The Human Question

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/despite-everything-francis-spufford-talks-about-unapologetic/?_r=0

We find ourselves walking down a path and see that it has a trajectory which is beyond where we were aiming to go; it is toward a point that we will never reach but which we always approach... (to be continued:  hopefully, I'll work out something about the Way.

When discussing God stuff, it's more important to focus (initially) on teleology, more specifically, on human teleology, that is, on whether we have have an natural inclination for one or more activities, and what that activity or set of activities might be.  Only after talking about that and how it relates to God would it make sense to talk about immateriality and immortality.  After all, only the desire a truly human kind of fulfillment could lead one to desire to be eternally so fulfilled.

What if human practical reasoning is the point where the presence of God is most evident?

Is "soul" part of a descriptive account of human action, or is it hidden, explanatory?  Or is both? If the first-person description of my action includes a kind of identity in the manifold of my actions then the soul is given in that description. If the third-person explanation posits being or activity that is continuous in the individual even when that individual has no first-person report of activity, then that explanation gives us the soul. If we can identify soul as given in one account with soul as given in the other, then.... well, I guess we can say (with a little irony) "mission accomplished." Perhaps relevant:  I need to find that great quote in the Summa theologiae that notes that esse is to essence as action is to power: it may be helpful here...

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin6.htm which is discussed in http://thomism.wordpress.com/2013/09/28/athanasiuss-cosmological-argument/ Where the blogger says, " Athanasius’s: If diverse things form a single reality,* there is some cause separate from them.  The best defense of this premise is, oddly enough, in Chapter VI of William James’s  Psychology “ On the Mind-Stuff Theory ” (it’s also in Volume 53 in the Great Books series). James uses it to show that, despite all the best efforts to the contrary, psychology has to posit the existence of a soul separate from all mental reality; though the same premise gets us Athanasius’s conclusion that we need some being separate from all natural or noumenal reality ." Nice!

http://thomism.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/note-on-the-clayton-dennett-debate/

My favorite epistemological joke--"How do you know that there will be a problem of induction tomorrow?" is closely related to the following point: Criticizing some attempts to solve the problem of induction as circular may itself be naive --unless one's estimation of this issue includes the recognition of the fact that it is only through induction that we recognize this problem.  There is no way to "step outside of our own skin," as it were, i.e., to make use of a non-inductively obtained vantage on this issue.  But there may be no need to do so if induction gives us eidetic knowledge rather than only predictions.  It would be a kind of faux pas to criticize the inductions had by others as being merely predictive and probable while regarding one's own grasp of the same in eidetic terms.  But that seems to be the sort of move that one must make in order to justify skepticism on the basis of the problem of induction.  If the attempted solution is not induct...

Defeasibilist: "We don't really know that 2+3=5" One response: that we know WHAT "2+3=5" means (while prescinding from the discussion of whether we know that it is or must be true) is sufficient to make manifest the fact that we have access to transcendent, Platonic objects.  What I think of when I say this is at least as obvious as what I see when I open my eyes. In order to disagree about whether a claim is true one must agree (at least in part) about what the utterance of the claim means.

The "no miracles hypothesis" (NMH) applies a form of reasoning called "inference to the best explanation" (IBE) to argue that scientific success is best explained by its truthfulness. After all, if science were successful but devoid of truth, then that success would seem miraculous.  Truthfulness is a better explanation than miraculousness; hence science's success is better explained by its truthfulness The objection to NMH is that it is an example of the very thing it is trying to justify: NMH is itself an inference to the best explanation, hence it can't be used to justify IBE without circularity. But IBE itself already has a kind of support in our common sense reasoning (as does truth); hence its use to argue that science gets us at the truth may seen as an application of common sense convictions to science.  On the basis of common sense, it seems more likely that science gets us at the truth than it is a miracle or coincidence.  If NMH is circular re...

http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2012/02/consciousness-mind-brain

What if the higher level operations we associate with human beings weren't the highest that there could be?  What if there were an animal operation that were as different from our cognitive and appetitive activities as ours is from digestion?  That is, what if cognition and appetite were not the highest possible animal activities? My conviction, of course, is that there's nothing higher than the two aforementioned operations, except for improved versions of sort of cognition and appetite presently found in humans.  But a materialist who sees cognition as a more complex version of a chemical process would have no reason in principle to deny that there could be something related to cognition as cognition is to taking in nourishment.  But what would that something be? Nothing?

The principle of parsimony is better served if the religious sense is regarded as related to science/philosophy/poetry as a whole is to many parts.

...or does a materialist recognize "states"?  And if s/he does, isn't that opening the door to energeia/form?

Anti-reductionism can start with beings that are complex but not living (e.g., atoms), and go from there to the investigation of organisms.

Append a discussion of biotechnology to the discussion of evolution.  Once you have the hierarchy / aperture theory established, you can   allow for biotechnological stuff, even life synthesis, while denying mechanism.

In disproving mechanism, I am not proving the existence of immateriality, but showing that there is more to matter than which can be conceived of mechanistically.

The Companion to the Philosophy of Biology  discusses the "hallmarks" of life: that is, characteristics that are, for the most part, found in living things, but which are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for life. I propose instead to look at these characteristics as found in humans and to explore how they are interrelated in us--especially how there might be a necessary/sufficient/contributing relation between these characteristics as they are found in us.  Next I would look at other species in comparison to humans, and in many ways as diminished examples of life as found humans, so that it might not be so surprising to see that some of those characteristics or hallmarks do not show up in some cases.

As one gets to lower levels of being, one finds greater fluctuation: it is hard to see how a genuine stability and continuity at the higher level could be in any way the result of the these lower level fluctuations.  And if it's illusory, it's hard to see how even an illusion could have the requisite stability.