[Another delayed piece. I intended to say a great deal more about this and that – about the attempt to identify consciousness with intelligence through evolutionary incrementalism, and so forth. But I think I have made the case I set out to make. . . . Also, I thought to divide the piece, but I can’t figure out where.]


[4/19/2009 : Inertia as definitive of 'matter' and material relationship is descriptive of force and the transfer of force, but not legitimately of 'cause' as qualitative change. Scientism attempts to base all change on inertia. Hence the nearly hysterical assertions, on the part of contemporary exponents of scientism, that the appearance of 'life' and 'consciousness' involve no qualitative shifts from 'matter'. Thus, from an 'objective' view, cause is suspect. This is part of my argument here.
            But what I am also arguing is that 'cause' is an analytical approach created by consciousness in the handling of the world. The history of philosophy itself shows that while cause and analysis are tacit in human self-awareness, their 'emergence' as abstract concepts is not universal and has a specific history. That history can only be narrated and justified by the peculiar approach to – and analytical 'unfolding' of – self-awareness being described in these posts.
            What gives inertia its peculiar validity, both in itself and as an establishing principle of validity, is this psychological ground, and not the 'discoveries' of science in terms of mechanistic 'matter'.]



            As a statistician, my father early on told me – and repeated often – something I think I knew intuitively from the first, namely, that correlation does not imply causality. Even if A and B always and only appear together, either simultaneously or in set sequence, one cannot draw any valid inference from that relationship in terms of causality. Causality must be inferred separately and from ‘external’ information. As a theoretical statistician, whose background included operations research and design of experiment – in other words, whose resume covered the range from industry to ‘pure’ research – he was commonly asked not only to establish correlation in terms of sets of data, he was also asked, formally and informally, to establish causality. Causality, he would say, is not my job. I only establish the statistical basis of correlation. The numbers themselves do not establish the causal vector or even the necessity of cause. As a scientist, one can presume that correlated events are somehow linked by causality, but the correlation itself is not inherently either evidence or proof that the relation itself is causal.
            One would think that scientists would begin their training with this fact. But while it is essentially a ‘philosophical’ issue, it is not a question of ‘logic’ but of empiricism itself, so apparently it eludes the scholarly grounding. But then, of course, we train ‘scientists’ from elementary school upward. A ‘theory of science’ course is not a prerequisite. And while I presume that there are such courses, I would wonder how many are taught by scientists outside the philosophy department – a legitimate practicum instead of a theory of a theory. We take it for granted that ‘scientific method’ in all its ramifications is an automatic acquisition in the pursuit of a given field, just as graduate research in literature goes with the territory. But there are ‘elementary’ facts about science that even journal editors commonly seem unaware of.

