Tag Archives: naturalistic transcendentalism

A new school of philosophy being created by Peter Bishop. Picks up from where Emerson and other philosophers of the 19th century left off in exploring the philosophy of human experience, but with a 21st century philosophical naturalism.

My Answer to Descartes

The Miracle of Me

I have been a lifelong humanist activist, starting as soon as I graduated from college. During the late 1970’s, I found that humanist materials were appropriate for college students and college graduates, but I was concerned about educating the young children in my new family about my own beliefs. My wife and I worked for two years to make some basic materials for kids. By 1980 I was ready to publish the results, my humanist creed, in the Humanist Magazine.

By this time, I had also written a number of songs, which I self-published in HCSJ’s First Humanist Songbook, also in 1980. During the next decade, I was one of the leaders of the Humanist Community of San Jose, frequently addressing the community on various philosophical issues. During this time, I found the saying of Descartes: “I think, therefore I am,” to be very frustrating due to its incompleteness. One day in 1990, this frustration bubbled to the surface and in about 30 minutes I had written a little poem that I called Me that was my answer to Descartes.

Me

I am.
I think, so I know that I am.
I understand, so I know what I am.
I feel, so I care what I am.
I dream, so I know what I might become.
I act, so I become myself.

By the time I was ready to transition out of hi-tech into philosophy, I would realize that this poem was a key part of my philosophical work. Although I think of this poem as my answer to Descartes, in fact Rene Descartes was very aware of our imaginations. He was so in awe of our mental capacities that he declared there to be mind-body duality. Although he was convinced that everything happens due to the action of natural law, that is, the laws of physics and biology, he could not imagine how these laws could result in what I am happy to call the miracle of me. During the enlightenment, the encyclopedists had declared that Descartes’ metaphysics were a complete failure. For David Hume, a late enlightenment philosopher, the puzzle was how could he reconcile his belief that humans are free to decide whatever they decide, with his belief that the human mind must work as a result of natural law.

By the late 20th century, however, the philosophy of existentialism was well developed, and so I started with a statement of the fact of our existence. There is no doubt that thinking is a very important capacity of human beings, and I wanted to put Descartes’ saying into perspective, which I did in the second line of the poem. After that, however, I wanted to acknowledge several other important activities of the human mind and show how they worked together to form our imaginations and the rest of our mind.

I decided to finish my poem by emphasizing that the whole point of a mind is to cause us to act in the world. Although I was familiar with Douglas Hofstadter‘s Godel, Escher, Bach, I had not fully appreciated what students of the human mind are starting appreciate: that the brain changes itself. As we exercise our capacity for free will, we act in the world, and we learn how we want to live in the world, and change our brains so we will act in the world in the way that we want to act. By living in this way, we are truly altering our beings and causing ourselves to become the unique individuals that we are.

Some 17 years later, Douglas Hofstadter himself was ready to make a similar declaration in his wonderful book I am a Strange Loop.

Naturalistic Transcendentalism – Overview

Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism was an important movement that arose early in the nineteenth century prior to Darwin publishing The Origin of Species. It arose out of the Enlightenment, which recognized the importance of natural law in the working of the universe. Ralph Waldo Emerson studied as a minister before beginning his work as a philosopher. In his first philosophical work, Nature. Emerson talked about his desire to achieve revelations. As he explored further how he could experience revelations, he soon talked about the human faculty of intuition. Emerson saw intuition as a key religious experience of knowing what is right, but without using a scientific reasoning process.

Transcendentalism emphasized the importance of human intuition in modern life, but was not opposed to the idea that human intuition is part of nature. As the transcendentalists continued to think about human intuition and the role human intuition plays in the forming of human judgement and the setting of goals, writers such as Thomas Carlyle, who lived from 1795 to 1881, talked about intuition being a phenomenon of “natural supernaturalism.” After Darwin published The Origin of Species many people misunderstood the naturalistic leanings of Transcendentalism’s origins. As science and the philosophy of science continued to develop into the twentieth century, people stopped thinking along Transcendentalist lines, and began to think about things from a more humanist perspective. Humanist thinking downplayed the importance of human intuition in favor of reasoning and in favor of conclusions about how to live life that are closer to everyday applicability.

Naturalism

As we look at these issues today, our naturalism is much more complex than it was in the early nineteenth century. It is now time to admit that human intuition is important within two dimensions. First, it plays a central role in the making of human judgements, and is therefore worthy of study. Second, it is a very important part of the subjective life of human beings. It even underlies human creativity, which is utilized by scientists as they propose new hypotheses.

Today, naturalism is so oriented toward scientific thinking that modern science declares that human intuition should not be studied until we can understand the natural law that causes it to work. Naturalistic Transcendentalism takes exception to this view, and declares instead that it is appropriate to study human intuition using the most powerful observations that exist of human intuition: our subjective observations of our inner beings. Modern naturalism declares our human being and all our human experiences to be natural phenomena that are not well understood in detail. There is still debate about which branch of science is most important to shedding light on how human intuition, and the rest of our subjective being, works from a scientific perspective.

Naturalistic Transcendentalism

It is appropriate to take up this line of thought more or less where the Transcendentalists and some other philosophers of the early nineteenth century left off, but from a twenty-first century perspective, in order to study the subjective human being and one of its most powerful faculties: human intuition. Questions abound, from what role should human intuition play in our personal philosophies to understanding the nature of the humanities. Thinking since the early nineteenth century has resulted in a triumph of philosophy in a mature philosophy of science. Perhaps if we pick up from where the Transcendentalists left off, we can form an equally significant philosophy of the humanities.

Publishing Naturalistic Transcendentalism

John Searle

Perhaps my most valuable recent discovery was John Searle’s article on Biological Naturalism. As a graduate student at MIT, I knew of the debates that raged between Marvin Minsky, Jerry Fodor, and John Searle. During those years as a young computer scientist, I thought that John Searle was inexplicably opposed to the idea that human consciousness was an information processing phenomenon. In this paper, Searle shows that many philosophers have been resistant to this idea for a very long time. Here was a paper by a recognized leader in philosophical thinking who explained and documented this state of affairs. In this paper, Searle recognized the naturalistic basis for human consciousness just enough to allow me to build on his thoughts.

Artificial Intelligence

In my paper, I explained that my background as a computer scientist with training in artificial intelligence gave me a way of looking at the basic issues of human consciousness from a new perspective. I explain how we make decisions at two different levels: the conscious decision-making level and the emotional level. It shows the potential for increasing understanding of ourselves by understanding more of how our mind works. Artificial intelligence, with its skills in reverse engineering from human intellectual capabilities, has valuable observations to share with philosophers.

Defining Intuition

I discovered that I had not explained the scientific foundations of my approach well. I admitted that neither I nor Ralph Waldo Emerson were able to define clearly what we mean by intuition. I carefully described the scientific state of knowledge about what human consciousness is and how it works. Science knows almost nothing about this phenomena. I explained how to move forward both scientifically and philosophically from the current state of affairs.

Welcome to my New Website!

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My new CD, Just the World in Motion has now been published, and I have delivered my foundational philosophical talk, Naturalistic Transcendentalism at the Symposium on the Philosophy of Humanism at the 2014 conference of the American Humanist Association.

Just This World

It’s Just the World in Motion