I got a surprising number of emails about whether God had an unconscious. It was actually just something that came to me that I'd not considered before. Yet it seems directly related to my many comments over the past few months about the nature of infinity. Assuming for the moment that what "stores" or "thinks" is essentially tied to material, there just doesn't appear to be a way to have material body contain infinite thoughts or awareness.
There are two ways out of this. The first is to argue for a kind of Cartesian soul or mind. This is the idea that what really thinks, knows, and so forth isn't the body (whether spiritual or mortal) but this immaterial mind. The problem with this, beyond the obvious problems of Cartesian dualism, is that all our science keeps telling us how important the brain is for our thought process. Clearly much of our language abilities, memories and much else is tied to the function of the brain. By making bodies essential Mormons, if anything, move far more towards a strong material view of the mind. I recognize that some, like B.H. Roberts, adopt a Cartesian view. But they do so primarily to make intelligence, or perhaps more properly will, separate from spirit. Further they don't really address many of the problems a Cartesian immaterial essence has over a Thomist soul, which seems much more compatible with LDS thought. (Although still problematic in my opinion -- more on that tomorrow) Obviously if the part of a person that thinks is immaterial, then the issue of size and possibly even infinity doesn't come up. If thinking is in some way tied to matter, even if only in a correlated way, then finitism raises its head. Since it seems likely thinking is tied to bodies in LDS thought, even for divine beings, it seems God can only think finite thoughts, even if he could potentially think any thought.
The other way out of this is to argue against atomism or even size limits. By that I mean that our thinking is limited by the speed and size of our cells. But there is no necessary reason that a material body must adopt that method for thinking. If one adopts a more functionalist view of the brain or even allows that mind could emerge from more things than human cells, then presumably other material configurations would do. Now in our universe there is a limit on this due to quantum mechanics. Thus even rejecting cells doesn't remove the problem of finitism. However we don't know what spirit matter is. At the point in time in physics we're really not sure about the nature of space/time either. Perhaps there is a universe where our limits on size don't occur. Now I personally doubt this, for various reasons. And it does seem rather questionable to say that quantum mechanics doesn't apply to spirit matter in terms of minimum lengths.
But lets say there is infinite division ala Leibniz. In that case there is always an infinite number of "places" to store information. This arises out of the nature of continuity. Two objects of different volumes will have the same number of parts. That sounds counter-intuitive, but the fact is that infinite sets are extremely counter-intuitive with all sorts of odd properties like that.
The problem is that all the evidence in science argues against that sort of reductionism. There are other problems with it, but for now let me suggest that it seems unlikely. Further, one must ask why a resurrected being would have a brain if they aren't going to use it. If we are a combination of spirit/intelligence and mortal body and a resurrected body has pretty much the same parts it does now, then presumably our thinking will be fairly similar to now. Indeed I think Mormon thought more or less requires this - putting a strong emphasis on desires and instincts that science would say arise out of a mortal brain. Those are often stated to be the main point of getting a body. I think a strong case could be made that one of the important parts in the LDS plan of salvation is getting a brain which does things the mind a spirit has can't.
So in the end we're trapped in the problem of trying to put infinite things in a finite box with finite sized parts. I don't think there is a way out of this. I'll explain why I don't think this a problem next.
I had originally planned on just adding a little to my previous discussion on God and infinities. However I think I'm going to take a slightly different approach. I had mentioned that many of these ideas appeared in a few books which really crystalized the ideas in my mind. One of the main books was Reading Peirce Reading. While this book was primarily focused in on considering how Peirce read various philosophers, one of the main topics was the influence of neoPlatonism on Peirce. This was surprising to me since at first glance Peirce does not seem like your stereotypical neoPlatonist. He is completely focused in on logic, tends to be critical of mysticism and fuzzy thinking, typically doesn't have kind words for the transcendentalists like Emerson, and is primarily a scientist. Yet a lot of this is simply due to misunderstandings of neoPlatonism. I don't want to get drawn into a discussion of neoPlatonism proper, misreadings of Plotinus, nor my own general change of view from being very anti-neoPlatonic to seeing a lot of value in it. (Indeed I've come to see that a lot of what I see in Levinas, Heidegger, and Derrida can be seen among the neoPlatonists) Instead I want to quote from Smyth's book on Peirce's ontology of knowledge which is actually a neoPlatonic ontology of knowledge. These are excerpted from various places, primarily starting around page 58. To begin though, allow me a quote from Plotinus to set the stage.
