Is Nature Capable of Transcendence?

1. Is Nature Capable of Transcendence? Anne Kull 21-24.10.2009 CECT Conference

2. Nature Religion Science Technology: All present the question, Whether there is meaning of the world and our lives in it? Whether finitum capax infiniti?

3. The quest for meaning • Science is woven into it • But the process itself becomes spiritually charged • It is risky to affirm that nature and our lives possess meaning and purpose in any deep sense • Almost all classical philosophy has argued that the ultimate reality is mind or spirit

4. Where philosophical consensus is and where not • Non-reductive naturalists • Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Aquinas, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel • Even the great dissenters, eg. David Hume and A. A. Ayer were not materialists • Common sense philosophers and pragmatists • Phenomalists, theists, sceptics etc.

5. Materialism? • In face of modern physics, any plausible form of materialism will be exceedingly complex and mysterious • The problem of consciousness – how conscious states (thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions) can arise from brain-states and brain-behaviour • Psychologically plausible when consciousness is demoted to insignificance

6. Two ends of the telescope • Focus on the impersonal: hard to explain emergence of consciousness, personality. • questions about our evolutionary past (How can humans emerge from the impersonal process?) • Focus on the human nature • Questions about our future (What is the function of our human nature? What ought we be doing as human beings?)

7. The telescope perspectives • In both cases we get a perspective on the real world • Both considerations are directly relevant to the questions of meaning and transcendence • The critical issue: Whether or not we include our moral experience in our understanding of nature and its meaning

8. Different “bottom-up” layers • Subatomic particles, etc. BUT: If we bracket out the creativity and self-awareness of a scientist, we will discover a nature that takes no account of human awareness or purposes • Self-awareness, feelings, the mind and struggle with moral existence. If ignored, then there will be no room for imagination, and we will never find transcendence

9. If we begin with our own consciousness, • We experience both freedom and purpose. Mind, possibility, and moral purpose are fully data of nature. Imagination comes into play, and we discern the possibilities of the here and now. • Our consciousness and mind are fully at home in the natural world. The question of our function in the world – the most interesting question for our lives.

10. Technology as a Mirror • We create new worlds in our technology that do not yet exist, but we also create meaning and justification and purpose of those worlds. • Two perspectives on technology: fear vs celebration designate differing points of view at technology “out there” • Becoming human with technologies “in here”

11. “Human becoming” • Expresses the idea that we are always in process, we are a becoming, and being human means that the journey is the reality – there may well be no final destination. • This journey is a religious reality, a journey of the spirit. • Human becoming is nature’s becoming!

12. Lynn Randolph, Cyborg

13. The spiritual quest for meaning • It’s not enough to balance the moral-experiential and the cosmological perspectives but these two approaches do configure the quest • Whether through experience or reason, we never fully succeed in our quest for meaning. In religious terms, it requires faith – we must construct our meanings in the face of the world’s fundamental ambiguity and ambivalence, even as we yearn that our “fit” with the world would be unambiguous.

14. Technology as the medium • for new selves and new identities to emerge. • Is this an anthropocentric reading? Yes, but with a new element: now that we have broken down the walls that separate humans from both nature and technology, we see that humans and their technology are a set of nature’s possibilities.

15. Openness to possibilities • The religion of cyborgs and technosapiens and technonative is also a religion of nature. • Openness to possibilities: Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes that if we are to live adequately we require visions of what the empirically present world can become, what its possibilities are.

16. Imagination • A.I: Artificial Intelligence (S. Spielberg, 2001): The greatest gift of humans is that they wish for things that do not exist. Only humans can believe in what is not actual. We can conceive of things that do not exist, we can conceive of circumstances and behaviors that do not exist. • Imagination is a gift; it is the medium in which we receive the future and discern its possibilities for ourselves and our world. • If we are to speak of religion, it must be religion that can encompass the human life that is technonative: it must be a possibility for the religion of the cyborgs.

17. Thank you!