I’m slowly reading Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature and trying to determine why I’m sympathetic to his general train of thought though I’m in opposition to some of his most important lines of thought. Maybe. It’s hard to say because he was trying hard to respond to empirical reality but he was somewhat entangled in language and concepts which simply assumed that, as one example that concerns me, human beings use something called a ‘mind’ to analyze and pass judgment upon reality. Maybe this mind is a substance or maybe just a faculty but it doesn’t seem to be grounded fully in the observable human being. I haven’t read any passages from Hume where he, in fact, explicitly stated any such beliefs on the ‘mind’, but he has written the first sections of A Treatise on Human Nature as if there is a real entity called the ‘mind’ which doesn’t seem to be a bodily organ and which is capable of accessing some realm of truths independent of our concrete world. I don’t think Hume’s heart is in this business of viewing mind as a given, mystical entity, but what choice had he? What could he have known of the remarkable properties of the human brain, properties which seem coextensive with those human aspects which were once seen as explainable only by a mystical, supernatural ‘mind’ or ‘soul’. What could Hume have known of the remarkable properties of the matter from which the brain is made? Empirically oriented thinkers such as Aristotle and Aquinas also backed off on this issue, positing — with one degree of certainty or another — the existence of an immaterial mind or soul because of their time-bound and well-justified belief that matter wasn’t plastic enough for abstract thinking.
Hume didn’t know, and can’t be blamed for not knowing, that the visual system, eyes to visual processing systems to higher level creation of a surrounding environment, is shaped in response to actual experience. There were interesting experiments done on some poor kittens when I was young. If they weren’t exposed to, say, vertical lines, when their visual systems were developing, they’d be blind to them all their lives. It would be sadistically comical, I guess, to watch them continually run into vertical wooden rails and they’d still not perceive them with their eyes.
This is to say that our eyes and brains don’t just process experience and allow it to form ideas in some sort of generic idea-processing organ. Our organs, speaking more generally than I usually do, are shaped by our responses to our environments. Our hearts and thigh muscles are shaped to wolf-like standards of endurance if we are, for example, nomadic hunters. Our eyes and visual systems see, at least more accurately, what we’ve responded to during crucial periods in our development. Our bodies are manifestations of our relationships to our environments and our minds, at their best, are more or less accurate images of God’s acts-of-being. You can think of acts-of-being as manifestations of God’s thoughts. In those manifestations, even the most humble of things, we can perceive thoughts of God and shape our minds to be embodiments of those particular thoughts of God.
In my writings, I’ve been trying to speak of a new way of understanding what ‘mind’ and ‘thinking’ really mean. I’ve not yet figured out a good way to say clearly what this new way really is, but I’ll try again. Let me present a crude diagram of the traditional view of the relationship between absolute truths, God, and Creation:
+----------------+ +------------+ +------------+
| | | | | |
| Rules of logic | | | | |
| | | | | |
| and other | | | | Concrete |
| | ===> | God | ===> | |
| metaphysical | | | | Creation |
| | | | | |
| truths | | | | |
+----------------+ +------------+ +------------+
^
| ^
| |
|
| +------------+
| | Human |
+===================================> | |
| Thinkers |
| |
+------------+
We should notice first of all that human thinkers stand outside the flux and uncertainty, at least in principle. This isn’t to say that even Plato thought man could bypass the uncertainty in his perceptions of empirical reality, only that the human mind could — in principle — operate as if born in a state of intellectual grace, god-like and not ‘fallen’ into mere concrete reality. In Plato’s allegory, as beautiful and powerful as it is wrong, man is chained in a cave where he sees only shadows of reality but he can escape if only for a short time and only if he has some sort of great motivation. Again, the uncertainty of our worldly knowledge is inherent in the world and in our current circumstances rather than being a natural result as a creature explores its world and struggles to understand it.
Hume, and a few others, moved towards an empirical view that was entirely inside the third box but stayed with the big picture. Somehow, a fully empirical creature, that is an entity belonging to Creation, could judge worldly knowledge as if it had a mind which wasn’t quite a creaturely entity, but… Confusion of a sort reigned, if not detected by most readers, but some modern thinkers were moving in the right direction even before historians of human thought, such as Snell or Onians began their work, even before the neuroscientists, such as Broca and Ramon y Cajal, began their work.