If we have failed to understand, it is that we have thought of knowledge as a mass of theorems and an accumulation of propositions, though that is false even for our sciences of the sense realm. (Enneads V.8.4)
Note, I'm quoting the basic sections from Smyth -- I've left some out so the numbering will not be comprehensive
Conjecture 1 The class of items that constitute scientific knowledge at any given time is neither finite nor even denumberably infinite, and might exceed every number, finite and transfinite.
Smyth brings up relative to this an interesting paper from Langendoen and Postal in The Vastness of Natural Language wherein they "prove" that the number of sentences in natural languages is larger than the set of real numbers. (i.e. larger than aleph0, in terms of Cantor's notation) In philosophy of language the position is termed "extreme platonism." (I should note that it appears the proof is for certain formal languages and ignores the fact that not all sentences in a natural language are meaningful) The point is though that the idea that knowledge is finite is wrong, and that knowledge is actually even larger than the kinds of infinities we generally are able to think about. I should add, given recent discussions on LDS-Phil, that Platonism proper is typically taken to only assert a finite number of statements - although potentially a very large finite set. Also note that this is a real infinite and not a potential infinite ala Aristotle. A potential infinity is merely the potential to always continue. At best this is akin to counting the set of integers. Further at any point the set one has counted is always finite.
Conjecture 2 The subject to whom an item of scientific knowledge belongs is not always distinctly conscious of itself as subject, and it can think or speak unconsciously (that is, without having any distinct consciousness of the thoughts or speech that communicates the item of knowledge)
Definition 2 Something is an occult or theoretical object just in case it is (i) hidden from immediate inspection-or not directly observable, but (ii) its existence and properties can be made known to us through processes of reasoning that are experimental, provisional, and public.
I should hasten to add here that while the term occult has come to have an exteremly negative connotation, a lot of this is due to shoddy thinking among Renaissance neoPlatonists. If we think of it not as something "magical" but simply as a theoretical entity, like gravity, then it hopefully loses a lot of its mystique. The term occult simply means not detectable. So when a doctor speaks of occult blood in a specimen it just means blood you can't see without a microscope. Smyth uses the term due to its use among neoPlatonists, but one really must be careful in not reading too much into the term.
Conjecture 3 The 'I' as the owner of knowledge is an occult or theoretical object, which is known to us by reasoning from signs.
This is a very important point. I believe that a lot of what Paul Ricouer has written about the past decades is simply to establish this point. We assume in various guises, that we have priviledged unfettered acess to the "I" who thinks. I think therefore I am. However this "I" is a theoretical entity and not an immediate one.
Conjecture 4 The identity and continuity of a human life can be explained on the model of the identity and continuity of a science or a rational system of knowledge, but, in order for this to give us a coherent account, the logical operations involved in science must themselves have been conceived on the model of what is living, rather than of mere mechanisms. Mere mechanisms produce wholes by operations that only assemble or aggregate a pre-existing stock of parts by a fixed and unchanging set of rules; what is living cannot be defined by an enumeration of parts.
This is probably one of the key aspects of neoPlatonic thought, and gets back to that quote I started the discussion off. The point is that while we've often thought of life as simply an aggregate of parts, conceived of in a mechanistic way, that can't be true. In neoPlatonism this is often conceived of as considering humans as words. A word never has an exhaustive meaning. It always is open to a kind of linguistic play and connotative behavior. Further it comes to take a meaning by its place in a sentence and surrounding context. As one shifts the context the meaning of the word shifts and changes. Peirce has an ironic take on this notion, "you are only a word and not even a complete sentence." This notion of conceiving existence in terms of linguistic existence rather than substance is very important for many philosophers and probably explains a lot of what Heidegger, Derrida, and others do as well. Plotinus put it like this, "all lives are thoughts . . . every life is some form of thought." (Enneads, III.8.8). This is not to deny our identity as selves, merely clarify it as being more than simply a substance changing through time. In neoPlatonism anything which displays this sense of life is called soul.
