A Grand Metaphysical Experiment, Part the first!

A thousand apologies, dear reader, for the impromptu and almost entirely unexpected hiatus. For a variety of reasons, none of which are coronavirus related, work on this, the greatest intellectual endeavour of all time had to be put on hold for a few weeks. What’s more, I cannot promise that the same or similar isn’t going to happen again in the near future. This time, however, it most certainly will be related to the current plague. Since we appear to be rapidly approaching the End of Days, there are one or two things I should like to get done before starting my new career as a cannibal/toilet paper scavenger/Thunderdome participant. 

In the meantime, however, I present for your entertainment and edification, the third instalment of my highfalutin cosmological speculations. The first, as you may be aware, is my essay, ‘A Convergence of Cosmologies: Personal Analogies in Modern Physics and Modern Metaphysics’ which can be found in Looking at the Sun: New Writings in Modern Personalism, eds. Anna Castriota and Simon Smith (Delaware/Malaga: Vernon Press, 2017). The second, as yet unreconstructed, instalment was presented on this blog some weeks ago under the title ‘Mirror of the Cosmos: Farrerian Reflections on Mind and Nature’. And now here we have, as I say, the third and for the time being last part.

One final thought, before we get down to philosophical business; and apologies if this is a bit off-topic, but if anyone reading this is the kind of steaming tosspot who unnecessarily hoards toilet paper or any other essentials during a time of crisis, while elderly and vulnerable people are left to struggle, kindly piss off and read something else. Your presence is not required here.

It is my sincerest hope that all such people catch cholera or something similar and so decrease the world’s overabundant and entirely surplus population of arseholes. In doing so, you would make the rest of us ever so grateful.

And so, with that out of the way, we present: 

A Grand Metaphysical Experiment

The Convergence of Cosmologies: Reprisal and Finale

1.      What’s it all about, Alfie?

This is about the fundamental fact that we are mythopoeic creatures, mythmakers, driven, apparently, to tell the universe that it is other than it really is. Truth, freedom, humanity and divinity, even the universe itself: these are myths we construct, diagrams we draw, stories we tell. And before anyone thinks about dropping a dismissive “just” or “merely” in front of those myths and stories, thereby disinterring the rotting corpse of rationalist dichotomous thinking, no thank you. We are driven to construct such myths, for only by doing so, and by living our belief in them, can they become true.

We construct narratives about ourselves and our universe so that, as Susan Langer puts it, we can orient ourselves within the universe. Myths which, in effect, embody a principle of predication whereby our thought about the whole wide sweep of creation finds a foothold, enabling us to understand our universe and ourselves.  More than that, they enable us to become ourselves, to become the kind of creature we are. Stories beget stories.

We need myths to be human, to be, as the writer Terry Pratchett so elegantly said, the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

Myth and symbol, as Langer and Ernst Cassirer recognised, are vital to the development of those most essentially human, activities: talking and knowing. They are the key to understanding the exploratory, explanatory, infinitely extendable, “upwardly” oriented modality of consciousness manifest in both science and religion. Myth and symbol are the very essence of human consciousness and all its great cosmological adventures; myth and symbol and our conscious participation in them.

1.1  A Bit of Background

Before I get carried away, I’d just like to signpost where this mythological turn is coming from. This is the last part of a larger project; some of you’ve already endured bits of it at other conferences. The aim of this project has been to pursue a more perfect alignment of science and religion.

Drawing increasingly on a common storehouse of personal analogies, modern physics and modern metaphysics have begun to converge in ways that practitioners in neither camp fully appreciate. This convergence works itself out in the dialectics of consciousness and the cosmos to which it belongs, quite possibly as the vital element.

The likes of Stephen Jay Gould, and Rupert Sheldrake are the main culprits in this cosmological conspiracy; their scientific writings are rich in anthropic images and metaphysically coloured metaphor. Echoes of Austin Farrer’s interactional metaphysics; its founding construct – what it means to be, or rather to become a person – analogically extended.  Echoes, too, of Ludwig Feuerbach’s anthropo-theology, with its transformative projects, idealised self-conceptions, with which consciousness transacts and extends itself, perhaps infinitely. Together, Farrer and Feuerbach open the way for consciousness to reinvest itself in the cosmological and anthropological projects of scientist and philosopher alike.

