A way around this is to present philosophy by field: ontology, epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, etc. and have the students discover what philosophers in the different ages have to say. I do this in the "Meeting of the Great Minds" forums with high school and college students. Students have to study a philosopher, gather quotes and biographical information about the philosopher, and in the forum stay in character as he or she interacts across the ages with other philosophers.
The meetings are great fun and a good way to review at the end of a unit.
My years as a priest in The Episcopal Church taught me about diversity and adversity. I learned that diversity is a slogan that requires a great deal of window dressing, and adversity is a reality that tests and stretches one's faith in God's goodness.
The Episcopal Church, once considered the domain of white male privilege, has worked hard to change the public image. Consider the first women to become bishops in the Episcopal Church. Barbara Harris, an African-American, was the first female bishop. Geralyn Wolfe was the first female bishop to convert from Judaism. Mary Glasspool was the first lesbian bishop. I knew all of them as we came up together in the Diocese of Pennsylvania.
Consider the diversity of the clergy delegation of the Diocese of Lexington (KY) to the 2010 General Convention.
The Rev. Robert L. Sessum
The Rev. Alan Sutherland
The Very Rev. Morris Thompson
The Rev. Dr. Janet Dunnavant
The Rev. Canon Johnnie Ross
Bob Sessum's parish experienced setbacks since the arrival of Stacy Sauls as the Bishop of the Diocese of Lexington in 2000. Bob lost some high rollers in the midst of a multi-million dollar building project. He went to Dromantine where he offered a lame justification to the Primates about The Episcopal Church's decision to consecrate Gene Robinson, the first partnered gay bishop.
My last contact with Bob was when I sat beside him at the funeral of one of his former parishioners who had been murdered by his son. The deceased and his family had left Bob's parish to help start St. Andrew's Anglican Church in Versailles (now an ACNA parish).
The ushers, readers, and priest were all from St. Andrew's Anglican Church, which I'm sure had to bite. Bob certainly didn't seem at ease that day. I'm betting that this is when he began contemplating early retirement.
After a lengthy search process, St. John's Episcopal Church in Versailles, Kentucky sought to call an Evangelical priest, David Brannen, who Bishop Sauls refused to admit, knowing that the priest would not align with the direction the bishop was taking the Diocese. This caused an uproar and Bishop Sauls disbanded St. John's vestry and took control of the church. A large number of the members of St. John's then left to form St. Andrew's Anglican Church. That congregation is situated in a lovely building a few miles from St. John's.
Another clergy delegate, Alan Sutherland, got himself into trouble at his parish in Winchester, Kentucky. After the equivalent of an ecclesiastical slap on the wrist, Alan was moved to the lovely historic parish of St John's in Versailles.
A member of St. John's reported that on the first Sunday Alan was present to celebrate the Eucharist there was such a stench of death in the church that the people could hardly tolerate being there. Apparently some creature had crawled into the undercroft and died. (This story reminds me of the cathedral belfry that was destroyed by lighting after the consecration of a certain apostate bishop in England.)
Morris Thompson was then the Dean of the Lexington Cathedral, the cathedral located just blocks from my former parish, St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, which was established by the rich cathedral members as a mission for their black servants. Morris crossed the threshold of my former parish exactly once. Bishop Sauls had invited him to attend the 125th anniversary of my parish since none of the clergy who had actually served there felt welcome to return for the festivities. (I had resigned on the Sunday Gene Robinson was consecrated and by then had managed to get myself inhibited. Morris Thompson was one of the parties who signed my letter of inhibition.)
I discovered later that the parishioners had been told that their former priests were sent written invitations, and they hoped some of them would be there to celebrate 125 years of ministry and worship on the corner of North Upper Street. This simply shows how unreliable the US postal service is.
The only clergy who attended the 125th anniversary were these delegates to General Convention. A strange coincidence!
Jan Dunnavant is a lovely lady who was tragically widowed about 16 years ago. She holds a D.Min. from Sewanee. Jan's congregation put forth a female deacon who served at my parish, St. Andrew's Episcopal Church. As it turned out the deacon was a lesbian.
Trouble was coming. I asked Bishop Sauls to consider moving the deacon to another parish (which was my prerogative as rector). The deacon had expressed interest in returning to her home parish where her recently widowed father worshiped. It seemed to me to be a reasonable, and mutually beneficial request. However, Sauls accused me of being a homophobe. Behind my back, he talked strategy with the deacon and my senior warden, and the next Sunday, after the liturgy, I faced an angry congregation, demanding that I explain why I was trying to get rid of their deacon.