Definition 3 Our theory of the mental should treat a human mind as a theoretical object introduced to explain signs or public and physical evidences of logical reasonings associated with human beings. A theory of logical forms as "living forms" explains these changes in the signs of thought by a teleology (rational purpose) governing possible changes in the laws of the changes in signs. But efficient causes or causes that commence or alter motions are always only physical causes and human minds are not efficient or moving causes.
This is an extension of the idea of man as a sign or a word as opposed to "stuff" in simple causal interactions.
Conjecture 5 Since the data for the reasonings in science must be public facts, and since, the logical standards or rules of the reasoning are communal, the results of scientific inquiry should also be regarded as belonging to a collective self or community, a kind of transcendental cosa nostra, rather than an individual ego or private mind. It is a higher standpoint, ethically and logically, than that of the ego.
This is very similar to what Searle calls corporate meaning. It is the fact that language must in some sense and to some degree be shared for the very possibility of language to take place. This transcendental subject is a kind of community which can know and can increase in knowledge. Of course in neoPlatonism there is a sense of a world-mind and a world-soul which is basically the unity of all soul and all mind. While once again misunderstandings tend to treat this as something magical, mystical, or in other negative senses, if we conceive of it simply as communal knowledge due to the inherent nature of language it loses a lot of those perjorative connotations. We speak a word in a kind of imitation of this corporate meaning that the word carries. This is very similar, if not identical to how within neoPlatonism a spoken word is in imitation of soul. (Soul, since words have a "living" nature to them due to the play within natural languages)
Conjecture 6 For a logician of science in the Neoplatonic tradition
science conveys an entirely objective and impersonal point of view, for
which:
(i) the relations that are established in valid reasonings are assumed to he
relations between public and objective facts, and within which
(ii) the hypothesis that there are private and personal reasoners will be
constructed so as to explain certain particular relationships between public,
objective facts that suggest the existence of bad reasonings, which, in turn,
means that
(iii) our knowledge of our own minds as distinct from the minds of others
presupposes a distinction between good and bad reasonings that must itself
be a distinction that can be drawn with reference only to public signs of the
reasonings and without reference to individual minds or their cognitive acts.
Conjecture 7 Neoplatonism in logic commits our logician as young Romantic to a fallibilist principle according to which 'to be human is to err'. The main function of the hypothesis that we each have our own mind is to account for objective evidence of bad reasonings that takes the form of demonstrably foolish public behavior.
All the previous conjectures really commit us to a notion of fallibilism that is quite extensive. It occurs both because man is a "word" and thus open to multiple interpretations and because of the very nature of infinite knowledge that can never be had by finite beings.
Conjecture 8 In the order of epistemological causation, the objects come first in this sense: any initiation of a movement or change in the concepts that result in knowledge has to be caused by the dynamic objects of the knowledge. So Neoplatonism in our logic of science means accepting a fundamental tenet of Aristotelian empiricism.
The exact meaning of this is a bit more complex, but might be termed "the argument of surprise." Nature acts upon us and our knowledge arises from this act from "without" that is never under our control. In a way, I think that neoPlatonism actually pushes this notion far farther than many traditional modern philosophies. As Peirce said, "the mind can only transform knowledge, but never originate it, unless it be fed with facts of observation." (5.392) Put simply, this is just the acceptance of traditional notions of Naturalism.
Definition 4 In Neoplatonic logic, something counts as inquiry just in case it is (i) a change of thoughts, caused by objects and terminated by a stability or fixity of thoughts, where (ii) the movements of thought are mediated by changes in public signs, and (iii) each alteration in the signs of thought can be reviewed, criticized and controlled by the standards of what is, or purports to be, an objective and impersonal logic.
Conjecture 9 The sign-theory of universals. Every act of
scientific understanding of objects consists of a sequence of reasonings in
which
(i) the reasonings are signs whose objects themselves are signs
that are caused by signs in a chain of signs that extends back to the ultimate
object of the understanding, where
(ii) these signs actually constitute
the properties and relationships of the object understood, in the sense that
(iii) what the object of knowledge really is, that is to say, any real
property or any real relationship of the object that initiated the inquiry, is
some predicate or other general sign of the object of inquiry that comes
itself to be designated as a possible object of inquiry. These signs
constituting the ultimate objects of knowledge are usually called
"experimental phenomena" or "reproducible effects."
