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
Dr Henry Stapp
Fritjof Capra has agreed to attend.
The open humanities press journal
“cosmos and hisory” has agreed to publish the proceedings;
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 450th 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.
·
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
21st 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?
