Reality often messes up our formal models or our less rigid schemes of how reality should work. A good thinker takes such glitches not as a sign that we can’t use models in a particular situation but rather as an invitation to think their way to a better model or perhaps to develop a more flexible understanding, perhaps a narrative structure in which some of the entities and events are describable by quantitative or qualitative mathematical models and much has to be described in a more purely qualitative way.
We need a general way of thinking this through and one of my goals has been to produce an understanding of created being which unites created being, and allows us to also see the true relationship of created being to its Maker. Specifically, I’m choosing to look at the `boundary’, which may be gradual or abrupt, between qualitative mathematical models and more purely qualitative understandings. This is roughly the domain of openended, non-deterministic narratives. This is also the domain which largely gives the setting for the more formal models and also points toward the greater story which is Creation, all the realms of created being.
I advocate the idea that relationships between and among creatures and other `abstractions’ are also a form of being. We can now abstract from matter and energy and fields to a level of reality already very abstract to us, though largely quantitative and deterministic to an extent that I’d further claim it can’t be the entire source of this concrete world’s being. That limited but extensive abstract level is described by the formalisms of quantum mechanics. Even on strictly physical grounds, it can’t be the entirety of the abstractions from which the thing-like being of this world is shaped. Spacetime comes from a different set of abstractions which may or may not be tightly linked at some highly abstract level to the abstractions of quantum mechanics. I’d go beyond what I’ve said in the previous few sentences: recognizing the dangers in consistency for its own sake, I would yet argue we get a more consistent and also more coherent description of created being if we simply consider those abstract levels (or realms) as created being. In this way of thought, I speak of concrete being as shaped from more abstract being. See How a Christian Finds Metaphysical Truths in Empirical Reality for a more complete description of my ideas, including a discussion of this very simple, almost cartoonish chart: 
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Don’t think of this chart in terms of knowledge of being but rather in terms of being which we can encapsulate in our minds so long as we respond properly to what lies outside of us, abstract being which is metaphysics and mathematics and some qualitative aspects of our concrete world and also concrete being which is chemical engineering and surgery and carpentry and child-rearing. Our vocations and avocations are created being as much as the tools and materials we use.
There is no absolute separation of abstract and concrete being. Concrete being is shaped from abstract being itself shaped from relatively more abstract being until we reach the truths God manifested as the raw stuff of this Creation, but abstract being remains yet in the lowest and most degraded things of this world.
This gives a new perspective on what a mathematical model is, including the most complex of scientific theories, say those of quantum physics or modern gravitational theory. It also gives us a way of speaking about my division of knowledge: revelation, speculation, scientific empirical knowledge, and practical empirical knowledge. (For more on this, see my freely downloadable book: Four Kinds of Knowledge.) Note also the problem I’ve created just by trying to break the bounds which were holding back human efforts to understand Creation, including human being, and to better order our own individual and communal selves: I’m forced at times to use a confusing, mixed language in which `knowledge’ seems to mean what I deny it means. But `knowledge’ had a meaning to ancient Hebrews and ancient Greeks far closer to that which I propose. For a man to know a woman was to become one with her in an act of sex and, at least to the ancient Hebrews, this implied a respectful and loving act. We can recover such an understanding of `knowledge’ and purge our thoughts and feelings and acts of the modern dualism which fragments our world in a way less plausible than the ancient split between body and soul or matter and spirit.
I propose:
For a man to know this world is to have an encapsulation of that story being told by God in his own mind, so that it shapes his feelings and thoughts and actions. If such a story is morally well-ordered, it can be the stuff of a civilization.
For a simple and short introduction to my understanding of being, see two essays I wrote early in the process of developing that understanding: A Christian View of Einstein’s and Bohr’s Debate on Reality and Quantum Mechanics and Moral Formation. In that second essay, I pointed out the similarity of Bohr’s `radical’ position to the teachings of the school of St John the Evangelist.
I’ve written of human being as a matter of heart and hands and mind—see Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?. Since we are images of God the Creator, this means we can speak, in the sense in which we already have something of a share of God’s life, of all created being as created by human mind and human heart and human hands at work along with our Father in Heaven. All three are necessary. All three acting together is truly God-like and when we share God’s life there will be no true distinction between the three. To feel is to act is to think. There will be one person even if the organs of brain and heart and hands yet exist.
I’ll quickly examine a case where some scientists applied the type of thinking associated with the study of complex dynamics (physics) to a linguistic problem. In the article, Focus: Why Language Exceptions Remain the Rule, Michael Schirber, a freelance science writer, discussed some work done by Christine Cuskley of the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy and her colleagues on an oddness which is particularly noticeable in English: Why do irregular verbs survive? Why “swept” instead of “sweeped?” Children try to apply the rules to every verb and will say “sweeped” until `corrected’ often enough that an eccentric verb form settles into their minds.
It turns out that it’s the verbs less often used which remain irregular. The force of many users, including children learning English, will lead to the use of a regular verb form so long as those many users do truly use that verb often enough.
