Between you, Jordan Peterson, and a lesser known but amazing podcast called Uberboyo, I can say I have honestly been led back to my Christian roots. Thanks again Mr. Pageau. Feels good to find meaning in divine love again, especially with the intellectual underpinnings that I have now built my faith on. The pieces fit and I finally feel content in wholeness :)
Hey Ethan, How is it going now with your Christianity? Are you going to church, do you have a relogious community or how do you live it out? I'd be curious because i have been following the same streams of thought: Peterson, Jung, Uberboyo, Pageau... But i still struggle with certain contradictions between Pageau and Peterson for example. Peterson sees objective truth and rationality as more findamental than Pageau i think.
@@kenthefele113 honestly I get it. It's genuinely frustrating to have a more nuanced, comprehensive, and spiritually insightful worldview because your awareness of bias, ignorance, propaganda, ideology, and ineptitude grows proportionally. It's the curse of genius.
@@koffeeblack5717 He takes joy in holding the most fringe views in Orthodoxy. :D Sometimes he even crosses the line by refusing to venerate certain saints, or saying an Ecumenical Council is wrong, or venerating anathemised people like Origen. Like Jonathan said, he's very smart, but also very annoying.
Heidegger answered this with his critique of Descartes in Being and Time. The first problem is that Being is not simply Beholding. Beholding arises from present obstacles that cannot be immediately accomodated. In these "breakdowns," we direct present attention, try to deconstruct and reconstruct until we can grasp the obstacle, thereby removing it from our path or incorporating it as equipment. This seems like a strange answer until you dig through the question, how can there be objects at all? When you look at an "atom" or "cell," how is that possible? And I don't mean resort back to visual data combined with perceptual brain matter -- that presumes the object is possible because the explanation relies upon objects already. I mean if you're a consciousness trying to consciously construct an object, what has to be happening in the mentalscape? Before you ever get to the idea of matter, you have to tunnel through these questions. If you start at materialism, you're already too lost to help, and the only way out is to examine how your materialist presuppositions are possible. The ultimate fundamental is Being itself, and the basic character of Being, the ultimate transcendental is temporality.
Basically, interacting with objects as things you just observe / look at is not the normal flow of life. You interact with things and the world by moving through it, using things, coping. Heidegger uses hammers as an example. You don't see the hammer when you're using it properly. Only when the hammer breaks, do you stop and observe the hammer as an object. This mode of interacting with the world, as subject observing object is not the absolute, prior, fundamental mode of life. Coping is as fundamental if not more fundamental. And that means trying to construct a worldview out of mere objects will always fail.
Great subject. I'm a Christian and I've been very interetested in this subject. The 2 most compelling models of consciousness (IMHO) is Koch and Tononi's IIT model and Roger Penrose's OrchOR. Both of the have panpsychism as a base. The idea the consciousness is fundamental to the universe like charge or spin. That it is inherent in matter.
I very much enjoy the choice of thumbnail, the Mandelbrot set being an object that is really simple in its technical construction, yet is experienced at a near incomprehensible level of complexity.
If you go to 15:54 of this video, titled _The Secret Code of Creation - Dr. Jason Lisle_ (link: th-cam.com/video/kEyPWJVYp84/w-d-xo.html), the almost perfect repetition of the entire Mandelbrot set on the left hand side reminds me of Genesis 2:26 "And God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness...'" and Genesis 2:27 "So God created man in his own image..."
Resonates big time. The truth is inside of us so when we recognize truthful speach in an other-self, theres a palpable feeling of resonance that points to Transcendence, Onesss, to Being itself.
With respect to emergence and conciousness, Fr. Thomas Hopko indulged me in a conversation about the implications of certain science fiction tropes back in 2006. I liked to write science fiction and I was trying to resolve the problem represented by the idea of machine sentience or sentience achieved via biological uplift (genetic tinkering) because it meant a (likely fallen) rational being that has come into being absent an Adam event (inbreathing of God). If sentience could happen without God's express help, then that means sentience is essentially an emergent property of matter. That struck me as flirting with blasphemy. Fr Thomas just smiled and said, "that's just your crypto manichism talking. If God created matter, who is to say sentience can't be an emergent property." It was shortly after that it occurred to me that in the creation account of Genesis God never says let there be birds and fish and wombats and pine trees. Instead He spoke to the land and the water and told them to bring forth all the various kinds of life. It kinda made me go hmmmm.
I managed to spark off a vigorous discussion on P. Vanderklays channel with this point so I might drop it here. I think the question of free will must take into account the fundamentally non-Newtonian nature of life, especially humans. What I mean by this is that despite the fact that every individual molecule and atom in a human obeys the laws of thermodynamics in regard to entropy, living beings are enthalpic in their nature until death. Not only that, we represent an anti-entropic envelope, like a ship against the tide of the universe. This was first observed by Julian Huxley, a top evolutionist, brother of Aldous Huxley. Ive done a couple of videos on this if people are interested (bad audio unfortunately), but ultimately I think there is very good scientific reason to NOT treat humans as a complex type of Newtonian object.
^^ It's a good point. The Universe in general is fundamentally non-Newtonian, and the opposing view of a clockwork Universe, commonly held and supported by everyday experience is damaging to mind and spirit.
Isaac Newton. Back to the late 1600's. Surely, at least, up is up, and down is down, is it not? How can there be divinity in a particle? If i but explain the gaps, then have i not explained God? I find this schoolboy sort of objection to religious dogma, tiresome. Young people today are taught to be enlightenment atheists who only believe what they see, taking for granting that they might even be capable of seeing something for what it is, or how it was meant to be seen. I feel like religion is playing peekaboo with the scientific community, and that the scientific community is struggling with item permanence.
@Adrian Matthews Life in evolutionary theory proceeds towards a state of greater complexity and order. Big 'E' entropy means that all chemical/physical equations move towards increasing the amount of Entropy in the wider universe. Little 'e' entropy is the general observation that ordered systems move towards a more chaotic state. i.e. emptying a box of matches on the ground will much more likely result in a chaotic pattern than a straight alignment. And then if a human lines them up, the universe will contrive to disrupt that order more rather than putting it back together. So we can say that over time Entropy>>>entropy. Enthalpy is the inverse of Entropy, while anti-entropy is the inverse of entropy. Indiviuduals maintain an a Enthalpic (non-deathlike) state within their bodies by increasing the general Entropy in our surrounds (though organic life sustains other life to a large degree, lowering the enthalpic burden by supplying complex Carbon structures to other life). Life as a whole seems to proceed, as Huxley maintained, towards anti-entropy. There is really no good reason WHY this should be the case, as its incredeibly unlikely in both cases. And anyone who bandies around the anthropic principle (either form) is just playing games and kicking the improbability up to another level, actually making their cosmological viewpoint more improbably. Humans are doubly anti-entropic because of our ability to embody the logos, to creatively reason and also to create order in our surrounds.
@Adrian Matthews Thus, religion no longer needs to 'hide in the gaps' as the sophomoric type of atheist will alledge. If we combine the fact that we need to reinsert the subjective perspective into physics to get good answers at the level of very-big or small (QM and GR), with the outcomes of Godels theorums (that truthful statements can be made that can never be proved), we can flip the cursed perspective of Bertrand Russel on its head. Humans are NOT an accident that thinks it is alive, who's only redemption is understanding the grid-lines of empirically derived reason that make up the universe. Rather anti-entropy shows that we are NOT things, we are something whos nature is, at least in part, set against the laws of 'things'. Thus science points us towards the fact that the newtonian/cartesian grid of objects clanging and banging into each other is merely a tool which is useful in many circumstances but not all. THUSLY: my conclusion is that the highest form of truth is the human embodying the logos, which can be also said to have some character that is opposed in the highest possible sense to entropy and death. And therefore the greatest evil, perhaps the greatest embodiment of he spirit of death and decay, can be said to proceed from the treatment of other people as 'things'.
There is room for a both-and concept of consciousness. It comes from above and below. We receive it and create it. In other words there are at least two aspects to consciousness: the influence (from above) and the seed (from below). The shape/structure of our material existence channels the influence while the seed is cultivated inside us. We are created and also subcreators if you prefer that language.
Wow. Just wow. This really helps me put into perspective the materialistic wordview, with which I'm really struggling with at the moment. Wow. Great stuff!
What I personally find interesting about evolution is that it's not quite the same type of science as most of today's science. Most of today's science is by Aristotle Techne. Evolution theory does not give any meaningful predictions. But provide post hoc rationalization - we are here because it was adaptive.
Great video! And I like how you describe the way you think about evolution. It is no doubt a fact of life, but not something which is all encompassing. I think people are definitely starting to realize there is a whole other side to the world that is revealed through mythology and the stories we've been telling forever. Thank you for the great content!
Emergence is only real if someone gives it meaning. Nothing in a mechanistic world is greater than its part unless a mind gives it meaning. A DVD only has a movie inside it apart from the microscopic pits that are "read" by an optical pick up through a laser because someone is on the other side watching the different pixels on a TV giving that information meaning. If it weren't for that person watching TV the disc would always stay a disc scattering information across space. The pixels on the TV would just be a conglomeration of pixels with no significance. One minute explanation of how a DVD works: th-cam.com/video/vGXFfFNQqNk/w-d-xo.html God gives this whole entire universe meaning which is why this Universe even exists. Furthermore, we give small meanings to things apart from the meaning that God gives to everything.
Jonathan, see if you can get a conversation going with Bernado Kastrup on panpsychism and consciousness in general. His idea is that we are all dissociated 'alters' of the one Mind, God, Brahma etc. Studies in Alzheimers and schizophrenia really strengthen the case. He's a computer engineer by trade and well versed on Jung and symbology. I'm hoping Rebel Wisdom will get around to him too. He fills a big gap in the conversation as an Idealist in opposition to scientific materialism. Good video. Thanks
Monism is very much at odds with Orthodox Christianity, which does not subsume/reject particularity in favor of 'the One' in the same way Eastern religions do. Monism also collapses into Dualism, which in turn leads to the Mind/Body problem, alienation, etc.
"Monism also collapses into Dualism". Can you expand on this? I've become very interested in Monistic Idealism over the last year, and I'm certainly open to hearing where it might fall down philosophically.
@@jamieyoung9392 Here I'm paraphrasing from R.J. Rushdoony's _The One and the Many:_ When you have realized that 'All is One,' it is not _you_ who has realized this. It is the One that has realized this. Yet the Unity has not even found itself, because it is no self. If it were a self, it would not have found itself, and if it has found itself it is no longer itself. Thus the Absolute must run off in opposite directions simultaneously. It cannot act in affirmation of temporal individuation, because to do so is to negate pure unification by affirming separation. Monism resolves into an irreconcilable tension between the One and the Many, the problem of Identity. This is exactly why the concept of the Trinity exists in Christianity, to overcome precisely this problem. The West has fallen back on this very problem with the advent of Modernity, where the ontic realm of God/divinity has collapsed, leaving Man and Nature (subject and object) locked in dialectical opposition. Saint Augustine injected this tension into Western Christianity by appropriating the Neo-Platonic notion of a Monadic God. Late-medieval scholastics such as William of Ockham rejected the notion of universals to preserve the omnipotence of a Divinely Simple God and a world comprised entirely of particularities (atoms) in perpetual flux, and this is the basic theological vision of Martin Luther.
