"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
In this new play by Eamann Breen, an Irish woman in London experiences a dramatic and life changing event that forces her to look at her life choices. With the help of a motley crew including Jimmy her ex-boyfriend, her soon to be, ex best friend Millicent Murphy and tell-your-truth Ruth, Sinead tells her tale.
The Young Offenders star, Hilary Rose, plays the part of our sometimes-unreliable narrator, Sinead.
Tadhg Murphy plays Jimmy, Helen Norton plays Ruth, Eduardo is John D Ruddy and Sharon Mannion plays Millicent Murphy
I HAVE BEEN ASKED why I've been going through the rather challenging exercise of attempting to make something of a transcription of the dialogue between Rupert Sheldrake and David Bentley Hart about fields as formal causes. In some ways, especially in trying to transcribe the philosophical language of Hart, it is the most difficult transcription I've ever attempted.
I suppose I'm asked that because I am a political blogger, the intent of my blog being to explore the reasons that the "left" at least among the English speaking People has been in the political wilderness so continually when it has better positions for a majority of People to the side that serves the few, the wealthy, the oligarchs and the parochial bigots, the "right".
Well, these issues raised within the issues of materialism, atheism, scientism, are ultimately and entirely relevant to politics and have been since at least the late 18th century when would-be secular governments tried to form without reference to God, that resulting in the United States and the catastrophic blood bath of the French Revolution and its decades, centuries long aftermath. I have come to realize that the vulgar materialism of the "right" is intrinsically related to the intellectual materialism of the secular, so-called "left." In fact, I think they are identical though held by different camps who are sometimes at odds with each other.
But it's even a complex relationship because there is a more genuine "left" that is not materialistic and not atheistic and not scientistic. The last one, at least, on a theoretical level, many on that "left" are unwitting adherents of scientism through badly thought out habits of thought derived from a romantic view of science. Thus the romantic view of such figures as Darwin and Einstein and, I'd argue, even going back to Spinoza.
Many of the same kinds of unwitting habits of thought complicate things in thinking about the political "right" in so far as they nominally associate themselves with the ultimate refutation of the very vulgar materialism they embody, Christianity. I could go into detail but I can make it a lot simpler, if the "Christians" of the American right REALLY took the teachings of Jesus seriously, they could never support the politicians and other cultural figures who pose as "Christian nationalists" because everything about them contradicts the Gospel of Jesus. They reject doing to others what they would have done to them, they despise the poor, the destitute the stranger among us, they absolutely reject genuine charity to the poor, the destitute, the widow, the orphan the stranger among us, those who are sick, those who are in prison. That rejection by the "right" is matched by the rejection of the materialist-atheist-scientistic "left" of the ultimate motivation in practicing those, motives that cannot be found in their ultimate oracles of materialism, atheism and scientism, The Law and the Prophets and, in the most radical form of all, the Gospel of Jesus. And in doing that, they alienate those who could likely be convinced of the rightness of changing their ways, in no small part through snobbery and entirely beside-the-point insistence on alienating them, arguing from Scripture for those things. It is one of the reasons that, for a time, before the appalling papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI installed hypocrites into so many bishoprics and as Cardinals, inspiring the neo-integralist crop of priests who are ascendant now, there was a vital and active Catholic left, one which my mother was a member of, out of which liberation theology manifested on an intellectual level.
Unlike with the complicated presence of scientism on the left, there is Scriptural precedent for identifying the defects of the "Christian right" in that Jesus recommended that "by their fruits you will know them." The products of right-wing "Christianity" are properly taken as decisive in identifying their infidelity to the Gospel. That's despite their enormous numbers among those deputed to be "Christians."
On the simplest level, if Republicans who professed Christianity really did follow the teachings of Jesus, they could never vote for a single one of the present Republican members of the Congress, any of the Republican candidates for President from well back into the 20th century, most of the other Republican politicians of the past century. I don't think we could have ever had most of the governments or courts we have had if the professing Christians had really followed even the most basic and universally admitted commandments of Jesus.
