Going Out on a Limb (Human Conscious Experience II)

In Human Conscious Experience I I talked about two ideas concerning what human consciousness is. The first came from Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop. Hofstadter shows that human self-awareness is a "strange loop," a property of any sufficiently complex system of information processing which allows the system to turn right around and process itself.

The other idea about consciousness came from David Chalmers' book The Conscious Mind, which holds that consciousness "supervenes" on physical brain processes. Consciousness as such is powerless to affect events in the physical world, just as the occupant of the sidecar of a motorcycle cannot steer the motorcycle.

For Hofstadter, consciousness qua consciousness is an illusion. All we really have is self-awareness, in the form of a self-referential strange loop. For Chalmers, consciousness is real, but (at least to a first approximation) it is "epiphenomenal." We wouldn't possess it were it not for the "extra work" that God (figuratively speaking; Chalmers is an agnostic) must have done to institute certain non-physical laws of nature, above and beyond the physical laws, that cause consciousness to supervene on physical brain states.

If you believe Hofstadter, we have no soul.

If you believe Chalmers, there is a wisp of a soul — but it can't do anything except enjoy its own inner conscious experience.

In my previous post, I tried to sketch out an alternative view of the conscious soul. It holds that the conscious mind or soul is an emergent property of the brain. As such, it is more than a limp epiphenomenon; it exerts "downward causation," also known as "top-down causality" or "whole-part influence."


That means it is like emergent properties of all sorts of complex systems. In theories of emergence, the whole world can be seen as one big complex system containing many complex subsystems that themselves each contain many complex subsystems, and so on and so on until a minimum level of complexity is reached. Each level of complexity emerges from the lower level. Each is the result of bottom-up causality in which the parts assemble themselves (or are assembled by some external force) into a whole that is greater than their sum, thereby causing something "extra" to exist above and beyond their own existence as parts.

An arch possesses such "extra" being, above and beyond the stones it is made of.

These emergent wholes, in turn, exert whole-part influence or downward causality on the parts at the next lower level. If the conscious mind is an emergent whole that springs forth from physical brain activities, it in turn causes events to happen at the physical level of the brain, and via the brain the body, and via the body the whole wide world.


One upshot is to believe that the conscious mind, contrary to Chalmers, is the natural result of human biological evolution. It did not arise because God did "extra work" in instituting non-physical laws of nature. It arose because evolution has just naturally produced ever-increasing embodiments of complexity at higher and higher levels of emergence.

I do not suggest that my view is an atheistic one, though. I think it is very theistic — as long as you are willing to entertain the notion that evolution is part of God's plan.

I'd like now to go out on a limb and try to show why believers in God might put aside any initial distaste for evolution and see these ideas as friendly to their point of view.

My argument is to the effect that the core of human consciousness is our ability to have personal inner experience. That is, we experience what we are conscious of in ways that differ from one individual to the next, but in all cases involve personal inner experience. If we were androids like Lt. Cmdr. Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, that wouldn't be true. Our experiences, plural, would register upon the screen of our mental awareness, but they would not generate inner experience, singular.


Experience as I am using the word is hard to define. Philosophers of mind have spoken of it as knowing "what it is like to be/do/know X," where X is just about anything that an entity is able to be, or do, or know. If a bat were conscious, it would know "what it is like to be a bat."

When we see a red tricycle, we feel we somehow know "what it it like to be, or at least to see, red." "Consciousness," "experience," and "feeling" are synonyms. In such philosophies, these terms imply more than awareness, more even than self-awareness. Chalmers gives this very sort of description to conscious experience or feeling; it is just that he does not ascribe causal efficacy to it, as I do.

For Hofstadter, there is nothing higher or loftier than strange-loop self-awareness. To him, such notions as "consciousness," "experience," and "feeling" are illusions of the strange loop inside the workings of the brain.


I hinge my argument that both Chalmers and Hofstadter miss the boat on the ideas of the great Jewish theologian Martin Buber about (in the title of his most famous book) I and Thou.

Buber's ideas in I and Thou are if anything even more abstruse than the ideas about consciousness I just talked about. I'll give my interpretation here.

When I encounter another person, I can treat that person as Thou or as It. The I-It relationship is deadening, and it doesn't matter whether I say I-He or I-She instead of I-It. Only an I-Thou relationship is a true, life-affirming dialogue.

In fact, the "I" of I-It is a different "I" than the "I" of I-Thou.

I interpret this as meaning that when I experience another person as Thou, what emerges into consciousness from the strange loop of my own self-awareness is a different existent than that which emerges when I experience the other person as It.

There are accordingly two "I" experiences: "I" of I-Thou and "I" of I-It. Ergo, the strange-loop "I" of Douglas Hofstadter's soulless philosophy is not the end of the story.

Moreover, unless these two seemingly very different inner "I" experiences make no difference to what actually happens in the physical world, Chalmers is equally off base. It seems to me, contrariwise, that a rich I-Thou dialogue will have different worldly consequences than a sterile I-It relationship. For example, the former is far more conducive to a healthy marriage and plenteous children.


It seems decidedly contrived, then, to claim that the inner, experiential distinction between "I" of I-Thou and "I" of I-It isn't somehow responsible for altering the stream of physical events in the world.

To go along with Chalmers is to imagine that the physical world is hermetically sealed off from mental phenomena — if mental phenomena exist at all. Hofstadter takes the position that there are no mental phenomena; what seem to be mental phenomena are but illusions of the strange loop. Chalmers says nearly the same thing, except that there are epiphenomenal manifestations of consciousness which exert no downward force on events.

Hofstadter accuses Chalmers of being a dualist, but I'd say Chalmers is nearly as much of an anti-dualist or materialist as Hofstadter is. Materialism is non-dualistic; it holds that the only reality is made of material, physical stuff. When the only exception to that rule is Chalmers' notion of "superveneient" consciousness which makes no difference at the level of physical events, in my book that's materialism with an asterisk.

In my book, consciousness as an emergent mental phenomenon possesses downward force and exerts whole-part influence. That is dualism par excellence.

The anti-dualism of Hofstadter can give no account of how the I-Thou experience and the I-It experience can have different "I's."

The anti-dualism of Chalmers (with an asterisk) cannot show how the I-Thou experience produces a different world than the I-It experience does.

Could this "different world" of the I-Thou experience be, by the way, what Jesus meant when he said the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand (Matthew 10:7)?

Human Conscious Experience I

Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop has been a hot topic of this blog recently and in the past. The book tries (and, I think, succeeds) in explaining the ability of the human mind to conceive of itself in the first-person, as an "I." It does this by recourse to ideas broached in early-20th century mathematics and symbolic logic to the effect that all symbol-manipulating systems above a certain low threshold of complexity, of which the human brain is one, are intrinsically "incomplete."

There are, inescapably, truths concerning these symbol-manipulation systems themselves that have to be true, Hofstadter shows, but nonetheless cannot be derived as theorems from within the system. Hofstadter calls the ability of a system to contain countless truths beyond its own ability to prove them a "strange loop." A strange loop arises from the ability of a system to refer to itself. Hofstadter shows, convincingly, that the "I" in the human mind is nothing more than just this sort of strange loop.

Once that much has been established, he extends it in quite a lovely way to show that we humans build up in our minds over the course of time (albeit imperfect) copies of the "I-loops" of other persons whom we love ... and they harbor copies of our "I-loops." When one of us dies, an "I-loop" copy lives on in the brains of their mourners.


After saying that much, I think Hofstadter misses an opportunity. He tries to show that what philosophers of the mind call "consciousness" (or "feeling," or "experience") is nothing more than the working of the strange "I-loop" in the brain. To the extent that consciousness and "soul" have been conflated historically in our thinking about thinking, the soul, too, is just the strange "I-loop," nothing more.

Hofstadter contrasts this view with that of David Chalmers, whose book The Conscious Mind I have dealt with in earlier posts. Chalmers' take on human consciousness is that it "supervenes" on the physical workings of the brain in a way that makes it a very real but nonphysical phenomenon.

Hofstadter won't embrace the views of Chalmers (who is a personal friend and former student of his) because they are dualistic: they require that not all things having being in this world be part of the physical order of things. Specifically the mind, to the extent that it is possesses consciousness, is nonphysical.

