In Search of Martin Buber (I)

Last night I awoke out of a deep sleep to a pre-dawn awareness that what I am presently in search of is spirituality, even more than religion.

Martin Buber's I and Thou

I immediately saw that all my recent interest in such things as the philosophy of Martin Buber in his book I and Thou and the worldview of Carl Sagan in all his works points in that direction (see Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans and its eleven predecessors in my "Quickening to Qualia" series).

Yet I knew that the specific trigger was something I read in this news article in The (Baltimore) Sun. In a theater review of a one-man show about German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "who was hanged by the Nazis in 1945 for his participation in a plot to kill Adolf Hitler," came this clause:

[Bonhoeffer's] father, a psychiatrist, was "a cautious agnostic," and though his family was not particularly religious or political, they were spiritual.

On the face of it it seems odd, at least to me, to say that someone might be spiritual when he or she is not particularly religious. Even so, only a slight amount of reflection makes it clear that that is exactly what Carl Sagan was.

Carl Sagan's Contact

His television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage was a spiritual love letter to all that is or ever will be. In his science fiction novel Contact, Sagan included a scene (pp. 302-307) in which several of his leading characters, including the scientists Ellie and Vaygay, are to dine with a Zen Buddhist Abbot named Utsumi. Ellie, Vaygay, and the other scientists are involved in building a Machine for space travel to somewhere in the cosmos to meet with the source of the interstellar Message giving the instructions for its, the Machine's, construction. On the way to the restaurant to meet Utsumi, Ellie asks Vaygay if Buddhists believe in God. Vaygay quips, "Their position seems to be that their God is so great that he doesn't even have to exist."

Godless or not, Utsumi is spiritual. During a consideration of the Vegans' reasons for communicating with Earth, Utsumi says, "I believe that we communicate out of love and compassion. ... I can communicate with a flower. ... I can talk to a stone.

The "innocent, almost childlike" Utsumi adds, "To communicate with a stone, you must become much less ... preoccupied. You must not do so much thinking, so much talking. When I say I communicate with a stone, I am not talking about words. The Christians say, 'In the beginning was the Word.' But I am talking about a communication much earlier, much more fundamental than that. ... To understand the language of the ants, you must become an ant."

The scientists describe the language of ants as traces of chemicals laid down on a path taken to food. Utsumi chides them, "Probably, that is the only way you know to become an ant." He asks why the study of ants and is told that scientists take pleasure in the understanding of them. "That is only another way of saying that they love the ants," he says.


Phiosophical though Martin Buber's I and Thou may seem, it too is basically spiritual. "The true community," writes Buber (p. 45), for example, "does not arise through peoples having feelings for one another ... but through, first, their taking their stand in living mutual relation with a living Centre, and, second, their being in living mutual relationship with one another."

This is very much like the passage in the Gospels where Jesus tells of the so-called Great Commandment and its sequel:

One of the scribes, when he came forward and heard them disputing and saw how well he had answered them, asked him, "Which is the first of all the commandments?" Jesus replied, "The first is this: 'Hear O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these." The scribe said to him, "Well said, teacher. You are right in saying, 'He is One and there is no other than he.' And 'to love him with your heart, with all your understanding, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself' is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices." And when Jesus saw that he answered with understanding, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." And no one had the courage to ask him any more questions. (Mark 12:28-34)

Buber, in a passage devoted mainly to showing that our feelings or emotions are not themselves a spiritual guide, in fact restates the two commandments of Jesus in terms not of God but of a "living Centre," adding:

The second has its source in the first, but is not given when the first alone is given ... The community is built up out of living mutual relation, but the builder is the living effective Centre.

That "builder" equates to Jesus's God. The "living Centre" is Thou, in Buber's scheme of the duality of human attitudes not It. The life of the spirit, one of these two attitudes, is in the subjective relationship I–Thou, not the objectification and exploitation which he calls I–It.

Jesus's own spirituality, clearly, was that of an I–Thou relationship with his Father in Heaven. Ellie, Vaygay, and the other scientists take their journey into the heavens where Ellie encounters her beloved father, long since deceased. Only he's not really her father, he's a godlike extraterrestrial with the ability to look like anyone in the memory bank of Ellie, whose mind he has read. He and his intergalactic coalition are so technologically advanced they can recreate the cosmos. For all intents and purposes, Ellie's faux-Papa is just like Jesus's: God.

The watchword of Ellie's faux-Papa is "lovingkindness" ... as was Jesus's. A watchword of Martin Buber's Thou as an innate, inborn drive is "tenderness." We start life knowing we seek "lovingkindness" and "tenderness" in, eventually, a spiritual Father. That is the essence of our search for spirituality.

Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans (Q2Q XII)

To follow up on The Mind's Enigmas, the previous post in this "Quickening to Qualia" series: In that post I lauded the late Carl Sagan and his "dialogue" with the cosmos; he treated it with the respect due a Thou, not an It.

Carl Sagan's Contact

Sagan, who died in 1996, was a force behind the scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In Sagan's 1985 science fiction novel Contact, the earth in fact receives an intelligent signal from outer space. Ellie Arroway, the radio-astronomer who finds the signal, at one point tells her lover, the president's science adviser:

"The theologians seem to have recognized a special, nonrational — I wouldn't call it irrational — aspect of the feeling of sacred or holy. They call it ‘numinous.’ The term was first used by ... let’s see ... somebody named Rudolph Otto in a 1923 book, The Idea of the Holy. He believed that humans were predisposed to detect and revere the numinous. He called it the misterium tremendum. Even my Latin is good enough for that.

"In the presence of the misterium tremendum, people feel utterly insignificant but not personally alienated. He thought of the numinous as a thing 'wholly other,' and the human response to it as 'absolute astonishment.' Now, if that's what religious people talk about when they use words like sacred or holy, I'm with them. I felt something like that just in listening for a signal, never mind in actually receiving it. I think all of science elicits that sense of awe." (p. 153)

Rudolf Otto's's The Idea of the Holy

Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) was an eminent German theologian and scholar of comparative religion who published Das Heilige or The Idea of the Holy in, actually, 1917. (1923 may have been when an English translation appeared.) In it, Otto found that there was something "'extra' in the meaning of 'holy' above and beyond the meaning of goodness" (p. 6). This something beyond the purely rational he called numen, or the numinous.

The numinous was, Otto said, a mysterium tremendum, and also a mysterium fascinans. A discussion of his thought can be found in this online essay, "Otto on the Numinous."

Otto's idea of a mysterium tremendum has to do with a unique sort of sublime dread that makes us tremble before, and at the same time hallow, the source of all mystery. An albeit inadequate word for this experience is "daunting." "Awful" ("awe-full") is a word that gives us a true sense of the "majesty" that provokes such dread.

A mysterium fascinans is, however daunting and awe-full, one that is also entrancing, beguiling to us. The very same mystery that most cows us also "allures [us] with a potent charm" (p. 31). What most frightens us most fascinates us. What most fascinates us most frightnens us. Here is the real meaning of the expression "fear of God."


What if we could turn directly toward that fearful, majestic mystery and address it, quite familiarly, as Papa? That is exactly what Jesus did, though in his language the word was not Papa but Abba. Abba was how he spoke to his Father, the Lord God in Heaven.

In Carl Sagan's novel Contact, Ellie Arroway, the protagonist who is something between an agnostic and an atheist, experiences both fascination and fear as she is launched in a speed-of-light-surpassing space vehicle toward the source of the Message, which has shown earthlings how to build the vehicle and make the journey. At the other end of her outbound leg, the source of the Message appears to Ellie in the form of her own beloved father, long since dead. Again, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans ... as Papa.