When I began political blogging more than eighteen years ago, I had no idea that in investigating the reasons for the failure of the American left would involve religion, never mind, specifically, Christianity, but that's what I have come to conclude. I think the failure of the American left is intrinsically related to the rejection and stigmatization of Christianity by the secular left, especially as that has tended to center in academic settings and the media and, with their derision and snobbery, the backlash to that has smeared the actual, real left which has been so well personified in The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. and others who work in a religious milieu. It certainly couldn't have escaped my notice that it was the religious left, which has also been such an active part of the organization of labor and which had the greatest success of any left in American history through abolitionism and the modern Civil Rights movement, was entirely more of a success than the materialist-atheist-scientistic "left" which has produced everything from the most modest of success by comparison and is more fairly characterized by a counter-productive backlash in the general population. That is despite what the mythology of show biz, fiction and media tell us. It is a fact that the most successful leftists in North American history have been Christian ministers. MLK jr. and Tommy Douglass in Canada, the father of the Canadian health insurance system. I am aware of no atheist on the left who matches their accomplishments or comes close to them.
I think anything that discredits materialism, atheism and scientism in the general culture and, especially, among those who receive academic credentials will be to the good. Anything that enhances the content of The Gospel of Jesus will be to the good AND I AM CONVINCED THAT THAT SUPPORT CAN COME IN NO OTHER VENUE THAN THROUGH REVEALED RELIGION. It doesn't have to be nominally Christian, many non-Christians have many, most or all of the same content as their motivation in their political and social and economic justice activities and motives. But that content is not replaced by anything from science or materialism or atheism and the many centuries of intellectual operation within that ideological framework has produced nothing at all which gives those any claim that they will ever find it. I have noted that when I used to look at one of the CSI blogs, years ago, that one of them proposed as a possibility that atheists should start to practice charitable giving. I congratulated them on discovering something which had literally been a major part of religion for millennia. That call by those organized atheists was met with derisive rejection by their fellow atheists on making anything like that a focus of materialist-atheist-scientism. Which I was already not surprised at. What is surprising is that any materialist-atheist-devotee of scientism would muster the feeling that they should do something like that because that cannot arise from the content of their ideology. What is even more shocking is the extent to which "Christian nationalists," the traditional American, pseudo-Christian right has adopted the very same indifference and hostility to the least among us that is characteristic of much of if not most explicit, logically conclusive materialist-atheist-scientism, which is far more characteristically represented politically by either totalitarianism or extreme, jejune libertarianism.
Just as David Bentley Hart was surprised to hear Rupert Sheldrake's latest thinking about fields as formal causes, especially at how obvious his points are because of their implications of a "mind-like" controller of that, I immediately saw in it support for the one who monotheistic religion knows as God. And, as they said, it's lying right there in the heart of modern physics, the obsessive and elusive quarry of all of modern theoretical physics and, if Sheldrake's hypothesis of morphic resonance is well founded, and he has come up with impressive support for it, every aspect of biology.* If his latest thinking about the nature of fields as the vital force in formative causation is true, than such mind-like force would have to impinge on every aspect of physical reality and, so, on the very subject matter of all of science. Since modern social-science is a faith product of old-fashioned scientistic material monism, such a force would be formative of all social structures (to the extent those are not an obvious product of the imaginations of human beings, which is hardly admitted by social would-be scientists).
As is indicated at the end of the discussion, the implications of that for religious thought, supporting the ideas of religion, are obvious even to the atheists who, on that basis and on that basis alone, would be expected to violently reject the idea and to come up with every kind of implausible or merely plausible reason for suppressing it just as they resisted what one of them derisively called the "big-bang" theory because they were afraid it was too close to the beginning of Genesis and that an absolute beginning to the universe would have no naturalistic or scientistic or materialistic explanation, that God created the Universe being entirely more plausible than it is under the simplifying regime of scientism, materialism and modern atheism.
If that discrediting of elite, pretentious materialism could be made into a discrediting of vulgar materialism such as fuels the Republican-fascist, "Christian right" I don't know but it's certain that the elite, pretentious materialism of the materialist-atheist-scientistic, academic, snob "left" hasn't worked that way. I'm certainly willing to try something that declares that vulgar materialism inhibits spiritual salvation as a revealed truth to anything the atheists have impotently proposed in that regard. I'd certainly welcome it over an impotent and stupid and discredited revival of any Marxist or secular-socialist or anarchist antique of the far less than quaint past. I'd certainly welcome it over the vulgar, pop-kulcha, stand-up comedian (who are never very funny) motive for most of the derisive rejection of Christianity which is the cheap substitute for the intellectual stuff even in most of the college-credentialed, post-literate population.
