it’s crucial that we humans make the evolutionary shift from “individuals” to “persons.”
What’s the difference?
We typically use these terms interchangeably, but for Teilhard they denote distinctly different, progressive evolutionary stages. An individual lives as an autonomous unit, subject to the old-order laws of “survival of the fittest” and planetary indifference. A person has come to understand themselves as belonging to greater relational field. They now sense their identity from a sense of wholeness in an entirely different order of coherence: a whole greater than the sum of its parts. In this greater whole both unity and differentiation are preserved; meanwhile the whole begins to be infused by a supremely personal tincture or essence. The universe is no longer random, but a system of relationships to which we all belong and are participating in!
.. As more complex forms emerged in unified units on our planet, consciousness was able to emerge with it. From this we can gather that the future of spirituality will not be found in the “enlightenment” of a select number of individuals, but will arrive through us collectively as a new “unit,” in the emergence of what we might call the mystical body of Christ.
Are electrons conscious?
.. nobody has provided even the beginnings of a satisfying solution to what David Chalmers called “the hard problem” of consciousness. More recently a quiet revolution has been occurring in philosophy of mind which aims to turn the brain-first approach on its head
.. It is the nature of consciousness that we really understand–through being conscious–and hence the philosophical task is to build our picture of the brain around our understanding of consciousness. We might call this a “consciousness-first” approach to the mind-body problem.
.. . How on earth can quality-rich experience be accommodated within soggy grey brain matter? The Russellian monist solution, inspired by certain writings of Bertrand Russell from the 1920s
.. There must be some intrinsic nature to the cerebellum, some way it is in and of itself independently of what it does. About this intrinsic nature physical science remains silent. Accepting this casts the problem of consciousness in a completely different light, and points the way to a solution.
.. Our discussion has led to another question, “What is the intrinsic nature of physical brain processes?” The Russellian monist proposes answering both question at once, by identifying phenomenal properties with the intrinsic nature of (at least some) physical brain processes. Whilst neuroscience characterises brain processes extrinsically, in terms of what they do, in their intrinsic nature they are forms of quality-rich consciousness.
.. Russellian monism is a general framework for unifying matter and mind and thereby avoiding dualism: the view of Descartes that mind and body are radically different kinds of thing.
.. panpsychism, the view that all matter involves experience of some form
.. The idea is that it is only by supposing that there is consciousness “all the way down” to electrons and quarks that we can render the emergence of human and animal consciousness intelligible. Experience can’t possibly emerge from the utterly non-experiential
.. How do the interactions of trillions of tiny minds produce a big mind? This is the so-called ‘combination problem’ for panpsychism
.. many significant developments in science have arisen not from experimental findings in the lab but from a radical reconceptualization of our picture of the universe formulated from the comfort of an armchair.
.. My hunch is that progress on consciousness, as well of course as involving neuroscience, will involve this kind of radical reconceptualization of the mind, the brain, and the relationship between them. Russellian monism looks to be a promising framework in which to do this.
Richard Rohr Meditation: The Whole World Is Our Cloister
In the Franciscan worldview, the Christ can be found everywhere. Nothing is secular or profane. You don’t really “get” the Christ mystery until body and spirit begin to operate as one. Once you see the material and the spiritual working together, everything is holy. The Christ is whenever and wherever the material and the spiritual co-exist—which is always and everywhere!
.. Francis believed that the Lord had shown him a different way, one which directly implied that the whole world—not just a single building—was our cloister. He did not need to create a sheltered space. We were to be “friars” instead of monks, living in the midst of ordinary people, in ordinary towns and cities. Franciscan friaries are still usually in the heart of major European and Latin American cities. We didn’t live on the edge of town because Christ is found as much in the middle of civilization as is in quiet retreats and hermitages.
.. Up until Francis of Assisi (1184-1226), most religious had to choose either a life of action or a life of contemplation. Secular priests worked with people in the parishes. The “true” religious went off to monasteries. Francis said there had to be a way to do both.
.. It’s as if consciousness wasn’t ready to imagine that it could find God in any way except by going into the desert, into the monastery, away from troubles, away from marriage, away from people. In that very real sense, we see a nondual mind emerging with the Franciscan movement.
.. We are still trying to teach that doing compassionate acts from a contemplative foundation is the greatest art form.
Is philosophy simply harder than science?
According to the “spin-off” theory of philosophical progress, all new sciences start as branches of philosophy, and only become established as separate disciplines once philosophy has bequeathed them the intellectual wherewithal to survive on their own.
There is certainly something to this story. Physics as we know it was grounded in the seventeenth-century “mechanical philosophy” of Descartes and others. Similarly, much psychology hinges on associationist principles first laid down by David Hume, and economics grew out doctrines first developed by thinkers who called themselves philosophers. The process continues into the contemporary world. During the twentieth century, both linguistics and computer science broke free of their philosophical moorings to establish themselves as independent disciplines.
According to the spin-off theory, then, the supposed lack of progress in philosophy is an illusion. Whenever philosophy does make progress, it spawns a new subject, which then no longer counts as part of philosophy. In reality, philosophy is full of progress, but this is obscured by the constant renaming of its intellectual progeny.
.. When it comes to topics like morality, knowledge, free will, consciousness and so on, the lecturers still debate a range of options that have been around for a long time.
.. Where philosophy hinges on analysis and argument, science is devoted to data. When scientists are invited to give research talks, they aren’t allowed simply to stand up and theorize, however interesting that would be. It is a professional requirement that they must present observational findings. If you don’t have any PowerPoint slides displaying your latest experimental results, then you don’t have a talk.
.. Plenty of experimentally intractable problems arise right within science. Take the interpretation of quantum mechanics, or the evolution of altruistic instincts. These are scientific questions all right, but they admit no simple experimental resolution. The problem is that, even though we have all the experimental results we could want, we can’t figure out a coherent theory to accommodate them. Philosophical problems arise within science as well as outside it.
The real difference between philosophy and science is not subject area, but the kind of problem at issue. Philosophical issues typically have the form of a paradox.
.. It should be said that scientists aren’t very good at this kind of thing. They are much happier with what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science”, working within “paradigms” of settled assumptions and techniques that allow them to focus on issues that can be settled experimentally. When they are faced with a real theoretical puzzle, most scientists close their eyes and hope it will go away.
.. One of the great scandals of modern intellectual life is the way that physicists brushed the problems of quantum mechanics under the carpet throughout the twentieth century. Led by Niels Bohr and his obscurantist “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics, they told generations of students that the glaring inconsistencies apparent in the theory were none of their business. “Shut up and calculate” was the typical response to any undergraduate who had the temerity to query the cogency of the theory. (This slogan has been variously attributed to Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman and others. The indeterminacy of the attribution is itself a testimony to the prevalence of the attitude.)
.. The “boo-hurrah” account of moral judgements was all the rage in the middle of the last century, but no-one any longer defends this simple-minded emotivism.