https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7Icn3I62JO8
My so I have some things that I wanted to talk about, but I wanted to know if any of you had something, any questions or something that you guys wanted to talk about this month. I had a follow up from last month. Yeah. Told me about a video by David Bentley Art where, if you remember, he mentioned panpsychism and also more, I saw other modern theories of mind. And you asked me if I had watched it, but I haven’t watched it then. I did. If you still want to talk about it. Yeah, sure. Let’s go. It’s definitely worth it. I mean, David Bentley Hart is very, very smart, very annoying, but very smart. And so it’s definitely worth watching because he’s writing a book on consciousness, which I think is going to be, I wrote to John Brevecky, by the way, and I asked him to watch the video. He said that he’s read all of David Bentley Hart’s, maybe not all, but he said he’s read quite a few of David Bentley Hart’s books and he really appreciates him. So I told him to watch that talk. And yeah, he also enjoyed that talk as well. You especially mentioned that video to me last time because he had talked about panpsychism at some point in the talk. I think I actually agree with him. And I think even Bergson would agree with him. There’s a small subtlety. He said that he disagrees with materialist or naturalist panpsychisms. He’s quite sympathetic to supernaturalist panpsychisms. And Bergson would fall on that camp. There’s a risk in what I’m going to say right now that I could go on a tangent and lose your interest. So I think I should start by asking you a question first. We all find you interesting, Jeffery, don’t worry. It’s starting when you’re too deep into your own philosophical theories and you don’t know if anybody else cares because you listen to other philosophers and you don’t care about what they say. So it’s dangerous. Anyway, so I just wanted to ask you, let’s see the… Before I even try to make my point, I’m going to ask you one question that doesn’t seem related, but trust me, it is. So let’s say you’re a materialist. You have a basic idea that, let’s say, those fundamental particles of physics, they follow certain laws. And when they get jumbled up together, they follow some laws. Again, it’s just that the interaction gets complicated. In theory, you could compute the results of all those interactions. Because of quantum stuff, you would have to use probabilities. You could not really predict exactly what would happen. But in theory, I could know all the positions and velocities of the particles in my body. I could use some really complicated computer to figure out what all the atoms, molecules, organs, and ultimately what my whole body would do. Even as I utter these words right now, I could completely explain that materialistic. That’s the crux of the materialistic explanation. And even if, let’s say, you want to add consciousness somewhere in that worldview, the thing is, even if like David Bentley mentioned in his talk, and that’s pretty much the state of philosophy of mind right now, most people agree that in that story I told you, at some point, you will have to make place for consciousness. And it’s not identical to whatever I just talked about. There’s something more than just mechanical causes that’s going on with us. But the issue is that the story I just told you seems complete. There’s no all of the causality. That whole story is so, so complete, so exhaustive, at least in theory, it should explain everything I do physically. So there’s no real room for my consciousness to act. Even as I say these words right now, the way my mouth moves, the way my chest caves in and out as I breathe in and out these words, in theory, I could explain that mechanistically, according to the materials. And what I would like to ask you and what I think, I think that psychists like Berkson, supernaturalists, the psychists, if you want to use David Bentley’s terminology, the supernaturalist and psychists can address the question I just asked you, but I haven’t really heard anybody else give a set of answers. So what I want to know is, in that whole mechanistic story I just told you, there’s a point where consciousness happens, and there’s something that actually breaks in the material story. There’s something that actually breaks in the story, and I want to know where, according to you, where do you think the problem is? Okay, so this is going to, I don’t know if this is going to answer your question, but when I hear your question, my first intuition is to say the problem arises at each of those, at each of the steps where there’s an identity. At every place in that, in the process that you described, where you jump from multiplicity to unity, there’s a problem at all those steps. So when you go from the quantum, you know, whatever field or whatever of potentiality, of possibility, when you go from, like you said, you have to use probability at that stage, when you go from there to the actual particles, when you go from the particles to the atoms, when you jump from the atoms to the molecules, when you jump from the molecules, etc., etc., then when you jump to you speaking, breathing, all those identities, all those things that have oneness to them, I think that that’s the problem of the mechanistic description, is that, is what they call, what do they call, emergence. I love what David Bentley Hart says in that quote, he says, emergence is just the word they use to replace magic. It’s like they just use a word to replace a process which they absolutely do not understand, which is how things, you know, become one, and so they just use that word to replace what other people would use to be magic. And so I think that that’s the problem. The problem happens the problem happens in the manner in which things become one, and then the Christian response to that is, that’s what logos is, that’s what, especially in St. Maximus the Confessor, he really does have this idea that logos is, you know, the identity, the essence, the purpose, all those things kind of wrapped into one of what makes something, something, basically. And so I think that, does that, do you think that that, does that answer the question you’re asking? I think I agree, and I think Bergson would agree as well. I want to try to push you further on one point. Let’s say when you jump from one level to another, let’s say from atoms to molecules or from maybe molecules to cells, at some point, do you think that, you know, it’s not just the reason, what, one of the reasons why you can’t do that jump, that the identity is because the, you actually cannot predict what will happen. So let’s say if I try to predict your behavior, Jonathan, looking at the behavior of all of your cells, I would