Monday, November 19, 2012

We're moving!

I started this blog a few years ago as a way to start getting my thinking--which is neither theological or scientific per se, but relies on both-- into the public sphere and see if it was making any sense to others and not just myself. In that process I came across Adam Frank who was at the time writing about a better conversation to be had by people involved through religion and science; this is how I eventually got involved with 13.7 Cosmos and Culture, a blog hosted by NPR.

The last three years have been a time of rich development for me as I focused my energies more on working with 13.7 (mostly with Stuart Kauffman) than on this blog. All the while though, the impetus for my thinking and writing through this time has been a vision of human life that's not only larger, but I is even more real than our visions currently in use- whether they originate in religion or science.

For instance, we could ask ourselves, "is human life superfluous on this planet?" How would you answer? 

In pointing to my own answer, I would ask, "does the name "consumer" and our act of showing off our consuming to each other, best describe our sense of being human?" If so, I would point out that Grizzly bears and Peacocks already exist and ably fulfill those roles; so yes, human life would be considered superfluous.

But I think and believe Human life is about something else in this universe, and has the capacity for not being superfluous. And I'm going to be writing about this under a new title which not only names a blog but could very well name a bar that gives place to the ideas we'll be developing together on that blog space. Here's the link:

http://theaweandawry.blogspot.com/

Some of you I know offline while others of you I only know online. In either case, your conversations with me have influenced me in ways you may not know. I hope you'll check out "the awe & awry" and see if its a place for you to come and help us, as we develop a larger vision of ourselves together.

All my best

Mike





   

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

What Is Real?

What is real? Off the bat we'd say trees are real. What about unicorns? Also easy, of course not. Okay, let's try beauty- is beauty real? I venture that almost all of us, apart from some who've entrenched themselves in some obscure philosophical deconstruction, would say "of course!" and then point to something they consider beautiful like a matured and majestic oak. (Or if by chance a Chevy van from the seventies drove by, they might point to a scene of a unicorn air brushed into a mural along its side ...please, gag me with a spoon!) 


But wait; this person didn't point to beauty, they pointed to a tree. It's the tree that can be touched and sniffed- not the beauty. If beauty were truly real, shouldn't we be able to dissect a beautiful tree and end up with a pile of cellulose and a pile of beautiful?


And when I think about it, beauty exists more like the unicorn does than in the way a tree does. And if unicorns aren't real how can....


I don't know about you, but I've encountered beauty in ways that are so profound, it felt more real to me than I did to myself...what should I make of this experience? What have you made with your own encounter with beauty?


Here's the thing. In our time, we've come to count as real, only the things that exist in space in the way furniture does in a living room; things that can't be "furniture" then, can't be real. In science culture, adherents to this view call them selves "materialists" so when it comes to our experience of the mind for instance, because the brain is furniture but the mind isn't, the brain is really real and the mind experience is made out to be simply illusory, and any thought other wise is met with a pat on the head for not being "in the know."


Adam Frank, an astrophysicist and a favorite thinker of mine, notes this about the nature of the real: "reality's there; you push on it, and it pushes back."


In other words, you can sit on a couch, and because it pushes back you don't free fall to the floor (which too pushes back). And though comfortably reclined on your couch you could put your feet on the matching ottoman, you couldn't put them on a pile of beauty-- no matter how solidly beautiful you consider your furniture and living room to be.


And yet, when I encounter beauty I encounter something that can push back even though I can't encounter it like I can furniture, and even though Newton's laws about push-back can't be applied. Again; what do we make of this quandary, that something which can't exist like furniture can still be real-- even though its existence is a lot like that of a unicorn?


I think the answer begins with understanding this: All things that exist are real, but not all things that are real exist.


What do I mean. We commonly use the words 'exist' and 'real' interchangeably. But the word existence is specific about its description of reality: it's gotta stand out-- like a pile does. What makes a pile of dirt, exist from its surrounding dirt, is that it stands out from the ground. This is  basic existence: something pile like.


In this sense of understanding, does beauty exist? No! If it did, I should be able to see a pile of it over there. Is beauty real? Yes! It has the ability to push back on us. Its push-back though, acts in ways that are entirely different from existing things like couches, or from non-existing things like unicorns.


So then, what if beauty was as real in this universe as any california redwood, even though redwoods exist but beauty does not? What could we make of this understanding?