I’m a citizen disappointed by the shallowness of our media and lack of honest examination of today’s deeper challenges. Such as coming to grips with what society has done to our Earth’s biosphere (life support system). I realize no one likes bad news, but faith-based denial isn’t going to do our children any good either.
~ ~ ~ Thus I’ve taken to writing what I'd like to see more of and to sharing selected writings of others.
~ ~ ~ feel free to copy and pass along any of the following.
I received the following constructive response to some of my thoughts and have decided to share this latest effort to clarify my Earth Centrist perspective.
Hi, Peter,
Many theists believe in evolution, viewing it as god’s means of creating humans, so evolution is a bit of a red herring in this debate. We do have the concept of god in our minds, but that tells us nothing about whether there is a god or not. We have the concepts of trees and unicorns; the former exist, the latter don’t. We need further argumentation to make a case for or against god’s existence.
Regards,
Thank you for responding and engaging with my ideas.
Your note invites some clarification.
This isn’t about lip service to evolution.
This is about our relationship with the thoughts we possess.
This is about taking Descartes' (pre-scientific) reduction of what we can known about the human condition, which he boiled down to: "I Think, Therefore I Am” - to a modern scientifically informed reduction of our actual human condition: "I Am, Therefore I Think."
We are evolved biological sensing creatures, product of a half billion years of Earth’s evolution - what that tells us is that our mind is produced by our body/brain interacting with the world. (Solms, Damasio, Sapolsky, etc.)
This brings us to a realization that it isn't a question of whether Gods are real or not.
It is about appreciating that God's are the product of our own human thoughts.
Meta-physical figments within our minds - outside the realm of physical world.
You write: "We do have the concept of god in our minds" - but that is exactly what begs the question: "How does an assumption of God become a Being of God?"
An Alternative Philosophical Perspective - Earth Centrism.
What is “Earth Centrism”?
The Earth Centrist’s perspective acknowledges Earth, her material constituents and physical processes, unfolding one day at a time, as our fundamental touchstone with reality. We acknowledge Earth and glory in understanding her pageant of Evolution and appreciating how that pageant is reflected within our own body and mind.
We celebrate the physical fact that humans were created out of Earth's evolving biosphere.
Science shows us that we belong to the nurturing mammalian branch of one of Earth’s amazing animal kingdoms. Yet, it’s undeniable that something quite unique happened around six million years ago when certain apes took a wild improbable evolutionary turn.
By and by, besides the marvel of our two hands, we developed two feet and legs, that could stand tall and run for hours, combined with keen eyes and a growing brain that learned rapidly and remembered.
During this period our brain physically morphed in some significant ways that enabled it to host a profound leap in cognitive information processing, storage and retrieval ability. On the outside hominids learned to make tools, hunt, fish, and select plants, plus they mastered fire for cooking and better living.
On the inside our brains were growing and benefiting from the new super nourishment while human curiosity and adventures started filling and stretching our Mindscapes with experiences, questions, and knowledge beyond anything the "natural" physical Earth ever knew.
By Mindscape, I mean the product of all that our body/brain perceives and processes, which of course, evolutionarily speaking, was dependent on our brain’s hardware keeping pace with and driving the ever increasing volume of information and thoughts.
While the human mind and spirit seem ineffable mysteries, they are also of tremendous consequence and real-world physical power. They drove our growing ability to study and manipulate our world; to communicate and record our experiences; and to formulate explanations for a world full of mysteries, threats, wonders and dreams.
People learned to think and gossip and paint pictures upon the canvas of cave walls, and even better, upon the canvas of each other’s imaginations. We’ve been adding to our mind’s awareness and complexity ever since.
Of course, while all this was going on our extraordinaryhuman mind was also beginning to wonder about the ‘Why’ of the world it observed and the difficult, fragile, short lives we were allotted.
In seeking comfort and answers to unknowable questions it seems inevitable that Gods would inhabit our Mindscape. I suspect inspired by buried memories of being coddled within mom’s protective loving bosom those first couple years of life.
No doubt these “Gods” enabled further successes, though not through super-natural interventions, rather through their ability to form, conform, reform & transform the Mindscapes of the people beginning to congregate. Thus, combining pragmatic civil societal needs with universally felt, but keenly personal questions, fears, and dreams.
During the middle ages tribal stories, accepted ancient doctrines, and religious “truths” were no longer enough to satisfy our Mindscape’s growing desire for ever better understanding and power over our destinies and the biosphere that sustains us.
