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This episode continues the Satanist Reads the Bible series on ecumenical phenomenology. For a summary of that theory, I recommend listening to the short episode “The User’s Guide to Ecumenical Phenomenology,” which lays out the general structure of the theory in a lean 20 minutes. I’ll provide an even more terse summary presently:
The concept of “reality” as we understand it is an illusion and a fundamental error about the true nature of reality, which is an essentially mental substance. Our experience of the world, ourselves, and our own thoughts are all patterns of neural activity within our brains. The consistency of experience between individuals, which I refer to as the liminal surface, is not reality itself but rather a shared mental experience. So-called “reality” beyond our experience, the ontic void, is inaccessible to us. What is actually real is mind, which functions as a distributed connectionist dynamical system, the ecumenicon, which is linked together by the liminal surface and which encodes the symbolic world of our knowledge and values.
As I’ve mentioned before, ecumenical phenomenology has an enormous capacity to answer a wide range of difficult philosophical questions. This episode will be exploring some of those questions and the answers that ecumenical phenomenology provides.
While it would certainly be possible to go even back to the pre-Socratics and apply ecumenical phenomenology to, for example, the ideas of Parmenides and Heraclitus, we’ll start a little further on, with Plato and his theory of Forms. After that we’ll survey a few other ideas before tying it all together and discussing how they fit into ecumenical phenomenology.
In his dialogues, Plato’s Socrates noted some contradictions in the relationship between our concepts of reality and the real things which those concepts represent. If we take a rose as our example, we might note that a rose becomes such by first being a rosebud and then transforming into something that is no longer a rosebud but rather a rose. We might then observe that the rose decays into something that is no longer a rose but rather, if we wait long enough, a small pile of dust. At each stage we ask whether or not the object in question is a rose: at first it isn’t, then it is, then it isn’t again. But the thing to which we are comparing the object in order to answer that question—the Idea or Form of a rose—is fixed and unchanging, or at least it seems that way. How can we then say that the rose is ever a rose if it never has all of the properties of a rose? It must be the case then that a rose and the idea of a rose are not the same thing. And while this seems obvious enough at first, some interesting questions result. What is the idea of a rose, or any idea? Are they real things? If they’re not real, does that mean we’re comparing roses to something that doesn’t even exist? That seems problematic as well. How can we know that something is a rose if we’re comparing it to something that we can’t know anything about because it doesn’t exist in the first place? But if the idea of a rose does exist independently of roses themselves, what is the nature of its being? Physical objects behave in certain ways and exist in time and space, but ideas do not exist in time and space, or at least they don’t appear to.
This is the question of abstract objects. Abstract objects are entities of debatable reality and nature which do not exist physically in time and space the way that roses do. Other examples of abstract objects include the number three, the character Frodo Baggins from the Lord of the Rings, the nation of Paraguay, and the laws of physics, but there are many other possible examples of many types or categories. Those who believe in the existence of at least one abstract object are called Platonists, thought it’s important to note that belief in abstract objects does not necessarily align with the specific philosophies espoused by Plato. Plato had some very specific doctrines regarding abstract objects and one need not assent to those doctrines in order to be considered a Platonist. Beyond that, the existence of abstract objects, as well as their nature if they do exist, have remained open questions over the subsequent two and a half millennia of philosophy.
It is my assertion that ecumenical phenomenology provides answers to these questions. Yes, abstract objects do exist. In fact, I think it’s likely that every abstract object that has been posited exists. They are structural patterns across the distributed connectionist system of mind, as real as and made of the same mental substance as everything else in our reality. This is not to say that the idea of a rose is exactly the same category of thing as a rose; we’ve already ruled that out. Roses appear as features of the liminal surface, accessible to all and consistent across human experience. The idea of a rose, on the other hand, while structured upon the liminal appearance of actual roses, does not itself have a liminal appearance. There’s nowhere I can go to see the idea of a rose apart from actual roses or depictions thereof, in other words.
To understand the significance of this, let’s look to one of the great minds of the 20th century, the mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel. Gödel is most famous for his Second Incompleteness Theorem, published in 1931. I’m oversimplifying a bit here, but the Second Incompleteness Theorem states that certain kinds of formal systems—systems of symbols and logical rules for their manipulation—cannot be used to prove their own consistency; in other words, they can’t be used to prove that the system will never result in a contradiction. Take the symbols and rules that you learned in school for doing arithmetic; that’s an example of exactly the kind of formal system Gödel was talking about, and it’s impossible, Gödel proved, to use arithmetic to prove that arithmetic will never result in an equation like 1 = 2.
