Dear God,

12 October 2015

I’m stoned right not. I woke too late to pray today. Thus, here I am after work writing/praying while stoned.

I blame the rum I drank last night.

I worked several hours today, out of which I can only in good conscience bill for 4.5. I went to the climbing gym with Philip. That guy’s a beast. I had trouble keeping up. It didn’t help that I was a little hungover.

Well yes yes God, fine. Jesus, I know already. I realize the rum can’t be entirely to blame given that it has no volition, and that I at least may. However, we must take into account those philosophers — often not scientists — and those scientists — often not philosophers — who believe that all causal power can be explained by the interaction of an entities’s smallest constituting parts — the reductive physicalists. If they’re correct, then I can’t be blamed either. Of course, one of the main problems with their position is that there really aren’t any smallest parts. Another important question they seem to take for granted an answer for is what is causality? Terrence Deacon helps here…

13 October 2015

I can’t lie to you God. This is what happened.

Right after I wrote “Terrence Deacon helps here,” I picked up the Deacon book to look through it to try to find a quote I could use. I was way too stoned for that. I got distracted by about five underlined passages, reading them over and over again, thinking about metaphysics while having cannabinoid influenced synaptic thunderstorms in my head, which is to say I got my stoned mind blown.

I put down the book, despaired that I was too stoned to read a dense science text, wondered what I was doing with my life, not so gently reminded myself that I should probably only smoke weed one or two days a week and not when I plan on getting any real intellectual work done, and then watched two episodes of the TV show Scandal with Sarann. I couldn’t get Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie out of my head the whole time, wishing that the world was such that Olivia Pope could just rock a badass fro or weave of some sort. I tried my best to ignore the feelings of being an utter career failure and looser myself as the smart and sexy lawyers on the television lived their fast paced and interesting lives. I didn’t look at porn after Sarann went to bed, though. Not that I do that every night or anything, as you know, but given how low I felt I’m happy with myself for not self-soothing in that way.

I’m finishing this post this morning, however, instead of writing a new damn post. I’m a day behind. I can only accept that and myself in it I suppose. That’s the spiritual answer — to choose grace and move forward into love.

I’m telling you that I’m only smoking one or two days a week from here on out. At least for a while. I can clean the house like a mad man while stoned, and hike like a true hippy. I can ride my bike, surf, talk philosophy, talk to homeless people, go on long diatribes about Haitian politics and neoliberalism, pray, have interesting discussions and laugh really hard with Rob or Nathan or Paul or Ian. I can dance and sometimes even write, but I don’t function at my highest capacity when I’m stoned. This is, in part, why I love it — it’s my little reminder that I’m more than a simple utility maximizing machine. But I have a lot to get done these days if I’m ever going to amount to anything.

Anyway, I’m no longer stoned, and I suppose it’s possible someone might be interested in the questions I posed above. I find them incredibly important. If so, they can read below. If not, no matter. Questions of human freedom and will don’t interest most people these days and that’s fine.

Towards a Process Physics

Classical physics looked at the world as if it was composed of localizable and isolatable stuff — atoms or particles. It was out of this idea that a substance metaphysics was buttressed and a modern one based; the idea that the natural world — the multi-verse, all that materially exists — is composed of ultimately differentiable stuff, that each thing has an essence. The problem that quantum physics poses is that at the smallest level which we have been able to empirically access we don’t find individual particles, but rather quantum fields. Quantum fields’ exact points in space and time are ambiguous. We don’t really know where they are, nor when they’re there. Their properties of extension can only be defined statistically and dynamically as a wave function, and a wave has no discrete extensional boundaries. In other words, quantum physics shows us that at the bottom of physical reality, so to speak, we don’t find individual and isolatable particles. Instead, we find only statistical regularities of a fundamental dynamic instability that is a product of quasi-stable, resonate like properties of quantum field processes.

What does all this mean? Well, that the natural world is a process not a substance, and if we are to know individual essences we can only know them through the abstraction of these processes in the mind because in the material world they don’t exist. That is to say, Hegel was correct — reality doesn’t exist, except for in the mind.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t individual things in the world. There are, but none of these things have the clear boundaries we like to think of. Everything is interconnected and in process together. The real um — kicker though, is that according to this understanding of the material world the reductive hypothesis is incorrect. It isn’t that all the causal work is done at bottom between the smallest constituting parts, such as neurons or atoms, because there are no parts, only process-like dynamics that are by definition organized, and thus it follows that all causality, even at the level of quantum events is due to organization. If this is true then the logical conclusion is that if fundamental processes are reorganized at a level of higher complexity than the reorganization will allow for different casual powers. We can have fundamentally different levels of causality—one of which is the mental realm—all without splitting the natural world in two, and all without transcendence as classically understood; we no longer have a need for dualism.