Here, in the Chalmers view as opposed to Hofstadter's, we have a way for the "soul" to be real but nonphysical and immaterial — though not necessarily God-given in any supernatural way. Hofstadter admits to puzzlement and even outright revulsion at such dualistic philosophies of mind.

Hofstadter even comes right out and lampoons Chalmers' views, accusing him of positing that there has to be an immaterial substance out of which consciousness is made: "feelium." Feelium really exists, Chalmers implies, but it is incapable of exerting causal influence over the physical stuff of the universe, including the matter in the brain. Or, as Hofstadter puts it pithily, feelium cannot "push anything around."

There has never been in the life of the entire universe any object, molecule, atom, or quark whose trajectory has been altered by the exertions of feelium. Rather, feelium is naught but the putative stuff of human inner experience — "stuff" which Hofstadter feels is a grand illusion. Philosophers have in the past not so frequently in the present) held that consciousness is bound up with categories of experience called qualia (sing. quale, a two-syllable word pronounced KWAH-lay). Whenever we see a red tricycle, the quale for redness is invoked in our minds, thus providing us with our inner experience of the redness of the tricycle. In this view, all of our inner experience is qualia-based. If there were no qualia, there would be no conscious experience.

So the qualia exist as the "atoms and quarks" of our conscious inner experience, as it were, but they never push "real" atoms and quarks around.


This Chalmers view is one which takes as a given the idea that the universe is "causally closed." In other words, all physical effects have causes, and all the causes that account for all the effects in the whole physical universe are contained within the physical universe itself. There is no room for the laws of nature to be guided from above, as it were.

It is the insistence on a causally closed universe which — paradoxically, since neither Chalmers nor Hofstadter believes in a supernatural God — winds up providing Hofstadter with his greatest occasion for heaping scorn upon Chalmers. Chalmers builds up an elaborate theory that there could be, at least in concept, an alternate universe in which humanoid beings who are outwardly our exact twins wholly lack conscious inner experience.

These "zombie twins" of ours have evolved in the same Darwinian way that Homo sapiens did in our universe, Chalmers asserts, but since in their universe our "extra" laws of nature — those above and beyond our merely physical laws, that gave us conscious inner experience that supervenes on our brain function — don't hold. In the absence of these "extra" laws, our zombie twins have evolved without what Hofstadter sneers at by calling it an inner store of feelium.

Yet, since the physical laws of nature are identical in both worlds, and since the zombie world, like ours, is causally closed, every physical event that happens in Z-world precisely mirrors its twin event in our world. So when one of us utters the words, "I am having conscious inner experience of a red tricycle," our zombie twin mouths the exact same words ... and, as we do, fully believes them! His brain's "belief" circuitry functions just as ours does — a necessary consequence of the assumption that the feelium in our heads (but absent in those of our zombie twins) cannot push anything around, not even the particles whose interactions result in the activity of the neural circuits of our brain.

In short, if a universe is causally closed, and if, accordingly, any purported conscious experience that exists within that universe is wholly unable to influence its physical events, there is absolutely no way for that universe's denizens (much less any outside observers) to know for sure whether purported conscious experience is real or not. The denizens could be total zombies, and not even know it themselves! (And so could we!)


Hofstadter pokes great fun at Chalmers for this necessary upshot of his, Chalmers', theory of consciousness as supervening in a wholly acausal way upon the physical workings of the brain, and therefore of the material universe. But it seems to me all this silliness about zombie twins dissipates once you eliminate the assumption that the physical universe — ours, that is — is closed to nonphysical (i.e., mental) causes.

My guess is that:

(a) "feelium" exists in our universe

(b) it is an emergent property of the physical brain's functioning

(c) it can exert downward causal influence on physical events

(d) its downward causal influence is always mediated through physical intermediaries

To say (a) is true is to say that there really is "mind stuff," in addition to physical matter in the universe. Consciousness, feeling, experience: these are all real.

To say (b) is true is to say that this "mind stuff" or "feelium" emerges from our brain states and neural activities, but is distinct from those merely physical phenomena and events. An analogy: an arch is an emergent property: in this case, of an arrangement of stones. When by means of a scaffolding we stack stones in just the right way and then drop a keystone in place among them, we can remove the scaffolding and the arch stands. It possesses an integrity of its own and merits being called an arch rather than just a stack of stones. The arch qua arch is real. It exists.

Likewise, the mind that emerges from brain states and functions has an integrity of its own, merits being called something more than a brain, is real, exists.

To say (c) is true is to say this real, existent entity we call the mind can actually, in Hofstadter's words, "push stuff around" in the physical world. It is not merely the limp "epiphenomenon," or some such thing, that Chalmers believes it to be. In Chalmers' view, the notion that the conscious mind "supervenes" on the physical brain is what renders it unable to "push stuff around," and is what opens the door to the possibility of a zombie world (and to the possibility that ours is the zombie world!).

(d) is the most important of the four points: To say (d) is true is to say that the mind, though real, can't cause physical things to happen all by itself. Mental causation requires mediation through the brain and the body.

In other words, mentalists like Uri Geller who claim to be able to bend spoons with their minds alone are a sham.

I don't know what good a bent spoon is anyway. Still, there are times when we intend to bend things for practical purposes, such as when (a long time ago) I used to straighten a paper clip in order to insert its end in a little hole in front of my computer's floppy disk drive (remember those?) to get it to eject a stuck disk. That seems such a practical task, but I can remember my relief at getting the disk out ... and that it was my anticipation of such relief which impelled me to do the paper clip trick in the first place.

I contend that relief, as a type of feeling, qualifies accordingly as a type of conscious experience. And it is an emergent property of a situation or activity organized/witnessed/anticipated/remembered by the brain. It was anticipated relief which impelled me to (a) remember how to do the paper clip trick and (b) actually use it. But the paper clip would not straighten itself, would not poke itself into the little hole, and would not press firmly on the mechanism inside. My mind had to tell my brain to tell my body to accomplish those things. My mind exerted a "downward causation" on parts of the physical world — specifically, on my computer. There was a causal sequence. That causal sequence, though it arose in my (nonphysical) mind, was mediated by certain parts of the physical world: my brain and body.


What I'm really trying to get at with all this abstruse talk about consciousness is the idea that our conscious experience counts for something. It is real, and it changes everything. It "pushes stuff around" in the physical world in ways that wouldn't otherwise happen. And it is the core of who we are.

Hofstadter disagrees, saying it's all an illusion. Chalmers, too, disagrees, saying it's real but can't push anything around physically.

I say it's real, and it pushes stuff around.

Taking the position I take has some real advantages. For one thing, systems that have "emergent properties" (as opposed to limp "epiphenomena") are generally "complex" systems. The sciences of complexity apply to the complex system of the brain and mind, once you assume that the conscious mind is an emergent property of the brain.

Emergent properties are quite real; the quality that makes two stacks of stones into a standing arch (once a keystone is in place) is an emergent property, and an arch-qua-arch is real.

Systems that have emergent properties put a different spin on the notion of causation. They embody bottom-up causation and top-down causation. Top-down causation is sometimes called whole-part influence. The whole is not only more than the sum of the parts, it influences the parts' very behavior: it causes things to happen.

If the mind is an emergent property of the brain, then mental states cause, or change, physical events. Those physical events occur initially in the brain, but they spread to the body and then, via the body, to the world around us.

Another advantage of assuming the conscious mind to be an emergent property of the brain is that it leverages complexity science's ability to explain the quantity of diversity of the natural world. Complexity science helps explain why Darwinian biological evolution sometimes produces new species by the droves, and later watches as small, medium, and large extinction events take place, wiping out most or all of the species.

For example, the sizes of species extinction events are not random, it turns out. Plotting the event's sizes (the numbers of species eliminated in any given event) against the frequencies of events of each size yields a curious result: when so-called "log log" axes are used, the plot turns out to be a straight line!

In nature, evolution originates and destroys biological species over time in a way that Darwin's theory alone couldn't have predicted: it is as if the earth's biosphere were a "complex adaptive system," and one that is not as "random" as once assumed. Because of (albeit difficult to explain) top-down causation/whole-part influence, the pageant of speciation and extinction is more orderly than even Darwin assumed.


The same "dynamics of diversity" apply to human conscious experience, I would speculate. That's why our experiences are the most real things we know: experience is a very real, downward-causative property of the mind that emerges from, and then influences, the workings of the physical brain.

I am put in mind of that extra-special event Christians sometimes call their "conversion experience." It is also sometimes called their experience of being "born again."

