Posted by johnboy on September 06, 19100 at 22:09:06:
Sorry I couldn't rewrite this but I think you will see the tangents, Diana. Also, I would write my Christocentric version much differently; this grows out of my ongoing dialogue with materialists.
From Is to Ought: A Meta-Ethic from Complexity Theory
subtitled: "A Congruent View"
The above title may be the most concise description of how I am, thus far informally, trying to piece my worldview together, reconciling my
epistemological methods, ontological intuitions and metaphysical suspicions utilizing a transcending hierarchy of fields (domains, realms, levels). When
I say "piece" it together, I obviously don't mean to say that I don't have a worldview, but that, like so many of us, I've never systematically tried to
articulate it. I don't suggest that the exercise is even a necessity for living more fully, but for me, it has been a stimulating and enriching exercise. So this piecing together is the construction of a mosaic to
facilitate fruitful exchanges with others who share my passion for the examined life.
While I have articulated an open-ended epistemology which could be described "both/and/plus", perhaps it would be useful to point out that I am aware of
its limits for both orthodoxy and orthopraxis, both theoretically and pragmatically. What does this mean? It means that I positively find it useful
to constrain a pluralistic epistemology within the framework of my hermeneutic of existing complexity theory. It means that I embrace the rigors
of the scientific method for cavorting around the realm of reality that I occupy and the realms which it transcends. It means that I am aware of the
facile tautological "truths" which one can fruitlessly assert when unconstrained by methodological frameworks. It means that I recognize
analogies and metaphors for what they are and don't take and apply them willy-nilly from one hierarchical realm to another, at least not without
recognizing that the analogies progressively weaken when crossing these realms to the point where they are more or less irrelevant, and I say this
aware of how pleasing they may be at times (noetically, ethically, aesthetically). The biggest (and most disappointing to me) example of such
irrelevant analogies has been in the trivialization of authentic mysticism by popularizers of relatavistic and quantum physics. Some of the analogies are
true enough but are so weak from having traversed so many hierarchical realms as to be rather pointless.
It also means that I am interested in evaluating the worldview algorithms that tend to flow from various epistemological, ontological and metaphysical
presuppositions. I am vitally interested in our neurognostic adaptations and how they might predispose us to certain epistemological biases, biases which
may be revealing of how isomorphic our phenomenal reality is with ding an sich noumenal reality. I want to negotiate between pragmatics and dogmatics,
orthopraxy and orthodoxy, the a priori and a posteriori, using a plurality of perspectives but without using those perspectives to blur the resulting
inconsistencies, paradoxes and contradictions with conceptualizations that are nothing more than empty place-holders. I want to explore the possible
alignments between the hierarchies, for example, using both aesthetical and soteriological criteria, but without suggesting that my ultimate concerns can
be anything more, empirically, than sneaking suspicions and provisional convictions which must necessarily be mediated by faith, a faith that is
nonetheless, even if never to be logically coercive, internally consistent and externally congruent. For instance, this congruence would be sought with
evolutionary epistemology as well as with transcendental metaphysics without confusing the two. For example, if I employed a pancritical skepticism, it
would be pancritically pancritical so as not to fall prey to a facile theory of knowledge itself which ignores what an evolutionary epistemology can teach
us about how we learn. I want to look again at the worldview algorithms listed below and carefully consider their implications for the atheisms,
nontheisms and theisms, for pantheism and panentheism, for ontological continuities and seeming discontinuities, for theories of consciousness, for
rationalism and fideism, and literally dozens of other "isms" which I consider to be succinct position statements moreso than just dismissive and
pejorative terms for various overemphases (for some folks precisely and purposefully intend their overemphases). I value the dialogic processes that
can uncover why these emphases and biases exist, and that explore how we characterize and mischaracterize them as under- or over-, good or bad,
relevant or irrelevant. I welcome a consilient application of philosophical methods toward the end of testing these emphases and biases for internal
consistency or logical coherency and remain mindful that we must carefully distinguish between those truth statements which are metaphorical, anagogical
and/or unitive before feeding them into our logical processes and processors for evaluation, an evaluation which can be conjunctive or disjunctive, which
can involve logical versus efficient causes, which can best be accomplished either intuitively or rationally, etc ad infinitum.
metaphysical monist epistemological monist ontological monist worldview = ???
metaphysical monist epistemological monist ontological dualist worldview = ???
metaphysical monist epistemological dualist ontological monist worldview = ???
metaphysical monist epistemological dualist ontological dualist worldview =???
metaphysical dualist epistemological dualist ontological dualist worldview =???
metaphysical dualist epistemological dualist ontological monist worldview =???
metaphysical dualist epistemological monist ontological dualist worldview =???
metaphysical dualist epistemological monist ontological monist worldview = ???
