Science and Religion: the Consciousness War
SCIENCE AND RELIGON:
The Consciousness War
There are two aims here:
1. to distinguish religion from science according to the way signs relate to reality through consciousness;
2. to distinguish "God" used in the history religion, as a kind of object that exists or not, from it use in connection with the Christian Trinity.
A third aim, to connect substitution of the "concept"-use for the participatory Triad-use with the psychohistorical devolution of American group consciousness and attendant phenomena such as the "war on terror", and Abu Ghraib, has been completed previously.
********
DOCUMENT 1 Anti-religious Dawkins and Dennett. Consciousness is "raised" by shedding belief in the existence of God.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/books/review/Holt.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
October 22, 2006
Beyond Belief
By JIM HOLT
Skip to next paragraph
THE GOD DELUSION
By Richard Dawkins.
406 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $27.
Richard Dawkins, who holds the interesting title of “Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science” at Oxford University, is a master of scientific exposition and synthesis. When it comes to his own specialty, evolutionary biology, there is none better. But the purpose of this book, his latest of many, is not to explain science. It is rather, as he tells us, “to raise consciousness,” which is quite another thing.
The nub of Dawkins’s consciousness-raising message is that to be an atheist is a “brave and splendid” aspiration. Belief in God is not only a delusion, he argues, but a “pernicious” one. On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is certitude that God exists and 7 is certitude that God does not exist, Dawkins rates himself a 6: “I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.”.
Dawkins’s case against religion follows an outline that goes back to Bertrand Russell’s classic 1927 essay “Why I Am Not a Christian.” First, discredit the traditional reasons for supposing that God exists. (“God” is here taken to denote the Judeo-Christian deity, presumed to be eternal, all-powerful, all-good and the creator of the world.)....
******
But .. to interrupt right there .. that ("the Judeo-Christian deity"), as any historian of religions will remind you, is not what "God" means for many, even if it were coherent with itself.
Which it is not. There is the little difference between the Old and New Testament uses in the Bible, glossed over by the hyphen between "Judeo" and "Christian". One is considerably older, a personified monotheism of the same general kind as Babylonian Marduk, circa 2000 BCE, composit consolidation of the earlier Sumerian pantheon. The other is a unique One-in-Three representation, the word "God" applied indifferently to the Father as chief source" of the.Three, or to the triad Father-Son-HolyGhost as a unit.
The fundamental logical difference is that, while some monotheistic version of "God's existence" might just be barely conceivable, what the Christian Trinity is about (communicates) starts from the notion of an Incarnation, the Second Person of what "God" previously meant (for the Jews, others; whoever used it objectively), which is disclosed to consciousness by the Third Person, the Spirit. Thus, even understanding of what "God" means, for Christians, invokes a kind of communication existentially prior to "belief", as if an inner act of affirmation or denial of a proposition (Russell's use). The Spirit does not present itself to consciousness in propositions, but as an energy vivifying tokenspace itself. To have natural-minded philosophical types proclaiming denial of "the existence of God", in the interest of raising consciousness , calling themselves "Brights" for having done so, is probably a pertinent, if not correct response to monotheisms. However, it is not pertinent to, perhaps not hostile toward, the Christian notion, from the standpoint of which they may well be "Dims".
Clearly, if a generic phrase is required for what historians (and psychohistorians) review as "God" use, by different people, bringing it home to individual consciousness across the millenia and continents, it will have to be a construct: the God of Gods. This requires a psychosemiotic analysis to decode. -- an exposition of what is attributed as a common intent to all uses. This is a presumption only satisfied by refernce to consciousness, itself, as the totality of content under sign-uses as such. "God", as a quasi-grammatical name, is a putative completion of that totality: All included under One.
This reconstruction of "God" as the Completing Totality (of totalities: the unity of all text under a single token) can be shown common to the Christian and the monotheistic representations, the last for unity of the external, cosmological container (of consciousness, through the physical body), the former for ("existential") unity of conscious experience on the token side.
DOCUMENT 2 Pro-Religion: defends consciousness against materialism.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/health/articles/061015/23soul.htm
Is There Room for the Soul?
New challenges to our most cherished beliefs about self and the human spirit
By Jay Tolson
Posted Sunday, October 15, 2006
A mind is a tough thing to think about. Consciousness is the defining feature of the human species. But is it possible that it is also no more than an extravagant biological add-on, something not really essential to our survival? That intriguing possibility plays on my mind as I cross the plaza of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, a breathtaking temple of science perched on a high bluff overlooking the Pacific ....