Thanks for highlighting the post. On a related topic have you looked into the works of Heraclitus? He developed the concept of the logos about 500 BC - it would be interesting if you could do a video about him and compare it how Christianity views the logos. I know Philo of Alexander was so interested in his ideas he interpreted the old Testament through this lens while working in Alexandria.
@@BarringtonDailey Heraclitus's philosophy of the Logos was enough for St. Justin Martyr to call him a "Christian before Christ". Heraclitus said the world follows the pattern of the Logos, but humans act as if they had their own private logos that they follow. Heraclitus "preached" following the Logos, and St. Justin Martyr saw that as the idea of submitting the individual will to God's will before Christ said "not my will but Yours be done." St. Justin Martyr also sees Socrates's death as almost an act of martyrdom in service to the Logos, which Socrates followed absolutely even under penalty of death. The ancient Greek philosophers were highly revered by early Christians, and some Orthodox churches even put Socrates into icons as if he were a saint.
I think that this video is very important. Besides its intrinsic importance it's important to me because it explains some of my reticence towards what you teach. Phenomenology is a more "psychological" philosophical school that is epistemologically lost. But I get why you want to use a phenomenological approach, because it's true that consciousness comes first. You can sometimes get away with that move and bypass a lot of philosophy. But the problem with starting with consciousness, that St Maximus dealt with, and you dealt with, and which led him to universalism, and you to perennialism with a universalist sensibility, is the sacrifice at the bottom. The moment when you try to see Christ in the other too much. The moment when you don't notice that progressivism is "built-in" in evolutionary thought, for example, and present in Peterson's Jungian arguments. When does that seeing Christ in others go too far? When it presumes to know our nature, when it declares our nature to be fine as is. And the worst part is that God does the same, so a lot of people get lost along the way. But the way we reach that conclusion is precisely the point, the "when" we eat of the fruit. While I don't discard evolution, the progressive metaphysics, the metaphysics of chaos, are still there, hidden in Gnosticism and Neoplatonic thought, hidden in this modern scientism that presumes to know human nature through these "spirits" in the archetypes. Peterson's model gives plausibility to Christianity, but it cannot be the right path. And the reason it cannot be the right path is because it grants ontological reality to the infinite ideas that man gives flesh to. If it were right then the transhumanists and Satanists would be too. If man has everything he needs, he doesn't need God. If we can frame our evolutionary landscape we can guide our evolution, if we can frame the materialistic world like this panpsychism conversation brought up then man mastered himself and needs nothing from God to become whatever man wants to be, despite God. Like I said, I'm not bothered by evolutionary theory either. The problem is that evolutionary theory really wants to be the master frame and convince us that we're both gods and mere animals, and it's a tempting idea. I think you're right in engaging in good-faith dialogue with smart people, I just don't know they'll change, and what's more, I know the best argument and the smartest ideas don't win all the time. But that's part of taking up the cross I guess, and it's good to sharpen all of us that do want to be sharpened. Peterson recapitulates Aristotle's and Plato's mistakes. Either he falls on the arbitrariness of pantheism (by defending free speech for example), or he falls on the arbitrariness of separating an ideal arbitrarily and choosing it over others (like his defense of classical liberalism as an ideology, which is tradition for tradition's sake).
The story and logos is the foundation. All those explanations of it are coming from it. The story isn’t caused by the chemicals. The chemicals are caused by the story. The material is secondary to the logos/moment of experience??
That's very much my intuition; and the reason materialists are so obtuse (disingenuous even) when presented with the simple distinction between 'how' and 'why'.
What do you think about the idea that the "creation myth" in Genesis is in some sense a "gathering up" and "offering up" to God the logii of the creation? So, maybe rather than a definitive sketch of God's forward creative procedure, it moreso reflects man's contemplation of his environment, the cosmos, as something coming together to a head or peak in God, where man offers to God the creation itself (thinking christologically, this makes sense)? The narrative would then be an act of worship more than a simple laying out of a cosmology or something. Many have noted that it is indeed written as poetry or song. This would also define what is meant by "Eden," a mystical unity of being instead of a literal spacio-temporal "place," so that the 1st and 2nd chapters are not as disjointed as they sometimes appear.
Non-reductive physicalism (property dualism) conflicts with metaphysical naturalism (i.e. ateleological ontologies of nature, e.g. atheism) because it posits an assignment of non-empirical (i.e its existence cannot be denied by objective observation/measurement) mental properties (i.e. internal observer/qualia/non-physical consciousness) to arbitrary physical systems (i.e. human neural networks/brains). Yet under the current scientific paradigm, physical systems are assumed to operate perfectly fine on their own, according to (either probabilistic/deterministic; irrelevant) physical law (cf. computer/philosophical zombie). 1. Panpsychism is a resolution to this problem (see also; "overdetermination"). Panpsychism however is limited by the "combination problem". As discussed, there is no reason why some ~conscious low level particles or "quiddities" should combine into a greater conscious unity/centre of consciousness (mind) and not others. This is where information processing models of consciousness mind might make more sense (in that this delineation might be defined by the level of information processing complexity occurring in a physical system). Simulation theory is also helpful in this regard, but it like substance dualism pushes the problem of creation (emergence/ instantiation) and function (behaviour) of mind back a layer. 2. Under any non-substance dualist philosophy of mind (including naturalistic panpsychism and property dualism) non-physical consciousness can't evolve, or provide any adaptive advantage to the system. If it say operated on the indeterminism of nature at a lower (quantum) level, we would be able to detect (measure) the physical events as behaving according to a pseudo-random probability distribution; this would break the precise probabilistic predictions of nature (quantum mechanics) in a way that follows some discoverable pattern. 3. Metaphysical free will could theoretically operate on such lower level physical (observed/measured) randomness, as per Robert Kane's 'free volition', because for metaphysical free will to exist its predictions are by definition unpredictable (observed random). There is however no clear reason for a conscious agent to reject any given desire in favour of a competing desire, assuming their mind (including desires and memory) are defined by the (probabilistic) physical system. A compatibilist would argue; what other reason is there for an agent to make a decision if not reason itself, which is a deterministic process (logic). Likewise, it is not clear how such a system of free will could be implemented practically, as neuronal systems are not obviously subject to quantum indeterminism (they are fairly macro and rely on ionic/molecular transfer/flow). 4. One possible "function" (philosophical) of non-physical consciousness under indeterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics (Copenhagen interpretation) might be to collapse the probability wave function (see "mini-collapse" as opposed to decoherence). Yet again, one might ask why or how would it do this, and if the prerequisites for its existence (instantiation in the universe) are defined by the physical system these prerequisites may as well be responsible rather than non-physical consciousness itself. Under nominalism, what we perceive as a unity of particles/particulars (according perhaps to some universal category or "universal"), could be an adaptive method of discriminating between regularities in emergent phenomena (pattern recognition). In this sense an object is not necessarily more than the sum of its parts, just a productive and reliable method of categorisation of how these parts are interacting with each other and producing the observed high level phenomenon. Nominalistic reduction of nature to this extent is however a problem for conscious unity (mind), at least how we perceive ourselves - as objectively singular and unified centres of consciousness. In that our existence is perceived to be whole and real (I think therefore I am). We have certainly evolved to believe in ourselves as unified agents - see self/other directed theory of mind - and our qualia/experience convey this. Individual conscious experiences (e.g. of some qualia in the field of view/awareness, say a red/moving point of light, or concept, say a dog) likewise are thought to be encoded across vast/multiple neural networks (and not localised to particles or individual neurons). Again, this pertains to the combination problem.
A lot of these problems in mereology emerge because one is viewing the parts as prior to the whole. If one holds the whole as prior to its parts then a lot of these issues, such as how do the parts compose a whole that is not reducible to its parts, simply dissolve because the whole subsumes the parts rather than parts composing the whole.
@Ghost Atheism (good) = "We don't know where it comes from, but acknowledge it happens" Theism (bad) = "We don't know, therefore we do know, let me tell you exactly how things work"
@Ghost Ugh. You are doing exactly what you claim I am doing. New atheism doesn't say a god does not exist, but we do like to point out all the irrational arguments people like to use to justify their invalid ideas. Classical theism is just as bad as religion. It is a bunch of incoherent, demonstrably false beliefs. On the other hand, Deism is less filled with illogical beliefs, but is still completely unnecessary.
What if all particles are indeed conscious, and except in complex organisms it never combines into a coherent whole, so that the rest of the material world is in a constant state of mute and incomprehensible suffering??
I am not a physicist and so my views of quantum mechanics' significance have to do mainly with symbolic significance. One of the findings from quantum experiments is that quantum entanglement can happen not only across space (already totally weird and counterintuitive) but also across time. This produces apparent "backwards causality" effects, like those observed in the Quantum eraser delayed choice experiment (lots of youtubes about it, I suggest looking it up). This is significant for conceiving of consciousness itself as a quantum effect -- it suggests consciousness is the constant reconciling of the present, past, and future to make that reconciliation "feel like" something singular and whole. At a macro-scale, this is turn suggests that something is profoundly wrong with the linear-progressive view of history where the past is always presumed to be "left behind" and "receding." Consciousness may more naturalistically prefer to relate to time, and to the very fabric of causality, such that events of great importance in the "remote" past have enduring formative vitality.
@@jacobshell8612 It does happen in nature at an observed rate of 1 pair in 16 million atoms. But quantum entanglement immediately collapses as soon as one of the two particles interacts with its environment in any way whatsoever. By the way, it isn't as if the two particles are literally the same object. They simply share the same wave function, thus contain the same information.
The word 'supernatural' is a bit like nails on a chalkboard I find, and that's not from agreement with naive reductive materialism (I don't) but it's because the word natural seems to have come to define anything in the set of what's real.
I'm not sure if I misunderstood Mr. Marceau's premise, but it seems like he is saying that the materialists believe that the world would be deterministic if we just had all the pertinent variables available. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells us this is wrong, so I doubt the materialists actually believe this, making me wonder if he's building a strawman argument. In fact, even at the macroscopic scale, experience tells us that the world is not deterministic but probabilistic, that's why we use statistics to predict what percentage of a product will fail prematurely, etc. There is no answer to any question in science without an associated uncertainty, anyone who tells you differently misunderstands the limits of our scientific ability. The reason we use deterministic models is that many of them can be adjusted such that they have low uncertainty, or at the least they can give us an idea of what to expect. They still have valuable predictive value a large percentage of the time, so they are still valuable By the way, I am an engineer, so I have had some university classes dealing with these concepts (of course the professors always tried to limit the philosophical discussion, jajaja).