It can be argued that there is no experience more central to the Christian belief than being born again, accepting Christ as one's personal savior, or other verbal descriptions of the same inner phenomenon.

The Christian New Testament is an account of historical events in the style called, by those who know such words, kerygma. "Preaching the gospel of Christ in the manner of the early church"; "the Apostolic proclamation of religious truths, especially as taught in the Gospels"; "the element of proclamation in Christian apologetic, as contrasted with didache, or its instructional aspects": these are all formal definitions of kerygma. Less formally, I would put it this way: kerygma is preaching designed to produce in the listener a born-again conversion experience.

The born-again experience is one of the vast number of "species" of experience that the conscious human mind is capable of. Especially to the evangelical Christian, no experience could be more important than the born-again, conversion experience.

Shared Souls

Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop tells us that the soul in each one of us is shared with others. The soul is the "I" we all talk about incessantly: I did this; I want that; I love you. The "I" is in the brain, but it's not built in. Rather, it's built up. We start out life with no soul, no "I." As children we build up out of our perceptions and experiences a set of categories represented as mental symbols. The all-embracing master symbol that ultimately arises is "I," the soul.

An "I" can happen in us because our brain is complex enough to manipulate symbol sets in a sufficiently rich way. The brain is, in fact, a universal machine: it can map any conceivable set of mental operations, including its own internal ones. As the brain learns to map itself, it becomes self-aware and develops a soul.

When our brain learns to map the mental operations of another brain, we have the basis for empathy. We develop empathy with those whom we love and who love us. Whenever empathy happens, we build a copy of the soul of another person in our own brain. Alongside our own "I," we create a "Thou"! Hofstadter calls this mutual interpenetration of souls "entwinement."


Put more simply, souls are shared.

Religion tells us something similar. My religion happens to be Christianity, which believes that we are all members of the "body of Christ." We are "saved" corporately, not just individually. We constitute the "bride"; Christ will return to us as the "bridegroom"; and when he does, his nuptials will equal our resurrection.

Entwinement, the sharing of souls, is implicit in this imagery. The Bible could have told us about how Jesus will usher us separately and individually into heaven at the end of time, but that's not what it says. It says, rather, that we are resurrected as one body, the bride to his groom.

"Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do to me," he said. More shared-soul imagery. Translation: we cannot treat anyone as beneath contempt, because they are us in Christ.


We are certainly not aware of any sort of soul interpenetration between ourselves and just anybody on the street. Be that as it may, it is not hard to construct an argument that there is a chain of entwinement that connects us to "just anyone," and the chain is rather short: six degrees of separation, we often hear said.

What we are aware of is the entwinement between ourselves and those we are close to. Personal closeness in this sense may be what Jesus meant by "neighbor" when he said, "Love thy neighbor." Not necessarily the folks next door physically, but the folks next door spiritually. They will have their own spiritual next-door neighbors, who will have their own, and so on and so on and so on. Pretty soon, everyone is included.

Hofstadter's viewpoint is frankly secular, not religious — yet it isn't hard to see how it could be religious, taken to it's logical conclusion.

Salt of the Earth

In A Strange-Loops Religion? I cast Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop as the founding text of a secular religion. The book argues that a soul arises in each of us only after — and due to — a long skein of mental perceptions of outward and inner reality, an ongoing process of registration that characterizes our early childhood development.

During that process, the soul gradually emerges as a "strange loop" within the brain, a functional, non-physical structure which, as it emerges, becomes able to develop an ever-more elaborate awareness of the brain's own activity. As it, the brain, processes the set of symbols which its, the brain's, perceptions build up over time, this "I"-loop — this soul, this emergent internal observer of our inner dance of symbols — becomes the most complex symbol of all, as it is aware of itself. It is, in fact, what we speak of when we use the word consciousness.

Our individual "I"-loops, inasmuch as they are symbols in the brain, are transmitted as "lower-resolution copies" to the brains of those we love, who in return bestow on us copies of their own "I"-loops. When one person dies, the "I"-loop copies in the brains of the deceased's beloveds who are left behind live on. In that way, no soul is an island: no one who loves and is loved ever truly dies.


All this talk of souls, love, and an afterlife is reminiscent, of course, of religion. But in all this religion-like talk of Hofstadter's there is no hint of anything mystical or supernatural. Hofstadter, in particular, rejects dualism, the philosophical position which holds that there are spiritual or metaphysical realities, not just physical ones.

Consciousness, the hallmark of the human condition which has been equated by religious believers to the supernatural soul, accordingly possesses an entirely physical basis, to Hofstadter. Although symbols in the brain are not themselves physical entities, they arise from physical matter in wholly non-mystical ways. Hofstadter's main brief in this book is to show how that can happen.

Yet, for all that, there is a spiritual dimension to Hofstadter's worldview:

It seems to me ... that the instinctive although seldom articulated purpose of holding a funeral or memorial service is to reunite the people most intimate with the deceased, or to collectively rekindle in them all, for one last time, the special living flame that represents the essence of that beloved person, profiting directly or indirectly from the presence of one another, feeling the shared presence of that person in the brains that remain, and thus solidifying to the maximal extent possible those secondary personal gemmae that remain aflicker in all these different brains. Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain and who are gathered to remember and reactivate the spirit of the departed, a collective corona that still glows. This is what human love means. The word "love" cannot be separated from the word "I"; the more deeply rooted the symbol for someone inside you, the greater the love, the brighter the light that remains behind. (p. 274)

Still, if that's all that is going on, the soul of the departed that the funereal rekindling keeps aflicker eventually dies out as those doing the rekindling die out. Not exactly a recipe for immortality.


To get to immortality, you have to take it a step further.

Consider what it takes for someone to be remembered as a "wonderful" person — not just in the formulaic pieties you always hear at funerals, but in the sense that the mourners actually felt (and still feel) that way about the one who is being mourned. This was the case at my most recently attended funeral: for Bruce, a man taken from his family and friends far too young by cancer. Everyone at the funeral, everyone who delivered encomiums and eulogies there, could have summed up his rich life in four words: "salt of the earth."

That Bruce embodied that biblical adjuration could not have happened were it not for the fact that Bruce's "I"-loop and that of so many other people had become mutually entwined in exactly the way Hofstadter speaks of in his book. Because Bruce was so constituted mentally and psychologically as to admit of the possibility of love, he was a good man.

Think of the many unfortunates in this world who are closed off from such soul-entwinement and live destructive lives as a result. They die alone, perhaps in a drive-by shooting. One feels they did not receive the right kind of love as children, lost the ability to share souls with other humans as adults, turned to crime and dissolution, and died having lived in vain.

They are anything but salt of the earth — a phrase that Jesus used to indicate that those who enter his "kingdom" do so for having done what salt does for meat: preserve it, keep it from rot.

The soul-sharing that Hofstadter's "soul as strange loop" concept enables also enables the good works of a lifetime that forever keep the world-as-God's-kingdom from rotting. The shared "I"-loop as flickering "gemma" may die out after one or two generations, but the good works and the personal decency of ones like Bruce who are called "salt of the earth" live on in the form of a tolerable world that would otherwise cease to exist.

In other words, there is an alchemy here: a strange-loop soul, when shared because it was sharable and love was possible, gets transmuted not into gold but into the salt of the earth. Because the kingdom does not cease to live, the soul, having attained that form, does not die.

A Strange-Loops Religion?

Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop could be read as, oddly enough, the founding text of a secular religion. Along with his earlier Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (the Old Testament to Strange Loop's New Testament?) this book gives us a modern, up-to-date reason to believe we are all connected, soul to soul, in a vast tapestry in which no man or woman is an island, entire of itself.

The "I"-symbol we each construct in our brain — which is to say, our individual soul — is not hermetically sealed inside our cranium as an isolated entity. Rather, those that we love and love us carry their own copies of the "I" which we mistakenly think belongs only to us ... and we have our own copies of their souls as well (see I Am a Hologram).

Hofstadter shows that each of us human beings have brains that can build symbols that represent, abstractly, all those kindred spirits whom we know and love. Our brains are, in a strict technical sense, "universal machines," or, put in everyday terms, great "copycats." We model one another so well in our thoughts that those persons whom we resonate most deeply with — the ones we have the best "chemistry" with — give rise to permanent symbols in our brains. These symbols inhabit our brains in precisely the same way as our own "I"-symbol does.