* I have to say that it was thinking very hard about what the theoretical first organism on Earth must have been like to be a self-contained, metabolizing, "eating and excreting," molecular-synthesizing, . . . ultimately successfully reproducing (presumably by the replication of the necessary molecules, physiological structures, enough to make two out of one, to result in two self-contained, metabolizing,etc. creatures) in what I think is an inescapable conclusion by a biologically active and effective containing membrane splitting and healing, all in an entirely unprecedented act which was probably the most complex physical phenomenon in the history of the Earth and not improbably in the universe, that I became convinced that the idea it was done by the will of God was, actually, the most probable explanation of it. Though I have also become convinced that seeming simplicity and random chance are god substitutes in actual atheist thinking because they skate over the complexities, some of the many quanta ignota that atheism skates over to come up with its seemingly plausible arguments that sway those who either don't know about or, as well, skate over the difficulties.
I would rather take my chances on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Reformation Project, those who worked with and around the late Bishop Thomas Gumbleton than anyone on the atheist "left." I'm not stupid enough to not see who have gotten and likely could now get results that result in a better life for us all.
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.
Note that I am not entirely certain that I caught some of the words in this section despite listening to them more than once. If you have a better idea of what those were, let me know.
DBH: You know, I have been fascinated in recent years by . . . Is it Paul Davies, the fellow who wrote The Demon in the Machine? This desire to find a way of writing information into the fundamental laws of physics.
But always with the presupposition - think I mean, I can't speak for him - the presupposition - what they're hoping to do is write the laws of information into physics according to the paradigm of mechanism, still,
RS: Yes
DBH: So that in some sense you can get from information theory to the information, itself. And, of course, information theory contains only bits, transmission of information.
RS: Yes, it's very limited.
Right. They would call syntactic instead of semantic. I wouldn't even call it that because it's a misuse of the idea, syntax is already an order of symbolic relations, rational . . . what they're talking about is more paratactic, and, of course, I think that's a fundamental error. They realize there's something missing from the picture that explains the propensity towards order, that seems even mega-trophic [?]order which you see everywhere in life. But they want to do it in a way that's still continuous with the seventeenth century scientific revolution, the basic premise that everything is a mechanistic relation.
RS: Well, I think it's doomed to failure because what I think, what I think anyway- obviously I'm not going to represent the majority view - the key word is "form" not "in-form-ation." What information means is puts form into something. It just mystifies the whole thing by creating another mathematical font because then you think information theory, quantifying bits and all that kind of thing. Whereas the plain English word "form" helps to explain, you know, the form. The sun is roughly a sphere and so is the Earth and the form of these bar magnets are long, thin things and they join up into an elongated form. All these things are playing and our minds work in terms of recognizing forms and it's what we do. "Information" merely obfuscates the issue, in my opinion.
DBH: No, you're speaking to the converted, actually. In fact the book that I have coming out in August has at least in part an argument just to this effect. And I also agree it's doomed to failure to understand the ordered relation of things such as you see in a magnetic field or arising from a magnetic field or imposed or impressed by any field in terms of information theory. Anything that wants to quantify it in terms allowing it to be dissolved into relations between discrete quanta of energy or mass is not going to succeed because form is inherently a top-down structure.
RS: Yes.
DBH: Even when you're talking about semantic and syntactic information in terms of information theory one of the more nonsensical suppositions that one gets, both, I think in evolutionary theory but in things as diverse as linguistics and physics and any number of differing spheres of concern, the notion that one can move from the quantification to what is clearly a qualitative relation or qualitative state of ordered relations that does not emerge naturally from mechanistic juxtaposition or the exertion of one force on another is NEVER going to work. You're never going to be able to demonstrate how the one arises from the other because it's precisely the opposite, isn't it In fact in information theory this should be obvious, of course, information theory tells us that the greater the order at a semantic or formal level, the greater the disorder at what they call the syntactic. That you can create an algorithm that repeats a limited pattern of numbers, say, in a periodic way, you know 1, 2, 7, 3 which repeats infinitely, but that's a very impoverished, very little information that's actually contained in it. It can be done but the more orderly this syntactic, I'd say "paratactic" is the more confined, constrained the level of what they'd call "information" let's say "syntactic content" or "formal content"is.
So you could never come up with an algorithm that generates Anna Karenina.
RS: No.