The human mind took another tremendous leap forward in awareness with the Intellectual Enlightenment and the birth of serious disciplined scientific study. Science’s success was dazzling in its ability to learn about, control and manipulate Earth’s physical resources and to transform entire environments.
Science was so successful that today most believe we are the masters of our world and too many have fallen into the hubristic trap of believing our ever fertile Mindscape is reality itself. But now I’m digressing, back on point, in summary,
Earth Centrism, is a perspective on our human condition that’s based on the understanding that Earth is our fundamental touchstone with physical reality and that we are creatures made through Earth’s own natural processes.
Earth Centrism comes from appreciating the “Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality divide.” Which also helps us get a handle on how the paternalistic Abrahamic mindset (that gave birth to three religions), with their self-serving attitudes towards other peoples, creatures, landscapes and resources, imposed a simplistic dualistic default that has blinded humanity to a clear understanding of ourselves, this planet, it’s processes, deep-time and how it created us.
The Mind/Brain conundrum and the Hard Problem of Consciousness are rooted in ancient religious and philosophical arguments, contrivances of our minds, dressed up in modern language. As though reality needs to prove itself to us self-serving petty humans.
Earth Centrism is founded on the understanding that scientific study of the material world is our best window into understanding our own lives within physical reality. Because Science is, at its core, a set of rules for observing and recording and learning about our natural world, and ourselves that strives as much as possible to eliminate human ego driven biases from its deliberations.
Science is founded on an unspoken understanding that we need each other to keep ourselves honest. It’s a community of educated, competitive, skeptical, experts who are constantly looking over each other’s shoulders. With fidelity to honesty being science’s Golden Rule.
I also contend that science offers spiritual/mystical challenges, experiences and resolutions, well beyond anything offered by the traditions of our self-made, ego straddled, religions with their tunnel vision and that ingrained resentment towards Earth and learning.
Earth Centrism is a personal emergent appreciation. When the sum total of all those insights one has collected from a life time of wonder and learning come together into a tapestry, a pageant of life and circumstance that is harmonious and graspable. When understanding and increasing awareness blossoms into a visceral connection that infuses one’s body and outlook upon life with the simple reality of being a transient element in Earth’s evolution.
Along with that comes a grounded feeling.A deep inside awareness that, I have arrived. I am a child of Earth, and it is beautiful, and this moment is mine.
... I should be going to bed, but my head is full of dancing memories from this evening’s (Dec 3rd) panel discussion that had four FLC professors debating the question: “Is belief in God rational?” Excellent stories told and arguments offered, claims made and responded to with counterclaims and more questions, as words upon words cascaded over each other.
Not for the first time. I found myself wondering, if philosophy’s goal is to help us understand, why the love for adding layers upon layers of creative complexity and hairsplitting that often obscures the fundamentals? After all, it is the simple fundamentals that make a coherent understanding possible?
Please understand I come at this God question from a different, and apparently somewhat unique Earth Centrist, science respecting, bottom up, evolutionary perspective that I’d like to share with you.
Is Belief in God Rational?
To me, that framing feels like a trick question of sorts
God is a belief in itself.
God is not a Thing.
Regarding people’s faith in a God - I ask, how does an assumption of God get transmuted into a Thing?
Is a belief in a belief rational? ( Is faith rational? )
I’d say sure, from an evolutionary and pragmatic societal perspective, there are a host of reasons faith in meta-physical beliefs could and does bring benefits to believers.
Regarding what God is, that needs to start with resolving the ageless question, “Who Am I?”
Fact is, I, we, are evolved biological animals, the product of half a billion unbroken years of Earth’s processes.
From the beginning all creatures have required a degree of awareness, processing and action abilities, each according to their individual biological complexity and kind. Ours is simply the most advanced mind, thanks to our incredible evolved body and its experiences.
Still, our thoughts are the interior reflection of our body communicating with itself as it processes incoming information from within and outside. (See Drs. Solms, Damasio, Sapolski, etc. for details.) It is our body and brain interacting with physical reality that produces our mind, our sense of self, all our thoughts - collectively our Mindscape.
The inevitable conclusion from the full scope of relevant biological/physical sciences is that consciousness is not a thing, it is an interaction. Our Consciousness is produced in the living moment by our living body.
As with the dynamo that stops producing electricity when it stops spinning - so too when our body stops living, our mind/consciousness ceases to be produced, after that, we become memories within those we leave behind.
