Theological Self-Assembly

by Thomas Scarborough

The Swiss Reformed theologian Emil Brunner wrote, ‘World-views may be grouped in pairs.’ His original word for ‘pairs’ was Gegensatzpaare—pairs of opposites.

We see this in every dictionary of philosophy: realism vs. anti-realism, theism vs. atheism, altruism vs. egoism, and so on. Brunner himself provided these examples: materialism–idealism, pantheism–deism, rationalism–sensualism, dogmatism–scepticism, and monism–dualism (pluralism).

When Brunner made this observation, in 1937, on the face of it he could have meant two things. He could have meant that truth will always have its opposite—or that world-views are merely manifestations of our dualistic thinking. That is, they are mere phenomena, which have little if anything to do with the merits or demerits of the world-views themselves.

In fact Brunner meant the former—namely, that truth will always have its opposite—yet with an interesting twist. All of our world-views are untrue, he wrote, while faith is true: ‘If faith is lacking, a world-viewis necessary.’ Further, world-views are theoretical, while faith is responsible. ‘We understand existence from the point of view of responsibility.’ Faith, therefore, belongs to a category all of its own, far from the realm of world-views.

This raises a thousand questions. Is this not intellectual suicide? Are world-views a true opposite of faith? Are world-views without responsibility? Do they not drive our actions in every case? And if faith is not about world-views, on what does one ground it? Of course, there is the question of definitions, too. How does one definefaith, and world-views? *

More than this, however, Brunner apparently did not see that grouping world-views in pairs of opposites is especially theological. Theologians themselves are past masters at it. The language of personal salvation suppresses the language of social commitment; the language of community excludes the language of justification by faith; the language of religious values marginalises the language of the glory of God, and so on, and vice versa.

In theology, we find pairs of opposites such as liberalism–conservatism, immanence–transcendence, legalism–antinomianism, premillennialism–postmillennialism, and so on. These are not peripheral doctrines, but belong to theology’s core, and demonstrate that theological language has a natural, powerful tendency to exclude other theological concepts.

Brunner himself was aware that the separation of faith and world-views could be problematic. He wrote, ‘Can we, for instance, understand the spirit without ideas, norms, values, laws of thought, logos?… There can never be any question of depreciating the reason, of hostility to reason, or of setting up a plea for irrationalism.’ Yet in that case, how may one interpret world-views as opposites of faith?

Theologians generally explain theological opposites in terms of the one-sidedness of their opponents—alternatively, they hold that their opponents are just plain wrong, or even apostate. Yet what if we simply have a natural tendency to generate pairs of opposites, regardless of truth?

It seems much like the honey-bee that remarks to another honey-bee that their colony has developed a most marvellous system: the exquisite selection of nectars and pollens, navigational skills second to none, with storage most wonderfully engineered. The other bee observes that the same is true, in fact, for all bees in every part of the world, over all of the known history of bees.

There is a powerful case in philosophy, not so much for our tendency to generate pairs of opposites, as our inability not to. The philosopher and logician Gottlob Frege described it as ‘the rule of words over the human mind.’ The literary critic and philosopher George Steiner wrote, ‘It is language that speaks, not, or not primordially, man.’ And the linguists Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen wrote, ‘We are thoroughly dominated by an unacknowledged metaphysics.’

That is, we are not free to think as we please. Whatever we turn out is the result of the dictatorship of ideas over the human mind—and over good sense, we might add. If this is the case in theology, then we have a theological crisis. Our cherished beliefs are merely the product of something more powerful than us, which holds us in its grip. How, then, to escape?

With our increasing awareness of various kinds of opposites—markedness, priority thoughts, term weighting, and otherness--among other things—it seems time that theologians should ask what is going on. For what reason are major concepts, both philosophical and theological, grouped in pairs of opposites? Is it, as is usually held, that some are true and others not? Is it that faith belongs to a category all of its own?

Or could it be that theological tenets of various kinds simply self-assemble?

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* Emil Brunner is difficult to interpret, perhaps due to no fault of interpreters. A seminal statement of his: ‘Our nous therefore is the vessel but not the source of the Word of God. Where it receives the Word of God it is called : faith.’ Bearing in mind that Brunner is not so much the subject here as Gegensatzpaare.

Are There Limits to Human Knowledge?