The Second Incompleteness Theorem has some remarkable implications, but we won’t be going into those here. Suffice to say it changed the study of mathematics forever. What we’ll be focusing on instead is Gödel’s search later in life for a Platonic ontology, as detailed in the book A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy by Gödel’s longtime friend Hao Wang (1996). Platonism we’ve already covered; an ontology is a description of the nature of something’s existence. Gödel was an explicit Platonist and wanted to ground his Platonic beliefs in a rigorous metaphysics. As already mentioned, I assert that ecumenical phenomenology provides exactly the ontology that he was looking for and could serve as the basis for a rigorous metaphysical treatment of Platonism.
As Wang details in his book, Gödel’s exact treatment of Platonism shifted significantly over the course of his life. I think that he was looking in the right places but made some key errors which prevented his figuring out his own version of ecumenical phenomenology. The primary error is the one that most of us make about the basic nature of reality. Wang describes Gödel as an idealist (1996, p. 8) but I think that he might be better characterized as a substance dualist, meaning that he believed that reality is comprised both of physical and mental substance. Though this is, as I have said, an illusion, both physical and mental substance seem to be clearly in evidence: we have the physical world around us and the mental world of our thoughts, which seem to have entirely different properties. The big question for dualists is how these two substances interact. Materialists, who believe in only material reality, have a similar difficulty to the dualists, having to explain how mental phenomena arise from what appears to be inert physical matter, but in point of fact Gödel rejected materialism (ibid.).
Idealist theories such as ecumenical phenomenology, which assert only mental substance as real and which are, at minimum, agnostic about the existence of any physical substance (which would not be, in any case, properly real), obviate both questions. Gödel’s belief in accessible physical reality sent him off on something of a wild goose chase, as part of his search was predicated on a conjecture that there must be some sort of organ or faculty of the human brain that allows us access to abstract reality (Wang, 1996, p. 233). An idealist theory requires no such organ; we come to know of abstract objects the same way we come to know about everything else: through reason and experience, including the rationality and experience of human communication.
According to Wang, Gödel saw two thinkers (aside from Plato) as being the key to his search for a Platonic ontology: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Edmund Husserl (p. 327). Let’s have a look at both to try to understand what Gödel saw in the works of these thinkers and how ecumenical phenomenology concords with their ideas.
Leibniz was born in Leipzig in 1646 and was, like Gödel and Husserl, both a mathematician and a philosopher (among other things). He’s most famous for his development of calculus, independently of Isaac Newton. Leibniz’s central philosophical doctrine was his monadology, a metaphysics that posits monads as the fundamental substance of reality.
It’s impossible to say what a monad is exactly because it’s completely atomic and elemental. According to Leibniz, everything is monads. You might start by thinking about them as having some of the characteristics of atoms, of souls, and of living things, and they have other properties as well. One, they are ideal rather than physical or spatiotemporal. They do not exist in time and space; rather, time and space and the appearance of the physical world emerge from the relationships between the monads. Two, there are different types of monads arranged in a hierarchy. Certain monads are capable of consciousness, and these would be monads such as you and I. Animals and plants and things would be lesser forms of monads. And three, each monad contains the entire universe from that monad’s particular perspective. You see, monads cannot interact with each other directly; rather, they operate harmoniously according to certain rules set in motion by God, each a “perpetual living mirror of the universe” (Leibniz and Strickland, §56), knowing how to carry out its role in the great monadic dance of the cosmos because it knows the entire universe from its own perspective.
Gödel believed that many of these properties were true of the abstract mathematical objects in which he was particularly interested. I’m not sure whether Gödel thought about it this way, but one could see how this would follow from his Second Incompleteness Theorem: certain mathematical truths, being undecidable according to the formal systems in which they are embedded, must be true purely in and of themselves while simultaneously harmonizing with the whole of mathematical reality.
I do not believe that Gödel was correct in his belief that mathematical objects are themselves monads. I still have a great deal of work to do on the nature of mathematical objects under ecumenical phenomenology and there are many questions on that matter that I may not be able to answer and that may in fact be unanswerable. That said, my current sense is that mathematical objects are mental structures which describe or mirror certain properties and behaviors of the liminal surface. Mathematical objects would not themselves then be monadic in nature. However, the ecumenicon as an ontology of all abstract objects does display some notable monadological features. Like monads, each mind contains the entire world from its own perspective, and minds interact with each other not directly but via the harmony of the liminal surface. Mathematical objects, then, or what we might call instances of mathematical objects as they exist in individual minds, are monadic in the sense of being a substructure of monadic mind (though Leibniz would have contested that monads are divisible in this way).