DBH: Because the causation works in the other direction. It's the semantic content which exists primarily at the level, well, in that case, an intending intellect that is already related to the future imposing an order on what would, otherwise, be simply random, in one sense, it's a random sequence at the paratactic level but the more determinate it is at the higher the more random it is at the lower. And it is in another sense totally deterministic if it were simply mechanistic relations. So you'll never be able to get from the latter to the former, there must be there has to. . . And I never thought of applying this to fields before. And, of course, you talk about morphic fields so it should be obvious, I suppose, but it seems sort of obvious, doesn't it.
RS: Yes. Well, it wasn't obvious to me until recently that it applies to all fields because all fields are top down causes. The gravitational field of the universe, according to Einstein, contains the entire universe and is that through which the interrelations of all planets, galaxies, everything, is ordered through this field. It's a top-down field, it doesn't emerge from matter it's there to start with. It's there right from the beginning of the universe according to big-bang theory. According to big-bang theory there's a primal. . . well M-theory and super-string theory. there's a primal 10 or 11 dimensional fields at the very moment of the big-bang which then splits up or bifurcates into the other fields of nature. But the whole thing is within a field right from the beginning, it's not that the field somehow emerges from informational process, somehow, It's there from the beginning and the magnetic field is there from the beginning. The electro-magnetic field with light and its presence in matter. And the fields that organize the quantum-matter fields that organize electrons in atoms and atoms in molecules and things are there from the beginning. Or at least from the beginning of the molecule.
So all fields, it seems to me, are top-down causes and all of them are formative. And I'm still thinking about this but nearly all of them work through attraction or repulsion. The strong nuclear field, for example, which is the field that's responsible for what's called the strong nuclear interactions, keeps the quarks together inside a proton or neutron and then helps shape the whole nucleus of the atom. And these are very localized fields, they only operate on the scale of an atom. And the weak nuclear interaction keeps atoms together and through changes in it you get radioactive decay. But these are fields that are incredibly localized but nevertheless organize the nucleus of very atom. And then you've got very localized fields that are still top-down because the strong interaction keeps the quarks together and they're either a proton on neutron and without this strong interaction they'd fly apart. And when you put them into a particle accelerator with enormous energy you can break up this interaction and you can get these separated particles briefly and then they assemble again. So all of these fields seem, to me, to have this top-down quality. And I think one of the problems of the philosophy of science and, indeed, in the thinking of scientists just in practical working in science is exactly that this kind of causation, they've tried to shoe-horn this into a mechanistic model.
And I've just been reading a book of the history of theories of fields in the ether, a history of fields in the 19th century. You know when Faraday thought that the whole of space was permeated by forces and matter was produced by forces that were non-localized they came together in kind of knots in atoms and things but they spread through all of space, And then Maxwell tried to think of the electromagnetic ether, the luminiferous ether. And a lot of 19th century physicists liked the idea of ether as subtle matter and to explain its properties mechanically. Maxwell's model was a vortices of fluid whizzing around tubes for the lines of force. But then what relativity theory, Einstein 1905, showed that you don't actually need this mechanical ether, the field is self-sufficient, self-subsistent. But, then, what are they? And, you know as Sir Lawrence Bragg said, in wonderful historic footage from the Royal Institution talking on magnets, you know giving demonstrations of magnets picking things up and so on. He says the magnet is the ultimate explanation, the field of the magnet can't be explained in terms of anything but magnets and electromagnetic fields. And he said what is a magnet made up of, it's made up of little magnets inside it. And, so even in super-string and M-theory which try and explain magnetic fields in terms of other fields is basically fields all the way down.
I don't have time to insert comments on this because it's turning out to be a far busier week than I'd expected. I will give you another recent discussion on the topic between Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon which has another version of the magnet demonstration and a discussion from a somewhat different angle.
AFTER DOING THIS blogging since May, 2006, writing things, sometimes long things day after day, I've found that I'm often stuck in how to find new things to write about. This spring, especially, has been difficult in that regard, or maybe it's the horrendous allergy season we're having or maybe it's finding it especially difficult to get my garden established - I have always depended on my garden for a good part of my economic survival, it's not just a hobby. Maybe it's being old.
Anyway, that's my problem, not yours. In lieu of finding out yet another thing to say about the shocking failure of English language liberal-democracy to withstand the degenerate effects of media deregulation and the removal of the safeguards that were put into place exactly to protect democracy from an unregulated media owned by billionaires and millionaires, that kind of moral degeneracy that is inherent in a secular legal culture that actually has no inclination to acknowledge the right to tell the truth and that there is no right to lie that should have legal protection, I've decided to do another transcription with some commentary of one of the most interesting things I've heard in a long time.