By Keith Tidman

‘Any research that cannot be reduced to actual visual observation is excluded where the stars are concerned…. It is inconceivable that we should ever be able to study, by any means whatsoever, their chemical or mineralogical structure’.

A premature declaration of the end of knowledge, made by the French philosopher, Auguste Comte, in 1835.

People often take delight in saying dolphins are smart. Yet, does even the smartest dolphin in the ocean understand quantum theory? No. Will it ever understand the theory, no matter how hard it tries? Of course not. We have no difficulty accepting that dolphins have cognitive limitations, fixed by their brains’ biology. We do not anticipate dolphins even asking the right questions, let alone answering them.

Some people then conclude that for the same reason — built-in biological boundaries of our species’ brains — humans likewise have hard limits to knowledge. And that, therefore, although we acquired an understanding of quantum theory, which has eluded dolphins, we may not arrive at solutions to other riddles. Like the unification of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, both effective in their own dominions. Or a definitive understanding of how and from where within the brain that consciousness arises, and what a complete description of consciousness might look like.

The thinking isn’t that such unification of branches of physics is impossible or that consciousness doesn’t exist, but that supposedly we’ll never be able to fully explain either one, for want of natural cognitive capacity. It’s argued that because of our allegedly ill-equipped brains, some things will forever remain a mystery to us. Just as dolphins will never understand calculus or infinity or the dolphin genome, human brains are likewise closed off from categories of intractable concepts.

Or at least, as it has been said.

Some among these believers of this view have adopted the self-describing moniker ‘mysterians’. They assert that as a member of the animal kingdom, homo sapiens are subject to the same kinds of insuperable cognitive walls. And that it is hubris, self-deception, and pretension to proclaim otherwise. There’s a needless resignation.

After all, the fact that early hominids did not yet understand the natural order of the universe does not mean that they were ill-equipped to eventually acquire such understanding, or that they were suffering so-called ‘cognitive closure’. Early humans were not fixed solely on survival, subsistence, and reproduction, where existence was defined solely by a daily grind over the millennia in a struggle to hold onto the status quo.

Instead, we were endowed from the start with a remarkable evolutionary path that got us to where we are today, and to where we will be in the future. With dexterously intelligent minds that enable us to wonder, discover, model, and refine our understanding of the world around us. To ponder our species’ position within the cosmic order. To contemplate our meaning, purpose, and destiny. And to continue this evolutionary path for however long our biological selves ensure our survival as opposed to extinction at our own hand or by external factors.

How is it, then, that we even come to know things? There are sundry methods, including (but not limited to) these: Logical, which entails the laws (rules) of formal logic, as exemplified by the iconic syllogism where conclusion follow premises. Semantic, which entails the denotative and connotative definitions and context-based meanings of words. Systemic, which entails the use of symbols, words, and operations/functions related to the universally agreed-upon rules of mathematics. And empirical, which entails evidence, information, and observation that come to us through our senses and such tools like those below for analysis, to confirm or finetune or discard hypotheses.

Sometimes the resulting understanding is truly paradigm-shifting; other times it’s progressive, incremental, and cumulative — contributed to by multiple people assembling elements from previous theories, not infrequently stretching over generations. Either way, belief follows — that is, until the cycle of reflection and reinvention begins again. Even as one theory is substituted for another, we remain buoyed by belief in the commonsensical fundamentals of attempting to understand the natural order of things. Theories and methodologies might both change; nonetheless, we stay faithful to the task, embracing the search for knowledge. Knowledge acquisition is thus fluid, persistently fed by new and better ideas that inform our models of reality.

We are aided in this intellectual quest by five baskets of ‘implements’: Physical devices like quantum computers, space-based telescopes, DNA sequencers, and particle accelerators. Tools for smart simulation, like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, big data, and machine learning. Symbolic representations, like natural languages (spoken and written), imagery, and mathematical modeling. The multiplicative collaboration of human minds, functioning like a hive of powerful biological parallel processors. And, lastly, the nexus among these implements.

This nexus among implements continually expands, at a quickening pace; we are, after all, consummate crafters of tools and collaborators. We might fairly presume that the nexus will indeed lead to an understanding of the ‘brass ring’ of knowledge, human consciousness. The cause-and-effect dynamic is cyclic: theoretical knowledge driving empirical knowledge driving theoretical knowledge — and so on indefinitely, part of the conjectural froth in which we ask and answer the tough questions. Such explanations of reality must take account, in balance, of both the natural world and metaphysical world, in their respective multiplicity of forms.

