I continue to write about the insights on human nature and the philosophical system explicated in the book: How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman, Columbia University Press, 2000.
The examples of the athlete and dancer demonstrate what I consider to be the three main properties of intentionality. The first is unity. Our brains and bodies are entirely committed to the actions of projecting ourselves corporeally into the world, and our perceptions are unified across all our senses at rates faster than we can perceive. Here I distinguish between the self, which is unified, and the awareness of self that we experience as the ego, which is not unified but can be splintered like sunlight on waves. The second property is wholeness: the entirety of life’s experience is brought to each moment of action. The experiences of games and dancing are generalized and continually built upon. It includes an effort, described by Aristotle and again by Goethe two centuries ago, as a blind, organic striving towards realizing our full potential within the constraints of heredity and environment. The third property of intentionality is purpose or intent, because, whether athletes and dancers are aware of it or not, their actions are directed to some end.
So perception is a continuous and mostly unconscious process that is sampled and marked intermittently by awareness, and what we remember are the samples, not the process. The fact that consciousness need not enter into the description of intentionality opens a new vista. Consciousness is not a good place to start a theory of brain function… [page 18]
Professor Freeman’s three criteria — unity, wholeness, and purpose — correspond rather well to the three criteria I use for defining a world or a person — unity, completeness, and coherence. I borrowed these three criteria from Michael’s Oakeshotte’s early work, Experience and Its Modes. For these initial discussions, I’ll take completeness and wholeness to be the same and also coherence and purpose (or intent).
Freeman talks of these criteria as being, in some sense, the result of “a blind, organic striving towards realizing our full potential within the constraints of heredity and environment.” We move towards that full potential but I see a higher hurdle before those three criteria become realized: we become persons when we belong to Christ and are infused with the Lord’s own Being. I have to confess, it’s hard to see the universe as a world yet because it’s moving towards that state but can only reach it apocalyptically, so to speak.
Though I don’t know exactly how I’ll get there, I’m headed towards an understanding of neurobiology under two constraining assumptions:
- As claimed by St. Thomas Aquinas, the human mind is shaped by the human being’s responses to its environment. In my interpretation of this principle given modern empirical knowledge, I conjecture that the best possible development of a human mind occurs when he at least dimly perceives something like the universe of Einstein, or at least the Cosmos of the ancients, and then is able to see that physical universe seen as ordered to God’s purposes
- As claimed by the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, we must move with the grain of the universe to become Christ-like. This is right in line with Romans 8, where the universe itself is moving towards some sort of redemption, along with our bodies. This universe, this world when seen as a story God decided to tell, is our birthplace and our teacher, not our enemy nor the domain of some Enemy. (Arguably, Aquinas must have assumed this in his claim, but Yoder made it admirably explicit in shocking terms.)
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These claims are part of the same truth: we are to shape ourselves, most obviously our minds, to the revealed truths of God. This involves a two-pronged effort in which the prongs are somewhat parallel but connected to each other. The two prongs form a complicated network when all the minor branches and interconnections are considered. First, we need to truly hear God’s revelations which come to us from the Bible and from traditional Christian forms of worship and prayer. Second, we need to understand the nature of God’s world, in its physical aspects and in the moral trajectory of life on earth.
God speaks to us in the most physical aspects of this phase of His Creation. To talk about the ‘moral trajectory’, we can understand the evolution of moral nature, especially amongst social mammals, as being consistent with the messages we hear in the Sermon on the Mount and in the story of Christ’s mission, suffering, death, and resurrection. Then we must see the biological development of each individual moral creature as being also on that ‘moral trajectory’. Without Christ, the perfection demanded in the Sermon on the Mount would have been absurd — and should still seem absurd to those who don’t believe in Christ’s divinity. With Christ, modern empirical knowledge about the evolution of moral behavior in rodents and primates can be seen as moving very slowly and fitfully towards that point that lies outside of this mortal world in which order and disorder struggle as God tells the story He wishes to tell.
This is a line of thought both complicated and complex and it can’t be developed in a short blog entry. I’ll soon start serious work on a book dealing with human moral nature in the context of Christian truths. Until then, it suffices to say that it’s not coincidence that Michael Oakeshotte’s profoundly insightful list of the attributes of a world — unity, wholeness, and purpose — and Walter J. Freeman’s insightful list of the attributes of a ‘self’ — unity, coherence, and completeness — are pretty much the same. If these attributes are put in the context of a complete Thomistic existentialism, then we see that a Christ-like human being — a person in my terminology — is a human animal that has shaped itself to the truths manifested in God’s world, the physical universe seen in light of God’s purposes. In this context, I should add that this universe can be seen as God’s world only in the light of Christ, He Who is Light itself.