I said that what they were asking about was confidential, contained in a letter to the bishop. In that confidential letter I had pleaded with Bishop Sauls to repent of departing from the Gospel ministry and sacred Church Tradition. For this I was accused of insubordination and the activists in the parish had more ammunition to launch against me.
A faithful saint named Elva Davis (may she rest in peace and rise in glory) suddenly walked to the front of the church where I was standing. She took a stand between me and the angry faces. She insisted that we all stop talking and start praying to know what God wants, but she was shamefully shouted down by a new comer to the parish, the same man who had screamed obscenities at me when I was teaching the adult Bible class a few Sundays earlier. He had to be physically restrained by one of the men, Vertner Taylor.
Since transparency is essential to build and rebuild trust, I agreed to have copies of the letter I sent to Bishop Sauls available the following Sunday, which I did. After all, it was no longer confidential.
Another clergy delegate was Johnnie Ross, the deployment officer for the Diocese of Lexington. He was the one who called to warn me that the Bishop would take action against me if I spoke to another American Anglican Council gathering. We chatted briefly on the phone, and we agreed that a priest has to do what the Lord requires. Johnnie reminded me that includes submission to one's bishop. I reminded him that as priests we have two bishops and the Lord Jesus' authority trumps that of all temporal authorities.
Obviously, the bishop and I held different understandings of what it means to uphold the Gospel and defend the flock from falsehood.
Johnnie acted as a spiritual mentor to one of the lay delegates from Lexington, an African-American activist, Austin Tuning. Austin was also a member of my parish, and a confidant of Bishop Sauls. He also was a lay delegate to General Convention.
So you see this delegation to General Convention represented a certain kind of diversity with an all white clergy delegation, one female, and two black lay delegates.
People are in favor of diversity as long as they are the ones defining it. Certainly all the delegates and alternates actively promoted the political ambitions of Bishop Sauls, who left the Diocese of Lexington in 2011 to serve Katharine Jefferts Schori, the first female Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.
In June 2015, Michael Curry was elected Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church. He is an African-American with a pleasant smile and a gift for storytelling. He is effusive about LOVE and made the perfect homilist for the royal wedding.
Bishop Sauls days as the Chief Operating Officer of The Episcopal Church were drawing to a close. In December 2015, Michael Curry placed Stacy Sauls, Samuel McDonald, Alex Baumgarten, on administrative leave after allegations of misconduct.
Looking back, I shake my head at how diversity and adversity complicated life in Kentucky. I hope for better days for the people of the Diocese of Lexington. They haven't had an easy time. Douglas Hahn was elected Bishop of the Diocese on August 18, 2012. He lied about having an affair with a parishioner and when the lie was exposed he was removed from office.
The present bishop of the Diocese of Lexington is a white man who formerly served as Bishop of Niassa, Mozambique. Mark Van Koevering (shown right) was raised in the Christian Reformed Church. Now there's diversity for you, and may God bless him!
What if the fundamental “stuff” of the universe isn’t matter or energy, but information?
That’s the idea some theorists are pursuing as they search for ever-more elegant and concise descriptions of the laws that govern our universe. Could our universe, in all its richness and diversity, really be just a bunch of bits?
To understand the buzz over information, we have to start at the beginning: What is information?
I like the phrase the “ontological basement” of reality, but question reality as content. As with Derrida, I would say reality is Presence.
I deal in data as a biblical anthropologist. Information is valuable in as far as it builds a cohesive picture of reality... and only if we deal with the inconvenience of reality.
Jason Baxter explores how the treasures of old writings can illumine the banality of our time.
At the end of each semester, I inevitably have one or two well-meaning students who are still unsure why they were asked to devote so much time and care to reading, annotating, and discussing archaic Greek literature. They enjoyed reading Homer. They liked our conversations in class, but, at the end of the course, lacking theoretical reasons, they still worry about why they spent so much time on pagan, non-Christian authors. Over the past few semesters, I have thought about how to best answer that question: Why read old (pagan) books? To do so, I would like to begin with an image from a myth.
At the beginning of his Timaeus, Plato retells the well-known myth of Atlantis. There was, once upon a time, a flourishing civilization, which excelled in the arts and sciences. They built a beautiful city, which blended perfectly into its natural environs. But one day, the city was lost. An earthquake caused it to be buried under an ocean of water. And there, at the floor of the ocean, this magnificent civilization rests, in silence.
