One magisterium; a science and religion conference

One magisterium; a science and religion conference

Please see the accompanying monograph;

 http://www.cambridgescholars.com/one-magisterium



This will be held late July 2015, location TBC. , as before, skype access will be allowed for those unable or loath to travel.

This conference is being run in conjunction with the online "bionoetics" programme at the university of
Ireland;


http://universityofireland.com/m-sc-in-interdisciplinary-studies/

For the special issue contact Cosmos and history;

 http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/announcement/view/11

Inquiries and submissions for the conference to eireann@yahoo.com; the deadline for conference abstracts (max 750 words)  is Feb 1 2015, 5pm GMT

Speakers who participated in 2014  included

Professor Jacob Needleman

http://www.jacobneedleman.com/

Dr Henry Stapp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Stapp

Fritjof Capra has agreed to attend.

The open humanities press journal “cosmos and hisory” has agreed to publish the proceedings;

http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/index

It will be run in after the success of Mind-5

 5th meeting of cog sci society of Ireland

 Provisional schedule Mar 6 for  " Foundations of mind", which ran in 2014 can be found at http://foundationsofmind.org/schedule.html

Themes

A Magisterium is an area of teaching authority. As we celenrate the 450^th anniversary of Galileo's birth, it seems clear that science has prevailed over superstition. The “new atheists" claim that there is indeed one Magisterium, that of science.

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At first glance, it seems that science will continue its march to victory over the epistemological claims of religion, eventually reducing them to the null set. More consequentially, it is increasingly accepted among religious “thinkers” as among scientific such that the magisterium, the teaching authority, of science trumps that of religion. The result is a consensus that state power, based as it should be on natural law, itself a reflection of the natural order of things, will increasingly base itself on science.

The evidence seems overwhelming; on the positive side there are physical theories accurate in their predictions to a part in a trillion, print-outs of one's genome for a few dollars, a steadfast adherence to the notion that the mind IS the brain and that the brain is being mapped. On the negative side there is in the epistemological domain the clear absurdities of the biblical account of creation and the notion of transubstantiation, let alone reincarnation, and in the social domain the horrors of religious terrorism and institutional child abuse.

Yet things are now not quite so simple. It would be a pity if citizenship was reduced to following the dictates of scientists we cannot understand; yet its mythic poverty is not the only limitation of science. For a start, “science” itself means knowledge and that gives little clue that science reflects a set of practices based on a set of logico-mathematical insights and related physical observations, from which it takes its impetus; most of its practitioners are not versed in the philosophy of science and are not aware of the controversial status of theory.

This is particularly the case for an activity like that of science which would propose eventually to give a fully rigorous account of how its practitioners construct its very own theories. With that, we encounter our first cavil. Since 1990, there has been what amounts to a mania in brain science for identifying particular human activities with physical locations in the brain. While there is little doubt that many of these “findings” are premature, if not downright fraudulent, as the equipment and statistical interpretation have been been cogently critiqued, there is a subtler point that has been missed about how neuroscientists propose reductionism should proceed.

Our brains, on which materialism insists that the mind is dependent, are capable of manipulation of mathematical tensors of higher order. For example, we use vectors, tensors of order one, all the time; there are tensors of a higher order than these, and they have proven necessary to describe our linguistic apparatus, and the structure of apace-time. Put in mathematical terms, neuroscience using fmri which claims to have solved the mystery of a brain process by localizing it is the attempt to reduce into a system that is a zero-order tensor. Yet we know that the brain can use tensors of order four, in Einstein's relativity. It is not just greedy reductionism; it is a reductionism both philistinical and doomed to failure.

Even if neuroscientists up their game and learn more math, problems will remain. For a start, neuroscientists who understand tensors will inevitably begin to wonder how we hairless apes managed to construct Einstein's relation of the Momenergy and Ricci tensors. For example, if the final goal of neuroscience is simply a catalog of cerebral locations identified by fmri, then all explanation is a zero-order tensor, or scalar. Yet the Momenergy and Ricci tensors with which Einstein, Hilbert and others worked – admittedly after a long and rigorous formation – are fourth order tensors, with the vectors used in linear systems being first-order tensors.

For the prospective neuroscientists, the sense of wonder at the unreasonable effectiveness of math from which Einstein himself suffered may derail their careers. They may conclude that the formalisms in neuroscience surely need to be just as complicated as those used by mathematicians.

Secondly, even “successful” reductions would seem to be extremely
problematic politically. One controverisal example is the eliminative materialism championed by the Churchlands, inter alia, which seeks to replace psychological explanation by neural explanation. At a time when the state is already encroaching on our privacy, the notion of a Philip K Dick “minority report” group of experts seems to be very frightening.

