What we're really talking about here is pantheism, which was considered a reasonable view of the universe in a lot of theological traditions until materalism was judged to have won some kind of final victory on acceptable models of the universe.
If one is prepared to reject the assertion that materialism is "settled science," and has correctly and finally identified the absolute boundaries of all reality, there's plenty of room to take the principles of emergence and apply them to all kinds of systems.
This is where a lot of my personal grasp of theology comes from- I think most religious systems are describing real, genuine, emergent systems that resemble or are indeed conscious or look conscious, and then have successive overlays and adulterations of culture.
It's also an open door to monotheism: if all of the the reasons across all of the agents are ultimately directed towards a single end, whether the agents know it or not, then you have a (Platonised) image of God
Monotheism and pantheism has always (IMO) been a very blurry line. You can see sectarian nudges towards it from BOTH directions in the history of world faiths.
It's funny that you revived this convo a few weeks later as I was pondering something along these lines yesterday. In a lot of instances of early Christianity, you seem to see a notion of Christian monotheism as being more a matter of competitive supremacy than "materialistic exclusivity." The 1st Commandment, itself says that you will not have any gods "before" the Christian God, but does not- nor do the various Biblical accounts of forceful or persuasive conversion- imply that those deities do not EXIST in some sense, simply that they are a lesser "product" that a right-minded consumer should reject.
When I look at the historical and biblical examples of Christian engagement with other cultural faiths, there seems to have been a gradual evolution in the thinking of the Christians in question from "Yahweh is the better god than these gods" to "these other gods are crypto-Satan or demons" to "these other gods do not exist and never did and the idea itself is a lie." Christian supremacy seemed to follow a trajectory of being a competitive "one among many but better" to becoming the "self-evident sole truth" as its diaspora evolved.
I hear similar memes to this day when I ask Christians things like "well, what were those millions of people in India worshipping before Christ revealed himself to a relatively isolated culture in the Middle East and why is everyone who didn't happen to have been exposed to the word of God due to geography going to Hell?" A kind of post-hoc logic has been established around it by modern times, but you can see the broken lines.
But yes, monotheism can be seen as an end-stage universalism that absorbs pantheism.
I really appreciate this, although less so the fact it is making me want to write an essay while I am in the middle of one... or two... or twelve?
Short version: I am annoyed about how the current discussion of consciousness and agency disdains "emergence" as a source of either or both. Emergence is specifically the creation of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, is opaque wrt its end state from the start, often results in different end states from the same initial conditions, and produces outcomes that are no where encoded in the system.
Which sounds exactly like "its in there, somewhere, but we can't point to what it is, and probably it can't either." The whole materialist vs spiritualist divide about this strikes me as willfully obtuse. Can "spirits" not exist for things that are sufficiently complex? Are there only a fixed number of types of spirit and we know all of them? Do new spirits not get created ever?
At the same time the materialists seem hell bent on discounting any sort of spirit or agency that matters, everywhere. Can't measure it, must not be there. Perhaps more accurately "Don't want it to be there, must not be there." I can understand that as a response to "We can't eat cows! They are sentient conscious beings!" but the proper response is "That is not a sufficient justification to not eat something. Just ask a wolf." and not refusing that anything has a spirit.
>> Can "spirits" not exist for things that are sufficiently complex? Are there only a fixed number of types of spirit and we know all of them? Do new spirits not get created ever?
Shinto doctrine specifically addresses this in deep detail. Short answer to your questions: think earthworms.
Yea, I am willing to agree that humans assign consciousness, agency, personality, intent, whatever, some form of human-ness to lots of things where it isn't really proper. What bugs the hell out of me is the lack of recognition that it is all a matter of degree. Sure, my coat doesn't have much agency, but the cow it came from did. Yet a cow would make a really bad human. So there must be something that has agency that a cow would look at and think "Damn, if you were a cow, you'd be dumb as hell." Just saying "This has a soul. That doesn't have a soul." and calling it a day is deeply unsatisfying.
Oh, I'm not actually arguing AGAINST you! I think the position of "proper" is much more up for debate than is assumed.
I'm a farmer. I keep a LOT of livestock: poultry, hogs, cows, and rabbits. I kill and eat these animals. In the meantime, I treat them well and watch them behave. There is endless nuance.
Sorry, didn't mean to argue either! :D (Been a shitty week arguing with people at work, might be bleeding in here.)
I think farmers (or anyone who spends a lot of time around animals) probably get it easier than those who spend all their time with objects. Cats understand shit, have intent, and know damned well when they are doing things you don't want them to. So do horses (and especially ponies...). Frogs have intent, but they don't seem to understand that humans have preferences outside of "wants to eat me/does not want to eat me." Chickens... I am not sure I have spent enough time with them to know that there is anything happening inside their heads other than a random number generator :D
And like you say, farmers don't have the luxury of the false dichotomy "It isn't at all like a human so it is ok to eat vs. It is like a human so it isn't ok." The answer is that it is human like in some ways, and it is ok to eat. Exactly as you say, you treat them well and with respect, but it is ok to eat them. That's their role in the world. What differentiates us from predators like wolves or lions is that we are nicer about it beforehand. (And don't start eating them before they are dead...)
