To what End? Meaning, Morality and Purpose
SpiritQuest: Faith and the Life of the Mind
September 26th Evening Presentation
Notes and Comments
“To what End? Meaning, Morality and Purpose”
To what end do we direct our intellectual endeavors? Is there purposefulness in the universe? How might the notion of doing that which is right be a constitutive part of reality?
Begin with a description of my senior research project at Willamette University: “The Effect of Acute Doses of Ethanol on the Sleep-time Responses of Several Strains of Inbred Mice.”
1. Research was sponsored by the Veteran’s Administration
2. Several Researchers at Portland’s VA Medical Research facility were studying alcoholism from various angles: psychology, neurochemistry, genetics, etc.
3. I worked with a researcher who was researching the genetic component of the development of tolerance to various effects of alcohol (ethanol, or EtOH as it was symbolized):
a. Sleep-time response
b. Startle response
c. Hypothermic reaction
4. In order to determine the genetic component involved (or to determine if a particular response indeed had a genetic component) we utilized several inbred strains of mice. Being inbred meant that their genetic particularities were consistent across their strain, which minimized the statistical tainting of the results by genetic drift and variability.
5. The experimental protocols had us inject all these mice of various strains with the same acute does of ethanol, and measure their particular responses after a first injection, and then compare these results after a subsequent injection after a prescribed period of time. These comparisons were used as a means for determining the amount of tolerance to ethanol the mice developed in their responses to ethanol.
6. So here I was, working day after day, injecting mice, measuring their temperature, or startling them while they were passed out, or measuring the amount of time they were passed out. At the end of their usefulness to us, we collected blood samples of each mouse, properly identified according to strain, experimental lot, dosage of EtOH, and then killed the mice.
7. Now, just the preceding year, I took part in the biology majors’ weekly seminar in which we discussed a number of topics, including ethics. I was particularly interested in these issues because of my interest in religion and my Christian commitments particularly. We had a number of discussions concerning the ethics of using animals for the purposes of research. So here I was, the next summer, actually using animals, albeit mice, in order to carry on this research.
8. One of the biomedical ethical issues involved had to do with where one draws the line when doing such research. Is it okay to do research on mice because they are small, with apparently limited intelligence, and are sort of annoying anyway, but more problematic when doing research on animals such as cats or dogs – animals that are part of our domestic sphere? What about higher primates? What are the ethics of doing research on humans? Many questions such as these occupied our conversations. These are, in fact, questions that are still relevant.
Usual way researchers deal with such issues is to set them apart into a separate category of concern or even being itself. How this is done classically over the lat 300 years, is to set up a duality between two different realms: the realm of matter and the realm of spirit. Brian Cantwell Smith, who is currently Dean and Professor at the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada, and is cross-appointed as Professor in the departments of Philosophy and Computer Science and in the Program in Communication, Culture and Technology at University of Toronto at Mississauga, has written extensively on issues concerning the conceptual foundations of computation and information and on new forms of metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology. He describes this “traditional” duality, or what he calls the “classic dialectic” this way:
1. A roughly causal, deterministic, value-free, third-person theory of material objects – a knowable, empirical science of the physical world; and
2. A more mysterious, phenomenological or experiential, inexorably first-person, value laden theory of spirit.
A realm for the body and a realm for the soul. It is a convenient dualism, an historically entrenched dualism – and still, unfortunately, a widely accepted dualism. [1]
Issues posed:
1. What is the place for human intentionality (or any sort of intentionality) in the world?
2. Are ethics and morality in a sphere of life separate and separable from the physical world?
3. Is there a place for purpose, significance and meaning in the world of which physical reality is a part?
What I would like to propose is a new metaphysic of reality that provides the foundation for a way of holding these seemingly disparate approaches and understandings of reality into a synthesis that honors the integrity of the differences in approach, but alos honors the unity of reality that we all experience. I call this new metaphysical approach the “Trinidimensionality of Reality.”
Briefly describe a precedent in Christian theology for utilizing the notion of the Trinity as a means to describe the phenomenon of human experience: Augustine and his Trinitarian phenomenology of experience:
1. Greek philosophical debates over the precedence of being or doing:
2. Some held that a person would do the good because they were good (being precedes doing)
3. Some held that a person would become good by doing the good (doing precedes being)
4. Philosophers reached an impasse. Could not prove one way or the other.
5. Augustine proposed that the problem was that the issue was incompletely stated. The missing ingredient was understanding the vital role played by human will. A person could be basically good, or could know the good, but in order to do the good, they needed to will to do it.