My conclusion is that, uniquely, the human species has boundless cognitive access rather than bounded cognitive closure. Such that even the long-sought ‘theory of everything’ will actually be just another mile marker on our intellectual journey to the next theory of everything, and the next one — all transient placeholders, extending ad infinitum.

There will be no end to curiosity, questions, and reflection; there will be no end to the paradigm-shifting effects of imagination, creativity, rationalism, and what-ifs; and there will be no end to answers, as human knowledge incessantly accrues.

Nine Cool Ways to ‘Rethink Thinking’

Detail from the cover illustration for the book Rethinking Thinking

By Martin Cohen

I’ve been thinking lot about thinking a lot! Here’s some of my thoughts…

Rule Number One in thinking, via the classic text The Art of War, is don’t do things the clever way, nor even the smart way: do them the easy way. Because it doesn’t matter what you’re wondering about, or researching or doing - someone else has probably solved the problem for you already. Flip to the back of the book, find the answer. In fact, the great thing about the ancient Chinese book, The Art of War, is that it is not a brainy book at all. It is really just unvarnished advice expressed in what was then the plainest language. We need more of that. Thinking Skill Two is to avoid ‘black and white’ thinking, binary distinctions, ‘yes/no’ language and questions, and instead interact with people in a non-linear, less ‘directive’ manner. Take the tip from ‘design thinking’ that approaches rooted in notions of questions and answers are themselves limiting insight, because questions and answers are like a series of straight lines, when what is needed is shading, colours and, well, ‘pictures’. This is why it is sometimes better to go for narratives – which are conceptually more like shapes.

Tip Number Three, which, yes, is connected to the previous tips, and that’s a good thing too, is to look for the pattern in the data. (That’s what Google does, of course, and it hasn’t done them any harm.) More generally, as I say in chapter three, these days, scientists and psychologists say that humans beings are, fundamentally, pattern seekers. Every aspect of the world arrives via the senses as an undifferentiated mass of data, yet we are usually unaware of this as it is presented to our minds in organized form following an automated and wholly unconscious process of pattern solving. However, there’s a caution that has to come with advice to pattern match, because as we become attentive to some characteristics, we start to latch onto confirmatory evidence, and may neglect - maybe indeed suppress - other information that doesn’t fit our preconceptions. Put another way, patterns are powerful tools for making sense of the world (or other people), but they aren’t actually the world – which may be more subtle and complex than we imagine.

Thinking Skill Number Four, coming in quite a different direction, is ‘pump up the intuition’. Instead of thinking about ‘what is’, think about what might be. The ability to create imaginary worlds in our heads is perhaps our most extraordinary mental tool –yet so often neglected in the pursuit of mere observations and measurements. The ability, that is, as I explore in chapter four, to take any set of facts and play with them, to consider alternatives and hypotheticals. Being ‘playful’ is what the approach is all about, and something that probably the techniques’s greatest exponent – Einstein – stressed too.

My Tip Number Five actually looks more of a caution than a counsel: put all your cozy assumptions to one side and instead be ready to rigorously test and challenge every aspect of them. This is part of the solution to the age-old problem of 'thinking you know’, when, in fact, you don’t, which has been the task of philosophy ever since Socrates walked the streets of Ancient Athens challenging the arrogant young men to debate. 'Thinking you know everything' about an issue is invariably intermingled with the tendency to only see what you expect to see, likely because you have got caught up in a particular story. Exploring some of the stories that make up the amazing tale of the moon shows how this, ‘engineering’ approach, an approach we wrongly dismiss as rather dull, actually has enormous creative power. Socrates understood that: demolishing old certainties is not an end in itself, but a precursor to allowing new ideas.

Problem Solving Strategy Number Six, my favourite tip, is to doodle! Doodles, it turns out, are another kind of ‘intuition pumps’ (like thought experiments) and that gives you the clue as to what is valuable about doodling. It is emphatically NOT about the visuals – yes some people can draw beautiful doodles, many people to curious ones, and some of us do downright awful ones – but the value of doodling lies in the freedom it gives your subconscious mind - with apologies to all those specialists in psychology who will insist on some technical definition of the term. Ideas, as the Japanese designer Oki Sato says, start small - and can easily wither at the first critical assessment.