            Nowadays, we have the elephant in the room or the six or eight hundred pound gorilla – the undeniable that we all succeed in denying and the undeniable beast that we deny at our peril. The six hundred pound gorilla is evolution. The elephant in the room is scientism, the artificial extrapolation of ‘science’. Scientism tells us that evolution ‘says’ all kinds of things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the descriptive inference which is in fact legitimately ‘scientific’ evolution. But the same scientism uses the incrementalism indigenous in the scientific process that establishes evolution to disestablish any inference outside the strict descriptive range of evolution itself, even though the same scientism allows us to draw extravagant inferences from evolution, as long as those inferences agree with the prepossessions of the proponents of scientism. Evolution denies God. But evolution cannot be equated with any kind of teleological force. Evolution ‘proves’ that life and consciousness are materially based, and therefore not the markers of some teleology inherent in evolution. And so on and so forth. And the arguments, of course, are ingenious, but ultimately they cannot hide the fact that scientism is a shell game based on a false conflation of inference and causality, of descriptive categories for the summation of incremental evidence or correlations, and the false presumption of generic causal principles inherent in those categories, which, as inferences, are only descriptive.
            Either evolution is a pure descriptive category, in which case it cannot be used to draw any inference outside the descriptive realm of the data. Or evolution is an inherently causal principle, in which case it is open to teleological or final causal explanations as well as the strictly efficient causes espoused by the proponents of scientism. If we can say that evolution denies God, we can just as well say that evolution affirms God, since both are outside the inherent inferential range of the data. As a legitimate inference, evolution is the inferential summation of a series of correlations. While, from a scientific point of view, evolution is beyond doubt, we still cannot say the same for the mechanism, as loud as some voices are to the contrary. Loud voices are not science. But the issue of evolution should be raising the question of the nature of inference, and specifically of the nature of scientific inference. Evolution is the ultimate incremental thesis. We arrive at plate tectonics through a series of inferential approaches, a long string of incremental discoveries and conclusions. But when we arrive at the final inference, the thesis is not only largely self-validating in terms of the evidence, it radically reduces the range of evidence we need in order to understand the process. We could say something of the same with respect to evolution in terms of the incremental moment of change. Hence, Darwin himself initially only proposed the evolution of species, and not of life itself. But the thesis still stands on the totality of evidence and not a reduced arena of fact. The extent of the incremental is still requisite.
            And this ambivalence of incremental and generality has become the tool for crime in the hands of the artificial ‘philosophers’ of science. But they were given this tool out of the history of ‘speculative’ philosophy. We encounter its prototype in Hume, who conveniently reduces Lockian philosophy without necessarily taking responsibility for the contradictions that thus arise. Logicians such as Bertrand Russell have held that Hume is irrefutable, and perhaps from a purely ‘logical’ perspective he is. But as an empiricist Hume is a logician or rationalist, and a false one at that. Where Hume is accurate is when he states that all experiential phenomena are appearances or ‘representations’ in consciousness. Where he errs is in presuming that some of these ‘representations’ can be taken as ‘matters of fact’ and somehow intimately correlated with ‘sense data’. This is a false conflation. If ‘representations’ are strictly appearances in consciousness, we cannot assume that they have any necessary connection with pure ‘sense data’, even if something in the ‘representation’ inherently seems to suggest it. Hume obviates this problem by calling these ‘representations’ ‘sense impressions’. But this is simply a linguistic trick. It does not distinguish, on any legitimately philosophical basis, between ‘representations’ which are apparently the perceptions of external objects and ‘representations’ which are more or less pure thought forms. What obscures this shell game is the incrementalist force of the concept of ‘sense data’. According to Hume, these ‘representations’ are not only ‘sense impressions’ but also ‘matters of fact’ because they are composed of pure ‘sense data’. Something in our consciousness buys into this statement, in spite of the fact that it is an incredibly raw solecism. And precisely from hence, scientism is born.
            What separates our experience of external objects from other experiences are the differences in our experience of validity. But these are not a function of sense data, but a function of the states and activities of consciousness. To distinguish differences in validities cannot be assigned to ‘sense data’. In fact, ‘sense data’ is a category of awareness created by the analysis of ‘representations’, and therefore is dependent both on the basic prior experience of validity and the distinguishing activities of consciousness that presuppose differences in validities, as well as on the prior wholeness of the representations themselves.
            What is seductive about ‘sense data’ is not inherent in the concept itself, but in the functional process that reduces a ‘representation’ to ‘sense data’. What we are viewing is a kind of ‘concretization’ of analysis itself. It seems like sense data should account for the peculiar sense of validity we have in the perception of external objects because the act of analyzing the object into sense data seems like both a direct intellectual and a concrete experiential analogue for the peculiar validity. Sense data as value – that is, the immediate act of sensory analysis – is precisely a poetic or mythical force, a metaphorical parallel for an experienced feeling, but not something inherently ‘objective’ in itself.

            But this experienced sense of validity in the incremental products of ostensible or actual analysis has, across the board, become a false marker for ‘objectivity’ and ‘objective validity’ in our intellectual culture. And, of course, in this culture, evolution is the incremental analysis without peer in terms of massed evidentiary data.

