What is Mind?: Part 2. Rules or Context?

I’ve argued that moral reasoning has the nature of narrative, a story, rather than being reasoning about axiomatic principles. This is certainly the most reasonable standard for Christians who accept the reality of the Incarnation. The Son of God didn’t come in glory carrying books on systematic theology and other supporting works in logic and mathematics and science and philosophy. He came among us, being born a seemingly ordinary baby, grew up to become a carpenter and then an itinerant preacher of sorts. He lived a life, a concrete life in which He showed preference for some human beings over others, for some forms of life over others, for some forms of human virtue over others.

I’ll not pretend to be developing a ‘neutral’ or ecumenical theory of the mind. My theory of mind assumes an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving Creator is manifesting His thoughts in the physical reality of which we are part. The human mind, when it develops properly, is a more or less complete, more or less accurate, encapsulation of God’s world. The world is a manifestation of certain thoughts of God, thoughts loved by God Himself and loved in an active way so that they became real in a creaturely way.

Our minds are not just some sort of mechanism for processing raw data about, say, the life-cycle of stars. Our minds develop by proper response to the realization that stars are not immortal entities but rather physical objects which develop from diffuse clouds of gas which compress…and so forth. An astrophysicist will himself live the life of a star, so to speak, in the process of bringing that star into the greater story of a galaxy and the still greater story of the universe. His thoughts, so to speak, are not about a star so much as they are thoughts about what it’s like to be a star.

If we consider our immediate environments and the universe as a whole as content-laden, then our brains are shaped by our response to that content but we encapsulate that content in the very ways in which our neurons are connected. Our minds, the relational aspects of our brains, reach out into our environments, even to the very edges of the universe as we currently consider it. We imitate God by playing, in the way of children learning to behave as adults. The game we play is to encapsulate reality in the very stuff and operations of our minds, making those manifested thoughts of God our very own thoughts. It’s harder for us to enter the realm of the abstract though our world was shaped from a more abstract realm of manifested truths, the truths which are the particular thoughts of God which He wished to manifest as objective reality, a reality which takes on a life of its own with a proper creaturely freedom.

As Creator, God loved one particular Creation in an active way, bringing it into existence. That Creation is one possibility out of a set of possibilities which is almost certainly describable as ‘absolutely infinite’ in size. The interested reader can refer to my published book (To See a World in a Grain of Sand) or some of my earlier entries, such as (The Christian in the Universe of Einstein: 2.1. God as the Creator of Truths) for preliminary discussions of the mathematical issues.

The study of empirical reality, including philosophy and mathematics as well as physics and biology, is the study of God in His contingent acts, but truly the study of God. Even when He acts to create and shape empirical reality, even when He tells the story which is Creation, He is still God and not some intermediary Demiurge. Nor is the universe something which somehow came into being in opposition to God. Nor is the universe something stolen by demons. The universe is the manifestation of certain thoughts of God.

We are images of God not because of some mystical and supernatural soul or mind — we are physical creatures of this universe, born into this universe and shaped to perhaps be capable of living as the companions of Christ in a different sort of universe. We are images of God the Creator because the human mind is the sort of entity capable — in principle only — of encapsulating this universe and more. In our imitative way, we can think God’s creative thoughts. We imitate God not in His completeness and His transcendent Being but rather in His freely chosen acts as Creator.

We are capable of encapsulating more than just this universe because this universe seems to certainly be but a phase of Creation, though I’m not sure phase is the right term. What I called the ‘Primordial Universe’ in my book, is the basic stuff of Creation, the manifestation of the truths God chose freely. Somehow, we seem to be able to think the thoughts which are manifested in that general and more abstract stuff of the Primordial Universe. In a way, this isn’t so surprising if our very stuff, the stuff of stars, and the stuff of magnetic fields and strong nuclear forces, are all shaped from that abstract stuff. I can’t claim to tie this argument down, nor do I believe it necessary or even possible to explain the range of human thought in explicit terms. We are characters in a story and have to move with the action of the story, with the grain of the universe. There is, in fact, no reason to believe our Author made us the way we are for any reason but His love for us. We are, in our own way, complex facts brought into existence by God. We can understand much about ourselves but not necessarily by way of reducing ourselves to elementary components.

In any case, the Primordial Universe is yet with us, underlying our being and surrounding it. It allows us to think in terms of transfinite set theory and other extremely abstract systems which are seemingly distant from our concrete universe, however useful they are in helping us to understand this concrete reality. To put it simply: we human beings are part of Creation as a whole and not just part of this universe. Perhaps more basically: the universe is a part of Creation as a whole and is a particular shaping of the truths God manifested in the Primordial Universe.