In his PBS series Cosmos, Sagan is awestruck at the sheer majesty of the universe. It has been through his mastery of space science, the viewer may muse, that Sagan has earned the right to call the cosmos itself Papa. He is at one with all its vastness and grandeur, its encompassing alienness and yet its potential hospitability. He has achieved atonement (at-one-ment) with the existent that he treats as Father — and as Thou.

Opening the Atlas of the Soul

From The (Baltimore) Sun of Sunday, September 24, 2006: "Holy day rites of passage help us find meaning in our lives" is Arthur J. Magida's paean to the annual ritual celebrations that commemorate and revisit, for members of every religious faith, the "moment when we are brought into the fold, into the tent, into the wisdom and the practices and the duties of being a member of that faith."

The occasion for Magida is this year's beginning of the Jewish High Holidays that began at sundown last Friday and will run until Yom Kippur next Sunday. The overarching point is that every religion, every faith, has such rites of passage and ritual commemorations. Any such rite, Magida says, represents "elaborate theater that helps us traverse crucial episodes in our lives." Any one of them "transports and instructs, alleviating the confusion and uncertainty that are so much a part of life."

Atonement is basic to each rite. It is the "humbling confrontation of self and past" that serves as "a rehearsal for the competence and the general, all-around bravura we need to get through life, with all its disruptions and annoyances and exasperations." To Magida, author of the reecently released Opening the Doors of Wonder: Reflections on Religious Rites of Passage, "life is a series of hunches and guesses strung together into a story — our story: a story that's perplexing, charming, entertaining, confusing, confounding and, maybe best of all, thoroughly unexpected."

Each of us, says Magida, is a "story in the making, a splendid narrative still being told." Because "our tales have endings that we haven't quite figured out yet," we are in dialogue with our own life narratives. They are asking each of us, "Who are you? Where are you?"

"These are questions," writes Magida, "that the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber says are 'the beginning of the way. ... We can let God in only where we really stand, where we live, where we live a true life. If we maintain holy discourse with the little world entrusted to us ... then we are establishing, in this our place, the Divine Presence.'"

"Maps to ourselves" is what Magida calls these holy rituals. They are "an atlas of our soul." And:

They introduce us to a Presence; they introduce us to our self; and they remind us that our lives have the profound possibility of being more charged, more potent and more glorious, and carry far higher stakes, than we ordinarily suspect, especially when we are stuck in the everyday that so often overtakes us. Burning off the haze of the mundane and the ordinary, these days turn us toward the light — never blinding and always illuminating.

Is there anything in Magida's description that disqualifies it as a characterization of specifically Christian commemorations such as, say, Lent or Advent? Not at all, I would say. In fact, the most profound thing Magida says is, "Everyone, in every faith, approaches God in his own time and his own fashion."

The Baylor Religion Survey

The Baylor Religion Survey is an in-depth statistical analysis of Americans' beliefs and practices concerning God and religion, as determined by extensive 2005 polling data. The initial findings were published in September 2006 by the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. A Baylor University news article about the initial publication appears here. An independent news article about it may be read here, at the website of The (Baltimore) Sun.

The initial published report, American Piety in the 21st Century: New Insights to the Depths and Complexity of Religion in the U.S., can be downloaded in PDF form by visiting this page or more directly by clicking here. Many statistical details (but not all) are available here, at the Association of Religious Data Archives.

A blog post which questions some of the statistical methodology that was used can be read here, at the "Amor et Labor" blog of Kletos Sumbulos.


The initial finding that is supposedly most surprising to many observers is that Americans are more religious and less secular than other recent surveys have found:

Are Americans losing their religion? Prior national studies with questions on religion, such as the General Social Survey and National Election Study, show an increase in the percent of the population with no religion over the past quarter century ... This growth in “religious nones” is often used by academics and the press to indicate growing secularization in the United States. But are Americans really that detached from organized religion?

Most surveys determine the religious affiliation of respondents by asking them to select their religious family or denomination from a list. This has become increasingly problematic over the years as more and more Americans are losing a strong denominational identity. The rising number of non-denominational congregations as well as congregations that minimize their denominational ties compound the problem. The declining importance of denomination, however, does not mean that religion itself is on the wane. Rather, Americans may simply be more likely to connect with religion at the local level ... To detect religious affiliation today, it is time to look beyond denomination. In addition to presenting respondents with a standard list of denominations, the Baylor Religion Survey asks respondents to give the name and address of their place of worship. Combining these three measures of religious belonging enables us to more thoroughly and accurately sort persons into broader religious traditions.

This method finds that barely 1 in 10 Americans (10.8%) says he or she is not affiliated with a broad religious tradition, much less a specific denomination. Other recent surveys such as the General Social Survey and National Election Study have put the (apparently rising) unaffiliated figure about 3 percentage points higher.

Evangelical Protestant, Mainline Protestant, Catholic, Black Protestant, Jewish, or Other (mainly Buddhist, Christian Science, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [Mormon], Hindu, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslim, Orthodox [Eastern, Russian, Greek], and Unitarian Universalist were the broad traditions identified in the survey.

Only 5.2% of Americans emerge from the poll's questions as atheists who are "certain that God does not exist." The other unaffiliated respondents — a roughly equal number of them, in fact — apparently have some belief in a higher power, even if they do not identify with any broad religious tradition.


The survey result which I personally find most provacative is the "Four Gods" hypothesis. The researchers claim (pp. 26ff.) they were able to derive from the poll's responses four meaningful groupings of non-atheists:

1. Those who believe in an "Authoritarian God" (31.4%)
   
2. Those who believe in a "Benevolent God" (23%)
3. Those who believe in a "Critical God" (16%)
4. Those who believe in a "Distant God" (31.4%)

They labeled these believer groups, for obvious alphabetic reasons, Types A, B, C, and D. The four groups were in turn derived from two "clear and distinct dimensions of belief in God":

1. God’s level of engagement – the extent to which individuals believe that God is directly involved in worldly and personal affairs.
   
   
2. God’s level of anger – the extent to which individuals believe that God is angered by human sins and tends towards punishing, severe, and wrathful characteristics.

Here are more details on the four types:

• Type A: Authoritarian God: Individuals who believe in the Authoritarian God tend to think that God is highly involved in their daily lives and world affairs. They tend to believe that God helps them in their decision-making and is also responsible for global events such as economic upturns or tsunamis. They also tend to feel that God is quite angry and is capable of meting out punishment to those who are unfaithful or ungodly.
  
  
• Type B: Benevolent God: Like believers in the Authoritarian God, believers in a Benevolent God tend to think that God is very active in our daily lives. But these individuals are less likely to believe that God is angry and acts in wrathful ways. Instead, the Benevolent God is mainly a force of positive influence in the world and is less willing to condemn or punish individuals.
  
  
• Type C: Critical God: Believers in a Critical God feel that God really does not interact with the world. Nevertheless, God still observes the world and views the current state of the world unfavorably. These individuals feel that God’s displeasure will be felt in another life and that divine justice may not be of this world.
  
  
• Type D: Distant God: Believers in a Distant God think that God is not active in the world and not especially angry either. These individuals tend towards thinking about God as a cosmic force which set the laws of nature in motion. As such, God does not “do” things in the world and does not hold clear opinions about our activities or world events.