            However, when we see ‘scientists’ using evolution to draw vast inferences concerning philosophical and theological possibilities – and particularly in terms of denial – we should notice how often these ‘scientific’ pronouncements are the dicta of chemists and biologists. Physicists, by and large, are far more circumspect. And we should remember that ‘physics’ is the science of ‘matter’. I would expect that the reason many physicists hold their distance from these arguments is because of the ambivalence of physical phenomena that began to emerge into science at the beginning of the 20^th century. While the chemists and biologists, whose sciences are dependent on the strict consistency of causality in terms of their analytical processes, insist on ‘causality’ and ‘matter’ in the evolutionary process, the physicists, the scientists of matter, are not so sure that such an absolute distinction can be drawn between matter and consciousness, between the processes of the world and the processes of human awareness. Nor are they any longer certain as to exactly what ‘causality’ means.
            In biology and chemistry, the 18^th and 19^th century definitions of ‘science’ still prevail, and this definition was grounded on an interpretation of causality and matter that was only valid for the 18^th and 19^th century. But the conflation of science and ‘materialism’ and ‘material causality’ was never valid. That is, the grounding of science in a definition of causality that presupposed ‘materiality’ and of a ‘materialism’ entirely based in the concept of inertia was doubly erroneous – a fact that should have been evident to the philosophers, if not the scientists of the era. But the theory of science has consistently reflected scientific discovery rather than a conscious objectification of the process of science itself. There is no necessary relationship between causality and inertia, unless we are willing to objectify both as pure functions of human consciousness. Only if we are willing to consider the active nature of perception and its necessary devolution as a reflective process, a process of active abstraction as well as receptivity, can we locate the point of convergence between inertia and causality. And at that point, inertia is the first principle of reflection, the pivot by which abstraction becomes possible, and causality simply mirrors the active fact of both perception and reflection. In other words, the necessary link between cause and inertia is a function of consciousness and not the world.
            The experience of objectivity touches this point of convergence. But the experience of objectivity has no necessary connection with materiality, as such. Rather, the 18^th and 19^th century idea of ‘matter’ is, once again, a poetic paradigm, an artificial ‘objectification’ of the experience of objectivity, but which, in itself, is valid neither for consciousness nor the world.

            In terms of science, causality itself is an inferential principle – something which 20^th century physics has shown. We cannot assume that ‘cause’, as such, is a self-evident principle. The fact that it seems to be self-evident in our experience should, at this point, call for analysis. The problem is that cause is not logical. The logicians grappled with this fact at the beginning of the 20^th century and were not only not able to access the ground of the question, they seem to have lost logic and perhaps philosophy as well into the bargain. But of course, they continue to teach logic as the immediate gate to philosophy nonetheless, thus suggesting the peculiar psychological problem involved in the issue.
            Cause is not inherently a function of matter. Just the reverse, the only point at which cause and inertia meet is the moment that turns consciousness back on itself to view itself as the inherent principle of experience, which is the same moment that experience itself is abstracted as a tangible value that can be viewed ‘in abstraction’, that is, outside the immediate moment of experience. This is the moment of consciousness that produces the experience of ‘object’ as well as of ‘moment’ itself. Cause and inertia both emerge from this moment as principles. But they are also the effective act of the moment, and as such can only be defined empirically – and primarily or essentially – in terms of this moment.
            In other words, what the history of science is doing is creating a kind of poetic paradigm for the moment of abstraction or reflection. The moment of objectivity touches back into this core moment of abstraction or reflection. This is the peculiar power of objectivity, its peculiar force as a moment of value. But the scientific process, as a process of discovery, is dialectical with respect to this moment of consciousness. It cannot approach it directly. So we have a dialectical approach – perhaps not of thesis and antithesis, but of reified metaphors that require their reflective abnegation. Materialism is addictive because it touches the valid core of our present awareness and experience, but precisely because it is an inappropriate description. In foreshortening and reifying and externalizing the description, it gives us a handle to grip without having to explode our own awareness and take the real risks necessary to enter the global frame in which a legitimate explanatory description of causality and inertia begins. This is where Einstein not only changed science, he changed the world. Einstein turned science around to face the moment of consciousness. The apparent dualism of light, he tacitly tells us, is in fact the analytical dualism of the observer. The dualism of the observer is the two modes of time. Time is immediate and without cause. Time is sequence and causality. In the immediate and causeless world, all is simultaneous: the speed of light is ‘infinite’ or instantaneous. In the world of time and causality, light itself, in spite of its apparent centrality, is also subject to inertia, and, in some respects, acts as the seed of inertia.
            But whether the causality and the inertia appertain to consciousness or to the world remains moot.
            Of course, these statements involve a moderately radical extension of the actual insights of Einstein. But they are legitimate extensions. For at least a year, apparently, Einstein remained in the peculiarly global state of consciousness implicit in his insights. Whether his later work embodies further excursions from within this state, or are in fact derivative and mirroring descriptions of this originating moment, I do not have the intellectual predilections or educational equipment to say. But had Einstein retained full consciousness in this global moment, the presumption is that he would have gradually ‘objectified’ it, at least for himself. And from that frame, one would presume that he would have recognized quantum physics as a natural outgrowth or extension of his own realizations.