The human mind is not a free-standing entity which processes information and facts the way that a steel-mill processes iron ore. The mind builds itself of the materials it processes and does so by those very processes. In this, the human mind or relational aspects of the human being is no different from the human body. The bread we eat and the wine we drink is not just processed — it becomes part of our body in the deepest sense. What we watch or learn becomes part of us, a frightening claim if we look honestly at the entertainment to which we’ve chosen to subject our selves and our children.

Neither our bodies nor our minds are sealed off from our environments. More serious thinkers, spiritual geniuses and poets as well as physicists, blend into the universe and into God’s story which is this world — that is, the universe seen in light of God’s purposes. In physical terms, we can think of our bodies living in seas of oxygen and other gases, breathing them in and also breathing in the various bacteria and fungus spores. Some of that oxygen soon becomes, quite literally, a part of our bodies strictly defined. Some of those bacteria take up residence in our guts, being part of us in another way — they can help us digest our food. Others attack us and can kill us after long periods of suffering.

The mind, immaterial but perhaps the core ‘component’ of the human being, shapes itself into an image, an imitation, of God in His role as Creator. That shaping process is possible because the universe, part of the greater Creation, is a manifestation of God’s thoughts in His role as Creator, the thoughts He freely chose to manifest in a way that they took on some limited independence from Him, becoming objects of His love rather than simply thoughts of His. At the same time, we have to remember that this universe moves towards God’s purposes by way of struggles between order and disorder. Sometimes, disorder can win temporarily so that great evil can come to life. Though that evil will itself move towards God’s purposes, we can destroy ourselves by letting that evil into our own selves, perhaps by watching some of the latest and greatest products of our entertainment industry.

Briefly, I’ll summarize the reason for thinking the human mind is the core ‘component’ the human being, though a human being is physical and the human mind is immaterial. In earlier postings, I’d noted how I’ve come to take the side of Niels Bohr against Albert Einstein in their famous debate on the meaning of reality. Bohr saw relationships as primary, even as bringing substantial beings into existence, though I don’t know that he realized so clearly the meaning of his position. Einstein saw substances as primary and thought of substantial beings as having relationships that didn’t change those substantial beings.

All created things play a role in helping God to bring itself and other things into being. As a consequence, all creatures, all particles of matter, all specks of time and space, are intertangled in ways that physicists and philosophers are just starting to explore. To be part of this universe is to be entangled with all our fellow-beings, even those stars ten billion light-years away from us. Though most physical processes follow ordinary rules of cause and effect, we have little reason to believe right now that these relationships and the implied acts of shaping are constrained by our understandings of time and space. In fact, there is some evidence from quantum mechanics that these very basic relationships aren’t constrained in such ways.

The human mind is unique in being capable of rising to awareness of those entanglements and can even willing choose to entangle itself more fully with its environments and the entities in those environments in its acts of trying to encapsulate what is actually well beyond the capacity of any particular human mind but that of Jesus Christ. And there are some hints in the Bible that the Son of God emptied Himself in such a way that He didn’t understand all of His own Creation while He was yet growing and maturing. He may have been wise beyond His years but His divine and absolutely infinite mind probably was somewhat detached from His human nature until near the end of His life. In His perfected, post-Resurrection human being, there was full union of divine and human mind and thus His human mind had full access to that absolutely infinite mental power.

As is my habit, I’ll risk being repetitive because I know I speak of common issues in ways that don’t seem too common. I push the language hard, having to use words and even grammatical structures in unusual ways. I often find myself stretching beyond my own understanding, but every true pioneer will find himself in alien territory. By constantly trying to make the same points from slightly different directions, I hope to better forge a language and a body of concepts which could be described as Thomistic Existentialism updated to consider modern empirical knowledge — as I already advertise it to be.

When the human mind is developed in an optimal way, it has a relationship to all of reality which is imitative of God’s relationship as Creator to His Creation. He brought the Primordial Universe into being from nothing and then shaped this universe from that Primordial Universe. After the basic shaping, He continued to shape things, comets and elks and human beings, and, in fact, to continuously create all of Creation by acts-of-being, existential acts. We can’t bring anything into existence from nothing and our ability to shape is far less than that of our Creator but we have frighteningly great power to shape our immediate environments, and to destroy them, to shape those human being over whom we have influence, or to destroy them.

