10.24.08
Many dualisms…
This is the article referred to earlier today, as I critiqued its trashing at Pharyngula, Creationists declare war over the brain. Despite the interest of the question, and the challenge to current redutionism, I don’t, needless to say, automatically agree with these views. The association with the ID/Discovery Institute nexus suggest the brain/mind question will end up in the same useless deadlock that the evolution debate is in.
But, while The Spiritual Brain, by O’Leary et al. is surely flawed it raises issues that passably challenge the standard reductionist view.
In fact, one problem is that Christian belief systems so blinker thinking that the spiritual psychologies outstanding in various traditions, far superior, are excluded as somehow heretical. Thus naive dualism does indeed fail. The Gurdjieff Con blog has a few discussions of the systems of Samkhya, and the modern renditions of the writer J.G. Bennett. While I don’t endorse such thinking, they do expose the problems with reductionist neuroscience, whose status is difficult to evaluate.
“YOU cannot overestimate,” thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, “how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You’re gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about… how Darwin’s explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it… I’m asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality.”
Materialism fails, OK, but then what is the opposite of materialism? This is the standard dialectic, the dualism question.
But what is the dualism between the material and the spiritual? This is a bunch of words.
Consider the following dualisms:
material/spiritual
hardware/software
material/X
X/Y
body/soul
material_2/material_2
phenomenal/noumenal
existence/essence
temporal/non-temporal
spatial/non-spatial
and finally:
material_1/material_2/material_3/material_4/… and
body/soul/spirit
the list could go on and on…
thing-like/idea-like, etc…
There are many unknowns here we can see that the terminology of ‘material/spiritual’ is misleading and probably played out.
The point is that there could be different kinds of materiality, or a host of different ways to resolve a spiritual psychology in material or other terms, if we could make the proper observations of the entities relevant, if they exist
The obstinate reality is the phenomenal/noumenal boundary indicated by Kant. Soul, a useless word, (material perhaps) may well exist in one of the above formats, but we don’t detect it. That leaves a Kantian indecidability dilemma: if we stick to the observable, we lose. If we speculate about the unobservable, we go astray in metaphysics. We MUST take into account of fuller ‘self, visible, invisible’, but we cannot succeed and remain dimensioned down.
Here science falls into the trap, perhaps, by saying there is no reality beyond the phenomenal. Human intuitions will never agree.
In any case our list above shows the hopeless confusion of terms that surrounds the question of dualism.
Scientists aren’t very helpful here. At the minimum they should distinguish the hardware/software distinction, a real duality that need cause no metaphysical confusion.