The tendency to see ourselves as above nature has deep roots.

                                                        The Ghost in the Machine

 

 

Science as highlighting. The scientific framework means the epistemological purview that takes in one aspect of the world – the underlying, measurable, predictable, causal, material, ‘mechanical’. We owe to it fantastic insights into nature and powerful (problematic and nonproblematic) technology. I love much of science, all of science insofar as it is not in the service of organized greed or sheer dumb power.  But to equate absolutely the scientific framework with knowledge as such is scientism, not science. No possible experiment, no possible mathematical proof could conceivably refute or confirm such an ‘hypothesis’ because it is not a hypothesis but a metaphysical world version. The non-scientific idea is that if science can’t get it, it is not real. We can understand the appeal of that metaphysic to some scientists – it allows them to be Lords of nature, the ultimate judges of the Real – more medieval than the most absolutist medieval theologian! 

       The reduction of all knowledge from art to the understanding of the particularity of people and more, to our inner lives of meaning as a whole to religious revelation to the framework of scientific knowledge – that is a crazy move in the sense that if taken seriously it mean most of our lives (including the lives of scientists) are illusions. It is analogous to life in the Matrix (of the well-known film). Since it is a metaphysical world version, I cannot prove it wrong ‘objectively’ to someone intent on holding it. But from the inside of human life to live it out in utmost consequence would be a life at least bordering on insanity. I recall a scene from the film A Beautiful Mind where the mathematical genius tries to pick up a young woman at a bar. He said to her: “I don’t exactly know what I am required to say for you to have intercourse with me, but can we just assume I have said all that. I mean we are essentially talking about fluid exchange, right?” Not the words of a beautiful mind. Well she slaps him. Yet he is simply living in a world version in which scientism is assumed true and which he believes is true. One could imagine a culture, perhaps, based on that metaphysics (Swift came close to imagining one in Gulliver’s Travels as did C.S, Lewis in his science fiction). But what a culture! Still, this is the level one must think about metaphysical world versions.

 

 

The Body and the Soul. Imagine there are two pieces of paper in front of you. One of them is a genuine $5 bill. The other is a perfect counterfeit. In fact, imagine that forgers illegally created it with the very same equipment that created the real bill. The difference between the real $5 bill and the fake isn't a matter of the physical properties of the piece of paper. It is nothing that would reveal itself to physics. If the criterion to consider any x genuinely real is that in principle it can be explained by physics, then the distinction between the counterfeit and real bill is itself not real. But that is absurd. Therefore, that criterion can’t be right. 

        A similar point holds for the home run. There are certain things that have to happen physically for a physical event to count as a home run. But with a little imagination, we can tell a story about what's "really" going on that has nothing to do with baseball. It just looks like a real baseball game. Boys are playing war with the bat as the cannon and the ball at the cannonball. They are trying to bombard the pretend army on the other side of the fence, which they imagine to be a trench. But to be a home run, the physical events have to be part of an actual baseball game. Without the right intentions, rule-following, etc., no set of physical events amounts to a baseball game. There are physical regularities in a baseball game, but some of the most important things have to do with explicitly, intentionally, following a set of rules or norms. Physics has a lot to say about the physics of spheres colliding with bats and so on; physics has nothing to say about stolen bases, designated hitters, and the like.

       The physical events as described by physics, therefore, never describe a home run. But the baseball facts emerge from the physical facts that physics can describe. These are not two separate dimensions of reality. Physics simply abstracts and focuses on one particular aspect of reality. No amount of purely physical knowledge can ever explain baseball. Or culture. Or our inner lives.

       The meanings of things are equally as real as the purely physical events. Meaning is interwoven with the physical universe – not something outside of it. It is natural. Meanings are embedded in the matrix of nature; not some spooky unnatural stuff that can’t be explained or whose reality must be explained away. They just can’t be explained by physics (or any science conceived on analogy to physics). Why should anyone have ever thought that they could be or must be so explained?! Our inner lives don’t float free of physical facts; physical facts don’t make our inner lives unreal. We are talking about two aspects of one reality we all experience all the time. For me, this is a perfect description of how the soul and the body express one reality. 