There is, indeed, something troubling, if not downright offensive, about the effort to reduce human consciousness to the operations of a 3-pound chunk of wrinkled brain tissue. Such reductionist thinking seems like an assault on the last redoubt of the soul, or, at least, the seat of the irreducible self. Deny or attempt to disprove the immaterial character of the mind, and you elicit some of the same passions that have animated the culture wars over evolution in the classroom, exposing the deep divide between hard-core religious fundamentalists on one side and the equally hard-core scientific fundamentalists on the other..
******
DISCUSSION
And lo here it comes to pass; religion framed as the metaphysical custodians of consciousness --the consciousness materialistic Brights would "raise" by refuting religion? !.
Let's go figure.
The paradox we have to work with is this: according to Dawkins and Dennet, religion is a "delusion" (cf. "Transcendental illusion", Kant for a "believed in" ens realissimum)
According to journalist Tolson (speaking about, if not for, Salk Institute researchers and some philosophers), it is religion that refuses to identity consciousness with the brain (even switched on and running).
Thus, religion, declared by natural minded scientists and philosophers to be a delusion, is the mode of consciousness that keeps natural minded scientists and philosophers from the delusion that that within them which knows is a physical organ (the brain).
Which one knows the truth about the other?
At this point, the impulse may be to save both. We are both brains and consciousness; conscious brains.
However one thing cannot be both of two things if they are essentially incompatible, as these are. Back to Descartes: bodies are extended; but thoughts, by means of which bodies are known via perception, are non-extended (non-material, not divisible, wholly given in a present moment). The attributes are essential to their respective instances "("substances"). As the extended cannot be identical with the non-extended, the same thing cannot be material and conscious; "the person", as a self-consistent thing, cannot be both conscious thought and material body.
The way mental things exist is not the way material things exist. The perception of a wheat field is not spread out, dotted with shocks of grain; that is its content, what the perception is "of". The type of content varies from visual through the other kinds of sense qualities, and according to causal vrs. subjectively determined succession within them.
Hypothesis: let consciousness be in relation to the functioning anthropological preparation, as TokenSpace -- the field of SIgn-Uses (S*) -- is in relation to space proper (extension). The logical relations (grammars for text, templates for tokens) of S* provide models for knowing the cosmos intellectually, and relating to it from within, as a thing knowing itself through thought.
Thought and consciousness2 are the upper segments of Plato's divided line; consciousness 1 (without thught) and the extended body are its lower segments. "Knowing" is putting together those S*-strings (S*trings) in consciousness that anticipate relations between what they are about in space.
The Consciousness War
There are two aims here:
1. to distinguish religion from science according to the way signs relate to reality through consciousness;
2. to distinguish "God" used in the history religion, as a kind of object that exists or not, from it use in connection with the Christian Trinity.
A third aim, to connect substitution of the "concept"-use for the participatory Triad-use with the psychohistorical devolution of American group consciousness and attendant phenomena such as the "war on terror", and Abu Ghraib, has been completed previously.
********
DOCUMENT 1 Anti-religious Dawkins and Dennett. Consciousness is "raised" by shedding belief in the existence of God.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/books/review/Holt.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
October 22, 2006
Beyond Belief
By JIM HOLT
Skip to next paragraph
THE GOD DELUSION
By Richard Dawkins.
406 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $27.
Richard Dawkins, who holds the interesting title of “Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science” at Oxford University, is a master of scientific exposition and synthesis. When it comes to his own specialty, evolutionary biology, there is none better. But the purpose of this book, his latest of many, is not to explain science. It is rather, as he tells us, “to raise consciousness,” which is quite another thing.
The nub of Dawkins’s consciousness-raising message is that to be an atheist is a “brave and splendid” aspiration. Belief in God is not only a delusion, he argues, but a “pernicious” one. On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is certitude that God exists and 7 is certitude that God does not exist, Dawkins rates himself a 6: “I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.”.
Dawkins’s case against religion follows an outline that goes back to Bertrand Russell’s classic 1927 essay “Why I Am Not a Christian.” First, discredit the traditional reasons for supposing that God exists. (“God” is here taken to denote the Judeo-Christian deity, presumed to be eternal, all-powerful, all-good and the creator of the world.)....
******
But .. to interrupt right there .. that ("the Judeo-Christian deity"), as any historian of religions will remind you, is not what "God" means for many, even if it were coherent with itself.
Which it is not. There is the little difference between the Old and New Testament uses in the Bible, glossed over by the hyphen between "Judeo" and "Christian". One is considerably older, a personified monotheism of the same general kind as Babylonian Marduk, circa 2000 BCE, composit consolidation of the earlier Sumerian pantheon. The other is a unique One-in-Three representation, the word "God" applied indifferently to the Father as chief source" of the.Three, or to the triad Father-Son-HolyGhost as a unit.