Type A ("Authoritarian God") is relatively big on both "engagement" and "anger." Type B ("Benevolent God") emphasizes "engagement" but minimizes "anger." Type C ("Critical God") de-emphasizes "engagement" with this world's affairs but attributes to a remote deity much "anger" at the way things are going. Type D ("Distant God") de-emphasizes both "engagement" and "anger."

This looks like a valuable contribution to the understanding of American religiosity, but a blog post which questions some of the methodology that was used to derive it can be read here, at the "Amor et Labor" blog of Kletos Sumbulos. The main complaint is that the questionnaire (which is shown at the end of the American Piety PDF) may have been constructed in such a way that the two reported dimensions of "engagement" and "anger" were bound to show up in the results with so-called statistical significance.


There are also worries about whether a "cluster analysis" would confirm the four belief types as being meaningfully separate from one another ... again, statistically speaking.

And in a comment I made to the post I said that, per a Wikipedia article on the statistical technique the survey used, called factor analysis: "Interpreting factor analysis is based on using a 'heuristic,' which is a solution that is 'convenient even if not absolutely true' ... More than one interpretation can be made of the same data factored the same way."

In other words, the "Four Gods" hypothesis may be more statistically "convenient" than "absolutely true."


Note also that there is no way to tell from the statistics given in the initial American Piety report how much, in believers' reported notions of God, God's "engagement" and "anger" pertain to the world's affairs in general, rather than the believers' own personal lives. The questionnaire does make such distinctions, but the "Four Gods" groupings do not.

Moreover, I see no way to tell whether respondents who feel God is, for example, "directly involved in my affairs" (see Question 22i) mean that God's personal involvement is at a subjective, spiritual level (as in "God comforts me" or "God seems to be silent when I pray to him") or at the level of objective events (as in "God didn't arrange for me to get the new job I wanted" or "Thanks to God, I finally found the right mate").

To me, that's a crucial distinction in believers' modes of piety. I, for instance, feel God is engaged with me and other believers at a personal, spiritual level but does not actually "make things happen" in the physical world ... or keep them from happening. I'm aware that other believers feel very strongly that God does exactly that. There's no apparent way to respond to the questions in the survey that would make such a distinction clear.

The Mind's Enigmas (Q2Q XI)

Throughout my "Quickening to Qualia" series (see "Thouness" and Self) I've made a case for a God with whom we can be in meaningful dialogue. I've based it upon a nonreligious, philosophical argument that consciousness arises out of our brain's complexity for ineffable reasons that can perhaps be best ascribed to a God-given law of nature.

Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works

Steven Pinker is not one who would embrace such a position. The professor of psychology and head of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT presents a range of other approaches to the mind's enigmas at the end of his excellent book How the Mind Works.

Pinker and I agree that consciousness, or sentience, defies explanation. Pinker deftly sets aside the other meanings of the word consciousness — self-knowledge and access to information. He then describes sentience as "subjective experience, phenomenal awareness, raw feels, first-person present tense, 'what it is like' to be or do something, if you have to ask you'll never know" (p. 135).

As I wrote in Water Into Wine, Pinker says that consciousness or sentience

has struck a great many thinkers as not just a problem but almost a miracle" (p. 132). One such thinker, Thomas Huxley, the English biologist known as "Darwin's bulldog" for defending the theory of evolution by natural selection, called it "just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp." Philosopher Colin McGinn, adds Pinker, speaks of "the water of the human brain ... turned into the wine of consciousness."

Pinker asks, "How could an event of neural information-processing cause the feel of a toothache or the taste of lemon or the color purple? How could I know whether a worm, a robot, a brain slice in a dish, or you are sentient? Is your sensation of red the same as mine, or might it be like my sensation of green? What is it like to be dead?" (p. 558)

Further, "What good is consciousness? ... Is consciousness an impotent side effect hovering over the symbols [used in information processing], like the lights flashing on a computer or the thunder that accompanies lightning? And if consciousness is useless — if a creature without it could negotiate the world as well as a creature with it — why would natural selection have favored the conscious one?" (p. 132)


There are other features of the human mind, says Pinker, that are equally hard to explain. The imponderables include (pp. 558-559):

• The self as a "unified center of sentience"
• Free will or unforced choice in deciding among possible actions
• The ability to know the meaning of abstract propositions such as "the set of natural numbers is infinite"
  
• The ability to know the truth of universals such as "the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, everywhere and for all eternity"
• A sense of moral truth as something absolutely real: "How did ought emerge from a universe of particles and planets, genes and bodies?"
  

There are, says Pinker, five ways to deal with knotty issues such as these which "give us a sense of bewilderment, of intellectual vertigo" (p. 559). The first, the one I favor but Pinker eschews, is the God hypothesis. I'll talk more about it presently.

Numbers two through four on Pinker's list don't satisfy Pinker either. One can say, first of all, "that the mysterious entities are an irreducible part of the universe and leave it at that" (p. 560). That consciousness, will, selves, ethics, etc., are brute facts — just like space, time, matter, energy, and other things physicists study — is the "irreducibility theory." It, Pinker complains, offers no insight and leaves us feeling cheated.

Or, one can simply deny the problems exist by claiming that statements about consciousness, will, etc., don't even rise to the level of uncertainty. These statements are, rather, meaningless, since there is no way to verify them; the philosophical position is called positivism. Pinker says it "leaves us incredulous, not enlightened" (p. 561). Something we know as supremely well as the fact of our own consciousness simply "cannot be defined out of existence."

Third, one can claim that all these mental imponderables can successfully be reduced to problems we are able to solve, by recourse to physical causality. For example, "consciousness is activity in layer 4 of the cortex" (see p. 561). Pinker rejects this approach, as do I, by arguing that our free will and moral choice are ruled out by it. We cannot be held morally responsible for choices we make if they are just "the causal effects of the cingulate sulcus," a portion of the brain. Furthermore, if our moral sense is reduced, per evolution theory, to a matter of "kin selection and reciprocal altruism," whither then our "conviction, as unshakable as our grasp of geometry, that some acts are inherently wrong, even if their net effects are neutral or beneficial"?


Pinker's preferred way of dealing with the mind's imponderables is "cognitive closure": saying there is no particular reason to suppose the human mind even has the power to answer every question that perplexes it. Our cognitive faculties are closed off from these answers, says Pinker, by the sheer fact that an ability to settle such highfalutin' questions was not part and parcel of our evolutionary design, brokered by natural selection.

From this perspective, all the things that make us persons — consciousness, will, a sense of morality, of comprehensible meaning, and of invariate truth, etc. — exist in a higher stratum of reality than we can ever hope to account for or explain.


I find Pinker's preference for dealing with the range of mental imponderables as problematic as he finds all the other options. To show why, I'll need first to discuss his objections to the God hypothesis.

Pinker cites H.L. Mencken to the effect that "theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing" (p. 560). Allusions to the divine to explain the mind's imponderables simply, Pinker says, "pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong?"

Pinker also asks, "How does he [God] infuse them [the enigmas] into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? Hoe does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his windows."

The question about what accounts for God's own aspects of personhood — mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong — is one I believe I can deal with. God would not be worthy of the name unless he is understood as self-revealing to humankind. In his self-revelation to Moses he called himself Yahweh: "I am that I am." He thereby tells us his existence requires no further explanation; there is no need to look for an infinite regress of causes atop causes, where the Most High is concerned.

