Saturday, August 29, 2020
Work Notes I
1.
erdmann. history of philosophy. v1
on paracelsus
We are not awfully concerned with Paracelsus, but we note the parallel with the notion of "tares."
4. To these two component parts, which together make man an animal, there is now added the seat not of the light of nature, but of the eternal reason, the soul, which springs from God (anima). This is the living breath, which when God created Adam He caused to be added to the limus terrae, and at the generation of each individual He causes to be added to the seed, the extract of all the elemental parts, and which at death, being eternal, returns to the eternal. The soul which is essentially distinct from the spirit, and which is re- lated to its thoughts as a king to his council, has its seat in the heart, with which accordingly we ought to love God (Phil, sag., Wks., x. pp. 263, 264). It is so related to the spirit that the latter may be called its body, and itself the spirit's spirit (De anim. horn., Wks., ii. p. 272 ff.). Paracelsus moreover sometimes uses the word spiritus in such a wide sense as to include both the spirit (of life) and the soul. It is the result of a confusion between spirit and soul when any one shifts to the power of the elements or the stars, the responsibility of an individual's being good or evil. Whether he be hot or cold depends on the former, whether he be smith or builder on the latter, but whether he be good or evil de- pends on the soul alone, which God has left free, and in the power of which He has left it to determine itself in one direc- tion or another. As regards the reasons which have induced God thus to leave the soul to freedom, in which if it persists it is miserable, whilst bliss consists in entire submission to God, philosophy has nothing to say. Indeed, all that con- cerns that supernatural essence, the soul, is denied, when considered by the light of nature (Phil, sag., Wks., x. p. 148). Through this triplicity of nature, man is partly like to, partly surpassed by, three other kinds of beings. He is nature, spirit, and angel, unites in himself the properties into which the beasts, angels, and elemental spirits (Sagance] are divided. These latter namely, which are named after the elements to which they belong, Watermen (Nymphs, Undines), Earthmen
2 4 l, 5-1 PARACELSUS. 617
(Gnomes, Pygmies), Airmen (Sylphs, Sylvans, Lemurs), Fire- men (Salamanders, Penates), have no souls and are therefore often called Inanimata. Only by marriage with human beings can they receive souls for themselves and their chil- dren (De nymphis, Wks., ix. p. 46 ff. et passim}. As the body has its food in the elements, the spirit in the stars, so the soul has its food in Christ, who speaks to her as the earth to her children ; take, eat, this is myself (Phil, sag., Wks.> x. p. 24). The means of partaking of this food is faith, which is so much more powerful and effects so much more than imagination, just because the soul is more than the spirit. It is on that account frequently contrasted as the sacramental with the elemental (De nat. rer., fol. 57).
5. As man by his three component parts points to the elemental, the sidereal and the divine ("deal") world, the knowledge of these three worlds is the condition of complete knowledge of man. Accordingly, philosophy, astronomy and theology are given as the foundations on which the true science of medicine rests. But Paracelsus, besides that he was himself a physician, had the further reason for referring to medicine, that in the true physician he saw the ideal of a scientific man, so much so that he says that of all the arts and faculties, that of the physician was the dearest to God (Paragr., Wks., ii. p. 83). Very naturally so, for the man whose task it is to investigate the nature of the highest thing in the world and to further its well-being, may well look down on the rest. Besides the dignity of its object, medicine may also pride itself on something else : in it namely, are united the two elements which according to Paracelsus belong to true science speculation, which without experience gives but "vain phantasies," and experimentum, which nevertheless without science, as Hippocrates says, is fallax and results in nothing but " experimentler " (empirics), who deserve no preference to many an old woman and barber ; but they combine to make a true experientia or a plain, demonstrative, and obvious philosophy (int. al.,Paragr. alt. and Labyrinth, meet., !V/cs., ii. pp. 106, 113, 115, 216). Without philosophic, astronomical and theological knowledge the physician is not in a position to decide which diseases are of an earthly, which of a sidereal origin, and which are visitations of God. But as the Tkeorica causes coincides with the Theorica curee (Labyrinth, medic., Wks., ii. p. 224), he runs the risk of attacking elemental
6l8 THIRD PERIOD OF MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY. [241,6.
diseases with sidereal remedies, or vice versa, or also of making attempts at natural healing where such do not belong (Param., Wks., i. pp. 20-23).
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
God can hide things from himself
We might consider that God is able to separate from himself to make an "other," which, to some degree, is not him.He can compartmentalize his consciousness.
He can want to see what one of his creatures, one of us, will do. Why would he have that desire if he knows everything past, present and future? Though that knowledge exists somewhere in his mind, he walls it off in order that he may enjoy his creatures, especially those among us who have received free will by being born again. But even those yet dead, he desires to rescue. God the Son may not know exactly when he will be able to save a person, just as he does not know when time will end and he will return in great power. God the Father knows that. But when God the Father is enjoying his Son, he may "forget" such foreknowledge.
What fun is a game if one knows in advance every move that will occur? That doesn't mean God does not retain all power. Through his Son -- though the dead cannot see this -- he is making our world better and better, more and more loving, with each passing day.