Doodling can be metaphorically compared to watering a thousand seeds scattered into a plant tray. You don't know at the outset which of the tiny seeds will be important - and you don't care. Instead, you give them all a chance to grow a little. Doodling, we might say, is similarly non-judgmental, and, at the same time, actively in praise of the importance of small thoughts. Of course, we do this all the time here at Philosophical Investigations!

Strategy Number Seven is about a very different kind of thinking. It's all about finding the explanatory key to make sense of complexity - the kid of complexity that is all around us at every level. Here, the thinking tools you need are an eye for detail along with an ability to see broader relationships. Put that way, it seems to require rather exceptional abilities But the thinking tool here is to stop trying to work out, and maybe even control a complex system from above. That's the conventional approach – where you gather all the information and then organise it.

No, the tip here is let the complexity organise itself - and you just concentrate on spotting the tell-tale signs of order. Watch for the 'emergent properties' that arise as a system organises itself and devote yourself to preserving the conditions in which the best solutions evolve. Put another way, if the cat wants food, it will keep pestering you. Be aware of the patterns in the data!

Tip Number Eight, is the computer programmer's cautionary motto: ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’. To illustrate this idea in the book, I looked at the science governing responses to the corona virus, which was indeed heavily driven not by real-world data, but by computer models. But forget that distinction for a moment, the point is really a very general one. In everything we do, be aware of the quality of the information you are acting on. It could be compared to decorating a room: before you apply the colorful paints, before you lay the expensive carpet, have you prepared the surfaces? Mended the floorboards? Because shortcuts in preparation carry disastrous costs down the line. It's the same thing with arguments and reasoning. That dodgy assumption you made in haste, or perhaps because checking seemed time-consuming (or just boring) to do – can easily undermine your entire strategy, causing it to fall apart like at the first brush with reality. Just as an elegant carpet is no use if the floorboard is creaking.

Thinking Strategy Nine, my last one here and the one ever so slightly paradoxically closing my book, is to use ‘emergent thinking’, by which I mean adopting strategies in life that involve exploring all the possibilities and then generating new ideas, concepts and solutions from out of combinations of those ideas which likely could not be found in them individually. Yes, the strategy sounds terribly simple, but that first stage - of exploring possibilities - can be terribly time consuming and literally, impractical. So there are a host of micro-strategies needed too, like learning how to find information quickly, and above all how to select just the useful stuff. This is why I call this strategy ‘thinking like a search engine’ in the book, but, as I explain there, search engines actually rely to a large extent on human judgements: about information relevance and quality.

You can't get away from it: sorting the garbage requires a little bit of skill along with the apparently trivial, routine procedures. Thinking requires a brain - whatever some researchers on mushrooms may tell you…

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*Martin Cohen’s book Rethinking Thinking: Problem Solving from Sun Tzu to Google was published by Imprint on April 4th.

Peering into the World's Biggest Search Engine

 If you type “cat” into Google, sone of the top results are for Caterpillar machinery

By Martin Cohen and Keith Tidman

How does Google work? The biggest online search engine has long become ubiquitous in everyday personal and professional life, accounting for an astounding 70 percent of searches globally. It’s a trillion-plus-dollar company with the power to influence, even disrupt, other industries. And yet exactly how it works, beyond broad strokes, remains somewhat shrouded.

So, let’s pull back the curtain a little, if we can, to try observing the cogs whirring behind that friendly webpage interface. At one level, Google’s approach is every bit as simple as imagined. An obvious instance being that a lot of factual queries often simply direct you to Wikipedia on the upper portion of the first displayed page.

Of course, every second, Google performs extraordinary feats, such as searching billions of pages in the blink of an eye. However, that near-instantaneity on the computing dimension is, these days, arguably the easiest to get a handle on — and something we have long since taken for granted. What’s more nuanced is how the search engine appears to evaluate and weigh information.

That’s where web crawlers can screen what motivates: like possibly prioritizing commercial partners, and on occasion seeming to favor particular social and political messages. Or so it seems. Given the stakes in company revenue, those relationships are an understandable approach to running a business. Indeed, it has been reported that some 90% of earnings come from keyword-driven, targeted advertising.

