(This is the Introduction to a series of posts on Freedom. The series is not about political freedom, for that would have less to do with Nature and Biology. I mean “metaphysical” freedom! How, in a universe of causes discovered by Newton and Einstein in physics, Mendeleev and Linus Pauling in chemistry, Darwin and Mendel in biology, can People, or any other animal, Freely Choose? There is a way that it ‘kind of’ happens! They are published for the sake of the clarification of basic philosophical and scientific positions. Later posts will contain many of these ideas expressed in a different form. First published 11/04/2018)
Bryan Cranston as Walter White, “breaking bad”.
What could you do? I mean, what might you choose to do? Are you free enough to just up and tell your boss, “I quit”, no preliminaries, just “see ya!” Or your husband or wife, “I’m done, I want a change; I’m moving out today!” Or maybe you decide to become a monk or a mountain-top sage; you pack a bag, buy a ticket to Nepal and off you go.
Seems possible. You just turn off your practical consideration of consequences and any moral concerns, and just choose to do it. Of course, you’re not going to do any of these things, especially in the whimsical, abbreviated fashion portrayed above;but theoretically, abstractly, is it possible?You choose, and then do! You choose to make some drastic change.
I used to think the answer was “yes;”I used to think we were that ‘free’, and I was actually somewhat spooked by it. “I could do that,” I ruminated, “fully responsible humans are capable of such radical choice.” By “radical choice,” I mean a choice not caused by outside forces, not even the context of the rest of a person’s life and times–physically, emotionally and in terms of character.Not caused, simply chosen!
Four of the greatest Existentialist thinkers: Sartre (bottom right) coined phrase “radical choice,” Dostoyevsky (top right) wrote Crime and Punishment, Nietzsche (bottom left) wrote one of the first explanations for morality, Kierkegaard (top left) was one of the original founders and predominately concerned with religion.
The famous French Existentialist philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre, coined this phrase, “radical choice”, and he suggested we should think of many of our choices in theses terms: They are totally up to us; each in reality is a true ‘pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.’ Each choice is your pure and unfettered act of making you who you are and you’re totally responsible! Wow, no wonder I was freaked by it; it’s really severe!
What’s the basis for this radical ability? Sartre thought it was ‘the self’, the ‘you’ in “you choose.” In reality, this “self” is disconnected from worldly causes, necessities and influences, he believed, even though it often seems highly connected. Where you come from, your momentary mood, your upbringing and even peer pressure is notthe true basis of any of your choices. If you think they are, that’s “bad faith,” says Sartre; it’s a denial of “your existential condition.” The real “self” is above these: It is not an object that is formed in your upbringing, or held by worldly needs, or gravity, or pushed by the wind. It is not a part of nature, in fact it is characterized by Sartre in contrast to nature! It is like an other-worldly ‘thing’, it transcends regular objects. What it can do—choose to do, we often underestimate.*
Maybe the situation is similar to recovering addicts in twelve step programs, they call upon some “higher power” to stay sober. And, this is freedom: it is not caused but must be made by a “Self” (or some ‘thing’) that transcends causes — a ‘thing’ kinda like God.
Freedom, for these existentialists, is like ‘reasonableness’ which also takes place ‘above the fray’ of causal forces and mundane worldly necessities. The “self” that is reasonable and free is an unusual ‘object’; it must avoid many worldly distractions.
Often the commission of a “radical choice” is portrayed as a criminal act. One of the great novels of all time is based on this theme. Raskolnikov, the main character in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment,convinces himself that the murder and robbery of a despicable pawnbroker and loan shark would be permissible, and that he will do it. He is not inclined by his nature or experience to do it, in fact he is a university student. What he does believe is his freedom to commit the act, and in the logic of it— the reasoning of the Utilitarian Theory of right and wrong. To kill the scoundrel will rid the world of an evil person whose fortune could then be used for the betterment of all, he calculates. What is right, is what is good for the majority.
He is also bolstered by the idea, popular then and now, that great people rise above their personal and historical context and act in great and unconventional ways. Raskolnikov thinks of himself in Napoleonic terms; today we tend to think of some of our great entrepreneurs in this way and shower them with massive wealth.
A more recent example of “radical choice” was the popular television series, Breaking
Cancer was the opportunity for Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston) to make a “radical choice”.
Bad. Here, a high school chemistry teacher makes the startling decision to become a crack cocaine “cook” and eventually “kingpin.” Implausible to the highest degree, the brilliance of the series’ writing and acting is the convincing portrayal of the mild-mannered man and his choices, including homicide. He makes his decisions, no doubt, and they are radically out of character.
I no longer believe in “radical choice,” or in it in quite the same way. It has made my life more tranquil. “I am who I am”, I more often think,and I make decisions along those lines. I am more embedded in myself than I was as a young man, more connected to an established life. It’s a good thing. I’m not the kind of person who becomes a monk much less commits a vile crime; in any realistic sense, I just couldn’t do it!
But, where does that leave the idea of choice and even freedom? If we think of ourselves as more embedded in our environment and more tied to our past and the world around us, how do we think of the opportunity to do something significantly different, whether good or bad?
I believe that the Existentialists were not totally wrong. We can make significant changes. The Self, as it ‘rises above’, as it gains ‘a vantage point to look back’ and consider itself and its actions, is not a metaphysical ‘thing’, but a biological and human social construction. The “Self” has this ability because of the way we are raised to be Persons, and take responsibility and hold others to their roles too. The Self does transcend, but not in the way the Existentialists thought. More on this in the coming posts in this series!
In the next post, though, I will swing 180 degrees from Sartre’s “radical choice”, to the idea of humans as machines designed to act appropriately in their environment. This new view brings humans into line with our universe of causes and effects. We fit in, like clock-work!
courtesy of ASH Wall Art
*Upon further consideration, I am not sure this is an accurate portrayal of Sartre’s position. It is more of a strawman, an exaggerated portrayal made to make a point and be easily knocked down.
What if Christians, Muslims and Jews came to understand their religious differences as a difference of opinion? After all, when something is true, it is pretty easy to get people to agree about it. Now, there is little agreement about what is called religious truth.
These religious people could still take their opinions seriously,but they wouldn’t get all apocalyptic and absolutist. Believers would no longer be as fanatic towards others, just more deeply personal about theirbelief.
What would motivate people to change in this manner?
It would be a growth in modesty and self-awareness, a reaction to all the discord, and killing; all the glaring abuses among people, humans—“us.” More of us would question people that believe “I’m right and you’re wrong; it’s obvious, it’s plain to see.”
This has already happened once in European history. In the 1500s, Catholics and Protestants killed each other, and even different Protestants killed and tortured each other.It all got to be too much. Laws were passed mandating tolerance, and the church was separated from the state.
Many people continue to come to this conclusion, that currently there is no true religion. The very diversity of kinds, and their conflicts, diminish religion’s overall stature. And many religious people have attempted to develop more acceptable–“truer”–versions of their own beliefs.
Jews are now Ultra-Orthodox, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and secular. Christians vary from extreme Biblical Literalists to Quakers and Unitarians. These latter groups allow sucha diverse appreciationof spiritual life that some doubt they are still Christian.
Islam is the least diverse of the three religions.It has only two major divisions, Sunni and Shiah, and these are not based in doctrinal differences but on the question of who was Mohammad’s rightful successor.
Today, there are few Islamic reformers, few secularists; the religion is traditional and strict in belief in a book inspired by the appearance of an angel in an Arabian desert about 1,400 years ago.
I’m sure my suggestion seems unfair to many of you. Am I trying to make religion trivial or not true in the strictest sense? Let me go a step further.
In the hope of increasing human agreement, humility, and self-awareness, I believe that scientists should also stop saying things like, “It is obvious that only science discovers what is out there and real!”
Curiously, this might not be too hard for them.Scientists already have a great respect for ongoing research and agreement with others. They agree on problems to investigate. They agree on hypotheses, and then test them. Scientists want their beliefs checked and are willing to give them up if many disagree.
In that sense, there is scientific truth but not religious truth.
By working together scientists have created aworld of progress. In effect, scientists say “We all agree; these are our accepted conclusions as based upon this approach. Try it yourself; it works.” And all of us really do agree: it is as obvious as the cell phones we use and the medicines we take.
The moral : religious people should be more like scientists.If you want a world in which a religious truth is accepted and plain to see, then come up with something the rest of us can sign on to.
Personally, I still hope for a truer kind of religion. The best of religion gives humans–“us”–an opportunity to bond in a life of solidarity not only with all otherpeople but the universe beyond.
By working together, religious people could create a world rich in human harmony and alive with a sense of a rightful place for us in the universe. A true religionwould make that apparent and secure to all. This is religion’s true dream: humans working in agreement to create a more meaningful universe.
The Simple Objection
Now many of you will surely disagree based on a simple point. What makes a belief true is not how many people agree with it, believe it, but whether it corresponds to reality.
Both religious people and scientists both say, “my beliefs are true because they fit the facts.” The Jewish God or Christian God or Islamic God is true, in their opinion, because that God exists, just as the scientist will say science is true because it discovers what really exists, in this case quantum waves and not gods.
There is a better way of understanding this, I humbly propose.
What we believe to be true has a lot more to do with human agreement than we now commonly recognize. What each of you presuppose is that there is a way, like “true faith”, or “the scientific method,” or “my book,” by which humans can escape our limitations–our sense organs, our “sin”, our place in history and society–and get to what lays outside of us independently and there for all times. You think we can discover some Absolute Truth, pre-existing and independent of us.
I don’t. I’m trying to think that our limitations are real and we ought to recognize them. Science has a limited approach to the world, so does religion and art and economics, for example; and each of these has been beneficial–sometimes–and beneficial in its own way in allowing us to live better lives.