Thus, not believing in the God hypothesis because it permits of no explanations of God's own existence or personal qualities is logically inconsistent. The God hypothesis is specifically one which says, right up front, that an uncaused God cannot and need not be explained or accounted for.


Furthermore, it is God's self-revealing personhood that, to this theist, counts as what's the most "worth knowing," of all that we can know.

If what's worth knowing is the criterion of choice, I don't see how Pinker's "cognitive closure" outstrips the God hypothesis. It puts all the personal attributes that theists say we share with God — consciousness, will, etc. — beyond a cloud cover impenetrable to cognitive inquiry. How does that tell us anything worth knowing?

True, it sidesteps questions such as that of human suffering. So I'll take a wild shot at that one: we suffer because we find ourselves hard put to cease saying the primary word I—It, instead of saying I—Thou (German Ich—Du). According to the Wikipedia subtopic on the philosophy of Martin Buber:

One key Ich—Du relationship Buber identified was that which can exist between a human being and God. Buber argued that this is the only way in which it is possible to interact with God, and that an Ich—Du relationship with anything or anyone connects in some way with the eternal relation to God.

Buber's philosophy is basically that I—Thou represents a relational attitude wholly different from I—It. In the latter, we simply use or are used by. One of the relatants is always an object. In the former, we are in a two-way dialogue. Our interlocutor is a subject whom we take to have independent moral stature, just as we do.

As I said in my previous posts, I consider Buber's philosophy profound, if hard to put into practice. I don't know how one could take it at all seriously without suspecting that the flaw in Steven Pinker's outlook is his tacit assumption that God, if real, is an It, like all the other candidate accounts of imponderable mental phenomena. Irreducibility theory, materialism, reducibility to the physical, and cognitive closure — all are It. God alone is Thou.

Suppose God:

• is real
• has personhood
• possesses will, consciousness, moral sensibility, etc.
• reveals himself to us as being/having all the above
  
• wants us to speak to him always as Thou

Wouldn't that list of "facts" about God be wholly consistent with the problems of our mental imponderables, our suffering, etc.? Doesn't the very existence of these enigmas fairly cry out for us to put aside the I—It of ordinary thought for a relationship of fruitful dialogue with the Most High, or at least with his beloved creatures?


It is out of such dialogue that comes the one aspect of religion/spirituality which Pinker extols: "our higher, spiritual, humane, ethical yearnings" (p. 555). But Pinker quickly disparages religion for its faults, excesses, and inconsistencies. For example: " ... even the Ten Commandments, read in context, prohibit murder, lying, and theft only within the tribe, not against outsiders."

Yet it's my conviction that the late astronomer Carl Sagan, nominally an atheist like Pinker, had a spiritual, dialogic relationship with the universe, the subject of his 1980 television series Cosmos. Though not a religious man, he was manifestly a man of higher, spiritual, humane, ethical yearnings.

Carl Sagan's Contact

"It's hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness," a character says in Sagan's science fiction novel Contact (p. 153). The speaker, a biologist, has been asked what he will do with a caterpillar he has been keenly observing on a held twig: kill it? The scene is the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, where 55,000 names of the honored U.S. dead are engraved in black, reflecting granite. The allusion: the caterpillar is not a miniature monster, eligible for killing like an enemy soldier. Neither, really, is the soldier. Both are Thou.

Sagan quotes Albert Einstein in the epigraph to the same chapter: "I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research." With the right spiritual attitude, everything is Thou.

This is what I think Steven Pinker misses in speaking as disparagingly of religion as he does. Despite its blemishes, it is the strongest voice in history for consciousness of Thou.

"Thouness" and Self (Q2Q X)

In The "Thou" of Revelation ... (Q2Q IX), my most recent post in this "Quickening to Qualia" series, I spoke of "Thouness" as the "qualitative feel" of encountering another self-aware, conscious, autonomous person.

Martin Buber's I and Thou

This is not just a matter of ordinary conscious experience. Martin Buber, in his 1923 book I and Thou, takes the idea of the Thou up out of the general realm of the experiential and into that of the relational. I believe Buber's idea of the relational depends as a necessary but not a sufficient condition on our experience of what it is like to have a self.

Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

In my previous posts in this series, I started out by looking for solid reasons why Christians such as myself might applaud Darwin's theory of evolution. A clue came from Robert Wright in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, a book giving the author's interpretation of Darwinian evolution. In it, Wright finds the human experience we call consciousness extraordinary.

Wright says natural selection is indifferent to consciousness, since the latter has no causal or functional effect. Because it doesn't really "do" anything, it doesn't make us fitter in any Darwinian sense. So why does it exist?

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

That question pointed me toward David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Chalmers, whom Wright cites, agrees that consciousness — a.k.a. subjective experience — doesn't really "do" anything.

Furthermore, its existence can't be explained in a reductive manner by analyzing it functionally, structurally, etc., and then giving a purely physical explanation of the involved causation. Consciousness's basic nature is mental, not material.

So, says Chalmers, our conscious experience of such things as "what it is like to see the color red" can never be explained by a knowledge base, however complete, of all the physical facts. Should we one day learn everything there is to know about, say, bats at a physical, biological, neural level, we even then could not know for sure whether bats are conscious.


Hence, consciousness does not automatically emerge from physical facts in an ineluctable way, as a matter of priori logic. We ourselves could be physically and functionally identical to what we are and still, for all mere argument could tell us, we might lack consciousness. The fact that we don't lack consciousness can accordingly be attributed only to some natural law afforded to this world in the same way as all the other natural laws have been afforded.

The law might specify, for example, that if there is information processing going on at a functional, physical level, then associated with that processing there is a qualitative experience that occurs at a phenomenal level. That qualitative, phenomenal experience is consciousness.

A corollary law might hold that the experience of consciousness which is associated with the processing of information will be faint or rich, depending on how simple or complex the underlying information processing is. Because the human brain is more complex than that of a bat, human consciousness is markedly richer than putative bat consciousness.


Those who believe that natural laws come from God are, of course, free to agree with me that the law of consciousness comes from God also. Chalmers, who owns to no particular religious orientation, says God hypothetically had to do "more work" to add the necessary law of consciousness to the others he was ordaining for nature. In this way, Chalmers's argument that consciousness is naturally, not logically, supervenient on the brain's functions suggests, in my theistic view, that evolution by natural selection — the force which tailored the human brain's functionality — is OK with God.

Why so? Because in tuning human brain functionality to a high level of complexity, natural selection provided an opportunity for the application of the law of consciousness to humankind in a uniquely non-faint way.


The above, in itself, is far from the whole story. I find that Martin Buber goes to great lengths to differentiate experience in general from what he calls "the cradle of Real Life" (p. 9). Specifically he says, "I do not experience the man to whom I say Thou."

The qualitative feel of the experience I have when I encounter another person does not in and of itself deserve the label I have invented, "Thouness." It remains an experience, on my part, of an It, says Buber, a "thing among things" (p. 8). To say the primary word I–Thou to a human being or to any other interlocutor is, on the other hand, to transcend mere experience.

To say the primary word I–Thou to a human, to a spiritual being — to God — or even to a tree is relational, not merely experiential. It does not blot out ordinary experience, it goes beyond it. As consciousness is something "extra" vis-à-vis the human mind, I–Thou relationality is something "extra" vis-à-vis ordinary conscious experience. It is that which unites in a seamless and eternal whole all experiential events concerning the relatant to whom I can say Thou.

