What’s it like to be a bat? That question was a matter of debate in certain philosophical circles a decade or two ago. I read a some contributions to that debate and remember at first feeling sympathy for the arguments of those who were considered champions of the mind as something that is independent of the flesh-and-blood body in such a way as to imply mind has a separate substance — ‘mind-stuff’. A surprising number of Christians feel this way, feel that we have minds made of some mysterious ‘mind-stuff’. Supporters of that viewpoint — Christian or otherwise, as I recall, tended to believe a human being couldn’t truly know what it’s like to be a bat because of the belief that there is something qualitatively unique which could be labeled the ‘human mind’.
I’m opposed to any absolute dualism but that of Creator/creature or necessary/contingent being — all created being is shaped from the Primordial Universe in my way of thought. As a consequence, I’m willing to see unity in Creation and to see man as truly belonging — for now — to this universe which is his birthplace and his place of formation. I’m also opposed to philosophies which are typically labeled as ‘monist’ largely because they don’t allow God to act freely, binding Him by chains of necessity to this universe which is ultimately a confusion of God and this universe.
As a Christian, I should add that the true ‘dualism’ comes down to a difference between God in His own necessary Being and God as a Creator who chose freely to create from nothing and then to shape this world from the truths He had manifested in His primary act of Creation — I call that primary manifestation the Primordial Universe. Thus, even the dualism between Creator and creature is really a dualism between (God as necessary Being) and (God as Creator acting freely).
And, yet, there is that weaker dualistic relationship between Creator and creature. This relationship is weaker in that it’s hard to understand how we can be, in any sense, independent of our all-powerful Creator. Yet, He has told us we have some sort of freedom and that implies we can move on our own. We’re not just puppets and our wills, while far from truly ‘free’, are not bound in the way or to the extent that some, such as Martin Luther, have thought. What sense can we make of this? To make sense of this is — from our creaturely viewpoint — to understand sense and to understand mind.
By looking at so-called ‘radical’ interpretations of quantum mechanics (such as that of Niels Bohr) through the lenses of an updated Thomistic existentialism, I’ve settled in upon what might be called an existentialism as well as a relationalism — to coin an ugly philosophical term. I plan to explore what was said of relations by Leibniz, Bradley, and others, but I don’t expect to find much of use in their writings if — as a I suspect — they thought like Einstein in his debate with Bohr: relations occur between substances which pre-exist those relationships and also remain unchanged by those relationships. It’s not relations as accidents of substances that concerns me but rather relationships as God’s acts of creation and shaping which concern me, and also secondary relationships as creaturely acts of shaping.
A mind shaped to understand substances is a mind shaped to understand matters of secondary importance. I don’t make that as a disparaging comment. We all have to deal with substance, including that which is our own selves. To deal well with substance is itself noble. In doing this, we reach for some sort of creaturely perfection, and, yet, we imitate God most fully by passing beyond substance, penetrating to the relationships which bring substance into being and other relationships which shape that substance into particular beings. The human mind reaches its peak when it most fully imitates God as Creator and Shaper. This is analogical to another distinction we might make between:
- those who know well the laws God has given us by revelation and in the nature of this universe; and
- those who understand love, the primary relationship.
A well-formed mind sees the relationships which underly reality, shaping what God has created. If that mind also has faith, it may even see the relationship of love by which God created from nothing.
Perhaps I could say the mind is the relational aspects of the human being. As such, it’s tied very strongly to the human body and its various external relationships.