“Truth” is more about what these approaches can show us, through our agreement in working together within each of them, from the time, place and life we now have. “Truth” should not be some ‘pie in the sky,’ some “absolute reality” barely imaginable. Today, we have truths all around us, but of a more humble and limited human kind. Our job is to keep working at these truths to improve our lives, I believe.
Where do these unusual Ideas come from? This is my understanding and application of a respected philosophic position, often called Pragmatism. It is a compromise between philosophical Idealism and Empiricism. It is a Holistic view started around the turn of the 20th century in America by John Dewey, William James, and others and continued in recent years by Willard Quine, Wilfred Sellars, Richard Rorty, Dan Dennett and others.
I mention this tradition to give my position some added credibility, but also because when truth is not mainly about corresponding to “Reality,” it becomes more about what traditions and authorities you respect and how you hope to adapt them to do good work for us now and in the future.
Our job now is to develop a more modern religion, that far more of us can agree to and live by, and thereby demonstrate its reality.
(This post is an abbreviation of the previous one–for more detail see the following, Why We Should All Agree About Religion. The text of this current post was submitted to the Columbus Dispatch as a guest column, but Rejected! Ouch, maybe it was a little too controversial. What do you think?)
What if Christians, Muslims and Jews came to understand their religious differences as no more than a difference of opinion? For after all, when something is true, it is usually pretty easy to get people to agree about it. But as things stand now, there is little agreement among these groups about, what we might call, “religious truth.”
Our current religious people could see their differences as a matter of personal preference, and possibly highly associated with where each person came fromand how they were raised. They would become like people who are “dog-people” or “cat-people”, or vegetarians and meat-eaters, or lovers of ice hockey (the Canadians and Russians) and lovers of soccer/football (Latin Americans, and the English).
People like this can still take their preferences very seriously,but they don’t get all apocalyptic and absolutist about them. Religious people could do the same, and it would take a lot of the edge, the conflict, out of all our lives. They would no longer be as fanatical towards others, and maybe just more deeply personal about these, their religiousbeliefs.
What would motivate people to change in this manner? Why would they want to engage in such a growth of modesty and self-awareness?
The change would be a continuing reaction to all the discord, and killing; all the glaring disparities and abuses among people, humans—“us.” Maybe more and more of us will get sick and tired of people that believe “I’m right and you’re wrong; its obvious, it’s just plain to see.” And these people say this about the most obtuse and complex matters!
This has already happened in European history. Following Martin Luther’s protestations against the Roman Catholic Church in the early 1500s, Catholics killed Protestants, Protestants killed Catholics, and even different kinds of Protestants killed and tortured each other.
It all got to be too much. Laws were passed mandating “tolerance” and the church was separated from the state. “Keep your religion to yourself,” became the motto, but only with limited success.
Many people continue to come to conclusions like the above. The very diversity of kinds and their conflicts tends to diminish religion’s overall stature. Many religious people have struggled to develop more acceptable–“truer”–versions of their beliefs, but some still cling to the old ways. It’s a mixed bag.
Jews are now Ultra-Orthodox, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and even secular, and those are in descending order from most literal and exacting to the more open and practical. Which kind is true?
The varieties of Christians are great in number and meaning. Extreme Biblical literalists believe events occur that defy natural law. They deny the Earth’s geological record and the legitimacy of Evolution. In recent decades and aided by their “truths,” they march to the poles and vote in near unanimity for the most reactionary candidates in an effort to enact laws for all of us.
But along with these Christian literalists existQuakers and Unitarian Universalistswho have opened their understanding of Christianity to allow for sucha diverse appreciationof human spiritual life that some doubt these groups are still “Christian.”
So what is the true Christianity? Is it a matter of personal taste?
Islam is possibly the most difficult to understand. Islam is particularly important to us in the Columbus area because we have the second largest Islamic community in the U.S. I want to get the following right, so I will follow the lead of the noted scholar of religion and Western translator of Islam, Karen Armstrong.
Islam is the least diverse of the three major monotheistic religions. It has only two major divisions, Sunni and Shiah, and these are not based in doctrinal differences but in the issue of succession. Who was the rightful successor of Muhammad? Sunni and Shiah back competing candidates, but each are still dedicated to very literal translations of The Koran and to the unquestioned leadership of their traditional Imams. There are few great differences in doctrine for Muslims.
To Muslims this unity of belief among them is simply because of their faith’s truth. It is the word of God as related by his prophet Mohammad (“peace be upon him,” as they say) and this is undeniable and obvious to them. But to Armstrong, there are political and historical reasons for theunanimity of Islamic belief, regardless of its contended validity.
Islamic countries fell prey to Western imperialism, she points out. The British and the Americans, and the Russians in Iran, were after oil. Historically, the belief arose that to retain one’s strict Islamic identity is to resist Western dominance. To this day, there are few Islamic secularists, few reformers; the religion is traditional and strict in its belief in the doctrines of The Koran, a book inspired by the appearance of the Angel Gabriel in a cave in the Arabian dessert about 1,400 years ago.
That is what Muslims believe, though I doubt many more of us will awaken to that realization. To me, Islam is no more true than any of the others.
Now I’m sure my contentions seem unfair or plainly ridiculous to many of you. Am I out to destroy religion? Am I trying to make religion trivial, wishy-washy, and not “true” in the strictest sense? So, to be fair, let me go a step further.
In the hope of increasing human agreement and continuing this suggested surge in humility and self-awareness, I believe that scientists should also stop saying things like, “It is obvious that only science discovers what is out there and real” or “Science is the absolute truth!”
Curiously, I believe giving this up might not be too hard for a lot of them.Scientists already have a very great respect for ongoing research and agreement with others. They always hold their current beliefs open for revision based on new information. They believe they have a method that promotes both progress—change in “truth”— and continuing agreement.
Yes, scientists love to agree. They agree on what problems to investigate. On how to define those problems and to do so in testable ways. They come up with hypotheses that they all understand and accept, and then tests to see if they work. They publish their results for all to see and criticize. Scientists want other people to check their beliefs and are willing to give them up if too many disagree.
A scientist may still believe in a proposed solution, but if others do not accept it, it is not “a truth” but more like their own preferred hunch; they do not go off and start their own sect! In contrast to religion, scientists have come to be very secure and almost unanimous in their accepted beliefs and in their validity.
In this sense, there is “scientific truth.” By working together scientists have created aworld of scientific progress all around us: electronic communication, advanced medicine, high-speed travel, towering buildings. In effect, scientists say “We all agree; these are our accepted conclusions as based upon this approach to the problem. Try it yourself; it works.” And all of us really do agree about science: It is as obvious as the cell phones we all use and the medicines we all take.
So the moral of my little story is that religious people should be more like scientists.If you want to have a world in which “a religious truth” is accepted and plain to see, then come up with something the rest of us can sign on to.Otherwise, sit back and quietly play out your private hunch, and wait (and wait) to see what comes of it, but until then don’t be so self-righteous.
Personally, I still hope for a newer and truer kind of religion. The best of religion gives humans–“us”–a real opportunity to bond in a life of solidarity not only with all otherpeople but the universe beyond.
By working together, religious people could create a world that is rich in human harmony and alive with a sense of a rightful place for us in a universe that is our source and destiny. A successful religion would make that apparent and secure to all. To me, this is religion’s best hope: Humans working in agreement to create a more humane universe.
(You may be asking, “How does The Universe become ‘humanized’?” Surely the universe is “just a meaningless rigamarole”–more on this quote in another post. By focusing on the cyclical and self-organizing tendencies that happen to build on each other, that is the answer. LUCKY US! We just happen to be in that environment of The Universe that happened to come out so well! ”Well?” Well, well enough to give rise to us, even with all the ‘issues’ we can still think need further improvement.—More on these thoughts later, but also in some of my previous post series. Sorry about the penguins marching so peculiarly.)
The Venus of Willendorf: made some 25,000 years ago. Human Culture at its take-off point. The Universe began Representing itself through us! And here at The Nature Religion Connection.org, that self-representation continues.
What if Christians, Muslims and Jews would come to understand their religious differences as no more than a difference of opinion? For after all, when something is true, it is usually pretty easy to get people to agree about it. But as things stand now, there is little agreement among these groups about a religious truth.
These religious people could see their differences as a matter of personal preference, and possibly highly associated with where each person came fromand how they were raised. They would become like people who are “dog-people” or “cat-people”, or vegetarians and meat-eaters, or lovers of ice hockey (the Canadians and Russians), and lovers of soccer/football (Latin Americans, and the English).
People like the above can still take their preferences very seriously, but they don’t get all apocalyptic and absolutist about them. Religious people could do the same, and it would take some of the edge, the conflict, out of all our lives. They would no longer be as fanatical towards others, and maybe just more deeply personal about these, their religiousbeliefs.
What would motivate people to change in this manner? Why would they want to engage in such a growth of modesty and self-awareness?
Maybe the change would be a continuing reaction to all the discord, and killing; all the glaring disparities and abuses among people, humans—“us.” Maybe more and more of us will get sick and tired of all the people that believe “I’m right and you’re wrong; its obvious, it’s just plain to see.” And these people say this about some of the most obtuse and complex matters!
Something like this has already happened in our European history. Following Martin Luther’s protestations against the Roman Catholic Church in the early 1500s, Catholics killed Protestants, Protestants killed Catholics, and even different kinds of Protestants killed and tortured each other.
It all got to be too much. Most people realized that obviously this kind offanatical religious belief had to be restricted. In Europe laws were passed mandating “tolerance” and here in the U.S. the church was separated from the state. “Keep your religion to yourself,” we tried to make the motto, but only with limited success.
Of course, many people continue to come to conclusions like the above. The very diversity of kinds and their conflicts tends to diminish religion’s overall stature. Many religious people have struggled to develop more acceptable–“truer”–versions of their beliefs, but some still cling to the old ways. It’s a mixed bag.
Jews are now Ultra-Orthodox, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and even secular, and those are in descending order from most literal and exacting to the more open and practical.