And my aim in all of this, the "problem" if you will, is attempting to see if I can get from an "is" to an "ought" using aesthetic judgements that arise
from a putative aesthetic teleology, however "loose" that teleology might be, based on the emergence of increasingly complex and novel structures in the
successive hierarchical fields which complexity theory admits to, however hypothetical that may be as regarding the transcendent fields which may
embrace our own. Epistemological problems will remain and the distinctions between immanence and transcendence will perdure; so, too, ontological
discontinuities and continuities may be hard to discriminate; however, the amount of congruence between physics and metaphysics, science and religion,
can be increased and, with that, the amount of consilience. The resulting meta-ethic certainly won't coerce any particular morality but could provide a
useful framework for approaching a fruitful "Global Ethic" dialogue between the alternate worldviews.
Were there protorational, protomoral and protoaesthetic adaptations selected
in a prelingual stage of our cognitive evolution accounting for the deeply felt but ineffable experiences of truth, goodness and beauty? Are these
experienced both as absolute presuppositions and as a highly evolved social hedonism, all residing in both the limbic and the right-brained nonrational,
inutitive, apophatic (you know the litany) aspect of our (you guessed it)bimodal consciousness? And how difficult will it be to uncover such adaptations, hopelessly entangled as they are with the products of cultural evolution? And what can we learn from the subdisciplines of comparative developmental psychology (cognitive, personality, faith, affective, moral
development, etc), of comparative transcultural anthropology and of comparative formative spirituality about the meta-ethic subdiscipline of motivational ethics?
My hypothesis is that: If we can recognize that the aesthetic interests of the individual, society and the cosmos are aligned, as suggested by an aesthetic teleological hermeneutic of complexity theory, then our strivings toward the maximum aesthetic attainment by the individual, society and the cosmos can use aesthetic judgments, however highly nuanced, to both derive and inform our ethics. One efficacy of such an alignment would be a more compelling morality. Everyone could buy in for the quid pro quo and Hume
would be happy. Kant would just have to get over it. The authoritative and nonauthoritative deontologies would be more congruent even if they differ on
some important presuppositions.
Why use the aesthetic in conjunction with an evolutionary epistemology rather than search for a Darwinian proto-morality based on survival strategies and such? The reason this appeals to me is because randomness, chaos and chance seem to be very very loosely connected, if connected at all, with a striving
toward "goodness". These fundamental processes, in the overall scheme of things, actually appear indifferent to and not conducive of moral "purposes"
whatsoever (and, at times, outright hostile?). Now, the aesthetic teleology needn't be a teleology in the strictest sense as far as randomness, chaos and
chance are concerned. For that matter, some may wish to view it as not teleological at all. The point is that these fundamental processes, in the overall scheme of things, recurrently are conducive to complexity and actually promote and assist beauty (and, yes, even while indifferent to it all). Obviously, to the extent we may at least partially interpret beauty as the appropriation of novelty and the shedding of monotony, to the extent we
may consider that the more bifurcations and permutations involved in the
formation of a dissipative structure (lapsing here into nonequilibrium
thermodynamics but the application is wider) then the more fragile and more
beautiful the structure, we might then reasonably assert the ongoing
attainment of the aesthetic even as we recognize that it does not result from
a purposeful striving but rather from randomness, chance and chaos. Recent
cosmological advances suggest that this aesthetic attainment rug may not ever
be pulled from under our meta-ethical feet by merciless thermodynamic
entropic processes but that recurrent Big Bangs and multiverses may forever
be exploding four-dimensionally from nothing. Still, does an appeal to this
overarching principle become irrelevant for, as I pointed out before, the
leap from physics to metaphysics is perilous, in some quarters, even
pointless? I think the answer to that is that there is enough randomness,
chance and chaos going on in biological natural selection processes, very
close to our ontological home, to keep the purists content with my aesthetic
paradigm. This approach can lead very quickly, for instance, to an ecological
ethic founded on an aesthetic biodiversity, aligned, of course, individually,
societally and cosmically. So to the extent I invoke analogies across
transcendent realms, it is for the alignment of interest purposes and one can
always look, close to ontological home, for "local" interests with rather
parochial concerns - anthropocentric, geocentric, cosmocentric, and other
diverse stakeholders who will exercise our unity of mission with a diversity
of ministries.