Now all this is fairly long. But hopefully it clarifies for some, especially for those with some background in philosophy, where I am coming at these problems.
I obviously have taken a lot of Peirce as my approach to understanding certain aspects of Mormonism. Yet this site was originally conceived of as a way of using Orson Pratt's beginnings of a formal theology as a way of understanding Mormon thought. That's not to say that I agree with Pratt. I think that in most ways, he was philosophically naive. However he tried to systemize a lot of Joseph Smith's thought in ways that are quite interesting. Even where he is wrong, I think he is wrong in an informative way. So why so much Peirce? For two reasons.
First, I think Peirce deals with many of the issues we find in Continental thought that so often get repressed or overlooked in the analytic traditions. Yet he does so in a way that I find to be clear, concise and simple. As much as I respect Heidegger, Nietzsche, Derrida or others, reading their works often is a bit of a chore. I think that Peirce brings together a lot of notions: phenomenology, Hegel's categories, Kant's revolution of philosophy, and neoPlatonism. Yet I think he corrects and adapts all of them in very important ways. Ways that I think we can find in the other thinkers, but in ways that are often easy to misunderstand. (Especially for a lay audience)
Tonight while reading up on a little Peirce for discussion about realism I came upon a passage that was quite interesting. It seemingly brought together both aspects of this blog. It is primarily a critism of Peirce towards traditional materialism. (Basically Newtonian conceptions of physics) However it really ends up addressing the approach Pratt took in his theology as well.
[by saying that atoms are not absolutely dead] I do not mean exactly that I hold them to be physically such as the materialists hold them to be, only with a small dose of sentiency superidded. For that, I grant, would be feeble enough. But what I mean is, that all there is, is First, Feelings; Second, Efforts; Third, Habits - all of which are more familiar to us on their psychical side than on their physical side; and that dead matter would be merely the final result of the complete induration of habit reducing the free play of feeling and the brute irrationality of effort to complete death. (CP 6.201)
Now this all involves some Peircean concepts which I'll not get into. I think Peirce would see Pratt's "solution" to materialism rather feeble, since he doesn't explain why things act in a lawful fashion. That they choose to do so doesn't really explain things that well. Peirce speaks instead of mind-like processes aquiring habits, becoming predictable. Yet to be free, they can't fully be habitual. There must be an element of chance in the phenomena - or divergence from the expected norm. If there isn't then we have the Newtonian determinism that traditional 19th century atomism postulated. The mode of matter that is entirely mechanical is called by Peirce Secondness. In its pure form is determinism. To counteract this there must be this element of chance which he compares to the notion of the swerve in old Greek Epicureanism. The Epicureans were materialists with an atomic conception of reality, but wherein there was a certain probability that atoms would swerve and not act in a purely deterministic fashion. This 'swerve' is also the very notion of feeling.
Those of you familiar with Leibniz' monadology should also see where Peirce differs from him. For Leibniz everything was purely deterministic. Further the feeling any monad had for reality was absent. We were ultimately unfeeling automatas.
How then do laws occur? In a manner somewhat akin to Pratt, matter acquires habits. Yet Pratt never really fully explains this, leaving huge gaps in his ability to answer basic questions of physics in terms of his ontology. (At least in all the writings of his I've been able to locate) For Peirce we have matter evolving. As it interacts by pure effort it acquires habits and habits entail predictability. Predictability entails laws and a law is a law to the degree it accurate predicts future phenomena.
An other interesting question with no real answer. But it is curious enough I thought I'd bring it up here. Orson Pratt and Brigham Young famously disagreed over the meaning of God. Pratt, despite is atomism, believed in something like God as the "essence" of all individual divine persons. While radically different from the more neoPlatonic inspired Trinity due to his odd form of materialism, it actually was in many other ways very similar. He felt that the referent of God was the attributes of godliness. When we worship God we aren't worshipping a person, but the attributes the person manifests. Young was very opposed to this and in certain ways many of their other disagreements hinge on this issue. Young very much adopted an anthropomorphic view of things and discounted most philosophical ideas regarding essential attributes, properties and so forth. I suspect in modern terms we'd consider him a bit of a pragmatist and a bit of an existentialist.
