Biology and Metaphysics

Again, thinking about nature & stuff: how do biology & sociology differ? On the one hand, there seem to be conflicts and divergences between them. Let us take standards of beauty. To some extent, these are given to us biologically. We are hard-wired to find certain features attractive. Those who are attracted to females like human female breasts and are not looking for peacock tails instead. But at the same time, society can work with that and present differing ideals of beauty. Sometimes these even conflict. The American obsession with thin women goes against what seems to be a overall global trend, which is about 20 lbs heavier (or so I remember from an undergrad psych class. If anyone has the actual scientific data on hand to back this up, that would be appreciated, but the whole point of my writing a blog instead of a journal article is that I don't feel like looking that up to have a chat :p .) On top of that, it would seem that sociology could in turn affect biology: sociological constraints give new standards of fitness for evolution.

But at the same time, sociology is biology.¹ Even as we can talk about these conflicts in ideals of beauty, these conflicts are differing parts of biology. We are social beings by nature, and the social dimensions of beauty and sexuality are written into our genes.

So there is a sense in which it is all biology which is interacting with itself. Some biological features develop and turn around to influence the features already there; some of which gave rise to the "higher order" features in the first place. This feedback loop creates the domain of sociology, which has its own principles and objects as distinct from bilogoy, even though it is also explained by biology.

This seems to be what is going on with the Neoplatonic principle of emanation. There are higher orders of reality, more "real" levels, that give rise to lower levels of reality.² The lower levels, though, do really exist in their own way. (Some indian philosophy has similar stuff, but there seems to be less value give to these lower levels, to the point that they are all equally "mâyâ" or play/illusion.)

There is a possible study of societies as such. But at the same time, sociology is an "emanation" of biology (as chemistry is of physics and biology of chemistry). Similarly, the search for a Grand Unifying Theoroy of Physics would be a search of a originary principle, motion, force, or whatnot, from which the other features of the physical universe emanate;³ that is, whatever the originary principle is, it is a dynamic one which interacts with itself. Considered as itself alone, it is one. Considered as interacting with itself, as "stumbling as from a drunken slumber" as Plotinus describes the descent of Being from the One, it is regarded as multiple forces, and ultimately as the innermost essence of every existing thing.

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¹ Which is not necessarily to say that human nature is reducible to biology - that is a separate question. But it would seem that, insofar as societies can be studied scientifically and as mired in natural causes, it produced by biology. But if you still don't like this, than take physics and chemistry for the illustration instead.

² One might argue that Neoplatonism would go in the opposite direction, however - from the wholes to the parts. One admittedly cannot simply assume Proclus' entire metaphysical scheme and apply it to modern science. However, if we look at physics as describing the fundamental principles of the world, and so that which unifies it the most, instead of as all the quintillions of atoms rushing around forming everything, there is something to be said for a Neo-Neoplatonism.

³ I have been going through easy examples, in which we merely have concentric circles: physics emanates chemistry, which emanates biology, which emanates sociology. Of course, it could be (and probably is) more complicated. For example, at least restricting ourselves to scientific psychology (which is not in itself a slam against other types), biology would then give rise to psychology, which together with biology would give rise to sociology, or something like that (insofar as there are features of society which are not mediated by direct mental processes).⁴

⁴ Now, where would consciousness fit in? We can see how chemical rules follow from physical ones, and can have an inkling of how sociology follows from biology. However, it is hard to see how consciousness would follow from biology or whatnot except insofar as the latter provides a suitable base of neurons (and by "hard to see," I mean that I don't feel like going through the arguments right now, but I have them). In other words, biology provides the material and formal causes for sociology, but only the material causes for consciousness. It might be that the elusiveness of any Grand Unifying Theory is that such theory does not merely provide unify physics, but would also explain other features of the world; in other words, it would always be underdetermined by purely physical data. This is mere speculation, but it does present a possibility, akin to Spinoza's God.