It’s no wonder Google plays up the idea that its engineers are super-smart at what they do. What Google wants us to understand is that its algorithm is complex and constantly changing, for the better. We are allowed to know that when Google decides which search results are most important, pages are ranked by how many other sites link to them — with those sites in turn weighted in importance by their own links.

It’s also obvious that Google performs common-sense concordance searches on the exact text of your query. If you straightforwardly ask, “What is the capital of France?” you will reliably and just as straightforwardly be led to a page saying something like “Paris is the capital of France.” All well and good, and unpretentious, as far as those sorts of one-off queries go.

But what might raise eyebrows among some Google users is the placing of commercial sites above or at least sprinkled amidst factual ones. If you ask, “What do cats eat?” you are led to a cat food manufacturer’s website close to the top of the page, with other informational links surrounding it as if to boost credibility. And if you type “cat” into Google, the links that we recently found near the top of the first page took us not to anything furry and feline  –  but to clunking, great, Caterpillar machinery.

Meanwhile, take a subject that off and on over the last two-plus years has been highly polarizing and politicized — rousing ire, so-called conspiracy theories, and presumptuousness that cleave society across several fronts — like the topical query: “Do covid vaccines have side effects?” Let’s put aside for a moment what you might already be convinced is the answer, either way — whether a full-throated yea or nay.

As a general matter, people might want search engines to reflect the range of context and views — to let searchers ultimately do their own due diligence regarding conflicting opinions. Yet, the all-important first page at Google started, at the time of this particular search, with four sites identified as ads. Followed by several other authoritative links, bunched under ‘More results’, pointing to the vaccine indeed being safe. So, let’s say, you’ll be reassured, but have you been fully informed, to help you understand background and accordingly to make up your own mind?

When we put a similar query to Yahoo!, for comparison, the results were a bit more diverse. Sure, two links were from one of the same sources as Google’s, but a third link was quite a change of pace: a blog suggesting there might be some safety issues, including references to scholarly papers to make sense of the data and conclusions. Might one, in the spirit of avoiding prejudgment, conclude that diversity of information better honours searchers’ agency?

Some people suggest that the technology at Google is rooted in its procedural approach to the science behind it. As a result, it seems that user access to the best information may play second fiddle to mainstream opinion and commercialization, supported, as it has been said, by harvested user data. Yet, isn’t all that the adventurist economic and business model many countries embrace in the name of individual agency and national growth?

Google has been instrumental, of course, in globally democratising access to information in ways undreamt of by history’s cleverest minds. Impressively vast knowledge at the world’s fingertips. But as author Ken Auletta said, “Naïveté and passion make a potent mix; combine the two with power and you have an extraordinary force, one that can effect great change for good or for ill.” Caveat emptor, in other words, despite what one might conclude are good intentions.

Might the savvy technical and business-theoretical minds at Google therefore continue parsing company strategies and search outcomes, as they inventively reshape the search engine’s operational model? And will that continual reinvention help to validate users’ experiences in quests for information intended not only to provide definitive answers but to inform users’ own prioritization and decision-making?

Martin Cohen investigates ‘How Does Google Think’ in his new book, Rethinking Thinking: Problem Solving fro Sun Tzu to Google, which was published by Imprint Academic last month.

Picture Post #74 The Swimmers

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Martin Cohen

La Grotte des Nageurs

OK this is not exactly about the image, as much as the context. But then, that’s often what we end up talking most about here at Pi with our Picture Post series. ‘La Grotte des Nageurs’, or ancient cave of the swimmers, contains these unmistakable image of people swimming.  It was discovered in Egypt, near the border with Libya,  in 1933 and immediately caused much bafflement as it was located in one of the world’s least swimmable areas. Could it be that, say ten thousand years earlier, the Sahara had been a bit more like the seaside?

Seriously, it is thought that at this time, the area was indeed very different, a humid savanna replete with all sorts of wild animals, including gazelles, lions, gireaffes and elephants!

But back to the humans, and what I like about this picture is the way it conveys that curious lightness of being that can only be obtained by plunging into water while maybe holding something like a float, or catching a current. It’s a simple painting, by any standard, yet a curiously precise and delicate one.

The Grotte was portrayed in the novel The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, and in a film adaptation starring Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas – and the two diminuitive swimming figures.