I once knew a young woman who helped introduce me to a popular form of Buddhism. She referred to herself jokingly as a “Jew-Bu”, a practicing Buddhist with a Jewish background.
On the other hand, there is sect in Israel that has at least one male member studying Torah through every hour of every day. They believe that if this chain is broken, the world will collapse. That is extreme and obviously a very different Judaism than that of my youthful friend. Which kind is true?
For Christianity, much the same can be said: its varieties are great in number and meaning. Extreme Biblical literalists believe events occur that defy natural law. They deny the Earth’s geological record and the legitimacy of Evolution as our best understanding of living things. Then, in recent decades and aided by these “truths,” they march off and vote in near unanimity for the most reactionary candidates in an effort to enact laws for all of us.
But along with these Christian literalists exist Quakers and Unitarian Universalists who have opened their understanding of Christianity to allow for sucha diverse appreciationof human spiritual life that some doubt these groups are still “Christian.”
Quakers, at their gatherings, sit in a circle in silence waiting to personally experience the presence of what may be equally described as “God”, “Spirit” or even “Light”. ”One hundred different Quakers might give you one hundred different definitions of God” writes a Quaker college chaplain. Quakers have no bishops or ministers to direct belief, and a specific creed that all must believe does not exist. These believers don’t even tell each other what is true, let alone non-Quakers.
So what is the true Christianity? Is it all a matter of personal taste?
The situation for Muslims is possibly the most difficult to understand. I know only a little about this religion personally, so I will rely largely on a particular religious scholar, Karen Armstrong, a member of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists, and the originator of the “Charter for Compassion.” Islam is particularly important to us in the Columbus area because we have the second largest Islamic community in the U.S. I want to get the following right.
Islam is the least diverse of the three major monotheistic religions. It has only two major divisions, Sunni and Shiah, and these are not based in doctrinal differences but in the issue of succession. Who was the rightful successor of Muhammad? Sunni and Shiah back competing candidates, but each are still dedicated to very literal translations of The Koran and to the unquestioned leadership of their traditional Imams. In this way, many western scholars, including Armstrong, have called Islam the most conservative of the major religions. There are few great differences in doctrine for most Muslims.
As in the most fundamental forms of Christianity and Judaism, to Muslim’s this unity of belief among them is simply because of their faith’s truth.It is the word of God as related by his prophet Mohammad (“peace be upon him,” as they say) and this is undeniable and obvious to them. But to Armstrong, there are political and historical reasons for theunanimity of Islamic belief, regardless of its supposed validity.
Islamic countries fell prey to Western imperialism, she points out. The British and the Americans, and the Russians in Iran, were after oil. Historically, the belief arose that to retain one’s strict Islamic identity is to resist Western dominance. To this day, there are few Islamic secularists, few reformers; the religion is traditional and strict in its belief in the doctrines of The Koran, a book originally inspired by the appearance of the Angel Gabriel in a cave in the Arabian dessert about 1,400 years ago.
That is what Muslims believe, though I doubt many more of us will awaken to that realization.
Now I’m sure to many of you, my contentions seem unfair, or plainly ridiculous. Am I out to destroy religion? Am I trying to make religion trivial, wishy-washy, and not “true” in the strictest sense? So, to be fair, let me go a step further.
In the hope of increasing this human agreement and continuing this suggested surge in humility and self-awareness,I believe that scientists should also stop saying things like, “It is obvious that only science discovers what is out there and real” or “Science is the truth!”
Curiously, I believe giving this up might not be too hard for a lot of them. Scientists already have a very great respect for ongoing research and agreement among them. They always hold their current beliefs open for revision based on new information. They believe they have a method that promotes both progress—change in “truths”— and continuing agreement about them.
Yes, scientists love to agree. They agree on what problems to investigate. On how to define those problems and to do so in testable ways. They come up with hypotheses that they all understand and accept, and then tests to see if they work. They publish their results for all to see and criticize. Scientists want other people to check their beliefs and are willing to give them up if too many disagree.
A scientist may still believe in a proposed solution, but if others do not accept it, it is not “a truth” but more like their own preferred hunch; they do not go off and start their own sect! In contrast to religion, scientists have come to be very secure and almost unanimous in their professionally accepted beliefs and in their validity.
In this sense, there are “scientific truths.” By working together scientists have created a world of scientific progress all around us: electronic communication, advanced medicine, high-speed travel, towering buildings. In effect, scientists can say “We all agree; these are our accepted conclusions as based upon our approach to the problems. Try it yourself; it works.” And all of us really do agree: It is as obvious as the cell phones we all use and the medicines we all take.
So the moral of my little story is that religious people should be more like scientists. If you want to have a world in which “a religious truth” is plain to see and true, then come up with something the rest of us can sign on to. Otherwise, sit back and quietly play out your private hunch, and wait (and wait) to see what comes of it, but until then don’t be so self-righteous.
Personally, I still hope for a newer and truer kind of religion. The best of religion gives humans—“us”—a real opportunity to bond in a life of solidarity not only with all other people but the universe beyond.
By working together, religious people could create a world that is rich in human harmony and alive with a sense of a rightful place for us in a universe that is our source and destiny. A successful religion would make that apparent and secure to all. To me, this is religion’s best hope: Humans working in agreement to create a more humane universe.
Now some of you are wondering, where do I get these far flung ideas? The best single source might be the old and venerable American philosopher from around the turn of the 20th century, John Dewey.
Dewey has been called“the philosopher of American democracy.” He was prominent in the social movements of his time working to bring prosperity, education, justice and a more useful idea of “truth” to not only all Americans, but all of “us” the world over. To Dewey, truth is, as much as anything, first, a decent respect for the opinion of others, and second, humans coming to agreement.
So for our new religion, what we need is “to get it together” among ourselves in agreement to a set of beliefs and practices that will manifest our harmony with the Earth and with a Universe which brought us forth and into which we shall return. Not a small task!
Well, at least, that is my opinion.
Still looking for THE BIG CONNECTION!NatureReligionConnection.org Logo by Marty
(The Theory of Plate Tectonics is surely as proven as the Theory of Evolution. In each case, Science proposes to us “the facts” hidden from our eyes and also “the connections” not immediately apparent.Volcanos and Earthquakes are associated events, as proven in the above theory.)
What is wrong with our ordinary world?Artists always try to make it more beautiful or at least more interesting. Ministers and preachers always try to improve our behavior and explain ordinary things in terms of a very unusual thing: The Divine.Scientists try to make our world more predictable by getting ‘below’ what we see by proposing objects that make the connections we never before realized. Engineers try to construct things that function better, or function in ways never before imagined. It seems we are always remaking our ordinary world–or at least seems so especially today.
(House at l’Estaque, by George Braque, 1908; one of the founders of Cubism, a new way to ‘see’ things. Cubism clearly realigns our visual world.)
Science is one of those ways of remaking our world; it ‘looks’ at the ordinary world differently. It is a very good way, one of the best. In this day and age, Science should be foundational to all well-educated and forward-looking thinking. Almost no other point of view has the influence it has, and unfortunately its authority is not more highly regarded by some.
But there is a peculiarity about the institution of science, and it does have a major rival—a rival point of view—that is up to the challenge. This rival is not religion, though religion has been sometimes closely associated with it. This rival to science has everything to do with personsand the basics of interpersonal communication.
The rival is the institutions in which occur the formation of “selves” and, in that sense, this rival to science is something like what we call “ethics“: the very generous rules and most magnanimous habits by which we should—but don’t always—live together with other selves.
Various historically prominent ethical personalities (regardless of their real or mythical status) have insisted upon the rival’s significance. Christianity, at its best, believes “Jesus” taught that at some point “the least shall come first”, a social equality doctrine. In some Jewish traditions, this was called “the golden rule”; a rule that should be enacted immediately and constantly by all. In the Koran, Mohammad set forth a very detailed and prolonged list of proper behaviors for Muslims, no matter how distorted some of us may see them to be in light of modern circumstances.
(Rabbi Hillel: “That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow. That is the whole Tora.” Depiction of Hillel the Elder, 1896, by Vasily Polenov. Hillel lived at the dawn of the Common Era.)
Many philosophers have come to argue for the significance of a contrasting view to science. Wilfrid Sellars was a prominent influence on American philosophy in the 60s and 70s. He argued for the importance of “the Manifest Image” that consists of our ordinary worldof mid-sized objects at mid-ranged speeds which prominently features “persons” with their “logical space of reasons.” Our “scientific image of the world” is based in our manifest image of it, he contended.
The most popularly acclaimed philosopher today is Daniel Dennett. He contends that the scientific view of the world is fundamental, a basic “stance” we take to understand things. But just as basic is “the intentional stance”, the approach we usually take to work with and understand persons (“selves”) including our own “self”.
When we take the scientific view in regard to persons, it is often to determine what is wrong; why they are notresponsible for their behavior—as in psychological depression, or why they are not functioning normally as due to a faulty heart valve. Usually persons are responsible for their behavior and function appropriately in accordance to their design, and so we do not treat them—or ourselves—as scientific objects, but asintentional objects, things that behave according to the beliefs they hold.
The Peculiar Thing about Science
What these philosophers mean is that the reasoning, evidence and research programs (the problems to be solved) that scientists use and work with, lie in our ordinary world of things, including our best rules for interacting with other persons. Some in this school of thought go so far as to say that scientists, as professionalpersons, are one of our best examples of not only rational but also ethical behavior, in the following way.
Scientists strongly tend to mutually agreeupon what problems/issues to research. They basically define these problems in agreed-upon-ways and construct proposed solutions (hypotheses). They agree on how to test or enact these hypotheses, and then come to an agreement on the results, the effectiveness of them. This scientific behavior is not only ethical behavior but also a very organized and specified approach to the things of the world. To the German philosopher, Ernst Cassirer, science is the most refined method of objectifying our world—of making and remaking objects we should all agree uponwithin a scientific context.