Based upon my understanding of modern empirical knowledge and the ways in which human beings shape their minds, I’d change the above diagram to this:
+------------+ +----------------+ +------------+ | | | | | | | | | Rules of logic | | Concrete | | | | | | | | | | and other | | Creation | | God | ===> | | ===> | | | | | metaphysical | | (including | | | | | | | | | | truths | | man) | +------------+ +----------------+ +------------+
Moreover, I’ve claimed that middle box is actually a part of Creation, what I call the Primordial Universe. It’s the manifested truths from which concrete worlds are created, this world and the world of the resurrected. That second box is with us in this world of the third box. We can see it clearly in the abstractions, such as the initially strange mathematics of relativity theory with its intertwining of space and time or of quantum mechanics where mathematical certainty and elegance is found in wave-functions which then collapse to concrete electrons or photons in ways that seem so ugly under traditional ways of thought.
With these diagrams in place, let me repeat a few things I’ve said often in my writings so that I can indicate how all of this ties back to cause and effect. Note first that in my model, the burden for verifying reason has been taken away from the human thinker who is himself embedded in concrete creation. Thought is more or less the processes by which man learns to bring the truth in things into his mind, to encapsulate it as the thinking processes of that mind which is then capable of moving on to ever more abstract truths which I’ve claimed to be so thing-like that things are shaped from then. This explains the ways of modern mathematicians and physicists, and increasingly other sorts of thinkers who deal with abstractions. We don’t have minds equipped with the circuitry of abstract reasoning which then simply need ‘facts’ to operate upon. We, most especially creative thinkers such as Einstein and Melville, are embedded in the thoughts God manifested in this world and we need to learn how to perceive those thoughts, whether manifested as the concreteness of a hunk of metal or the abstractness of the subatomic particles which give that hunk of metal its properities. We need to learn how to let our minds move along with human approximations to those concrete and abstract manifestations of the thoughts of a rational Creator.
Man is embedded in a world which seems at first to be made of concrete entities which ‘obey’, to some extent, abstract laws. As man has increased his knowledge of empirical reality, his best thinkers have started to work as if the abstractions are as inherent to this thing-like world as are the nails and semiconductors. The theories of relativity and of quantum mechanics deal not with abstractions which time, space, and matter obey. They are the behavior of time, space, and matter. They are also the proper thoughts of a physicist rather than being theories he processes with some sort of ‘mind’ which can stand in judgment upon those theories.
My ideas arise from an effort to openly and honestly respond to what we know of our world and I’m motivated by a Christian faith that the transcendental God freely and willingly took on a role as a certain sort of all-powerful and all-knowing and all-loving Creator. No matter how strange the discoveries of modern empirical knowledge might seem, they are revelations of manifested thoughts of that Creator. If matter interacts in such a way as to indicate cause-and-effect relationships, if we can develop theories about those interactions which include those relationships in a necessary way, we aren’t forming some abstract picture of concrete things so much as we are seeing abstract aspects which are part of concrete things. We are seeing the inherent behavior of thing-like being. We are seeing not abstractions in the sense of mental acts of imagination but rather abstract levels of the being from which those things are made.
I get this impression that Hume had an instinct that something like this is true but he didn’t have the empirical knowledge or the abstract thinking tools to form a more coherent view uniting the concrete (billiard-balls) and the abstract (cause-and-effect relationships). Even now, in this time after Cantor and Einstein, Melville and Wallace Stevens, I’m having a great deal of trouble setting down my views on what a human mind is and how it forms, what it’s relationship is to our world, but I think I’m moving a bit closer to a clear statement of my views. To do this, I’m beginning to speak a different language than those around me. I’m pretty sure that even if there are problems in my work, even if someone else finds a better way to deal with these matters, I’m speaking a childish version of a language not to be spoken in a mature form for a generation or more. At that time, richer concepts of being, including both concrete and abstract levels, will be as natural to well-educated youngsters as Darwinian ideas of life and Einsteinian ideas of time and space are now. Those richer concepts of being will, of course, include those Darwinian and Einsteinian ideas, or some more advanced and more sophisticated versions of those ideas.