            But I started out talking about incrementalism.
            If we turn Darwinism around, in the same way we have turned Newtonian physics around in looking at Einstein, we see what I have already suggested for both physics and sensory theory – that the proof structure peculiar to Darwinian evolution constitutes a legitimate, if metaphorical paradigm for the analytical and perhaps even the reflective process of consciousness. But the paradigm resides in the whole theory and its presentation. At a speculative level, evolution was a pervasive topic by the early 19^th century, but it was not simply the religious scruples that caused most serious thinkers to consider proposals for biological evolution as capricious. The difficulties can be expressed through a wide range of terms, but largely resolve to questions of synthesis and continuity. Both advocates and adversaries raised questions of complexity, design and discontinuity, of the incredible sophistication and diversity of organisms and the apparent gaps in the branches and keys for the emerging classificatory systems of botany and zoology. A linear evolution seemed not only unreasonable but essentially impossible.
            What Darwin did was amass a set of facts and propose an evolutionary mechanism that, while not ‘proving’ evolution with any finality, established the legitimate possibility of biological evolution. What Darwin proved is that incremental links could be established between results so diverse as to seem, at first appearance, necessarily unrelated, and, by the same generic methodology, that more sophisticated organs can emerge from relatively less sophisticated. While Darwin began to define ‘natural selection’ more or less closely, he largely allowed ‘variation’ to remain an unexplained observable fact. In other words, he defined a mechanism for evolution, particularly suited to the ‘scientific materialism’ of his day, and he offered a range of selected instances in which he could document, with voluminous data, the possibility of an evolutionary process in a species range or a developmental sequence. The marshalling of the data is probably the real field of his creative genius, since it involves both a range of knowledge and a creative activity of identification and appropriately scientific association that is literally staggering to this day. Undoubtedly, one has to have something of the scientific consciousness to appreciate his brilliance, since his intellectual legerdemain is literally buried in detail.
            But, in that sense, Darwin did not prove evolution. The Origin of the Species is a prescription for a proof, establishing by its own massive accretion of material that the proof would ultimately involve a cultural scientific process. We cannot say where we are culturally in that aggregation of fact. But clearly, we have filled enough of the gaps and discovered enough of a ‘back story’, so that evolution is now scientifically undeniable.

            The abstract problem with Darwin in terms of modern scientific models for ‘proof’ is that they rely on the incrementalism of his detail without recognizing, first, that the thesis of evolution transcends any of the sequential masses of data and, second, that Darwin never offered these sequences as conclusive ‘proofs’, in themselves, even of the necessity of evolutionary relationship or sequence in the specific array he was setting forth. If there is proof involved, it is cumulative and analogical. This is why it is possible that, although evolution is undeniable, the mechanism could still be problematic. Establishing the one does not necessarily establish the other. And the proof of evolution is essentially descriptive. The fact that we now have this extensive ‘picture’ of evolution, with such a vast array of discrete steps now visible in the chart, is the proof. But, of course, this is characteristic of science, which, in many respects, is descriptive rather than explanatory. Much that is considered explanatory or even ‘causal’ is commonly simply a descriptive modality.

