It's right there, staring us in the face

I LIKED HOW yesterday's post where I didn't interrupt the conversation read on the page and so have decided to post my commentary as an answer to an unposted complaint, separately.   Here's the conclusion of Sheldrake and Hart on fields as formal causes.

DBH: You know.  Of course the great resist . . . I mean one way of characterizing classical Aristotelian etiology is simply to say that it presumes from the first that nature has a mind-like structure rather than mind to being an emergent result of physical forces.  That all of nature has a mind because, of course, a top-down cause, a formal cause has to be constrained by a finality, it has to be determined by that for which it is [can't hear the last word].  Which means there is a sort of horizontal structure, in the sense that there's something like the structure of time in the sense there's a past and a future and a present that there is in a thought that intends an end.  But it also has to exist in a kind of now at a higher level to be a form.  I'm being very vague here, but the point is that if you start talking in that way, if you try to recover that notion of form in its classical [acceptation], in a sort of distorted mechanistic picture of it which allowed it to be dismissed on the grounds that it was a defective mechanistic model, then, of course, you're in a . . .  I mean, I can see what the anxiety would be you're also. . . you begin invoking a prior mind-like structure to physical relations you're talking about, that has to be there first.  And this little mystery in what direction that might seem to point in.  

RS: Yes. But you see, the prior mind-like structure is actually there in field theory. I mean, the whole universe as a universe in so far as it's a unity is held together by the gravitational field.  And that's part of physics. It's not a sundry wild speculation, physics has these top-down explanations, that's not just atomistic it's a combination  of top-down and bottom-up theories, and the fields are what give the top-down.  And though they may have crudely misinterpreted Aristotle, the fact is that his theory of stones falling to the Earth in terms of formal and final causes wasn't just something in the minds, stones actually do fall to the Earth and go "splat" if they fall into water and things.  And so something was actually happening. It wasn't just in the mind and . . .

DBH: Well, when I say mind-like, I don't mean just in the mind, I don't mean something that someone has drempt-up that exists only in thought    I mean that the very physical relations that say compose a tree as a tree are a set of rational relations that are always already mind-like as if the tree itself, as a physical object is a thought.  

RS: Yes.

DBH: You know and . . . You say that science is full of top-down and bottom-up but, of course, you know the etiological . . . I wouldn't say the etiological, the religious commitment of someone like, say, like the recently departed Daniel Dennett, is that somehow all these top-down causes can be reduced to the bottom-up, also.

RS:  Yes, and what he dismissed as "sky-hooks" things that come from [he makes a gesture of "above"].  Well, gravity is a "sky-hook".

DBH: Yeah.  Well, that's why I'm enjoying this conversation because you say it and it seems obvious but for some reason, apparently I have this thought that points toward the obvious.  I've always thought, though, about the Aristotelian scheme is that it simply is a recognition of something that's obviously true about the ways which you describe a thing or event.  If I were to ask you what something is or what happened, I'm asking you a set. . . immediately a set of interrelated questions that can't be separated from one another, without making the question vacuous. What it's made of, what shape it has, what . . . But also what makes it happen, how does it begin and what the full expression of all its potentialities are.  Then that would be as fine a way of thinking of final causalities.  It's . . . whatever it is is defined by that telos, that full expression of whatever its  potentials are as a finite thing you're um. . . And all that the Aristotelian etiology says is that this very obvious set of rational relations, which is what your mind tells you you need in order to define, to recognize as a discrete something or event in relation to the universe of other somethings and events is really an ontology.  

RS:  Yes.