I like the image of the luxuriously wealthy city at the bottom of the ocean because the metaphor of archaeology brilliantly captures the goals of a student of the humanities. What if, along with the physical ruins of buildings, there were certain ideas, certain ways of life, certain ways of thinking which have been buried under the rubble of time? What if some truth from antiquity, which used to be obvious to everyone else, had only begun to seem bizarre to modern man? As everyone knows, Hesiod’s Theogony is a very bizarre piece of writing by our standards. But what if the truth is, it is not so much this book which is weird, but we who have become strange? What if we moderns are the ones out of step with everyone else, not the ancients who are backwards and behind the times, but we who are out of tune? It is for this reason, with these questions in mind, that I encourage my students, every time they bump into a passage (or book) particularly strange and bizarre, to slow down, re-read, and think more deeply. You might have hit a cultural blind spot.
In his Works of Love, arguably his greatest ethical text, Kierkegaard uses an agricultural metaphor to describe busyness:
''…the busy people sow and harvest and again sow and harvest (busyness harvests over and over again), […] the busy people store the barns full of what they harvested and rest upon their gains—alas, […] the person who truly wills the good in the same span of time does not see even the smallest fruit of his labors and he becomes the object of ridicule as someone who does not know how to sow, as someone who labors in vain and is merely shadowboxing…''
This passage can be read in light of Kierkegaard’s account of boredom. Like the bored person who rotates their crops, the busy person is described by way of an agricultural metaphor: sowing and harvesting and sowing again. And the bored person and busy person’s similarities do not stop there. The busy person is also experiencing something indeterminate, and is, like the bored person, worse off for doing so.
For Kierkegaard, busy people are experiencing something indeterminate because their activities are not directed towards some particular good. The busy person may seem busy with some specific activity. In the case of the agricultural example in the passage above, the busy person appears busy with sowing and harvesting. The busy person sows and harvests and rests upon these gains. But what is the purpose of this rest? Only to begin once more, for “busyness harvests over and over again.” There is nothing gained by the cycle other than rest from the labor it requires.
Is there value in idleness? From a psychological standpoint there is, if the idle time is used for reflection. Yet this too is a kind of labor. Further, reflection often leads to productivity and fruition of something latent. For some, physical labor in a field stimulates personal reflection. I know this was true for me while cutting and staking tobacco in Kentucky.
It appears that we have a conundrum. What are your thoughts on this?
Randy Isaac of the American Scientific Affiliation reviews
HOW CAN PHYSICS UNDERLIE THE MIND?
Top-Down Causation in the Human Context
by George Ellis. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2016.
501 pages. Hardcover; $80.00. ISBN: 9783662498071
In this magnum opus, as Philip Clayton described it, George Ellis lays out the case for top-down causation in the emergentist perspective. For decades he has been one of the leading proponents of emergence, a philosophical perspective that lies in between strong reductionism on one hand, and vitalism on the other. Reductionist critics of emergence had claimed that the properties and substances that emerged from more fundamental elements had no causal power of their own but were solely determined. Ellis powerfully argues that these emerging entities do indeed have top-down causal powers and that any understanding of the mind, consciousness, and free will must take that into account.
George F R Ellis was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1939. He earned a BS degree in physics from the University of Cape Town and a PhD in Applied Math and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University. He collaborated with Stephen Hawking to co-author the book The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time. He returned to the University of Cape Town in 1973 where he taught until retirement in 2005, becoming one of the world’s leading theorists in cosmology. He is a Quaker and has served as president of the International Society for Science and Religion. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2004. He is a co-author with Nancey Murphy of the book On The Moral Nature of the Universe: Cosmology, Theology, and Ethics. Ellis is a Platonist and has long worked on the emergence of complexity and top-down causality, the focus of this book.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy characterizes emergence as “emergent entities (properties or substances) ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them.” Reductionists have countered that these emergent entities have no real causal powers but are determined by the fundamental entities in a purely bottom-up fashion. Ellis devotes this book to showing how top-down causation by the emergent entities on the fundamental entities is real and not illusory. He credits many colleagues for work over several decades in compiling this resource, including Nancey Murphy, Warren Brown, Tim O’Connor, Robert Russell, and others.
Emergence is context dependent, Ellis points out. In the natural world, self-assembly is the key mechanism of emergence. In the biological world it is natural selection while in the man-made world emergence is found in design and construction. His focus is not so much on origins to explain how the world came to be as it is on describing the way the world is. An interacting ensemble of entities, no matter how they came together, generates new entities with more complexity. Ellis offers us a compendium of all the ways in which this can happen.