It seems to me self-evident from the above that our God’s must be a product of our thoughts, which in turn, are driven by personal biological imperatives, needs, ego, bias, etc.
The Hard Problem is figuring out why such a straightforward observation - that our body/brain interacting with the world produces our mind - is so assiduously avoided.
Our Gods are very real, still we should be very clear, our Gods belong to the meta-physical realm.
Gods are not part of this physical reality that makes up the biology of our bodies, nor the substance of this miracle planet Earth that created us to begin with, along with the rules all of Earth’s nature operates under.
Key concepts: Appreciating the ‘Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide.’
Appreciating that our living body produces our thoughts, and that our Gods are born from within our own ego-centric thoughts.
***
The other question discussed was: “Does Morality Require God?”
How can it, if we create our own Gods?
For me, that realization puts the responsibility right back upon us humans, collectively and individually.
===============================================
The Durango Telegraph printed my letter Jan 9th and it was nice reading it in print. At first I thought it was fine, but then as I was rereading it and thinking about sharing it a little more, I decides to cut out the coy implications and spell it out. Mainly around the conclusion.
I should be going to bed, but my head is full of dancing memories from this evening’s (Dec. 3, 2024) panel discussion of four FLC professors debating the question: “Is belief in God rational?” Excellent stories were told and arguments offered. Claims were made and responded to with counterclaims and more questions, as words upon words cascaded over each other.
Not for the first time. I found myself wondering, if philosophy’s goal is to help us understand, why the love for adding layers upon layers of creative complexity and hairsplitting that often obscures the fundamentals? After all, isn’t it the simple fundamentals that makes a coherent understanding possible?
Please understand I come at this God question from a somewhat unique Earth-centrist, science-respecting, bottom-up, evolutionary perspective.
Is belief in God rational?
To me, that framing feels like a trick question of sorts.
God is a belief in itself. God is not a thing.
Regarding people’s faith in a God, I ask, how does an assumption of God get transmuted into a thing, (that is, an interested personal god)?
Is a belief in a belief rational? Is faith rational?
I’d say sure, from an evolutionary and pragmatic perspective, there are a host of reasons faith in meta-physical beliefs could and does bring benefits to believers.
Regarding what God is? That needs to start with resolving the ageless question, “Who am I”?
Fact is, I, we, are evolved biological creatures, the product of half a billion unbroken years of Earth’s processes. Recall that from the beginning, all creatures have required a degree of awareness, processing, and action abilities, each according to their individual biology. Ours is simply the most complex mind, thanks to our incredibly evolved body and experiences.
Still, our thoughts are the interior reflection of our body communicating with itself as it processes incoming information. (See: Drs. Solms, Damasio, Sapolski, etc. for details.) It is our body and brain interacting with physical reality that produces our mind, sense of self, thoughts – collectively our mindscape.
The inevitable conclusion from the scope of sciences is that consciousness is not a thing, it is an interaction. Individual consciousness is produced in the (cumulative) living moment, by our living body. Then the next moment-in-time happens and we must be prepared, to survive.
What about the human soul that pulses so proudly within us? Okay, consider the dynamo that stops producing electricity when it stops spinning.
When our body/brain stops living, our mind/consciousness ceases to be produced. After that, we become memories within those we leave behind.
It seems to me self-evident from the above that God must be a product of our thoughts, which in turn, are driven by personal biological imperatives, needs, ego, bias, etc.
The so-called Hard Problem is figuring out why such a straightforward observation – that our body/brain interacting with the living world produces our mind – is so assiduously avoided by philosophers.
Our Gods are very real, still we should be very clear, our Gods belong to the meta-physical realm.
Gods are not part of the physical reality that makes up the biology of our bodies, or this Earth and her processes.
That’s not to say there might not be ‘a something’ buried deep within the substance of this miracle planet Earth that created us to begin with, and that sustains us, in spite of our over-whelming self-destructive disregard. But such thoughts bring us back to the most important lesson within the Bible itself: "God is Beyond Human Understanding." Period.
Bringing it back down to the biological reality of our lives on Earth, the key concepts are physical reality ~ human mind divide: appreciating that our living body produces our thoughts, and that our Gods are born from within our own ego-centric consciousness.
The other question discussed was: “Does morality require God?”
How can it, if we create our own Gods?
For me, that realization puts the responsibility right back upon us humans, collectively and individually.
The glaring problem with their conceptions and the endless philosophizing is that they rarely truly incorporate the ramifications of Evolution beyond lip service.