He can want to see what one of his creatures, one of us, will do. Why would he have that desire if he knows everything past, present and future? Though that knowledge exists somewhere in his mind, he walls it off in order that he may enjoy his creatures, especially those among us who have received free will by being born again. But even those yet dead, he desires to rescue. God the Son may not know exactly when he will be able to save a person, just as he does not know when time will end and he will return in great power. God the Father knows that. But when God the Father is enjoying his Son, he may "forget" such foreknowledge.
What fun is a game if one knows in advance every move that will occur? That doesn't mean God does not retain all power. Through his Son -- though the dead cannot see this -- he is making our world better and better, more and more loving, with each passing day.
Tuesday, July 21, 2020
Footnote Sre19
Sre19. Ted Honderich, entry on unlikely philosophical propositions, Ted Honderich ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford 1995).
Footnote Rir45
Rir45. Owen Flanagan, entry on mind, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Ted Honderich, ed. (Oxford 1995). Flanagan is a professor of philosophy and of neurobiology at Duke University.
Friday, July 17, 2020
Footnote pHH34
pHH34. In 1956, Russell lashed the plain language movement, which of course he knew to have been a legacy of Wittgenstein as championed by Ryle.
Russell gives us a fable:
Russell gives us a fable:
The professor of mental philosophy, when called by his bedmaker one morning developed a dangerous frenzy, and had to be taken away by the police in an ambulance. I heard a colleague, a believer in "common usage," asking the poor philosopher's doctor about the occurrence. The doctor replied that the professor had had a temporary psychotic instability, which had subsided after an hour. The believer in "common usage," insofar as objecting to the doctor's language, repeated it to other inquirers. But it happened that I, who live on the professor's staircase, overheard the following dialogue between the bedmaker and the policeman:From Portraits from Memory (Allen and Unwin 1956) as quoted in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Dennon, editors (Simon and Schuster 1961).Policeman: 'Ere, I want a word with yer.In this little dialogue, "word," "mean," "mental," and "chronic"are all used in accordance with common usage. They are not so used in the pages of Mind by those who pretend that common usage, as determined by mass observation, statistics, medians, standard deviations, and the rest of the apparatus. What they believe in is the usage of persons who have their amount of education, neither more nor less. Less is illiterate, more is pedantry -- as we are given to understand.
Bedmaker: What do you mean -- 'a word'? I ain't done nothing.
Policeman: Ah, that's just it. Yer ought to 'ave done something. Couldn't yer see the pore gentleman was mental?
Bedmaker: That I could. For an 'ole 'our 'e went on something chronic. But when they're mental, you can't make them understand.
Wednesday, June 10, 2020
Footnote cP28
cP28. Donald Mackay, an information theorist and physicist, counters the Cartesian notion of Karl Popper and John Eccles that the brain must be open to non-physical influences if mental activity is to be effective. Consider a computer set up to solve a mathematical equation.
Mackay makes the interesting point that, as a computer program may be "embodied" in different physical machines,
I would like to hone the notion of determinism by arguing that the word is used as an explanation for a pattern, in which sub-pattern A is judged to necessarily be followed by sub-pattern B. The "laws of physics" are explanations, reinforced with mathematics, that explain and thus predict that phenomenon A "must" be followed by phenomenon B. When a set of such explanations accounts for a plenitude of phenomena, it is considered a good theory, or a very useful explanation. Of course, modern physics relies on the uniformity and regularity of nature as an article of faith -- though quantum weirdness undermines that creed at least somewhat.
No physical explanation, it seems to me, can ever get at the fundamental nitty gritty of the cosmos's animation. That is beyond human ken, as far as I can tell.
As for Mackay's thought on resurrection implying the possibility of some computer program -- i.e. soul -- providing self-identity from one embodiment to the next, I would like to stretch that idea a bit more by drawing an analogy between the universal Turing machine (UTM), which can be set to any computable program. The UTM, I suppose, would be analogous to an Oversoul -- or in other word, God. There is an infinitude of possible programs (with the 7 billion of the human variety now present with us comprising an infinitesimally small percentage of that set). So, following Mackay, we might say it is within logic to say that while possibly most programs exist only transiently (though they subsist in the Platonic set of possibilities), the "human" TM programs either continue forever or indefinitely. Further, we can imagine the UTM resetting some of the conditions on the continuing TMs (us) to improve their efficiency (transformed by the renewing of their minds).
Another point: Just as there is no reason that a UTM cannot inhabit a number of computers simultaneously, what is the objection to the Oversoul/God being expressed in many embodiments? Similarly, as a TM can be simultaneously poly-local, what is the objection to human bi- or poly-localism?
Obviously, we must not lose sight of the fact that all this expresses only rough analogies offered for the purpose of saying that not only do non-physical entities exist -- or subsist -- but that there is no logical reason to deny Christian verities merely on the basis of physicalism.