Experience is the firing of neuronsThe varied world of things are all atomsNot even atoms are ultimate h ere are their sub-atomic parts.
(Science is a very restrictiveand limited Frame of Reference. A very particular way of looking at and interacting with nature. It ignores all that cannot be interpreted in terms of spatial position and its change, shape, mass, time, and laws of attraction and repulsion.)
But the peculiarity is that in interpreting the results of science it is sometimes contended that scientifically discovered objects shouldreplace ordinary objects because they are ‘more real’, ‘truly objective’, and ‘proven’. This is called Scientific Realism. Science is “true” because it discovers what really exists by avoiding the “subjectivity” of the human perspective.
It was John Locke, at the end of the 17th century, that gave the above position its most popular formulation. The “primary qualities” of a thing, its location, mass, and movement, are what is real about it and existing in the world. The “secondary qualities” of the thing are “added by the mind,” and not part of the thing itself. Its smell, taste, color, and our feelings about that thing are added by the perceiving subject and thus not “objective.”
(“Things are really…” the little particles that compose them, or… Detail from George Seurat’s Parade de cirque, 1889.)
A thing like “red” is really a frequency of electromagnetism or some particular series of neural firings in the brain associate with that perceived wave length. Or the objects of the ordinary world are really conglomerations of particles, and function by laws that preclude any talk of “purposes.” Or “free will” (choice) does not truly exist for people, and that we should give up thinking human behavior is not physically determined. Our actions are no different than those of the planets!
(Human behavior is just as predictable as the movements of the planets, some think; and maybe in a way they are right.)
The following prominent scientists contend that “free will” does not exist: Stephen Hawking, Marvin Minsky (a pioneer in computer science), Steven Pinker (today’s most famous theoretical psychologist), Jerry Coyne (biologist), Sam Harris (neuro scientist and noted atheist), Paul Davies (physicist), and Albert Einstein, who said “A being endowed with…a more perfect intelligence …would smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.”
These and others are mentioned in Dennett’s essay on Erasmus (16th century Dutch intellectual) “Sometimes a Spin Doctor is Right,” who publicly argued againstMartin Luther who contended “man” had no free will due to the omniscience of the God who created all things. Our futures are predetermined, contended Luther. Erasmus “spun” the evidence to conclude differently.
But the peculiar thing about the realist’s interpretation of science’s meaning is that scientists themselves exhibit many of the characteristics that are supposedly non-existent. They make many perceptual (ordinary world) observations and many responsible decisions (choices). They start with problemsexperienced in the ordinary world and end up by rationally agreeing on the outcomes of tests conducted in the ordinary world, yet, the character of the ordinary world is supposedly that which is in doubt.
It is far from clear how this Scientific Realism can make sense, ultimately. One of the analogies used is that Science is like a ladder with its base standing in the ordinary world and extending into the world as depicted by science, and once we have climbed that ladder we can kick it away; the ordinary view of things is no longer necessary.
After all, it seems people—including scientists—are basically physical objects in composition, and their behavior is just as determined as the stars in the sky, it would seem to necessarily follow.
(Jacob’s Ladder by Marc Chagall, 1973. God creates the ladder, the way for human’s to attain the other world, or so this tale from the Bible is sometimes interpreted.)
George Herbert Mead
These issues were recently brought to light again for me when I was reading the old philosopher and one of the founding members of the science of sociology, specifically Social Psychology, G.H. Mead. Mead associated with the philosophers John Dewey, CS Pierce, William James (also a psychologist and brother of novelist Henry James) and famous legal scholar and judge, Oliver Wendel Holmes, around the turn of the 20th century in Boston and Chicago. They originated a movement of thought based in the perceived necessity for humans to act meaningfully, called Pragmatism.
(The “Chicago Club” of progressive thinkers, from around the turn of the century. The “scientific image”of the world seems to leave little room for “meaning” and meaningful human behavior, they agreed.)
Mead argued that experimental scientists and people who make discoveries through the use of inference are quite at home with a dual image of ‘the world’: an ordinary world and a scientific world exist, and there is “an ineradicable difference” between them. (All bolding and italics of his statements are my own.) Here is how Mead tries to make that dual world work.
The scientific world is composed of “ideal objects” that are far more clearly defined and with relations more necessary and predictable within their proposed theory, their proposed parameters. It is a world of “abstractions” and “hypothetical objects” awaiting observation and verification, and tends to retain this hypothetical status “which keeps the scientist’s attention alive to possible departures…for (she/he) is eager to find them” writes Mead. “While they work, they pass as objects,” he argues, and in that way the objects of science arethe objects of our knowledge,“to a peculiar degree.” They are good ideas, for as long as they pass inspection and further verification by the community of scientists, and then when they do not, they return to “the ideal realm.” They are ideas that had their day.
This view of science is called Instrumentalism: the propositions of science are useful to us in making our world more predictable and, most significantly, in facilitating the enhancement of our ability to act together, argue the Pragmatists.
We agree upon objects in the world to coordinate our behavior,he contends, andI say that is really a shocking claim! Contrary to Scientific Realism, and going a step further, these Pragmatists argue that All Objects are useful human devices whose purpose is to establish a way of life for freely interacting selves. Selves live in a community of selves who ‘congregate’ around the objects they mutually recognize.
Now it may help, initially, to think of theseuseful human objects as our symbolicrepresentationsof the objects that really exist beyond us. We live in a ‘world’ of human representations–words, art objects, science objects, religious objects (“gods”, “angels,” “souls,” etc.), ethical objects (“persons,” “selves”), we might want to say. But in the end, Pragmatists will argue that this distinction between our representations and what really existsbeyond them will not hold up!
(In a strange way, All Objects are Useful Human Devices. Through them we work together to have a world in common. Diego Rivera’s Detroit Murals, an excerpt.)
And “Selves” are a unique kind of object, for this way of thinking. Dennett contends they are the “objects that exhibit intentionality;” their behavior is most effectively predicted by considering the beliefs they hold. “Selves” have a very creative role to play; other “objects” are far more determined by their circumstances, less “free”, and not “intelligent”. The importance of “selves” is to create meaning, though other objects certainly have meaning for these selves.
(The different models of “the atom.” It is “an ideal object” contends Mead. Surely, there is something “there” that is like what we often call “an atom.” This is an achievement typical of science.)
Mead contends that our primary and original world is “the world that is there.” It is in contrast to the scientific world. ”The world that is there” is “the common world within which the intelligent community lives and moves and has its being,” writes Mead, and is similar to Sellars’ “manifest image.” Its objects are largely “unquestioned” and “immediately perceived” as a world of things that are taken for granted as part of a community of persons “as a going concern.” It is the world of “concrete experience”, as opposed to the abstract experiences of science. As such, it is “there, not as known, but as containing the conditions of knowledge,” he says.
To havean experience of an object and to know that object are two different things, for pragmatists.
This world of “immediate things” is not a static world. It has been worked on through history and is “shot through with reflective construction and reconstruction.” In this sense our ordinary world contains many of the past achievements of science but also problems, as alluded to in the opening of this essay. The “world that is there” is not so well constructed, nor consistent.
By comparison to the hypothetical objects of science, our ordinary world is “vague and indeterminate.” Its objects are not as clearly defined or predictable, but they are generally not questioned. Mead says it is the job of science (and Cassirer would add our other reconstructive institutions like language, art, and ethics) “to disentangle” these taken-for-granted objects and their parts, and propose alternate views with different orientations or objects in their place, or in addition to them.
And here is where Mead’s theory becomes especially interesting, and the following is a restatement of ‘the shocking claim’ made above.
“Objects” are the outcomes of human behavior, and this in very specific ways. Science has its way of remaking“the world that is there”. Yet, that ordinary world also contains objects of economic value, objects of artistic value, and objects of ethical and religious value. Mead, and this whole progressive movement, advocate for “the social nature of mind” because “the self” and its “thinking” are social. “Mind” is the unified activity and the shared perspective of a society. To an important degree, each society has a set of its own objects!
The human “mind” makes objects not in just any old way but in a long and protracted struggle with whatever it is that is out there in complete abstraction or independence from us. And of that very bland substance—“the world” in complete abstraction— we have nothing to say except what we do say in art, religion, science, ethics, economics, etc. In other words, what we call “The World” does not exist ‘on its own’ but in all these meaningful ways for us to act. For Pragmatists, science is just one particular take on the world, though a very good and important one.
(What is out there in complete abstraction from us?Painting No. 21–by Mark Rothko, 1951–is still too concrete an expression of ‘the world’ in complete abstraction. Rothko (1903-1966) is one of the most famous of the modern Abstract Expressionists.)
More Abstract Expressionism—a world without our normal frames of reference, a world without any frame of reference? Left, Composition by Willem de Kooning, 1955. Middle, Such is the Way to the Stars by Hans Hofmann, 1962. Right, Desert Moon by Lee Krasner, 1955.
For Pragmatists, the idea of a world existing that is outside of any human frame of reference is a very confused idea. Science is a very useful way to look at all things, but it is not the only way. Other forms of activity, like art, are also very useful to us, “the selves” who act.
So what we learn is twofold, the scientific ‘take on the world‘ is informative–it seems to show that ‘we’ are completely enclosed in a system of predetermined causes. Yet, science also shows us, contends the Pragmatists, that science is a way of doing things, an activity among scientists that has its own ‘approach to the world’ that exemplifies cooperative, creative, and free behavior.
For Pragmatists, science exists in both the above ways and is extremely impressive on both of these counts. Science shows that we live in “a world” or in “many worlds” that call forth important and even competing meanings.
(Metro map of Columbus, Ohio. Downtown is the denser center. Hilliard is to the west and north. Current metro population is just over 2 million, and Columbus is the 14th largest U.S. city.)
On a recent Saturday at lunch time, a 36-year-old man left his home to buy his 3-year-old daughter chicken nuggets. He did not make it far.
