My favorite monthly illustration in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry is from February. A lovely winter scene down on the farm, three women sitting more or less together in a little shed. Two of the women are sitting with their pudenda hanging out. They are the peasants. The third is a lady and is fully clothed.
This was in the days when we were more fully understanding ourselves as "souls". Some souls sat with their pussies out; some were granted modesty.
People who think going back to "souls" is a good and necessary idea must either imagine themselves as "lady/gentleman souls" or don't mind the thought of being a "peasant soul", genitalia exposed to the common view.
This is a absolute corker of an essay. Bernado Kashrup’s theories are very interesting about analytical idealism but he didn’t get there first, an earlier version of this was put forward by Bishop Berkley, (subjective idealism famously refuted by Dr Johnson).
If you want even more weird physics theories check out Superdeterminism and Bell’s Theorem, as I understand this (and I could be wrong), this means that the universe does not function without free will, that is our choices and agency are key to the outcome of the unfolding of reality, something in contradiction to the ‘inevitability of progress’ narrative. Who or what is driving this narrative? Is it an over reach of the left hemisphere as McGilchrist contends?
This is really good: an excellent summation of where we are now and how we got here.
Pessimistically, I would argue that the reason that, 100 years after the fact, the consequences of quantum theory haven’t even been absorbed into mainstream scientific discourse, let alone by the culture at large, is due to more than mere stubbornness or reluctance to face the implications, but rather due to something even more fundamental. It’s not because we will not, but because we quite literally cannot. If it were simply a question of taking a radical approach to the issue, or overcoming our prejudices and challenging our assumptions, then we would have got along further than we have now. As things are, it is impossible to escape the feeling that this time, we really have run into the buffers of what we are capable of understanding, not just as individuals, but as a species. In other words, it’s not just a “software” issue, but a “hardware” issue too. Like it or not, we need our brains for thinking, and they might just be the limiting factor here.
Optimistically, though, the human brain does evolve, and in ways and according to timescales that can’t be fully explained by classical evolutionary biology. Our “capacity for self-reflexive consciousness” may not actually be that old, occurring as you state at our ascendancy to the literate age, and may have involved a certain “rewiring” of our physical brains. We may be standing on on the thresholds of something similar, something which should fill us trepidation, frustration and hope. Trepidation, as it will be accompanied by a deal of mental anguish (Julian Jaynes contents that this was a factor in the societal breakdown of the late bronze age collapse), frustration, as it won’t happen in any of our lifetimes, but hope that our descendants at least will ascend to a genuinely post-rational future, beyond our comprehension.
A more optimistic analysis of this came two days ago (10th Feb) in a conversation between Jonathan Pageau and JP Marceau in a conversation about the latter's recently published book 'Post-reductionist Christianity: A Way Out of the Meaning Crisis.'
I finally got around to watching this. Yes, it was an interesting discussion and it seems that interest in "post-materialism" is more widespread than I'd previously thought. I still have doubts about whether it can coalesce into something coherent, but the shortcomings of the materialist view are increasingly apparently and something will eventually have to give.
Really interesting thesis. A few things came to mind:
1) While I understand your essay is focused on a Western arc, and I will be charitable and assume you purposely did so for the sake of writing a concise essay in which Plato's theory provides a nice scaffolding, but we are striving for an understanding that can be applied to human civilization at large, or I would hope, so why start with the Axial age? Plato is definitely NOT the first recorded reference to the soul. Plato was not the earliest thinker to give structure to the idea of interiority and souls as such. Plato's eros, thumos, and logos all have antecedents in Buddhism. There are continuities between Plato's divine order and Buddhist understandings of the discovery of God within the soul. If you are positing these interlocking views of the soul and the world as foundational to your theory of understanding singularities than I think one could date a seismic inflection point way earlier than 13th century AD no? And, I think one ought to if our goal here is to arrive at a broader reaching truth.
2)Furthermore, and I guess to the previous point I find it curious that you place the first singularity of literacy when you do, rather than take into account far earlier evidence of language and literacy and thus a sense of interiority. The ancient Egyptians had a very advanced language which they used to document their spiritual beliefs, desires, and sense of achievements. They even, in a sense, used language to control the narrative they wished to leave behind and did so prolifically...so it seems we could say indeed language IS a singularity, and likely the first needed to anchor the premise of this overarching theory you lay out, but it certainly came about much earlier than the Axial Age. In fact I think locating a single point of singularity within literacy proves a daunting task if you take into account continuity theories for the origin of language itself, which most ascribe to over discontinuous theories for the origins of language. That said, I do think language, or literacy, is the notable singularity for perhaps understanding a sense of interiority, I just think it was remiss not to acknowledge it as happening way earlier.