The "I"-symbol in my head, the one that is "uniquely me," is, of course, the only one that connects directly to my own sensory-motor apparatus. The experiences of other "I"-symbols that I make copies of in my brain depend on my receiving vicarious, empathic inputs from other people who are the copies' originators. But that's exactly the point, isn't it? That's exactly what happens all the time: we see through each others' eyes so easily. That's why Hofstadter says we all have a "nearly insatiable hunger ... for vicarious experiences" (p. 246), thus accounting for our shared love of movies, novels, soap operas, comic books, jokes, etc., etc., etc., that give us a vicarious experience of other peoples' realities.


At its best, our universal vicarity becomes full-fledged empathy, says Hofstadter. He calls empathy "the most admirable quality of humanity." Heartfelt empathy, I'd add to that, is at bottom what traditional religions are there to bring out in us. The step up from vicarity (which we all have) to true charity (which is rarer) is one of degree, not of kind, and it is this step more than any other which religion prods us to take.

Heartfelt empathy, when you think about it, is the root of human loving-kindness. As a well-read Christian, I know that "Christian love" is spoken of as the Latin word for the virtue of loving-kindness which gives us our word "charity": caritas. In translations from the Latin, this word is often rendered "love," pure and simple, as in "God is love" for Deus caritas est. Another early Christian term for the same thing, this one Greek, is the three-syllable word agapē, meaning the unconditional love God has for us and the love we have for each other in emulation of God.

Every religious tradition has its own version of this. In Jewish tradition it is chesed. In Buddhism it is mettā. What if caritas, agapē, chesed, and mettā are different names for the loving-kindness that naturally happens whenever two souls are entwined?

"Entwinement" is Hofstadter's word for the idea that we have strange, feedback-type loops in our brain, not only for our own "I"-symbol, but for each of the "I"-symbols we import from others whom we have "soulful" relationships with. In I Am a Hologram, I likened all of these "I"-symbols to holograms, in that a subdivided hologram contains all the information in the original, except at lower resolution and fidelity. So when we become entwined with someone, it is as if they forward us a little piece of their inner soul-hologram. We copy that and thenceforth have a (lower-resolution) copy of their soul in our brain. The same thing happens in the other direction as well. Entwinement is two-way soul-sharing.

When we die, our original "I"-hologram disappears. But the many copies of it that have been disseminated among the various people we have soul-shared with in our lifetime could be thought of as capable of reconstructing the master copy in all its erstwhile fidelity and glory. In strange-loops religion, the afterlife is how we live on in the world that we know here and now: as copies of "I"-holograms residing in the living brains of our loved ones.

I Am a Hologram

Douglas Hofstadter's book I Am a Strange Loop tells of the author's unutterable sorrow at the death, during the time the book was being written, of his wife Carol.

The book itself is a summing up of his earlier Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. The two books together present Hofstadter's insights into how it is that the human mind can be aware of itself and can give itself a name: "I."

As the Strange Loop dust jacket puts it:

For each human being, this "I" seems to be the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real — is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics?

Hofstadter shows the "I" to be a virtual reality, an illusion. It doesn't really exist. It can't push electrons around in our brain. It's isn't a physical entity, a group of neurons or pathways in the brain, and the laws of physics alone can't account for it.

What actually happens is that, at a level higher than the physical, the mind is full of symbols. Symbols are not anything mystical; Hofstadter shows how they can arise in something so humdrum as the busyness of an ant colony.

Yet, as we know, symbols can be manipulated in logical ways, according to various formal systems of mathematical inference. These formal systems are, the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel showed, inherently — and somewhat disappointingly — "incomplete." Surprisingly, there are, inside each of them, not just one true statement but an infinite number of true statements that the systems themselves are incapable of deriving.

As a body of theorems, every formal system is constructed from the ground up by means of applying rules of inference to a starter set of axioms. The non-derivable theorems would seem to be just as accessible to the logic and mechanics of theorem generation as are the derivable ones.

Yet they cannot be generated — though they are inescapably true. They can't be shown to be true within the system, but if you stand outside the system and think about these unprovable statements, you can see that their being false would introduce a fundamental inconsistency into a formal system that is absolutely allergic to any whiff of inconsistency. Hence, they must be true.

In short, all formal systems based on the logical manipulation of symbols to derive provable theorems based on a set of axioms are incomplete.

Hofstadter extends this basic insight to show how the set of symbols that the human mind manipulates, day in and day out, as it goes about doing its basic mental operations, is just the same. In the human mind, as in every formal system, the provable and the derivable do not exhaust the true. It is this actuality that opens the door to the possibility of a self-aware mental being, an "I" which stands outside the formal logic of our basic mental operations and independently discerns truth.

If Gödel had been wrong about the intrinsic incompleteness of formal systems, we would be living in a zombie universe in which there can be no "I," no self-awareness. Thank God Gödel was right!

Moreover, this "I"-ness of ours is, at its core, a "strange loop": the logical operations of the brain that would ordinarily constitute a straightforward hierarchy of symbol manipulation at higher and lower levels of abstraction turns, in the end, into a feedback loop. The Dutch artist M.C. Escher captured the strangeness of such loops in Drawing Hands (right).

If the above were all Hofstadter had to say, his books would be compelling. That they are also profound has to do with how he extends his basic insight into a discussion of how the unique "I"-loop of each of the people we love inhabits, in greater or lesser degree, our brain, and we, our individual "I," theirs. Again, the dust jacket gives a capsule summary:

How do we mirror other beings inside our mind? Can many strange loops of different "strengths" inhabit one brain? If so, then a hallowed tenet of our culture — that one human brain houses one human soul — is an illusion.

This notion is something the loss of Carol Hofstadter brought home to Douglas. As acute as the pain of separation was for him for a very long time, it ultimately morphed into an awareness that Carol's "I" was still alive — in Doug's brain! Also, in the brains of their children. Also, at lesser strengths, inside the brains of everyone who had ever known Carol personally!

Get it? Each of us has an "I" that is not real, in neither the physical nor the metaphysical sense, and is quintessentially strange in the way that all "strange loops" are strange. What's more, there is a spare copy of our unique "I" inside the brain of every person who knows us and loves us.

Likewise, we carry around copies of the "I"-loop of all whom, to adopt the locution of Martin Buber in I and Thou, we say "Thou" to. Depending on the depth of the mutual, personal, I-Thou relationship, the "strength" of the "I"-loop copy varies ... but it is present in every case.

Because we carry our own copies of others' "I"-loops, we learn to "see things through their eyes," as it were. We share their experiences vicariously and empathically. We "channel" these other people, in the popular parlance — as long as channeling is understood as being something neither mystical nor supernatural.

Not only can we channel those who are close to us during their lifetimes, we remain able to channel them after they're gone. My father has been dead for 20 years, my mother for 23, but scarcely a day goes by without my channeling one or the other of them, or both of them, within the confines of my own imagination.


Hofstadter uses the analogy of the strange loop to show how an "I" can exist within us and be transmitted to others. My own favorite analogy for the situation in which friends and loved ones share copies of one another's "I"-loops is the hologram. I don't claim to have a detailed understanding of holography, but my impression is that when a certain kind of light is bounced off an object onto a piece of photographic film, the light's waves form an interference pattern — criss-crossing ripples — which the film records. Then when the film is developed and the same kind of light is passed through the interference patterns on it, a virtual image of the original object appears before the eye. This image is as three-dimensional as the original object.

Interestingly, if you cut the photographic slide that records the interference pattern in half, each half can reproduce the full image of the object, all by itself. There is some minor loss of fidelity, but basically, all the information in the original slide is present in each half. If you continue to subdivide the halves, each subdivided hologram again contains the entirety of the original body of information, if in yet more attenuated fidelity, and can again reproduce the full image.

We can think of Carol Hofstadter's "I" as having been a hologram at full size and strength in her, while she was alive. Meanwhile, Doug's brain created a smaller (but nearly full-sized) copy of the "I-of-Carol" hologram during his and Carol's life together. When she passed on, his smaller copy of the hologram, which provided him with ongoing access to an only-slightly-attenuated "I-of-Carol," lived on.

Their children each possessed a like copy of the original "I-of-Carol" hologram. Innumerable friends and acquaintances of Carol and Doug also cherished "I-of-Carol" holograms at various scales and degrees of attenuation.