Seems to me as a society our biggest problem is that most are still trapped within the Abrahamic mindset of absolute self-absorption. A bubble where our own thoughts, perceptions and expectations totally engulf our thinking and leaves no space for explicitly recognizing the physical realities beyond our own immediate desires and thoughts - that unrecognized attitude permeates and shackles our understanding of the world around us.
For all the lectures on the topic, I rarely hear any examination of the relationship between our selves and the knowledge we acquire. That’s a big problem because it blinds us to Earth's realities and the needs of others, such as this life sustaining biosphere we’re currently destroying as fast as we can.
Appreciating the Physical Reality ~ Human Mindscape divide
I can’t figure out, why it isn’t self-evident to folks that consciousness and mind can’t be understood by studying modern people in these modern times? Consciousness requires an evolutionary perspective of the natural, biological forces at work. First producing simple creatures that eventually evolved into aware complex creatures, with branches that eventually evolved into Homo during the last minute+ of Evolution’s 24 hours of Creation, only then into Homo sapiens, a mere 3, 4 seconds ago.
How does one ponder the human brain and mind without wondering about all the time before Homo? We evolved out of the mammalian class of animals. Think about it, the breast-feeding body plan with a lifestyle built around nurturing their young, developing families and even communities.
Matthew Whiteley has written another fascinating and provocative article. Although, I’ll admit, it confused, rather than enlightening me. Still, it offered me plenty to think about, while inviting some questions, perhaps offer some suggestions towards resolution.
I believe the other side of this story is terribly under reported, so even though I’m under-qualified, what I do know comes from the best and the brightest in their fields and it deserves being shared one way, or the other.
Here is a down-to-Earth, Evolution appreciating approach to unraveling these hard philosophical problems about human consciousness, including the apparently baffling experiencing the experience conundrum.
In his article, right out of the gate, Matthew hits me with some cognitive whiplash because his title reads, “Physicalism is False.” Wow, quite the suggestion. Okay, let’s see where this goes. Followed by, “Why the mystery of consciousness is not vitalism.”
Bam, where did that come from?
How could vitalism — or Anil Seth’s use of it as metaphor — inform our understanding of Physicalism, one way or the other?
Ironically these days, scientists have cracked open significant aspects behind the biological mechanisms that actually do produce our body’s “vital spirit” — though it’s quite a bit more complicated. Still, biology, and life is factually all about harnessed electricity.
This brings us to Physicalism, that’s an observation, a description. Everything is made out of atoms, molecules, folds within folds of harmonic cumulative complexity, gravity, the laws of nature, Earth’s evolution, biology, etc., and all that follows. The stuff science is capable of objectively observing and measuring.
Then there are our thoughts, fleeting as the moment. We feel a soul inside of ourselves, even though nothing has ever been found. Our thoughts, passions, ideas, the voices in your head, all this isn’t like anything physical. What is it? It’s a product of our physical body and brain. For me not more baffling than iron and magnet and motion producing electricity.
There are more channels of communication happening within our bodies than we dream of. We are only aware of the surface. Our human consciousness is this generation’s iteration of over half a billion years worth of unbroken generations and Earth’s research, and development, and culling, and dumb luck. All the work happened down here on Earth via geology/biology/time, evolving with every generation. Squishy wet and messy biology and deep-time unfolding one day at a time.
The stuff science is capable of objectively observing and measuring.
Zoom image will be displayed
Contemplating a postcard vs. being there.
(¶4) Matthew “… many physicalists simply take to denying elements in the (philosophical) discussion as having any meaning and suggesting that those who point out a property to consciousness that is self-evidently non-physical are somehow deluded by a kind of linguistic woo.
If I could have a dialogue with Matthew,
I’d ask him to elaborate on that. Because, I, myself understand consciousness as something the living body (the physical) produces.
All of consciousness neatly fits into the “meta-physical” realm of our existence. In fact, seems to me, it is our thoughts that create the bounds of the metaphysical realm.
(¶5) Matthew “The result then is that we seem to require laborious thought experiments to somehow exactly delineate the aspects of consciousness that are non-physical in order to somehow “prove” it, as if we can put them in a separate category as “stuff science will never explain, …”
I would suggest: Physical Reality ~ our Human Mind as a natural divide.
(Actually any biological creature’s “mind”. Since some level of self-awareness exists within all living creatures that ever survived to create off-spring.)
(¶5b) Matthew “Thought experiments … attempt to cut with a scalpel in between physical and non-physical aspects of experience to induce the realisation that something about experience simply lies beyond the reach of science.