But there is more to these echoes than a shared imagery.  There is a deeper synthesis at work here.

Consider, for example, Einstein on the strange but persistent belief that ‘our thoughts and feelings are somehow separate from all the rest.’ Urging us to free ourselves from this ‘optical delusion of… consciousness,’ he gave astrophysics an anthropo-theological flourish, calling it ‘the one issue of true religion’. Or how about the Evolutionary Biologist, Julian Huxley who said, ‘[a]s a result of a thousand million years of evolution the universe is becoming conscious of itself.’
With this in mind, I want to take a minute to recap what’s gone before so that this last stage will make sense.

And if you come back in approximately a week, dear reader, you may find me doing precisely that. In the meantime, I hope everyone stays safe and well as we all prepare for a future as cannibals and scavengers of bog roll. Until next week, keep your distance, wash your hands, and try not to act like a c***.

Challenging Anthropocentrism: Ethical Parity in Material Relations

by Denis Larrivee

26-28 of February 2020, Vatican City: the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life sponsored a conference on the social, ethical, and anthropological issues raised by Artificial Intelligence technologies. Contributing was Denis Larrivee with a poster discussing novel ethical models that normatively equate technical systems with the human being.

Introduction – Revising a Human-Centered Ethics through Techne Anthropology

Artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, synthetic biology, and brain organoids are only a few of many technological achievements likely to alter not only the relation between human beings and technology but also how the human being is himself understood or even altered. This reality has prompted frequent reference to the passing of an age of unfettered technological advance to the beginning of an age of ethical alignment, where the metric of progress is no longer technological capability but human fulfilment. “We need to make sure that these technologies are aligned to humans in terms of our moral values and ethical principles [1].” These Aristotelian and other similar concepts attribute to the human being a value centrality premised on his subjectivity, capacity for morality, and autonomy in the pursuit of the good [2,3]. Paralleling technical advance, however – indeed an outcome of it – are challenged to this centrality. These have raised questions about the value structures and ethical systems that flow from human privileging and whether these can and should be replaced in keeping with the enhanced technical capabilities and new material understanding. Current proposals often invoke, for example, a horizontal rather than hierarchical notion of value placement, in which ethical parity is equivalently shared rather than imposed. These proposals premise value contingency on an ‘exceptionless’ criterion that is ontologically neutral and that appeals to a universal techne anthropology. Human ‘exceptionlessness’, however, is itself increasingly challenged by neuroscience at organismal levels of control, revealing the influence of a natural order oriented toward autonomy, self-awareness, and ontological identification. This poster explores the consequences of techne anthropology for ethical theory, ethical praxis, and the ethical subject and posits that its derivative ethical systems fail to account for this natural order and the ontological distinctiveness intrinsic to the human being, who is physically instantiated in global neural operation.

Ethics in an Absence of The Natural Order

Ethical and Philosophical Challenges to Anthropocentrism

Tacitly acknowledged in most research initiatives is an ethical imperative that prioritizes the value of the human being. Termed anthropocentrism, its prioritization places human beings at the apex of organismal life and grounds ethical praxis, thereby promoting human flourishing and restricting harmful interventions. Anthropocentrism, however, has been challenged ethically, for its perceived placement of value in human beings alone [4, 5], and philosophically, as an adequate account of reality [6,7]. Table 1 identifies the major current and historically recent challenges to anthropocentrism, their features and ethical consequences, and movements endorsing their objections. 

Imposing an Order of Techne

The Universality of Techne Anthropology

‘…the doctrine that man is a machine was argued most forcefully in 1751 by de La Mettrie….suggesting there may be no clear distinction between living matter and dead matter…Yet, in spite of the victory of the new quantum theory….the doctrine that man is a machine has perhaps more defenders than before among physicists, biologists, and philosophers; especially in the form of the thesis that man is a computer…’ 

