Readings: of The Ghost in the Machine

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from the fourth essay, “Thinking Again,”of Marilyn Robinson’s book, Absence of Mind – the Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self:

As Bertrand Russell pointed out decades before Gilbert Ryle coined this potent phrase [i.e “the Ghost in the Machine”], the old, confident distinction between materiality and nonmateriality is not a thing modern science can endorse. Physicists say a change in a split photon occurs simultaneously in its severed half, at any theoretical distance. As if there were no time or space, this information of change passes instantly from one to the other. Is an event that defies any understanding we have of causality a physical event? Yes. Can the seeming timelessness and spacelessness that mediate this change also be called physical? Presumably, since they have unambiguous physical consequences. Then perhaps we cannot claim to know the nature of the physical, and perhaps we ought not to be so confident in opposing it to a real or imagined nonphysical. These terms, as conventionally used, are not identical with the terms “real” and “unreal,” though the belief that they are is the oldest tenet of positivism. The old notion of dualism should be put aside, now that we know a little about the uncanny properties of the finer textures of the physical.

This consideration, which has long lingered on the periphery of my knowledge base—as an uninvited squatter of sorts—has indeed (now that Ms. Robinson has so forcefully rubbed my nose in it) caused me, of necessity, to put aside my old notion of dualism.

I have not been a positivist. But I have been a dualist of the type: Spirit Good / Matter Bad. As such distinctions become ambiguous, however, so must that species of dualistic assumption. The only sort of dualism left standing would be that of the Good as opposed to the Evil. But if, as we are sometimes told, the Evil has no real existence, but is only an absence of the Good, then what? It’s all Good?

You tell me. I’m stumped…
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Readings: Are You Positive About That?

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I am currently about one-third of the way through Marilynne Robinson’s interesting book of essays, Absence of Mind: the Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. Specifically, I am on the second essay, entitled “The Strange History of Altruism.” In this chapter, Robinson briefly recalls the history and cultural influence of positivism, and offers her thoughts on the pernicious effects positivism has had on the concept of the self, in science as well as in art and literature.

Since Darwin, Comte, Freud, et al. and the advent of what she labels “parascientific thought,” the notion of persons acting to benefit others at a real cost to themselves has been discredited, she argues, at a huge cost to the idea of an essential human nature.

I shall post an excerpt from this chapter below, and ask that my readers—particularly the writers and poets among you—to contemplate the significance of this kind of parascientific thought on your creative life project:

…[evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey] Miller states, ‘Evolution cannot favor altruistic information-sharing any more than it can favor altruistic food-sharing. Therefore, most animals’ signals must have evolved to manipulate the behavior of another animal for the signaler’s own benefit.’ And other animals have evolved to ignore them, because it didn’t pay to listen to manipulators. Ergo, it seems, we, alone among the animals, have language. Why the complexity of language and our adeptness in the use of it? Gazzaniga says, “Considering this conundrum, Miller proposes that language’s complexities evolved for verbal courtship. This solves the altruism problem by providing a sexual payoff for eloquent speaking by the male and female.”

Is it true? Are the astonishing sonnets of Shakespeare and the elegant word-play of a Dylan Thomas or a Sandra Agricola (plug!), nothing more than grand elaborations on such classic pickup lines as “Fuck me if I’m wrong, but isn’t your name Martha?”

Is a poet essentially of a kind with the short-lived and behaviorally hard-wired moth on its herky-jerky flight towards an artificial light?
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Readings: Everything That Really Matters

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I am currently reading the novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, by one of my very favorite contemporary writers, Rebecca Goldstein. Or, as she designates herself on the title page of this offering: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.

The excerpts I will share below involve a discussion between two doctoral candidates, each a disciple of the brilliant, if eccentric, faculty star: Prof. Jonas Elijah Klapper. The pair had been for a late-night drink at a student hang-out and had been accosted and “good-naturedly” ridiculed by a group of other grad students for being Klapper’s students. The older of the pair speaks first:
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xxx“Of course [that’s a typical opinion of Klapper]. Jonas gets that all the time from so-called philosophers. He’s the only one who’s doing real philosophy these days, ever since the logical positivists set out to hunt down and exterminate any genuine philosophical insights. These are the guys who run around calling out ‘meaningless’ wherever they find something difficult and profound. …If they can’t bag it in some trivial empirical test, they blast it out of the skies with ‘meaningless.’ Look, according to these guys, even Nietzsche isn’t a real philosopher, and that—to use one of their own favorite ploys—is a reductio ad absurdum if ever there was one.”
xxx“Why didn’t we set the guy straight? Shouldn’t we have defended Professor Klapper?” [asks the younger of the two]

Now, here follows the points that grabbed me, and with which I tend to wholeheartedly agree (even if Rebecca Goldstein may not, btw):

xxx“There’s no point. These guys are ideologues. Their worldviews would crumble if you got them to give up their positivistic, nihilistic scientism. The English departments are mired in political ideology, and the philosophers are buried in scientistic ideology. Jonas is the sole defender of the faith.”

The liberal arts, like the departments of political science and economics, have been invaded and successfully colonized by ideologues. But the issue is not—as is often bruited about by the rightwing ideologues—that they are political leftists; the issue is that they are positivists, dominating disciplines which should be the domains of creative thinkers and idealists. If this trend is not reversed, the soul of our living, organic, age-old civilization is kaput; replaced by a debased anti-culture of mass-produced, repeatable and disposable, inorganic facts.
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