The idea of self appropriation is that intellect should be able to note itself in its different operations and become as familiar with them as we are with seeing when we open our eyes in daytime. The idea is that consciousness might be conscious of itself in a full way. By contrast would be the approach which thought that everything should be understood by studying the brain, with consciousness being indicated by a certain measureable sort of brain activity, valuable as such an approach might be.
To man belongs animal extroversion and the fringe of intelligence found in animals. So we move to the shade when it is too hot. There is pleasure and pain. This is the world of the nursery but it stays with us throughout life, for the most part helping us but also sometimes leading us astray. It is helpful to recall this basic level, for it is constantly operative. Without it scientists could not measure, historians could not read, artists could not paint and philosophers could not learn or communicate. Without it, the vast world of commonsense could not operate technology, make a living, or promote justice and welfare. So important is this world that one might imagine the only task of intellect is to see that things are working – this would be the pragmatic philosophy. David Hume tends to confine us to this world. It is the world most men live in most of the time it seems to them, though there may be a tinge of respect for science or religion.
In fact, the normal experience of man is to learn a language and move into a world which is wider and deeper than the world of animal extroversion. In the world mediated to us by meaning not everything can be seen, and though imagination may try to escort everything, it falters at mathematical infinity or for that matter, at geological time spans.
The world into which we grow up is mediated by meaning, motivated by value, charged with feeling. We are enormously shaped by a people we come to belong to, usually so that we should be upright and useful citizens, and sanctioning and encouraging our development there may be a religious tradition. Belief plays a huge part in this appropriation, and we cannot possibly verify everything we come to believe concerning fiction and history, science and philosophy, religion and morals.
In addition to the world of animal extroversion, we move into a world of truth and being, where truth in the mind corresponds with reality lying usually beyond the mind. To some sorts of truth, generalisation belongs – so the heartbeat causes circulation of the blood in all bodies- while other truths are unique, so William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066. Self appropriation is to do with noticing and understanding one’s own cognitional operations. Similarly, we find here that some things are generalisations and some things belong to us alone. So we all have questions from time to time – it is a general state of affairs like the heartbeat – but coming to dedicate our life in love is usually a unique story I imagine.
Animals have sorts of questions belonging to their extroversion – which way did the fox go? – but most human questioning goes on in a thought process which has become interior, so that we think using words, concepts, and images trying to find the answer to our question. Aquinas refers to “phantasm” and Lonergan to “schematic image” as part of the matter being used when we have a question.
Perhaps it is helpful to distinguish phantasm and schematic image in the following way. Phantasm provides us with all the materials which might be helpful in answering the question and we work on them, dismissing this, focussing on that until we find a perspective which is illuminating and which gives an insight which might be helpful. The perspective which is illuminating is the schematic image. The Greeks realised that diagrams were helpful. I think it was Socrates who asked a child to double a square but the child’s efforts produced four squares because he doubled each side. There was a person who wondered why the car wouldn’t start when the garage had checked everything. Attention focussed on the key. A different key had been used. I would love to know how to irrevocably evangelise England anew, and through England, pioneer in so many things, the world, but here is a question so huge that in each generation one can only add a mite to the solution. I recall recusant Catholics who found their way forward was “to show charity to their non-Catholic neighbours”. There are questions to which you do not have the complete answer.
Insight though might yield several different possible answers to a question. If it is a question about ontology, there is only one possible answer. If it is about conduct there may be several answers of increasing difficulty. I think an element here is that the more heroic path may have a greater risk of failure because of weakness. So St Thomas More decided not to be a priest for some reason (perhaps there is more than one reason?!) he felt attracted to marriage. This was a way forward he thought he had the grace to carry out.
I have been piling three intellectual levels together. One is the level of question and possible answer. So a possible answer to doubling the square is to double the sides. The next is the level of answers which are sure, in which the true judgement gives one a hold on reality. The next is the level of answers which relate to conduct – what should I do?
The modern world relates closely to the third level, but without the second level, so that charismatic, loving, and affectionate people would guide the world forward with an enthusiasm which blinds them to the importance of truth and reality. For such questions take one into the philosophic miasma. That miasma has to deal with modern science and modern history. It brings in thought in a heavy and life demanding way. So easily it is dismissed. All you need is goodness, all you need is love. If a person is brought to you in the jungle with appendicitis, certain medical knowledge and skill would assist love to express itself, but it is to be acquired only through a process of training.