Karl Popper, 1978

Invoking Natural Reality in Value Origins

Addressing the Philosophical Challenge through Neuroscience

Classically, value theory posits that values are situated in a metaphysics of being, populated by entities that are the subject of a predication of qualitative properties. The human being is thereby regarded as an ontologically constitutive, value locus. The ability to manipulate matter, however, has disrupted the association between being and ontology, a conceptual process initiated in Bacon’s and, later, Heidegger’s metaphysics of being. This rupture is reflected in the attribution of value to consciousness (by Derek Parfit) and phenomenology of the emotions (by Eric Scheler) in isolation from the individual. However, neuroscience now shows that cognitive operations emerge from an ontologically constituted entity, the individual, who is instantiated through the mediation of globally directed brain states. These observations reveal that neural organization is governed by metaphysical principles of individuation and qualification; that is, according to a classical metaphysics of being. Hence, in a metaphysics of neuroscience, value contingency rests in the individual as a neurally qualified entity and is differentiated by ontological qualification. Human beings, thereby, occupy the apex of a value hierarchy. Value relations, accordingly, are seen to be structured with respect to oneself, e.g. in the presence of self circuits, [9,10] and between distinguishable entities, e.g. Theory of Mind [11,12]. Intentionalized value relations are maximal when both objects are subjectively aware and are entities in their own right; that is, as individuals with subjectivity and ontological parity. Subject object relations, on the other hand, lack value parity because they exhibit a partial or absence of reciprocity. This value hierarchy is reflected in the physical instantiation of normative relations, seen in many neuroscientific findings extending along a descending hierarchy of value from the greatest (subject-subject) to the least (subject-object). Table 2 illustrates how neuroscientific findings conform to these basic metaphysical influences that shape normative relations in the world.

An Ethics of Enlightened Stewardship:

Ontology in the Natural Order

Ethical parity models presuppose the structuring of lateral and mutually influential normative relations between humans and multiple, technically generated ‘entities’ that share subsets of human properties. On the basis of this last, parity models extend Kant’s Categorical Imperative, adopting a Kingdom of Ends formulation that posits that no entity may be instrumentally used as a means by another - e.g., certain forms of ecoethics [4] - that is, all are invested with equivalent value. Yet the reciprocal and mutual imposition of value does not account for how value is contingent, who can invest it, and what can be done with it. By contrast, relating value to being, that is, to observable reality - evidenced in a metaphysical order revealed by neuroscience, for example - evokes a moral response of ethical supervision that is consistent with external reality []. This model prioritizes the normative position of human beings, but in the context of a metaphysically informed stewardship, that endorses an intrinsic hierarchy of naturally invested values. 

Accepting an Order of Nature

The Order of Nature vs the Order of Biology

‘…the expressions ‘the order of nature’ and ‘the biological order’ must not be confused as identical…biological order is part of that universal empiricism that weighs so heavily on the mind of modern man…and is a product of the human intellect which abstracts its elements from a larger reality….’ 

John Paul II, 1981 

References

[1] Ethically Aligned Design, First Edition: A Vision for Prioritizing Human Well-being with Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. IEEE Standards Association, 2017

[2] Kant I (1993). Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. By Ellington JW. Hackett Press.

[3] Wojtyla K (2011) Man in the Field of Responsibility. Trans. Kemp KW. South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press.

[4] Latour B (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[5] Chandler D (2013) The world of attachment: the post-humanist challenge to freedom and necessity Millennium J Inter Studies 41(3):516-534.

[6] Rae G (2014) Heidegger’s influence on posthumanism: the destruction of metaphysics, technology, and the overcoming of anthropocentrism. His Human Sci 27(1):51-69.

[7] Levy N (2011) Neuroethics and the Extended Mind In Sahakian B, Illes J (eds) Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[8] Gillett C (2016) Reductionism and Emergence in Science and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[9] Damasio A (2012) Self comes to mind: constructing the conscious brain. Pantheon Books, New York

[10] Carroll J (2012) The truth about fiction: biological reality and imaginary lives. Style 46:129-160

[11] Decety J, Cowell JM (2014) Friends or foes: is empathy necessary for moral behavior. Perspectives Psychol 9(5):525-537.

[12] Esfeld M (2004) Quantum entanglement and a metaphysics of relations. Studies Hist Phil Modern Physics 35:601-617.

[13] Rhonheim M (2008) The Perspective of the Acting Person. Washington DC: Catholic University Press.