The mathematician means by this that the behaviour of the computer is determined by the equation he wants to solve; were it not so, it would be of no interest to him. On the other hand, if we were to ask a computer engineer what is happening in the computer, he could easily demonstrate that every physical event in it was determined (same word) by the laws of physics as applied to the physical components. Any appearance of conflict here would be quite illusory. There is no need for a computer to be "open to non-physical influences" in order that its behavior may be determined by a (non-physical) equation as well as the laws of physics. The two "claims to determination" here are not mutually exclusive; rather they are complementary.But, MacKay adds, the analogy is limited by the fact that we (unlike the computer) are conscious agents.
Mackay makes the interesting point that, as a computer program may be "embodied" in different physical machines,
mechanistic brain science would seem to raise ... little objection to the hope of eternal life expressed in biblical Christian doctrine, with its characteristic emphasis on the "resurrection" (not to be confused with the resuscitation) of the body. The destruction of our present embodiment sets no logical barrier to our being re-embodied, perhaps in a quite different medium, if our Creator so wishes.The quotations are from Mackay's contribution to The Oxford Companion to the Mind, Richard L. Gregory, ed. (Oxford 1987) as cited in the anthology Immortality, Paul Edwards, ed. (Prometheus 1997). Mackay in the first quotation refers to The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism by Popper and Eccles (Springer-Verlag 1977).
I would like to hone the notion of determinism by arguing that the word is used as an explanation for a pattern, in which sub-pattern A is judged to necessarily be followed by sub-pattern B. The "laws of physics" are explanations, reinforced with mathematics, that explain and thus predict that phenomenon A "must" be followed by phenomenon B. When a set of such explanations accounts for a plenitude of phenomena, it is considered a good theory, or a very useful explanation. Of course, modern physics relies on the uniformity and regularity of nature as an article of faith -- though quantum weirdness undermines that creed at least somewhat.
No physical explanation, it seems to me, can ever get at the fundamental nitty gritty of the cosmos's animation. That is beyond human ken, as far as I can tell.
As for Mackay's thought on resurrection implying the possibility of some computer program -- i.e. soul -- providing self-identity from one embodiment to the next, I would like to stretch that idea a bit more by drawing an analogy between the universal Turing machine (UTM), which can be set to any computable program. The UTM, I suppose, would be analogous to an Oversoul -- or in other word, God. There is an infinitude of possible programs (with the 7 billion of the human variety now present with us comprising an infinitesimally small percentage of that set). So, following Mackay, we might say it is within logic to say that while possibly most programs exist only transiently (though they subsist in the Platonic set of possibilities), the "human" TM programs either continue forever or indefinitely. Further, we can imagine the UTM resetting some of the conditions on the continuing TMs (us) to improve their efficiency (transformed by the renewing of their minds).
Another point: Just as there is no reason that a UTM cannot inhabit a number of computers simultaneously, what is the objection to the Oversoul/God being expressed in many embodiments? Similarly, as a TM can be simultaneously poly-local, what is the objection to human bi- or poly-localism?
Obviously, we must not lose sight of the fact that all this expresses only rough analogies offered for the purpose of saying that not only do non-physical entities exist -- or subsist -- but that there is no logical reason to deny Christian verities merely on the basis of physicalism.
Footnote AT20
AT20. John Hick gives a useful summary of the Ryle/dualism situation:
There was of course quite a bit of controversy over Descartesian dualism in the 17th and 18th centuries, as British and then French thinkers proposed various forms of materialism (such as resurrection of the material body and material soul), but the general public retained its belief in the immaterial soul, a belief which tended to fall off after World War II. There has also been a great deal of difficulty over the distinction, if any, between the soul and the mind. Descartes essentially saw no distinction, and even today it is popularly assumed that the mind -- purified -- will carry on pretty much as on earth. But this point gives rise to various subtleties which we do not go into here.
The body-soul distinction, first formulated as a philosophical doctrine in ancient Greece, was baptized into Christianity, ran through the medieval period, and entered the modern world with the public status of a self-evident truth when it was redefined in the seventeenth century by Descartes. Since World War II, however, the Cartesian mind-matter dualism, having been taken for granted for many centuries, has been sharply criticized by philosophers of the contemporary analytical school. It is argued [particularly by Ryle] that the words that describe mental characteristics and operations -- such as "intelligent," "thoughtful," "carefree," "happy," "calculating" and the like -- apply in practice to types of human behavior and to behavioral dispositions. They refer to the empirical individual, the observable human being who is born and grows and acts and feels and dies, and not to the shadowy proceedings of a "ghost in the machine."
Thus, the Old Testament scholar, J. Pedersen, says of the Hebrews that for them "the body is the soul in its outward form."Philosophy of Religion
by John Hicks
(Prentice Hall 1963; 2d ed. 1973)
There was of course quite a bit of controversy over Descartesian dualism in the 17th and 18th centuries, as British and then French thinkers proposed various forms of materialism (such as resurrection of the material body and material soul), but the general public retained its belief in the immaterial soul, a belief which tended to fall off after World War II. There has also been a great deal of difficulty over the distinction, if any, between the soul and the mind. Descartes essentially saw no distinction, and even today it is popularly assumed that the mind -- purified -- will carry on pretty much as on earth. But this point gives rise to various subtleties which we do not go into here.
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