In ordinary language, idealism is what belongs to youth before a cynical realism breaks in on one’s living. In philosophic terminology, idealism is the idea that there is the life of the mind, there are meanings and values man cares for, but they are not related to reality since what is real lies beyond us. Critical realism is the position that we can know what is real. It sees in scientific truth sometimes the absolute attainment of truth and sometimes an asymptotic approach to the truth. Science is espoused in its positions and developments, and history in its succession of narratives. Certain absolutes are attained in the process of self appropriation including the capacity to be absolutely certain.
This then is human nature with the precepts to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible. Providence places human nature in the context of a love which coming from God raises the whole level of meaning and value. Stirred by such love, the individual and the group must account for it and keep it alive. Theology is thus reflection on conversion, but it is this reflection going on in a new context. So in 1800, before the geologists, no one guessed at the age of the earth. The new idea emerging raises huge questions about the Bible and its Babylonian cosmology. With the benefit of a certain hindsight, one can say that the written Word of God is concerned with revelation, with giving to man a revelation which he could not attain by his own natural powers. So we praise three persons in one God, Father, Son, and Spirit.
Saturday 19 September 2009
Determinism and Freedom
Our culture is rightly massively influenced by science, but the scientific outlook is easily a deterministic one, for every atom follows Newton’s exact laws expressed by the equation F=MA. It was argued that if you knew the exact situation at one time you could predict any subsequent situation. Obviously, since a person is made up of atoms, personal conduct, though it gives the illusion of freedom and responsibility, must also be determined by atomic masses and forces.
If you read the last chapter of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, you find the same determinism controlling human life, despite the fact that he has portrayed the heights and the depths of human life and love, with characters like Pierre and Natasha.
Obviously the idea of such determinism is fatal for the religious outlook, or for that matter, for a humanist outlook which has a concern for rights and duties. A community massively influenced by the scientific outlook needs also to be massively influenced by the religious outlook, but how is this possible? One can see a task here for philosophy.
I recall solving the problem for myself by what I called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. I noticed that Christianity could not get along without simple things like bread, wine, and water. These things I saw as things to be understood in their own right and used appropriately. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness was to see atoms as the only real things. I granted that any material thing could be broken down into the atoms which composed it but I did not grant that the atoms could tell you everything about bread or for that matter about man.
I realised that I was affirming the commonsense world as a sort of starting point and I realised that science itself depended on commonsense as well, as when a chemist picks up a pipette for example.
I was helped further by the Aristotelian and Thomism philosophy of matter and form. Prime matter is potency to form. Every material existent is formed. Form has to take account of underlying matter. So it occurred to me that every atom was formed, and so it was unlikely that each atom was identical with another, any more than snowflakes are identical. There was a Catholic philosopher, Donceel, who claimed God could not put a human soul into a cow, because the matter was not suitably formed. I suppose this idea gets rid of the Hindu idea that we might in the next life come back as a snake or a dog, but it raises questions about the degree of formation needed for the information of a human soul. Back in the 1960s, before abortion had become legal, it seemed possible to consider various stages before the infusion of a soul. I suppose one could argue on the one hand that a cow’s brain was not capable of rational thought, but that the human fertilised embryo, though not yet conscious, is capable of developing a brain capable of rational thought. What you have then is not a potential human being but a human being in potential (as we all are in deep sleep).
Lonergan is a Thomist, but he works up to the matter form position using classical science with its rules and also using statistical theory, probability theory. Indeed, he calls the position he arrives at “emergent probability” which he equates with divine providence.
He would point out that even in a laboratory there are alien influences. The measurements taken do not make an exact line. The arrival of probability theory gives one more knowledge, not less. So one knows that an asteroid follows closely Newton’s laws, but if you want to know the chance of a large asteroid hitting the earth in this decade you need to study the past and see with what frequency they have done so in previous centuries. Probability theory is not a cloak for ignorance. Rather it extends knowledge.
If you throw a dice six times and you get six sixes, you will be suspicious that it is weighted. If you throw it 100 times and get 100 sixes, you will know something unusual is going on.
If you have a chemical environment with many different complex carbon based molecules, you will occasionally get the same complex molecule again. If though you get a molecule nourishing itself, using a digestive system and then dividing itself, something different is going on. You have got a new sort of thing, more stable, always there.