I wonder if philosophers ever use that scalpel to cut between a radio transmitter and the electromagnetic wave it generates? What would they find?
Pondering the physical producing the non-physical signal.
If you’re thinking, “Come on, we know radio signals are physical because we can observe and measure them.” — okay, then consider the state of modern brain imaging.
You’ll find images of human thoughts in motion. Some studies even claim mind-reading abilities. You will also find images of the molecular components that produce bits of consciousness and thoughts.
Of course those bits mean nothing, Not until incorporated with the whole of the humming super complex organism, that is our physical body/brain, in motion, process the “now” moment.
What more do Philosophers expect?
Are they still looking for God?
(¶6) I think however that all of these thought experiments are slightly misguided, largely because their aim lies in separation.
I totally agree.
Only through a holistic appreciation can we hope to build the evidence into understanding.
Body + Brain + Interaction (interior & exterior) = Mind, (a constituent of the fleeting moment.)
(¶8) You might observe that all this sounds like an argument for physicalism. I am not a physicalist, in fact I think physicalism is an absurd dogma of the modern world whose existence represents the absolute spiritual, philosophical and cultural failure of our current civilization.
This remark floored me.
I won’t guess at what Matthew is implying. So, have no response to this, even though his words keep bouncing around in my mind.
If I were in an actual discussion with Matthew, I would certainly ask him to elaborate on what sorts of “failures” he’s referring to.
(¶9) At its basis is a problem of definition. What actually is physical? The word tends to act as a stand in for a set of other things, perhaps often simply the word ‘science’
Philosophy can over complicate and obscure any meaning.
At its root Physicalism is recognizing the fundamental material stuff of our existence.
Stuff we can observe, measure, replicate, (even if only in principle). It’s everything in the world “out there.”
What is overlooked way too often, is that physicalism is biology too.
Biology is Physicalism at its most complex! It will challenge, mystify overwhelm, while putting one in touch with “Awe” like nothing else I’ve experienced.
Looked at seriously, biology almost demands mystical grappling. It offers up intellectual challenges and, I dare say, resolutions beyond anything any school-boy-club, or preacher, can dream up.
Yet, it is all of the physical realm, with a touch of electricity at its heart.
I would suggest the following categorization is an important first base appreciation, the
Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide.
(¶9b) but more commonly a general feeling that there is some atomic level substance that we can reduce everything to, aimed more often not at a clear articulation of what this even means but a forbidding of any other possibility, namely the “God talk” that may afflict you if you crack open the doorway to it.
Matthew, why that tone of defensiveness?
The beautiful thing about recognizing that we are creatures of Earth — and that our consciousness actually and truly is the reflection of our body communicating with itself,while in the act of surviving — is that we learn to appreciate that, oh, of course, my God is real!
As real as I want him/her/it to be.
Why? Because we create our own gods out of the stuff of our own experience and fears.
Why would people create God?
Because we are lonely!
Life is constant toil and unforgiving.
Our loved ones die, and abandon us, or don’t understand us.
Sometimes we make stupid “unforgivable” mistakes, yet must live on.
We create Gods out of the needs within our hearts and souls and loneliness.
We need someone who Will Always Be There willing to listen and reassure, during the darkest night, and the most glorious of daybreaks, and everything in between, including those weirdest, scariest last moments of our lives.
I’ve experienced babies becoming toddlers, while a specific blanket evolves into a life’s necessity item. Especially when times get scary, visit to doctor, travel, etc. It’s like a fractal of how we once acquired Gods.
I believe we can not help but create a metaphysical (wishing it could be super-natural) companion, and it seems to me, of course, it would be modeled after that buried feeling of being enveloped in mom’s loving bosom with dad’s protection nearby (especially those first months and years that form the core of our character), coupled with our needs and expectations.
Okay, so God is real? What does that mean?
It means, God is a product of your own physical experience and mind, not something come down from on high!
(¶10) … Of these positions, only one is philosophically incoherent, which is physicalism. Physicalism proposes the problems inherent in all of the above thought experiments, and can only resolve the problem of consciousness
with recourse to some form of illusionism,
ie. we seem to be experiencing something non-physical,
but since the non-physical can be explained by physical laws,
therefore the intrinsic nature of its existence must be physical.
Oh boy,
that paragraph doesn’t offer near enough definitions.
Besides all this feels within the philosophical arena, while my mind is occupied with the real Earth and evolution, biology and physical data.