What breaks in the materialist story of mechanical processes? I like the conceptualization of the materialists' cold dead one dimensional analysis as a story. I guess this is the difference between fiction and nonfiction. Now I am imagining a children's book in this style. "The Very Hungry Caterpillar Whose Thoughts and Decisions are all Predetermined and Governed by Mechanical Processes and Laws Beyond His Control" This story would probably turn your kid into a sociopath. Science or theoretically nonfiction explains how things are and how they are known to behave. Fiction or metaphorical idealization, symbolic abstraction, grasps at what things could be in the realm of experience, encompassing both the understood and the not-understood. The act of writing fiction assumes a value beyond the known because you are asking a abstract question when you engage in art and why would you ask a question if nothing matters? So inherently the process of reading or experiencing an artistic work engages the audience in the process of observation and embodiment of these abstractions in whatever form they lie, and this builds the psyche the logic, the understanding, the consciousness to know and understand itself, logos, God, the universal laws of nature, so that the line of best fit the individual can place into the world is now more accurate from the standpoint of optimally resonating with all variables and stimuli. The gates of heaven open the moment the individual recognizes this capacity as "a right way" or recognize that there is a good and evil, and heaven begins when the individual lets go of ego and completely submits to the divine perfection of the moment and lets his instantaneous embodiment of logic, his genetic and social nature, and the unconsciously incorporated self knowledge as the art he perceives builds up. So to answer your question materialists start with the assumption that there is no moment of letting go to the instant and choosing Godtruth vs satanlies.
There are different points from which the materialists can depart from the belief in the embodiment of the ideal. These days almost nobody is Godly they may have never met such a person and so are unable to conceive of someone absolutely letting go to the truth of every moment. Others might suggest that even this choice is predetermined but that is an unknown and will remain an unknown probably forever. Jesse Lee Peterson a real Godly pastor, unconventional by today's standards says we have no free will and that the light of God shines upon people by chance and only God knows if peoples eyes will be opened. He says the light is within all people and sometimes people need outside influence to open this capacity to embody it and sometimes it is internal, often it builds, it often involves suffering and realizing your judgement of good and evil as manifested through fear, ego, dissatisfaction, being a pansy beta male, living a life of quiet desperation.
Wonderful conversation, thank you for sharing it. If Donald Hoffman is of interest (as he should be!), people here might also find Tom Campbell's work valuable. His work views 'matter' as information, such that our 'physical' universe is experienced by consciousness (or soul) in much the same manner as a computer-generated virtual reality game in which we are wholly immersed. His model calls God "The Greater Consciousness System", which is a finite and evolving entity of which we (souls, or "individuated units of consciousness") are constituent and similarly evolving parts. The virtual reality we inhabit is not programmed so much as set in motion with initial conditions (Big Bang) that have evolved as science describes (more or less). His model thus includes all of scientific discovery but within the context of a God/Consciousness-created subset here for the purpose of furthering our co-evolution towards Love.
I think there is a wide misunderstanding and misrepresenting of Quantum Physic by those addressed in this video as Materialists. I very often hear such misunderstandings in various talks and debates about Free Will and it's very annoying because it hinders the possibility to actually have a real discussion about it. This should also serve as a good answer and counter argument related to the first question posed in this video. The "Materialist" premises are based on a classical understanding of mechanics: if I know the state of all particles in a given system at a given time I can predict everything occurring with a 100% accuracy. The problem with such a statement is that the actual Universe does not look like it abides to this premise, which is known as Local Realism. Local Realism has been put to test experimentally in the last 60 years and it's been taking enormous hits; at the quantum level particles do not behave in such a way that makes it possible for us to predict their behavior in a way compatible with Classical Mechanic. It is not that there are "hidden variables" (as many suggested at first) that makes the information incomplete and so it makes our prediction only a probability, it is actually that some measurable properties of particles are not preexisting values to the measurement and the very act of measuring them makes the property in question collapse to a certain value. This is VERY unintuitive and so it makes it easy for people to misunderstand its implications, it also contradicts Local Realism premise and predictions to its very core. The common arguments by Materialists and Determinists are not supported by our current empirical evidence, it seems to me the very existence of phenomena like Quantum Fluctuations make such position just unsustainable and make instead great floor in favor of the actual existence of such a thing as Free Will (at least on a metaphysical level). Now what can be argued is that we are bounded by our biological existence and therefore our behavior isn't actually free of bonds in our decision making, and that's fair and reasonable, but the Universe isn't just a mechanical system, it just doesn't seem, at least to our current knowledge, to behave like that on its fundamental levels and every experiment so far confirmed it. (Please note that this topic is actually much more complex and nuanced than how I make it seem and I do not wish to imply that a deterministic Universe is not possible, it just doesn't look so to our most up to date scientific knowledge).
How does a property collapse to a specific value upon measuring it exactly? I don't think i'm understanding the scope of the issue here because i only have a vague idea what the whole observation shtick actually means.
@@user-kw9hg9o Ok so I wrote a lengthy example twice and I deleted it by mistake 'cause I'm apparently dumb, I'll just redirect you to look up Quantum Entanglement, that should make things clearer. In brief I can maybe make a simplistic analogy: it's as if I wanted to measure your height, but you weren't "any tall" before I actually made the measurement. An entangled particle doesn't actually have a clear and definite position, spin, momentum or polarization prior to the measurement, all those properties are in a superposed quantum state and they collapse to a certain value upon measurement.
If we project value, Beutey and meaning on to the world through consciousness, doesn’t that mean that these things are not IN the world itself, but rather have only a reality in consciousness? Isn’t this a reversion to Galeleo’s move to divide the world into the primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities being those with existence outside of the mind, secondary qualities being those projected on to world by the mind. This is far removed from the medieval world in which meaning, beauty, telos, is ect, were part of the world, in the manner of Aristotles four causes for example.
Well, with the Christian idea, God's consciousness is the objective constitutive element. God protects things into it subjectively, but in relation to us, that is an objective reality of the thing perceived. We can go further and project onto it as well, but we can't change what is truly there via God. We can, at most, mask it for ourselves. Like with a murderer. In truth, God has imputed His own image onto that creation and we can never truly remove that by projecting our hatred onto them and calling them a monster. We can only deceive ourselves by doing so, making their true divinely instantiated nature.
The Catholic Church teaches that the soul is the form of the body. This is the exact opposite of materialism which posits that the body is the form of the soul. Materialists begin at the termination of act rather than at its origin. Souls (persons) are the animating, unifying principle of the body. This is most obvious at death, which happens at a moment when the soul leaves the body and the body immediately begins a complete decomposition. Death is a moment before which the body lived and after which it is dead.
Those aren’t jumps of complexity. They are levels of dissection. People cut the thing apart then say the parts they cut out are the cause of their cutting. This is madness!
bro ur heart makes toroidal field, where ur memories are stored ~sheldrake when 2 toroidal fields are near they come in contact like vesica pisces = overlap of 2 circles = venn diagram when eye glances meet, people are linked and data can transfer between the 2 energy fields. this is how some people can naturally practice telepathy also. let say u are in stress, alcoholic, and anger problems => turbulent ,weak, imbalance energetic field vs love => harmonious, strong, good Panpsychichism = all psychic abilities activated after having used logic, having sought truth & understanding p.s. stay away from academia. live in the field.
Hey Jonathan, I'd like to get your views on Jordan Peterson's views on evolution elaborated. I thought I had Jordan Peterson's views figured out, especially given that he talks about the Kingdom of God, implying it as a telos. But, as I reread 12 Rules I found where he says it's an error to consider that evolution has a final destination as a fixed point. My question for you, Jonathan, is: do you think it makes sense to talk about the Kingdom of God as an ultimately desirable state for humanity, but at the same time say that it's an error to consider that evolution has an ultimate end state? (In 12 Rules Jordan calls the Kingdom the "greatest possible prize" and says that to place the alleviation of unnecessary suffering at the top of your hierarchy of values is to work to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth (sounding a lot like Leo Tolstoy).)
I can give a teensy insight that I think I have on Jordan's views. He talks about the Kingdom of God as a kind of goal in the moral sense as the ultimate pattern of play which promotes the eternally reiterable playing of games. I think that the reason he then pairs that with the statement you've brought forth from 12 Rules is that(based on a conversation Peterson has with a Christian TH-camr) Jordan's idea of perfect is non-static. His idea of perfection is like "something that is continually perfected". So I think that his idea of God is that God may be perfect, but that God is continually perfecting Himself. If God Himself is continually being perfected, then evolution's goal would never have an end, only a continual striving forwards. Assuming I've understood him correctly, I'd love to disagree with him in person because I think he is too informed by his clinical practice. I think he has the idea of that continual perfecting from the character development that he sees in we insufficient mortals. We either have a positive or negative character arc at all times. So, of course, he leans towards the positive one. But there is such a thing(in narratives) as a flat character arc where the character is never changed by the environment(positively or negatively), but instead changes the environment through the steadfastness of their character. I think this is the true idea of God's perfection. There's a reason that Jesus never has a "character transformation", and it's because there was nothing to transform. He was perfect and only effected change on His environment, lifting them up with Him, and promising to do so fully at the end.
@@terrencemedders1867 hmm actually now that you put it that way, it reminds me of a quote from Thomas Aquinas I heard from Bishop Barron. It goes something like the saints in heaven delight in how incomprehensible God is. So it's not God that is continually perfected, but ourselves in the presence of God. I also think I remember him saying somewhere that Christianity worships the process that continually transforms chaos into order instead of just order itself. Tried to find where he said that but haven't had luck so far. Thanks, your comment helped clear it up!
@@RSanchez111, I've yet to read Aquinas, but that sounds really cool. I remember him saying it to, but I can't remember either. His videos are many and long, so I think we should be graded on a curve when trying to find a single statement of his lol. No problem, thank you!
@@terrencemedders1867 lol agree on his videos. I keep notes with links to clips that I find particularly striking, and I think I found the clip I was thinking of earlier: th-cam.com/video/sZPcenI4Atw/w-d-xo.html Starting at 13:00 specifically he starts talking about the "Spirit of the Order" and the "Spirit of the Ordering Principle". He says Christianity got the idea of God the Father as the Spirit of the Order, and while he didn't say it explicitly in the clip this obviously implies that God the Son is the Spirit of the Ordering Principle, His Word. JBP talks about the dynamic relationship between culture and the spirit that generates culture, and says that the spirit that generates culture should be superodinate to the spirit of the culture. So it's not a final destination, but the continual process that should be superodinate. JBP also says that you need to uphold the values of the group, but the values of the group should be subordinated to producing the individual who gives the group vision. This to me is reminiscent of Matthew 5:17, where Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them."
Dear Jonathan, when I was little, my father (a Russian Orthodox Christian) always told me that everything has a soul. Not only humans and animals, but plants and inanimate objects as well. I wonder if you would call that panpsychism or rather panentheism. I consider myself a panentheist and a pantheist, but I am not sure what the relation to panpsychism is. What would you say?
