An Appendix: Logos vs Mythos

This post is an appendix to The Next Great Revolution in Reality. Also, please read the first part of this post for more thoughts on the role myth has to play on forward-looking thinkers:

Since this post was originally written I have come to realise the true significance of the two main modes of thought expressed therein. The mythos of religious belief has, over the past few centuries, become prey to the savage logos of scientific rationalism.

I come to the words of Karen Armstrong, in her epic, pocket-sized title 'A Short History of Myth' to elaborate this point further:

Scientific logos and myth were becoming incompatible. Hitherto science had been conducted within a comprehensive mythology that explained its significance. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-62), a deeply religious man, was filled with horror when he contemplated the 'eternal silence' of the infinite universe opened up by modern science.

When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as thought lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, now what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does no drive people to despair.

This type of alienation has also been part of the modern experience...

...Mythical thinking and practice had helped people to face the prospect of extinction and nothingness, and to come through it with a degree of acceptance. Without this discipline, it has been difficult for many to avoid despair. The Twentieth Century presented us with one nihilistic icon after another, and many of the extravagant hopes of modernity and the Enlightenment were shown to be false...

...Logos has in many ways transformed our lives for the better, but this has not been an unmitigated triumph. Our demythologised world is very comfortable for many of us who are fortunate enough to live in first-world countries, but it is not the earthly paradise predicted by Bacon and Locke. When we contemplate the dark epiphanies of the twentieth century, we see that modern anxiety is not simply the result of self-indulgent neurosis. We are facing something unprecedented. Our societies saw death as a transition to other modes of being. They did not nurture simplistic and vulgar ideas of an afterlife, but devised rites and myths that helped people to face the unspeakable. In no other culture would anybody settle down in the middle of a rite of passage or an initiation, with the horror unresolved. But this is what we have to do in the absence of a viable mythology. There is a moving and even heroic asceticism in the current rejection of myth. But purely linear, logical and historical modes of thought have debarred many of us from therapies and devices that have enabled men and women to draw on the full resources of their humanity in order to live the unacceptable.

We must disabuse ourselves of the nineteenth century fallacy that myth is false or that it represents an inferior mode of thought. We cannot completely recreate ourselves, cancel out the rational bias of our education, and return to pre-modern sensibility. But we can acquire a more educated attitude to mythology. We are myth-making creatures and, during the twentieth century, we saw some very destructive modern myths... We cannot counter these bad myths with reason alone, because undiluted logos cannot deal with such deep-rooted, unexercised fears, desires and neuroses. That is the role of an ethically and spiritually informed mythology.

Uniting these two modes of thought is akin to solving the mind/body problem, combining modernism with postmodernism and making the Newtonian and Quantum universes compatiable all at once! Yet, who can deny that there is something fundamental missing from a completely rational understanding of reality?

Of course the obvious answers that surface are usually:

"A scientific view of the world is my spirituality."

or

"Buddhist meditation is compatiable with science."

But these responses kind of miss the point. The role of myth is as a mode of thinking. Mythos and Logos represent the two ways we interact with the universe. At the moment many of us seem to be missing half the picture, and even those who do aspire to having a spiritual aspect to their thought end up viewing their 'myth' with Logos tinted spectacles. For example, being convinced that Jesus actually rose to heaven misses the mythological component of his story - again, in the words of Karen Armstrong:

A myth was an event which in some sense had happened once, but which also happened all the time.

Jesus as mythos is a constant affirmation of the cycles of death and rebirth which occur in each one of us every day of our lives. Surely a much more significant truth than any historically understood figure who got crucified for saying nice things about people.

How can we reclaim our mythos?

Sun, Jan 13, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: consciousness, future, evolution, Philosophy, thought, human, religion, Science, Ideas, culture, progress, myth, history, mythos, logos

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The Next Great Revolution in Reality

This post was originally composed for my blog and published many moons ago. Since its conception my position on the three movements of thought outlined below has evolved considerably. To reflect this I have also posted an appendix here. Please do not overlook the original post for the wonderful insights of its commenters.