This time it's not a lecture but of what I believe is a recent conversation between the scientist Rupert Sheldrake and the philosopher David Bentley Hart on a topic chosen by Rupert Sheldrake, his recent thinking about fields and how they don't fit into the classical notions of science. It's not only a good example of Sheldrake's continuing and creative curiosity about the phenomena of the world around us but of the relevance of philosophical thinking to science. It also proves how bad for science it is that so few scientists can really engaged with philosophical thinking on the level that Sheldrake can. And also how, far from it being religion that impinges on science, for which scientists are always on guard against, they allow materialist-atheist even scientistic ideology in with welcoming arms. Sheldrake and Hart talk about things they've been thinking about a lot recently, I have to say that I've been thinking ever more about how the motive of atheism, even more than its associated ideologies of materialism and scientism has become for academia and academic culture what the Articles of Anglican faith used to be for places such as Oxford, something you must proclaim to work within if you're to be allowed in to it.
Note: This is a working transcription, not a verbatim one of every sound on the video. There are one or two words either I'm not hearing clearly or which are neither in my vocabulary nor the dictionaries I've got at hand. I'm working off-line on this so I don't have the access to online resources that I've become used to using when I have a working internet connection. I'm posting the video so you can hear it for yourself and see the demonstration that Rupert Sheldrake shows. Please let me know if there are any major inaccuracies. I might have more to say about it as after thinking more about it.
Rupert Sheldrake: Well, welcome David. I'm very pleased that you're here in Hampstead, England, and it's wonderful that we can actually meet in person.
David Bentley Hart: Thank you.
Rupert Sheldrake: I do have an agenda, there's a question I'm burning to discuss with you and whether or not you think it has any value or not I haven't the faintest idea.
But I've been thinking a lot about the basic principles of physics recently. And trying to think about them without the fog of mathematics that normally occludes all discussion and prevents all thought on the subject. And what I'm really interested in is the question of fields, the fields of nature which include the gravitational field, the electromagnetic field, quantum-matter fields, the strong and weak nuclear fields, and, in my own hypothesis, morphic fields. The fields as causes. But the things you and I and many people have discussed, that the mechanistic revolution in the seventeenth century, formal and final causes were amputated from nature, and we were left with just material and efficient causes. Or material and moving causes.
But when field theory was introduced into science in the 1840s by Faraday, it was a profound revolution that in many ways went beyond mechanistic understanding. And although fields have been crammed into a kind of classical science in the physics textbooks and all that kind of thing they don't follow the rules.
And I've got this illustration that I thought I might try out on you if you're up for it.
DBH: Oh, I'm always in.
[The Illustration]
RS: So, this is, obviously, a white plate and what I have here are a series of small bar magnets [very small, maybe a few centimeter or so, each]. There's one. And each one has a north and a south pole. And, now, normally when we're told about magnets, you know the North pole repels other North poles and attracts South poles. And it sounds as if repulsion and attraction are equivalent. You know, they attract or repel in equivalent ways. But, actually, what happens is there's a formative process going on. And what I'm going to do is just throw individual bar magnets down and if attraction and repulsion were equal you'd end up with a kind of random melee of magnets. That's not what happens.
[As he throws the magnets on the plate, they join up in first two lines of magnets and then the two lines join into one longer line of bar magnets and not fall separated in a random pattern.]
You see they. . . although attraction-repulsion, like poles repel, different poles attract, sounds as if it's equivalent, in practice attraction dominates. And what's happening is a formative effect, here. What happens is kind of a formative process. A kind of formative process where there's a kind of causation involved here which is not material causation because the magnetic field isn't material. And it's not really energetic in the sense that I have to throw them in with a certain amount of energy, what's pulling them together is force, a magnetic force. But that force is not moving energy it's something else. It pulls them towards an end. They're attracted, But when the magnet, each of those magnets when it attracts another magnet, it loses no energy when it attracts it. There's no expenditure of energy. And if you have a magnet on your fridge door and it's holding up a piece of paper on the fridge door, against the power of gravity, It can do it for years on end and it's not expending any energy to defy the power of gravity.
And so, when a magnetic field or a gravitational field is operating it's not expending energy.