A stolen Kia driven by a 15-year-old with two companions was being pursued by police. It ran a stop sign broadsiding Matthew Moshi’s car. He died several days later leaving behind the daughter, a wife, and a 17-month-old boy.
This vehicular homicide occurred two miles south of my home here in Lower Hilliard on Hilliard Rome Rd. For 35 years I have lived in this neighborhood and it has been peaceful, until recently. I can now sadly empathize with neighborhoods that have long endured violence. Mine is now increasingly one of them.
In the summer of 2021, four blocks from my home, two teenage girls where arguing and fighting outside a condominium. It was videoed by a neighbor. The 16-year-old broke off the fight, ran in the house and quickly returned with a handgun, ending the fight and the 17-year-old’s life.
Early this year, two young men entered the Esporta gym just down the street to apparently play basketball. It ended in a dispute with another player in which the 19-year-old suspect pulled out a gun and shot to death Tabias Cunningham, 23.
This past July, three young men stole a Porsche SUV at gunpoint from a Whitehall dealership. They were 19, 20, and 23 years old. They drove across town to my Far West Side neighborhood, likely driving right up Hilliard Rome Rd., to a bank next to the Kroger’s my wife and I shop three times a week. There they stole $90 k but were barricaded in place temporarily by police cruisers when they attempted to leave the lot. They did not realize their movements were being tracked through the vehicle’s GPS. But, this did not stop them.
They pushed and wiggled their way through the barricade by driving over a curb—all caught on dash cam—and raced through my neighborhood again. They were finally stopped on I70 near Mound St., heading back toward Whitehall. Here, an exchange of gunfire critically wounded an officer but also killed the 19 year old gunman. The other two suspects were soon apprehended, one after a foot chase, the other in Chicago trying to board an airplane.
This occurred on a Friday and the shootout on I70, about a ten minute drive from my home, occurred at 4pm rush hour. One drive reported his car hit by a stray bullet in the mayhem. One wonders if the major influence in the lives of these young criminals is the morally abhorrent but hugely popular video game “Grand Theft Auto”? Its premise is to steal a car and avoid capture for as long as possible, regardless of the collateral damage.
These are the major violent crimes in recent years in my neighborhood, though it overlooks some minor ones such as the car that pulled up to my neighbors work van at 3:30 am two weeks ago. They broke out the window and stole almost $2,000 in tools. This was vaguely captured on a doorbell camera, setting off a rash of upgrades in home security devices along my block.
All this is not unique to Lower Hilliard, unfortunately. The mayor, several high-ranking police officers, and the head of the Columbus Police Union have all made various statements on a trend. Young people are involved in a serious upswing in crime, not only crime but in brazen and rash acts of violence.
Following the shooting death of a 16 year old by a 13 year old in Easton Town Center this past August, Mayor Ginther pleaded in a press conference, “Parents, I need you to step up. Know where your kids are, who they are with, and if they are involved in any violent activity. Do they have firearms? Go through their backpacks, go through their rooms. We need you to be fully engaged helping to keep out kids and our city safe. The police cannot raise your children. Parents have to raise their children.”
I first became publicly involved in this issue when I commented in a letter to the editor (“Highly charged language does more harm than good” 9/12/23) on a different tragic incident in east Columbus, the shooting death of Ta’Kiya Young. 21 years old, pregnant, the mother of two, Young is seen on store video participating with two conspirators in a mini “flash mob” raid on a Kroger liqueur store. Confronted by police in the parking lot, she chose to drive her car at and into one of the officers, who fired a fatal round through the windshield. Why did she not just surrender?
The record seems to indicate a very sad kind of fad, a very destructive disfunction among a relatively small group of young people. Court records show that though there has been a drop in total homicides this year, there has been two to three times as many juveniles bound over as adults for homicide in the last two years than in previous years, in 2022, a total of 25, in 2023, so far 20 juveniles bound over as adults. Additionally, in 2020 a police study contended that nearly 50% of homicides were perpetrated by members of about 17 Columbus street gangs.
And car theft has risen dramatically. 2022 showed a 22% increase in car theft totaling over 11,000 vehicles. Through September of this year 8,249 cars have been stolen in Columbus, on track with the rising trend. But in 2020, there were only about 6,000 stolen vehicles, and in 2021 some 8,500 according to CPD data. It has been a steady rise.
(A stripped steering column of a Kia. Available of TikTok are videos showing step by step how to steel these cars with the use of an USB cord.)
A large part of this disturbing increase is connected to “a boom of social media postings and culture surrounding ‘Kia Boys'”, according to Dispatch reporter Bethany Bruner (10/31/23). At the end of August of this year, 391 juveniles had been charged in relation to vehicle theft as opposed to 173 adults, she reports.
“You ask (the teenagers) how many times have you been in a stolen vehicle, and they’re in multiple stolen vehicles every week,” Columbus Police Cmdr. Alex Behnen told The Dispatch. And the autos of opportunity are Kia and Hyundai, with 85% of the cars stolen in September of this year in Columbus of those makes. Hence the moniker, “Kia Boyz.”
So what can be done?
First, lock them up! Currently there is a ‘revolving door’ practice of arrest and release. Partly due to their young age, partly due to the crowded and unfavorable conditions within juvenile justice facilities, it is reported that perpetrators are apprehended and then released, only to have it happen again and again. But, these offenders are too dangerous to be on the streets.
Second, reform the juvenile detention system to make it safer, larger, and more oriented toward rehabilitation. Third, allow cities like Columbus to pass the gun regulations that may help remove some firearms from our streets and our young people. Four, improve our inner city schools and provide increased programming and positive opportunities for young people after school, on weekends, and during the summer.
But, do something we must, for the cost is already too high. Innocent lives are already being wasted, lives like Matthew Moshi and his family. Lives are potentially being wasted like my own and my wife’s every time we pull onto Hilliard Rome Rd. Finally, the lives of these young clueless perpetrators, whose recklessness and disregard is a waste paid for by themselves and their families, along with the rest of us.
(Results for Ohio Issue 1 bycounty, the Reproductive Rights, Pro-Choice, amendment to the Ohio Constitution, from November 7th election. “Yes” are light to deep blue. Very Light to dark green are counties voting “No” for abortion rights.)
Wow, from the look of the map of returns, you would think that the “Yes” to Reproductive Choice lost! Almost 3 of 4 Ohio Counties voted against a broad and pretty reasonable window for a woman’s ability to choose an abortion. But all the big-city counties, and a large number of high population suburbs in surrounding counties, came in heavily Yes. The result was a Victory, the seventh state out of seven to vote Pro-Choice since the overturn of Roe by the Supreme Court.
The deepest blues are Cleveland and Columbus were over 7 of 10 voters said Yes! An overwhelming majority. Among the other heavier blue is Cincinnati , Toledo, and Akron, all with well over 6 of 10 voters. Dayton, my home town, came in at almost 6 of 10. Northern and N. East Ohio which composes the Cleveland-Akron metro area, came in significantly Yes. The suburbs of Columbus (Central Ohio on the map), also significantly Yes.
Also going for a Woman’s Right to Choose were Ohio’s “college” towns, like Athens—alone in the southeast— home of Ohio U. at 7 of 10 and Butler County and Woods County, home of Miami U. and Bowling Green State U., largely Yes.
These are Ohio’s progressive strongholds: the bog cities, their suburbs, and our college students.
Interestingly, the deepest greens—the most adamantly “Pro-Life”—is a stripe of farming counties running from far Northwest and down along the Indiana border, some of these going as strongly as 8 of 10 against “Choice”, including my father’s place of birth Mercer County at 79% No! These people are largely of German descent—German surnames abound; they are farmers and small town small factory workers.
(In west and northwest Ohio the land is very flat and you drive down the state route highways with farms on each side, until you see a steeple in the distance. It is another small town built around a rather large and very traditional Catholic church—St. Henry, Maria Stein, Van Wert, Coldwater, St. Marys…. Within several stop lights, you are back among the farms and heading toward the next steeple. This is Ohio’s most conservative region, but not highly populated.)
In the end, the totals were not that close: 57% Yes to Abortion Rights and 43% No. It was a thorough rebuke of Ohio’s Republican Party-controlled state government, who have done nothing but pass further and further restrictions on abortion, less and less restrictions on guns, and fewer and fewer taxes that could be used to reform this state’s public school system and provide needed services to our many residents who seek to improve their lives by growing their skill-set and escaping violence and drug addiction. These Republican politicians have thwarted our Democratic Party-controlled big cities from acting on their own to address these issues. Our Governor DeWine (German surname) went in big to defeat Issue 1, and this time was rebuked by our progressive voters instead of his own Republican Party right wing. DeWine is a somewhat moderate, anti-Trump Republican.
There is more work to be done here in Ohio. The above 57 to 43 majority was an echo of the polling that also shows similar margins (or greater) for election district reform and gun control. The redistricting reform campaign has already started for a constitutional amendment to take that process out of the hands of these biased Republicans.
Ohio’s Progressive Coalition of voters, that voted for Barack Obama and placed him into the presidency, has started to reconstitute itself!
Also succeeding in this election was a referendum constituted law (not a constitutional amendment) to Legalize Recreational Marijuana (Issue 2). It is interesting to compare the outcome maps of these two issues. Its largely the same areas going “Pro” on each Issue but support for Marijuana a little more tepid in some areas and more wide-ranging over all.
Pro-Reproductive Choice in blue.
Pro-Recreational Marijuana in blue.
It was a Pro- Choice day (Nov. 7th) here in Ohio—the right toIndividually Choose what to do with your own body and life style!
The Script Ohio done by The Ohio State Marching Band at all football games.
Ohio, the 13th state in the union, 1803. Population 12 million. “The heart of it all,” says the commercials. “OH–” we occasionally call out, and others reply “–IO.”
Is democracy real in Ohio? The answer is “No” when you factor in all the relevant issues. And some of it is our fault; the majority of Ohioans sometimes do not insist that their state (and national) government enact their beliefs and desires.