If by a Canon of Parsimony you confine yourself simply to the empirical evidence, then what you have is the emergence of something unexpected, something prepared for by the previous situation, but something one would describe as biological rather than chemical. If at an earlier stage of things one had been able to observe a total set of subatomic particles assembling themselves into atoms, one would be able to observe that they formed themselves according to MendAlien subsequent table. Stage A is observable; Stage B is observable, and by insight one can explain what makes Stage B so different from Stage A. The Canon of Parsimony confines the empirical scientist to describing what he can observe and explaining what he observes. What is to be observed is the arrival of new realities on the stage; the stage thereby is changed, and further realities are enabled to emerge. Such emergence has a probability because it happens again and again and such emergencies going on again and again have led to our commonsense world with its bread, wine, and water, but without water you would not have bread or wine.
I met a scientist who was describing how an embryo grows. Suddenly an arm begins to emerge. He described the wonder of it by saying form appears to precede matter. Since it happens again and again there is a probability of it. What happens is not predictable simply from the material substrate.
What emerges are not just new species but a new environment containing many species in the interdependence that constitutes an ecology in which each finds a supporting environment. The scientist can anticipate the emergence. The theologian sees the finger of God and the introduction of new forms. There are schemes of recurrence of the pattern if A then B, if B then C, and if C then A, so if parents then children, if children then growing up, if growing up then parents.
The same probable emergence of new schemes of recurrence goes on in human life, so for example, if fish then fishing, if fishing then nets, if nets then boats, if boats then plenty of fish, if plenty of fish, population growth. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. So the materials for Newton were prepared by Galileo and others. So there is emergent probability working in philosophy as well as in science and since we must see the finger of God in emergent probability, we must anticipate emergent probability in the Church as well. Does this mean we anticipate a new saint – or perhaps something more like a new ecology, so that a richer supportive environment comes about for many?
Contrasted with my early claim of misplaced concreteness, the theory of emergent probability is at home in our modern world with its awareness of the long term evolution which has gone on in the physical environment (de Chardin’s Cosmogenesis) and the development in man’s world through historical process (anthropogenesis). While one might posit emergent probability in general communication going on between God and Man – “in many and various ways God spoke to our ancestors” - I think that with the Christian mystery we have to speak directly of Providence for we are called by Christ to faith, but we find in the Church a “scheme of recurrence”, - the Sacramental system, and we find the emergence of a new order of affairs marked by the fruits of the Spirit – “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self control”. There is ever a rich environment for a new generation of faith.
If philosophical achievement has led through emergent probability to the possibility of a philosophy of philosophies this might allow the emergence of a theology of theologies. For God would speak with commonsense consciousness in all its varieties, but also with differentiated consciousness, whether scientific, scholarly, artistic, or philosophic. Faith is a common assent. The rich responses made need to speak to each other and support each other including, of course, the assent made by the successor of St Peter.
If you read the last chapter of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, you find the same determinism controlling human life, despite the fact that he has portrayed the heights and the depths of human life and love, with characters like Pierre and Natasha.
Obviously the idea of such determinism is fatal for the religious outlook, or for that matter, for a humanist outlook which has a concern for rights and duties. A community massively influenced by the scientific outlook needs also to be massively influenced by the religious outlook, but how is this possible? One can see a task here for philosophy.
I recall solving the problem for myself by what I called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. I noticed that Christianity could not get along without simple things like bread, wine, and water. These things I saw as things to be understood in their own right and used appropriately. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness was to see atoms as the only real things. I granted that any material thing could be broken down into the atoms which composed it but I did not grant that the atoms could tell you everything about bread or for that matter about man.
I realised that I was affirming the commonsense world as a sort of starting point and I realised that science itself depended on commonsense as well, as when a chemist picks up a pipette for example.
