilist philosophy of our times:
".....If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case prone.
"…….I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment -or, as the Nazis liked to say, 'of blood and soil'. I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz ....were ultimately prepared, not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers." Viktor Frankl
To hold the human estate in high esteem is taken to be a holdover of outmoded religious beliefs. Notions of the ‘dignity of man’ are greeted with derision; current ‘political rectitude’ commands the acceptance of its antithesis –that of self-abnegation.
"…….It is the height of intellectual perversion to renounce, in the name of scientific objectivity, our position as the highest form of life on earth, and our own advent by process of evolution as the most important problem of evolution" Michael Polanyi
Nothing is spared from its depredations; its secret poison infects magazines, films, art, literature, and the whole of the educational system. Reach any book off the university bookshelf dealing with cognitive psychology or Neo-Darwinism; glance at any such magazine as Scientific American at your local supermarket; or tune into any educational program on these subjects -as put out, for example, by Public Broadcasting (in the USA). Almost all of the intellectuals dominating the present scene and who are becoming increasingly known to the general public tell the same story. It is one of a secularism which is misrepresented, sotto voce, as a plausible if not a necessary inference from the discoveries of science. What are actually interpretations that they have chosen to put upon their findings are being passed of as of empirical origin –as a part of the discoveries themselves
Science prides itself upon its open-mindedness, but this doesn't extend to the underlying set of beliefs upon which it stands. It is constrained within a dogmatism as rigid as any of those of religious fundamentalism to which its spokesmen point with derision. In short, it has anathema established itself as a cult -with its full measure of credos and sacerdotals. There is a College of Cardinals, with annual investitures at Stockholm. Those so elevated receive something more than medals and money. Merlin’s cloak is laid across their shoulders, or so it seems to be believed. Scarce unpacked upon their return, the newly-elected are already busily at work offering the Received Opinion upon the ‘Great Questions’ having nothing to do with their particular areas of expertise –and they are listened to with respect and deference. There is also evidence of a trafficking in relics; some of Einstein’s hand-written notes recently changed hands –to the tune of 3 Megabucks I have in my possession a personal letter to me signed by Francis Crick. Who knows; maybe fifty years from now, passing under the auctioneer’s gavel at Sotheby’s, it may fetch a price sufficient to put my great-great-grandson through Stanford. Science has replaced the Seven Sacraments of the church with its own litany. Truth –whose domain is limited to the material realm ‘out there’-is to be reached through a succession of four hallowed stages: the detection of contradictory phenomena; the framing of a formal hypothesis to contend with the dilemma: the putting together of an experimental proceeding of empirical interrogation, and a final judgment in the light of what this exercise discloses. Wisdom is to be sought solely through an endless cycling of this Fourfold Path. All suggestions that there are other means of access to which we must unavoidably turn are blatant heresy; they are anathema.
Though not formalized in any 'black candle' ceremony, anyone straying more than a few paces from the Received Orthodoxy may find himself excommunicated by a lock-out from peer-protected journals; \ worse, he may suffer truncation of funding.
Here is a brief overview of what this cult omits -and the corruption that ensues when they try to fill the voids from their own penurious resources:
O Epistemological (in its adherence to a Perceptual/Praxial Interface of Naive Realism).
O
Modal -or Categorical (the 'Second Category' of Consciousness is Marginalized –or dismissed as persona non grata -even as an 'illusion'!)
O Formal (the Refusal to Extend its Formal Canon in the Services of Life & Mind)
O Ontological (The Realm of Transcendence is Denied)
O Eschatological. Death is a meaningless absurdity –making total nonsense of the existence of each and every one of us
The epistemology of ‘naïve realism’ is about as resoundingly disconfirmed as it is possible for a doctrine to be –regardless of its overwhelming commonsense appeal. No proffered weltbild offering itself as a candidate ‘New Paradigm’ that does not concede –and come to terms with- this error can qualify for serious consideration. In its place, we have little choice but that which substitutes some kind of purely internal –and mental- surrogate construction that points to its Real World referent of which we have no direct or Gnostic knowledge whatsoever. Connections between these two realms –the Microcosmic and the macrocosmic- are mediated by those threads of Ariadne, the fibers of the peripheral nervous system. These channels are also remote from conscious access. What they convey is no mere than patterned configurations of hints –rendered entirely within the parameters of physics. They are blind to every aspect of meaning, consciousness, value or subjective significance. This places the burden squarely on the shoulders of the psyche of adding meaning to symbols -whether these latter be of linguistic or iconic form. Willy nilly, drawing exclusively upon its own imaginative resources, make sense of the destitute offerings of the cortical sensoriia.
The immediate consequence of this epistemological shift is a retilting of the brain/mind playing field in the direction of mind. It is hard to overstate the impact of this about-face upon the scope and richness of the subjective realm. That vivid scene world which we take to be the Real world itself is entirely mental. .
".......The paradox of consciousness and personality is that each of us is situated precisely at the centre of this world; each of us is at the centre of infinity."