But now, the battle for our state is on, and the whole nation is watching! After Tuesday, November 7th, —this coming Tuesday!—Ohioans will have had their chance to decide our state’s Abortion Rights Law.
“Abortion is Health Care” is a slogan I like. The facts show, abortion is not a misused medical procedure. State medical data show, that in 2022, almost 90% of abortions occurred with the fetus (or the “unborn child” as insisted upon by opponents) was 12 weeks or less in gestation. Yet, of course, it is almost universally agreed that a woman does not know, or know for sure, that she is pregnant until around or after 6 weeks. Its a narrow window for decision.
If Ohioans get out to vote, our current extreme abortion law (currently on hold by court order) will be struck down by a popular vote affirming a new Ohio Constitutional Amendment assuring a woman’s right to reproductive decision-making. Government will have to stay out, except to provide some broad and reasonable limits, such as fetal viability at around 22-23 weeks.
The current law, The Heartbeat Law, is by no means reasonable; it is extreme. Nor is it in accord with the beliefs of most Ohioans, at least in so far as numerous polling shows.
That is the clincher! It is easy for many Ohioans to respond to a public opinion poll, harder to get themselves tothe polling place to vote and then to have their vote matter. Too many reasonable Ohioans have allowed themselves to be hornswoggled by far right Republicans—often from Ohio’s small towns and rural areas, and also holders of Fundamentalist Christian views.
These extreme Republicans, often MAGA Republicans but not always, have rigged Ohio’s voting districts to maximize the effectiveness of their voters and minimize the impact of voters who tend to have differing views . This “gerrymandering” is already in the process of being challenged in the courts, but also by an upcoming and new state-wide constitutional amendment vote.
So here in Ohio, we are in the process of directly placing in the hands of the voters this state’s law on abortion and on the creation of fair voting district boundaries. Soon hopefully, we will also take state gun laws to task, for there is another issue where current law and current belief of the majority of Ohioans are far out of synch.
On the abortion issue, numerous polls have shown approximately the following. Over 80% of Ohio’s likely voters want wide abortion options for victims of rape and incest. About 70% of likely voters believe that a fetal heartbeat is too quick a limit for a woman to decide such a vital issue. And advocates for these extreme anti-abortion measures often make it clear that their religious beliefs are at the base of their view that personhood occurs at conception. I say, do not make your religious beliefs, our state’s law!
On further grounds, Republican politicians have forfeited the credibility to govern. Their former State Speaker of The House (Larry Householder) and former State Party Chairperson (Matt Borges) are currently in jail convicted earlier this year of the largest bribery corruption scandal in state history. Donald Trump, their leading presidential candidate, is under indictment on 94 criminal counts. Additionally, Republican State House Representatives were unable among themselves to agree upon a new Speaker, a situation that mirrored the recent circus in Washington D.C. Republican politicians seem unable to organize and govern themselves, or even conduct themselves within the law. Therefore, Republicans do not deserve to govern this state or this nation.
These are difficult times, but they are also exciting times; times that are full of opportunity. Cast your vote now for abortion rights in Ohio, and soon be prepared to continue this assertiveness to regain Ohio for the majority of its citizens and restore true democracy to this worthy state.
(Melancholy Woman (1902) from Picasso’s “Blue Period.” Working with the pure perception of blue?)
I came upon an author new to me. I’m not an aficionado of Science Fiction, maybe that is why I had not heard of Olaf Stapledon; British, he died at about the time I was born, 1950. Stapledon was a professor of philosophy along with a novelist.
Stapledon is called science fiction’s “singular genius” by Nobel Prize winning physicist, Frank Wilczek, in an article on Artificial Intelligence titled, “The Unity of Intelligence.”That article argues for the reality of real intelligence in machines, and that is where I discovered Stapledon. He is said to have influenced many notable Brits including Bertrand Russel, Virginia Wolf, and CS Lewis disliked his anti-Christianity so much that he wrote a major work as a rebuttal of Stapledon. Yet, Stapledon was/is spiritual; he just wants something profoundly new.
The only work I have read so far is his Odd John. Published in 1936, it is pronouncedly skeptical of the prospects for humanity. Little wonder, 1936! This short book is not about AI, but is about an enhanced kind of human intelligence, in fact, an enhanced kind of human—a new species—not homo sapiens but “homo superior,” Stapledon calls them. They are “supernormals,” he writes. They are far above the old norm.
“Above” in what way, is the most interesting part. They are not just super smart, which they are; they possess a new and unique type of sensibility. They are aware of facts and connections that most of us only occasionally and dimly perceive. In that sense and some important other more physical ways—like a gestation period of 11 months and a notably larger head and eyes—these supernormals are “freakish,” says Stapledon. “John Wainwright”, their eventual leader, is early on referred to with great affection by his mother as “odd”; “Odd John” she calls him.
These differences create significant tensions. Normal humans are often repelled by John’s oddity—his shape, his physical immaturity, his startling intelligence—but they find themselves strangely attracted to a charismatic quality possessed by him. He, in turn, struggles mightily with his feelings toward the obviously inferior nature of Homo sapiens, even his own father and mother— but his mother least of all, for she is a little like him and the source of his genetic superiority.
We readers join in this tension when John describes “normals,” at their best, as like a good pet dog: somewhat smart, often loyal, and in limited ways lovable. We ask ourselves, ‘Is John really better than us, or is he a monster?’ Stapledon gives us reason to believe the latter because he makes it clear that normal (good) ethics do not apply to the supernormal. And this is demonstrated in some shocking acts by “Odd John.”
Seeing Through the Eye of Others
One of the unique abilities of Homo superior is something like what we can do: We ‘see’ things from another’s point of view. We say things like ‘put yourself in my place,’ or ‘you don’t know what it is like until you put on her shoes and walk around in them.’ But in this case, Stapledon’s Homo superior literally does see through other’s eyes. They are telepathic, especially in reference to each other.
John finds a few other supernormals around the world by perceiving, vaguely at first, what they see or hear. He does not know who they are or where they are, but he is in their mind with them—occasionally, and mysteriously even to him at first— sharing their current perceptions. It is, as if, they are ‘of one mind’ and this ‘group mind’ becomes one of Stapledon’s important themes. Odd John must then deduce where the others are and who they are from the clues in their perception in an effort to find them.
(An electric arc, current jumping from one conductor to the other.)
At first I did not like this ploy, making the sharing of “mind” something like a physical power. Telepathy supposedly is like some electric arc or maybe like radar, it seems. When the supernormals find each other and eventually move to a remote island in the Pacific, they develop these powers to the point where they do not have to speak audibly in some situations, but communicate simply “by mind.“
This unity of mind extends to a unity of action that Stapledon portrays. When Homo superior gathers for a discussion and a decision, unanimityis their eventual state, complete mutual understanding. On their island colony they function as a total democracy and then act in unison, based on agreed-upon premises. This is a large part of their superiority, and this is an ethical and spiritual accomplishment, it is suggested. Coming to agreement and acting mutually are vital, Stapledon seems to believe, for an advanced humanity!
“Objectivity” is one of contemporary philosophy’s great issues, as Stapledon is aware. Many philosophers no longer simply hold that an idea or statement of ours is truebecause it corresponds to something that exists independently of us in nature. They no longer contend that we should all agree on something because it is “objectively” out there and independent of us, and we can all see it or have good evidence for it. They do not believe “objectivity” is like the ability to ‘jump out of our own humanity’ and ‘rise above our nature’ to discover an object as it truly exists independently of us; as if our human participation in nature is an inhibition and contributes nothing to nature’s basic character.
A recurrent theme of this blog site is, we better understand “truth” in a more subtle way. Since we are inherently part of nature, the idea of truth functions more as an organizational principle for both ourselves and what we find around us. Truthfulness is a way we can act and then what we find, or participate in the creation of, when we act in these ‘truthful’ ways. (Philosophers as far back as Kant contended something like this, and the position is sometimes called Instrumentalism.) Two of the conditions for ‘truthful behavior‘ are mutual agreement and unified actions, as with Stapledon’s “supernormals.”
(College physics majors at work. It is not clear that physicists find nature as it is independently of us. Their highly complex equipment and exotic theories place earthly nature in the most peculiar situations. What they actually do, is work on jointly held premises and insist on an agreed interpretation of their results.)
How does this Apply to Our Real World?
We real humans do not have telepathic powers in any kind of physical sense, it surely seems to me. But here is how we do ‘see through other eyes.’
Our experiences are as much social as they are individual. We do have some very raw individual experiences, but almost just as soon as we individually have these, we have our Interpretations of their meaning which is always social.Raw pain—simple and excruciating—is maybe the best example; in the moments of its existence interpretation is blotted out. But also raw pleasure, or the perception of the plain quality of a color—the ‘blueness’ of blue, for example.
(The Soup (1902) How quickly does blue evoke in you various emotions? Does “sadness” or ” clarity and brilliance” like the sky, rush forth? We cannot separate our various attachments to “blue” from what theoretically must be blue’s plain perception ‘somewhere originally’ in our process of experience.)
Here is how we do ‘see through the eyes of others.’ First,we invest great energy and place much stock in sharing our experience of life. We write and read novels, autobiographies, memoirs. We text and Facebook, and tell and listen to stories. We read poems and create movies. We gossip, and testify in court.
(Hansel and Gretel, how many times do you think this story has been told? One of the many famous illustrations of it, this one by Arthur Rackham, 1929,)
We communicate in these many many ways and more. “Communicate” means “to share in, partake of; use or enjoy in common,” says the Oxford English Dictionary. And that we do with our experience, even the most ‘private’ of it like pain, pleasure, or blue. “Socialization precedes individualization,” declared the noted philosopher, Richard Rorty.
