Commentary: Platonism, Incarnation, Artificial Intelligence, and Arguments for God
I've decided to compile some of my various scattered comments on certain topics and bring them here. I find that social media discussions are often the catalyst for genuine insight into the logic of my philosophical positions. The question and comments I am responding to are not particularly relevant in order to grasp the points I am trying to pass across. Each image marks a new general topic (for example, the first image is of Plato, hence the topic is Platonism) and each ellipsis marks a new, different, comment. I apologize if they aren't rigorously analytic, that isn't my writing style. I would just suggest you "go with the flow".
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For #1, atomism, even modern atomism, is wrong. Quantum Field Theory, which is the most "fundamental" theory now, doesn't have absolutely indivisible atomic particles. Even then, the modern conception of the atom is not the "atom" of the ancient atomists. I'm pretty sure following Plato was the right choice, we are returning to his conclusions these days.
For #2, I agree with the others that Dawkins has misunderstood the forms. In fact, Dawkins is treating the forms as "concepts" and in an "atomic manner", as if the forms don't "live" in each other in communion and are simply ideal "images" of whatever is here. "Rabbitness" is not a "mental" rabbit in "mental" space. The forms are continuous and discontinuous with each other because of the unity of being. It is that unity and simultaneous diversity that makes any change, even evolutionary change, possible in the first place. "Rabbitness" is in "mammalness" is in "animalness" is in "isness". Their connection guarantees intermediate states. It is simply that these states are not changes in the *essence* of the rabbit, but in the material substrate that manifests a form. Different (and yet the same) things are manifesting in a continuous "flow" of time, but *what* manifests has not changed, it simply "gives way" to another form, or on a smaller scale another logoi of that form that communicates another possibility of that form's expression.
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The difference between Cutsinger's position and that of Intelligent Design (ID) is that he isn't explaining the inherent differences of species in terms of "irreducible complexity" but in terms of the difference of "form", in the platonic sense. What Cutsinger contests is the idea that that the "essence" of one species, simply considered as "material", is transformed into another. This makes no sense Platonically. That's why he says the species *through* which another came "has served as a portal for creative, causative Power, but is not itself that cause." One might still want to interpret it in an ID sense, but I don't think that is necessary or even in accordance with the philosophy of the text. Sensible material can and does change. Evolution depends on the plasticity of sensible material and its "configurations". Substantial form, on the other hand, does not change.
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I think you're mixing up some things here. Avatars are "divine descents", and such a definition can definitely be used to describe events beyond the particular uses in a Hindu Tradition. Creation is a divine descent, so is the birth of any human in general, and especially (for the Christian) Christ's birth. Part of the Christian message is precisely the realization of this: "Insofar as you have done this to these little ones, you have done it to me."
Calling Christ an avatar doesn't reduce his Incarnation to 33 years. The very act of calling Him an avatar opens up a whole world of associations that intensify the Christian message. The person of Christ is not constrained by individuality. He makes the constraint of individuality possible, by being, in a sense the only Individual, by being all possible individuals, their deepest person. You are not the man from Nazareth in one sense (historical particularity), yet you are that man in another (essential humanity and supra-individual person). Ofcourse there's a lot of specifications and uses of the word that is specific to Hinduism, but it is precisely the universal nature of what that word communicates that makes such specification possible, with its many sides. There's no where in Christian dogma that states that Christ only appeared once in history and no more. Scripture won't even abide it. It is the face of the Logos that Moses sees when he feasts with God on Sinai. That, in fact, was another type of "Divine Descent". It was Christ who spoke through the Prophets, AS THE PROPHETS. Before Abraham (not to talk of Isaiah) was, HE IS. The events of Palestine 2000 years ago are a special case of a divine descent that is the very being of creation, and has been exemplified many times before.
There is no Logos Asarkos (Logos without Flesh), as a particular Christian school of thought says. You cannot see God as such except as one of his divinized created faces. The Perennialist takes this further, and says this descent occurs in every valid Tradition (although there is a possibly intentional vagueness as to what constitutes a "valid" Tradition). Ofcourse, they are not in the manner of the events at Palestine, but that doesn't take away from their nature as divine descents, which have been documented in many places at many times. The cosmic divine descent that is creation as such is not an exclusively Perennialist position. The (Christian, in this case) Perennialist simply takes it to what he sees as the obvious conclusion.