At the publisher’s request, Ellis structured the book in such a way that each chapter could be sold as a separate stand-alone booklet in addition to the entire set of eight chapters as a single book. This style led to a significant amount of repetition, especially of references, but in a sense, that repetition helped provide an illusion of actually understanding the material. A brief description of each chapter will help the reader decide which option is best for them.
Chapter 1: Complexity and Emergence
Ellis introduces all the key terms and ideas in the first chapter, though with few examples and a minimum of detail. He sets forth the basic ideas of the hieracrchical structure of the universe and of emergence of causal entities at the higher levels. He ends the chapter with some practical implications for health care, mental health, and education. The chapter therefore serves as an effective complete summary of the book but will leave the reader seeking a more detailed explanation.
Complexity lies in the hierarchical structure, in which the bottom layers are the fundamental forces and particles of physics and chemistry. The higher levels are composed of combinations and interactions of the entities in the lower levels. Ensembles of large numbers of interacting entities at one level enable new entities at the next higher level. Those higher-level entities can, in turn, have a causal effect on the lower level entities by controlling the scope and bounds of their interaction. These higher-level entities are said to emerge from that interaction. Bottom-up causation refers to the lower levels of physical particles and their interactions generating higher level, more complex entities. Top-down causation refers to the higher levels imposing constraints or boundary conditions on the lower level entities.
Reductionists claim that top-down causation is an illusion and everthing is determined in a bottom-up fashion. Vitalists, and, in a sense, spiritualists, posit a vital or spiritual force that provide the top-down causation to the lower level entities. Emergentists claim that the top-down causation of higher level entities is real, necessary, and sufficient for the joint top-down/bottom-up causal effects to explain the structure of the universe. Ellis ignores the vitalists and addresses this book as a response to reductionists.
Chapter 2: Digital Computer Systems
Anyone who, like me, has participated in the design of a computer hardware system or who has written any software program will greatly enjoy this chapter. Ellis describes the hardware and software as hierarchical systems that display all the key features of emergence. A reader unfamiliar with and uninterested in computing systems can safely skip this chapter but it does provide an illuminating description of the major features of emergence.
Most, though not necessarily all, higher-levels entities in computing systems are created by intelligent designers and do not emerge through self-organization of the lower levels or through natural selection. In other words, the higher levels of the hierarchy that impose constraints on the lower levels are constructed by intelligent agents external to the computing system itself. A circuit designer, for example, can direct a computer processor chip manufacturer to constrain the size and shape of a transistor. The atoms and molecules in that transistor then interact within the confines of that top-down constraint and effect the behavior desired by the designer. Emergence refers to the properties and entities that arise when the designer has implemented the desired constraints and context.
Ellis closes this chapter with this gem: “At a higher level, the existence of computers is an outcome of the human drive for meaning and purpose: it is an expression of the possibility space of meanings, the higher levels whereby we guide what actions take place.”
Chapter 3: The Basis of Complexity
Chapters 3 and 4 lay out the technical details of emergence. In this chapter the focus is on the hierarchical structure that forms the basis for complexity. Moving from a lower level to a higher level in the hierarchy, the components of one level are comprised of ensembles of interacting elements of the next lower level. For example, solid materials are composed of a very large number of atoms which occupy a lower level in the hierarchy. These atoms, in turn, are composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons which comprise an even lower level. Looking upwards, the solid material forms the basis, when shaped or combined with other solids, of an object that can be used as a tool. The tool may result from an even higher level of intent or purpose to carry out a particular function. The shape of that tool forms a basis for the range of motion of the component atoms. In this way, both top-down and bottom-up causation can be seen.
Chapter 4: Types of Top-Down Causation
The second part of the technical explanation of emergence emphasizes the many different ways in which top-down causation can occur. The simplest types are deterministic as in the lower levels where, say, quarks interact to form protons and neutrons with little variation. More complex types occur in higher level systems where feedback can occur. At even higher levels there are much more interesting types involving adaptive systems. When a high level entity can change in such a way that the lowest levels are channeled into enabling a modified higher level system, then adaptation has occurred. This is where the tremendous power of emergence can be seen.
Chapter 5: Is There Room at the Bottom?
Ellis asks whether the notion of bottom-up and top-down working simultaneously would overdetermine the system. If the physics of the lowest levels is causally closed, can top-down causation really occur? Here Ellis provides several ways in which top-down causation can work. There can be contextual constraints or constraining structures or a change in the nature of the lower level elements. An example of the last is that a free neutron has a lifetime of less than 15 minutes but when the neutron forms a higher level nucleon by interacting with one or more protons or other neutrons, it is stable. The interaction of the neutron with other particles changes the nature of the neutron. Causality from above influences the outcomes of the lower-level causal forces.