Second,we have fads, fashions, movements (both political and social). We have geographic cultures and historical eras. Picasso had his “blue period” and western culture had its “Renaissance.” Today, it is said that we live in “The Age of Science” or better, “The Information Age!” It’s all around us and part of us; I can feel it, can you? It is the way we see the world these days.
(The Greedy Girl , 1901. Seeing blue through the eyes of Picasso— that color will never be the same again.)
Third,we have deeply inset mutual intentions and expectations. This is the most important sense that “we see through the eyes of others.” Our society, all societies, have a system of roles and assignments within which we individuals are formed and then function in that society as what we now call, “selves.”Yourself, myself, ourselves, all exist together in a mutually held symbolic system.
“We go about populating each other’s heads with beliefs,” says philosopher Dan Dennett. It is as if your brain is running a program, and all our brains are participating in that same program. “The Self” is not you as your body, nor your physical brain, nor even your neural firings. The brain is the hardware that program is running on. Intelligent animals, like chimps and dolphin, have much the same hardware as we, but they don’t have the software, and that starts with a language-using society of “others.” “The self” and “other” are an essential contrast, neither exists alone, and both are the social symbols by which we play our roles “as selves.”
(What was it “like” to be a woman… in ancient Egypt, 16th century England, or as a member of the Native American Iowa people in the early 1800s? Depicted above, an ancient Egyptian, Queen Elizabeth I herself–by unknown artist 1580, and Female War Eagle–by George Catlin, 1844. Each woman had significantly different roles in their societies, and must have had very different experiences of themselves and their lives.)
In our infancy and childhood there is a long and obvious initiation. A process of creating “self” in relation to “other.” It is a process of learning language and especially names and relationships: “Papa, Baby, Mama, doggie, Vivian (the baby’s name), Sister, Mama, Baby, Dada…” and so we go over and over, reviewing all the prime ‘actors’ until the ‘parts’ and ‘roles’ are assigned and start to be clarified and more detailed for the child. We live within “an extraordinarily efficient…system of expectation-generation,” says Dennett.
The crucial point is reached when the child starts to “see” and “feel” these relations in her/himself. “I am Vivian, I want…” but “what will Mama say?” And probably as late as 12-14 years (and much later for some “adult situations”) , the normal child advances intofull-fledged“Personhood.” It is at this point that they are competent explainers of their own behaviors. When asked, “why did you do that?” They are able to respond reasonably; they have a generally appropriate response. They are now ‘response-able,’ or as we say, “responsible persons.” They have proven to see things as we do by giving back to us generally accepted appropriate answers for who they are and what they do.
These “responsible persons” then go on to promote their society’s way of life and even change it. An individual may come to disagree with their society’s interpretations, meanings, or customs for a situation, but this is possible because the dynamics of this role-playing system have become internalized in that individual. This allows “a self/a person”, ‘to look back on’ or ‘look down upon’ themselves (or their former self) like a separate object—“this is me,” we say, as if pointing from outside— and use this ‘position’ to judge what they ‘see’ as their self and other selves and may attempt adaptations.In this way, we have become an objectto ourself and others, but a special kind of object, “a person” that is necessarily “self-conscious.”
We literally “talk to ourselves;” we rehearse these different social roles and expected situations within our own “mind.” We call this “thought” and we do it all the time. Generally, we then proceed to communicate our thoughts with other members of our society for their consideration and for the coordination of all. In that way we work to stay “of one mind” with those so very close to us.
(“Posting of Luther’s 95 Theses” by Julius Hubner, 1878. Martin Luther posted the premises for his new religion in 1517. Similarly Einstein published his four papers in his “miracle year” of 1905. We individually get new ideas, but most often we soon seek affirmation of them from others.)
This is how a society enters primarily into the formation of its individual “selves” and then how these selves then perpetuate and adjust their society. It isa new levelof natural phenomena, says Dennett and other like-minded thinkers. It is more complex and more symbol-based than other natural aggregations. It is more than the machinery and chemical interactions of brains; more than, and even more complex than, the physical particles that compose it, in some ways. It is an emergent form of reality.
Human behavior of this kind is something new, something somewhat like “Homo superior”, the new life-form conceived by Olaf Stapledon in his evocative novel, “Odd John”. In the end (SPOILER ALERT) this new species unanimously decides to relinquish their selves, their lives, and their colony rather than physically fight for survival against a world of hostile, suspicious and inferior Homo sapiens.
Olaf Stapledon. As argued above, we humans are largely creatures of our times and societies. I must warn you that some ‘minor’, but distasteful, racial stereotyping is contained in Odd John.
I grew up at the dawn of Rock’n’ Roll, a musical movementthat created its own genre. It involved a New Musical Sensibility that was not appreciated by all, especially at first. Here, Peter Paul and Mary, members of theFolk music genre, make fun of, satirize, the new musical style. After hearing this song ‘a hundred times’ in my life, I never realized its sarcastic and critical intent until last week! Part of its wit is that it is itself a good rock song. I love Peter’s look and imitation of Donovan, and Mary’s outfit and dancing! “Groovy, man!”
More to come on the reality of Group Mind. Stay tuned-in; I can feel The Good, Good, Good Vibrations!
THE NATURE RELIGION CONNECTION. Continuing the quest for a better society! (drawing by Marty)
(I’ve been searching for a simple statement that gets to the point of this blog site; maybe this is it. Most of you will think it far fetched, yet there is a Logic to it and it stretches way back into Philosophic Tradition. Complete with Garden Photos and a Poem at the end. A revision of the earlier post of the same title—but up-graded! Try it on for size, Please!)
(The Backyard Sanctuary: Our World can be A Sacred Place! Photo by GWW.)
The Manifesto
In the spring and summer, each morning I take my cup of coffee and walk about our backyard garden. I carefully inspect its progress from the previous day: new shoots have appeared, old flowers fading, a weed to be pulled, new blooms opening and to be admired. Various birds fly by and others are calling. I stop and consider the weather; very pleasing, but other times not; it’s too cool or too wet. We often are in need of a few sunny days. In either case, my plants soldier-on and I consider what I should do to improve this beautiful place, our garden, Our Backyard Sanctuary.
(Our Garden: Yellow Swallowtail on Zinnia, a Zinnia close-up and in full bloom.)
It is not a “strictly physical” place, not simply particles and chemical reactions and the qualities that those kinds directly exhibit. This garden of my wife’s and mine is a human artifact, a place with carefully selected plants, much considered placement, precisely cut borders, and gently curving walkways. It is a chosen mixture of both sun and shade, privacy and open sky; a fairly complete composition,though always shifting.
(The Crocus in snow and sun.)
This garden is a place of Life, for plants exhibitthe most marvelous design. The Crocus are first to poke up their heads in spring, with delicate little flowers. Then come the Daffodil and their yellow trumpets; then Tulip with their gracious cup, marked interior, and array of color.
(The gracious cup, marked interior, array of color: The Tulip.)
In the shade, the Ostrich Fern unravel their fronds, rolling them open to the light. The JapanesePainted Fern exhibit on each leaf detailed shades of green slowly verging into almost black.
(The Ostrich Fern unravelling its frowns to display a remarkable symmetry.)
In front of our long row of Hosta, my wife plants her border of Impatiens, an annual that flowers through summer and produces best in shade. The Empress Wu Hosta is our crowning jewel. Sitting back beneath our cottonless (male) Cottonwood tree, the Empress crowns at over three feet into the air and spreads more than six feet in diameter. She is a tremendous mound of foliage with each highly ridged bright green leaf running 18 to 20 inches long and a foot wide. All her bio-mass bursts forth each spring from below the ground and is fully in place by mid June. By August, she has finished with her rather insignificant flowering (to the gardener) and by fall is ready to be cut back to do it all over the next year.
(The foliage on the Empress Wu Hosta is rich, deep, and ridged. A natural irrigation system, water is guided down to the center of the plant.)
Each plant is a tidy package. It cycles about itself in its own little circle. The perennials — the crocus, daffodils, tulips, ferns and hosta — all have a prolonged cycles lasting many years, but go through a distinct annual cycle, also. The annuals — the Impatiens — complete their life cycle in a single season. But they all end their path with Seed; the reproducedcodeof “its form“ passed into the future. It is as if part of them — Their Information — never die!
(The Tidy Packages: Daffodil, perennial Poppy, two variety of Columbine [Aquilegia] with seed, and Hosta–The Empress in the way-back.)
(A Cooperative Environment!)
Basically, fundamentally, essentially, a plant and its environment are a cooperative, self-enhancing effort. It is not that they — the plant and its environment — always “get it together” or always “keep it together”; they do not. There are “bad” seasons and difficult “spells”; but “at their core”, The Good MUST Out Weigh The Bad.That much is inherent in the idea of Natural Design.
It’s a good vibe!Designs are real in nature; every design, if it exists, is Goodat something. It isfunctional: itisbetterthan a vast number of alternatives, but maybe not quite as good as some Possibilitiesthat we can vaguely imagine. Biology, the science of Life, is based of The Adaptionist Hypothesis, argues philosopher Dan Dennett: if a living thing exists, it has proven itself (at least temporarily) to have succeeded in its quest.
That is the core of The Nature Religion Connection: If a lack of coordination and cooperation (Dis-Function, Chaos) were the predominant “tone” of the world, then complex entities like “plants” would not exist, nor would we! “The Living World” is fundamentally Good, at least from the point of view of Mother Nature.
And what of our own? Let us Reflect. From our point of view, this world can be Our Backyard Sanctuary, if held in proper respect, if nurtured, if understood, if thoughtfully criticized and accepted, if loved. This Living World is a reflection of us, and us of it.
The Poem
THE BACKYARD SANCTUARYNo god is needed; My wife and I will do.
We split and weed, and plant seed.
We trim and choose, and rule our tiny spot,
but not like one such other.
Mother Nature framed this scene,
and with her choices will be Queen.
But at least, I see my debt
and live to fill Her offer.It is a special place, our world;
the world of life and persons.