Moreover, the various and sundry "I-of-whoever" holograms rattling around in each of our brains modify the central "I-of-me" hologram each of us builds. I cannot tell you how many times I realize that one friend or another has imprinted something of himself or herself indelibly on my inner experience, my "I-of-me" hologram. I have one particular longtime friend, for example, whose love of our mutually shared Catholic Church dwarfs mine, I am a bit ashamed to admit. (I'll call her Mary, a pseudonym.) But I can look at the Church through Mary's eyes any time I want to, and when I do its beauty becomes instantly apparent to me.

In ways that I would not care to try to quantify, her Church-love has changed me.

That means the it has changed the copy of my "I"-hologram that is possessed by any other friend of mine, call him Joseph ... who may not know Mary at all. If my "I"-hologram changes Joseph in any way, then I have indirectly exposed Joseph to Mary's "I"-hologram as well.

Should, God forbid, Mary die tomorrow, she will live on in me, and in Joseph, whom I have touched in an I-Thou way, and in anyone Joseph touches in an I-Thou way ... and on and on and on, until the end of time.

And that is a thought that is truly marvelous to contemplate!

Theology of the Body, Part 9

Now, yet more in my Theology of the Body (TOB) series about the theological outlook espoused by the late Pope John Paul II, as described in Christopher West's book Theology of the Body for Beginners.

The "theology of the body," as John Paul called it, is all about chastity, the opposite of lust.

According to West, TOB affirms that there is, beyond repression or indulgence, a third way of the heart by which we can redeem our erotic impulses. Once we have found this way, we can turn our sexuality into a sacrament.

That's the good news. The bad news is that it isn't either quick or easy to find the way. Time after time, West writes, we must pray to Jesus to transform our lust. Eventually, if we have enough faith, we will be rewarded.

Self-scrutiny tells me that I personally don't have enough faith for this. And, on a chastity scale from one to ten, where ten is the Virgin Mary, I imagine I'm at least a six. I don't lust in my heart all that much. But I know that some people do, and many who don't haven't found the sacramental third way; rather, they repress and suppress and turn aside from sexual indulgences in deference to what West calls the "negative" rules of purity.

Most good Christians, I believe, are thou-shalt-not Christians.

The theology of the body, accordingly, would seem to be a sort of post-graduate course in the "nuptial meaning of life."


Intellectually, I can see that the Bible affirms such a nuptial meaning. The story begins with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Before the fall from grace that occurs when they eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they innocently live out the original nuptial meaning just as God wants them to, and they are not at all ashamed of their nakedness.

After they eat the forbidden fruit, cover their private parts, and are expelled from Eden, a huge amount of narrative ensues, all focused on the way God interacts with his people in view of their inheritance of Adam and Eve's original sin and their constant infidelity to his worship and will. Eventually, Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was born of a virgin, walks this earth. He teaches us, works miracles, dies on a cross, is resurrected and assumed into heaven, and eventually turns out to have been the Son of God all the time. Finally, at the end of history, his return to us is promised in the Book of Revelation; he will be the Bridegroom, and his redeemed people will be his Bride.

As I say, the Bible as a whole affirms the nuptial meaning of our existence. I can see that intellectually. But I cannot see how the vast bulk of us are really capable of faithfully living that meaning, except in negative, thou-shalt-not terms.

Theology of the Body, Part 8

Now, more in my Theology of the Body series about the "theology of the body" (TOB) espoused by the late Pope John Paul II, as described in Christopher West's book Theology of the Body for Beginners.

In Theology of the Body, Part 7 I described TOB as a way of understanding Christ's redemption of humankind's "original sin." The original sin of Adam and Eve, our mythical forebears in the Book of Genesis, was rooted in lust: exchanging their initial ability to delight in each other sexually, in the context of giving themselves to one another totally, for something much, much less ennobling, and therefore shameful. Lust (even when shared) is self-gratification for its own sake. It blocks us from knowing the "nuptial meaning" of human existence.

I made the case in the prior post that you can match up the process of re-appropriating this nuptial meaning of life with the process of Self-realization laid out by Jung. Given the essential Jungian step which I refer to as "addressing the Anima (or Animus)", the biblical idea that a man and woman must cleave together as "one flesh" receives its secular, psychological interpretation. Two approaches to one great truth, these would seem to be.

The two approaches are united in being more matters of inner personal experience than just believing in psychological formulas or adhering to religious laws. Pope John Paul II talked about how the thing that his theology of the body seeks is not just adherence to an ethic or set of rules concerning sex. Rather, our hearts must be converted to a "new ethos" wherein we no longer desire to break the erstwhile rules.

To gain the inner personal experience we seek, so that we might come to know the "nuptial meaning of the body," is not something that we can expect to happen fully in this lifetime. Fulfillment, in the sense of completion, West writes, comes only in heaven. Yet we can make a start:

As we open ourselves to this gift, the grace of redemption begins to "re-vivify" our humanity, to enliven our hearts with God's own goodness. To the degree that we allow this grace to inform and transform us, God's Holy Spirit impregnates our sexual desires [in John Paul II's words] "with everything that is noble and beautiful," with "the supreme value which is love" ... (pp. 43-44)

My own problem with this is one West addresses in his section "Purity Is Not Prudishness" (pp. 45-47). The problem is this: I don't yet seem to have the ability to find the middle way between lust and prudishness.

I accordingly feel quite encouraged by John Paul's words (written in Love & Responsibility while he was still Karol Wojtyla) to the effect that "mature purity"

consists in quickness to affirm the value of a person in every situation, and in raising [sexual reactions] to the personal level ... (p. 45)

I sort of already know that, but can't always put it into practice ... and so I have found myself adopting a "don't look" policy: don't even produce an occasion of sin by looking at a woman with concupiscence in the first place. As West points out (p. 46), that's a bit like the Old Testament admonition, "Turn away your eyes from a shapely woman" — and it is no more than "a necessary first step," a "negative" and immature purity.

According to John Paul II:

"In mature purity man enjoys the fruits of the victory won over lust." He enjoys the "efficacy of the gift of the Holy Spirit" who restores to his experience of the body "all its simplicity, its explicitness, and also its interior joy" ...

... thus rescuing us from both lust and prudishness at one and the same time!

This means I can expect to discard my "don't look" training wheels real soon now.

Theology of the Body, Part 7

This post represents a re-taking up of my Theology of the Body series from three years ago. The focus of the series is the "theology of the body" espoused by the late Pope John Paul II, as described in Christopher West's book Theology of the Body for Beginners.

In previous installments, I indicated how conflicted I was about what I'll abbreviate as TOB. On the one hand, I felt deeply drawn to it; on the other, repelled by it as a sure way to drive a wedge between true believers and everyone else.

The basic idea of TOB is that there is really nothing more fundamental, in terms of our life in this world, than sex in all its ramifications, and therefore nothing more capable of serving as the taproot of sin than sex. When our original desire to share ourselves fully with one another, man-to-woman and woman-to-man, was perverted into lust, it became our "original sin." Christ's death on a cross and resurrection to life everlasting have redeemed that sin and all its follow-on transgressions fully, assuring us of a place in heaven, but we have to appropriate that redemption willingly, and at some great difficulty, in this life.

The theology of the body, laid out by John Paul II in a series of talks early in his pontificate, is a discourse in how we do that.


Herein, rather than try to lay out the entire complex subject in one blog post, I'd like to try to relate the Holy Father's theology of the body to Jungian psychology.

In my long recent series on Jungian Wholeness and its Addressing the Anima subset, I discussed Jung's ideas about the hidden powers of the unconscious mind: the archetypes, including the Shadow, the Anima, and the Self. The Shadow, I said, betokens the repository of aspects of the psyche that we don't like about ourselves. We don't particularly want to see our sexual avidity as "lust," for instance, so we park "lust" in the unconscious depths, where it becomes part of the Shadow complex.

Jung held that deeper than the Shadow in men lies the archetype called the Anima (the Animus in women). As a feminine component in a masculine personality, the Anima represents a man's ideal for members of the opposite sex. The Animus in women, as a masculine component in a feminine soul, does the same in return. True psychic health demands that at some point the Anima/Animus should be confronted, internally and consciously, but even before that happens, the Anima/Animus typically gets projected outward on a member of the other sex. As a result, we fall in love.