When Thou is present, says Buber, mere things are nonexistent. Things have qualities of which consciousness is cognizant. Through these qualities a thing can be discriminated from other things — which precludes I–Thou participation in wholeness and unity. In this sense, ordinary conscious experience affiliates more with the I–It attitude than with the I–Thou. Buber tersely writes:

— What, then, do we experience of Thou?
— Just nothing. For we do not experience it.
— What, then, do we know of Thou?
— Just everything. For we know nothing isolated about it any more. (p. 11)

In view of the above, "Thouness" cannot be taken to represent just another phenomenal quality among qualities — even if it is stipulated to be first-among-equals among all the qualia which may be presented as "raw sensation" to the conscious "inner mind."

The I–Thou encounter might at best be thought of as the completion of conscious experience in a relational fusion which admits of no further isolation or separation.

One could also say that I–Thou relationality is the limit of conscious experience, analogous to the limit of a mathematical function. For example, the limit of y=x, as x approaches infinity, is itself infinity. I–Thou relationality might be said to be the limit of personal consciousness as it approaches a sense of sheer totality.

Consciousness per se is a prerequisite of Buber's view of the relational. I—Thou awareness is perhaps the perfection of consciousness, with all of its usual localizations removed.


Bridging the idea of consciousness per se and Buber's notion of the Thou is the idea of self-consciousness. Chalmers discusses self-consciousness — the sense of self — as being subtly different from self-awareness, but in some views of consciousness they are the same. (This Wikipedia subtopic may be of help here.)

Chalmers says of the sense of self:

"One sometimes feels that there is something to conscious experience that transcends all [its] specific elements: a kind of background hum, for instance, that is somehow fundamental to consciousness and that is there even when all the other components are not. The phenomenology of self is so deep and intangible that it somehow seems illusory, consisting in nothing over and above specific elements [of ordinary conscious experience]. Still, there seems to be something to the phenomenology of self, even if it is very hard to pin down. (p. 10)

If we visualize this "background hum" of one's sense of self achieving its fullness or completion in meeting and engaging in dialogue with another Thou who likewise has such a personal "background hum," we may be getting very close to what Buber was talking about in I and Thou. We can see why Buber insisted that we do not merely "experience" the Thou: that would make it seem like "Thouness" is nothing over and above the list of specific qualities we sense in any old I–It (or I–He or I–She) experience.

An experience of "Thouness" would accordingly seem to be the submerging of one's own "background hum" in the larger, cosmic one, transcending all "ordinary" experience. One loses oneself, in speaking the primary word I-Thou, only if one has a self to lose. One has a self to lose only if one is richly conscious. One is richly conscious only if one has a highly evolved brain: so says the law of consciousness instituted by God.

The "Thou" of Revelation ... (Q2Q IX)

Martin Buber's I and Thou

In Thouness (Q2Q VIII), the previous post in this, my "Quickening to Qualia" series, I took up the insights of the late Jewish thinker Martin Buber into "the primary word I–Thou," as presented in his 1923 book I and Thou. I had an intuition that, in the conscious experience of a human being, what I spoke of as "Thouness" amounts to the "qualitative feel" of encountering another self-aware, conscious, autonomous person.

If that person is experienced as an object, not as a subject blessed with conscious experience of his or her own, the qualitative feel will instead be one of "Itness." In Buber's terms, the primary word I–It will be spoken, not I-Thou. The basic nature of the I relatant will accordingly change from the I of I–Thou to the I in I–It, a wholly different kind of I.

Speaking to God or another person using the primary word I–Thou and not I–It is an act which lies at the core of religious experience for Buber. My intuition here is that saying I—Thou is possible at all for us only because we humans possess consciousness.

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

This intuition accords with ideas about consciousness broached by philosopher of mind David J. Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Chalmers makes a formal, technical argument to the effect that the consciousness that accompanies the causal, functional, psychological aspects of the human mind is not itself causal or functional. Nor can it be fully explained by any appeal to strictly physical levels of causation.

Rather, Chalmers thinks, some yet-to-be-discovered natural law determines that consciousness will inevitably arise from the merely psychological workings of the mind, in creatures like us with complex enough brains. Chalmers makes no claim to belief in God, but theists such as I are free to imagine this natural law being added to the others ordained for this world by God himself, in accomplishing his creative act.

Millard J. Erickson's's Christian Theology

One clue as to why God might have done this comes from Christian Theology, a review of Christian belief by theologian Millard J. Erickson. (This book is now in its second edition. I have the original edition.) The clue concerns a particular theological slant on divine revelation's relationship to human history: revelation through history (pp. 183 ff.) It is the view of a number of theologians who have called themselves neoorthodox that:

Historical events should not be identified with revelation ... . They are merely the means through which revelation came. For revelation is not seen as the communication of information to man. Rather, it is God's presentation of himself. Revelation is a personal encounter between God and man.

The distinction between revelation and "the communication of information," intriguingly, patterns closely with Chalmers's distinction between a conscious mind of subjective experience and a psychological, strictly functional mind which is basically tasked with ... wait for it ... information processing. I imagine these two halves of our human mental whole as, respectively, "the inner mind" and "the outer mind." Without what I think of as the inner mind, says Chalmers, we would be but functionally equivalent zombies lacking all conscious experience, blind to the qualitative feels of "redness" or "juiciness" ... or, I would add, "Thouness."

"Thouness," furthermore, can be thought of the qualitative feel of each and every "personal encounter," whether the Thou which the I encounters is God or man.


Erickson continues his discussion of "revelation through history" by alluding to the Old Testament encounters of Moses and Isaiah with God. He then says:

But the accounts of these events are not revelation, for the events themselves were not revelation. Thus, one may record the words spoken by God, as the Book of Exodus claims that Moses did, and another may read those words, and read of the circumstances of the event, but one will not thereby have obtained revelation. The revelation of God came through the words and deeds of Jesus, but those words and deeds were not the revelation per se. Thus, the Pharisees did not meet God when Jesus performed miraculous deeds. Rather, they maintained that he did what he did by the power of Beelzebub. There were many who saw and heard Jesus, but did not meet God. They simply came away convinced that he was a remarkable man. ...

Revelation, then, is not perceived as an occurrence of history. The event is merely the shell in which the revelation was clothed. Rather, the revelation is something extra added to that event. It is God's direct coming to someone through that event. Without this direct coming, the historical event is opaque; indeed this was the case for numerous persons who observed but stood by unmoved.

A "something extra" that is added to an observed event seemingly patterns with the "something extra" by which Chalmers says the phenomenon of consciousness augments the mere information-processing transactions of the psychological mind. We might accordingly say that the outer, functional mind is "merely the shell" of the inner, experiential mind. That inner mind takes in what phenomenologists speak of as "raw sensations," as that of "redness." The arrival of the quale of "redness" at the gateway to the inner mind feels, indeed, like a "direct coming." So, too, with the quale of "Thouness."


When Buber speaks of "experience" (pp. 5-6), he identifies it as an experience of "something" in the world, even if it is of something "inner" — by which I think he, for example, means the experience of being hungry. He contrasts this realm of experience with "the world of relation."

What Buber is talking rather disparagingly about as mere "experience," in which the word I is but that of I—It, may be what Chalmers refers to as "awareness." Awareness, an aspect of the outer, functional mind, likewise is always of something.

Or, possibly, Buber and Chalmers are talking about "experience" in exactly the same phenomenological way. Buber invokes the word "experience" in this manner (p. 5):

The man who experiences has not part in the world. For it is "in him" and not between him and the world that the experience arises.