Religious Dialogue and Dissertation Topics

I've been thinking over a couple of dissertation topics which my advisor has been throwing my way. The first one would give me a solid grounding in history of philosophy and experience in Greek, Latin, and Arabic. If you don't want the details, skip down to the next paragraph. It would be a study of secondary causation of God's knowledge through Proclus (5th century Neoplatonist, held that the One emanates out the world in a dizzying array of steps to account for multiplicity) and Dionysius (likely 5th-6th century Syrian monk heavily influenced by Neoplatonism; made God the direct cause of all the things Proclus split up), al-Kindi (9th century Arabian philosopher, instrumental in having works translated from Greek and Syriac, including a paraphrase of Plotinus which became known as "The Theology of Aristotle", and who held that God is the only literal agent), Ibn Sina/Avicenna (10th-11th century Persian philosopher, held that God only knows universals and that the world emanates from God in a set of stages), Ibn Rushd/Averroes (12th century Andalusian philosopher, held that God knows things as their cause), and finally the 13th century Christian philosopher and theologian Aquinas, who held that God knows everything directly as their act of being, and who seems to develop this view while working through Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd. A possible conclusion would go on through to the 14th century with Scotus and Ockham, and where this focus on the individual might end up.

But I'm not sure that I'm going in that direction; it'll be a good stuff for papers, but the second idea grabbed my interest more: the epistemology of religious dialogue. It exciting me to think that I might be able to go back to doing some contemporary stuff. I can do the historical stuff well, and I always want to keep one foot in it since I still think that that is where some of the best philosophy has been done, but I want to create, to be active, to do more than sitting over texts. I don't have the attention span to be a full-time scholar, if nothing else.

So, what would be the basic problematic? On the one extreme, we have groups who engage in some sort of dialogue, but who refuse to budge. The lines have been drawn, the communities have been fixed, and now the task is to refine their own views and to figure out how to live with the either group in the political arena. For this reason, I consider this to be merely political dialogue; the religious issues would only be brought up insofar as they are relevant to how we live together without changing too much. There is a place for this too, but I do not think that it is genuine religious dialogue. I think that Plantinga' basic belief arguments would end up here, if there were to work at all.

The other extreme is pluralism. Religious pluralism might try to circumvent the issue, by saying (to put it simplistically) that we're already agreeing on the important aspects. But this is one view among others, not one view encapsulating others, and so must join the dialogue as an alternative religious vision. Pluralism still would make sense: it would still be a rejection of any overly particular claims to special revelation while an acknowledgment of a spiritual reality which has bee explored by thinkers across traditions. But that doesn't solve the problem of dialogue.

So, where does that leave us? Religious dialogue, it seems to me, must leave one open to the dialogue partner. One must be able to come to the partner expecting to hear something one does not yet understand. And this seems to me to mean that, in any genuine religious dialogue, the possibility for self-conversion must be present. This is not the necessity of conversion, or even the probability, but I must always leave it the possibility open that I may hear something new which could convince me. Otherwise, to have closed the possibility, is to have predetermined what I can hear from the partner.

But now we get to what is really tricky. Religious beliefs depend a great deal upon testimony, whether from divine revelations, the primordial sounds of the universe, or from enlightened humans who realized something we are not likely to catch on our own. If any of these form of revelation are true, it is likely that there are true things about the world for which I must really upon testimony. And so, in religious dialogue, there will be a tension: one the one hand, I must leave myself open to the possibility of self-conversion, or else it is not dialogue; one the other hand, both of us hold to a possible truth that transcends us and our ways of knowing, and for which we rely on the testimony and experience of others, which we do not give up simply because we here one thing that contradicts it. Given this tension, how does the epistemology of religious dialogue work?

If I were to go this route, I would like to spend most of my time in concrete studies. One direction I could take it would be an analysis of historical Muslim inter-religious contexts, in line with my interest in Arabic thought. There's Andalusia, with its mix of Christians, Jews, and Muslims; there's the Mughal empire in India and the different ways in which Muslims and Hindus interacted; then there's Muslim appropriations of Confucianism over in China. It's just a thought, right now, but it would be nice to get back into my interest in world religions through my graduate studies.