Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

LOGOS
The Mystery of How We Make Sense of the World

Raymond Tallis
Physician & Philosopher

“The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility”
___Albert Einstein

   Post 99. September 16, 2019

  LOGOS Makes Sense

   Logic of the Cosmos

 Raymond Tallis’ philosophical awakening was accompanied by “an overwhelming astonishment that . . . I could make everyday sense of myself and my world.” Non-philosophers may take that talent for understanding for granted, and may not be aware that their pinhole view is skewed. However, since the human mind is an integral part of the objective world that it faces as the subject, it’s easy to forget that comprehension of a complex topic is like eating : somehow you must get on the outside of the food in order to digest it. We are consumers of nutritious Information, but we are also immersed in a mulligan stew1 of potential knowledge. So, how do we separate ourselves from the object of our investigation in order to decide which morsels we want to make a part of us? How does the knower distinguish himself from the known? That is the ancient conundrum of how subjective creatures can obtain objective truth, purged of personal bias.

One way to get a bird’s eye view is by abstraction of complex reality into simpler ideal concepts. Ironically, that successful tactic of extraction-from-context & reduction-of-connections followed by modern Science has magnified the perceived gap between knower and known, between Man and Nature. So Tallis has become concerned that the either-this-or-that wedge of isolation has made understanding reality-as-a whole more difficult. He says, “it has motivated my critique of many anti-humanist intellectual trends . . .” Consequently, he describes his book, Logos, as “an endeavor to wake out of, or to, ordinary wakefulness : to discover the strangeness in the blindingly obvious.” On the other hand, he also says, “we are too busy being our localized selves to ascend to the uncom-promised awareness of a consciousness that belongs to no-one, no-where, and no-when.” Which is the utopian goal of Philosophy : to achieve perfect objectivity, to see the world from God’s perspective. Or perhaps more practically, to see the world through the innocent eyes of a child.

Dr. Tallis introduces his topic by observing that, “the greatest mysteries are those we are most likely to overlook, because they are the ground on which we stand when we puzzle over things that surprise us.” As Astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.” Unless, of course, comprehensibility is essential to the purpose of the creation. Tyson and Tallis are not theists, so just like the emergence of Consciousness from mindless evolution, Comprehensibility is a “hard problem” for those who can’t accept the notion of an intentional Creator. Which is the mystery that is necessary to decode all other mysteries.

Normally, the puzzles of the world are simple enough to solve with prefabricated solutions. But, sometimes we are baffled by “huh?” situations. In which case, Tallis notes that, “typically, it is the (local) failure of sense that provokes us into thought. Otherwise, we are far too complicit in the necessary assumptions of common sense.” It’s when something doesn’t make sense intuitively, that we bring out the big guns of logical reasoning to discover clues to resolving the problem at hand. But he also observes that, “the vast majority of organisms flourish . . . without making sense of the world in the way that we humans do.” Indeed, Science, Philosophy, and Religion are exclusively human ways of knowing.       
                    Post 99 continued . . . click Next

1. Mulligan Stew :
   Hobo stew, made of a mish-mash of whatever items are at hand – begged scavenged, found, or stolen. No recipe. No reason.

Logos as Reason

─ to grasp ─