Modern evolutionary-neuro-biological sciences are dancing with that spark of life — get up to speed on the insights of Solms, Damasio, Sapolsky, beyond that, Nick Lane, Hazen, Shubin, Sloan-Wilson and many others.
I believe the problem is that philosophy never escaped theology’s base convictions, which remain a potent undiscussed under-current to most of todays, profitable, but fruitless, philosophizing.
(¶11) But vitalism is not something that makes sense as an analogy. …
Actually it’s ironic, modern understanding is demonstrating that a metaphorical “vitalism” actually is at work within our cells.
It started long ago, with an evolving geological Earth plus deep time.
Earth produced geologic conditions just right enough to create a matrix upon which energy, that is electricity could be harnessed.
By and by, the Kreb cycle (citric acid cycle) came into being.
Seems to me, this could be the moment biology was invented.
Then there were beyond-epic geological changes over more deep time during which the dance between geology & biology was evolving and refining Earth’s mineral composition — while continuing to learn how to harness that Kreb cycle into a source for Life to thrive with.
About 8, 7, 6 hundred million years ago, complex multicellular life established themselves.
By half a billion years ago, they were active creatures creating ecologies, and it was off to the races. Driven by Earth’s changing conditions. (Check out David Quammen’s “The Tangle Tree”)
Worth noting, is that the most fundamental reality of living creatures is that they required a degree of self awareness & decision making & controlled action-potentials, 500 million years ago, as they do today.
(¶12) …The observation that no scientific explanation will account for consciousness is not a claim that science can’t fully explain what the brain is doing.
The even if it did, it still wouldn’t tell you what the thing it describes actually is. … Science tells us nothing about the essential nature of experience, it does not tell us what it is.
Of course it does. The nonstop symphony of interactions is the essential nature of experience. Wedged in the fleeting moment between future and past.
What more are we expecting?
Perhaps ponder why a video of a roller coaster ride — doesn’t feel like — actually strapping your creature body into the car, then climbing up the track, then having your world drop out, and your face and hair whipping through the wind, as your guts feel the Gs, and your belly does somersaults.
Can you understand why this philosophical attitude feels like a bored kids’ self-indulgence, to a thinking/working stiff like myself?
(¶13) If someone conducts brain surgery on a conscious patient, they see a brain, obviously. For a physicalist, that’s it, and the question “how are a brain and the experience you are having the same thing?” is moot, the thing that connects the two is the scientific explanation, and if we haven’t explained it yet, we will: any attempt to argue anything else takes us back to vitalism.
That feels pretty unfair.
What does Matthew mean with “the same thing”?
What’s his question?
Our answers are constrained by the quality of the questions we ask.
In this case I suggest the questioner is obligated to work harder on formulating a coherent realistic question that is respectful of modern evolutionary biological understanding.
Here I read, sweeping biased opinion.
(¶13b) But what kind of a solution is this? Consciousness is the most basic fact there is, and it is the only fact that is actual. …
Right so let’s look at what our observations tell us at face value.
Body + Brain + Interaction (interior & exterior) = Consciousness
A review of the state of the science offer amazing insights, supporting such a formulation. I invite challenges to that opinion.
(¶14) … any dogmatic physicalism simply rests upon nonsensical assumptions and projections of future explanations that seem to misunderstand the role of science.
I would say that statement is ill-considered and ignores the depth and breadth of modern neurological evolutionary biology, all of which is certainly physical reality.
(¶14b) … but it will still be up to us to consider what to do with that remarkable and stupefying fact that existence is found only in through ontological stained glass of perspective.
What’s the problem?
Though the glass darkly and all that?
For me, a clear appreciation for the Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide, has done wonders in clarify that glass.
(¶14c) … This fact can only be explained as ‘physical’ if we are willing to uphold the deliberate pretense that it is otherwise.
Please excuse my blunt words, but this statement can only be made by someone who hasn’t done his homework and throughly considered modern evolutionary biological neurological findings, insights and how that is informing and reshaping our understanding of ourselves in the world, as part of the world, not above it.
It comes down to asking better questions, and reducing faith-based expectations.
I don’t mean to sound snippy. But I’m a 70 year old heart broken evolution science enthusiast who has spent his life keeping up on new findings, thereby gaining a front row seat to the past half century of evolutionary breakthroughs and revolutionary scientific insights.
And I’m tired of seeing philosophers ignoring that wealth of new understanding because philosophy is more about ego, theology, careers and gamesmanship — rather than grappling with questions that would have mattered to humanity.
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