actually not be able to do so. So maybe I would get, that’s something that Bergson thought, and what, it’s something that supernaturalists, that psychologists say, it’s a, you know, even if in theory I could, let’s say, I know all of the positions and velocities of the particles in your brain, let’s say, and if I try to, you know, compute what you would do at this moment, or if I could replicate the experiment, what you would do in such and such situation over the next thousand iterations, let’s say, you know, the materialist would want to say that I can predict the probability distribution that would occur, and a supernaturalist, the psychist, would say that no, actually you could not, you know, if I told you the probability distribution ahead of time, let’s say, you could always decide to break it. You do not have to follow those laws, so you would be unpredictable. That’s something you would endorse. I’ve never thought about that, and I don’t know, like in terms of the technical aspects of it, I wouldn’t know. Like I wouldn’t know, when you say it, it sounds reasonable to me in terms of understanding how in every single occasion, any unity is more than its parts. Like any form of unity is always more than the parts that constitute it. You know, there’s something, there’s some animating principle, there’s some, there’s a logos, there’s a name, there’s an identity which makes something into one, and that cannot be reduced to its elemental, to the particles that make it. So in that sense, I would, intuitively I would agree with you, but it’s hard for me to know because I, like those types of, the type of experiment where I would know if you could predict my behavior with all those calculations. I don’t know, I’m not enough of a scientist to answer that question, but in principle, I think that it’s always true that a whole is more than its parts, that’s for sure. Cool. Yeah, that’s basically the modern way to talk about free will because things get complicated now because of probabilities we know from physics, but the way to ask if we have free will enough is to ask if the probability distributions given to us by physics fail when we make choices. Right, okay. Yeah, so I was just asking in a very complicated way whether or not you think we have free will by breaking the causality implications from levels world. Right, I have to admit that I’ve never thought about it. I’ve never thought about the relationship between freedom and let’s say the break between the different levels. It actually matters a lot. That’s a point where a lot of modern pens, I think that’s the biggest problem that modern pens have, the materialists or non-supernaturalist ones, they have to explain, that’s something David Manthiork mentioned in his talk. Let’s say you’re a materialist and you learn about consciousness one day and you realize, oh damn, my theory doesn’t work. I have to put consciousness back into the world. Like a lot of materialists are doing right now, he becomes a pen-psychist and he says, well, if consciousness has to happen in the brain, then it must somehow be present in the cells, in the molecules, in the atoms, in the fundamental particles and so on. You put consciousness back all the way to the body. Right, yeah. But then the question is, how do those combine? Why do the consciousness of the fundamental particles combine? How can it ever, especially, that’s a tough point that Bergson talked about this, but very few pens-psychists talk about this right now, at least for now. If you have the whole mechanistic causal story I just told you about, and let’s say you put, even if you do put consciousnesses into the fundamental particles, well, it seems that you have the whole story. You can explain everything that happens mechanistically using your particles, atoms, molecules, and so on, that story. You can put consciousness into the particles, but why would there be consciousness in the atoms, in the molecules, in the cells, and so on? And even if it somehow combines, why would it combine into something coherent? Yeah, I think that, for sure, I think that the Christian answer, the St. Maximus answer, is the primacy of the human person in the sense that it is, you know, St. Maximus talks about how the human, the person, the human being is the laboratory of the union of all opposites. And so, to a certain extent, the unity of things appears through human consciousness. Now, whether or not there’s consciousness in the actual things, I think that that might be a way to get around the special place that humanity plays, let’s say, in this whole story, in the cosmos, which in Christianity is definitely a central space. In a certain manner, it really is clear that human beings participate in creation and participate even to a certain extent in the manner in which the world exists. And so, I think that if you see it, to me, that seems to be the solution to the problem, is that through human consciousness, then that’s how those levels exist. It doesn’t mean it’s a relative thing. It doesn’t mean that it’s a subjective thing at all. It’s universal, but it’s contained in the human experience. It’s contained in human nature. The follow-up I have then is, because in the story I just told you, the advantage that supernaturalists and psychists have is that by saying that once, or even following what you said earlier about the logos, let’s say when you have one level, one multiplicity that becomes united in one of those, then the unity can break the causal predictions of the lower level. It can do things that the lower level could not. It explains why the higher level would evolve as well. This way you can explain why our consciousness is coherent, why it has wrong logos instead of being just a jumbled mess of consciousnesses of fundamental particles. That would just be random. Yeah, exactly. Right. No, but for sure, I think that the idea of logos in the world is that logos in a certain manner is also present in every aspect of reality. Of course, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to… the logy are in a way, this is the way I understand it, the logy are indefinite. It’s not like there’s a definite amount of logy there. There’s an indefinite amount of logy which become contained in higher logy. I always use the example of the microphone. The microphone has an indefinite amount of logy and those are contained in the logos of the microphone. Then you can keep going up, until you reach the human consciousness, human mind. Then those human minds also come together and then are an offering up to the divine mind which transcends everything. That movement of everything gathered. The human being plays a central figure. That’s why this whole idea of the human being as a microcosm, you see that in so many… you see it in Sam