            It is a false theory of science, for example, that lays the earliest line of evolutionary development against a base of ‘materialism’ and presumes that ‘matter’ is therefore the ‘cause’ of life. But as I say, such association or correlation does not establish either causality or the necessary vector of cause. ‘Matter’ and ‘life’ are essentially distinct principles. If we can allow causality on the basis of association, then we have to presume the possibility that life is indigenous in ‘matter’. But this is the point at which scientism shows its hand. Causality is only allowed to move from matter to life, not from life to matter. There is no scientific data for this assertion, only the assumptions of the sameness of matter and causality and hence for the priority of matter. This, however, is speculative philosophy – and purely speculative philosophy – and not something actually validated from an evidentiary base in science.
            Of course, the parallel or incrementalist sequence that sees ‘evolution’ beginning in terms of the materialist evolution of ‘life’ is entirely speculative. We have no evidentiary record of the change, either in the laboratory or in the world. But even if we discovered the microscopic fossil remains of the event, this would not change the nature of the sequence as correlation or association rather than a necessary function of causality, much less establish the vector of the cause. The reason we will not see ‘life’ as causative is not simply because we presume that matter antedates life. The problem is inherent in our false perception of the analytical process. It is scientism and not science that will not allow us to define ‘life’ as a fully distinct or independent function with respect to matter. Granted that living organisms are clearly associated with matter, that their bodies are material, that matter feeds them and that, apart from those pre-sexual creatures which are ostensibly ‘immortal’, when a living creature dies, what is left is matter. But this last suggests that ‘life’ is not matter. And, of course, the materialist insists, in this direction, that life cannot be identified with matter. Matter is necessarily inorganic. Therefore, in our consideration of matter, it is not possible to identify life with matter. But with respect to life, it is not possible to identify life with anything else except matter. So which is it?
            In other words, it is scientism which will not let us identify ‘life’ as an independent function of existence or as a reality that is co-equal to the independent function and reality of matter – the fact that life finally cannot be identified with matter notwithstanding. The partisan of scientism tells us that ‘science’ dictates that life cannot be matter, but simultaneously that life cannot be other than matter. The problem, of course, for scientism, is that ‘life’ necessarily stands outside of matter, in some respect. Therefore, scientism denies us the right to define this extra-material aspect of life precisely because it is extra-material, and does it in the name of ‘science’, as if science were not about descriptive renderings of experience and immediate evidence, but, in fact, were first of all a theory of matter. But science is about experience and not about prior conceptions.
            Everywhere, our experience not only tells us about things outside ‘material’ existence, but shows us functions that cannot be rendered into material existence. But scientism insists that because they are not material they are not ‘scientific’ and therefore must be excluded from science. The reason science has yet to make generic statements about life and consciousness is because life and consciousness have been systematically precluded from the scientific purview, not because they are not ‘empirical’ – that is, not within the frame of our ‘experience’ – but because their immaterialism violates the false prior premise of scientism, the pseudo-philosophy of pseudo-science. But this in turn shows us how pervasive scientism is in science. But it is not only pervasive in science, it is pervasive at this point in all modes of our thought.

            At the same time, contrary to the false derivates from Darwinism, parallel incrementalism is not a proof of anything. Darwin’s extended parallels are not proofs. They are exemplary moments. And they are exemplary moments not because Darwin could construct a probable series of linking increments, but because the linked increments dispensed with the argument that the two ends of the series could not be related. What Darwin was doing, largely, was dismissing the prior arguments against biological evolution. Ultimately the linking of the majority of perceivable evolutionary points over the last century and a half has eventuated in a ‘proof’ of evolution. But even here there is no necessary ‘causality’, but only a measure of descriptive completeness. The description may make it clear that there is a causal process at work here, but the description itself is not causal, nor does it infer a specific causal mechanism. The relative completeness of the description gives us closure or proof that in fact evolution is at work here. But it does not say how evolution works.
            But this parallel incrementalism has now become the pervasive tool of scientism, particularly for the scientific pseudo-philosophers who link science strictly with causality or matter. We have just shown the catch-22 nature of the pseudo-scientific approach to ‘life’, the shell game in which life is only material, except when it’s not; but when it’s not, by definition, it’s not ‘scientific’, and therefore we cannot consider it, or any evidence that might be derived or adduced from its non-material nature. And when we move to expose the shell game, the magic of scientism allows its proponents to jump over into the incrementalism of the evolutionary process, as if the ‘emergence’ of life itself had somehow been subsumed under the theory – that is, as if the descriptive process or history of development of the evolutionary tree had somehow established a causal relationship between evolution and life, with evolution itself being the causative factor, not only a total violation of the exclusively descriptive nature of the developmental process but also a violation of the principle that precludes assigning causality on the basis of association alone.
            In other words, every move in the larger shell game of scientism is based on the prepossession, the bias, the prior prejudice, the artificial religious faith that ‘science’ is somehow based strictly in causality and matter, that only ‘matter’ as a strictly inertial or linear causal function qualifies as ‘science’, and that only quantifiable causal formulas are genuine expressions of ‘science’. Not only does this turn its back on modern ‘physics’, the science of matter, but it flies in the face of the bulk of scientific ‘truth’. Only a tiny fraction of science is strictly causal explanation. The vast body of science is largely composed of descriptive formulas that only implicitly involve a causal thesis. None of the formulas that describe cosmic movement ‘explain’ gravity in any causal terms. All are strictly descriptive. The evolutionary tree is entirely descriptive. It implies sequential development. And in its present state of appearance, it implies these sequences more or less absolutely. But a refined statement of the causal mechanism or mechanisms at the core of the evolutionary process is still the essential living issue in evolutionary theory.

