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Humanity is on a journey. There may be no answer to the question of why we embarked on this journey to self awareness, but we do know to some extent what came before. Man before technology, like our pre-human cousins share a lot with each other and to different degrees with all related organisms. This observation can be made detailed in the biological sciences. Genetically we share a lot with yeast as compared with simpler micro-organisms. The central questions of this book revolve around the fact that we only recently come to know all of this in any deep way and that the accumulated practical effects of this knowledge place us at a certain crossroads of history. Wisdom is in the title not because the book makes any claim to contain great wisdom but to call into question the value of qualities like intelligence and knowledge vs. wisdom, whatever that might be. Wisdom must be more that simply anticipatory. We'll have to cover a lot of ground about how we come to have knowledge of objective reality before we can understand what this means. We will see how there is a great abyss between what we can have knowledge of and what is possible. Living systems and even complex automatons can be shown to be beyond analysis in important ways, and therefore they can exhibit powers that are magical in the sense of being beyond analysis, but not in the sense that require the intervention of gods or spirits in the normal causal flow. Of course, we will have to take it on faith that the gods do not intervene as it is impossible to prove either way.
In the end we need a ground for discovering the open future in which wisdom can fully flower. Securing the future is much more than knowing what is coming, but more importantly being able to make good collective decisions. Plato suggested we should have philosopher kings running the show, which might be a good idea if you could come up with a workable selection process that could guarantee the necessary qualities of experience and wisdom in sufficient quantity. If wisdom is something like being able to make the decision that you would make based on being able to know the outcome we would need to know the outcomes for all the paths not followed, and knowing the outcomes, how do we even compare? Is wisdom being concerned about other species becoming extinct and the environment threatened based solely onself-interestself-interest, or must it also include compassion for all of our fellow living beings?
There are furtherdifficulties,difficulties. For instance, if we are only recently self-aware, our emergence can be little more than a cosmic accident. Can there be a wisdom of Gaia that guides the longlong-term term development of the living Earth that knew that the age of the dinosaurs had to end in order for mammals and eventually humans to emerge? Wisdom is realizing that even though such questions can never be answered definitively, that the ways we have answered it throughout history and in oral culturestraditions beforedating back from pre-history are not wrong for having used magical explanations for the parts they could not understand. It is just that the modern analytic tradition often chooses to ignore the bits of their theory that amount otto little more than hand-waving. Is the best explanation regarding some deep theory of the emergence of intelligence and maybe even wisdom,wisdom or a variation of intelligent design or anthropic principle? I'm inclined to look for wisdom in the origin stories and epistemic traditions of all ages and to respect the insight of artists and mystics as deeply as we should withthe insights provided by math and science.
One of the broad arcs that will develop is about Plato and idealism and how it continues in the clockwork universe models inspired by Descarte and later the logical positivists. Although we owe a great many debts to Plato and the Greeks for making some of the most important early steps on the journey, there are some deep problems with philosophies descended from them. There is a kind of fundamentalism in maintaining that ideas and geometric forms are more basic to reality than experience. It is ironic that science only really takes off when working scientists are able to go beyond what is conventional and given by a pre-existing understanding and to trust only experience and measurement.
Along the way, we will see how the pragmatists starting with Pierce and continuing with Lewis give a much better account than simple idealism. Idealists right down to the logical positivists are always overly optimistic about the potential applicability and effectiveness of their methods. Solve some simple math problems and you can calculate the world equation that will exactly map the future faithfully and fatefully. The pragmatists don't make the mistake of confusing their models with the world as given. Ideas and formalisms are important because they are important to our minds, to our ways of knowing and interpreting the world. That the formalisms (maths) we discover turn out to be useful in understanding and predicting the world, and gaining fine control over the material conditions of our lives follows from its pragmatic methods. The effectiveness of formal methods in working out practical consequences is undeniable, but just as undeniable is that the abyss beyond the knowable is itself unknowable and vast.
The worst of logical positivism becomes a kind of fundamentalism that cannot stand and leads to errors of logic at the deepest levels. to say that the given is beyond formalism is not to invoke a god of the gaps or other magical explaination. It is the conjecture of science there is no need for any hypothesis invoking god as an explaination, but even if true it does not rule out God's existence.
Technology considered historically is the subject of material culture in the field of anthropology. We can be characterized by this as the technological animal. You could point to our language as the unique characteristic, but it is clear that technology and language are linked capacities even if you consider them distinct as language could be seen as our first technology. In this book, we will trace the path of parts of the journey, often in ways that are more poetic and synthetic than scientific and analytic. The most interesting and crucial parts of the journey involve questions of how we know about the world. We notice that we are at a point in this journey where we are just discovering most of what we know.
The analytic approach to knowing that is so successful in both expanding the frontier of what we know, and in giving us technological wonders in a rapidly changing material culture that it is recent in a way that is independent of scale. Whether we look at decades, centuries, millinnia, we see the same thing; look back one or two units at a given scale and you will see that now is really different than before. This could be an illusion of perspective obliquely related to some form of anthropic principle, but we can test that. If we go back 1000 years, we see a lot of change, even catastrophic change over years and decades, but the material culture was not changing like it is now. My grandfather told us stories of the first car coming to town, and commercial jet travel evolved from having no technology for flight at all in his lifetime.