The last paragraph of the article is a summary sufficient for my current purposes:
“The strength of this paper is that it focuses on the essential ingredients of simplified models for the evolution of language,” says Eduardo Altmann of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany. Because the new model can be solved analytically, it provides more direct access to the conditions that produce the different language states, he says. In addition to irregular verbs, Altmann imagines the model could also work for instances where two languages (or ideas or beliefs) compete.
The initial model didn’t work and the scientists complicated it, making it more accurate but at the cost of adding in a population of people with certain behaviors about adopting simpler rules or staying with the older rules—this population can’t be identified. To match reality on a global level, they had to move away from reality on a local level.
This is all very interesting but my point will be a still more general one. Because we, as individuals, are very particular, we view being from a particular perspective at any time. On the other hand, we as communal human beings, view being—including this thing-like world—from a multitude of particular perspectives which an individual can somewhat assimilate and, in a weak sense, come to understand a great deal about Creation. Of course, what we understand about Creation is always timebound and spacebound, culturally constrained, subject to our particular role and skills, and so on.
When communal forces suppress an individual’s inclination to do things more consistently and, at least arguably, better, we see the communal mind at work; this should be generalized to the conflict when any individual tries to think or feel or act in a creative way that conflicts with convention. Our communal minds are themselves far from mature, even for the simplest of communities with the simplest of roles in the life of the community which can be called mankind and is really the Body of Christ in formation. (This doesn’t mean all men will be saved into the Body of Christ in Heaven, just as it is well recognized that formal membership in the Church doesn’t imply any automatic salvation.)
In Mathematical Models of Human Communities: Randomness, I wrote:
From facts come—sometimes—patterns. We’ve become somewhat accustomed, by way of terribly vulgarized mathematics and biology and other sciences, to the idea that patterns come from `randomness’ or `chaos’. Something of an overview can be communicated to those who have not heard of Poincare or Hadamard or Duhem, Ruelle or Smale or Prigogine and to those who don’t know what a nonlinear equation is; we should wonder what sense these people make of it. We are at a more complex transition point than the one noted by Oystein Ore, prominent number theorist and teacher (see Number Theory and Its History republished by Dover Publications in 1988): in the 14th century or so, long division was coming into use and was considered to be a topic for mathematical geniuses, well beyond those even of more normal high intelligence. Nowadays, we start learning long division in mass education elementary schools, though many still have trouble with it and some can never master it even to the point of figuring how much per pound a roast costs if 4.5 pounds costs $25.
In the struggle between consistency and established convention in verb forms, we see the communal mind reluctant to change certain fundamentals of language unless it has good reasons to do so. In the ongoing expansion of the human mind’s capacity for learning what was once considered advanced mathematics in elementary school, we see the communal mind growing and maturing and individual minds somehow becoming capable of mastering skills well beyond the capacity of similar minds in earlier generations. Could the same happen with quantum mechanics and other hard theories some day? Could it happen with larger and more complex bodies of theories and concepts and narratives, such as the greater narrative of this world and the world of the resurrected set in the entirety of Creation?
We can see in the study of the irregular verbs that there is always the possibility of an imbalance between the individual mind or the communal mind. It’s hard for a people to develop individual and communal minds in a way such that both are strong and healthy, though—in principle—the strongest and most capable of individual and communal minds will develop together and co-exist. But not in peace, for we live in a world of struggle. It’s almost a cliche that some of the best literature has been written by authors fighting the constraints of implicit or explicit censorship. I think of myself as fighting an implicit censorship which is the result of willful ignorance and the resultant stupidity of Americans and most other Westerners; this censorship takes the form of a sort of Gresham-like flooding of the bookstores and movies and television lineups with mindless crap which dulls the mind and stimulates our less noble emotions and will often lead to immoral acts.
My current opinion is that we’re not in a situation where individual or communal minds have become too strong at the expense of the other. There are certainly some who think only the thoughts put into their heads by the wig-stands of the mainstream media or by the speeches of Presidents or Senators. There are also certainly those who think to break free of a morally disordered society, or perhaps to protect their own interests as they remain part of that society, by nurturing their own sense of individuality and denying what they inherited from their fellow-citizens or from men of distant times and places. This latter denial often takes the form of treating received human being as objective knowledge, that is, knowledge which can be treated as if it were x’s to be combined in logical formulations. In any case, the West in 2015 has individual and communal minds which are both weak.
We Americans are morally unordered or disordered individuals who are ignorant and functionally stupid, yet we have some sort of strong attachment to the idea that we are well-formed individuals. Our communities, and communal minds, are equally disordered and yet express a strong self-regard, unlovable and criminal communities demanding our full and unqualified love. We Americans are poorly formed individuals moving in disordered herds and we think ourselves to be at the height of human accomplishment, downright exceptional we are. Similar states hold in most Western countries though the paths to those disordered states were different and some of those other Western peoples seem to at least suspect something is profoundly wrong inside of us and our various communities.
And, yet, there is much truth in claims that we’ve reached our disordered states at least partly because of those who sought to develop our communal natures at the expense of our individual natures, because of others who sought to rip individuals from their communities or to seduce them to leave their families and other communities. Marxists and libertarians are equally committed to deformed understandings of human being.