Take the Earth's gravitational field, to look at another formative field. The formitative effect of gravitational fields is usually to create spheres, the moon the Sun the Earth. But say there's a meteor heading through empty space with a particular velocity. If it's attracted towards the Earth's gravitational field and zooms down and hits the Earth, with a big bang, , , the meteorite hasn't gained any . , , well, it's gained potential energy from the Earth's magnetic field which gives it kinetic energy, which makes it hit the Earth, but the Earth has expended no energy whatsoever in making that happen. In fact, when the meteorite arrives at the Earth the mass of the Earth increases a little bit and its gravitational pull increases. So, what I'm suggesting is that the gravitational field, or magnetic fields are acting as formal and final causes. You know, when Aristotle said a stone falls to Earth because it's seeking its proper place and it's a final cause, actually that seems to be the case. So, I wondered, I've never seen this discussed in philosophy of science anywhere.
DBH: It's very attractive, though, isn't it. Well, of course, when formal and final causes were banished from scientific language progressively in the seventeenth century, they had already, in a sense, been converted in the minds of many into extrinsic physical , , They were still being thought of in terms of mechanical energy, mechanical relations, push and pull but that's not what they actually are in Aristotle's thought, There they really are a set of rational relations that are logically prior to the actions that obey them. And are indiscernible from them.
But, actually, I'd never thought of this before. No energy expended.
Of course, that's always been the issue with fields, hasn't it. We don't really know what gravity is.
RS: No, Newton was baffled by it and he never came up with, his ultimate answer was in terms of the divine will. He thought matter, itself, couldn't have the power to act on all other matter through the universe at a distance.
DBH: The very notion of a formal cause is a thing that had been so utterly altered by the early modern period, in peoples' imagination. It was already a sort of tacit mechanism, that it had come into scientific, or natural philosophy, as early as the 14th century and I think that by the 17th century it was fairly established as a misreading the Aristotelian tradition. But what you're saying makes, I have to say, a surprising kind of sense to me. Because, of course, what a formal cause really is in Aristotle's thought is a rational relation of order that explains the possibility that doesn't merely seem to be inherent merely in matter and motion. A set of ordered relations that are dictated by an antecedent finality that things aren't necessarily aiming at but the perfectio, the complete, expression of their potentials. It's an entirely different understanding of causality than the mechanistic picture. And you might be right, maybe one of the reasons that we find fields so baffling, trying to define them, is because we are using a truncated causal-etiological language . . . see, you've taken me off-guard here. . .
RS: That's all right, I mean that may be all right for me, but maybe not for you, it's, the thing is, well, it's only recently that I've got excited about this, because I've always thought my whole hypothesis of morphic or formative causation, morphic fields is all about morphic fields as formative causes, as formal causes. But it's only very recently that I've come to realize that all fields have that property. And that if you say that, what you're saying about Aristotle, it's not just contained in the matter of the movement, then these magnets we just looked at lining up is a formal pattern that's to do with rational relations and stuff, it has nothing to do with the matter. Because the matter of the iron magnets, if you demagnetize an iron magnet by heating it up, the actual amount of iron is still the same, the weight is still the same, the molecular, the atomic constitution in crystalline form is much the same, all that's happened is it's lost its magnetism. And so there is a kind of - it's not a material cause, the iron that's giving this effect and it's not the way that I threw them on the plate that's causing this effect because if I'd thrown little pieces of ordinary iron, say demagnetized they wouldn't have lined up like that.
My guess would be that people who are entirely caught up in materailist-atheist devotees of scientism who are always making the most extreme leaps from observations or, even more so, complete speculations by scientists about physical phenomena to the most attenuated arguments for their ideology would pooh-pooh this based on the simplicity of the illustration with the bar magnets - ignoring the fact that the entire basis of especially modern science rests, ultimately, on observations as simple or even more mundane than the one Rupert Sheldrake uses as a motivation to thinking about what is, as both of them say, something that seems to never have been addressed before in the literature of science or natural philosophy. The reality, though, couldn't be more widespread as those fields which Sheldrake lists permeate the entirety of physical existence and, so, everything we perceive of it. If he is correct then the dogma of non-teleology in conventional science is not only not always valid, it is entirely invalid on the most basic of levels. What implications that would have for those things that we all leap to about the ultimate meaning of things not physically demonstrable could be, one of the things that would have to be imperiled by it is one of the cornerstones of materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology.