3) Lastly, reading this I began to wonder if evolution itself doesn't function similarly to the ways you describe generalized AI. Isn't evolution just a method by which species recursively improve? We could consider "technology" to be the first use of stone tools, or fire, or whatever, which catalyzed the progression from earlier forms of humans to current homo sapiens, which essentially was a species replacement. AI in some sense, and the trans-humanist era could very well be another progression in this evolution. Neither good nor bad, perhaps an inevitable progression from our current state?
Excellent essay! You referenced Federico Faggin, who posits, if I may crudely paraphrase--that consciousness may be a quantum field which issues free-will on collapse of the wave function--a very seductive idea (perhaps short on particulars thus far). Do you have any thoughts on his ideas?
I enjoyed reading _Irreducible_ and though I can't really comment on the more speculative end of Faggin's book except to say it's speculative, I am am very struck by the small but vehement subculture of technologists who seem to have arrived at metaphysical idealism precisely _through_ technology. That seems logical, to me, but if there's an element frustratingly missing (or maybe I've just not found it yet) it's any bridging thought between those guys and people who are hacking at similar coalfaces in adjacent disciplines such as philosophy and theology. I want there to be an "Everything Really Is In Mind" conference somewhere, with keynotes from (eg) David Bentley Hart, Robert Koons, Bernardo Kastrup, Federico Faggin, maybe John Milbank and Roger Penrose too, and a massive metaphysical bunfight in the coffee room afterwards
I did some research on "identity" and it comes from either psychologist Erik Erikson and his notion of "identity crisis" or GH Mead but the first uses of identity in the contemporary sense preceded both and were by police referring to the "identity" of so and so.
My favorite monthly illustration in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry is from February. A lovely winter scene down on the farm, three women sitting more or less together in a little shed. Two of the women are sitting with their pudenda hanging out. They are the peasants. The third is a lady and is fully clothed.
This was in the days when we were more fully understanding ourselves as "souls". Some souls sat with their pussies out; some were granted modesty.
People who think going back to "souls" is a good and necessary idea must either imagine themselves as "lady/gentleman souls" or don't mind the thought of being a "peasant soul", genitalia exposed to the common view.
This is a absolute corker of an essay. Bernado Kashrup’s theories are very interesting about analytical idealism but he didn’t get there first, an earlier version of this was put forward by Bishop Berkley, (subjective idealism famously refuted by Dr Johnson).
If you want even more weird physics theories check out Superdeterminism and Bell’s Theorem, as I understand this (and I could be wrong), this means that the universe does not function without free will, that is our choices and agency are key to the outcome of the unfolding of reality, something in contradiction to the ‘inevitability of progress’ narrative. Who or what is driving this narrative? Is it an over reach of the left hemisphere as McGilchrist contends?
https://www.irishphilosophy.com/2023/02/08/10246/
This is really good: an excellent summation of where we are now and how we got here.
Pessimistically, I would argue that the reason that, 100 years after the fact, the consequences of quantum theory haven’t even been absorbed into mainstream scientific discourse, let alone by the culture at large, is due to more than mere stubbornness or reluctance to face the implications, but rather due to something even more fundamental. It’s not because we will not, but because we quite literally cannot. If it were simply a question of taking a radical approach to the issue, or overcoming our prejudices and challenging our assumptions, then we would have got along further than we have now. As things are, it is impossible to escape the feeling that this time, we really have run into the buffers of what we are capable of understanding, not just as individuals, but as a species. In other words, it’s not just a “software” issue, but a “hardware” issue too. Like it or not, we need our brains for thinking, and they might just be the limiting factor here.
Optimistically, though, the human brain does evolve, and in ways and according to timescales that can’t be fully explained by classical evolutionary biology. Our “capacity for self-reflexive consciousness” may not actually be that old, occurring as you state at our ascendancy to the literate age, and may have involved a certain “rewiring” of our physical brains. We may be standing on on the thresholds of something similar, something which should fill us trepidation, frustration and hope. Trepidation, as it will be accompanied by a deal of mental anguish (Julian Jaynes contents that this was a factor in the societal breakdown of the late bronze age collapse), frustration, as it won’t happen in any of our lifetimes, but hope that our descendants at least will ascend to a genuinely post-rational future, beyond our comprehension.