The world has no part in the experience. It permits itself to be experienced, but has no concern in the matter. For it does nothing to the experience, and the experience does nothing to it.

This usage patterns with Chalmers's idea that conscious inner experience is not in the causal loop of events participated in and caused by the functional, psychological component of the mind.


Whether Buber's "experience" equals Chalmers's "awareness," or both thinkers mean the same phenomenological thing by "experience," the be all and end all for Buber is "the world of relation," established by speaking the primary word I—Thou.

The distinction which Buber draws between the experiential and the relational is not one which Chalmers says much about. He does allude to a possible third component of the mind, in addition to the psychological component and the conscious component, which he calls relational: " ... it is not much of a burden [on his main argument concerning consciousness] to note that there might also be a relational component to certain mental states, over and above the psychological and phenomenal components. Either way, no deep further mystery arises" (p. 21).

Here, perhaps, Chalmers is being a bit spiritually tone deaf. To him, all "manifest phenomena ... fall into two classes, those we have third-person access to, and those we have first-person access to." Buber might say that the former are merely the It of I—It , and the latter are merely the I of I—It. To Buber, the world of relation, established by the primary word I—Thou, does actually involve a deep further mystery, one to which he devotes his book. Perhaps Buber would even say that the Thou is the one manifest phenomenon that we have second-person access to.


I have little doubt that it is only those who say I—Thou to God who get a revelation, where others see only an historical event. I have no reason to think I myself would have understood the "something extra" that Jesus represented, or Isaiah, or Moses. In fact, I rather think of myself as a tone-deaf Pharisee, not as an in-the-know disciple.

Still, I think I see some of the implications of all this talk of phenomenal consciousness à la Chalmers. It looks as if there is within the inner mind of conscious experience an innermost holy-of-holies: an interior world of the I—Thou relationship.

Since this spiritual inner sanctum is nestled within our conscious mind, it follows that we need the phenomenon of consciousness to be able to hope to approach God properly as a Thou and not a He, She, or It.

Chalmers says consciousness is something extra that is associated with the complex information processing of the psychological mind. That capacity, in turn, evolved out of the lesser complexity of the brains of other animals. Moreover, the association of consciousness with human information-processing capabilities happens only by virtue of a natural law which — hypothetically, if there is a God — came from him.


That suggests to me that Christians need not fear Darwin's theory of evolution as in any way threatening to the revelation of God to them in Jesus Christ.

In fact — though it is an argument for another day — I would imagine evolution (rather than special creation) as the only way in which God could create persons who are autonomous agents possessed of free will. Perhaps free will, like consciousness, is part and parcel of our unique ability to speak the primary word I—Thou. If that is so, Darwinian evolution could turn into Chistianity's best friend!

Thouness (Q2Q VIII)

In Water Into Wine (Q2Q VII), the preceding post in my "Quickening to Qualia" series, I spoke of "Thouness." I said "Thouness" was, to the conscious mind, a notion like "redness." That is, it is a quale — the singular of qualia, which from the point of view of theorists of consciousness like David J. Chalmers, are the stuff of our subjective inner experience.

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

In The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Chalmers makes a case for consciousness — subjective experience — being unlike every other aspect of the human mind. I use an analogy of my own to model the difference: conscious experience happens in an experiential "inner mind," with an interface with the "outer mind." The latter consists of all our mental operations that can be termed psychological, or functional, or behavior-causing.

The outer mind of perception and cognition, thought and emotion, memory and learning can be fully explained by taking the arena of explanation down a level or so into to the purely physical — whether the physical is construed as neurons in a network, or the brain's biochemistry, or the chemical makeup of brain tissue, or the basic subatomic particles physicists study.

The conscious inner mind cannot, however, be fully explained in the same physical way. There is something in the natural world — consciousness — whose facts and principles are not merely physical; so Chalmers shows. That something is nonetheless governed by natural laws, even if these laws are not precisely physical laws. One of these laws — the laws that are "hypothetically" ordained by God, in Chalmers's non-religious parlance — is that the phenomenal mind of our subjective inner experience supervenes on our psychological mind of cognition, perception, behavior causing, etc.

Thus, in my analogy, whenever information is processed by the outer mind, conscious experience is enabled in the inner mind. If the outer mind perceives a red tricycle, the inner mind receives, as it were, a certain "raw sensation": the "redness" of that tricycle. "Redness" is one of the multifarious qualia to which the inner mind is receptive.

Martin Buber's I and Thou

I suppose that "Thouness" is likewise a quale to which the inner mind is, or can become, receptive. My idea of "Thouness" is taken from Martin Buber's I and Thou. Buber's 1923 book (I have a 1958 English version translated from the original German) is, alas, not easy to understand or paraphrase.

Buber was a German-Jewish thinker whose thought about how God and humans relate to one another is just as profound from the Christian perspective as the Jewish. My earlier attempts to read his book, going back to my college days in the 1960s, resulted in only a shallow comprehension of his message. I have begun to reread it now, to try to correlate what he says with what I am gleaning about conscious experience from Chalmers.

Buber begins his book by positing two "primary words": I–Thou and I–It. (I–He and I–She are no different than I–It). Each of the two primary words signifies a distinct relation: a relation, not a thing. The I in I–Thou is, somewhat surprisingly, not the same I as in I–It. Each I implies a unique attitude. "To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude" (p. 3).

"If I face a human being as my Thou," Buber adds (p. 8), "and say the primary word I–Thou to him, he is not a thing among things, and does not consist of things."

Buber's translator, Ronald Gregor Smith, writes in his preface that Buber, in writing so directly and concretely about abstract notions such as these, lays a "special claim upon the reader" (p. viii). It occurs to me that the quale which I am calling "Thouness" is itself characterized by a similar "element of claim, calling for a specific response."

If, per Smith, "the question for Buber [is] how may I understand my experience of a relation with God?" — if Buber reveals that relation's "inner nature" as "direct or immediate," albeit perceived through "concrete human experience" and "the hallowing of the everyday" — then I am encouraged to view the Thou relatant of I–Thou — whether divine or human — as one in whom I can meet "Thouness," rather than one in which I merely experience what it is like to use "Itness."


For me to recognize and meet "Thouness," my inner, conscious mind has to "receive" it as a quale. If the inner mind supervenes on the outer mind, which processes all stimulations from the "outside world," then perhaps the outer mind has to be configured in a certain way before the "Thouness" of another person can get through to my inner mind.

I draw an analogy with the color vision of cats. Cats are not thought to be able to distinguish the color red — the price of having superior night vision to ours. If cats have an inner mind (Chalmers sees little reason to limit consciousness to just humans) they might nevertheless come equipped with an inward receptivity to the quale "redness."

In other words, if we could perform the necessary surgical procedures on a cat's retinas, brain, etc., to allow it to be able to distinguish the color red, the quale "redness" could concevably be "sensed" or received by its inner mind.

The tradeoff would be that it would lose its vaunted night vision. In the wild, night vision helps it to hunt and eat to stay alive. Night vision is key to the cat's ability to manipulate things in its environment — i.e., prey — in a using relationship which Buber would call I–It.

Once this hypothetical operation on a wild feline's vision were performed, the cat would be able to distinguish the redness of its prey's blood for the first time — if, that is, it could still locate its prey. More likely, it would have nothing to eat. Just before starving to death, it might twig to something noble like "Cats do not live by prey alone." Then it would go to cat heaven.