The issue remains, however, that God often calls himself Truth. Certainly the simplest way to read this is as a metaphor. And I don't want to downplay that reading too much. However D&C 93:23-28 suggests that there may be more to this.
Let's consider D&C 93's definition of truth as knowing all things. Let's define truth is the property of knowing all things. Then the property God may well be identical with this. Perhaps the property God may appear to have some features not simply the same as knowing all things. The real issue is whether other attributes we associate with God are entailed by knowing all things. If they are, then Truth and God are the same. Of course this is God in the sense of an attribute or universal and not a person. But any person who knows all things would be God. It is, in a way, a kind of halfway position between Pratt and Young. (Halfway since Pratt believed the Spirit was divine atoms which had all the divine attributes and which were in all divine glorified beings - kind of a material way of having universals yet being a nominalist)
Lots of various LDS Philosophy topics in various blogs the past few days. Nate Oman has the interesting topic of avoiding the problem of evil using contract theory. To me and possibly a few others, this seems simply moving from Leibniz' notion that this is the best of all possible worlds to the best of all possible contracts. It doesn't explain why the contract was the best possible without limiting God in some way.
Not directly related to LDS philosophy, but perhaps related to LDS doing philosophy, Jim Faulconer questions whether there is a conflict between intellectual pursuits and religious pursuits. I think he raises a lot of issues. While certainly some seem to see conflicts between their religion and their intellect, I've never seen it in my life.
Christopher Bradford has some interesting comments on Paul's discussion of the war between the flesh and spirit. That generated a bit of a discussion between he and I in his comments section. (Scroll down to the story that says, "Teaching from the Manual" as his permanent link doesn't appear to work) I may make a comment on some of the ideas we raised there here in the future.
The Stanford online Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new entry for Compatibilism. That's always a very relevant topic for Mormon philosophers given that our theology definitely tends towards needing compatibilism. (There are, of course non-compatibilists who adopt various forms of Open Theism -- but I think that comes largely due to rejecting compatibilism on logical grounds)
Nick Bostrom at Oxford has an interesting paper on the problem of ethics that requires some aggregate and infinite universes. I've touched upon this problem before. Of course I think utilitarianism has the much larger problem of even "summing" happiness. But the problem of infinities looms large for all consequentialists. (Although clearly it affects some much more than others)
Browsing a few odds and ends and I came upon the table of contents for the new issue of First Things. One of the intriguing article titles in the table of contents is "How Richard Rorty Found Religion." Now, as many probably know, his wife Mary is Mormon. (She's also a scholar of ancient philosophy). So I can't help but wonder exactly what religion (if any) Rorty found. After all this is the same Rorty who said "Once the 'religious hypothesis' is disengaged from the opportunity to inflict humiliation and pain on people who do not profess the correct creed, it loses interest for many people." That "correct creed" bit makes me suspect it is a veiled swipe at Mormonism. I've always wondered what kind of discussions about religion go on in that household. Anyway, if anyone knows what the First Things articles is about, drop me an email. I'm kind of curious.
I must confess that I enjoyed his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature back in college. I still have a copy. Originally I was pointed his way by some strange figure in the rows of book at the BYU library while a freshman researching a paper for Chauncey Riddle's Epistemology class. I've no idea who this person was, but he seemed to think this would be very funny. I heard a rumor, which I've never verified, that Riddle was Rorty's home teacher when he lived back east. In any case he never commented to me about it and I lost touch with Riddle over the years. Still Rorty was my introduction to pragmatism although I grew out of him before I even graduated from college. He just never seemed rigorous enough for me. One of the more enjoyable reads though was a debate between Umberto Eco and Richard Rorty over the limits of interpretation using Eco's novel Foucalt's Pendulum. The debate was published as Interpretation and Overinterpretation. The debate was a thoroughgoing attack or defense of what Eco considers the "hermetic hermeutic." Ironically the debate was one of the O. C. Tanner Lectures - a rather notable rich Mormon who has a store across from the temple in Salt Lake City. (And many of the lectures involved noted "Mormon" philosopher Sterling M. McMurrin)
For those interested in what Rorty's been up to there was a rather interesting interview with him in Philosophy Now back in October of last year. Quite a few interesting comments in it, such as his main influences in college being his teachers Leo Strauss and Charles Hartshorne. I also thought that his comment about basically having the same views as Putnam was interesting. (I rather like Putnam who seems to engage issues much more robustly than Rorty) He also says interesting things about Davidson, although I can't tell if he really meant Davidson or merely misspoke and meant Putnam. However he definitely praises Davidson as doing more original work than either he or Putnam. (Whom he sees as merely following Dewey). A rather interesting interview to say the least - although no comments on religion.