 

 

Cremation.  It looks like I will have to go to the furnace rather than the grave when my life is done – for financial reasons; I am too poor to be buried. Perhaps my preference for rotting comes from all the poetry I have read where expressions like ‘fellow travelers to the grave’ occur; or the famous scene from Shakespeare where Hamlet speaks to the skull of the jester who loved so well as a child. There is nothing very poetic about the crematorium: indeed the first association I have with that word is the Holocaust, thus dehumanization, the destruction of human dignity in death. Anyway, I developed a morbid curiosity about the environmental impact cremating millions of people every week. The Internet of course provides instant information – thus from Wikipedia:

 

Each cremation requires about 110 L (28 US gal) of fuel and releases about 240 kg (540 lb.) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Thus, the roughly 1 million bodies that are cremated annually in the United States produce about 240,000 t (270,000 short tons) of carbon dioxide, which is more CO2 pollution than 22,000 average American homes generate in a year. The environmental impact may be reduced by using cremators for longer periods, and relaxing the requirement for a cremation to take place on the same day that the coffin is received, which reduces the use of fossil fuel and hence carbon emissions. Cremation is therefore becoming more friendly toward the environment. Some funeral and crematorium owners offer a carbon neutral funeral service incorporating efficient-burning coffins made from lightweight recycled composite board.

 

My morbid curiosity continued. I remember my science teacher once telling us twelve-year-old that actually we are nothing but about ten dollars’ worth of chemicals. Well, I wanted to check that and found this:

 

99% of the mass of the human body consists of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. They are worth about $576. All the other elements taken together are worth only about $9 more. For the calculations, I have assumed a mass of 80 kg, and the prices are the best estimates I could find.

 

 

Inflation. My morbid curiosity continued: what happens to the body chemically during cremation. Like magic, this came up:

 

Cremated remains are mostly dry calcium phosphates with some minor minerals, such as salts of sodium and potassium. Sulfur and most carbon are driven off as oxidized gases during the process, although about 1% to 4% of carbon remains as carbonate. The ash remaining represents very roughly 3.5% of the body's original mass (2.5% in children). Because the weight of dry bone fragments is so closely connected to skeletal mass, their weight varies greatly from person to person. Because many changes in body composition (such as fat and muscle loss or gain) do not affect the weight of cremated remains, the weight of the remains can be more closely predicted from the person's height and sex (which predicts skeletal weight), than it can be predicted from the person's simple weight.

 

Note the fine use of scientific style: the use of the passive voice; the typical vocabulary and syntax used for combining the technical terms. It is the language used to describe a laboratory experience, impersonal since anyone and everyone should see and record the same thing; it is repeatable, another name for ‘objective’; it doesn’t matter who the observer is – if they are doing science, they are all alike, allowing only for differences in competence such as you might find among bricklayers. Emotions are bracketed out. Meanings are bracketed out. It is a loveless, dry, abstract language – the language Data the android presumably would use. And indeed, scientifically we wouldn’t distinguish between the kind of descriptions and explanations involved in analyzing a cremation and those involved in the analyzing of burning garbage or burning oil or natural gas: scientifically, they are all on one, flat level. Surgeons speak the same language before doing a heart transplant, say; pharmaceutical researchers the same when discussing the processes of testing new chemical drugs on animals. And so on.

        

 

All facts are equal. This reflection on cremation got me thinking about one of the most interestingly written philosophical works I know, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-

Philosophicus. There is posited that reality consists basically of just such flat ‘states of affairs’:

“The world is everything that is the case. The world is the totality of facts….” And language is meaningful only insofar as it consists of propositions that express (models, represents, pictures, share a logical form with, corresponds to) such facts. The “world” according to Wittgenstein we could by imagining all possible scientific hypotheses getting a scientifically testable answer; then we would have complete knowledge of reality as it is in itself – a giant library full of such descriptions such as I offered about cremation. That such facts are flat can be inferred from what he says at the end of the book about propositions: “All propositions are of equal value (Alle Sätze sind gleichwertig).” Further:

 

In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value…. Propositions cannot express anything higher.

 

And this fits to the language of cremation I cited above; whether it is the body of father or the burning of gasoline by a particular car motor, as far as the chemist is concerned, both are on the same level. Any personal, human, “subjective” feelings are completely separate from the objective description of the world, a world of facts where all facts are of equal and thus no value. Value, meaning is outside the world, outside of meaningful language even:

 

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course, there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is this not the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?) Still, there is the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.

 

In this way of thinking, if I make the transition from thinking about chemical processes and environmental impacts to thinking about my response to my father’s death and cremation – let’s say from a realm of fact to a realm of meaning, of love (and the failures of love) – then “I” am actually leaving the world. I am thereby leaving the possibility of meaningful (true or false) linguistic expression. I am entering an inexpressible mystical realm, where something beyond the world shows itself in the world. The chemical analysis of the cremation, the autopsy (had there been one) – anything say-able (in propositions), anything that science could possibly say about my father’s death meaning of my father’s death must necessarily be utterly blind, indeed indifferent, to any meaning it has. 