The authors of Genesis capture this pretty well in the story about the garden. Man, in a state of nature, like his great ape cousins and other close relatives found in the fossil record is <i>in the garden</i> in ecstatic union with his environment. Prior to the fall from grace so conveniently blamed on Eve, what came before is animal intelligence built on genetic intelligence. These are the grounds for all the presumably uniquely human forms of knowing, awareness and even wisdom. This foundation is deep and wide, and, leaving aside the atheist/theist debates, the reality of what we can observe is simply awe inspiring. Clearly the living systems of the earth got on for billions of years without this feature of mankind, so it isn't completely clear what we are needed for.
Several arcs will wind their way through this book as most of it will be about human language, culture and technology in order to focus on the opportunities and risks posed by the development of a technological species.
When did we start telling creation stories?
Arcs, knowledge/wisdom
Limits of knowledge, from Plato to Logical Positivism: Failure (general) and success (limited)
Beyond the limits: not all schools of wisdom are thus limited, what else can we know and how do we know it?
The past and the future: On being pragmatic: How should one evaluate consequences
In the end we need a ground for discovering the open future in which wisdom can fully flower. Securing the future is much more than knowing what is coming, but more importantly being able to make good collective decisions. Plato suggested we should have philosopher kings running the show, which might be a good idea if you could come up with a workable selection process that could guarantee the necessary qualities of experience and wisdom in sufficient quantity. If wisdom is something like being able to make the decision that you would make based on being able to know the outcome we would need to know the outcomes for all the paths not followed, and knowing the outcomes, how do we even compare? Is wisdom being concerned about other species becoming extinct and the environment threatened based solely on
There are further
One of the broad arcs that will develop is about Plato and idealism and how it continues in the clockwork universe models inspired by Descarte and later the logical positivists. Although we owe a great many debts to Plato and the Greeks for making some of the most important early steps on the journey, there are some deep problems with philosophies descended from them. There is a kind of fundamentalism in maintaining that ideas and geometric forms are more basic to reality than experience. It is ironic that science only really takes off when working scientists are able to go beyond what is conventional and given by a pre-existing understanding and to trust only experience and measurement.
Along the way, we will see how the pragmatists starting with Pierce and continuing with Lewis give a much better account than simple idealism. Idealists right down to the logical positivists are always overly optimistic about the potential applicability and effectiveness of their methods. Solve some simple math problems and you can calculate the world equation that will exactly map the future faithfully and fatefully. The pragmatists don't make the mistake of confusing their models with the world as given. Ideas and formalisms are important because they are important to our minds, to our ways of knowing and interpreting the world. That the formalisms (maths) we discover turn out to be useful in understanding and predicting the world, and gaining fine control over the material conditions of our lives follows from its pragmatic methods. The effectiveness of formal methods in working out practical consequences is undeniable, but just as undeniable is that the abyss beyond the knowable is itself unknowable and vast.
The worst of logical positivism becomes a kind of fundamentalism that cannot stand and leads to errors of logic at the deepest levels. to say that the given is beyond formalism is not to invoke a god of the gaps or other magical explaination. It is the conjecture of science there is no need for any hypothesis invoking god as an explaination, but even if true it does not rule out God's existence.
Technology considered historically is the subject of material culture in the field of anthropology. We can be characterized by this as the technological animal. You could point to our language as the unique characteristic, but it is clear that technology and language are linked capacities even if you consider them distinct as language could be seen as our first technology. In this book, we will trace the path of parts of the journey, often in ways that are more poetic and synthetic than scientific and analytic. The most interesting and crucial parts of the journey involve questions of how we know about the world. We notice that we are at a point in this journey where we are just discovering most of what we know.
The analytic approach to knowing that is so successful in both expanding the frontier of what we know, and in giving us technological wonders in a rapidly changing material culture that it is recent in a way that is independent of scale. Whether we look at decades, centuries, millinnia, we see the same thing; look back one or two units at a given scale and you will see that now is really different than before. This could be an illusion of perspective obliquely related to some form of anthropic principle, but we can test that. If we go back 1000 years, we see a lot of change, even catastrophic change over years and decades, but the material culture was not changing like it is now. My grandfather told us stories of the first car coming to town, and commercial jet travel evolved from having no technology for flight at all in his lifetime.
The authors of Genesis capture this pretty well in the story about the garden. Man, in a state of nature, like his great ape cousins and other close relatives found in the fossil record is <i>in the garden</i> in ecstatic union with his environment. Prior to the fall from grace so conveniently blamed on Eve, what came before is animal intelligence built on genetic intelligence. These are the grounds for all the presumably uniquely human forms of knowing, awareness and even wisdom. This foundation is deep and wide, and, leaving aside the atheist/theist debates, the reality of what we can observe is simply awe inspiring. Clearly the living systems of the earth got on for billions of years without this feature of mankind, so it isn't completely clear what we are needed for.
Several arcs will wind their way through this book as most of it will be about human language, culture and technology in order to focus on the opportunities and risks posed by the development of a technological species.
When did we start telling creation stories?
Arcs, knowledge/wisdom
Limits of knowledge, from Plato to Logical Positivism: Failure (general) and success (limited)
Beyond the limits: not all schools of wisdom are thus limited, what else can we know and how do we know it?
The past and the future: On being pragmatic: How should one evaluate consequences