Sometimes I think the biggest problem with modern philosophy and morality is the unexamined assumption that it can and should be easy.
All life eats all other life, and if there's something intrinsically immoral in there, then we have an intrinsically immoral universe.
Chickens are galactically stupid. But I've also seen chickens that were best friends and chickens that protected each other from bullies and chickens that mourned their dead. Not 99%. But once in a while.
Which is fine, I'd just like us to stop being hypocritical about the rules.
I sympathise with materialists in that new agey types make wild, untestable assertions that can neither be falsified nor verified, which helps no one advance to more useful frames. Plus, materialism enables the kind of reliable predictions that mean I'm home writing this rather than decomposing somewhere below the last flight I was on. But materialists overreach when they claim to know beyond the how and insist that their method is sufficient to describe every what. Hard concur on your re-articulation of the essence here, by the way.
Agreed. I think it is rather a case of materialists having really terrible interlocutors on the other side, historically, and the new agey/woo woo scammers looked so bad that people over corrected. I suspect that after the whole COVID vaccine SCIENCE debacle that many will over correct the opposite way.
Come to think of it, the debate about whether viruses count as life forms reminds me a bit of the spirits debate. At some point if you get to a spot where many things don't fit any of your categories, you have to conclude your categories have the problem, not reality.
This leads us to some big problems as the woke "different ways of knowing" and "2+2 literally =5" being applied to the "building bridges and flying aircraft" domain of human life.
I think the over-correction you've identified is already occurring in the form of postmodern woke ideology, as it seeks to "white knight" cultural traditions that have fallen behind from failure to reconcile with materialistic realities.
The loss of respect for, or at least acknowledgement of, different domains (rather than different "ways of knowing" the same fact) is part of the problem. We cannot literally say that Thor is causing thunder when we can watch (or even cause in the lab) thunder and lightning through material processes- a "winner takes all" situation has been created in which only one can reasonably be true and the other must be rejected wholly.
Yea... I am rather worried for my kids' future world, as the way things are going sooner or later there are not going to be a lot of people who can keep bridges and airplanes up. We might well see a lot of Soviet era style "Well, this used to work, but it broke and we are still waiting on the parts" sort of situations. Too much of wokeism is just cargo cult versions of actual work and production. As you say, promoting other cultural traditions that obviously don't work in the modern world (and didn't work so hot in the premodern, for that matter) is just a black hole for failure. There's a lot of good from earlier traditions that we have lost, but just grabbing everything that seems to have failed wholesale is a mistake too.
The over correction I am worried about, though, is among the non-woke. I think one of the biggest problems of the scientific institutions being corrupted is that people not just lose faith in the institutions, they start to think "maybe the process of science is the problem" entirely. Some people seem to be moving towards "Well, they lied about COVID, and climate change, and gods know what else. You know, it probably is Thor making lightning, after all. This science business is just a woke elite scam!"
I see a lot of this happening in the evangelical communities that have become "strange bedfellows" in the COVID dissent substacks where I spend the majority of my time and real-life effort. They are resisting in different ways and for different reasons than I am, and some of that makes me cringe a little for its implications ("vaccines are tyrannical, and also women need to stop wearing pants immediately because it is an abomination"), especially as we see an emerging backlash to woke ideology across very varied dissenting subcultures.
As someone personally able to reconcile at least a passingly pagan theology with a background in rational science, I do worry about the near future at least in the Western world.
Yes, that's exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. In general, I think people tend to blame the group or the people, something they can name, and not the behavioral mistakes in these sorts of cases. Then they, or some other group, start doing the exact same thing under another name, and they are blind to the problem because they only cared about the name. I think that is why people make the mistake of e.g. supporting communists because they hate fascists, only to find out the communists want basically the same thing the fascists did. Whoops.
I think in part, but one has to square egregores with materialism as well. I am fairly comfortable with the idea myself, although less with it being a separate entity from its people, but I expect there is a lot of ground work to be done connecting the dots for others. Or possibly my mind is just a mess from doing too much agent based modeling of complex systems :P
I was thinking about corporate personhood while writing the piece. And even brands. Lots is written about brands without ever really getting to the root of what a brand actually is. Someone could write a whole book about Apple on this basis, without ever mentioning products, logos or Steve Jobs.
What we're really talking about here is pantheism, which was considered a reasonable view of the universe in a lot of theological traditions until materalism was judged to have won some kind of final victory on acceptable models of the universe.