[14] Habermas J (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press

[15] Ranisch R (2012) Impersonalism in bioethics. American J Bioethics. 12(8):40-41.

[16] Pope Francis. Laudato Si: On Care for our Common Home. Vatican City: Vatican City Press.

CfP: Inscriptions Vol. 3, No. 2

Open Invitation

Inscriptions, an international journal of contemporary thinking on art, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, invites contributions to our upcoming open issue (vol. 3, no. 2). We are looking for well-crafted and skilfully written scholarly essays and literary fiction (poetry, aphorisms, short stories, fables, literary essays, etc.).

Inscriptions is an interdisciplinary, double-blind peer-reviewed journal that welcomes all approaches that seek to shed light on current and abiding topics in the domains of art, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. The journal is published online and in print and is indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Our authors include Wolfgang Schirmacher, Siobhan Doyle, Christopher Norris, and Jørgen Veisland.

Access to content in this journal remains open on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. We do not charge authors for submission or publication.

Submission instructions: Academic essays should be 3,000 to 4,500 words, while scholarship in the form of interviews, reviews, opinion pieces, etc., may be shorter. We encourage potential authors to submit proposals (150 words) for review prior to their writing/submitting entire full-length manuscripts; include title, institutional affiliation, and a brief author bio with the text of your proposal.

For this upcoming issue we also seek submissions of literary fiction (poetry, aphorisms, short stories, fables, literary essays, etc.), to be reviewed by our Fiction Editor Sally-Ann Murray.

Submissions for volume 3, number 2 (2020) are due by 15 March 2020. For a full overview of our policies for submission, review, and publication, please see our website:

https://inscriptions.tankebanen.no/

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Torgeir Fjeld

Editor-in-Chief, Inscriptions

Mirror of the Cosmos: Farrerian Reflections on Mind and Nature, Again!

by Simon Smith

Part 7: Arriving together! Did the Cosmos Move for You? 

This is a manifold to which consciousness assuredly belongs, quite possibly as the vital ingredient. If that cosmological revolution which transformed inert matter into participative agency is correct, as both physics and metaphysics suggest, then we who explore it must belong to it. We are, as Einstein avowed, ‘part of the whole, called by us “Universe”.’[1] Huxley agreed, as we have seen, insisting that ‘[h]uman intellectual constructions, together with machines and societies, birds and plants, and minerals and suns and nebulae, are all part of the one cosmic process’.[2] Our exploratory activities, then, are an integral element in the nexus of process and pattern wherein the universe we are exploring is manifest. Those activities make what we call “The Universe” a uni-verse, a whole. What else, since the ‘diagrammatic unity’ of the construct is, Farrer reminds us, nowhere but in the diagrammatising mind. That is the lesson of Schrödinger’s famous feline experiment. Our activities contribute to the collapse of an indefinite range of coexisting quantum possibilities into a coherent, mapable, history; or, as Conti trenchantly put it, ‘[a]cts become facts’.[3]

Crucially, it is in these unifying projects, in the coalescing of consciousness, ‘including all [its] spiritual properties and achievements, with the rest of the universe’,[4] that the downgraded analogue of personal agency is thoroughly upgraded. With a full turn of the hermeneutic circle, what began as projection returns as self-reflection, an image of longed-for harmony and wholeness, of completion or perfection, of infinite otherness.

The transformative potential of such evocative constructs, for human development and for the universe of which that development is a part, becomes clear. Such images - mirrors, masks, personae - reveal the uni-verse as it is known and the mind which knows it. ‘Know thyself’; so sayeth the Delphic oracle; don the mask and speak truth. Wise counsel, indeed; but Sagan’s imagery echoes a more “upwardly mobile” spirit, for ‘[w]e are a way for the cosmos to know itself’.[5] Likewise, Huxley made a lunar leap when he said, ‘[a]s a result of a thousand million years of evolution the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past history and its possible future’.[6]