One other quote by Rorty probably is in order, because it is far more intriguing than his snipe at those who think religions can be true. It involves telling the difference between works of art inspired by a religion and being an application of that religion.
One way to tell the difference between a work of art being inspired by a religious or philosophical view and its being an application of that view by asking yourself: do I need to know about the view in order to appreciate the work? This is not a very good test, however: appreciation is a matter of degree, so the more you know about all the circumstances surrounding the creation of the work, the better you can appreciate it. A slightly less crude test is: do I have to believe in the view in order to take an interest in the work? Is the work the sort of thing that only a follower of Ficino, or only a convinced reader of A VISION, or only a pious Hindu, or only a devout Mormon, or only a passionate Heideggerian, can really get into it?
If the answer to this latter question is "yes", we may begin to have doubts about the value of the work in question. In the case of works which seem inseperable froem certain religious beliefs, we start taking about pious kitsch. In the case of works that seem inseperable from a philosophical credo, we may find ourselves saying that a given cultural province has become over-theorized. If you don't much like Rothko or Pollock you may grumble that these are paintings that only people who have read too much Clement Greenberg can love. If you found most of the "deconstructive" readings of literary texts which were fashionable in the 1970's and the 1980's contrived and pointless, you are likely to say that they only look good to people who have read too much Derrida. If you don't like Eisenman's houses, you may say the same.
But one should not say any of these things, for they are all false. In fact, lots of people who are enthusiastic about Rothko and Pollock find Greenberg a bit silly. There were, I should imagine, lots of Florentines who loved the Primavera but thought Ficino pointless, and indeed remained unclear about how the differences between Renaissance humanism and decadent scholasticism. You can like Barbara Johnson's reading of Melville or Eisenman's houses a lot even if you find philosophy, up to and including Derrida, a great bore. The work of art may respond to needs quite different from those which were satisfied by the philosopher who inspired the work, even in cases where the artist thinks of himself or herself as applying the philosophers principles. In the case of religious kitsch, on the other hand, you are very unlikely to hang a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on your wall if you do not actually believe that he died for our sins. Important works of art take on a life of their own independent of their inspiration, even if that inspiration is regarded by the artist as instruction.
(Richard Rorty, "Philosophy and Culture")
A few corrections to my ealier comments on Rorty. Apparently Chauncey Riddle was in the east the time Rorty was married to his first wife. So it is rather doubtful Riddle ever home taught Rorty. On the other hand they did apparently have an exchange over the existence of God back in the late 80's or early 90's. Rorty said that there was no God. Riddle then asked if he was sure about that. (Basically challenged the confidence of that claim) Rorty backed down saying while he was reasonably confidence which within his form of pragmatism was akin to saying he knew. Riddle replied by asking something like if God appeared to him wouldn't that make him believe in God? Rorty agreed but felt that such a God would just be an other actor in the universe and not God. At which point someone apparently piped up saying, "well not just any other actor." The discourse was interesting since it clearly indicates that what Rorty objected to was the more neoPlatonic like God as ultimate origin or ousia. It seems like he may have felt a Mormon conception was more acceptable (although still doubtful). I'd really be interested in knowing what Rorty felt about Peirce's conceptions about God which are so intertwined in pragmatism.
Regarding Rorty and Putnam, I came upon a fairly good paper distinguishing them. It also suggests that the elements of Dewey that Rorty latches onto the most are those most out of date. "Rorty, Putnam, and the Pragmatist View of Epistemology and Metaphysics."
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