If one is prepared to reject the assertion that materialism is "settled science," and has correctly and finally identified the absolute boundaries of all reality, there's plenty of room to take the principles of emergence and apply them to all kinds of systems.
This is where a lot of my personal grasp of theology comes from- I think most religious systems are describing real, genuine, emergent systems that resemble or are indeed conscious or look conscious, and then have successive overlays and adulterations of culture.
It's also an open door to monotheism: if all of the the reasons across all of the agents are ultimately directed towards a single end, whether the agents know it or not, then you have a (Platonised) image of God
Monotheism and pantheism has always (IMO) been a very blurry line. You can see sectarian nudges towards it from BOTH directions in the history of world faiths.
It's funny that you revived this convo a few weeks later as I was pondering something along these lines yesterday. In a lot of instances of early Christianity, you seem to see a notion of Christian monotheism as being more a matter of competitive supremacy than "materialistic exclusivity." The 1st Commandment, itself says that you will not have any gods "before" the Christian God, but does not- nor do the various Biblical accounts of forceful or persuasive conversion- imply that those deities do not EXIST in some sense, simply that they are a lesser "product" that a right-minded consumer should reject.
When I look at the historical and biblical examples of Christian engagement with other cultural faiths, there seems to have been a gradual evolution in the thinking of the Christians in question from "Yahweh is the better god than these gods" to "these other gods are crypto-Satan or demons" to "these other gods do not exist and never did and the idea itself is a lie." Christian supremacy seemed to follow a trajectory of being a competitive "one among many but better" to becoming the "self-evident sole truth" as its diaspora evolved.
I hear similar memes to this day when I ask Christians things like "well, what were those millions of people in India worshipping before Christ revealed himself to a relatively isolated culture in the Middle East and why is everyone who didn't happen to have been exposed to the word of God due to geography going to Hell?" A kind of post-hoc logic has been established around it by modern times, but you can see the broken lines.
But yes, monotheism can be seen as an end-stage universalism that absorbs pantheism.
You know, there's a button for that. :)
I really appreciate this, although less so the fact it is making me want to write an essay while I am in the middle of one... or two... or twelve?
Short version: I am annoyed about how the current discussion of consciousness and agency disdains "emergence" as a source of either or both. Emergence is specifically the creation of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, is opaque wrt its end state from the start, often results in different end states from the same initial conditions, and produces outcomes that are no where encoded in the system.
Which sounds exactly like "its in there, somewhere, but we can't point to what it is, and probably it can't either." The whole materialist vs spiritualist divide about this strikes me as willfully obtuse. Can "spirits" not exist for things that are sufficiently complex? Are there only a fixed number of types of spirit and we know all of them? Do new spirits not get created ever?
At the same time the materialists seem hell bent on discounting any sort of spirit or agency that matters, everywhere. Can't measure it, must not be there. Perhaps more accurately "Don't want it to be there, must not be there." I can understand that as a response to "We can't eat cows! They are sentient conscious beings!" but the proper response is "That is not a sufficient justification to not eat something. Just ask a wolf." and not refusing that anything has a spirit.
>> Can "spirits" not exist for things that are sufficiently complex? Are there only a fixed number of types of spirit and we know all of them? Do new spirits not get created ever?
Shinto doctrine specifically addresses this in deep detail. Short answer to your questions: think earthworms.
Yea, I am willing to agree that humans assign consciousness, agency, personality, intent, whatever, some form of human-ness to lots of things where it isn't really proper. What bugs the hell out of me is the lack of recognition that it is all a matter of degree. Sure, my coat doesn't have much agency, but the cow it came from did. Yet a cow would make a really bad human. So there must be something that has agency that a cow would look at and think "Damn, if you were a cow, you'd be dumb as hell." Just saying "This has a soul. That doesn't have a soul." and calling it a day is deeply unsatisfying.
Oh, I'm not actually arguing AGAINST you! I think the position of "proper" is much more up for debate than is assumed.
I'm a farmer. I keep a LOT of livestock: poultry, hogs, cows, and rabbits. I kill and eat these animals. In the meantime, I treat them well and watch them behave. There is endless nuance.
Sorry, didn't mean to argue either! :D (Been a shitty week arguing with people at work, might be bleeding in here.)
I think farmers (or anyone who spends a lot of time around animals) probably get it easier than those who spend all their time with objects. Cats understand shit, have intent, and know damned well when they are doing things you don't want them to. So do horses (and especially ponies...). Frogs have intent, but they don't seem to understand that humans have preferences outside of "wants to eat me/does not want to eat me." Chickens... I am not sure I have spent enough time with them to know that there is anything happening inside their heads other than a random number generator :D
And like you say, farmers don't have the luxury of the false dichotomy "It isn't at all like a human so it is ok to eat vs. It is like a human so it isn't ok." The answer is that it is human like in some ways, and it is ok to eat. Exactly as you say, you treat them well and with respect, but it is ok to eat them. That's their role in the world. What differentiates us from predators like wolves or lions is that we are nicer about it beforehand. (And don't start eating them before they are dead...)