The fundamental logical difference is that, while some monotheistic version of "God's existence" might just be barely conceivable, what the Christian Trinity is about (communicates) starts from the notion of an Incarnation, the Second Person of what "God" previously meant (for the Jews, others; whoever used it objectively), which is disclosed to consciousness by the Third Person, the Spirit. Thus, even understanding of what "God" means, for Christians, invokes a kind of communication existentially prior to "belief", as if an inner act of affirmation or denial of a proposition (Russell's use). The Spirit does not present itself to consciousness in propositions, but as an energy vivifying tokenspace itself. To have natural-minded philosophical types proclaiming denial of "the existence of God", in the interest of raising consciousness , calling themselves "Brights" for having done so, is probably a pertinent, if not correct response to monotheisms. However, it is not pertinent to, perhaps not hostile toward, the Christian notion, from the standpoint of which they may well be "Dims".
Clearly, if a generic phrase is required for what historians (and psychohistorians) review as "God" use, by different people, bringing it home to individual consciousness across the millenia and continents, it will have to be a construct: the God of Gods. This requires a psychosemiotic analysis to decode. -- an exposition of what is attributed as a common intent to all uses. This is a presumption only satisfied by refernce to consciousness, itself, as the totality of content under sign-uses as such. "God", as a quasi-grammatical name, is a putative completion of that totality: All included under One.
This reconstruction of "God" as the Completing Totality (of totalities: the unity of all text under a single token) can be shown common to the Christian and the monotheistic representations, the last for unity of the external, cosmological container (of consciousness, through the physical body), the former for ("existential") unity of conscious experience on the token side.
DOCUMENT 2 Pro-Religion: defends consciousness against materialism.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/health/articles/061015/23soul.htm
Is There Room for the Soul?
New challenges to our most cherished beliefs about self and the human spirit
By Jay Tolson
Posted Sunday, October 15, 2006
A mind is a tough thing to think about. Consciousness is the defining feature of the human species. But is it possible that it is also no more than an extravagant biological add-on, something not really essential to our survival? That intriguing possibility plays on my mind as I cross the plaza of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, a breathtaking temple of science perched on a high bluff overlooking the Pacific ....
There is, indeed, something troubling, if not downright offensive, about the effort to reduce human consciousness to the operations of a 3-pound chunk of wrinkled brain tissue. Such reductionist thinking seems like an assault on the last redoubt of the soul, or, at least, the seat of the irreducible self. Deny or attempt to disprove the immaterial character of the mind, and you elicit some of the same passions that have animated the culture wars over evolution in the classroom, exposing the deep divide between hard-core religious fundamentalists on one side and the equally hard-core scientific fundamentalists on the other..
******
DISCUSSION
And lo here it comes to pass; religion framed as the metaphysical custodians of consciousness --the consciousness materialistic Brights would "raise" by refuting religion? !.
Let's go figure.
The paradox we have to work with is this: according to Dawkins and Dennet, religion is a "delusion" (cf. "Transcendental illusion", Kant for a "believed in" ens realissimum)
According to journalist Tolson (speaking about, if not for, Salk Institute researchers and some philosophers), it is religion that refuses to identity consciousness with the brain (even switched on and running).
Thus, religion, declared by natural minded scientists and philosophers to be a delusion, is the mode of consciousness that keeps natural minded scientists and philosophers from the delusion that that within them which knows is a physical organ (the brain).
Which one knows the truth about the other?
At this point, the impulse may be to save both. We are both brains and consciousness; conscious brains.
However one thing cannot be both of two things if they are essentially incompatible, as these are. Back to Descartes: bodies are extended; but thoughts, by means of which bodies are known via perception, are non-extended (non-material, not divisible, wholly given in a present moment). The attributes are essential to their respective instances "("substances"). As the extended cannot be identical with the non-extended, the same thing cannot be material and conscious; "the person", as a self-consistent thing, cannot be both conscious thought and material body.
The way mental things exist is not the way material things exist. The perception of a wheat field is not spread out, dotted with shocks of grain; that is its content, what the perception is "of". The type of content varies from visual through the other kinds of sense qualities, and according to causal vrs. subjectively determined succession within them.
Hypothesis: let consciousness be in relation to the functioning anthropological preparation, as TokenSpace -- the field of SIgn-Uses (S*) -- is in relation to space proper (extension). The logical relations (grammars for text, templates for tokens) of S* provide models for knowing the cosmos intellectually, and relating to it from within, as a thing knowing itself through thought.
Thought and consciousness2 are the upper segments of Plato's divided line; consciousness 1 (without thught) and the extended body are its lower segments. "Knowing" is putting together those S*-strings (S*trings) in consciousness that anticipate relations between what they are about in space.
posted by Sid Thomas | 12:29 AM
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