"A guide for the Perplexed" Discussion Thread

Schumacher’s central point, made again and again, is that people at different levels sense things differently. This puts is where he diverges from the claims of scientific materialism. Scientific materialism is based on the claim that any valid observation can be replicated by anyone, and observations which can’t be replicated by anyone are suspect.

That claim is easy enough to dismiss on a basic level–blind people don’t see the same things as everyone else–but Schumacher tackles it on a much more sophisticated level.

Obviously to perceive physical objects we must have the right physical characteristics. We can’t see without an eye or hear without an ear. Obviously to understand mental things we must have the right mental characteristics. We can’t appreciate Shakespeare or use calculus without first going through some mental development. It’s logical, then, that we can understand spiritual truths without the right spiritual development. That is Schumacher’s point. Saying that physics and chemistry is adequate for understanding everything that is approached with physics and chemistry does not address Schumacher’s argument for different levels of being. (One might even suggest that it confirms it.)

So he’s a mystic and a romantic?

Actually, that analogy seems perfect for explaining my point. If someone knew animals that ran at 40mph, 50 mph, and 60mph, then telling them that a cheetah runs somewhat faster than that would give to a good portrait of the cheetah and what it could do. By contrast, if someone knew the orangutan, gorilla, and chimpanzee, telling them that the human is smarter than the chimpanzee does not give them a good portrait of the human. The human’s mind does not diverge from the chimp’s by degree, but by type. Because human beings have the potential to evaluate, control, and direct their own mind, there can be recursion within the mind and the possibilities are “infinite” as Schumacher says. A chimp cannot consciously better its own mind and spirit, therefore it’s not in the same class.

Obviously many people don’t accept this logic and insist that there’s no difference of type between humans and animals. Schumacher explains exactly why: because of their level, they fail to see things on the higher level. Richard Dawkins imposes certain limits on human behavior based on the behavior of moths(!), despite the fact that he must have seen humans doing types of things that moths can’t do. BrainFireBob asserts the inferiority of animals based on a single action that he finds disgusting. One could easily attack humans with the same basic argument, and many people do. People who choose to see only the worst in people and things will see only the worst, but there is also the option of seeing the best, and that’s what it takes to perceive the highest levels of in humanity as well as the levels above humanity.

I did no such thing.

I pointed out the fact that dignity is a relative concept- and asked what dignity means to such a species. It is disingenuous and in fact putting words into my mouth to claim I ever said otherwise.

I essentially am claiming that imposing what humans desire in terms of dignity to be completely and unforgiveably impericist.

I think you misunderstand my argument, or perhaps you are defending a less stringent position that Schumacher advocates. I’ve got no problem with there being different levels of being. Part of the reason that I spend so much effort on this chapter is that you only need this (levels of being) to reach significant chunks of the rest of the book. However, as I said in post 11

He asserts, vehemently, and on several occasions, that there must be these discontinuities, but I don’t see the support for such a statement. To say that there is a discontinuity between two levels, I take it, is to say that everything that exists can be placed neatly into either one, as well as an inherent mysteriousness criterion that Schumacher imposes. I don’t disagree with Schumacher, nor does any scientist that I’m aware of, when he says that living things exists. We do disagree when he asserts that there are no “‘links’ or ‘transitional forms’” between the two. As it stands, Schumacher’s views have more to do with creationism than anything serious scientists believe (image from here).

What about the other supposed discontinuities? If the plant-animal discontinuity exists at all, it must have occurred in the Cambrian explosion. Wikipedia cites this as taking 70-80 million years, which is very fast, but is not evidence of a discontinuity. The smallest estimate of time from unicellular-to-multicellular life I can think of (from an ID proponent) is 6 million years, still not what I’d call a discontinuity. The story for animals-to-humans is a bit more interesting. Here is a 2003 article from National Geographic about the debate between “evolution and revolution” in terms of what made us human. There is somewhat controversial evidence that the change happened very fast, perhaps fast enough to qualify as a genuine discontinuity. If this turns out to be the case, we ought to believe it because that is where the evidence, that lowly public knowledge, points.

Let’s look at it from a different angle and recall our intellect who knows only physics. We can divide people into two groups based on how they think this intellect will react to our description of a cell: those who believe it will say “By golly!” and those who believe it will “Bullshit!”. I am, and I think you are too, in the “By golly!” group. But as I read Schumacher, I would be completely unsurprised to learn that he believed in a form of vitalism, and thus a solidly within the “Bullshit!” group. The point of my discussion is that, if the “By golly!” group is correct, we can get to life (and by extension the other levels of being (at this point I wish we were reading Dennett)) in a strictly physicalist setting, and largely with Schumacher’s own arguments. To get beyond physicalism you need these mysterious discontinuities, but where are they? By this point it seems that science has made a fairly solid case that at least two of them simply don’t exist.

I imagine someone would get an inaccurate picture of humanity from that description. Thing is, this universe has four perfectly good dimensions. The picture would change substantially if you included Homo Erectus, Neandertals, or maybe even pre-Great Leap Forward Homo Sapiens.

If I’m thinking of the right argument from Dawkins, the moth analogy was to demonstrate that we can be wrong about our own self interest—that our own senses and even intellectual processes can guide us to self-destructive actions. The analogy isn’t so much for the religious as it is for people who believe that natural selection would make self-destructive actions impossible.

I think Schumacher does address those issues relating to discontinuities, though maybe not in as much detail as he could. In chapters two and three he does acknowledge that there are cases lying on the border between two levels of being, which could go either way. When he says “discontinuities” he means breaks in what he calls “the vertical dimension”. In other words, self-awareness is not merely an advanced form of consciousness, consciousness is not merely an advanced form of life, and so on.

I think he’d also say that trying to approach these discontinuities by analyzing fossils and trying to pinpoint the exact moment in geological time when they emerged is barking up the wrong tree. Fossils are only ‘dead’ things, and even if we could find the fossil that indicated exactly where and when the first self-aware human being ever existed, it would not help us deeply understand self-awareness.

The point he’s trying to make is that human beings do, think, and feel classes of behaviors, thoughts, and feelings, that nothing lower on the chain is capable of. Humans write poetry, philosophize, investigate their own history, climb Mt. Everest because it’s there, debate books on message boards, give up their life for a cause, and do many other that are beyond the realm of comprehension for even the smartest chimpanzee. This is the discontinuity between the human and animal levels. Even if we could describe with physical science the precise moment when such possibilities came into existence, the discontinuity would still be there.