Oscillation, Part 2
To review ... Three realms: mental, physical, spiritual. Mental is where life happens. Culture is a shared mental realm; cultural artifacts are like frozen orange juice. People are sentient pixels; pictures make us happy.
Next question: ethics. Where does ought come from?
Everything I know about the shared mental realm of culture, the physical realm, and the spiritual realm—it all exists to me only ever in my personal, private mental realm. And it's all flat. Every mental object is fundamentally the same as another, just like every computer file is "really just" a bit-pattern.
Take the following picture of Lena Söderberg.
This image is from a Playboy centerfold, and since the early 1970's it has been a standard sample image in technical work on image processing. Clearly, this image has a dense mat of cultural meanings. But as a computer image, it is "really just" this bit-pattern:
So if the mental realm is fundamentally flat, where does ethics come from?
When you start a computer, you have a chain reaction of simpler systems starting more complex ones, where a system is a set of processes. Very roughly, whenever power is applied to the computer, it takes the bit-pattern stored in its first memory slot, and runs it. This first bit-pattern finds another bit-pattern on the hard drive, and runs that. Etc., etc., until eventually the computer is running a bit-pattern called "Firefox" to display a bit-pattern called "YouTube."
When you wake up in the morning, something in your subconscious is triggering a whole set of processes—space/time, quantity, quality, relation, modality—that together constitute consciousness. To continue the analogy, consciousness is our operating system. Culture is what we do with it. Culture is our MS Office, our iLife, and our Firefox. It's also our spreadsheets, our videos, and our lena.jpg.
Now we're approaching David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness: what are the subconscious processes that bootstrap consciousness, and how did they get there? I'm going to hang a louie, however.
Where does identity come from?
Consciousness is not identity. Identity—personhood—comes from participation in a culture, in a shared mental realm. Belonging. Tribe. Family. Clan. Pixels want pictures.
But culture is a mental object, an abstraction; it is distinguished. All distinction trades low-level detail for high-level power, so cultures must diverge and mutually contradict. The logical possibilities at each level of abstraction are forks in the road, and someone will take each path. So while all people share bare consciousness, we must identify with necessarily exclusive, totalizing cultures in order to gain personhood. Personhood is a mental object.
Secularism and fundamentalism are the same. The humane, erudite secularist both demonizes and evangelizes the fundamentalist. Who doesn't think they're right? And yet who can avoid it, this thinking you're right, this identification with a culture? You make culture and culture makes you.
This image is from a Playboy centerfold, and since the early 1970's it has been a standard sample image in technical work on image processing. Clearly, this image has a dense mat of cultural meanings. But as a computer image, it is "really just" this bit-pattern:
1111111111011000111111111110000000000000000100000100101001000110010010010100011Likewise, the image for me, in my own personal, private mental realm, is "really just" a mental object. All my reactions to it are "really just" mental objects. All my value judgments about it are "really just" mental objects. The value judgment implicit in the phrase "really just" is "really just" a mental object. Like everything else, ethics is "really just" a mental object.
0000000000000000100000001000000010000000001100000000000000110000000000000000000
0011111111111011010000000100110100010100000110100001101111011101000110111101110
0110110100001101111011100000010000000110011001011100011000000000000001110000100
0010010010010100110100000011111011010000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
1000000000000010010000000000000000000000000000000000100000000000000100000000001
0010000000000000000000000000000000000100000000000000100011100001000010010010010
1001101000000111111001100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000100000000...
So if the mental realm is fundamentally flat, where does ethics come from?
When you start a computer, you have a chain reaction of simpler systems starting more complex ones, where a system is a set of processes. Very roughly, whenever power is applied to the computer, it takes the bit-pattern stored in its first memory slot, and runs it. This first bit-pattern finds another bit-pattern on the hard drive, and runs that. Etc., etc., until eventually the computer is running a bit-pattern called "Firefox" to display a bit-pattern called "YouTube."
When you wake up in the morning, something in your subconscious is triggering a whole set of processes—space/time, quantity, quality, relation, modality—that together constitute consciousness. To continue the analogy, consciousness is our operating system. Culture is what we do with it. Culture is our MS Office, our iLife, and our Firefox. It's also our spreadsheets, our videos, and our lena.jpg.
Now we're approaching David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness: what are the subconscious processes that bootstrap consciousness, and how did they get there? I'm going to hang a louie, however.
Where does identity come from?
Consciousness is not identity. Identity—personhood—comes from participation in a culture, in a shared mental realm. Belonging. Tribe. Family. Clan. Pixels want pictures.