I hope you enjoy this experiment in thought:

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According to Freud there have been three great scientific revolutions that completely re-drew the boundaries which border human reality:

• Copernican: Where our geocentric perspective of the cosmos was revolutionised by the concept of the human world, the Earth, as being one mere weave within the infinite cosmic tapestry of creation.
• Darwinian: Where our view of man as the pinnacle of God's reality was overthrown by the idea that life evolved from nothing. The revolution in which our egocentric universe was crushed under the image of mankind as 'mere' hairless, ape descendants.
• Freudian/Psychological: Where the self which governs all action within our minds was displaced by the notion of the unconscious. The control we perceive as consciousness is nothing but waves lapping on the shores of the innumerable archipelagos of reality the brain rules over.
  

Each of these revolutions was to displace mankind as centre of our world and thus humiliate our egocentric position. Yet, parodoxical as it may seem, these scientific upheavals have increased our intimacy with reality, adding meaning to our existence without invoking religion.

We are but one species amongst millions of mutation-governed organisms, ruled over by the nature of brains we have little understanding of and cast on our single planet afloat an infinite cosmological sea. Each shift exposing a deeper purpose, without God; each individual note when composed together dictates the flowing melody that is our existence.

I believe it is only a matter of time before the next great revolution in science; in reality arrives on our doorsteps. A shift in perspective that attains equal scientific, social and theological significance as the ones outlined above. Once again, this revolution will alter the nature of reality, as perceived by us, at the most fundamental level. So I ask you...

What will it be? Has it already begun? And finally, will religion still be able to find a foothold on the human psyche once it has happened?

Let your Earth-bound, ape-evolved, unconscious imaginations go wild on this one...

(The appendix for this post, and a question in its own right, can be viewed here...)

Thu, Jan 10, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: consciousness, future, evolution, Philosophy, thought, human, religion, Science, Ideas, culture, progress, myth, history

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Perceiving Infinity: Schematic Portals into The Mind of God

Infinity defies absolute definition. Perception of the infinite, for anything other than a mind which is itself infinitely composed, is an oxymoron. And yet, in historical conceptions of the infinite, or at least the imperceptibly extended, can be found abstract tools by which to better comprehend the very nature of thought, and thus reality itself.

The idea of infinity can lead you to grasp the mind of God.

Let me show you:

In Islamic tradition:

When Mahomet was transported to heaven, he says: I saw there an angel, the most gigantic of all created beings. It had 70,000 heads, each had 70,000 faces, each face had 70,000 mouths, each mouth had 70,000 tongues, and each tongue spoke 70,000 languages; all were employed in singing God's praises.

This would make more than 31,000 trillion languages, and nearly five billion mouths. - link

In Hindu tradition:

A kalpa consists of a period of 1,728,000 solar years called Adi Sandhi, followed by 14 manvantaras and Sandhi Kalas...

Thus a day of Brahma, kalpa, is of duration: 4.32 billion solar years.

Two kalpas constitute a day and night of Brahma; the life cycle of Brahma is one hundred years of Brahma, or 311 trillion years. We are currently in the 51st year of the present Brahma and so about 155 trillion years have elapsed since He took over as Brahma. - link

I find these mythologies fascinating because of the way they manipulate the schema of infinity (or the excruciatingly large) to evoke a sense of awe. What is telling here, and in more familiar concepts such as the omnipotent, omniscient Judaeo-Christian God, is how the human mind absolves itself from ever accessing these infinities whilst at the same time invoking that sense of awe as reason to believe in the infinite:

By the name God I understand a substance that is infinite (eternal, immutable,) independent, all-knowing, all-powerful, and by which I myself and everything else, if anything else does exist, have been created. Now all these characteristics are such that the more diligently I attend to them, the less do they appear capable of proceeding from me alone; hence, ... we must conclude that God necessarily exists.

- Rene Descartes, Meditations

The logical error here rests on the premise that Descartes is capable of attaining access to 'God's perfect form'. The very idea of infinity, or breadth therein contained, is nothing but a schematic simulacrum of the true form of infinity. The mind IS NOT capable of perceiving the infinite, yet I think in conjunction with semiotics a clearer path to infinity can be reached.