I’m once again floundering a little because I’m trying to form thoughts for which I have only vague concepts. I’m not confident yet where I’m heading and, thus, more than a bit reluctant to re-define words or coin new words. I may find some help in various books that discuss quantum mechanics but probably will find no help at all in the more traditional literature of philosophy. It’s not that scientists are more clearheaded thinkers than philosophers, not by a long shot — some of each are geniuses at philosophical modes of thought and some of each are not. It is the case that the weird facts of quantum mechanics have forced honest thinkers to realize that the world isn’t always so impressed with traditional metaphysical thought. Some of the best thinkers in the field of quantum mechanics are the philosophers who’ve come in to see what they could make of the evidence, including Kurt Hubner, whose “Critique of Scientific Reason” played a major role in helping me to understand the debate between Einstein and Bohr. (See A Christian view of Einstein’s and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality.)
God’s ways are not our ways and it seems that the truths He manifested in this universe are greater than those which the traditions of metaphysics would have us believe. I’ve spoken of this in various postings (such as Hellenistic Metaphysics is Too Small) and also in my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand. I’ve never said that Hellenistic metaphysics is wrong just as I would never say that Hellenistic mathematics is wrong. Heraclitus and Plato and Aristotle laid down foundational thought in metaphysics just as Pythagoras and Euclid and Archimedes did in mathematics. God’s creation has forced us to expand greatly upon those foundations. I think that a reincarnated Plato would agree with this if he were to survey modern physics and mathematics. Aquinas did agree with this, at least in principle, by nothing an implication of the development of philosophical thought in its early centuries — metaphysics uses the specific sciences.
A greatly expanded understanding of the possibilities of physics and mathematics would lead to a greatly expanded understanding of the possibilities of metaphysics. At least, it should. In general, it hasn’t done so. Our age might provide interesting materials for the study of future historians of human thought. With that burst of creativity in mathematics and physics during the 19th century and the early 20th century, why have we not seen a burst of creativity in metaphysics and theology? Something has happened to stunt our imaginations so that our minds haven’t expanded into the greater regions of Creation which we have perceived very faintly.
Forgive me if I repeat myself repeatedly while I play around with ways to formulate ideas which are still too faint.
As I interpret matters, modern science is best explained by an existentialist philosophy emphasizing relationships rather than substance. It’s far from coincidence that a philosophy that explains the universe also is consistent with the revelations of the Creator about His purposes in creating and also His revelations about His own Transcendent Act-of-being. Without getting into the details, or even knowing many of them, I can say that Niels Bohr’s ‘radical’ way of understanding physical reality is quite consistent with that greatest of all theological poems: the first 18 verses of chapter 1 of “The Gospel According to John”.
It’s hardly surprising that it’s taken so many centuries to understand the revelations in the Bible. St. Thomas Aquinas saw much but lived in the very early decades of the expansion of modern empirical knowledge. Rather than being a creature whose imagination can outrun the possibilities of our world, man is a creature who needs to shape his imagination and mind by learning of the wonders of our world. Moreover, the world is such that understanding it seems to let us see, however tentatively, before and beneath the world. We can penetrate to the manifested truths from which our world is shaped. And, to give credit where credit is due, it is the mathematicians and physicists, historians and poets, of the modern world who have given us the materials and the attitudes to let us shape our minds to be entities wondrous beyond even infinities greater than infinity, beyond black-holes, beyond the evidence that we live in a dynamic and developmental world. We can see beyond this world to the Creation of which it is part.
We can know what it’s like to be a bat or a black-hole, just because we can have some understanding of the relationships which shape the stuff of the Primordial Universe into this world and then shape particular chunks of this world into bats or black-holes.
We have to reason to the importance of relationships, by various routes, because we can’t see relationships while we can see substance including the response of substantial beings to relationships. We think of that substance, physical matter as being primary, but science hints otherwise. I’ll not speak of primary creation, that is God’s act-of-being by which He created from nothing. When we consider secondary creation — what I call shaping, we enter the strange logical mazes of quantum mechanics where the state of a photon in one part of the lab is provably dependent upon what happens to a corresponding photon in another part of the lab and dependent in such a way as to imply instantaneous communication, faster than the speed of light.