Yet it is perhaps highly unlikely that neuroscientific expertise would be sufficient for state purposes; in fact it is more likely that any worthwhile tools for mind-reading and prediction, which are unlikely to exist before 2050, would be introduced as commercial
products. The handy hairless apes of homo sapiens sapiens will, as ever, in this scenario gleefully add them to the artillery with which they act on each other and move on in societies that have faced much larger changes in the past.

However, that type of brake put on the progress of “science” may only be the beginning. The Victorian universe was eternal; the modern one features creation from a single point, rough-hew this how we may. Indeed, the cosmos shows fine-tuning of physical constants in a manner that leads to complex conscious creatures driven to understand said cosmos, all the while debating furiously how these constants came to be just so. The Darwinian biosphere was atomistic chance and biological necessity; ours features far-from equilibrium conditions like the gaseous contents of the atmosphere that facilitate our existence. In fact, man is right back at the center of things in a way no-one dared to predict.

There are many other issues that beg explanation along these lines; in fact, it could be argued that we have gotten good enough t science to become aware of its limitations. For example, Goedel DID point out paradoxes about cognition in mathematical systems and the puzzling ontological status of infinite sets that indeed suggest access to processes that are outside the Turing/Church realm. It also is arguable that the observer is still enmeshed in state-vector reduction, with attempts to dispense with him still highly controversial

Indeed, the hitherto “subjective” notion of information is now immanent in third-person physics, as the idea of code is in biology. As we explore in mathematical physics, we find that concepts like symmetry, far from being psychological mechanisms, seem almost to have a deus ex machina status, guiding us to ever deeper insights into nature. Conversely, in areas like quantum field theory, we sometimes do “bad math”, with non-converging infinite series, where any number could be obtained, and yet it works. Both subtle and devious is the Lord.

This is not an attempt to re-introduce creationism; it is rather an attempt at broadening the debate. We can continue along the lines above. Folk psychology, rather than eliminative materialism, will prevail precisely because it is a more effective algorithmic compression for most people than eliminative materialism and it is attested in its strengths and weaknesses by tens of millennia of human societies. People striving for self-development will passionately, head and heart together, seek through the intellect the ground of Being, and/or attempt to eviscerate the self through compassionate action/observing it to death, and/or attempt to change the world, if necessary through artistic creation.

We can call such activities attempts at “ontological self-transformation”, in the manner that James Carroll characterizes his training for the priesthood as requiring that he “ontologically” transform himself. We can then speculate how this this notion of “ontological self-transformation” might map onto evolutionary as onto scholastic thought.

All these activities exist in the broader society outside the academy – indeed several of them, like the arts arguably work better outside it. This allows us to introduce a critical distinction between different movements in society, of which the academic is just one. In fact, as of the early 21^st century, the academic sphere is mutating its role in society so quickly that it behooves us to attempt a prediction of its role; the academic sphere will fall to whoever can attract the brightest and most free-spirited young adults to spend 3-4 years under their discipline. The web means we no longer need a physical premises; the paralysis of science in controversies about the status of the “gene”, “dark matter and energy”, the “central dogma” and so on means that the truth-seeking passion of these kids can better be satisfied without state funding that turns them into idiot savants.

So much for the academic “magisterium”; it is in fact mainly an environment for the pedagogical process. According to thinkers like Drummond, there is but one magisterium in society; it unifies the movements misread as “science” and “religion”; it invokes as its highest value the further evolution of man singular, and humanity as a whole; it accepts the political and scientific progress made since the renaissance, and embraces scientific discovery; it does not accept greedy reductionism aka scientism. While its community, culture and ceremonies are yet to be formed, the notion that something must be considered as sacred, be it the organic psychological development of our kids or the integrity of the biosphere, is accepted. It is also clear that the corporate destruction of our higher nature requires a reply, and that the political space still exists for both an activist and a quietist response, with much of the tools still available free in western societies.

Papers are invited which

- address any of the themes suggested above, whether agreeing or disagreeing – even if strongly – with the implicit and explicit contentions

• address the issue of overlapping, singular, or no magisteria
• address the issue of reductionism, failed or successful;
• consider the issue of ontology;
• contrast approaches to the fine-tuning problem
• Address such controversies as the horizon problem
• comment of the appropriateness in science of biology's “central dogma”
• Propose mechanisms for macro-evolution, if necessary through code biology
• Propose appropriate types of reduction, for example from Biology to physics/chemistry and from psychology to neuroscience
• Consider the issue of truth, state power and authority in the space initially opened up by thinkers like Hobbes;
• Consider the ontology of Buddhism as expressed in the Pali canon vis a vis its psychology
  
    Quantum fluctuations and God of the gaps for example what are  the implications of the quantum mind hypothesis if true?
    Lost and esoteric Christianities - for example, does Exodus 17:7 refer to an experience transcending Yahweh?