What if, for us if not for cats, "Thouness" is originally like "redness" is for cats — impossible to activate? We need to undergo some sort of "operation" on our outer mental apparatus before the quale of "Thouness" can get through to the inner mind. Meanwhile, "Itness" gets through just fine, so we don't starve to death.

That, at any rate, is the point of view which I would like to explore in future posts in this series.

Water Into Wine (Q2Q VII)

This post follows What Is It Like To Be Self-Aware? (Q2Q VI) as the seventh in my "Quickening to Qualia" series.

Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works

When we think hard about the phenomenon of consciousness, as I have been doing all along in this series, we are apt to agree with professor of psychology Steven Pinker, writing in How the Mind Works, that "consciousness or sentience, the raw sensation of toothaches and redness and saltiness and middle C, is still a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" (p. 60).

"Consciousness," Pinker notes, "has struck a great many thinkers as not just a problem but almost a miracle" (p. 132). One such thinker, Thomas Huxley, the English biologist known as "Darwin's bulldog" for defending the theory of evolution by natural selection, called it "just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp." Philosopher Colin McGinn, adds Pinker, speaks of "the water of the human brain ... turned into the wine of consciousness."


I must admit that I personally find consciousness not only unaccountable but nearly indescribable, despite my possibly vain attempts to characterize it in earlier posts. "Raw sensation" may be as good a way as any to characterize the ephemeral phenomenon we call subjective experience (the latter being synonymous with consciousness or sentience).

Yet "raw sensation" is a phrase that feels like the opposite sort of thing. It is quite close to the primary idea of sensation as being what nerve endings do in feeding data to the brain. One reads, in discussions of consciousness, references to the notion of the "sensation of redness," for example. What is meant, though, is anything but the notion of what light of a certain wavelength does to receptors in the retina of the eye.


It is as if there is a mind within the mind. The outer mind is a computer. It takes in the sensory data from nerve receptors and processes it into various sorts of perceptions and higher cogitations. The outer mind is responsible for learning, memory, emotions, and everything else about the mental life which we place in the category of psychological, or functional, or behavior-causing.

At some point in the outer mind's neural circuitry perhaps — speaking not literally but figuratively — there might be taps or probes from the inner mind which furnish the latter with its raw sensations: e.g., "redness." The inner mind is a mind of experientiality. Toothaches and redness and saltiness and middle C are experiences that the inner mind is alert to.

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

Imagined slightly differently, there is an interface between the outer mind of activity and the inner mind of experience. The "sensory inputs" at the interface to the inner mind are the qualia, such as "redness," spoken of by David J. Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.

In The Surprise of Selfhood (Q2Q V) and I and Thou (Q2Q IV), I suggested that Judeo-Christian religion is all about an I-Thou relationship with God. We cannot enter into an I-Thou relationship with a personal God, I said then, unless we are ourselves persons who can have the experience of selfhood. I think I'd now prefer to change that: what we actually need is a capacity for the experience of "Thouness."

Martin Buber's I and Thou

On this view, which I adapt from I and Thou by Martin Buber, "Thouness" is a quale (the singular of qualia), just as is "redness" is also a quale. "Thouuness" contrasts with another quale, "Itness," in this way: "Thouness" is associated with others whom we experience as subjects; "Itness," with mere objects. Subjects have inner minds like ours, capable of conscious experience; objects do not, and are fair game for various forms of manipulation which we undertake with a view to our personal gratification.

Chalmers's view of the conscious, subjective experience of such qualia is that it co-occurs with the psychological operations of what I am calling the outer mind. He wants to lay the groundwork for a scientific theory to explain, as cognitive science does for the outer mind, the workings of the inner mind.

He also wants to establish that the set of facts about and properties of experientiality in the inner mind supervenes on the physical facts and properties of the outer, functional mind in a way that results from the natural laws of this world. Supervenience basically means that facts at a "higher level" actually add nothing at all to the facts pertaining to some foundational "lower level."

For example, the facts of biology supervene on the facts of physics in this world. Once you know the facts of physics and the properties of the world's biological entities, you know all the facts about biology. (For the most part, facts are merely specific instantiations of general properties. Humans qua humans have the property of having a brain. It is accordingly a fact that you have a brain, and another fact that I have a brain.)

The properties of human brains for the most part supervene on the properties physicists study. The facts about brains, likewise, on physical facts. Furthermore, they both do so in a logically supervienient way. There could be no world physically indistinguishable from our own in which the properties and facts pertaining to human brains were different. Chalmers says that logical supervenience is (with a slight semantic qualification) the same thing as metaphysical supervenience.

But, says Chalmers, there could be a physically indistinguishable world in which God (speaking hypothetically, since Chalmers claims no belief in God) did not go to the trouble of establishing an (extra) natural law which makes conscious experience supervene on the physical, in a mode of supervenience Chalmers terms natural supervenience. If conscious experience in the inner mind (as I call it) co-occurs with the functional information processing going on in the outer mind, it is only because God (again, speaking hypothetically) made this extra law.

I'll now take it a step further: I suggest a firm theological explanation for the co-occurrence. God not just hypothetically but actually ordained, when he created our world, that by virtue of its natural laws there would be such an inevitable co-occurrence. His purpose: to enable creatures to evolve who can enter into a I-Thou relationship with him, and equally with each other, the twin foundations of spiritual life. Absent our inner mind's receptivity to the quale of "Thouness," that could never happen. The "water" of our natural lives could never be turned, through faith and good works, into "new wine."

What Is It Like To Be Self-Aware? (Q2Q VI)

In my series of posts under the umbrella title "Quickening to Qualia," or Q2Q, this is the sixth. The fifth, this one's predecessor, was The Surprise of Selfhood (Q2Q V).

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

Thus far, when I wasn't rambling on about what I imagine to be the religious implications of my topic, I was considering what it means to be conscious, a subject investigated by David J. Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.

This philosopher of mind says our minds are both psychological and phenomenal. The psychological properties of mind comprise just about everything we, in our everyday way of thinking, would call mental. Most or all of what we think of as cognition, not to mention perception or sensation, is, to Chalmers, psychological. Such psychological operations of the mind are basically functional. They take in information, they process that input, they produce output. The output typically determines behavior.

As all this goes on from one moment to the next, there is something else going on as well: experience. We have an experience of what it is like to be pricked by a rose, even as our functional minds react in a more practical way. These what-it-is-like experiences are the phenomenal components of our minds. It is by virtue of them that we are truly conscious.

Chalmers puts it this way (p. 11): "On the phenomenal concept, mind is characterized by the way it feels; on the psychological concept, mind is characterized by what it does."

All of our mental states are apt to have phenomenal and psychological aspects yoked in tandem. This is why our everyday language is ambiguous between the two. When we say we are "conscious" (see pp. 26-27) we often mean simply that we are awake, not asleep. Or, if we claim to be "conscious" of something, then either we have knowledge of that thing, or we are paying attention to it. Behavior under our "conscious" control is, basically, voluntary behavior.

We can be "conscious" of internal states of mind; this is introspection. Often, if we wish, we can report verbally on our "conscious" internal states.

We even have the ability to think about ourselves: "our existence as individuals ... our distinctness from others" (p. 27). It is in this respect, I think, that the phenomenal, as distinct from the psychological, is at its most diaphanous.


Chalmers has it that all these everyday ideas of what it means to be "conscious" are really about awareness, not consciousness per se. All forms of awareness, whether focused externally or internally — including self-awareness — are in and of themselves functional and, accordingly, psychological.