There are two tentative conclusions to be drawn from these sorts of experiments:
- Substantial being in this universe is linked, at the quantum level, in ways that don’t seem to affect ordinary behavior. The quantum level is measured by energy — it’s not necessarily small in size but rather small in energy changes. I’m not attempting to downgrade the importance of this insight by qualifying it. Those links even imply an entanglement of all parts of the universe — your body is part of systems that include stars which are billions of light-years away.
- Collapse of a vaguely defined particle to one state of being occurs by some interaction. Many scientists and writers of popular science refer to this interaction as observation, often entangling this issue with that of consciousness. It seems to me to be more true to describe this interaction as the formation of a relationship.
This supports my general claim in “To See a World…” that God manifested the truths which underly Creation as some sort of homogeneous being, the Primordial Universe, which is perfectly bound together — at least from a creaturely viewpoint, containing not a hint of thing-like being, of particularity as we know it. When God began to shape this universe, He shattered that Primordial Universe, or a part of it, making a number of particles which formed, if you will, a clay-like raw substance. This raw substance of our universe is what physicists are researching in accelerators and in astrophysical work that starts from observations of the universe in its very early stages. And it is those physicists who have also found hints of the unity which still exists to some extent.
God began shaping this clay to tell a story, a story which can be fully and truly seen only by Him.
Mind is a more direct access to the relationships which underly our world, which are the bridge from the Primordial Universe and this universe of particular, thing-like being. In this way of speaking, mind will remain the bridge between the Primordial Universe and the incorruptible world of the resurrected.
To think is to penetrate to the relationships which form and shape the things and events of our universe, even to penetrate so deep as to be able to speak of the Primordial Universe or of the world of the resurrected. Being manifested truths, the Primordial Universe is somewhat a world of pure relationships.
To an extent that might surprise many, including some great metaphysicians, thinking is a matter of exploratory narratives. I’m about to dive into some works about the re-envisioning of thought in evolutionary biological terms. I don’t have any problems with non-ideological efforts of that sort but I do think that philosophers, as opposed to biological scientists working within the domain of verifiability, should think in terms of narratives which add purpose to the flow of events and return us, oddly enough, to metaphysics of the Hellenistic sort though necessarily enlarged in a way that corresponds to the modern enlargement of mathematics and physics — and other branches of empirical learning.
To think narratively is to think not only in terms of purposes but also in terms of relationships, not just among the living characters but also relationships with the particular environments of those characters.
I’ve already claimed that the human mind, founded upon the human brain, is the only known entity in this world which is capable of encapsulating the world, the physical universe seen as morally ordered to God’s purposes. This possibility of encapsulating the world is very much a matter of principle and not of fact because of our ‘smallness’ and our various frailties.
Yet, this power of encapsulating God’s world in our minds gives us a way of sharing in God’s acts-of-being. As God creates from nothing and as He shapes what He has created into particular worlds, we can imitate Him in the way of a child imitating his father at work with his saws and chisels. We pick up a stick and pretend to saw another stick.
In principle, we can know what it’s like to be a bat, or even a star collapsing into a black-hole. Our powers of abstraction and of generalization, both mathematical and literary, allow us to build bridges into other forms of being, at least other forms of being shaped in this universe, shaped to God’s purposes to be the story which is this world, a morally ordered narrative.
We can think of our powers of knowing what it’s like to be a bat or a collapsing star in terms of my chronology of God’s work of creating and shaping. By our powers of abstraction and generalization, we move back in time, or down into the depths of our own physical stuff, to that strange stuff of the Primordial Universe. In these terms, the process of imagining what it’s like to be something non-human in our universe is much like that of creatively thinking about abstract mathematics except the journey to abstract mathematics may by only in that downward direction — when abstract mathematics is used directly to understand some aspect of the physical world, a return-journey occurs. When we do this, when we try to understand the world and not just to imagine being something — the efforts may be intertwined, we’re imagining what it’s like to participate with God in some of His work of shaping what He has created from nothing.