01.29.12

Up from materialism

Posted in General at 12:59 pm by nemo

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/rupert-sheldrakes-new-book-dogs-know-when-their-owners-are-coming-home-ergo-jesus/

We have listed two reviews of Sheldrake’s book, and the link above is to the sourpuss Coyne’s attempted squelch. But his comments are revealing of all the limits of reductionist thinking.
That said, we should note here that this problem has been solved a hundred times in the New Age movement, and the list is awaiting its 101st. It is still an unsolved problem.
In fact, the philosopher Schopenhauer was the first, and perhaps, the best here, with his category of the ‘will’ in nature, and his open acknowledgment that Platonic ideas, or idealism in general must complement materialism. And we have cited J.G. Bennett here with his variant: the triad of being, function, will. Note that matter has disappeared into ‘being’ where it is the complement to consciousness. Thus matter and consciousness are the objective/subjective poles of being.
In New Age circles, there is a useful trick to solve the problem by reclassification, and we can consider J.G. Bennett in another way: the (unacknowledged) translation of Samkhya into modern concepts, with the proposition that all entities in the universe, including the spiritual, have a material component (recall the joke of Gurdjieff about ‘weighing’ god).

These suggestions succeed by doing nothing except reslicing the pie, and pulling verbal rabbits out of a hat. The result works because it reflects reality better. How can you obsess over materialism in the realm of ideas? This stumbling block should be obvious step one, but has instead thrown materialists into frenzied attacks on idealism.
The transcendental idealism of Kant (and Schopenhauer, contra real idealists like Hegel, et al.) is a useful hybrid.
But none of these solutions have resolved the ‘noumenal’ mystery of such things as soul. The question of ‘soul’ is however probably material in a sense unknow to us. Go hunt among the sufis: they peddle ‘soul seeds’ that clearly stand outside the body, but which interact with the body senses in the lower belly. I have no idea what the real significance of this is, and there are no manuals, or faqs. It is however a clear case of the ‘material’ in a novel sense.
The moral here is that we don’t have to reject materialism. What we need is a balanced set of concepts, and, beyond that, an hypothesis of the material co-substrate of spiritual entities.
But we have so far failed to make much progress here!
But we failed to make progress with the concept of ‘energy’ for millennia. Then the problem was solved. Many of the confusions of spirituality resemble those of ‘energy’. Energy is an abstraction, we cannot see it, yet we have learned to infer its action (I didn’t even say existence) and even to measure it. Note that energy is a correlate of matter. Energy as a phenomenon must strongly resemble the ‘spiritual’ correlate of matter in fields of ‘soul’ and ‘mind’ (maybe).
Much of this can be dealt with by operational concepts: we use ‘mind’ whether we can define it or not. We speak of ‘ideas’, even if we can’t explain their status relative to matter.

In any case, the challenge to ‘materialism’ is nonetheless vital, as here with these books, because of the mirage of universality created by scientists around it. That mirage is, ironically,as illusory as the spiritual is said to be.
If you are curious about sufis, go become a fakir (beggar) in a moslem country, for some years. Maybe they will issue their substitute for a faq.

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