Axel, but you see it in Renaissance thinking and in medieval thinking. It really is this… not only the idea that the human being is a little version of the cosmos, but that he gathers the cosmos within himself is also part of being a microcosm. That’s how I solve those problems, is to see the central importance of the human person and then to understand this multiplicity as coming together within all the… in a hierarchy up to our own person and then together in communion up towards the transcendent. That’s a funny thing, a side note. A lot of panpsychists right now have really deep problems talking about combination of different consciousnesses, probably because they still seem to have a very Cartesian idea of what consciousness is, something very isolated, and not extended and separate. I think your center video was really great. They think that using the word love is just too sappy. They don’t want to use the word love because that’s it. That’s the key. Love is the key to everything. That’s the Christian answer is that the world exists through love and God is love and love is that possibility for things to be in communion and one and multiple at the same time and that goes all the way up into the Trinity as the transcendent example of that existence in love. Love doesn’t sound like an analytical word. And to go back to evolution, do you… because I have explained that panpsychists, at least Bergson, can give an idea of why consciousness would evolve and on your side, how do you… do you try to explain it and if you do, do you go along Brad Leak-Petersenian lines, I guess? I don’t mind Jordan’s way that he describes things. I definitely don’t care very much. You know it’s funny because I remember when I was an evangelical, people would always want to know if you’re a creationist. You’re a creationist. When I was a teenager, I actually was a creationist for a little while just because everybody around me was a creationist and then when I started to understand evolutionary theory and started to understand those ideas, I thought well these aren’t silly, like there’s some interesting things in there and then I started to pay attention and found it interesting and then when I mostly discovered a non-scientific vision of the world, a symbolic vision of the world, then it started not to matter to me and so people would ask me, you know, do you believe in evolution and my answer is always, I don’t believe in evolution. I think it happened but I don’t believe in it. Like I don’t think about it. I don’t trust it. I don’t put my trust in evolution. It doesn’t bother me that things mechanically happen that way but it doesn’t seem to me like that’s the best structure to know how we should live today and how we should be together and how we should live in communion. I think the phenomenological approach to the way we experience the world, to phenomena, I think is far more useful in order to describe how we actually exist in the world and I also think that the religious structures and the religious symbolic structures are far more useful to help us understand the purpose of existence and so because of that, until today, I usually don’t and then so when I heard Jordan talk about evolution the way he talked about it, I thought it was interesting because I thought, oh it’s interesting because he’s able to talk about it in a manner which takes into, let’s say, takes into, okay so this is, I guess, this is a way, I think I mentioned this before in one of the Q&A’s is that the interesting thing that’s happening and which I do find interesting is that as, let’s say, science has taken over the entire field of perception, let’s say, in the new atheist type where it’s like science is everything, scientific knowledge is everything and then we even have, you know, now like this whole science of consciousness and all of that and that’s what Jordan uses often to describe some of the things he’s describing, then what happens is they’re no longer, they can no longer pretend like they’re in absolute opposition to religious thinking because, you know, the whole enlightenment was done in opposition, was done in like we’re gonna get rid of this dark horrible thing that’s religion and we’re going to replace it with reason and with science and with all this and so that kind of march of progress and that march of thinking, now it’s over. It’s like, okay, so now you can’t, you’ve taken over the entire field and so now you actually now have to explain religion. It has to fit in your model or else if it doesn’t fit in your model there’s something missing, there’s something missing in your model. You’ve opposed it to build your, to put your model in front but now you have to include that which you fought if you want your model to be all encompassing and in doing that, that’s where we’re seeing this strange flip where all of a sudden it’s like, oh wait a minute, things are now flipping back where we’re realizing the supremacy of consciousness and the inevitability of hierarchies of meaning. All these things are now appearing even in the eyes of the scientists. John Dravecki is of course a perfect example of that and so it’s an interest to me that I find very interesting and so that’s one of the reasons why I pay attention to this whole thing that’s going on with Jordan and with John Dravecki and the discussion with other people who are talking and what’s the name of the other guy, they’re the consciousness guy, forget his name again. We talked about him quite so many times. Oh right, Hoffman. Yes, Don Hoffman, there you go, that guy. So anyway, so that’s what I find, that’s definitely something that I find very interesting and I think it’s that, it’s really which has made me all of a sudden pay attention to science more because I think that there’s an interesting thing happening right now and it’s worth paying attention to and it’s worth speaking into it and I think that if you notice the way that I speak, I think that I’ve adjusted the way that I speak to people and I’ve adjusted the way that I give my talks, not always, but sometimes I’ve adjusted them to talk to those people, to talk to the people who are kind of realizing this shift that’s going on right now and this kind of this flip and so to be able to speak into it in a manner that they’ll understand. All those talks that I did, like sacred art in secular terms and sacred space in secular terms is pretty much addressed to those people, addressed to those people who are suddenly realizing that you no longer can’t avoid hierarchies of meaning and you can’t avoid consciousness as at least the question to be answered, to be talked, to be discussed. So I think that that’s an interesting aspect of science that I care about, let’s say. That’s the only reason why I could care about evolution.