Chapter 6: The Foundations: Physics and Top-Down Causation
Physicists and chemists as well as astronomers and cosmologists will revel in reading this chapter. Ellis dives into the details of the lower levels of the hierarchies in this universe to examine the fundamental forces. He explores quantum dynamics, the arrow of time, and gives numerous examples from condensed-matter physics and chemistry. The principles of emergence as laid out in the previous chapters are beautifully illustrated by many examples. Those who are not enamored with physics or chemistry can safely skip or skim the chapter.
Chapter 7: The Mind and the Brain
At last Ellis arrives at the issue everyone is waiting for. How can the brain give rise to the mind? No one should miss this chapter. Not only are biologists and neuroscientists in prominence but also those broadly involved in the social context of our world.
In the hierarchical perspective, a brain is enabled from the bottom by a series of levels from the fundamental particles up through the biochemistry of life and the neurons and neural networks. In turn, these networks in the brain enable a higher level of individual consciousness which in turn enables a society of interacting individuals forming a culture. All of this occurs in the context of an environment leading to a fine-tuned system.
The high level social interactions and environment affect personal perceptions, ideas, and purpose, leading to decisions and actions that causally work downward to direct biochemical activity. Such activity enables the desired actions. In this way, bottom-up and top-down causality work together to implement what we call the mind.
The importance of adaptive systems is emphasized in this chapter. Biological systems are far more adaptive than non-biological systems. When higher level entities are able to modify selection criteria and adapt to the environment by influencing the outcomes of the lower level processes, then a vast spectrum of possibilities opens up.
Chapter 8: The Broader View
Ellis refers to this portion of the book as a polemic that sets emergence apart from reductionism. He reprises the full concept of emergence and then looks at the broad implications.
Inserted in this chapter is a section on “Learning to Read and Write” that Ellis co-authors with his wife, Carole Bloch. They argue that modern methods of teaching people to read over-emphasize a bottom-up approach. This means that there is a focus on the elemental phonemes before putting it all together into a meaningful sentence. Rather, they recommend a greater emphasis on top-down learning in which the meaning is emphasized first. Then the combination of top-down and bottom-up learning leads to a more efficient process. This exemplifies Ellis’ view that everything can be treated as an integrated bottom-up/top-down system.
The book suffers from the weight of making each chapter a stand-alone booklet. The flow is uneven and repetitive. The benefit is that each chapter can indeed be read by itself and a reader interested in only one aspect of emergence can profitably select the relevant chapter. The reader will then be left hungry for more and will want to return for the remaining chapters.
Ellis does not allude to the implications for science and faith. He is a man of faith and has written elsewhere of his disagreement with atheism and with those who advocate a scientific religion. His views seem to be essentially that of Non-Interventionist Objective Divine Action (NIODA) as advocated by Robert Russell, Nancey Murphy, and others. The emergence that he describes in this book is easily compatible with such a view. Multi-level explanations lend themselves well to including the spiritual domain, as Donald MacKay, for example, explained in the middle of the 20th century. On the other hand, materialists can also find support for their own presupposition in this book. The higher levels of explanation, including those leading to meaning and purpose, are fully enabled by the underlying physics and need no external source. If spiritual levels are not required, though not negated, by a complete hierarchical explanation of a system, then on what basis do we believe they exist? Most of all, this book strikes at the heart of dualism. The mind is described as enabled by the brain through the emergence of entities capable of supporting consciousness and rational thought through the interaction of a vast number of complex neurological components. It cannot exist independently from the brain and needs no external vitality other than the environmental interaction for food and energy. The concepts in this book will fuel discussions on faith and science for a long time to come.
Ellis closes the book with this final paragraph: “The daily world in which we live came about by imaginative investigation of possibilities, discarding those that don’t work: the adaptive process that is a central theme of this book, enabled by a modicum of randomness at the macro- and micro-levels, interacting with necessary physical processes. And it is these processes that also allow the emergence of the ordinariness of everyday life: which actually is quite extraordinary. Bottom-up effects are crucial to emergence. Physics underlies all. Nevertheless, the vitality of life, which arises from physics, transcends it.”
The casual reader seeking a relaxing fireside read is advised to look elsewhere. This book is an indispensable resource for anyone who seriously ponders the structure of the universe, the miracle of life, and the mystery of consciousness.