But culture is a mental object, an abstraction; it is distinguished. All distinction trades low-level detail for high-level power, so cultures must diverge and mutually contradict. The logical possibilities at each level of abstraction are forks in the road, and someone will take each path. So while all people share bare consciousness, we must identify with necessarily exclusive, totalizing cultures in order to gain personhood. Personhood is a mental object.
Secularism and fundamentalism are the same. The humane, erudite secularist both demonizes and evangelizes the fundamentalist. Who doesn't think they're right? And yet who can avoid it, this thinking you're right, this identification with a culture? You make culture and culture makes you.
9 comments:
I think that there is only one realm. Does anyone else think that?
Why?
Semantics I guess, I am most likely saying the same thing that you are, just defining different terms.
Generally, I think that everything is spiritual. more specifically it goes back to what little i have picked up about string theory, I won't get into that again now.
Just, suppose there is one realm, I'll call it spiritual, that is "reality" and all other realms are abstractions of or scaled versions of that "spiritual" realm. I believe that that is what you're saying, but where we differ, I think, is in the abstractions being different realms. Take your binary version of a pinup girl, the 1010101 would represent the spiritual realm and the actual picture would represent the abstracted physical realm, but the spiritual realm is still there, accessable, and actually all that is really of substance to begin with. But I am not entirely certain that this thought is actually any different than yours.
I think that what I was trying to ask is, "does anyone in the philosophical realm or in the blag realm think that there is only one realm?"
I guess my main argument would be that the mental realm is not flat, that it is actually as tangible--neurons firing, chemicals being produced--as the physical realm and as mysterious as the spiritual realm and they are actually one and the same.
"Semantics, I guess ..."
Yeah, we're close. Realm is an abstraction over the spiritual. But while I agree that the spiritual realm is "there" and "of substance," I'm not sure how it is "accessible" to consciousness. In fact, I think consciousness is precisely the trade-off between access to the spiritual realm and well, consciousness--self-awareness, the ability to perform further abstractions.
Do you think we can access the spiritual realm except in metaphor? How?
As far as other blagosophers, that's what these posts were about. The basic feedback is, "no, not really." I think they're wrong, but I've still got lots of getting-up-to-speed to do ... :^)
"...I think consciousness is precisely the trade-off between access to the spiritual realm and well, consciousness--self-awareness, the ability to perform further abstractions."
I am not sure how self awareness prevents access to the spiritual realm. I agree that it can and does, I just am not sure that it must.
"neurons ... chemicals"
As I'm describing it, the neurons and chemicals are the "direct connection" between the physical and the mental. They're two sides of a coin. The flatness refers to the fact that an "ethical judgment" or a "value" is not a fundamental object. It's a "mental object", or if you like, a pattern of neurons and chemicals.
On the other hand, that doesn't mean it isn't real! Sure, the underlying, inaccessible spiritual whatever is the only thing that is "really real", but on my view personhood doesn't even exist until higher levels of order. The real-ness of a mental object depends on the abstractions below it.
"I am not sure how self awareness prevents access to the spiritual realm. I agree that it can and does, I just am not sure that it must."
Well, the way I'm thinking of it, self-awareness or consciousness is the basic mental process, which is abstraction or distinction. Distinction involves a loss of information and a gain in power or benefit. Distinction "creates" a new mental object. Having this new mental object enables the creation of still further mental objects. Distinguishing "car" and "street" and "stop sign" enables you to distinguish "traffic" and "accident patterns" etc.
Now, consciousness itself depends on certain lower-level abstractions like space and time and the categories (quantity, quality, relation, modality). In Kant's language, space/time and the categories make experience (or consciousness) possible. Space/time and the categories are the grid or the abstractions through which we are able to access the non-mental realm. The physical realm is that portion of the non-mental realm that is processable under space/time and the categories. The spiritual realm is that portion of the non-mental realm that is not so processable. So on this view the spiritual realm is precisely inaccessible to consciousness.
"where does 'ought' come from..."
Just been reading some interesting stuff about ethics as based on the interpersonal foundation of reality. Created reality as contingent upon a God of inter-trinitarian relationship, who desires to bring creation into that relationship via the obedience of the son, and all of ethics is just a description of the proper human side of that relationship. i.e. there is no "moral law", there's just "Hesed," ("covenant faithfulness") to God.
I know this is a theological, not a properly metaphysical or philosophical account of ethics. call me a fundamentalist :)
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