A more optimistic analysis of this came two days ago (10th Feb) in a conversation between Jonathan Pageau and JP Marceau in a conversation about the latter's recently published book 'Post-reductionist Christianity: A Way Out of the Meaning Crisis.'
It's worth checking out.
https://youtu.be/JAZqHMvEEG8?si=s9WZuFrTgqWBmZr1
I finally got around to watching this. Yes, it was an interesting discussion and it seems that interest in "post-materialism" is more widespread than I'd previously thought. I still have doubts about whether it can coalesce into something coherent, but the shortcomings of the materialist view are increasingly apparently and something will eventually have to give.
Really interesting thesis. A few things came to mind:
1) While I understand your essay is focused on a Western arc, and I will be charitable and assume you purposely did so for the sake of writing a concise essay in which Plato's theory provides a nice scaffolding, but we are striving for an understanding that can be applied to human civilization at large, or I would hope, so why start with the Axial age? Plato is definitely NOT the first recorded reference to the soul. Plato was not the earliest thinker to give structure to the idea of interiority and souls as such. Plato's eros, thumos, and logos all have antecedents in Buddhism. There are continuities between Plato's divine order and Buddhist understandings of the discovery of God within the soul. If you are positing these interlocking views of the soul and the world as foundational to your theory of understanding singularities than I think one could date a seismic inflection point way earlier than 13th century AD no? And, I think one ought to if our goal here is to arrive at a broader reaching truth.
2)Furthermore, and I guess to the previous point I find it curious that you place the first singularity of literacy when you do, rather than take into account far earlier evidence of language and literacy and thus a sense of interiority. The ancient Egyptians had a very advanced language which they used to document their spiritual beliefs, desires, and sense of achievements. They even, in a sense, used language to control the narrative they wished to leave behind and did so prolifically...so it seems we could say indeed language IS a singularity, and likely the first needed to anchor the premise of this overarching theory you lay out, but it certainly came about much earlier than the Axial Age. In fact I think locating a single point of singularity within literacy proves a daunting task if you take into account continuity theories for the origin of language itself, which most ascribe to over discontinuous theories for the origins of language. That said, I do think language, or literacy, is the notable singularity for perhaps understanding a sense of interiority, I just think it was remiss not to acknowledge it as happening way earlier.
3) Lastly, reading this I began to wonder if evolution itself doesn't function similarly to the ways you describe generalized AI. Isn't evolution just a method by which species recursively improve? We could consider "technology" to be the first use of stone tools, or fire, or whatever, which catalyzed the progression from earlier forms of humans to current homo sapiens, which essentially was a species replacement. AI in some sense, and the trans-humanist era could very well be another progression in this evolution. Neither good nor bad, perhaps an inevitable progression from our current state?
Excellent essay! You referenced Federico Faggin, who posits, if I may crudely paraphrase--that consciousness may be a quantum field which issues free-will on collapse of the wave function--a very seductive idea (perhaps short on particulars thus far). Do you have any thoughts on his ideas?
I enjoyed reading _Irreducible_ and though I can't really comment on the more speculative end of Faggin's book except to say it's speculative, I am am very struck by the small but vehement subculture of technologists who seem to have arrived at metaphysical idealism precisely _through_ technology. That seems logical, to me, but if there's an element frustratingly missing (or maybe I've just not found it yet) it's any bridging thought between those guys and people who are hacking at similar coalfaces in adjacent disciplines such as philosophy and theology. I want there to be an "Everything Really Is In Mind" conference somewhere, with keynotes from (eg) David Bentley Hart, Robert Koons, Bernardo Kastrup, Federico Faggin, maybe John Milbank and Roger Penrose too, and a massive metaphysical bunfight in the coffee room afterwards
I did some research on "identity" and it comes from either psychologist Erik Erikson and his notion of "identity crisis" or GH Mead but the first uses of identity in the contemporary sense preceded both and were by police referring to the "identity" of so and so.
Thank you, Ms. Harrington, for your article. It's important.
Thanks for this -- but shouldn't 'The first recorded reference to the soul—psyche—in the
Western tradition appears in Plato, one of the most profoundly influential philosophers
of the Axial Age.' use 'the first recorded discussion of the psyche..' ?