It is our Response and Ability,
to keep it such and More;
to pass it to our future kind
for ashes soon we be.
For after all, we are but links
in this "Great Chain of Being."
Of what is now and what comes after,
we make our contribution,
too.
(Glorious Morning, Morning Glory, this photo is unenhanced! This is the light and color at the center of this natural wonder in The Backyard Sanctuary! All photos by GWW from the garden of Greg and Sheri.
GETTING TO THE HEART OF THINGS at The Connection. Logo Drawing by Marty
(Residents of Maui are certainly aware of the comfort and pleasantries of that tropical isle, well, at least until recently. No environment, not even an Hawaiian Paradise, is immune to a horrible tragedy: R.I.P. Nature’s most primitive forces are still capable of breaking through.)
How fortunate can a creature be? Pretty fortunate is the answer in some basic and important ways. If we understood this, life could have a very different feel to it, and maybe take some very different directions for us, at least seemingly. In the following essay, let me “look on the bright side” and play “Pollyanna” for a while and see where it takes us.
All things–animate or inanimate– have a tight relation to their environment. Non-living things are really tight; they’re behavior is completely determined by it. Inanimate objects are a simple cog in a machine, defined and determined from everything around them. Yet, they are distinguishable, and maintain an independence of size, shape, duration, composition and even function. A rock is as big as it is and often maintains a shape; it can last a long time and maintain its composition, though it does succumb to deterioration. This rock may function (work) to help form a mountain or slow the flow of water in a stream.
The relationship of an inanimate object to its environment is what we have taken to be the definition of “mechanical.” In its simplest form, machines are specific spatial patterns interacting with (pushing, pulling, interceding between) the spatial patterns around them. They have a function largely determined by their shape.
(A Diagram of the Simplest Machines: As strange as this may seem, at the most fundamental level “a machine” is a spatial pattern working on the spaces around it. And a “thing”, in this simplest of senses, is just such a spatial pattern doing some work. Diagram from Britannica.)
Physics and chemistry are the ultimate understanding of the relation of all objects in terms of their space, shape, mass, and motion. These are very simple characteristics, and in that sense these sciences are not only simplistic but also very effective.
(A diagram of the organization of the Solar System in Newtonian terms [by James Ferguson, 1756]. In terms of distance, motion, and mass, the Solar System is almost perfectly predictable and balanced.)
Living Things
But a living thing is more independent of its environment; the relation is more complicated. This starts with a kind of wall, between it and its surroundings. The simplest of cells have a membrane and this evolved further into, what we have actually called, cell wallsfor plants. But many other parts of living things function as at least partial barriers to the outside: skin, shells, fur, (and even extending beyond the immediate body) huddling in mass (like emperor penguins), or digging holes (as in gophers and prairie dogs), making hutches, dens or nests, and even “houses” (for us humans). These are forms of insulation (from the Latin, insula, island), aseparation from some of the direct influences of the environment. It’s good design.
(Prairie Dog, a kind of squirrel that burrows and lives in large extended family units–“prairie dog towns”–that can cover many acres. Their way of life insulates them from many of this world’s harshest influences.)
By these walls, “a homeostasis” for these living individuals is facilitated. The dictionary tells us this means “internal regulatory processes” maintain “a dynamic stability” that “counteracts external disturbances.” Living things work to stay the same through many of the changes around them.
(Keeping Out “the Bad,” to Conserve “the Good”–at least from a prairie dog’s point of view. Down in the complex of burrows,food can be stored and protection found, temperatures are also moderated, 40-50 degrees F in winter [5-10 C], 60-75 degrees F in summer [15-25 C].)
How closely associated can we think of these prairie dogs? Clearly, to any one dog, the other dogs of its extended family and fellow ‘citizens of the town’ are its most immediate environment. Somewhat like a single cell in a complex organism, these dogs function together closely, live together closely, and have the same lineage. Considering that all living cells were once independently living procaryotes before the “miracle” of multicellularity, the thesis of this post—that environments can indeed be very “friendly”—is born out doubly through each cell in a dog’s body and then again in each prairie dog’s highly social life style. We can and have made our own environments!
Living or Non-Living?
But the lines between living things and non-living things has become blurred especially in recent decades, and rightly so. Living things have become increasingly understood as machine-like, and some non-living things have taken on some characteristics of the living. A quick example of each: the operation of cellular division (mitosis) and DNA copying within every cell is shockingly machine-like, but on the other hand, computers now “think”, “talk” to you on the phone, and “write” reasonable essays and stories.
But what of reproduction, one of the hallmarks of life? Living things have reproduced themselves amazingly over the course of 4 billion years, and continue to do so. One of the signature features of a living thing is that it is born of, made by, another living thing. Can a machine–of the nuts and bolts variety, or even of microchips and electricity–be thought of as capable of reproduction? None are capable of it so far.
Some of the most interesting scientific, mathematical (?) and engineering work of the WWII era focused on this question: could a machine reproduce itself? Mathematicians such as Alan Turing and John Von Newman were intrigued with the logic of it; physicists at the Manhattan Project played with some of the earliest computers in their off hours trying to discover their capabilities; engineers designed and built the first very simple robots.
(1950, engineer Claude Shannon and his maze-learning robotic mouse named “Theseus”. The maze, with re-arrangeable panels, sat atop the computer that tracked, memorized, and analyzed Theseus’s efforts. On first run, Theseus bumps into every wall until he finally stumbles his way through. On second run, he moves directly through to the exit! The final photo is of inside the box, the computer with its 1950’s technology. Shannon went on to become the founder of “information theory”. Photos from cyberneticzoo.com, and MIT Technology Review.)
In a book that has become a cult classic, The Recursive Universe(1985), William Poundstone starts its very first page with the problem of “Complexity and Simplicity” and asks us to imagine a robot whose job it was to reproduce itself:
It might wander around a warehouse, collecting all the components needed…When it had every thing, it would assemble the parts into a new machine. Then both machines would duplicate and there would be four…and then eight…and then sixteen…
Soon, by the magic of exponential production, these robots would be swarming all over that warehouse and possibly beyond. Of course, a significant level of complexity would have to have been attained. The robot would have to be able to ‘see’, and have mechanical ‘arms and hands’ supple enough to do the assembly. But also, it would need to contain the instructions needed for the job and be able to ‘read’ them, and then it would need to reproduce those instructions for its duplicate. Mathematician Von Newman proved theoretically that all this was possible, and further, that it was possible for a machine to produce a machine more complex than itself!
(Diagram of some of the Biologic Machinery in each living cell; it operates in DNA Replication. The helicase enzyme (blue triangle, mid diagram] breaks apart the original double-stranded molecule by severing the hydrogen bonds of the nucleotides. The DNA polymerases [orangish] gather the appropriate free-floating nucleotides and assembles the duplicate strands.)
This up-graded concept of “machinery” became most fruitful, not initially in robotics, but inbiology. Poundstone explains that this was the era of the discovery of DNA and its double helix. The connection was obvious to these scientists: “living cells are complex self-reproducing machines.”
Filling Our Planet
For this essay, the point is that these living machines then filled our planetand that the environment for any living thing is now largely other living things or their products. This is the basis for the general beneficent nature of an environment—its living individuals are akin to massive portions of what surrounds them!“It’s a family resemblance,” writes Lewis Thomas, a leading science essayist (in the 1970s) and head of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “The uniformity of the earth’s life [is] more astonishing than its diversity,” he urges us to consider. We are “at home” in an environment that ‘we’ have largely constructed, and we could feel and be more “at home” if we dedicated ourselves to it.
(The Atmosphere: “our earth’s protective blanket.” Prominent among the examples of Life producing its own favorable environment is the oxygen and ozone, O2 and O3, that are such a significant part of our current planet.)
The Whole of Things
Some the Earth’s latest products, people, do not understand the necessarily tight, familial, and cooperative character of the relation of an individual person to the environment of other persons, other living things, and their products. These individual persons take their apparent independence and their individual needs as overwhelmingly ascendant.It’s all about “Number One” to them, but they are mistaken.
Philosopher Dan Dennett contends that we tend to “take too much credit for our accomplishments and place too much blame on ourselves for failures.” For these individuals that ‘think that they are all that,’ the reality is their behavior is dysfunctional and their thinking is deluded. They are living parasitically off the cooperative behavior of the majority of us—“us” humans and other living creatures. If their extreme individualism would proliferate, society would crumble apart; smaller social units would have to suffice, and even those units would fall apart; human “persons“ would no longer exist, and ‘we’ would return to a form of non-human pack-living with little awareness of “self”.
A brief slogan that captures this wholistic approach to humans, to living things, and to our planet itself (in its current state) is “socialization precedes individualization!” Without the whole of thingslargely working together, we, ‘individual’ living things, would not exist as we now do.
(In the spirit of a Tibetan Medicine Mandela: We are fortunate that the whole of things as they are, is as tolerant as it is, of the diversity and complexity that we now have. Many a universe can be imagined where nothing of much interest develops,argues Dennett, Poundstone, and many others.)
(A universe of simplicity where nothing of interest develops.)
In posts in the following weeks, several prominent environments and historical situations will be discussed to illuminate their particularly “friendly” or beneficial character to “us,” the living creatures that inhabit them. The blurry line between life and non-life will also be further explored.
(Life creating its own environment, prominent instances: photo one, The Primordial Soup—deep sea vent where complex organic molecules freely floated and eventually hooked up into a more complex object, “life.” Photo two, the dawning of multicellular life—a common single-celled microbe found in soil enters its reproductive stage by “streaming” multi-celled fruiting bodies. Photo three, the ordinary sea sponge was possibly the first “animal,” but also was a communally living animal: the first “herd”, “flock” or “school”. It surrounds itself with its own off spring, relations of its own kind.)
the naturereligionconnection.org “We Don’t Seem Able to Live With Them, But We Sure Can’t Live Without Them”
Nature Religion Connection 