The way we treat our Anima/Animus figure, once we have done so, is intended to be the opposite of lust.

If the healthy sexual desire we have for our beloved turns to lust, or gets smothered by the lust we have for other women or men, we lose the ability to "address the Anima." But addressing the Anima allows "her" (or "him," as the Animus in women is referred to) to guide us in our ultimate search for the Self.

The Self is the one archetype which can unify the psyche. It has a number of aspects which I discussed in earlier posts, including the capability of being symbolized as a Christian cross. For purposes of this post, the Self represents the imago Dei, the "image of God" within us.

Stripped of excess detail, we need to move from being slave to the Shadow (lust) to full expression of the "better angels of our nature" when we address the Anima, either in the guise of our beloved spouse or internally and consciously. That leads us onward to some sort of union with God.

So the Jungian scheme of things would seem to be consistent with John Paul II's theology of the body!

On "Humanae Vitae"

In this The Connubial Couch series of posts, I've been blogging about my conversion to believing that heterosexual married couples gain admittance to an inner sanctum barred to homosexual couples. Within this sanctum, I have noted, marital intimacies give birth to an instantiation of something of nontarnishable beauty and universal worth. The "bliss secrets" of the connubial couch are, unlike "ordinary" human secrets, sacred and holy because, of all human secrets, they alone connect with an inner essence of timeless truth.

This was both something I "just knew" intuitively — despite my erstwhile support for gay rights and gay marriage — and something I was able to reason my way to, based on a philosophical analysis of the nature of secrets.

Then, having decided on that much, I asked where such thinking was bound to lead. As I was pondering that question, I picked up the Catholic Review and read the article "Pope urges church to help couples see beauty of natural procreation."

Pope Benedict XVI has, the article says, "asked why is it that the world and many Catholics still have a difficult time understanding the church's teachings 40 years after Pope Paul VI's encyclical on human life and birth control."

Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical "Humanae Vitae" ("On Human Life") in 1968, forbidding Catholics to use not only abortion but also artificial means of preventing pregnancy such as condoms and the Pill. Now, on the encyclical's 40th anniversary, the current Holy Father is pointedly reaffirming it.

I didn't do so before reading the article, but I think I now understand why the Church makes such a big deal about artificial contraception:

Pope Benedict said technical responses to "the great human questions" such as life and death often seem to offer the easier solution.

"But in reality (a technical solution such as artificial contraception) obscures the underlying question concerning the meaning of human sexuality" and the need for couples to exercise "responsible control" over their sexual desires so that the expression of those desires may become expressions of self-giving, "personal love," he said.

When talking about love between two people, technical responses cannot replace "a maturation of freedom," the pope said.

As I interpret that idea, the pope is saying that of all the available birth-control strategies, only the one popularly known as the rhythm method encourages couples to abstain from instant gratification of sexual desires at critical times of the month. Only a birth-control regimen consistent with so-called "natural procreation" fosters our learning of marital self-control. And self-control is a necessary constraint, if the intimacies of the connubial couch are to instantiate sacred, timeless truth.

I find that a compelling reason for the Church to counsel against artificial birth control, actually. Unfortunately, I still do not see why the Church forbids it outright, as opposed to merely deprecating it.

Be that as it may, here is what I consider to be a timeless truth: freedom in this world conspires with timeless forms and essences above and beyond this world to produce works of timeless beauty — but only when freedom is hemmed in by appropriate constraints, limits, boundary conditions. Otherwise, the result is chaos.


I have spent a number of years pondering the significance of recent scientific insights into chaos theory and its close ally, the theory of complexity. Scientists have discovered that certain fundamental physical processes are inherently chaotic and have developed ways to understand and model chaos. While those advances were taking place, other scientists looked into processes that, while not literally chaotic, occupy a nearby regime that has been nicknamed the "edge of chaos." The latter include the dynamical processes associated with life on earth as it has evolved, and continues to evolve. Earthly evolution has, of course, produced us.

Systems are capable of moving over and back out of chaos, it has been found. One of the ways to distinguish between truly chaotic systems and living systems that are typically at the edge of chaos is in terms of their "boundary conditions."

Mathematically, boundary conditions apply to systems being modeled by differential equations ... the sorts of equations that are necessary when dealing with nonequilibrium dynamical systems, which all living systems are. A system's behavior can be determined mathematically by means of solving the appropriate differential equations — sometimes not an easy task. But how the equations are to be solved depends also on a set of assumptions about boundary conditions. Change the boundary conditions, and the solutions to the equations change.

In other words, a system's future is determined not only by its equations but also by its boundary conditions.

Metaphorically, the same is true for us as living systems. The limits and constraints that are placed on our behavior shape our destinies.

But we humans are, within externally imposed limits and constraints, free. We have free will. One of the things we can do with our free will is to adopt self-imposed limits and constraints — additional boundary conditions of the soul, if you will.

When the Catholic Church asks us not to use "technical" or "artificial" means of birth control, we are being asked to place boundary conditions on our souls, as it were, as a strategy by which we can perfect our capacity for self-giving, personal love and thereby achieve a true "maturation of freedom."

Rightly or wrongly, the Church sees "Humanae Vitae" as a weapon we can all employ in the struggle against societal and cultural (not just personal) chaos.

More on the Connubial Couch

As I was saying in Secrets of the Connubial Couch, I think I have found a way to reason to something I previously resisted believing: that there is an inner sanctum of connubial bliss whose secrets are shared among married couples ... but only if they are heterosexual couples. There is an impenetrable barrier between heterosexual couples and homosexual couples that keeps their respective "bliss secrets," however similar on the surface, ultimately disparate.

There is a marital inner sanctum, I said, which contains secrets that are unlike any other sorts of secrets. Connubial intimacies alone produce something of timeless beauty, because their secrets alone possess an inner essence that renders them universal and enduring.

Now I would like to point out that the discussion in that prior post is founded on two separate pillars of thought. I'll call the pillars those of the "right brain" and the "left brain."

My "right brain" pillar relies on gut feelings and intuition. Somehow, though I've never been married, I "just know" it's true that marital intimacy is somehow unique. Further, I just know that a heterosexual couple and a homosexual couple can never be marital "sidekicks" with fully interchangeable knowledge of this connubial inner sanctum.

At that point, my "left brain" takes over with its skill at philosophical reasoning. It reasons that secrets either do or don't have an essence. (An essence, philosophers say, is the idea or form which unites objects that mutually partake of it. A table, for instance, like every other table, partakes of the form/idea/essence of Table-ness.)

Philosophers disagree as to whether forms and essences are in fact real or only imaginary, but as I said in On Secrets, I tend to agree with those thinkers who say this: timeless beauty is real, and it could never be incarnated as art if there were not a universal and eternal form or idea of Beauty.

So, supposing that there are forms and essences, I went on to ask whether our personal secrets possess them. In general, I think I was able to argue successfully that they do not. There is typically nothing intrinsic to a run-of-the-mill secret that makes it a secret.

Yet, as I hope I was able to demonstrate, the secret intimacies of the marital couch are an exception. Betrayals of those intimacies constitute a betrayal of more than the personal secrets of the respective individuals involved. The mingling on a marital couch of two individuals' bliss secrets instantiates something of eternal, timeless beauty. Ergo, couples' bliss secrets do, unlike other secrets, have an essence.

In that way the left side of my brain was able to ratify what the right side believed anyway.


The discussion concerning homosexual couples was similar to that first one. I began with an intuition that I ought to be able to devise an argument to the effect that homosexual couples are somehow barred from the inner sanctum to which all heterosexual marriages readily gain admission. Casting about for what precisely such an argument might be, I found this: it just "popped into my head" that extending the argument about secrets shared by two spouses in a single marriage to cover secrets shared between two married couples, as marital "sidekicks," might reveal the distinction I wanted to expose.

My right brain was feeding a button of thought into my left brain in hopes that the latter could sew a vest on it. And that's exactly what happened. I concluded that the inability to share inner-sanctum secrets make heterosexual and homosexual couples akin to oil and water: unable, in the final analysis, to mix.


That's the status of the discussion so far. Now I find myself wondering where it goes from here.

If there is something extraordinary about the intimacies of heterosexual marriage which turns the dross of ordinary sex into the gold of something untarnished, beautiful, and timeless, so what?

Of course, as a Catholic, I find that one of the first answers that presents itself for consideration is the one I think of as the "full Pope" position on matters sexual and familial. By this I mean what the late Pope John Paul II called the "theology of the body."