"......Mind is a microcosm which, though its existence at the heart of the universe is ceaselessly threatened, nevertheless possesses a higher ontological density than that whole universe." Jacques Maritain
"......All science (wissenschaft) however is a function of the soul in which all knowledge is rooted. The soul is the greatest of all cosmic miracles, it is the conditio sine qua non of the world as an object. It is exceedingly astonishing that the Western World (apart from very rare exceptions) seems to have so little appreciation of this being so. The flood of external objects of cognizance has made the subject of all cognizance withdraw into the
-or, more hyperbolically:
"....Every time a man dies, a whole universe is destroyed" Popper
In the course of discussion with colleagues, I have found it to be necessary to go to great pains to drive home this pungent message. The interested reader should follow upon http://ontodynamics.com/summary_naive_realism.htm It is replete with a score or more of illustrations. Three of these are offered below without further comment; they hint –strongly- at what this is all about .
The interiority of the awake mind enjoys the illumination of consciousness -that ‘Second category’ standing altogether apart from the material/formal parameters of the physical realm. As such, its very presence challenges the positivist doctrine –for the way in which it challenges the autonomy of physics (and its satellite disciplines) The ‘mainstream way of coping is to marginalize it as an ‘epiphenomenon’, emitted –for some unknown reason- as a baleful glow when matter is appropriately constituted and activated as it evidently is by the enchanted loom of the cerebral cortex. So trivialized, it is stripped of most of the attributes that make it what it truly is, granting it only a bare sentience. The mind/brain coupling is taken to operate in one direction only, in which the theatre of consciousness is totally captive to its cerebral concomitants; that there might be reverse traffic in which the mind intrudes into and impinges upon the cortex below is not an allowable option.
As if all of this were not idiocy enough, some intellectuals held in high standing by their colleagues have even dismissed it as an ‘illusion’. Now, this is a very odd stance to adopt, given that consciousness is one of the few attributes that are known directly by immersion; there is no meaning to be given to arguments that arrive at it through processes of inference. The very sentence ‘consciousness is an illusion’ is diseased; it is a catachresis in which its two branches are mutually ejective. It is in the same category as such sentences as ‘the square root of minus one is purple’. ,
It is worth a passing mention that this dispatch of naïve realism opens up a whole new window of introspection for the enquiring psychologist. It suggests a novel way of pursuing Edmund Husserl’s phenomenalistic initiative, It starts with the insight that what the psyche is perceiving is a configuration in mental substance which it directly knows by direct infusion. The Inner world is an extension of the self. .This is what incarnation is ultimately all about.
The second
ellipsis in the above listing is curious After all, it is very much
within the tradition of science that from time to time, new empirical
discoveries are made that defy explanation within the scope of the
ambient natural law. Whenever this happens, the canon of the lex
naturalis has been extended to bring the formerly recalcitrant
discoveries within the fold. At the present day, cosmologists, in
particular, have granted themselves a very free hand in their
speculations, taking on quasi-theological overtones that would have done
credit to Duns Scotus and his fellow Scholars of the Middle Ages.
Yet, no such license is being granted when it comes to the
manifestations of life and mind. Why? Well, we don’t really
have far to look. If mind is truly to be taken as something
special, with its own private prerogatives, then before you know it, the
Psyche –as efficacious, authentic agent- will make its
re-entrance; next it will be the soul and finally "God" -as the
intellectual takes Him to be- will be back in. To give mind (and
life) any kind of special recognition is, they seem to fear, to poke a
hole in the dyke. Before we know it, the trickle wwould become a
stream, the stream a flood, until the entire scientific endeavour would
find itself submerged under ten meters of twelfth century North Sea
water. To switch metaphors; it has taken centuries of
burdensome labour, we are reminded, to confine the Imp withinn the
bottle; let us take care, therefore, lest we loosen the cork.
The denial of Transcendence in all of its forms is very far from
neutral; it carries with it the negative of an odium antitheologicum;
the intellectual has a sensitive nose for the possibilities of
sacrilege, and he will commit it when he can.
Over all matters of the sacred and the secular, his mindset is
incorrigible. This in itself is reason enough for why there is no way
that the future shall come from him
This brings me finally to the c word, the one that heads the list in the intellectual's lexicon of neo-obscenities. I do apologize, but the time has come for plain speaking. So I'm going to spell it out -and can only hope there are no ladies present. It is c-o-n-s-c-i-o-u-s-n-e-s-s. The dedicated positivist views its presence with the deepest disdain. For him, it is as though the awake brain emitted a malodorous phosphorescent gas –a revolting self-conscious stench, as Sartre might have put it. Seemingly, there is some kind of abscess hidden deep within the medullary substance that becomes active during waking hours. From it oozes a loathsome putrescence as the cortex threatens to go into autolysis. As Hartwig Kühlenbeck has noted, there is something incorrigibly corrupt about the carbon atom with perverse and surrealist consequences. So, what are we to do? Faced by this dilemma, the intellectual has vacillated between turning a blind eye to the whole matter, or alternatively, granting consciousness a grudging re-entrance -after being shorn of almost all of the properties that make it what it truly is. It has been reduced to a mere non-efficacious epiphenomenon devoid of all influence upon the flow of events. It is carried along as a helpless captive to the workings
of Sherrington's 'enchanted' cortical loom. The threat, of course, is not merely that of allowing a true agency to take hold. The problem is that of the whole world addressed by the richness of the mind/brain ensemble's subjective interiority. There are too many things to be found there -unmentionable things within that same lexicon. The interested reader will find these outrageous fabrications trumped in spades at: http://ontodynamics.com/positivism.htm/ Home /