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All manifestations are "enfleshments", whether human, soulish, angelic, etc, of a divine reality that is beyond embodiment. When I say there is no "Logos Asarkos", I mean there is no person of the Logos that we can see that is not enfleshed, not even in heaven. If we are talking about the divine essence, ofcourse the essence is not a body, but when we are talking about the Logos as he creates and reveals (which in truth is the only Logos there is), there is no Logos Asarkos.The person of the "created-uncreated Logos" is inseparable from the mystery of embodiment. He is at once bodiless (in his divine nature) and endlessly embodied (in his created nature). He will not be without body. The fullness of creation is eternal as his body, precisely because his person is beyond embodiment. That eternal embodiment is the reason he can come to us in as many forms as he likes, because they are his forms from eternity.
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The issue here is a misunderstanding "mind" and "consciousness". An "artificial mind" is, for a Neoplatonist like Hart, a nonsensical notion. Nous cannot be something a being "has", or worse, "made" or "constructed". Instead, it's the opposite. It is Nous that constructs and makes.
Humans, angels, and such don't "have" consciousness. Instead, Consciousness *is* human, angelic, etc. It is simply "being", and simultaneously "being as" as it reverses on itself. You can't "make" that. Hart is working with a radically different understanding of "Consciousness" than the computer scientist here. No matter how sophisticated the instrument, it cannot be "aware" because the higher is not caused by the lower. It is reverse. It is "aware" human nous that constructs the sophisticated machine and is "aware" *through* it.
What is happening when one attempts this construction of computers made to mimic or enhance human function is that the unity of Nous is (again, in Neoplatonic terms) "divided" into its lower functions and effects. The intelligible unity of such a machine is not in that machine, but in the Nous that makes it. If that Nous disappears (returns to heaven in death, for example), all that's left is its "ghost" effects, which speak of the now lost intelligible cause. Traditionally, the fragmented "soulish" effects of Nous, when apparently severed from their principle, are "demons", the lower kind especially. The disordered soul is ruled by these "passions", which are "legion", in what is basically demon possession.
In "AI", the machine becomes a "demon possessed" golem, the shadow of a living soul. It is really modern magic, funnelling the lower soulish functions into automata, the opposite of the automata (like "wheels") in scripture, who are definitely not "quantitative". I don't know whether it is possible for a non-human integral Nous to "seize" a machine (perhaps an angel? or worse, a higher demon?), but I'm pretty sure finding out would be at a steep cost, one of which we are already paying: The popular reduction of human consciousness to computational mimicry.
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#1. No one, not even God, "makes mind". If we are talking about "awareness" and "intellect", then, quoting DBH, and remembering that the beginning is the end, "teleologically, the mind is God".
#2. By their very nature, machines are not, and cannot be, aware, so the question is itself mute. Otherwise, it is not a machine, and then the question again arises: where is the line between inanimate and animate? The answer cannot be found on the side of the inanimate. Inasmuch as we are, or anyone is, trying to "build" something that with more "sophistication", will somehow get conscious, we are not just shooting in the dark, but in the wrong room.
#3. Awareness is a two-way street. What you see enters into you and you into it. There is no absolute individual "consciousness" that each person has individually. Who you are - and not just what you are - is also in your offspring, relatives and the entire human race. It is only the lower effects and accidents (birth, experience, etc) that may be unique to each individual, and sadly, it is these "lower effects" we are trying to gather up together in order for something to seem conscious, precisely opposite of that is meant to be. And sadly again, as we continue like this, these "lower effects" define us till we can no longer tell the difference between mimicry and authenticity, between human accidents (he "looks" alive) and genuine spiritual discernment. If you're looking for conscious machines enough, you will find them, at a steep cost.
#4. Tied to the #3 and your question, who will define "general human-level intelligence" for us and how will it not be indistinguishable from what most mystics would call being "asleep while awake", the condition of most of humanity lost in the "Tamasic" (Hindu) or "Law of the Flesh" (Christian) or "irrationality" (Platonic)? I think when discussing these things, we should really pay a lot more attention to what many of the old guys who researched their own minds in rigorous mysticism say about its nature. A lot of the talk of the "hard problem of consciousness" would be avoided, because it seems to me that when they say this that they really have not even scratched it. I would love to actually "scratch" it and then talk about the relation of Nous to machinery and computing (for example, the relation of arithmos to programming and computation). But, before all that we need an agreement on metaphysics, and if we don't have that, we can't do anything, and those who really guide the development of AI, who are very much "materialist" and "reductionist" in their approach, will lead us to places I don't think we want to go.