As all Catholics and most non-Catholics are surely aware, the Church has some fairly un-modern ideas about sex. The previous Holy Father gathered all the traditional strands of Catholic sexual morality into a unified teaching he dubbed the "theology of the body." Many of these strands are ones I have found myself in opposition to in the past.

Since one of the strands of traditional Catholic teaching is that homosexual relations are "gravely disordered," or words to that effect, and since I have in the past aligned myself with the contrarians who say the Church ought to sanction gay rights and gay marriages, for me now to doubt that erstwhile stance opens up the possibility that my new way of thinking implies a "full Pope" position on sexual morality.

More on that in the next post ...

Secrets of the Connubial Couch

In my last post I talked about sex and secrets. I said that secrets are strange: although two people may insist they share the same secret simply because the words that would be used to state one person's secret are identical to those used to state the other's, in reality all secret-originators are keeping their own personal secrets, distinct from everybody else's secrets, however alike.

It's a violation of trust for me to reveal a secret that you have shared with me, even if my own deepest, darkest, most intimate secret can be stated in exactly the same words as yours, and so would seem to be exactly the same secret. If your secret is that you are gay, and my secret is that I am gay, it would be a violation of trust for me to reveal your hidden sexual identity — even if I'm in the process of coming out of the closet myself.

I don't possess your secret, and it's not mine to give away.

Because this is so, I said that secrets in general have no "essence" of the sort philosophers talk about. They do not partake of any abstract form or idea that sets their need for secrecy from within, as it were. In general, there is nothing intrinsic to gayness or anything else that makes secrecy absolutely necessary. In a different world (such as that of the ancient Greeks, where homosexual behavior was rife) there would be no point to being in the closet.


I went on to say in my earlier post that we have no deeper secrets than those concerning sex. The secrets of the connubial couch, if we view them as being kept separately and individually by each marital partner alone, might seem to be his-and-hers secrets, not theirs. His unutterable delight might be his ephemeral own, as might hers also be.

In philosopher-speak, again, connubial secrets might accordingly seem to have no "essence," no universality. There would be no occasion of timelessness, of beauty, of transcendence. Put another way, the two partners' hidden, inner awarnesses might never mingle to make something enduring.

But that's not the way it is.

No, different rules apply to married couples and their shared secrets. A couple may, for instance, reserve from public awareness the fact that they use whipped cream for fun and games in the bedroom. I would be a betrayal for him to tell his buddies about the earthly delights of Reddi-Wip if she doesn't want him to, even if he doesn't see why everyone shouldn't know.

But the reason it's a betrayal is different from that of the previous example; it's their secret — "their" being a plural pronoun with a singular thrust.

In the earlier example, you and I are (we imagined) both hiding the fact that we are gay. We are not lovers; there is no connubial couch for us. Perhaps you are female, and thus a lesbian, while I am a male homosexual. We simply don't have eyes for each other. If either of us reveals the other's secret, it is a violation of trust ... but it is not a betrayal of connubial proportions.

On the other hand, if a wife tells a casual girlfriend about her husband's liking her to wear thongs under her business suits, what is being betrayed is a plural secret. What is being broken faith with is the timeless essence of connubial trust.

From something without an essence — the secrets of a sexual encounter, as kept separately by those individuals whose brief contact produces them — can, in marriage, become something with an essence, a universality, and a timelessness: the beauty of real sex. Real connubial bliss may be the only personal secret with a timeless essence.


Let's give our married couples names. The first couple, the one with the liking for whipped cream and other delights, are Sam and Diane. The second, with the racy underwear thing, are Chip and Dale.

Now, let's say the two couples are best friends.

That means, among other things, that it's now OK for Dale to let on to Diane that Chip likes her, Dale, to wear the skimpiest of undies. And Sam can tell Chip how Reddi-Wip puts spice in his and Diane's love life. Why? Because both couples are on the same exalted plane of marital intimacy, it is somehow not a violation for them to compare notes.

At the same time, these shared secrets cannot be blabbed to outsiders without it being a betrayal at the connubial level. If Diane tells her casual friend — call her Susie — about Dale's thong-wearing, it's not just a garden-variety breach of trust ... it's as bad as if Sam himself had done the blabbing.

Connubial secrets can be shared, but only with others who are personally known to share the same holy paradise of marital secrecy. All who enter the inner sanctum are alike. All who keep its secrets outwardly may share them inwardly.

Yet there are limits. It would utterly destroy the holiness if Sam were to sleep with Dale, or Chip with Diane. Nor is group sex allowed, à la the movie Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. The inner sanctum does have private compartments.


What if Dale were a he? Would everything I just said remain the same?

Of course, Dale's naughty secret might not involve the same kind of thong undies, owing to the idiosyncrasies of the male anatomy. But would all else remain as it was?

In other words, could Sam and Diane treat a male couple as fellow celebrants in the inner sanctum, with full privileges of note-comparing and shared intimacies?

I'm not sure that if I were Sam, I could. It would seem to be necessary that our imaginary "sidekick couple," mine and Diane's, be heterosexual. Somehow, the meanings of naughty underwear and dairy-oriented enhancements to bliss change when the respective partners don't match up, gender-wise.

You don't agree? Imagine if Sam and Diane's secret is the same as Chip and Dale's: in each case, the wife, Diane or Dale, wears naughty undies to work. The secrets here are not just alike, they're identical.

But if Dale's a guy, the twin secrets drop to the level of being "just alike." They're no longer identical.

You may object that the problem here is due to Sam, Diane, Chip, and a female Dale having imbibed the homophobia of the culture. Change the culture, and Dale could just as well be a guy.

I'm not so sure. Even in ancient Greece, I doubt a heterosexual pair could be marital "sidekicks" with a homosexual couple. But even if you're right and I'm wrong about that, there can be little doubt that as our culture stands right now, gay and straight couples can never occupy the same connubial inner sanctum.


Time for a summary: I am reasoning from a gut-level feeling that the secrets of the connubial couch are different from other secrets. They alone, if shared inappropriately, represent a violation of a plural entity's trust. Other secrecy violations violate only the trust of a single individual.

Moreover, my gut tells me that marital secrets can in fact be shared (at least, some of them) between married couples who know each other so well that neither one can doubt the other's right of admission into the inner sanctum of marital understanding. There is, in effect, a secret handshake that two married couples can use to validate one another's admissibility to the sanctum.

Third, this "secret handshake" is categorically unavailable if one of the couples is made up of two guys (or two gals).

On Secrets

A confession: I've been looking at porn on the Internet. Smut. Naughty stuff ... what used to be called, quaintly, "French postcards." Yet I've found that what you can see if you enter the right words in the Google Images search box goes way beyond naughty. And it isn't really all that much fun to look at, truth be told. The question is, why not?

An answer crossed my mind today as I pondered the nature of secrets.

Secrets are things we don't want to tell others, don't want them to see or know about. That much is unremarkable. What seems to me to be more remarkable about secrets is that each one is unique.

That's a big deal if you are like me and tend to agree with the protagonist of Muriel Barbery's award-winning novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Renée Michel is the concierge in a Parisian hôtel particulier who ponders thoughts above her station. At one point she glimpses the master's thesis of one of her tenants' daughters and is set to musing about the philosophy of William of Ockham.

Ockham held that there are no universals, just unique and particular entities that only seem to participate in a universal form or ideal. There is no such thing as the quintessence of table-ness, only this table, that table, this other table. The notion that the abstract idea of the table is real is a trick of the human capacity to use language, thereby to invent (non-existent) general categories.

But Renée Michel disagrees:

As far as Will of Ockham is concerned, things are singular, and the realism of universals is erroneous. There are only particular realities, generality is merely in the mind and to presume that generic realities exist is merely to make what is simple complicated. But can we be so sure? Was I not seeking congruence between Raphael and Vermeer only yesterday? The eye recognizes a shared form to which both belong, and that is Beauty. And I daresay there must be reality in that form, it cannot be a simple expedient of the human mind classifying in order to understand, and discerning in order to apprehend: for you cannot classify something that is not classifiable, you cannot put things together that cannot be together in a group, or gather those that cannot be gathered. A table cannot be a View of Delft: the human mind cannot create this dissimilarity, any more than it can invent the deep solidarity connecting a Dutch still life to an Italian Virgin and Child. In every table there is an essence that gives it its form and, similarly, every work of art belongs to a universal form that alone confers its seal upon the work. To be sure, we cannot perceive this universality directly: that is one of the reasons why so many philosophers have balked at considering essences to be real, for I will only ever see the table that is before me, and not the universal "table" form; only the painting, and not the very essence of Beauty. And yet ... and yet it is there, before our eyes: every painting by a Dutch master is an incarnation of Beauty; a dazzling apparition that we can only contemplate through the singular, but that opens a tiny window onto eternity and the timelessness of a sublime form.