Sometimes I think the biggest problem with modern philosophy and morality is the unexamined assumption that it can and should be easy.
All life eats all other life, and if there's something intrinsically immoral in there, then we have an intrinsically immoral universe.
Chickens are galactically stupid. But I've also seen chickens that were best friends and chickens that protected each other from bullies and chickens that mourned their dead. Not 99%. But once in a while.
Which is fine, I'd just like us to stop being hypocritical about the rules.
I sympathise with materialists in that new agey types make wild, untestable assertions that can neither be falsified nor verified, which helps no one advance to more useful frames. Plus, materialism enables the kind of reliable predictions that mean I'm home writing this rather than decomposing somewhere below the last flight I was on. But materialists overreach when they claim to know beyond the how and insist that their method is sufficient to describe every what. Hard concur on your re-articulation of the essence here, by the way.
Agreed. I think it is rather a case of materialists having really terrible interlocutors on the other side, historically, and the new agey/woo woo scammers looked so bad that people over corrected. I suspect that after the whole COVID vaccine SCIENCE debacle that many will over correct the opposite way.
Come to think of it, the debate about whether viruses count as life forms reminds me a bit of the spirits debate. At some point if you get to a spot where many things don't fit any of your categories, you have to conclude your categories have the problem, not reality.
This leads us to some big problems as the woke "different ways of knowing" and "2+2 literally =5" being applied to the "building bridges and flying aircraft" domain of human life.
I think the over-correction you've identified is already occurring in the form of postmodern woke ideology, as it seeks to "white knight" cultural traditions that have fallen behind from failure to reconcile with materialistic realities.
The loss of respect for, or at least acknowledgement of, different domains (rather than different "ways of knowing" the same fact) is part of the problem. We cannot literally say that Thor is causing thunder when we can watch (or even cause in the lab) thunder and lightning through material processes- a "winner takes all" situation has been created in which only one can reasonably be true and the other must be rejected wholly.
Yea... I am rather worried for my kids' future world, as the way things are going sooner or later there are not going to be a lot of people who can keep bridges and airplanes up. We might well see a lot of Soviet era style "Well, this used to work, but it broke and we are still waiting on the parts" sort of situations. Too much of wokeism is just cargo cult versions of actual work and production. As you say, promoting other cultural traditions that obviously don't work in the modern world (and didn't work so hot in the premodern, for that matter) is just a black hole for failure. There's a lot of good from earlier traditions that we have lost, but just grabbing everything that seems to have failed wholesale is a mistake too.
The over correction I am worried about, though, is among the non-woke. I think one of the biggest problems of the scientific institutions being corrupted is that people not just lose faith in the institutions, they start to think "maybe the process of science is the problem" entirely. Some people seem to be moving towards "Well, they lied about COVID, and climate change, and gods know what else. You know, it probably is Thor making lightning, after all. This science business is just a woke elite scam!"
I see a lot of this happening in the evangelical communities that have become "strange bedfellows" in the COVID dissent substacks where I spend the majority of my time and real-life effort. They are resisting in different ways and for different reasons than I am, and some of that makes me cringe a little for its implications ("vaccines are tyrannical, and also women need to stop wearing pants immediately because it is an abomination"), especially as we see an emerging backlash to woke ideology across very varied dissenting subcultures.
As someone personally able to reconcile at least a passingly pagan theology with a background in rational science, I do worry about the near future at least in the Western world.
Yes, that's exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. In general, I think people tend to blame the group or the people, something they can name, and not the behavioral mistakes in these sorts of cases. Then they, or some other group, start doing the exact same thing under another name, and they are blind to the problem because they only cared about the name. I think that is why people make the mistake of e.g. supporting communists because they hate fascists, only to find out the communists want basically the same thing the fascists did. Whoops.
I think in part, but one has to square egregores with materialism as well. I am fairly comfortable with the idea myself, although less with it being a separate entity from its people, but I expect there is a lot of ground work to be done connecting the dots for others. Or possibly my mind is just a mess from doing too much agent based modeling of complex systems :P
I was thinking about corporate personhood while writing the piece. And even brands. Lots is written about brands without ever really getting to the root of what a brand actually is. Someone could write a whole book about Apple on this basis, without ever mentioning products, logos or Steve Jobs.
I have a wonderful insight/fever dream I need to write up. I have often wondered if it had an audience, but you will love it :)
You're going to have to write that, now
Ah, but you're writing cool fiction and even though I've got a good plot idea I just can't write it. It all balances out.