The salient point is that folks may be able go a long way in their joint
ethical formulations and dialogue, before experiencing metaphysical gridlock,
when using an aesthetic teleology derived from complexity theory. The
aesthetic attainment is something all can witness and verify. The role of
chance, chaos and randomness is also empirically demonstrable. Whether the
attainment is actually teleological or purposeful can be set aside as we
traverse most of the "lower" fields or realms together, epistemologically and
ontologically, hand-in-hand, as we conduct our moral discourse, heart toheart.
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There are questions to be answered and issues to be dealt with for sure.
How will an aesthetic teleology avoid falling into some of the traps which
snare many metaethical theories? For instance, how will it avoid appealing to
a single intuition about our everyday moral discourse and, from there,
attempting to account for the entirety of our moral judgment as if it is
based on the conclusions drawn from that intuition?
Are our moral lives not far too complex to admit of a single all-encompassing
metaethic?Are we in clear danger of proceeding from descriptive or analytic
philosophical pursuits (which seek to describe how things are)
inappropriately to an area of normative judgment (normativity itself being
merely the concern with how things should be done)?
Should we say anything about first-order (directly normative) moral theory;
that is, questions about what we actually should do? Or should we restrict
our consideration to second-order (metaethical) moral theory; that is,
questions about what moral judgment consists in, about the semantic function
of moral talk, about linguistics, about whether there are independent moral
facts, and about the nature of subjective moral experience (moral
phenomenology) among other questions?
Are we just headed toward a redundant and pedestrian utilitarianism (the
rather simple idea that right actions are those which promote happiness in
some form )?
In an aesthetic teleology, how distinct should we take the gap between
metaethics and first-order moral theory to be?
Using an evolutionary epistemology and cultural anthropology to evaluate both
the aesthetic and normative, in concrete situations, might the boundary
between first- and second-order normative theories be blurred? And what about
the boundary between metanormative issues and normative psychology, such as
it is? Might it also become less distinct?
Can an aesthetic teleology accommodate, to varying degrees, both cognitivism
(those moral theories which think that moral judgments can be true or false
or are truth-apt) and noncognitivism (those that think that they cannot be
true or false) ? Perhaps we are more concerned with the efficacy of our
approach which might be clearly linked to moral motivation?
Can an aesthetic teleology contribute constructively to the moral motivation
subdiscipline of the metaethical debate? If it is obviously concerned with
the way we are motivated morally and the way we make aesthetical judgments,
then, in this regard, can it accommodate to varying degrees both internalism
(holding that we are, other things being equal, necessarily motivated by our
moral judgments) and externalism (holding that we can make perfectly sincere
moral judgments and yet fail to be motivated by them)? Again, can we
accommodate the notion that moral judgments appear to be truth-apt, appear to
express beliefs, appear to be held objectively, as well as the notion that
moral judgments appear to be internally motivating? Can an aesthetic
teleology accommodate the Humean picture of normative psychology, that is
that moral motivation is taken to require both a desire that something be the
case and a belief that to do x will satisfy the desire?
Can an aesthetic teleology at least, in part, provide some solution to the
problem of moral force? Can it avoid the excesses of emotivism which reduce
moral judgment to an extreme subjectivity? If not highly nuanced, can't an
aesthetic teleology fall prey to that extreme reduction of emotivism which
can remove the distinctively moral nature of moral judgments?
If an aesthetic teleology doesn't draw a strong boundary between moral and
aesthetic judgments, then how will that affect the force of such judgments?
How will we measure the force of our moral and aesthetic judgments? When can
moral force be predicted by an overarching metaethical analysis, by
principles unpacked from our aesthetic teleological shopping basket after
making the trip to the stores of evolutionary biology, cultural anthropology,
developmental psychology and developmental formative spirituality? Are there
not instances when moral force can only be predicted by metaethical analyses
conducted in more unique concrete situations? And these two previous
questions presume that moral force and moral motivation are germane to our
elaboration of ethics and moral codes?
The questions to be answered and issues to be dealt with "section" above were
mostly paraphrased from the "Metaethics and Normativity Research Plans" of
Matthew Bayliss which are published online at url =
http://www.shef.ac.uk/misc/personal/pip97mwb/webht.htm and while I gratefully
acknowledge the tutorial his outline gave me, please don't associate him with
any superficial or inartful employment of same by me.