And now we turn to Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology, born in Moravia in 1859. For a bit of background, let’s start with Immanuel Kant, who published his revolutionary Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. In his Critique, Kant asserted that the noumenal world of things-in-themselves—things as they exist apart from our experience of them—is inaccessible and unknowable, and that all that we have access to is the phenomenal world of our conscious experience. Following this, philosophers including Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel continued to focus on metaphysical matters using phenomenal conscious experience as a basis. Husserl, in contrast, sought to hone in on phenomenal consciousness itself. To this end, he developed phenomenology as an eiditic science, a science of ideal reality as revealed by careful and systematic examination of phenomenal conscious experience.
Gödel said once that “Philosophy as an exact theory should do for metaphysics as much as Newton did for physics” (in Wang, 1996, p. 164). As already stated, Gödel was a Platonist, a realist with regards to the conceptual world of abstract objects. What he was searching for in Husserl was a metaphysical grounding for this belief (ibid.). What’s not at all clear is why exactly Gödel thought that Husserl had the key to a Platonic ontology. Wang himself disagrees with Gödel’s Platonism (p. 327) and, while he takes Gödel seriously on the matter and spends a great deal of the book providing context for Gödel’s various notes on Husserl, it’s clear that Wang himself didn’t really understand Gödel’s interest and may have even thought it to be a mistake, writing “Even though there are traces of Husserl’s influence in some of Gödel’s very limited number of available writings after 1959, it is not clear that his work actually derived much benefit from his study of Husserl. In 1972, [Gödel] stated that he had not found what he was looking for in his pursuit of philosophy” (p. 61).
I believe I understand exactly what Gödel saw in Husserl and I think that Gödel was indeed looking in the right place. What Gödel (and Husserl) lacked was the key that translates Husserlian phenomenology into a Platonic ontology. As I’ve described elsewhere, I believe that the connectionist theory of mind provides exactly that key.
To understand what Gödel saw in Husserl’s ideas, let’s turn to the fifth of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. Gödel had stated that he saw the Cartesian Meditations as being one of Husserl’s most important works (p. 81), and the fifth one in particular provides some striking clues as to why he believed this.
The title Cartesian Meditations refers to the Meditations on First Philosophy by the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes. In the Meditations, Descartes seeks a foundation for certain knowledge, and precedes to systematically question all of his beliefs to determine what can be known with certainty. The third meditation contains the famous statement “Cogito ergo sum,” “I think, therefore I am,” and it is on this foundation of certainty that Descartes builds the rest of his philosophy.
Husserl’s objective in his own Meditations is to follow in Descartes’ footsteps by introspecting his way to an understanding of the essential structures of consciousness, the nature of knowledge, and the relationship between the subjective and objective. The fifth Cartesian meditation is titled “Uncovering the Sphere of Transcendental Being as Monadological Intersubjectivity.” We note a few things immediately: one, “transcendental being”, a reference to Kant’s transcendental subject, the subject which consciously experiences the world, distinct from the empirical ego, which is the idea of the self that exists within the transcendental subject’s experience. Two, the concept of intersubjectivity, a third category of perspective or standpoint beyond the subjective and the objective. Three, the description of intersubjectivity as monadological, in other words, conforming to Leibniz’s description of monads. Putting it all together, Husserl is laying out a foundation for understanding the nature of subjective being as an intersubjectivity which has a monadological character.
Husserl begins with a problem, one which should sound a bit familiar if you’ve been following this series: metaphysical idealism, the assertion that reality is mental substance, upon which Husserl’s phenomenology is based, can lead us in the direction of a problematic solipsism, a belief that one’s own experience is the only real experience, that other people are not properly real. Husserl responds by turning to his phenomenology to state that we experience others as “governing psychically in their respective natural organisms,” as “subjects for this world, as experiencing it (this same world that I experience) and, in doing so, experiencing me too, even as I experience the world and others in it” (1960, p. 91). Husserl is saying that our basic phenomenal experience of other people is of them as fellow subjects of experience.
Husserl then proceeds to describe, with remarkable detail and insight, the phenomenal experience of the world as mental substance, as arising fully constituted within his own being, and how other subjects, as well as the objective world, exist for him within this reality. He describes his sphere of “ownness” as being monadic in nature, existing in a “community of monads” founded upon “the commonness of Nature.” Key to this community is the notion of empathy, the understanding that each mind sees the whole from its own perspective and our ability to relate to those different perspectives from the standpoint of our own. What this community creates is the transcendental intersubjectivity of our experience, which we have “fashioned into a cultural world… a world having human significances…” (1960, p. 133), “…the life-world for us all” which “presents itself to us according to our personal upbringing and development or according to our membership in this or that nation, this or that cultural community” (p. 136).