Our thoughts are not just in our own heads. The thoughts of an astrophysicist are found in his instruments, his collections of data, his techniques of analysis, and his understandings of what all this means. This is to say that his thoughts are, in principle, in those stars and black holes and in the developmental patterns of the universe. Michael Polanyi pointed out that tools are extensions of our bodies, even in the strong sense that a surgeon’s scalpel probably becomes part of that mapping of his body which his brain makes. This is what makes prosthetics work so well in some cases — the artificial limb doesn’t become the natural limb but it becomes part of the body mapping in place of that natural limb. I’m making a similar but somewhat more vague claim for our thoughts. Our thoughts are contained in our tools — not just the ones so intimate as to become parts of our body mappings, in our social relationships, in all of our habits and customs, in our languages — poetic like Gaelic or flat and prosaic like English, in our books and our musical traditions and even our recorded music. Like physical tools, all the objects of our attention, and the techniques behind them, become part of our mapping of our worldviews and our own selves.

If this is so, then we are historical creatures to a greater extent than we might think. We can, in principle, know what it’s like to be any creature, including a bat hunting for mosquitoes or a scout leading the advance of the Gaelic tribes as they entered Ireland more than 2500 years ago. But that assumes that bat and that Gaelic scout are part of their environments, shaped by their contexts. It is the environments we understand and then we creatively imagine the sort of particular creature that could have been shaped by any particular environment. We can’t become a particular existing bat, but we can imagine what it’s like to be a creature having a specific set of relationships with a particular sort of environment. A follower of Einstein’s position would logically say that is far less than knowing what it’s like to be a bat, believing there to be some sort of ‘bat’ substance independent of its environment and its relationships with that environment and other creatures. A follower of Bohr would logically say the relationships of a bat are what create that bat. St. John the Apostle seemed to be saying pretty much the same in teaching that God’s acts of love are His acts of creation. I stand with Bohr and even more so with St. John the Apostle.

Depending upon our attitudes, we are either in a very bad situation or a very good situation. We can view ourselves as prisoners of our contexts, of the positions in which we were placed by God and whatever we make of those positions. Whatever we can imagine ourselves to be, we have to return to our own selves and our own contextual positions to eat and sleep and defend ourselves. Sartre, who was an atheist, took a pessimistic view of our insubstantial being and our lack of control over our being — a wrongful view held for the right reasons. A thinker unable to shed his thoughts of the modern infatuation with individualism should be in despair, not because of some presumed radical separation from whatever created us — a Lutheran or Barthian separation from God would negate our existence. Such a thinker should rather be in despair because an individual can be such only if he is primarily a being of substance over which he himself can, in principle, gain some serious degree of control. Sartre understood the real implications of modern individualism.

Alternatively, we can see ourselves as parts of a much greater whole but unique parts capable of understanding the whole, not in the way of axiomatic reasoning but in the way of moving with the grain of the universe, of making God’s story also our story set in our deepest parts. If we side with Bohr and St. John, and if we are willing to see this as a necessary good — we are what we are — then we move on to try to control our relationships inthe proper way. In my case, I returned to Christianity at a time when I didn’t really enjoy prayer or worship and I had a struggle reading the Bible. The next 20 years were a series of ups and downs but finally was I able to discipline myself so that I prefer attending a Mass to watching a football game on TV. By far. It’s still struggle to keep up a regular prayer schedule but I usually enjoy praying the Liturgy of the Hours when I force myself to open the book and get going. Over that same time, I also re-taught myself to enjoy reading books that demand a mental effort and to prefer good folk music or classical musical to most popular music. In these efforts, I was choosing to change my relationships to God and to His Creation.

We imitate God in His acts of creation though not His primary Act of Creation. It’s our mind which can do this. A man or woman working with AIDS victims in Jamaica is shaping his or her mind to that of God and we do that by making ourselves more self-aware parts of God’s story, by learning to understand and love that story. Those aspects of reality labeled biological are important in understanding our particular selves. Those aspects of reality labeled physics and mathematics are very important in understanding Creation at a more basic level. In the end, even physics and mathematics, yes, even metaphysics, are most important in the way they provide us with languages and concepts to tell our version of God’s story which is this world. That story is not a series of encyclopedic articles nor a collection of logical or mathematical axioms. That story is a morally ordered narrative told in terms of the entities and processes of this universe, not in terms of individuals passing through a stage set and not in terms of magical processes or strange spirits.

That tells us what a human mind can be at its best — an entity flowing freely and smoothly along with that story, part of that story and yet capable of comprehending the entirety of the story, at least in principle. Yet, to reach that point, we have to always remember we are set in more particular contexts inside that story. There is no place to stand outside the story and observe it in a neutral way. It is only possible to understand the story once we move along with it, to move with the grain of the universe, in terms used by the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder.