Swimmers

A city: driving at its centre, crossing an intersection through the green lights, a playhouse sideways to a church not lit, then a road, then a night-time avenue, then a dark football stadium, I was reminded once again of how sometimes it looks as though cars - their oblate fish-like shapes, their colours, their smoked glass - seem to to originate from a Philip K Dick world - to exist as precursors perhaps: to our future robot identities or existing perhaps as contemporary with them (supposing a car a kind of proto-robot): except that we are not aware of it.  They don’t seem fully real, modern cars.  Like those swimming pools with windows cut into the sides below water level.  Looking through the greenish glass one sees a series of headless bodies in movement suspended impossibly, feet kicking; and then suddenly a complete swimmer appears, perhaps having dived in or jumped.   They coalesce holding their noses, a stream of bubbles behind.  All this in silence.  Like a street light caught in the bulbous glass of a car’s rear window, the yellowish stain of the lamp a lozenge exploding and sliding into oblivion.  Cars are like the swimmers that never fully appear; they hang there in reality but are never truly present; or they are present but for a moment. 

Man: the Imaginary Animal

Only rational strategems exist.  There is no rationality.

It is not possible to predicate the logically conditional with the logically absolute; because only the circumstantial is absolute!

The strategem is to take into account one’s lack of rationality. 

One hunts the animal but that can only be as it is rather than according to a scripted (or an idealised) procedure.

This is the question: How does one hunt an imaginary animal?

Alister McGrath hunts down Dawkins pretty well (in Dawkins’ God) but does Dawkins respond?

Dawkins thinks he is not an imaginary animal!

We have the situation: “The imaginary animal thinks it is real.”

“The world consists in facts.”  “It is all that is the case.”

Megalomania

It’s self-fulfilling of me isn’t it?  The human species is unique because it is stuffed with megalomaniacs.

We aren’t SO special

The fact that we think that we are a unique, special species in the universe is connected with the fact that something is wrong with us.  It seems a vague thing to suggest.  But the observation is real enough; it is precise enough in detail.

To point out just one of the disadvantages that this attitude bestows on us, for example.  Megalomania. 

I see in multiples of me and not me.  “The person I feel most sorry for in all this is me.”

Is that just a foible or is it a fundamental human ‘reality’?

Don’t let incredulity dictate what is real, let the facts do so.

By Nature Lost

The human condition suggests something very simple.  That we haven’t yet been able to grasp the nature of human reality.

By Nature

If one is to take NATURE as one’s rule stick, the assumption that humanity is at the top of a hierarchical structure seems unjustified and unjustifiable.  The idea that we are pre-eminent in nature is not a scientific finding.  What is strange is that such a value system has to derive from non-factual sense, which is to say from a basically religious preconception of identity.  In nature if one looks at it merely factually there is no top or bottom; it is only an imposed value system that says that there is a top and bottom.  So ironically enough the opening paragraph of The Selfish Gene presupposes what any religious belief system does; that humankind is pre-eminent.  An entire series of unexamined assumptions informs a world picture that - as a matter of fact - in sense diminishes or contradicts whatever we can glean from the idea of nature as fact.   For example, dispense with the idea that we are pre-eminent - dispense with the idea that anything is pre-eminent - just think about the facts: what does it suggest of the human condition as compared with the condition of other creatures - I mean In Nature - where nothing is pre-eminent?  Several immediately striking ideas can be formulated.  The first is this, that we seem to be deficient or lacking in evolutionary terms.  That we don’t seem to have what we need - unlike virtually every other living creature - but exist outside Nature.  This deficiency is evidenced in every and any dimension that one considers.  Humans wear clothes for example.  Do any other creatures do the same?  Why the need to add to Nature’s bounty?  Familiarity may assure us of the fact that there is no mystery to be understood here.  After all isn’t it obvious, the necessity: clothes!  They have always been worn.  Right back to Neanderthals and the Ice Age.  (”Neanderthals wore them too!”)  But that isn’t an explanation of course, if it is true.   Clearly the answer we give ourselves is that we wear them to keep warm.  Well, but - for instance - bears in the same situation seem to have evolved fur, monkeys too.  Our next of kin.  But fur is a more efficient solution to the weather.  It functions as its own form of display it doesn’t require catching or weaving or buying and so on: all round a more intelligent solution.  Looked at in these terms therefore the prideful act of wearing clothes seems like an indulgence; in fact it looks stupid in such terms - a willfully clownish thing to do for in spite of our belief that the wearing of clothes indicates intelligence and the circumstance of being ‘higher up’ than those furry beings who don’t need them, they have arrived at the more intelligent solution - objectively.  Yes, this sounds idiotic.  After all we are human beings and therefore the topmost species!  But let go of all that; get rid of the human value assumptions that underpin this, and NATURE speaks to the contrary; it says that clothes are a stupidity rather than a sign of intelligence.  The facts taken objectively (I am saying) suggest that there is a deficiency in our being.  Yes I know.  It’s beyond the pale to think such a thing.  But if one is supposed to be a rational being, then let’s try to be rational.  For example, this isn’t an isolated example; the same argument can be levelled against the pride and joy of we human beings in the modern world - technology.  Technology too would suggest that we are deficient rather than in a state of plenitude; that our lives are fundamentally lacking in well-being, that we should need to keep shoring up our existence with newly invented devices to make life easier and more comfortable … These may seem like crackpot suggestions but what I am doing - in effect - is abandoning the inadvertent dog-collar that Dawkins unconsciously wears, and by which he seems to be so infuriated.  I am pursuing what logic dictates, given the facts, rather than taking for granted our common human value-system I am looking at what logic indicates is the human condition in or by Nature. 

The super-rational

Is it to be understood that one field of behaviours can be called objective and the other can’t?

Or is all human behaviour subjective?  (”Or is the idea of ‘objectivity’ itself a form of subjectivity?”)

Walk down the street.  Everyone has a different face.  Everyone exists in their own style. 

Is that subjective?  “In an objective world there wouldn’t be these poor specimens.  Everyone would be strong.  Fit!”  I imagine a super-race: objectivity!  The ideal.

Everyone would be a ‘bright’.  No one would believe in God.  No-one would be irrational.  So, a super-rationality!

No one would actually smile!

A Baby Smiling

What compels us to say: “That is not really a baby smiling.  That is just a mechanism by which genes reproduce themselves.”

“The baby isn’t actually smiling.”  “That is just our human subjectivity.  It isn’t objectively real.”

Do people only smile ’subjectively’?

What might it mean to say: he didn’t actually smile?

“The whole thing was a deception.”

- So are our genes deceiving us?

(Imagine someone smiling (’scientifically’) and saying  with a ’scientific’ chuckle: “Yes, well you could say that.”)

A Map

“Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.”

What sets this in concrete - ?  These words summon up a picture of certainty.   “… the sex cells or ‘gametes’ of males are much smaller and more numerous than the gametes of females …”  Page 141 of The Selfish Gene.  This is simply a fact, one can say nothing else, so - is this the basis of sexuality? 

 Someone might want to insist: “That is its material basis ..”  Or “That is the car·bu·ret·tor so to speak: the petrol needs to be mixed with air for the engine to fire.” 

“So that is what it is.” - “So that is what what is?  What do you mean?” - “So that is what sexuality is: the gamete.” - What stops us from going on to say (for example): “So that is what your face is (truly speaking):  a map of cells.  It doesn’t really express anything.”

What do we want with the phrase: “What it really is … ” - ?

16. Virgin and Child

A 14th C. altarpiece Virgin and Child with Saints: shows each saint in profile; each bearing the same expression, alert slightly narrowed eyes (revealed by the one eye visible) in a face sombre, reverent, pure, serene.  The painting’s meaning is shown clear in each expression.  (Collectively in mood embodied and betokened mysterious, knowing, transcendent.)

So an image of human possibility as knowledge.