"Self-consciousness" is consequently an ambiguous term. On the one hand, it "can be understood as awareness of oneself" (p. 29). This is a functional, psychological idea. It might better be styled "self-awareness."

On the other hand, "self-consciousness" has "a certain sort of phenomenal state associated with" it (p. 27). I take it that he means here roughly this: an experience of what it is like to be self-aware.


Awareness is accordingly, per Chalmers, "psychological consciousness," which is functional, as distinct from "phenomenal consciousness," which is not. Now, it is the latter which Chalmers means, most of the time, when he uses (just plain) "consciousness." I have to admit to wondering, by the bye, why he doesn't simply replace this term with another: experience.

True, experience is another word with more than one everyday meaning. But it is one which, to my mind, carries the intended overtones of indescribable savor or ineffable aura better than the relatively neutral "consciousness": "I can't tell you what it's like, you just have to experience it."


At any rate, whether you choose to call it the one or you call it the other, it grows ever more diaphanous over the course of Chalmers's first chapter, as he teases apart all the concepts which might be, and often are, referred to as "consciousness."

We need to be cognizant, he says, not just of a distinction between the psychological mind and the physical body (i.e., the brain). We also need to take into account the distinction between the phenomenal mind and the psychological-functional-causal mind — no matter how diaphanous the former concept becomes by comparison with the latter.

Why? Even thouugh the two mental capacities typically co-occur, "one can wonder how to explain the phenomenal quality [of experience], and one can wonder how to explain the playing of the causal role, and these are two distinct wonderings" (p. 22).

Put more succinctly, we can ask ourselves what it is like to be self-aware ... and, since we can, we require an explanation for this fact. It will never come, says Chalmers, from a consideration of the psychological-functional-causal mind alone.

The Surprise of Selfhood (Q2Q V)

I now take up the fifth installment in a series of posts I have labeled "Quickening to Qualia." This post follows on I and Thou (Q2Q IV), in which I argued that we are able to have an I-Thou relationship with God — with one another, too — because one of the components of our human mentality is intrinsically relational.

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

The relational component of our human mental capacity is brought up briefly by David J. Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. This philosopher of mind says our minds are both psychological and phenomenal. Our minds correlate our behavior with our circumstances and are aware of our inner states, but beyond that, they experience.

Our minds' ability to know "what it is like" to, say, see the color red is part and parcel of subjective experience. Subjective experience is connected with sensation, perception, cognition, and the other aspects of human psychological capacities. Still, conscious experience is fundamentally a separate kind of thing. It is phenomenal, not psychological.

A third mental component, the relational, comes into the picture for Chalmers only as a stopgap against the possibility that the phenomenal and the psychological do not wholly exhaust the mental capacities we humans have. His true interest is in the phenomenal component of the human mind, our consciousness or subjective experience. He says it serves to give us access to "qualitative feels" or qualia: notions like redness and surprisingness. Qualia are the stuff of consciousness.

To me, Chalmers misses a bet by saying — even in the teeth of a possible third component of the mind which he dubs relational — that "there is no independent third class of phenomena forcing itself on us to be explained" (p. 21). He thinks once you explain the phenomenal and the psychological, you can most likely combine the two explanations rather trivially to explain the relational.


I think — to pick up on ideas explicated by the theologian-philosopher Martin Buber in I and Thou — this may be true for I-It relationships, but not for I-Thou relationships. Religion, in Buber's view, would be meaningless without the possibility of a dialogue between two persons.

I look at it this way:

1. We gain spiritual life by entering into an I-Thou relationship with a personal God.
   
   
2. We cannot enter into an I-Thou relationship with God unless we are ourselves persons, albeit imperfect ones. As persons, we are possessed of free will, and we can choose not to allow God to perfect us in our personhood. But we can also allow God to leverage our natural personhood into a permanent spiritual life with him.
   
   
3. We cannot be persons, possessed of free will, as all persons are, unless we can have the experience of selfhood. (Chalmers calls this "self-consciousness.")
   
   
4. We cannot be self-conscious unless we are conscious: unless we are capable of having subjective experiences by virtue of the phenomenal components of our minds.
   
   
5. The fact that we are conscious is surprising, given that (per Chalmers) we conceivably might have evolved as zombie creatures with only psychological, not phenomenal, components to our mentality.

I think of the search for an I-Thou relationship with God — in which God, not us, does most of the work of fitting us for such a relationship — as the essence of faith.

In the Christian view of faith, we are told by God, working in our hearts and via the Bible and the Church, what we must do and must not do; this is Judeo-Christian morality. It is all about avoiding the things that lock us into damaging I-It outlooks and encouraging the things that open us to life-giving I-Thou relationality.

I-It outlooks subliminally treat all others as objects, as dead things. They eventually deaden the "I" half of the I-It equation, as well as the "It" half.

I-Thou relationality lets God into our lives, both individually and communally. That is when he can begin the work of radically changing our imperfect natural selves into perfect spiritual beings.


By virtue of the logic above, we would have no hope becoming spiritual selves in I-Thou relationality with God if we were not, equally surprisingly, conscious to begin with. Our consciousness underpins our self-awareness, which underpins our existence as persons who possess free will and can accept or refuse Gods' redemption, which underpins our ability to learn to relate, in I-Thou fashion, with the One God Who is in Three Persons, Father, Son, and Spirit.

The Christian notion of the Holy Trinity, by the way, has been called by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity a union of three divine persons. The first is the Father, the Lord God of the Old Testament. The second is his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, who was of the same sort of Being as the Father "before all worlds." The third divine personage, the Holy Ghost, is the spirit of their mutual love.

I wonder if Buber, if he were Christian — he was in fact Jewish — would have said that the Holy Spirit is the original I-Thou relationship!


Chalmers addresses the question of the reasons, metaphysical or otherwise, why brains such as ours which are complex information processors can also have conscious experience. I have not yet read far enough into his book to know what answers he comes up with. My answer is similar to that of Robert Wright in Nonzero. We could have found ourselves inhabiting an externally identical zombie world, but didn't. That is because of our surprising consciousness alone.

But evolution needn't have made us conscious, since our inner experience has nothing to do with what natural selection "sees" and ratifies. Natural selection is interested only in what we do, not in how we feel about it. So the surprising experience of selfhood which depends on our equally surprising experience of consciousness cannot be explained by Darwinian principles.

That suggests that God made a world in which there would evolve creatures with enough information-processing "smarts" to also be conscious, so to be able to be made to have, through faith, perfect spiritual selves.


As Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity's final chapter, "I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call 'me' can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own."

In Chalmers's analysis, with the exception of the phenomenal properties of "my" mind, most of what I call "me" can indeed be explained, if not easily, someday by cognitive scientists studying the specifically psychological properties of the mind. Only phenomenology (remember, Chalmers says little about relationality) is deeply mysterious and truly surprising.

The deepest mystery is not why there exist the psychological states that arise from physical changes in the brain in response to environmental stimuli; these states alone are what cause our subsequent behavior. It is rather why psychological states invariably co-occur with experiential states. "Perhaps it is logically possible," writes Chalmers, "that one could have the experience without the causation, but it seems to be an empirical fact that they go together" (p. 22).

Put another way, the unfailing link between our psychological mind and our phenomenal mind is something of a brute fact in search of an explanation. This is what Chalmers calls "the mind-mind problem" (p. 25).

Perhaps the basis of an explanation is in the five steps of logic listed above. In a nutshell: God's plan insists that we live in a world of consciousness, leading up to selfhood. So that is exactly the sort of world he created.