            The most obvious place in which scientism is presently at work is in the arrested development of consciousness studies. After a promising start, consciousness studies have become mired in two areas, which in fact reflect a single issue. The basic question is how to define consciousness, and the specific consequence is the question of how to define ‘phenomena’ of consciousness, or, as the term has developed, ‘qualia’. This carries us back to the question of science as based on ‘sense data’, an issue touched lightly here at the outset and more extensively in my posts of 7/1, ‘Consciousness, the Easy Problem’ in two parts. There I deal extensively with the issue of sense data and the formally philosophical background. But here we are concerned primarily with scientism, the false philosophy of science that has arisen largely within the fields of science itself and within and through the works of scientists and ostensible scientists, although their attitudes and ‘conclusions’ have been adopted by not a few academic philosophers. That the issue of sense data, an equally erroneous shell game, is also part of scientism, is proven here in the particular case by the advent of ‘qualia’, a word which ultimately signifies sense data, although it implies the abstraction of the datum as a pure or isolated phenomena in itself. The abstractive force of the word is apparently its value here, since, in the discussion, the word is being used as a pure abstractive category for ‘phenomena’ itself, since all ‘phenomena’, whether objective or subjective, are ultimately not only ‘mediated’ by consciousness, but are in fact formal functions of consciousness, by definition, in terms of their appearance in awareness. As Hume taught us, all ‘phenomena’ that we are aware of – which is all phenomena, including our sense of phenomena beyond the purview of our awareness – are ‘representations’ in consciousness. Which means that, as we know them, they are somehow ‘pure consciousness’, whatever else they are in terms of their validity. That is, a representation in consciousness is, first of all, an expression of the ‘substance’ of consciousness. And this, I suppose, is the fact that drives both the definitional basis of qualia and the hunt for qualia as the defining or evidentiary indicators of ‘pure awareness’.
            Of course, this is simply a somewhat more subtle version of the catch-22 of materialism in science. All phenomena are a function of consciousness. Therefore no phenomenon can become the specific indicator of consciousness, at least, that is, if we start from phenomena and not from consciousness.

            If the elephant in the room of ‘science’ is scientism, the elephant in the room of philosophy – the beast whose denial has brought philosophy to a standstill and allowed the persistence of such artifices as scientism – is solipsism, the fact that all experience is a function of consciousness, and therefore is substantively consciousness itself, at least in terms of our experience. George Berkeley first enunciated it clearly. Hume took half of it to play his shell game of partial skepticism. Had he taken the whole, given his purely rationalistic methodology, he would have had to end in complete nihilism.
            But, as we have suggested in this piece, and as we have presented throughout this blog in our more philosophical posts, there is a way out. When we recognize that our present experience is reflective and grounded in reflection, we can identify the empirical conditions of consciousness which allow us to construct, not only a valid analytical presentation of consciousness as an independent base, but a legitimate substructure for the process of experience. The thesis is global, and therefore, like relativity and quantum theory, involves a measure of paradox, but, like those hypotheses, still follow certain rules of behavior, however peculiar and global.