Eternity: for all its invisibility, we gaze at it.

Yet, it seems to me, we can never gaze upon the essence of a secret, for a secret has no essence. A secret is what it is only by virtue of the intentions of the person who is keeping it.

Suppose you are gay, but keeping it a secret. Suppose also that you have a friend — not a lover — who is also in the closet. It may seem that you share the same secret, and that therefore secrets have universal essences.

But now imagine that your friend tells someone else that you and he (let's say your friend is male) are both gay. What will be your reaction? Isn't it apt to be that it's well and good for him to part with his own secret if he bloody well wants to, but he has no right whatsoever to betray your confidence?

Secrets belong only to their originators. Even if the gist of a secret is identical between two secret-keepers, each person's secret is an entirely separate entity. Ergo, secrets (though they have gists) have no essences.


It all has to do with consciousness. Animals don't have secrets, because they are not conscious. (Or, if they do possess consciousness at some level, it is only to that extent that they are capable of secrecy.)

Jung had it that human consciousness lies along an arc from the pre-conscious "participation mystique" of infancy to the advanced awareness of a guru on a mountaintop — which amounts to the same oceanic, all-is-one immersion, now at a fully conscious level.

If you are a pre-conscious infant, there can be no hiddenness, no secrecy. The same is true of the mountaintop guru, to whom all secrets are revealed. And the same goes for God, from whom no secrets can be kept. In fact, Jung spoke of the advanced stages of consciousness as the realization of the Self as the imago Dei, the image of God.

But most of us spend our days at stages of consciousness that are somewhere in between these endpoints. Everyday consciousness is secret-keeping consciousness. If our lives were open books to everyone who is not a baby or a guru, and their interior lives were equally open to our own view, life would be impossible to deal with.

I have often fantasized about what it would be like if one could see each innermost thought of another individual, blazoned on his or her forehead: "I don't really like Alice, but I have to pretend to since her husband is my husband's boss"; "I don't want the buddies I hang around with to know I like medieval French poetry"; "I'm planning to dump my girlfriend, but I'm not ready to tell her yet."

Those pieces of inner dialogue would be bad enough, if revealed to one and all. Far worse, though, would be thoughts about sex: "I'm sure horny today"; "I'm not horny, but would like to be — where can I score some Viagra?"; "I'm sleeping with my secretary and don't want my wife to find out"; "I can't keep my eyes off her breasts/his behind"; and so on.

Well, then ... why are thoughts about sex more secret than other thoughts? I think the answer is that secrecy is the essence of sex.


If not secrecy per se, then intimacy. Confidentiality. What goes on between us is nobody else's business. That sort of thing. Otherwise, it's just friction and heat, spanning and delving, pumping and orgasm.

The eternal essence of sex retches at the thought. The eternal essence of sex knows that sex involves holding, and being held, close. You aren't really holding someone close if you know that what the two of you are doing is being filmed and will wind up on the Internet.

So, from something without an essence — the secrets of the bedroom, as kept separately by those who share the bed — comes something with an essence and a universality: the beauty of real sex. Go figure.

What's Your Blick?

"What's Your Blick? God or Science?" is the title of a recent book review in Washington Post Book World. The book in question: Michael Novak's No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers.

Reviewer Jacques Berlinerblau described the book as a riposte to the New Atheism of Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, all of whom have recent bestsellers disparaging religion and belief in God. Novak, says the "unrepentant Jewish atheist" Berlinerblau, is a Catholic theologian who would like to have a "heart-to-heart chat with these Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."

According to Berlinerblau,

To help frame the debate, Novak invokes the idea of a "blick," a "way of viewing reality that is not usually overturned by one or more pieces of countervailing evidence." Coined in about 1950 by the British philosopher R.M. Hare (who spelled it "blik"), the term refers to a mental filter through which people sift information, admitting some things as facts and rejecting others. To simplify somewhat, atheists and theists process information about the cosmos in radically different ways.

I'll take that "blick" idea a bit further. According to the late psychologist Carl Jung (see Quest for the Self, Part 2), human consciousness has at least five (and perhaps seven) stages of development:

1. A stage in early infancy when the conscious mind as such has yet to develop, and we experience a "participation mystique" where we have no idea we are separate from the rest of the world.
   
2. Then we learn to differentiate external persons and objects from ourselves — and right off we begin projecting the potencies of our inner unconscious mind outward upon them. A primitive sort of religious sense evolves, where the powerful archetypes, projected outward, seem to animate objects in the environment. Every tree is a god.
   
3. Later, we start projecting our inner archetypes out upon upon abstract entities, such as our notion of God in Heaven. Now it is the One God who has the numinous power of all the archetypes.
   
4. The next, fourth stage of conscious development is characterized by a seeming end to the proclivity to project the energy of our inner archetypes out onto persons and things, whether they be concrete and specific (Stage 2) or abstract and general (Stage 3). This is the stage atheists embody.
   
5. Next, in Stage 5, the "modern man's" anomie, meaninglessness, and lack of spiritual center, typical of Stage 4, gives way to an ability to take the once-hidden potencies of the unconscious mind — the archetypes — and bring them under direct mental scrutiny and into conscious acceptance.
6. In Stage 6 (see Quest for the Self, Part 3), the boundary between inside-the-mind and and outside-the-mind begins to crumble. This is a stage reached by mystics. The apparently inner structures which Jung called archetypes are seen to correspond, after all, to structures of being in the outer, nonpsychic world.
7. Finally, Stage 7 consciousness has come full circle, back to the "participation mystique" of infancy in which we have not yet become aware that we are distinct from everyone and everything in our environment. The difference is that originally we did not understand the inner-outer distinction in the first place, while now we are fully conscious of having overcome it.
   

Few people get beyond Stage 4, and modern people who have strong religious beliefs remain at Stage 3. While Jung described these seven stages as coming in the indicated sequence, and he seemed to think later stages superior to earlier stages, I find it more useful to think of the stages as stations on a circular railroad line, none of which is privileged over any other.

Some people, as we know, get off the train at the third station. They are religious believers.

Other people, atheists, disembark at the fourth stop. (Many of them were seemingly asleep when the train let off passengers at Station 3.)

When and if someone stays on the train for the entire journey and disembarks only at Station 7, he has in effect arrived back where he started — but making the trip has elevated what was originally strictly unconscious in him, as the "participation mystique," to the level of full consciousness.


Now, add to that model the following: each stage from 2 through 4 involves an increasingly insistent act of repudiation:

• Stage 2 repudiates the (pre-conscious) notion from Stage 1 that "all is one."
• Stage 3 repudiates the idea that what are really our inner archetypes, projected outward, control the outside world — if we are in harmony with the gods, things go our way.
• Stage 4 repudiates the notion that the same kind of thinking applies validly, but only to God Above, whom we can't see.
  

Then the final three stages involve successive reintroductions of the powers and relationships that were formerly repudiated:

• Stage 5 reintroduces the inner powers (the archetypes) at the level of conscious belief.
  
• Stage 6 re-links these powers with external potencies.
  
• Stage 7 returns us to a (now-conscious) "all is one" awareness.
  

In this model, there are not two blicks, but seven.

Admittedly, only blicks 3 and 4 apply to most modern adults. Blick 5 is the one Jung advocated, in which adults, usually in the second half of their life spans, follow a path of "individuation" toward a goal of "Self-realization."

(The Self is the archetype-of-archetypes, the "image of God" in the soul. Self-realization involves paying attention to the symbols the archetypes propel into our dreams and fantasies, rituals and myths — symbols which link up with things treated by traditional religious believers as facts. Moses' burning bush is a fact to a traditional theist, a symbol to a Jungian.)

Perhaps the New Atheists and the champions of traditional religion could stop shouting at each other if they recognized that theirs are only two of the seven possible blicks!