@@julianw6604 That could very well be. Would you say the essence of a thing is given by its creator (could be God or not)? And would that qualify as panpsychism, panentheism, or something else?
J.A. Brown Well I’m a Christian so I would say God gives the soul somehow. I don’t have an answer to these questions right now, I’m just trying to move beyond substance dualism. If you watch the lecture they were referring to by David Bentley Hart, he does discuss the soul and how it’s often misunderstood. He says, soul is synonymous (if I Remember correctly) with something’s existence.
Is there branch of panpsychism that is top down? Because I see God as the integration of all such things: consciousness, being/nonbeing, love, virtue, good, etc. In perhaps Babylonian and even earlier Near Eastern style, all things "divine" (nontangeable) are derivatives of aspects of God, and all things material (cells, molecules, physics, etc) are integrals of the chaos of the material world. So the body is the product of unifying the earthly, while the mind or soul is a derivative of the way God is (His Image/Likeness). Therefore, evolution is simply forming the body, and humanity being the microcosm of the universe is in regards to the same; while the soul is not explained as such, as it has more in common with the angels and God.
Yes, it's called Cosmopsychism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a good rundown of it here: plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#MicrVersCosm
You cant quantify love unless you are a Christian and use are you sinning against this person as your measurement. Love can be used as an absolute value... Yes or No?
Beautiful articulation Jonathan of the unity vs discord once you enter the varying resolutions of the component parts which make up reality. Reminds me of a thought experiment I had once with a friend: Imagine the entire volume of the room you are in, including yourself, every single atom, electron, quark, you name it, was analyzed and disassembled into all the composing elements. Now imagine rearranging these atoms into the most perfect geometrically atomically stable configuration, taking into account all resolutions, perfect stability, perfect symmetry.. Perhaps this airy being is alive. Perhaps it is crystaline. Perhaps both.. Likely it is fractal in nature. The problem in solving for this is the infinity of combinations at the varying resolutions. Like trying every combination of a 10 digit password except the password might only work if you heat up and cool down the elements in a specific order, at a specific pressure. As in chess, move order matters in chemistry. Quantity of atoms matters. There are special ways to take electrons away from or add to an atom to change its properties to make specific compounds. One might say therefore that there is a theoretical perfection if all unknowns are known and you have infinite calculation power. But imagine you are this room and you are given 80 years of life to assemble yourself into the best perfection you can. Now it is unclear how you should prioritize your time. But I would theorize that the answer for this sentient room's existential questions is still to engage first in its own nature and from self examination and embodiment and self awareness as experiences through natural self-preferential exploratory process will lead to the truest and best path as articulated by your specific nature, and if we start with the presupposition that this in itself is to be valued, then it is a sort of heavenly perfection that way too.. We would all make different perfect rooms and they would all be perfect anyway.
Materialism breaks down at the level of logos interpretation and recall of past information. This is the degree of subjective reality a machine can not and will not be able to predict. This infinity of the neo-plutonic is where the mind and free will rests (the cracks). Machinery or materialism cannot enter this realm.
if you're going to invoke logos as God then you have to be logically consistent in every department. Marcion was correct in his reasoning and the Bible clearly describes two Gods: the diabolical one of the O.T.and a rather less evil one in the N.T. at least on a surface level. The sticky aspect of this is when we apply Logos (reason and logic) to the idea of spiritual crime and punishment: the N.T. god is every bit an unreasonable A-hole in this dept. so even Marcion's correct perceptions are problematic. As a Gnostic, I suggest Ditheism and Docetism are the rational solutions to many of the inconsistencies and incoherence in western theism. And, no, there is no reasonable free will on this plane although our higher self monad likely does have free will although the Archons are deeply involved in manipulating the Bardo experiences. Yes, reincarnation is more reasonable (logos) than the one strike and you're out of the psychopathic archons who control western theism.
Maybe I'm just silly, but I don't understand what's so mysterious about the relation between the materialistic world and consciousness and logos. I think the oneness, divinity, logos are just phenomena of consciousness and it is just a function of brain. In other words, brain is able to perceive the whole phenomenon of logos and that's how we can organize the reality into oneness. I suppose, the more our consciousness evolves, the more we will be able to see God in everything, even without believing. And at the same time. the more science uncovers secrets of the natural world the more we will be able to understand how even the consciousness emerges from our brains and how it works mechanically. So, yes, we have a free will to an extent, as opposed to a rock or a plant for example. At any point, I don't see a thing here that would be mysterious. Am I insane, stupid or what? Edit: I fully agree with what Karl Jung said when asked if he believes in God. He said, I don't have to believe, I know. To me, atheists are just blind or prideful when they deny the existence of divinity. You either have to believe in God or accept the reality of his existence by using your rationality. At the same time, sooner or later, science will be able to explain what is logos and even how exactly we are able to perceive it.
The issue is the Hard Problem of Consciousness - the inability of materialism to explain how dead matter miraculously creates the qualia of experience. Pan-psychism seems to be a attempt to save materialism, but faces some of the same stumbling blocks. If you are interested, I recommend Bernardo Kastrup's site here on TH-cam. I found it very fascinating.
Canis Lupis, the problem is mysterious because the ideas of free will and determinism mutually refute each other while also requiring each other to be true. For example, the idea that everything in nature is determined means that free will is impossible, because nothing can violate the laws of nature. Yet there must also be formal, universal principles behind everything for nature to be determined (or else there would be no regularity in nature). The natural tendency of most thinkers is to subsume consciousness into nature (materialism), or subsume nature into consciousness (pan-psychism). Neither answer will ever solve this problem for the reasons I've already described.
@@AdHominus You laid it out pretty clearly for me, thank you. But according to my intuition, it is still pretty easy to solve - neither free will is an absolute, except for God's will, conceptually speaking, nor determinism is true as a property of matter (except at the most basic level of complexity). Determinism is just an illusion that comes from our immature and incomplete understanding of nature. Nature seems to be deterministic only at the fundamental level but the more we move into higher and higher levels of complexity the less rigid the structure becomes. Take for example basic living organisms, they don't have a free will equal to humans, but they posses a property that's homologous with free will - they are able to gather energy and organize matter. Even they are able to increase the glory of God, so to speak. And I want to point out, that I'm not in any way original in this approach. Jonathan Pageau is conveying the same view, as I see it. That's why I find the logic of nature being something exclusionary to the divine silly. Nature and God are just on the opposite sides of the spectrum but they fully complement each other, and in fact we wouldn't exist as an intelligent and conscious species if it wasn't the case. Still, it's just my intuition and of course I don't fully understand the gray area where one emerges from the other.
@@Wolf-Spirit_Alpha-Sigma Though you state that free will is not absolute, you go on to state that determinism is an illusion. This seems to me that you're subsuming nature into consciousness, and for that reason runs into the problem I laid out earlier: if there is such a thing as free will, to whatever degree, there would be an interruption in the chain of causality, an uncaused cause, that would render causality (and hence nature) to be self-contradictory. In addition, how can non-causal phenomenon at higher levels of complexity emerge at from strict causality at lower levels of complexity? Are you suggesting _deus ex machina?_ I think it is dubious to define free will as anything other than 'the will of the self-conscious subject to relate himself to objective nature'. Free will can't be said to be homologous to anything since it lacks structure by definition; it is the agent that grants structure onto nature, instead of passively receiving it from pre-determinations. So to take your example of microbes, it is in their nature to utilize energy to maintain homeostasis and reproduce. The fact that what they are doing is natural, inherent to what they are, means that their will is determined by their nature. In addition, there actions take place within a causal chain stretching back millions of years of nearly-identical microbes acting on the exact same drives.
@@AdHominus Well, you're leading a blind man - me. Scrapping what i wrote earlier, I must say I would now consider determinism to be the only sensible stance. What ever we call divine got to be a part of nature - noble part but not supernatural or "otherworldy". Concluding from that assumption, there is no "free" will - there is only will as a function of consciousnesses and mind. And even consciousnesses must be some kind of a natural phenomenon. I cannot on the other hand accept any spooky theories like panpsychism and such. I follow my reason, wherever it takes me. Still, the ideas of logos and God might fit in the deterministic world, if we can imagine them as top level complexity of nature. I seems I slightly misunderstood my intuition by thinking there is a third option. Funny that I don't feel any less spiritual even if I define spirit as a high level natural phenomenon. I tell you, humans are so full of pride, when they think that something in their brains is so special that it needs to be something opposing the laws of nature. Big oof. Thank you for your time.
Sorry Johnathan, you are wrong. There’s nothing that grounds us more then knowing that Adam and Eve were our actual historical ancestors. Talk about giving a sense of meaning to time and space. The same way a the Church can give meaning to space as the central point of a town, and to time vía it’s liturgical calendar. As you state in your latest video 😊☦️
![[Live] : ONE 169 วันนี้!! "อนาโตลี vs อูมาร์"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/IK3YZVWuFJg/mqdefault.jpg)
Between you, Jordan Peterson, and a lesser known but amazing podcast called Uberboyo, I can say I have honestly been led back to my Christian roots. Thanks again Mr. Pageau. Feels good to find meaning in divine love again, especially with the intellectual underpinnings that I have now built my faith on. The pieces fit and I finally feel content in wholeness :)
Try CS Lewis
Hey Ethan, How is it going now with your Christianity? Are you going to church, do you have a relogious community or how do you live it out?
I'd be curious because i have been following the same streams of thought: Peterson, Jung, Uberboyo, Pageau... But i still struggle with certain contradictions between Pageau and Peterson for example. Peterson sees objective truth and rationality as more findamental than Pageau i think.
"Very annoying but very smart," - Most accurate description of David Bentley Hart
How's he annoying?? I mean, besides being abrasive and condescending etc. lol
@@koffeeblack5717 It’s hard to blame him. He’s one of the best theologians alive and many people dismiss his field.
@@kenthefele113 honestly I get it. It's genuinely frustrating to have a more nuanced, comprehensive, and spiritually insightful worldview because your awareness of bias, ignorance, propaganda, ideology, and ineptitude grows proportionally. It's the curse of genius.
@@koffeeblack5717
He takes joy in holding the most fringe views in Orthodoxy. :D Sometimes he even crosses the line by refusing to venerate certain saints, or saying an Ecumenical Council is wrong, or venerating anathemised people like Origen.
Like Jonathan said, he's very smart, but also very annoying.
Heidegger answered this with his critique of Descartes in Being and Time. The first problem is that Being is not simply Beholding. Beholding arises from present obstacles that cannot be immediately accomodated. In these "breakdowns," we direct present attention, try to deconstruct and reconstruct until we can grasp the obstacle, thereby removing it from our path or incorporating it as equipment. This seems like a strange answer until you dig through the question, how can there be objects at all? When you look at an "atom" or "cell," how is that possible? And I don't mean resort back to visual data combined with perceptual brain matter -- that presumes the object is possible because the explanation relies upon objects already. I mean if you're a consciousness trying to consciously construct an object, what has to be happening in the mentalscape? Before you ever get to the idea of matter, you have to tunnel through these questions. If you start at materialism, you're already too lost to help, and the only way out is to examine how your materialist presuppositions are possible. The ultimate fundamental is Being itself, and the basic character of Being, the ultimate transcendental is temporality.