In such images of cosmic consciousness the analogical upgrade soars far beyond its origin, towards a ‘transcending archetype’. Farrer called it a ‘“crypto-apprehension” of Infinite Act’, where ‘Infinite Act’ is itself a divinely inspired metaphor; providential embrace interpenetrating (pro)creative acts.[7] This hints at our own infinite extensions, psychologically informed metaphysics reminds us, because it is essentially dialectical, participative, interpersonal. It reflects, simultaneously, both what we are and what we might be: consciousness engaged in its own cosmological extensions. “Crypto-apprehensions” and reflections of perfection invite consciousness to re-conceive itself; no chastened distillate of thought nor unmeant mechanism, but as creative participation in its own projects. Only by entering into them may we overcome what Einstein described as ‘a kind of optical delusion of… consciousness’: the persistent belief that ‘our thoughts and feelings [indeed, all our activities] are somehow separate from the rest’; species, “universe”, and all our others. The scientist advised against taking our limitations too much to heart, be they physical, metaphysical, or psychological. To free ourselves from them and the delusions they provoke, that, he said, giving astrophysics an anthropo-theological flourish, is ‘the one issue of true religion’.

Feuerbach’s point precisely. If the cosmos is, as Huxley maintains, full partner in consciousness[8] then the theistical mind shall countenance no constraint on personal participations. For a ‘limited consciousness,’ Feuerbach declared, ‘is no consciousness’; no consciousness, at any rate, of the cosmos or its interpersonal affirmations and affiliations. ‘Consciousness, in the strict or proper sense, is identical with the consciousness of the infinite’.[9] The infinite nature of consciousness lies in the conscious appropriation of and by the dialectic. Therein lies our own reflection; the image of consciousness cognising and re-cognising, thereby realising, itself as an expression of infinite creativity. That means ‘nothing else than the consciousness of the infinity of the consciousness; or, in the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature’.

Whether Farrer would approve of such Germanic circumlocutions we may never know. Undoubtedly, however, he would applaud the psychological and theological, sentiments. He called it ‘cosmic personalism’.[10] In so doing, he sought, as William James would say, to do the universe the deepest service he could; like Einstein, Sagan, Huxley, Feuerbach, et al., he would say “thou” to it; more, he would, as Whitman did, say:

‘I, turning, call to thee, O Soul, thou actual Me’.

Modelling our explorations of the universe on such dialectical extensions – as Farrer adjured – overcomes the deadlock between personalism and “impersonalism”. The physical and psychological outreach of “personhood”, creative participation in the becoming of others, where conscious acts are embodied in and as a universe becoming conscious of itself: there is the vital clue to the re-integration of mind-and-world.

That re-integration opens the door to a convergence of speculative cosmology with personalist and pragmatic theist; a convergence far deeper than scholars in their respective camps may realise; deeper, certainly, than the “closed category”, subject/object, thinking which still dominates philosophy, theology, and science could ever allow. That convergence is, of course, our real beginning; for conscious exploration and extension; for discovering the unity of our own deeper natures ‘with others and with the rest of the universe’.[11] And in such discoveries, does consciousness or “personhood” become ‘the root of unlimited freedom, the jumping-off place for infinity’; or so Huxley thought. It becomes, as we do think and Farrer might have said, the embarkation point for the very grandest of metaphysical experiments.

Phew! Well, I’m sure we’re all glad that’s finally over. And that really is the end – the sexy end! Oh yeah, and so on and so forth. 

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[1] My emphasis. Possibly a letter of 1950, as quoted in The New York Times (29 March 1972) and The New York Post (28 November 1972). However, The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (Princeton University Press, 2005: ISBN 0691120749), p. 206, has a different and presumably more accurate version of this letter, which she dates to February 12, 1950 and describes as “a letter to a distraught father who had lost his young son and had asked Einstein for some comforting words”.

[2] Huxley, 120.

[3] Conti, Metaphysical Personalism 184.

[4] Huxley, 120.

[5] Sagan, ‘The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean’ 6 min, 40 sec.

[6] Huxley, ‘Transhumanism’, in New Bottles for New Wine, London: Chatto & Windus, 1957, pp.

[7] Conti, ‘Austin Farrer & the Analogy of Other Minds’ 53-4.

[8] Huxley, 122.

[9] Feurbach 2-3.

[10] Farrer, Saving Belief, 63.

[11] Huxley, 267.