I was helped further by the Aristotelian and Thomism philosophy of matter and form. Prime matter is potency to form. Every material existent is formed. Form has to take account of underlying matter. So it occurred to me that every atom was formed, and so it was unlikely that each atom was identical with another, any more than snowflakes are identical. There was a Catholic philosopher, Donceel, who claimed God could not put a human soul into a cow, because the matter was not suitably formed. I suppose this idea gets rid of the Hindu idea that we might in the next life come back as a snake or a dog, but it raises questions about the degree of formation needed for the information of a human soul. Back in the 1960s, before abortion had become legal, it seemed possible to consider various stages before the infusion of a soul. I suppose one could argue on the one hand that a cow’s brain was not capable of rational thought, but that the human fertilised embryo, though not yet conscious, is capable of developing a brain capable of rational thought. What you have then is not a potential human being but a human being in potential (as we all are in deep sleep).
Lonergan is a Thomist, but he works up to the matter form position using classical science with its rules and also using statistical theory, probability theory. Indeed, he calls the position he arrives at “emergent probability” which he equates with divine providence.
He would point out that even in a laboratory there are alien influences. The measurements taken do not make an exact line. The arrival of probability theory gives one more knowledge, not less. So one knows that an asteroid follows closely Newton’s laws, but if you want to know the chance of a large asteroid hitting the earth in this decade you need to study the past and see with what frequency they have done so in previous centuries. Probability theory is not a cloak for ignorance. Rather it extends knowledge.
If you throw a dice six times and you get six sixes, you will be suspicious that it is weighted. If you throw it 100 times and get 100 sixes, you will know something unusual is going on.
If you have a chemical environment with many different complex carbon based molecules, you will occasionally get the same complex molecule again. If though you get a molecule nourishing itself, using a digestive system and then dividing itself, something different is going on. You have got a new sort of thing, more stable, always there.
If by a Canon of Parsimony you confine yourself simply to the empirical evidence, then what you have is the emergence of something unexpected, something prepared for by the previous situation, but something one would describe as biological rather than chemical. If at an earlier stage of things one had been able to observe a total set of subatomic particles assembling themselves into atoms, one would be able to observe that they formed themselves according to MendAlien subsequent table. Stage A is observable; Stage B is observable, and by insight one can explain what makes Stage B so different from Stage A. The Canon of Parsimony confines the empirical scientist to describing what he can observe and explaining what he observes. What is to be observed is the arrival of new realities on the stage; the stage thereby is changed, and further realities are enabled to emerge. Such emergence has a probability because it happens again and again and such emergencies going on again and again have led to our commonsense world with its bread, wine, and water, but without water you would not have bread or wine.
I met a scientist who was describing how an embryo grows. Suddenly an arm begins to emerge. He described the wonder of it by saying form appears to precede matter. Since it happens again and again there is a probability of it. What happens is not predictable simply from the material substrate.
What emerges are not just new species but a new environment containing many species in the interdependence that constitutes an ecology in which each finds a supporting environment. The scientist can anticipate the emergence. The theologian sees the finger of God and the introduction of new forms. There are schemes of recurrence of the pattern if A then B, if B then C, and if C then A, so if parents then children, if children then growing up, if growing up then parents.
The same probable emergence of new schemes of recurrence goes on in human life, so for example, if fish then fishing, if fishing then nets, if nets then boats, if boats then plenty of fish, if plenty of fish, population growth. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. So the materials for Newton were prepared by Galileo and others. So there is emergent probability working in philosophy as well as in science and since we must see the finger of God in emergent probability, we must anticipate emergent probability in the Church as well. Does this mean we anticipate a new saint – or perhaps something more like a new ecology, so that a richer supportive environment comes about for many?
Contrasted with my early claim of misplaced concreteness, the theory of emergent probability is at home in our modern world with its awareness of the long term evolution which has gone on in the physical environment (de Chardin’s Cosmogenesis) and the development in man’s world through historical process (anthropogenesis). While one might posit emergent probability in general communication going on between God and Man – “in many and various ways God spoke to our ancestors” - I think that with the Christian mystery we have to speak directly of Providence for we are called by Christ to faith, but we find in the Church a “scheme of recurrence”, - the Sacramental system, and we find the emergence of a new order of affairs marked by the fruits of the Spirit – “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self control”. There is ever a rich environment for a new generation of faith.
If philosophical achievement has led through emergent probability to the possibility of a philosophy of philosophies this might allow the emergence of a theology of theologies. For God would speak with commonsense consciousness in all its varieties, but also with differentiated consciousness, whether scientific, scholarly, artistic, or philosophic. Faith is a common assent. The rich responses made need to speak to each other and support each other including, of course, the assent made by the successor of St Peter.
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