Could you please try to make this point clearer?
Basically, interacting with objects as things you just observe / look at is not the normal flow of life. You interact with things and the world by moving through it, using things, coping.
Heidegger uses hammers as an example. You don't see the hammer when you're using it properly. Only when the hammer breaks, do you stop and observe the hammer as an object.
This mode of interacting with the world, as subject observing object is not the absolute, prior, fundamental mode of life. Coping is as fundamental if not more fundamental. And that means trying to construct a worldview out of mere objects will always fail.
English isn't my first language but one of the reason why I listen to your content is that your accent sounds very clear for me..thx by the way
Great subject. I'm a Christian and I've been very interetested in this subject. The 2 most compelling models of consciousness (IMHO) is Koch and Tononi's IIT model and Roger Penrose's OrchOR. Both of the have panpsychism as a base. The idea the consciousness is fundamental to the universe like charge or spin. That it is inherent in matter.
I very much enjoy the choice of thumbnail, the Mandelbrot set being an object that is really simple in its technical construction, yet is experienced at a near incomprehensible level of complexity.
If you go to 15:54 of this video, titled _The Secret Code of Creation - Dr. Jason Lisle_ (link: th-cam.com/video/kEyPWJVYp84/w-d-xo.html), the almost perfect repetition of the entire Mandelbrot set on the left hand side reminds me of Genesis 2:26 "And God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness...'" and Genesis 2:27 "So God created man in his own image..."
Resonates big time. The truth is inside of us so when we recognize truthful speach in an other-self, theres a palpable feeling of resonance that points to Transcendence, Onesss, to Being itself.
I have a feeling this will be a good one. Cannot wait to get home from work tomorrow to watch this.
With respect to emergence and conciousness, Fr. Thomas Hopko indulged me in a conversation about the implications of certain science fiction tropes back in 2006. I liked to write science fiction and I was trying to resolve the problem represented by the idea of machine sentience or sentience achieved via biological uplift (genetic tinkering) because it meant a (likely fallen) rational being that has come into being absent an Adam event (inbreathing of God). If sentience could happen without God's express help, then that means sentience is essentially an emergent property of matter. That struck me as flirting with blasphemy. Fr Thomas just smiled and said, "that's just your crypto manichism talking. If God created matter, who is to say sentience can't be an emergent property." It was shortly after that it occurred to me that in the creation account of Genesis God never says let there be birds and fish and wombats and pine trees. Instead He spoke to the land and the water and told them to bring forth all the various kinds of life. It kinda made me go hmmmm.
I managed to spark off a vigorous discussion on P. Vanderklays channel with this point so I might drop it here. I think the question of free will must take into account the fundamentally non-Newtonian nature of life, especially humans. What I mean by this is that despite the fact that every individual molecule and atom in a human obeys the laws of thermodynamics in regard to entropy, living beings are enthalpic in their nature until death. Not only that, we represent an anti-entropic envelope, like a ship against the tide of the universe. This was first observed by Julian Huxley, a top evolutionist, brother of Aldous Huxley. Ive done a couple of videos on this if people are interested (bad audio unfortunately), but ultimately I think there is very good scientific reason to NOT treat humans as a complex type of Newtonian object.
^^ It's a good point. The Universe in general is fundamentally non-Newtonian, and the opposing view of a clockwork Universe, commonly held and supported by everyday experience is damaging to mind and spirit.
Check out Robert Waggoner,Jeffrey Mishlove(New Thinking Allowed),Tom Campbell and Frank Elaridi's"seeing without eyes"vids.
Isaac Newton. Back to the late 1600's. Surely, at least, up is up, and down is down, is it not? How can there be divinity in a particle? If i but explain the gaps, then have i not explained God?
I find this schoolboy sort of objection to religious dogma, tiresome. Young people today are taught to be enlightenment atheists who only believe what they see, taking for granting that they might even be capable of seeing something for what it is, or how it was meant to be seen.
I feel like religion is playing peekaboo with the scientific community, and that the scientific community is struggling with item permanence.
@Adrian Matthews Life in evolutionary theory proceeds towards a state of greater complexity and order. Big 'E' entropy means that all chemical/physical equations move towards increasing the amount of Entropy in the wider universe. Little 'e' entropy is the general observation that ordered systems move towards a more chaotic state. i.e. emptying a box of matches on the ground will much more likely result in a chaotic pattern than a straight alignment. And then if a human lines them up, the universe will contrive to disrupt that order more rather than putting it back together. So we can say that over time Entropy>>>entropy. Enthalpy is the inverse of Entropy, while anti-entropy is the inverse of entropy. Indiviuduals maintain an a Enthalpic (non-deathlike) state within their bodies by increasing the general Entropy in our surrounds (though organic life sustains other life to a large degree, lowering the enthalpic burden by supplying complex Carbon structures to other life). Life as a whole seems to proceed, as Huxley maintained, towards anti-entropy. There is really no good reason WHY this should be the case, as its incredeibly unlikely in both cases. And anyone who bandies around the anthropic principle (either form) is just playing games and kicking the improbability up to another level, actually making their cosmological viewpoint more improbably. Humans are doubly anti-entropic because of our ability to embody the logos, to creatively reason and also to create order in our surrounds.
@Adrian Matthews Thus, religion no longer needs to 'hide in the gaps' as the sophomoric type of atheist will alledge. If we combine the fact that we need to reinsert the subjective perspective into physics to get good answers at the level of very-big or small (QM and GR), with the outcomes of Godels theorums (that truthful statements can be made that can never be proved), we can flip the cursed perspective of Bertrand Russel on its head. Humans are NOT an accident that thinks it is alive, who's only redemption is understanding the grid-lines of empirically derived reason that make up the universe. Rather anti-entropy shows that we are NOT things, we are something whos nature is, at least in part, set against the laws of 'things'. Thus science points us towards the fact that the newtonian/cartesian grid of objects clanging and banging into each other is merely a tool which is useful in many circumstances but not all. THUSLY: my conclusion is that the highest form of truth is the human embodying the logos, which can be also said to have some character that is opposed in the highest possible sense to entropy and death. And therefore the greatest evil, perhaps the greatest embodiment of he spirit of death and decay, can be said to proceed from the treatment of other people as 'things'.
There is room for a both-and concept of consciousness. It comes from above and below. We receive it and create it. In other words there are at least two aspects to consciousness: the influence (from above) and the seed (from below). The shape/structure of our material existence channels the influence while the seed is cultivated inside us. We are created and also subcreators if you prefer that language.
Awesome.
Wow. Just wow. This really helps me put into perspective the materialistic wordview, with which I'm really struggling with at the moment. Wow. Great stuff!
What I personally find interesting about evolution is that it's not quite the same type of science as most of today's science. Most of today's science is by Aristotle Techne. Evolution theory does not give any meaningful predictions. But provide post hoc rationalization - we are here because it was adaptive.
It gives lots of predictions, such as where we might find certain fossils, or genetic markers, or predicting population dynamics
Great video! And I like how you describe the way you think about evolution. It is no doubt a fact of life, but not something which is all encompassing. I think people are definitely starting to realize there is a whole other side to the world that is revealed through mythology and the stories we've been telling forever. Thank you for the great content!
I wish I could have grown up with an understanding of these things....
Emergence is only real if someone gives it meaning. Nothing in a mechanistic world is greater than its part unless a mind gives it meaning.
A DVD only has a movie inside it apart from the microscopic pits that are "read" by an optical pick up through a laser because someone is on the other side watching the different pixels on a TV giving that information meaning. If it weren't for that person watching TV the disc would always stay a disc scattering information across space. The pixels on the TV would just be a conglomeration of pixels with no significance.
One minute explanation of how a DVD works: th-cam.com/video/vGXFfFNQqNk/w-d-xo.html
God gives this whole entire universe meaning which is why this Universe even exists. Furthermore, we give small meanings to things apart from the meaning that God gives to everything.
Jonathan, see if you can get a conversation going with Bernado Kastrup on panpsychism and consciousness in general. His idea is that we are all dissociated 'alters' of the one Mind, God, Brahma etc. Studies in Alzheimers and schizophrenia really strengthen the case. He's a computer engineer by trade and well versed on Jung and symbology. I'm hoping Rebel Wisdom will get around to him too. He fills a big gap in the conversation as an Idealist in opposition to scientific materialism. Good video. Thanks
Monism is very much at odds with Orthodox Christianity, which does not subsume/reject particularity in favor of 'the One' in the same way Eastern religions do. Monism also collapses into Dualism, which in turn leads to the Mind/Body problem, alienation, etc.
"Monism also collapses into Dualism". Can you expand on this? I've become very interested in Monistic Idealism over the last year, and I'm certainly open to hearing where it might fall down philosophically.
@@jamieyoung9392 Here I'm paraphrasing from R.J. Rushdoony's _The One and the Many:_ When you have realized that 'All is One,' it is not _you_ who has realized this. It is the One that has realized this. Yet the Unity has not even found itself, because it is no self. If it were a self, it would not have found itself, and if it has found itself it is no longer itself. Thus the Absolute must run off in opposite directions simultaneously. It cannot act in affirmation of temporal individuation, because to do so is to negate pure unification by affirming separation. Monism resolves into an irreconcilable tension between the One and the Many, the problem of Identity. This is exactly why the concept of the Trinity exists in Christianity, to overcome precisely this problem.
The West has fallen back on this very problem with the advent of Modernity, where the ontic realm of God/divinity has collapsed, leaving Man and Nature (subject and object) locked in dialectical opposition. Saint Augustine injected this tension into Western Christianity by appropriating the Neo-Platonic notion of a Monadic God. Late-medieval scholastics such as William of Ockham rejected the notion of universals to preserve the omnipotence of a Divinely Simple God and a world comprised entirely of particularities (atoms) in perpetual flux, and this is the basic theological vision of Martin Luther.
Yours is by far the most intelligent comment section on TH-cam.
The materialist idea at the start of the video was explored by Dostoevsky in the book 'The Underground Man' back in the 19C.
Thanks for highlighting the post. On a related topic have you looked into the works of Heraclitus? He developed the concept of the logos about 500 BC - it would be interesting if you could do a video about him and compare it how Christianity views the logos. I know Philo of Alexander was so interested in his ideas he interpreted the old Testament through this lens while working in Alexandria.
@@BarringtonDailey Heraclitus's philosophy of the Logos was enough for St. Justin Martyr to call him a "Christian before Christ". Heraclitus said the world follows the pattern of the Logos, but humans act as if they had their own private logos that they follow. Heraclitus "preached" following the Logos, and St. Justin Martyr saw that as the idea of submitting the individual will to God's will before Christ said "not my will but Yours be done." St. Justin Martyr also sees Socrates's death as almost an act of martyrdom in service to the Logos, which Socrates followed absolutely even under penalty of death. The ancient Greek philosophers were highly revered by early Christians, and some Orthodox churches even put Socrates into icons as if he were a saint.