6. Augustine developed a phenomenology of human experience out of this in which these principles corresponded to the Trinity:
a. Being – God the Father
b. Doing – God the Son or Logos
c. Willing - God the Holy Spirit
My proposal is that we consider a parallel typology of how all reality is composed of three interconnected, interdependent and inter-referential strands or threads or dimensions if you will:
1. There are three basic dimensions to reality: Physical (or Material), Mindal, and Spiritual
1.1. Physical
1.1.1. Matter and energy
1.1.2. Electromagnetic spectrum diagrams this
1.1.3. All physical phenomena
1.2. Mindal
1.2.1. Dimension of ordering principles - Logos
1.2.2. Laws
1.2.3. Intelligibility
1.2.4. Noumenal realm
1.2.5. Memes (?)
1.2.5.1. Quanta of information or ideas
1.2.6. Paradigms and shifts, worldviews and revolutions occur and exist in this realm
1.2.7. Potential for observation and quantification
1.2.8. Reflection
1.2.9. logic
1.2.10. rationality
1.2.11. Mathematics – one of the big philosophical problems in relation to sensation-based science, and the principle of physical effects requiring physical contact upon one another has to do with the reality of numbers. Do numbers really exist? How can numbers affect one another through formulations if they do not physically come into contact, if they exist as ideas or abstractions? For most people this is not a problem, but for the philosophy of science it is. However, placing mathematical operations and the abstractions called numbers within the mindal realm, and serving as mindal representation of physical relationships and processes can solve this dilemma.
1.2.12. Collective unconscious of Jung is a product of this property of all reality, that is the ground of existence. Perhaps collective meta-conscious is a better term to use. Communal Archetypes exist at this meta level, to which all consciousness, all those with the appropriate imaginal capacity have access. It is perhaps this level of creative abstraction that denotes specifically human consciousness in distinction from the consciousness that all sentient beings share.
1.3. Spiritual
1.3.1. Intention and directionality
1.3.2. Relationships, interrelationships
1.3.3. Will
1.3.4. Purpose
1.3.5. Connections, interconnections and joining occur in this dimension
1.3.6. Morality and values
1.3.7. Levels of meaning and significance
1.3.8. Things seen in relationship to one another
1.3.9. Consideration of means and ends – how the means used determine or result in the end – cause and effect as a spiritual property
1.3.10. There is a quantum level to spirituality as well as to physical reality – means and ends decisions and considerations occur at the small everyday level as well as at large, global and communal level
1.3.11. Social and communal concerns particularly are articulated in spiritual terms, although there are of course mindal and physical components. But as a phenomenon across species, it is the spiritual impulse toward intentionality, relationality and meaning that characterizes community and social aggregation.
1.4. Intersections and interstices
1.4.1. Creativity as the coordinated conjoining across all three dimensions
1.4.1.1. Human creativity features the particularly and peculiarly human predominance of will and intention. In other words, the universal tendency towards spontaneity, generativity, and manifestation becomes especially purposeful, intentional and teleological (end- and goal- and product-driven and oriented)
1.4.1.2. Natural systems display creativity in terms of spontaneity, mutation, evolution (defined as change and development), adaptation, novelty
1.4.2. There are parallels and correlations between the dimensions in which, for instance, mathematical formulas represent physical processes, and moral values describe the nature of actions taken in the physical realm.
2. Issues and problems that this approach can address:
2.1. Mind-body or mind-brain problem
2.2. Evolutionary biology and purposiveness – contra Richard Dawkins
2.3. Consciousness – not just a mindal thing, but correlating all three dimensions – an emergent property of the interaction of all three dimensions concurrently. Yes, it is a physical phenomenon, yes, it is a mental phenomenon, yes, it is a spiritual phenomenon – all simultaneously and co-actively.
Other random but related thoughts:
1. Intelligence and consciousness manifests itself – gives expression to itself.
a. Divine design of the universe
b. Human creativity
c. Human search for meaning and purpose is a particular manifestation of this property. This gives rise to the individual quest to invent oneself, or to determine one’s own spiritual path, etc.
d. Notion of dying to self and falling into embrace of God, etc., relates to the fact that the true religious quest is only satisfied by merging into the grand design of the universe. All of the particular human schemes are unsatisfying because they are incomplete, flawed, imperfect, skewed, and destructive. This includes individual schemes as well as social, denominational, corporate and any group scheme. “It’s not about me. It’s about God.”
2. Trinitarian approach to ontology
a. God is being itself as well as a Being.
b. Trinitarian Christian theology has focused upon How God is a Being in three persons. but my approach is to focus upon the nature of Being itself – a Trinitarian ontology, as it were. Tripartite is another way to describe it, although that implies discrete and isolatable parts, which is the opposite of my intention. I am wanting to describe how the three strands of reality are all interwoven interdependent upon and interpenetrating one another.
c. Most descriptions of reality are one or two dimensional at most.
e.g., science employs physical and mindal strands.
[1] Brian Cantwell Smith, “God, Approximately,” in Science and the Spiritual Quest, edited by W. Mark Richardson, Robert John Russell, Philip Clayton and Kirk Wegter-McNelly, (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 208.
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