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If you think of classical metaphysics, of which Thomism is a school, as some sort of enterprise where we "model" things and adjust based on how it "corresponds" to something empirical like the theory of relativity, you have totally missed the point. "Essences" are not just a feature of "models", they name what we presuppose in every act of intentional knowing objects: that they are "this" and not "that".
Even if we "model" something, it has the same essence of whatever is being modelled, no matter how limitedly. It is this unity of essence, the same unity that undergirds our very comparisons, that Feser is working with here. "Actualization" names the coming to awareness of essence to intellect, and the unity of intellect with essence (exemplified as form), which is, really, theosis in miniature. The only problem of "reification" would be to take the limited wordings and concepts that manifest deeper realities for the full realities themselves, and to forget the wordless intuition that spawns such words. That's why Feser can say that his is not just a Thomist argument.
This sort of theology is based on intuition of these realities themselves, an intellection of their essence that is simply unity with them in our deepest person. It starts from innate knowledge and not ignorance. Rejecting it is to simply reject a revelation and common sense, nothing more, nothing less.Classical arguments like these name the nameless foundation of thinking as such, the very basis of whatever theory we may bring out. They specifically negate all attempts to circumscribe reality with words and in so doing reveal reality for those who have the disposition to "see" it (or better still, realise that they cannot "see" it; and again, the purpose of the argument is NOT to substitute some sort of model for reality, but the opposite). If you look closely, Feser's argument is apophatic. From the outside, it looks like self-satisfied intellectualism when in fact it is something everyone must implicitly know to reason correctly. They are not on the same level as those that use "models".
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No one can even "think" without the intuition of essence and existence, for example. The root of our intentional consciousness, what we may call "intelligence" (as opposed to "reasoning") is the same root of the existence of anything *as that thing* in the world, whether physical or conceptual or whatever. We are in the world and a part of it. We have a common "root". This "root" is only knowable "backwards", or to use DBH's words, through the "ordo cognoscendi". But we know that the causal priority is the opposite (ordo essendi). The essence of something (objective) and perfect knowledge of said thing (subjective) are ultimately the same. To be is to be knowable (in the sense of the limited knowing of concepts), and to be knowable (in the previous sense) presupposes that it is already known (in the fullest sense, essential knowing, knowing what it is by being that which is).
To know something is to know what it is like to be that thing, and hence to be it in some sense. This is the privilege of the human, to be all things in intellect, and in that sense to transcend them, and I might add, "create them", their history and such (DBH hints to this in RIM, and is part of the reasoning of the "supratemporal fall"). The relationship these arguments speak of is not between man and an external world he is potentially inert to. These arguments describe creation ex nihilo. The "actualization" of potential is the awareness of potential whereby it "becomes" actual, that is, manifest to intellect, "potential" denoting that which is only indirectly revealed, like how human essence is indirectly revealed through humans. However, because this is a language describing the workings of "consciousness", it cannot, therefore, be language simply about things that consciousness knows, it cannot be about "presupposition" and "models", but about itself. Hence, the question you asked doesn't apply. A better question would be "What is knowledge?", or better yet "Who is it that knows?"
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To say God is absolutely simple is precisely to say God is infinitely beyond being and essence. It is an apophatic statement already. You cannot imagine or Intellect the absolutely simple, anymore than you can imagine existence as such.
God is absolutely simple = God is infinitely more
If the worry is about personhood, then you need to realise that personhood is an abyss. God is personhood, God is person, God is persons, and God is this by being an abyss in himself, infinite and by implication simple, ungraspable, and beyond intelligible.
It is the apophatic that maintains personhood, for the person as such is not *directly* knowable in the mode of intellection. Only the person knows the person, and this knowledge is holy ignorance. It is the abyss we must remember to forget in the face of the God. The piety of the simple man and that of the philosopher should meet: In devotion to the God beyond whose face is literally "nothing". The fullness of the void that is God is expressed in the face of our God. The apophatic is the deepest cataphatic. In affirming the "beyondness" of God we affirm his "hereness". By affirming simplicity, the Christian is then to turn to Christ's multiplicity. It is in his face that you find the Simple, always and everywhere through the "forgetfulness" of intoxicated Love for Him.