"Consciousness is a orderly whole"
Me at 2:00 at night: If a tiger broke into my house right now, could I take it down before it killed me?
I'm routing for you man. Good luck.
Have you read The revolutionary phenotype? I wish we can have your opinion on its meaning.
The tree grows to it's vast totality from a mere seed.
The conceptual landscape is brought into being from a MEME
"just planting seeds" - Bill Hicks.
I think that this video is very important. Besides its intrinsic importance it's important to me because it explains some of my reticence towards what you teach. Phenomenology is a more "psychological" philosophical school that is epistemologically lost. But I get why you want to use a phenomenological approach, because it's true that consciousness comes first. You can sometimes get away with that move and bypass a lot of philosophy. But the problem with starting with consciousness, that St Maximus dealt with, and you dealt with, and which led him to universalism, and you to perennialism with a universalist sensibility, is the sacrifice at the bottom. The moment when you try to see Christ in the other too much. The moment when you don't notice that progressivism is "built-in" in evolutionary thought, for example, and present in Peterson's Jungian arguments.
When does that seeing Christ in others go too far? When it presumes to know our nature, when it declares our nature to be fine as is. And the worst part is that God does the same, so a lot of people get lost along the way. But the way we reach that conclusion is precisely the point, the "when" we eat of the fruit.
While I don't discard evolution, the progressive metaphysics, the metaphysics of chaos, are still there, hidden in Gnosticism and Neoplatonic thought, hidden in this modern scientism that presumes to know human nature through these "spirits" in the archetypes. Peterson's model gives plausibility to Christianity, but it cannot be the right path. And the reason it cannot be the right path is because it grants ontological reality to the infinite ideas that man gives flesh to. If it were right then the transhumanists and Satanists would be too. If man has everything he needs, he doesn't need God. If we can frame our evolutionary landscape we can guide our evolution, if we can frame the materialistic world like this panpsychism conversation brought up then man mastered himself and needs nothing from God to become whatever man wants to be, despite God.
Like I said, I'm not bothered by evolutionary theory either. The problem is that evolutionary theory really wants to be the master frame and convince us that we're both gods and mere animals, and it's a tempting idea. I think you're right in engaging in good-faith dialogue with smart people, I just don't know they'll change, and what's more, I know the best argument and the smartest ideas don't win all the time. But that's part of taking up the cross I guess, and it's good to sharpen all of us that do want to be sharpened.
Peterson recapitulates Aristotle's and Plato's mistakes. Either he falls on the arbitrariness of pantheism (by defending free speech for example), or he falls on the arbitrariness of separating an ideal arbitrarily and choosing it over others (like his defense of classical liberalism as an ideology, which is tradition for tradition's sake).
You should get Matthew T. Segall on your podcast to discuss panpsychism more in depth.
The story and logos is the foundation. All those explanations of it are coming from it. The story isn’t caused by the chemicals. The chemicals are caused by the story. The material is secondary to the logos/moment of experience??
That's very much my intuition; and the reason materialists are so obtuse (disingenuous even) when presented with the simple distinction between 'how' and 'why'.
Yes
John 1:1-5 - maybe?
@@jungatheart6359 well said. Much shorter explanation for the phenomenon than mine lol
What do you think about the idea that the "creation myth" in Genesis is in some sense a "gathering up" and "offering up" to God the logii of the creation? So, maybe rather than a definitive sketch of God's forward creative procedure, it moreso reflects man's contemplation of his environment, the cosmos, as something coming together to a head or peak in God, where man offers to God the creation itself (thinking christologically, this makes sense)? The narrative would then be an act of worship more than a simple laying out of a cosmology or something. Many have noted that it is indeed written as poetry or song. This would also define what is meant by "Eden," a mystical unity of being instead of a literal spacio-temporal "place," so that the 1st and 2nd chapters are not as disjointed as they sometimes appear.
Non-reductive physicalism (property dualism) conflicts with metaphysical naturalism (i.e. ateleological ontologies of nature, e.g. atheism) because it posits an assignment of non-empirical (i.e its existence cannot be denied by objective observation/measurement) mental properties (i.e. internal observer/qualia/non-physical consciousness) to arbitrary physical systems (i.e. human neural networks/brains). Yet under the current scientific paradigm, physical systems are assumed to operate perfectly fine on their own, according to (either probabilistic/deterministic; irrelevant) physical law (cf. computer/philosophical zombie).
1. Panpsychism is a resolution to this problem (see also; "overdetermination"). Panpsychism however is limited by the "combination problem". As discussed, there is no reason why some ~conscious low level particles or "quiddities" should combine into a greater conscious unity/centre of consciousness (mind) and not others. This is where information processing models of consciousness mind might make more sense (in that this delineation might be defined by the level of information processing complexity occurring in a physical system). Simulation theory is also helpful in this regard, but it like substance dualism pushes the problem of creation (emergence/ instantiation) and function (behaviour) of mind back a layer.
2. Under any non-substance dualist philosophy of mind (including naturalistic panpsychism and property dualism) non-physical consciousness can't evolve, or provide any adaptive advantage to the system. If it say operated on the indeterminism of nature at a lower (quantum) level, we would be able to detect (measure) the physical events as behaving according to a pseudo-random probability distribution; this would break the precise probabilistic predictions of nature (quantum mechanics) in a way that follows some discoverable pattern.
3. Metaphysical free will could theoretically operate on such lower level physical (observed/measured) randomness, as per Robert Kane's 'free volition', because for metaphysical free will to exist its predictions are by definition unpredictable (observed random). There is however no clear reason for a conscious agent to reject any given desire in favour of a competing desire, assuming their mind (including desires and memory) are defined by the (probabilistic) physical system. A compatibilist would argue; what other reason is there for an agent to make a decision if not reason itself, which is a deterministic process (logic). Likewise, it is not clear how such a system of free will could be implemented practically, as neuronal systems are not obviously subject to quantum indeterminism (they are fairly macro and rely on ionic/molecular transfer/flow).
4. One possible "function" (philosophical) of non-physical consciousness under indeterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics (Copenhagen interpretation) might be to collapse the probability wave function (see "mini-collapse" as opposed to decoherence). Yet again, one might ask why or how would it do this, and if the prerequisites for its existence (instantiation in the universe) are defined by the physical system these prerequisites may as well be responsible rather than non-physical consciousness itself.
Under nominalism, what we perceive as a unity of particles/particulars (according perhaps to some universal category or "universal"), could be an adaptive method of discriminating between regularities in emergent phenomena (pattern recognition). In this sense an object is not necessarily more than the sum of its parts, just a productive and reliable method of categorisation of how these parts are interacting with each other and producing the observed high level phenomenon. Nominalistic reduction of nature to this extent is however a problem for conscious unity (mind), at least how we perceive ourselves - as objectively singular and unified centres of consciousness. In that our existence is perceived to be whole and real (I think therefore I am). We have certainly evolved to believe in ourselves as unified agents - see self/other directed theory of mind - and our qualia/experience convey this. Individual conscious experiences (e.g. of some qualia in the field of view/awareness, say a red/moving point of light, or concept, say a dog) likewise are thought to be encoded across vast/multiple neural networks (and not localised to particles or individual neurons). Again, this pertains to the combination problem.
A lot of these problems in mereology emerge because one is viewing the parts as prior to the whole. If one holds the whole as prior to its parts then a lot of these issues, such as how do the parts compose a whole that is not reducible to its parts, simply dissolve because the whole subsumes the parts rather than parts composing the whole.
That is why you are called Monistic Idealism. But Love means that you do not subsume the parts, but they continue to exist within the whole.
@@JonathanPageau Indeed. I agree that I do not subsume the parts. God is love and God subsumes everything.
Who is this "John Gervakie [sp?]"? (22:07 and 22:19)
Great video! I get hung up on on details.
Emergent properties are not magic. Even things that are not well understood are probably not magic.
Brilliant idea about emergence being the materialists word for magic. Just another daily reminder that Sam Harris is just another religious zealot.
@Ghost well put. A philosophy/religion becomes a pathological ideology when it starts to deny the unknown.
@Ghost
Atheism (good) = "We don't know where it comes from, but acknowledge it happens"
Theism (bad) = "We don't know, therefore we do know, let me tell you exactly how things work"
@Ghost Ugh. You are doing exactly what you claim I am doing. New atheism doesn't say a god does not exist, but we do like to point out all the irrational arguments people like to use to justify their invalid ideas.
Classical theism is just as bad as religion. It is a bunch of incoherent, demonstrably false beliefs.
On the other hand, Deism is less filled with illogical beliefs, but is still completely unnecessary.
What if all particles are indeed conscious, and except in complex organisms it never combines into a coherent whole, so that the rest of the material world is in a constant state of mute and incomprehensible suffering??
Great talk, Jonathan waht books did u read to see evolution a bit different? Are u coming to CA to speak?
Awesome talk. Jonathan, you remind me of The Dude in this video, xD
I am not a physicist and so my views of quantum mechanics' significance have to do mainly with symbolic significance. One of the findings from quantum experiments is that quantum entanglement can happen not only across space (already totally weird and counterintuitive) but also across time. This produces apparent "backwards causality" effects, like those observed in the Quantum eraser delayed choice experiment (lots of youtubes about it, I suggest looking it up). This is significant for conceiving of consciousness itself as a quantum effect -- it suggests consciousness is the constant reconciling of the present, past, and future to make that reconciliation "feel like" something singular and whole. At a macro-scale, this is turn suggests that something is profoundly wrong with the linear-progressive view of history where the past is always presumed to be "left behind" and "receding." Consciousness may more naturalistically prefer to relate to time, and to the very fabric of causality, such that events of great importance in the "remote" past have enduring formative vitality.
Quantum entanglement is a statistically very very rare event. On the macro-scale in which we live, it exercises no effect whatsoever.
@@AdHominus What do you mean "statistically rare" here? Are you saying it only happens in a lab setting or something like that?
@@jacobshell8612 It does happen in nature at an observed rate of 1 pair in 16 million atoms. But quantum entanglement immediately collapses as soon as one of the two particles interacts with its environment in any way whatsoever. By the way, it isn't as if the two particles are literally the same object. They simply share the same wave function, thus contain the same information.
You should look into Object Oriented Ontology.
The word 'supernatural' is a bit like nails on a chalkboard I find, and that's not from agreement with naive reductive materialism (I don't) but it's because the word natural seems to have come to define anything in the set of what's real.
Does Jean-Philippe Marceau have a youtube channel. People like Jean-Philippe need to be talking and thinking out loud on youtube.
