SCIENCE & SPIRITUALITY
ART and SCIENCE are naturally energized by SPIRITUALITY–both draw upon dispositions deep within us and are highly motivated to reach beyond conventional boundaries. Both dispel the “lethargy of custom.” And the large areas of cognitive overlap often put them in each other’s service.
ART and SCIENCE is sometimes viewed as competitors with each other and with SPIRITUALITY, but these views would be an error: ART, SCIENCE, and SPIRITUALITY are the categories of convenience for the great human enterprises that aspire to transcendence. This engages the perpetual change that is the essence of being: a “maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal” (Berman 1982*)
But… “… science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspirations toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed as an image: Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” (Albert Einstein, 1941)[i]
In other words, art, science, religion are all unique but more-or-less overlapping constellations of cognitive competencies. Each is an extension of normal human functions that have become ritualized, established, and culturally enshrined, but which often by means of their overlap can provide support for each other.
Where the extant combination of human competencies fail to meet a prevailing need for coherence — if sufficiently urgent– is sought in the spiritual, mythic and metaphoric beliefs that can be accommodated to a the best possible story with the facts available.
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- On the Origin of Religion: Read Culotta (2002): “When did religious beliefs begin? A likely place to find out is the archaeological record, but inferring “religion” from ancient objects and practices can be a tall order. Many researchers take the use of symbols as a clue to budding spirituality.” What we are asking is “what were they thinking?” What can these artifacts say about the state of mind of the ancestors that created them? What were the circumstances that selected for specific cognitive competencies manifest in this way. More widely? What can we say about the state of mind of any artist? any other person? any creature? ourselves?
- of course we are necessarily incomplete: we have our congenital dispositions and memory: all else is imagination. We have not concluded our inquiries and at some point they–we–will cease, we will have crossed to the Undiscovered Country,
- The GOD of the GAPS is a view that the inability to provide a coherent empirical explanation for a phenomenon is evidence of the existence of god, bridging gaps in the story with necessarily inexplicable or ineffable or transcendent forces. see S&S notes on the GOD of the GAPS
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There is an important sense in which we are “prepared” to behave a certain way or believe a certain thing: it coheres, a new belief is found to be so consilient or consonant with what we have already learned that it supports or strengthens or fully realizes that constellation of ideas. “What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires—desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.” (Bertrand Russell, from his “Roads to Freedom”)[i] (& see “AFFORDANCE”)
THE PROBLEM with discourse about SPIRITUALITY:
- “Spirituality” has a multiplicity of authoritative definitions. (exemplified in Wikipedia) See the S&S GLOSSARY
- Spirituality is discourse about the ineffable. We are, at an important level, impaired by the notorious inadequacy of words at least in so far as they represent our interior experience, thoughts, ideas. Ludwig Wittegnstein stated Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” (in his closing paragraph of Tractatus Logico-Philophicus) , but while words are flawed, they are not useless: they can approximate the underlying feelings and, of course, there are other ways to communicate! We may never realize an ultimate, immutable TRUTH (if indeed such things exist) but we can be guided by what we think they might be and move towards them by successive approximations as we learn more and reflect upon our learning as new knowledge mingles with old, with who we are and have become by disposition and experience.
Still we can use language to take us at least partway to mutual understanding and socially enabled insight: A working definition to invite or enable the ethological perspective allows for its natural history: the biologically-informed causes and consequences of spirituality.
“SPIRITUALITY is a state of consciousness that reflects engagement the deep and often urgent NEED to understand, a “need to know.” [see “we are infovores”] The state of consciousness can be characterized in biological as well as phenomenological terms. The need reflects a biologically relevant need: it is to understand cause and effect relationships, a need expressed in all organisms (and living cells?) that change their behavior as a result of experience (learn, accommodate to their environments). Much of this need is accommodated by automatisms and acquired habit, but at the furthest end of the spectrum of expressions of this need is the awareness of phenomena that cannot be accommodated by our senses or cognition, they exceed our competence to understand and thereby create a sense of inferiority. The need to know is progressively energized by affect that is recruited by real or perceived urgency. This involves it intimately with the neuroendocrine stress system, the source of emotions.
Cause and effect relationships are the building blocks of the narratives –stories– that affect if not direct our behavior. As such, an adaptive tool, to be most useful, the story should be built of valid (veridical) phenomena. And should be reliable (consistently manifest). These are qualities which can be tested or taken on faith. Our confidence in the narrative is important to its utility and can vary with the qualities of validity and reliability. Narratives in which we are VERY confident are regarded as TRUTH.”