My reading the Cartesian Meditations for the first time, only a few months ago, was a remarkable experience. My theory of ecumenical phenomenology had, for the most part, already been formulated, though I wasn’t calling it by that name yet (and in fact I began to call it by that name after reading Husserl). Husserl describes, in exacting detail and matching note for note, those phenomena which I had described as arising from the structure of the ecumenicon. Here’s a remarkable passage: “…the investigations concerning the transcendental constitution of a world, which we have roughly indicated in these meditations, are precisely the beginning of a radical clarification of the sense and origin… of the concepts: world, Nature, space, time, psychophysical being, [humanity], psyche, animate organism, social community, culture, and so forth” (p. 154). In other words, Husserl claims he has presented a description of phenomena with which any fundamental ontology of our intersubjective experience of the “objective” world as well as our intersubjective symbolic experience of it must accord.
However, while Husserl addresses many ontological questions in the Meditations, he does not himself—much to Gödel’s chagrin, I believe—present any comprehensive ontology meeting that description. To such a degree as he concerns himself with that matter at all, he leaves it as an open question, one to which I have an answer, an answer which matches Husserl’s requirements on every point. Husserl began from phenomenal experience and reasoned from the necessary conditions for that experience to criteria for an ontology. I began from an analysis of completely different phenomena and reasoned from there to an ontology matching precisely Husserl’s criteria.
To review, ecumenical phenomenology describes reality not in terms of whatever physical substance might lie underneath it but in terms of a phenomenal and intersubjective world of meanings and values constructed like a scaffold over a surface of common experience which links together otherwise-isolated mental experience, each mind containing the entire world from its own perspective and harmonizing with other minds by way of the shared experiences of that surface, forming a distributed, connectionist neural network of incredible complexity. The only thing missing from Husserl is the neural network. Across the span of a century and coming from vastly different starting positions, Husserl and I met exactly in the middle. Such a remarkable accord could not possibly be coincidence. It was at this point that I became certain that my theory of ecumenical phenomenology is correct and that I had indeed solved one of the most difficult and far-reaching open questions in all of philosophy: the ecumenicon, the distributed dynamical system of connectionist mind linked together by the liminal surface of the ontic void, is the ontology of abstract reality and of the phenomenal experience of the world in general.
I don’t say this to brag; anyone familiar with the show knows that that just isn’t my way, and in fact the total theory of ecumenical phenomenology is almost entirely the work of others, with my own contribution—though critical—being quite small. But I can’t deny what I’ve found.
My turn to idealism—the position that mind is the fundamental substance of reality—means that some of the positions I’ve held in the past are no longer tenable, or require substantial revision. For example, in an essay from September of 2020, “The Ethics of Perfectionism,” I explored questions of morality and came to the conclusion that either there are no moral facts—no objective facts about right and wrong—or that any moral facts that do exist are unknowable. I think my argument on that front is very strong; in fact, I think it’s one of my best, but it was predicated on beliefs about the nature of reality which, though quite understandable, I now know to be mistaken. Moral facts do exist as part of abstract reality within the realm of the intersubjective, neither fully objective nor fully subjective. A substantial foundation of my argument against moral realism was the absence among moral facts of the causal properties which clearly belong to objective facts. For example, if I fill up my car with orange juice instead of gasoline, my car will break down whether or not I’m aware of the fact that cars run on gasoline and not on orange juice, but people get away with things that are clearly wrong all the time. Mistakes about moral reality, in other words, don’t seem to affect the world the way that mistakes about what we usually call objective reality do. But ecumenical phenomenology has uncovered an interesting connection between meaning and causation that leads me to believe that moral facts do exist and have causal properties not unlike those of so-called “objective” facts.
Speaking of meaning, I’ve mentioned several times in the past my endorsing the basic position of existentialism, which is that the world is essentially devoid of meaning and values, though it is possible for us to bring meaning into the world. I now reject that position as well. It’s not all wrong: we do indeed bring meaning into the world and play an active role in its creation, but one, that’s true of the whole of reality, and two, it’s unavoidable. Rather than being devoid of meaning, the world is suffused with it down to the core, to the point that the word “meaning” is just a particular way of looking at the substance of reality itself. Everything signifies, and everything is significant.
I’ll be exploring all of these facets of ecumenical phenomenology in coming essays. You’ll soon find that my fundamental religious position has shifted as well, but my discovery of the essentially spiritual nature of reality has not reversed them so much as strengthened and intensified them. That work is especially challenging; I know you’re all looking forward to it but my explorations of the religious implications of ecumenical phenomenology will be the most important work I’ve ever done and it’s important that I be cautious and thorough. Fortunately, I’m not the first person to approach religion from this angle and I’ve found some helpful guides, such as the 3rd century Greek philosopher Plotinus.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited
Husserl, E. (1960). Cartesian Meditations. Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4952-7
Leibniz, G. W., & Strickland, L. (2014). Leibniz’s Monadology: A new translation and guide. Edinburgh university press.
Wang, H. (1996). A logical journey: From Gödel to philosophy. MIT Press.