I'm not sure if I misunderstood Mr. Marceau's premise, but it seems like he is saying that the materialists believe that the world would be deterministic if we just had all the pertinent variables available. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells us this is wrong, so I doubt the materialists actually believe this, making me wonder if he's building a strawman argument. In fact, even at the macroscopic scale, experience tells us that the world is not deterministic but probabilistic, that's why we use statistics to predict what percentage of a product will fail prematurely, etc. There is no answer to any question in science without an associated uncertainty, anyone who tells you differently misunderstands the limits of our scientific ability. The reason we use deterministic models is that many of them can be adjusted such that they have low uncertainty, or at the least they can give us an idea of what to expect. They still have valuable predictive value a large percentage of the time, so they are still valuable
By the way, I am an engineer, so I have had some university classes dealing with these concepts (of course the professors always tried to limit the philosophical discussion, jajaja).
What breaks in the materialist story of mechanical processes?
I like the conceptualization of the materialists' cold dead one dimensional analysis as a story. I guess this is the difference between fiction and nonfiction. Now I am imagining a children's book in this style.
"The Very Hungry Caterpillar Whose Thoughts and Decisions are all Predetermined and Governed by Mechanical Processes and Laws Beyond His Control"
This story would probably turn your kid into a sociopath.
Science or theoretically nonfiction explains how things are and how they are known to behave.
Fiction or metaphorical idealization, symbolic abstraction, grasps at what things could be in the realm of experience, encompassing both the understood and the not-understood. The act of writing fiction assumes a value beyond the known because you are asking a abstract question when you engage in art and why would you ask a question if nothing matters? So inherently the process of reading or experiencing an artistic work engages the audience in the process of observation and embodiment of these abstractions in whatever form they lie, and this builds the psyche the logic, the understanding, the consciousness to know and understand itself, logos, God, the universal laws of nature, so that the line of best fit the individual can place into the world is now more accurate from the standpoint of optimally resonating with all variables and stimuli. The gates of heaven open the moment the individual recognizes this capacity as "a right way" or recognize that there is a good and evil, and heaven begins when the individual lets go of ego and completely submits to the divine perfection of the moment and lets his instantaneous embodiment of logic, his genetic and social nature, and the unconsciously incorporated self knowledge as the art he perceives builds up.
So to answer your question materialists start with the assumption that there is no moment of letting go to the instant and choosing Godtruth vs satanlies.
There are different points from which the materialists can depart from the belief in the embodiment of the ideal. These days almost nobody is Godly they may have never met such a person and so are unable to conceive of someone absolutely letting go to the truth of every moment. Others might suggest that even this choice is predetermined but that is an unknown and will remain an unknown probably forever. Jesse Lee Peterson a real Godly pastor, unconventional by today's standards says we have no free will and that the light of God shines upon people by chance and only God knows if peoples eyes will be opened. He says the light is within all people and sometimes people need outside influence to open this capacity to embody it and sometimes it is internal, often it builds, it often involves suffering and realizing your judgement of good and evil as manifested through fear, ego, dissatisfaction, being a pansy beta male, living a life of quiet desperation.
Jon, do you have knowledge on Japanese Astrology? If so, could you give me some bibliography on it?
Wonderful conversation, thank you for sharing it.
If Donald Hoffman is of interest (as he should be!), people here might also find Tom Campbell's work valuable. His work views 'matter' as information, such that our 'physical' universe is experienced by consciousness (or soul) in much the same manner as a computer-generated virtual reality game in which we are wholly immersed. His model calls God "The Greater Consciousness System", which is a finite and evolving entity of which we (souls, or "individuated units of consciousness") are constituent and similarly evolving parts. The virtual reality we inhabit is not programmed so much as set in motion with initial conditions (Big Bang) that have evolved as science describes (more or less). His model thus includes all of scientific discovery but within the context of a God/Consciousness-created subset here for the purpose of furthering our co-evolution towards Love.
18:58 yes
I think there is a wide misunderstanding and misrepresenting of Quantum Physic by those addressed in this video as Materialists. I very often hear such misunderstandings in various talks and debates about Free Will and it's very annoying because it hinders the possibility to actually have a real discussion about it.
This should also serve as a good answer and counter argument related to the first question posed in this video.
The "Materialist" premises are based on a classical understanding of mechanics: if I know the state of all particles in a given system at a given time I can predict everything occurring with a 100% accuracy.
The problem with such a statement is that the actual Universe does not look like it abides to this premise, which is known as Local Realism.
Local Realism has been put to test experimentally in the last 60 years and it's been taking enormous hits; at the quantum level particles do not behave in such a way that makes it possible for us to predict their behavior in a way compatible with Classical Mechanic. It is not that there are "hidden variables" (as many suggested at first) that makes the information incomplete and so it makes our prediction only a probability, it is actually that some measurable properties of particles are not preexisting values to the measurement and the very act of measuring them makes the property in question collapse to a certain value. This is VERY unintuitive and so it makes it easy for people to misunderstand its implications, it also contradicts Local Realism premise and predictions to its very core.
The common arguments by Materialists and Determinists are not supported by our current empirical evidence, it seems to me the very existence of phenomena like Quantum Fluctuations make such position just unsustainable and make instead great floor in favor of the actual existence of such a thing as Free Will (at least on a metaphysical level).
Now what can be argued is that we are bounded by our biological existence and therefore our behavior isn't actually free of bonds in our decision making, and that's fair and reasonable, but the Universe isn't just a mechanical system, it just doesn't seem, at least to our current knowledge, to behave like that on its fundamental levels and every experiment so far confirmed it.
(Please note that this topic is actually much more complex and nuanced than how I make it seem and I do not wish to imply that a deterministic Universe is not possible, it just doesn't look so to our most up to date scientific knowledge).
How does a property collapse to a specific value upon measuring it exactly? I don't think i'm understanding the scope of the issue here because i only have a vague idea what the whole observation shtick actually means.
@@user-kw9hg9o Ok so I wrote a lengthy example twice and I deleted it by mistake 'cause I'm apparently dumb, I'll just redirect you to look up Quantum Entanglement, that should make things clearer.
In brief I can maybe make a simplistic analogy: it's as if I wanted to measure your height, but you weren't "any tall" before I actually made the measurement. An entangled particle doesn't actually have a clear and definite position, spin, momentum or polarization prior to the measurement, all those properties are in a superposed quantum state and they collapse to a certain value upon measurement.
@@deBarnik
How do they know a particle doesn't have a definite state and how is measurement done precisely ?
@@user-kw9hg9o en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment
If we project value, Beutey and meaning on to the world through consciousness, doesn’t that mean that these things are not IN the world itself, but rather have only a reality in consciousness? Isn’t this a reversion to Galeleo’s move to divide the world into the primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities being those with existence outside of the mind, secondary qualities being those projected on to world by the mind. This is far removed from the medieval world in which meaning, beauty, telos, is ect, were part of the world, in the manner of Aristotles four causes for example.
Well, with the Christian idea, God's consciousness is the objective constitutive element. God protects things into it subjectively, but in relation to us, that is an objective reality of the thing perceived. We can go further and project onto it as well, but we can't change what is truly there via God. We can, at most, mask it for ourselves. Like with a murderer. In truth, God has imputed His own image onto that creation and we can never truly remove that by projecting our hatred onto them and calling them a monster. We can only deceive ourselves by doing so, making their true divinely instantiated nature.
Identity keeps everything from just being white noise.
The Catholic Church teaches that the soul is the form of the body. This is the exact opposite of materialism which posits that the body is the form of the soul. Materialists begin at the termination of act rather than at its origin. Souls (persons) are the animating, unifying principle of the body. This is most obvious at death, which happens at a moment when the soul leaves the body and the body immediately begins a complete decomposition. Death is a moment before which the body lived and after which it is dead.
Those aren’t jumps of complexity. They are levels of dissection. People cut the thing apart then say the parts they cut out are the cause of their cutting. This is madness!
10:13 bookmark
bro
ur heart makes toroidal field, where ur memories are stored ~sheldrake
when 2 toroidal fields are near they come in contact like vesica pisces = overlap of 2 circles = venn diagram
when eye glances meet, people are linked and data can transfer between the 2 energy fields.
this is how some people can naturally practice telepathy also.
let say u are in stress, alcoholic, and anger problems => turbulent ,weak, imbalance energetic field
vs
love => harmonious, strong, good
Panpsychichism = all psychic abilities activated after having used logic, having sought truth & understanding
p.s. stay away from academia. live in the field.
Hey Jonathan, I'd like to get your views on Jordan Peterson's views on evolution elaborated. I thought I had Jordan Peterson's views figured out, especially given that he talks about the Kingdom of God, implying it as a telos. But, as I reread 12 Rules I found where he says it's an error to consider that evolution has a final destination as a fixed point. My question for you, Jonathan, is: do you think it makes sense to talk about the Kingdom of God as an ultimately desirable state for humanity, but at the same time say that it's an error to consider that evolution has an ultimate end state?
(In 12 Rules Jordan calls the Kingdom the "greatest possible prize" and says that to place the alleviation of unnecessary suffering at the top of your hierarchy of values is to work to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth (sounding a lot like Leo Tolstoy).)
I can give a teensy insight that I think I have on Jordan's views. He talks about the Kingdom of God as a kind of goal in the moral sense as the ultimate pattern of play which promotes the eternally reiterable playing of games. I think that the reason he then pairs that with the statement you've brought forth from 12 Rules is that(based on a conversation Peterson has with a Christian TH-camr) Jordan's idea of perfect is non-static. His idea of perfection is like "something that is continually perfected". So I think that his idea of God is that God may be perfect, but that God is continually perfecting Himself. If God Himself is continually being perfected, then evolution's goal would never have an end, only a continual striving forwards.
Assuming I've understood him correctly, I'd love to disagree with him in person because I think he is too informed by his clinical practice. I think he has the idea of that continual perfecting from the character development that he sees in we insufficient mortals. We either have a positive or negative character arc at all times. So, of course, he leans towards the positive one. But there is such a thing(in narratives) as a flat character arc where the character is never changed by the environment(positively or negatively), but instead changes the environment through the steadfastness of their character. I think this is the true idea of God's perfection. There's a reason that Jesus never has a "character transformation", and it's because there was nothing to transform. He was perfect and only effected change on His environment, lifting them up with Him, and promising to do so fully at the end.
@@terrencemedders1867 hmm actually now that you put it that way, it reminds me of a quote from Thomas Aquinas I heard from Bishop Barron. It goes something like the saints in heaven delight in how incomprehensible God is. So it's not God that is continually perfected, but ourselves in the presence of God.
I also think I remember him saying somewhere that Christianity worships the process that continually transforms chaos into order instead of just order itself. Tried to find where he said that but haven't had luck so far.
Thanks, your comment helped clear it up!
@@RSanchez111, I've yet to read Aquinas, but that sounds really cool.
I remember him saying it to, but I can't remember either. His videos are many and long, so I think we should be graded on a curve when trying to find a single statement of his lol.
No problem, thank you!