      This meaning, which is intertwined with the love I and I believe my whole family had for him, is mystical for Wittgenstein; most of my contemporaries, who mostly hold to a dualism between the objective world of scientific facts and the inner world of human emotions, of the inner life, would not go so far. They would simply say the meaning my father’s death and cremation had for me is “subjective.” This view has attracted me. I most strongly reject it, however. Well, to say something positive about cremation: it is better than having my body imprisoned in an airtight, non-degradable coffin.

 

 

Dualism, the body, and the soul. This radical division of the world into an objective realm of fact and a subjective realm of meaning/value is a modern form of an ancient way of thinking, present in some Hindu spirituality, in other religions of the near East (Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism), in the development of lines of thought in Protagoras and Plato. The body, the material world is either meaningless or worse, positively evil; the spirit, the subjective inner life, is the source of all meaning and value. The body is an outer casing, or a prison for the spirit. It operates according to its own depersonalized laws and is always at least in principle in conflict with spirit, which is free insofar as it does not become dominated by the body. The point of religious expression of dualism is clear: to free the spirit from the tendency of the material body to dominate it.

      What strikes me is how dualistic (gnostic even) modern philosophy became, and how strong it is in popular culture. Descartes’ methodological doubting of everything, even the ‘outer world’ as accessed through our organs of perception, left him with only the certainty of his solitary ego and its spiritual, non-material nature. Kant’s moral philosophy recognizes only one Good: the good will, thus something outside the material world we experience. The world of matter is the province of science; the world of spirit is the province of morality. All value comes from the spirit; the material or phenomenal world obeys mechanical laws and is indifferent to our spiritual needs. Who we are, our essential self, is disconnected from the body that contains it, a body that like every other material object in the universe follows the laws of matter, exhaustively describable by a perfect science. Wittgenstein’s logical view of the world is in this tradition.

      Now this is a possible world version (in Goodman’s sense), subject only to the circular kinds of reduction to absurdity refutations that can never be definitive. But as Wittgenstein well knew, there is no fact of the matter about it. Nothing forces me to adopt it if it doesn’t make better sense than other world versions. It has become so powerful culturally, it almost has the force of common sense, despite those scientifically minded, reductionist academics who would eliminate the spiritual entirely from their world version and include only the material world as explainable by science (with perhaps some mathematical objects).

      My view is this. The meanings involved in our lives – in particular, the meaning of my father’s death – are actual. Rather than seeing them as “mystical” because they are outside the realm of fact, of science, I think it makes more sense to see them as belonging to reality, to nature – to see nature itself as mystical, if that helps to capture the wonder of it all. I am not a spirit trapped in a body, a ghost in a machine. Nor I am identical to what science can tell me about my body, to the set of possible scientific propositions about my body. The conclusion is clear: we are material beings, and our lives are meaningful, loving at best, constantly failing at love. Therefore: we are material beings capable of spirit; material-spiritual beings; body-souls; besouled-bodies. Matter (matter-energy) is in potential anyhow more than just a bunch of stuff exhaustively describable by our science. And when am awakened to the beauty and wonder of color, of trees, or whatever, the only thing that keeps me from thinking that those are rational responses to the reality of matter is the dualistic ontology that many people for intellectual, cultural, and emotional reasons hold on to. (Our culture was defined when the first missionary cut down the first sacred grove of trees.) There is beauty everywhere, but not everyone can see it, Confucius said. I guess I am more a fan of material than the wrongly called “materialists.”       My father died; his body was cremated. I will die and my body will probably be cremated. Science can tell us as much as such events as spectrographic analysis can tell us about

          Rembrandt’s painting of the Prodigal Son or an acoustic analysis could tell us about the Matthew Passion of Bach – spiritualized matter, material embodiments of spirit. All the great and terrible realities of the human spirit are not separate from ‘the universe’; not uncanny spiritual substances thrown into some chance relation with matter. Meaning, the spirit, love, beauty, etc. are as much a part of the universe as the sun, as atoms and molecules, as forces and gravity.

      Thus, there is another world version besides ‘all reality is matter-energy or spirit’ and ‘all reality is nothing but matter-energy’; there is also ‘reality includes spiritual matter, whatever else it includes.’