Conscious awareness of an inadequate cognitive competence invites the engagement of NON-CONSCIOUS COGNITION, the “FORCE,” the transpersonal consciousness, the transcendental … on the other hand, “the best things can’t be told…”
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MYSTERY
Mystery invokes the need-to-know. In all organisms, real or perceived needs evoke coping mechanisms. These mechanisms are highly adaptive and range in function from maintenance of an organism’s physiological stability through providing competitive advantages that serve its inclusive fitness. Among these mechanisms, our individual and collective efforts to understand the causes and consequences of phenomena in the world are arguably among our most potent adaptive advantages.
Listen to Iris DeMent’s version of “Let the Mystery Be”
We can also argue that the attempt to understand may be more important than understanding itself: a key lesson of evolutionary biology is that the ability to survive and prosper is a matter of being better than a competitor, not perfect ! Adaptive behavior in higher organisms involves fluent interactions between areas of the nervous system specialized for acting on the basis of established, ongoing, and prospective scenarios. This behavior engages relatively fixed intrinsic or congenital mechanisms (such as reflexes), relatively flexible acquired mechanisms (such as habits and learning), and their imaginative reconfiguration in the light of new or anticipated circumstances (creativity, invention).
The orchestration of the relative influences of these massively interconnected parts of the nervous system that deploy these behavioral control mechanisms is an ongoing activity. In one variant of the orchestration, we experience INTUITION, involving more-or-less conscious access to nonconscious resources.
While CONSCIOUSNESS of one’s SELF is only one of a multitude of states of consciousness and focuses on only one dimension of being, a sense of one’s self may manifest the fullest expression of the intuitive project.
Consciousness and Creativity from the perspective of DEEP ETHOLOGY [link needs repair]
CONSCIOUSNESS –the higher levels of organization of COGNITION
“human cognition involves . . . many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of internal cognitive “spaces,” each of which provides a proprietary canvas on which some aspect of human cognition is continually unfolding.” (Churchland, 2002; quoted by Greenberg 2019)
But these can go awry: There exists in the mind “a multiplicity of functional systems that are hierarchically organized but can become dissociated from one another” (Ernest Hilgard 1977:17) (ER Hilgard Divided Consciousness: Multiple Control in Human Action and Thought. Wile, NY – cited by 1997:75)
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“Most of us consider consciousness threatening because our usual methods of understanding run out of steam,” according to Colin McGinn (in his essay review of John R. Searle — “Can we ever understand consciousness?” 1999. NYRB June 10:44-48) BUT we need to start someplace!! What is Consciousness? [more link needs repair ]
| THE BRAIN “multitasks” –lots of things go on simultaneously –and often compete with each other for control of behavior. Surely you have had almost debilitating episodes of being unable to “make up your mind?” There always seems to be multiple explanations for phenomena — which shall you select? why that one? What about intuition? |
intuition link needs repair |
Actually, what is intuition?? [A&O on INTUITION … more – link needs repair].
| THE MIND’s MULTIPLE STREAMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS at least affect each other and are often in competition. Mental contents then become consciousness “by winning the competitions against other mental contents for domination in the control of behavior . . .” and in the competition for domination, access to language centers is a distinct advantage (Daniel C. Dennett. 1996. Kinds of Minds. Basic Books. p.155). The end result is the familiar insight that we create ourselves –a kind of biological medium is the message. (Summarized from the 1986 Tucson conference, “Towards a Science of Consciousness”).
The stream of consciousness is really a cascade of multiple interacting streams:
But what does “stream of consciousness” mean in literature? [more – link needs repair ]
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| . | STATES and PHENOMENA of CONSCIOUSNESS [links need repair] | |||
| ROUTINE | EXPANDED | ANOMALIES | ||
| DUALITIES of CONSCIOUSNESS | ||||
| EXPRESSED
affect and cognitive link needs repair | IMPLICIT
CHANGE link needs repair | RECONCILED
“unity” link needs repair | ||
Consider:
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Archived Presentation:
* “There is a mode of vital experience‑‑experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils‑‑that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience “modernity.” To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world‑‑and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, “all that is solid melts into air.” (Berman, Marshall. (1982) All That is Solid Melts into Air. Simon and Schuster, N.Y. 384 pp.)
[i]. Albert Einstein in Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium (1941) ch. 13) also quoted by Sam Hurts in AA God Hypothesis,@ Oak Ridge Forum on Science and Religion [http://www.oakridgefrs.net/godhypothesis.html] Jan 4, 2005)
[i]. Truth of Coherence: There is an important sense in which we are “prepared” to behave a certain way or believe a certain thing: it coheres, a new belief is found to be so consilient or consonant with what we have already learned that it supports or strengthens or fully realizes that constellation of ideas. Russell’s quotes help support this case (Bertrand Russell, from his “Roads to Freedom” an e-mail contribution to SciPan by Sue Williams <[email protected]> Mon, 20 Sep 1999 12:40:26 +0200; Re: Our DNA and the need for religion….)