DBH:  That there's no reason . . . But the whole history of modern thought, in the West at least, on these things, . . . I mean we talk about the mechanistic philosophy on the one hand, trying to separate final and formal causes are just suppositious notions of some sort of extrinsic design, which is not what they were.  But it's also, you see, in the Cartesian division between a res concertans and a res extenses as if these are ontologically distinct realities. The latter can only, . . . as you say, to the degree it posses order it's only through the will of God, it's not something intrinsic to the very structure, or even the Kantian supposition that there's something so utterly discontinuous between the ontological realm of phenomena and what mind does that all we know of reality is representation and the representation is, itself, only kind of noetic allegory of a reality that we can't know. Whereas with Aristotle you're in the realm of common sense which is, you know, the stone falls and it always falls therefor there's a finality written into the relationship of stone and Earth.  What is the nature of that finality?  And it somehow is obviously primordial, it's not something that arises from the accidental juxtaposition of stoniness and Earth.

RS:  Well, exactly. But that's exactly why, you see, I think we can recover some of that sense through thinking about fields in a new way,  I think the answer is hiding in plain sight.  That the gravitational model. . . Back to Dennett and "sky-hooks."         You say "what's an explanation of the tides" going up and down in the ocean every day.  Well, the gravitational force of the moon. Well, that sounds like a "sky-hook" to me. It's [makes an up and down gesture as they chuckle].

DBH: Quite literally.

RS:  Literally. I mean, it's so. . .      The thing it's . . .

DBH:  But it's amazing, people like Dennet, how many quanta ignota, they were willing, or he was willing, they are willing to tolerate simply on promissory notes that at some point these will be reduced to blind mechanical forces that are nothing but the exchange of energy between physical mass.

RS:  But what's so extraordinary about it is that it's such an old-fashioned agenda because it was superseded in physics, itself, by field theory from Faraday onward.     

DBH: Well, maybe from Newton onward.

RS:  From Newton onward because, well, Newton didn't call it a field, nevertheless, Newtonian gravitation never fitted into this mechanistic model.  And in 18th century, 17th century and 18th century science electricity and magnetism were more or less excluded.  You know, no one really understood them. It was really only field theory that came to the rescue with Faraday.  But if you look at the early magnetic theory of Gilbert in 1600, De Magnete, where Gilbert shows that the lodestone points toward the Earth's North Pole, not the north pole star, that the Earth, itself is a magnet.  Gilbert called it "the soul of the Earth" and so he's lorded as the origin of modern magnetic theory but his explanation of the motive power, as it were, of the magnet was the soul of the Earth, it was a formal cause.

DBH:  Well, of course, "psyche" literally is a form [in] Aristotle,   The form of the body, also the form of the living thing.  That's why I brought up this issue of this etiology as being mind-like relations, is I think that's not, that shouldn't be treated as a metaphor or as a quaint, sentimental or picturesque way of talking.  That   actually, that's a . . . there might be some good, hard empirical reasons for calling it "the soul of the Earth."  That it has an actual rational structure toward an end.

RS:  Well, I think that, actually, what's happened is the old idea of souls as organizing principles has been replaced in modern science by fields. Cause, you know the first Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Thales   says, you know, the lodestone has a soul.  The Greeks thought magnetism was explained by souls, not just living organisms but magnetism. So did Gilbert at the beginning of the seventeenth century.  Then Faraday calls it a "magnetic field."  And they thought the soul of the universe held everything together, the anima mundi or whatever they called it.  But then we have the gravitational field.  What Aristotle called the "vegetative soul" shaping bodies, in my way of understanding the morphogenetic field.  So there's a sense in which souls have replaced fields in modern science. Having been driven out in the 17th century they came back in the 19th century in disguise under the name of "fields."

DBH: But, of course, because the language of souls was subsumed into the Cartesian picture in which soul isn't actually a formative principle, it's not even part of natural philosophy.  So, I like this.  Again, as I say, though, what I find rather shocking is it seems obvious now that you say it. But, honestly, it's never occurred to me before. I mean, I have always . . . that there's a principle of order in the formation of everything, the formation of life, the way in which all things consist that obviously can't be reduced to mechanical causes but I actually hadn't thought in terms of something that's a resident in modern physics, quantified in modern physics that's actually qualifying for the descriptions.

RS: It's right there, staring us in the face.  But it's only in the last few months I've been thinking about this.     

I think we could continue this later.  We have to break off at this stage, it's dinner time.  Thanks very much.