This is great Janice. Ellie wanted to know what my difference's with Dowd were, this is a key one. I believe there is a psychic-spiritual dimension in everything. Michael and Connie are of the emergentist understanding of this type. We begin with dead or inert matter and at there is increasing complexity at certain stages there are phase shifts. So, e.g.., consciousness is an epiphenomenon of complexity.
Here's an explanation, satisfactory to me, of why this is not the case:
It seems that if we accept the modern scientific view of nature, we
must accept the human phenomenon as supernatural, either emerging out of the
natural realm but categorially quite different or else the product of special
creation by some supernatural power. In science, we recognize the emergence of
certain properties. For instance, water has properties not possessed by the
elements that constitute it. But the elements and their organization explain
water and its properties. However, there is no accounting for categorial
structures. We cannot explain subject matter with normative and inherent
meaning structures in terms of subject matter with only factual structures. If
a categorially enriched subject matter should appear in a context with only
existential and factual structures, its appearance would be a total mystery. In
fact, there would be two mysteries: the new categorial structures and their
appearance at the time and place in which they came into being. This has led
some to think in terms of special creation. But that generates the mystery of a
transcendent creative power with its categorial structure. That amounts to
explaining a mystery by embedding it in a larger mystery created for the
purpose. The intellectual quest drives us toward the reduction of mystery, not
the multiplication or enlargement of it.
The most plausible course
seems to be to rethink nature in such a way that we can account for the
appearance of the categorially rich biological and human realms as developments
in or fulfillment of preexisting nature. In other words, the fact that
biological and human phenomena appear on this planet in a “natural” environment
tells us something about the “natural” environment, for it must be such that it
brings forth the biological and the full array of human phenomena. . . . Hence,
we seem compelled to reintroduce humanistic categories into the
descriptive/explanatory language of science in its account of nature. If so, we
have a new humanistic view of nature and less mystery. Of course the categorial
structures of factuality, normativity, semantic intentionality, and causality
(whether naturalistic in the modern sense or teleological) remain givens
without explanation, for there is no logical room for an explanation of such
basic features of the world.
Here's a discussion of "emergentism" as distinguished from "emergence." Connie and Mike clearly stated to me that they are emergentists:
Some varieties of emergentism are not specifically concerned with the
mind-body problem, and instead suggest a
hierarchical or layered view of the whole of nature, with the layers arranged in terms of increasing
complexity with each requiring its own
special science. Typically
physics is basic, with
chemistry built on top of it, then
biology,
psychology and
social sciences. Reductionists respond that the arrangement of the sciences is a matter of convenience, and that chemistry is derivable from physics (and so forth)
in principle, an argument which gained force after the establishment of a quantum-mechanical basis for chemistry.
[1]
Other varieties see
mind or
consciousness as specifically and anomalously requiring emergentist explanation, and therefore constitute a family of positions in the
philosophy of mind.
Douglas Hofstadter summarises this view as
"the soul is more than the hum of its parts". A number of philosophers have offered the argument that
qualia constitute the
hard problem of consciousness, and resist reductive explanation in a way that all other phenomena do not. In contrast, reductionists generally see the task of accounting for the possibly atypical properties of mind and of living things as a matter of showing that, contrary to appearances, such properties are indeed fully accountable in terms of the properties of the basic constituents of nature and therefore in no way genuinely atypical.
I am a panpsychist, or I prefer a "panexperientialist."
Here are some of the other differences I have with Connie and Mike:
I don't believe you can divide the world between the empirically verifiable--by the five sense and logic--and the subjective. I accept Henry James radical empiricism which recognizes other ways of knowing including somatic (or bodily), intuitive and conative (will, impulse, desire, and striving).
I don't accept God as simply reality, or as we often have said "the way life is." I believe that God is the subject of God's own experience and acts.
I don't believe there can be a marriage of religion and science--science here meaning empirical science, that which is measurable, that which covers primary but not secondary qualifies.
I agree with Connie and Mike that there is a religious dimension of the scientific quest and that there is awe and mystery in scientific discovery.
What evolution means deserves its own email, which I will send later.
The phone call you note sounds wonderful Janice. I won't listen in Saturday but I will listen to the recording.
Herman