@@terrencemedders1867 lol agree on his videos. I keep notes with links to clips that I find particularly striking, and I think I found the clip I was thinking of earlier:
th-cam.com/video/sZPcenI4Atw/w-d-xo.html
Starting at 13:00 specifically he starts talking about the "Spirit of the Order" and the "Spirit of the Ordering Principle". He says Christianity got the idea of God the Father as the Spirit of the Order, and while he didn't say it explicitly in the clip this obviously implies that God the Son is the Spirit of the Ordering Principle, His Word. JBP talks about the dynamic relationship between culture and the spirit that generates culture, and says that the spirit that generates culture should be superodinate to the spirit of the culture. So it's not a final destination, but the continual process that should be superodinate.
JBP also says that you need to uphold the values of the group, but the values of the group should be subordinated to producing the individual who gives the group vision. This to me is reminiscent of Matthew 5:17, where Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them."
Dear Jonathan, when I was little, my father (a Russian Orthodox Christian) always told me that everything has a soul. Not only humans and animals, but plants and inanimate objects as well. I wonder if you would call that panpsychism or rather panentheism. I consider myself a panentheist and a pantheist, but I am not sure what the relation to panpsychism is. What would you say?
J.A. Brown Maybe by soul he meant somethings essence, it’s being, the way it exists and is put together.
@@julianw6604 That could very well be. Would you say the essence of a thing is given by its creator (could be God or not)? And would that qualify as panpsychism, panentheism, or something else?
J.A. Brown Well I’m a Christian so I would say God gives the soul somehow. I don’t have an answer to these questions right now, I’m just trying to move beyond substance dualism. If you watch the lecture they were referring to by David Bentley Hart, he does discuss the soul and how it’s often misunderstood. He says, soul is synonymous (if I Remember correctly) with something’s existence.
@@julianw6604 That is an interesting idea. I will try to watch David Bentley Hart. Thank you for your response.
J.A. Brown I wish I could help you out more here, but I’m very ignorant of these things myself.
Is there branch of panpsychism that is top down? Because I see God as the integration of all such things: consciousness, being/nonbeing, love, virtue, good, etc. In perhaps Babylonian and even earlier Near Eastern style, all things "divine" (nontangeable) are derivatives of aspects of God, and all things material (cells, molecules, physics, etc) are integrals of the chaos of the material world. So the body is the product of unifying the earthly, while the mind or soul is a derivative of the way God is (His Image/Likeness). Therefore, evolution is simply forming the body, and humanity being the microcosm of the universe is in regards to the same; while the soul is not explained as such, as it has more in common with the angels and God.
Yes, it's called Cosmopsychism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a good rundown of it here: plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#MicrVersCosm
“Very very smart but very very annoying.” Lol Jonathan 😂
"You can no longer avoid consciousness" . "Idk what psychic substance is :)" Wait what is everybody talking about? I'm so cocky.
I think we can learn from the swamis who have dedicated 1000s of years to consciousness studies.
You cant quantify love unless you are a Christian and use are you sinning against this person as your measurement. Love can be used as an absolute value... Yes or No?
Beautiful articulation Jonathan of the unity vs discord once you enter the varying resolutions of the component parts which make up reality. Reminds me of a thought experiment I had once with a friend:
Imagine the entire volume of the room you are in, including yourself, every single atom, electron, quark, you name it, was analyzed and disassembled into all the composing elements. Now imagine rearranging these atoms into the most perfect geometrically atomically stable configuration, taking into account all resolutions, perfect stability, perfect symmetry.. Perhaps this airy being is alive. Perhaps it is crystaline. Perhaps both.. Likely it is fractal in nature. The problem in solving for this is the infinity of combinations at the varying resolutions. Like trying every combination of a 10 digit password except the password might only work if you heat up and cool down the elements in a specific order, at a specific pressure. As in chess, move order matters in chemistry. Quantity of atoms matters. There are special ways to take electrons away from or add to an atom to change its properties to make specific compounds.
One might say therefore that there is a theoretical perfection if all unknowns are known and you have infinite calculation power. But imagine you are this room and you are given 80 years of life to assemble yourself into the best perfection you can. Now it is unclear how you should prioritize your time.
But I would theorize that the answer for this sentient room's existential questions is still to engage first in its own nature and from self examination and embodiment and self awareness as experiences through natural self-preferential exploratory process will lead to the truest and best path as articulated by your specific nature, and if we start with the presupposition that this in itself is to be valued, then it is a sort of heavenly perfection that way too.. We would all make different perfect rooms and they would all be perfect anyway.
Also I would like to study under you Jonathan I am going to build something crazy, please if you would message me I would love to talk to you about it
Materialism breaks down at the level of logos interpretation and recall of past information. This is the degree of subjective reality a machine can not and will not be able to predict. This infinity of the neo-plutonic is where the mind and free will rests (the cracks). Machinery or materialism cannot enter this realm.
A. N. Whitehead’s Process philosophy and Process Theology as laid down by David Ray Griffin is a good supplement to these models.
if you're going to invoke logos as God then you have to be logically consistent in every department. Marcion was correct in his reasoning and the Bible clearly describes two Gods: the diabolical one of the O.T.and a rather less evil one in the N.T. at least on a surface level. The sticky aspect of this is when we apply Logos (reason and logic) to the idea of spiritual crime and punishment: the N.T. god is every bit an unreasonable A-hole in this dept. so even Marcion's correct perceptions are problematic.
As a Gnostic, I suggest Ditheism and Docetism are the rational solutions to many of the inconsistencies and incoherence in western theism.
And, no, there is no reasonable free will on this plane although our higher self monad likely does have free will although the Archons are deeply involved in manipulating the Bardo experiences. Yes, reincarnation is more reasonable (logos) than the one strike and you're out of the psychopathic archons who control western theism.
Only cowards ban intelligent comments...
Maybe I'm just silly, but I don't understand what's so mysterious about the relation between the materialistic world and consciousness and logos. I think the oneness, divinity, logos are just phenomena of consciousness and it is just a function of brain. In other words, brain is able to perceive the whole phenomenon of logos and that's how we can organize the reality into oneness. I suppose, the more our consciousness evolves, the more we will be able to see God in everything, even without believing. And at the same time. the more science uncovers secrets of the natural world the more we will be able to understand how even the consciousness emerges from our brains and how it works mechanically. So, yes, we have a free will to an extent, as opposed to a rock or a plant for example. At any point, I don't see a thing here that would be mysterious. Am I insane, stupid or what?
Edit: I fully agree with what Karl Jung said when asked if he believes in God. He said, I don't have to believe, I know.
To me, atheists are just blind or prideful when they deny the existence of divinity. You either have to believe in God or accept the reality of his existence by using your rationality. At the same time, sooner or later, science will be able to explain what is logos and even how exactly we are able to perceive it.
The issue is the Hard Problem of Consciousness - the inability of materialism to explain how dead matter miraculously creates the qualia of experience. Pan-psychism seems to be a attempt to save materialism, but faces some of the same stumbling blocks. If you are interested, I recommend Bernardo Kastrup's site here on TH-cam. I found it very fascinating.
Canis Lupis, the problem is mysterious because the ideas of free will and determinism mutually refute each other while also requiring each other to be true. For example, the idea that everything in nature is determined means that free will is impossible, because nothing can violate the laws of nature. Yet there must also be formal, universal principles behind everything for nature to be determined (or else there would be no regularity in nature). The natural tendency of most thinkers is to subsume consciousness into nature (materialism), or subsume nature into consciousness (pan-psychism). Neither answer will ever solve this problem for the reasons I've already described.
@@AdHominus You laid it out pretty clearly for me, thank you. But according to my intuition, it is still pretty easy to solve - neither free will is an absolute, except for God's will, conceptually speaking, nor determinism is true as a property of matter (except at the most basic level of complexity). Determinism is just an illusion that comes from our immature and incomplete understanding of nature. Nature seems to be deterministic only at the fundamental level but the more we move into higher and higher levels of complexity the less rigid the structure becomes. Take for example basic living organisms, they don't have a free will equal to humans, but they posses a property that's homologous with free will - they are able to gather energy and organize matter. Even they are able to increase the glory of God, so to speak. And I want to point out, that I'm not in any way original in this approach. Jonathan Pageau is conveying the same view, as I see it. That's why I find the logic of nature being something exclusionary to the divine silly. Nature and God are just on the opposite sides of the spectrum but they fully complement each other, and in fact we wouldn't exist as an intelligent and conscious species if it wasn't the case. Still, it's just my intuition and of course I don't fully understand the gray area where one emerges from the other.
@@Wolf-Spirit_Alpha-Sigma Though you state that free will is not absolute, you go on to state that determinism is an illusion. This seems to me that you're subsuming nature into consciousness, and for that reason runs into the problem I laid out earlier: if there is such a thing as free will, to whatever degree, there would be an interruption in the chain of causality, an uncaused cause, that would render causality (and hence nature) to be self-contradictory. In addition, how can non-causal phenomenon at higher levels of complexity emerge at from strict causality at lower levels of complexity? Are you suggesting _deus ex machina?_
I think it is dubious to define free will as anything other than 'the will of the self-conscious subject to relate himself to objective nature'. Free will can't be said to be homologous to anything since it lacks structure by definition; it is the agent that grants structure onto nature, instead of passively receiving it from pre-determinations. So to take your example of microbes, it is in their nature to utilize energy to maintain homeostasis and reproduce. The fact that what they are doing is natural, inherent to what they are, means that their will is determined by their nature. In addition, there actions take place within a causal chain stretching back millions of years of nearly-identical microbes acting on the exact same drives.
@@AdHominus Well, you're leading a blind man - me. Scrapping what i wrote earlier, I must say I would now consider determinism to be the only sensible stance. What ever we call divine got to be a part of nature - noble part but not supernatural or "otherworldy". Concluding from that assumption, there is no "free" will - there is only will as a function of consciousnesses and mind. And even consciousnesses must be some kind of a natural phenomenon. I cannot on the other hand accept any spooky theories like panpsychism and such. I follow my reason, wherever it takes me. Still, the ideas of logos and God might fit in the deterministic world, if we can imagine them as top level complexity of nature. I seems I slightly misunderstood my intuition by thinking there is a third option. Funny that I don't feel any less spiritual even if I define spirit as a high level natural phenomenon. I tell you, humans are so full of pride, when they think that something in their brains is so special that it needs to be something opposing the laws of nature. Big oof. Thank you for your time.
... that sweater tho
My favorite sweater, Slovakian hand knit wool. Actually smells like lanolin.
@@JonathanPageau : little distractive, no ?
Sorry Johnathan, you are wrong.
There’s nothing that grounds us more then knowing that Adam and Eve were our actual historical ancestors.
Talk about giving a sense of meaning to time and space. The same way a the Church can give meaning to space as the central point of a town, and to time vía it’s liturgical calendar.
As you state in your latest video 😊☦️
You're beating on the table, it makes too much noise !!!
Himan thoight is nothibg but biology.
Biology is noyhing but phydics.
Physicd isnothing but mathematics.
Mathematics is nothing but human thpught.
Clout