In this perceived moment, itself a composite whole made of an infinite number of infinitesimal components, there is the potential in your consciousness for an infinite number of conciliations to occur. The universe of form is, in mind, schematic and transitory. It is the method by which form is assimilated into mental schema which manifests the universe so true. The infinite universe infinitely schematised:

[An] aspect of consciousness I wish to mention here is modeled upon a behavioral process common to most mammals. It really springs from simple recognition, where a slightly ambiguous perceived object is made to conform to some previously learned schema, an automatic process sometimes called assimilation. We assimilate a new stimulus into our conception or schema about it, even though it is slightly different. Since we never from moment to moment see or hear or touch things in exactly the same way, this process of assimilation into previous experience is going on all the time as we perceive our world. We are putting things together in recognizable objects on the basis of the previously learned schemes we have of them...

- Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness...

In this conception of consciously formed reality finite limits on the nature of our schema halt the further assimilation of external stimulus. Thus all subjective representations of the objective universe can only ever go part of the way to attaining a true tautology of semblance. In a universe of varying types of consciousness, as evolved in the various central nervous systems on this planet, this problem of semblance can be some way overcome. Distinct consciousnesses will form different schema to represent the same stimulus. The universe is better realised in many consciousnesses, of which perhaps an infinite variety have the capacity to exist:

Consciousness is "a holistic emergent property of the interaction of neurons which has the power to be self-reflective and ascertain its own awareness"

- Max Velmans, Understanding Consciousness

I am still left wondering about true infinity, at least that which consciousness can attain. What would be the nature of a stimulus which had the capacity to assimilate an endless variety of schema? Or alternatively, is there such thing as a mental construct, a concept, which has no limit to the stimulus it can assimilate? Perhaps the mind of God is capable in its imagined brevity to perceive every objective truth from an infinity of angles. In fact, this need necessarily be the case for any infinitely capable being, such as God. To this kind of consciousness even the proverbial dog shit you carry around on your shoes has an infinite number of ways it can be perceived.

Further still, I was lead into thought on matters of entropy (not least because of this forum post). The black-hole is nature's favourite point of infinity. All data in the universe, once subsumed by the awesome gravity of the black-hole, would come to be represented at a singular point of infinitesimal breadth; a singularity. The mind of God may be such an entity, for in its infinite density of assimilative capacity the only form it could take is that of a singularity.

Not only is a black-hole, and now perhaps the mind of God, a singularity of infinite density, so too was the very universe we now reside in at the momentary point when nothing became everything: the big-bang:

If the singularity at the centre of a black hole lies in the future, representing a final state, the singularity of a white hole lies in the past, as a beginning, as in the big bang. So if our universe is a white hole, the big question is: is there a black hole universe on the other side of the big bang?

- Mikio Kaku, Parallel Worlds

Or perhaps (to assimilate both mine and Kaku's concepts into one, infinitely schematised entity) the mind of God itself exists on the other side of this universe. A mind so dense in assimilatory power that all concepts, all datum, all matter and entropically governed consciousness converge at a point only to be spewed majesically out the other side, into this reality.

The conscious mind is a schematic canvas on which subjective reality is being painted by the infinite, yet unattainable, idea of God. The cyclical power of assimilation, of consciousness, or self-reflexion should not be overlooked, because in the evolved mind of all conscious beings everywhere the idea of infinity, and the God-Simulacrum therein made prisoner, reorders reality such that it can reflect upon itself. Infinity is coming to perceive itself through us. All minds are infinite, my schema tell me so...

(This article was originally posted on my site, The Huge Entity)

See also:

• On the Nature of Seeing and The Act of Creation
• Pi Transcendence, Conscious Assimilation and the Quest for the Ultimate Metaphor
• Art, Technology and the Progressive Hand of Human Imagination

Thu, Jan 3, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: evolution, universe, Philosophy, physics, reality, perception, singularity, Science, Consciousness, Maths, Ideas, God, Simulacrum, History, Language, Human, Religion, Books, Quotes

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