What language best represents human experience? Scientific and materialistic language, the language of quantity? Or is it narrative and personification that beat capture our reality?
The later part of this episode is one of the greatest summaries of the culture War problem and how to conceptualize it I’ve ever heard. It’s solid gold and could give birth to tons of discussion. Starts about an hour fifteen in.
As for the first half of the discussion, which was about evolution and religion and/or morality, it was less clear, because the answers to those questions don’t lie before our eyes. It’s an attempt to peek behind the veil of our fundamental being. Who or what is really in control, or what is the true origin, or what is the best level at which to approach understanding of ethical and religious phenomena?
I have to side with Jordan on this one, or at least side against Bret because he’s saying absurd things. Bret is ascribing the phenomenological qualities of individuals, and particularly minds, to genes and genetic mechanisms. He’s anthropomorphizing and deifying genes, talking about genes wanting this or desiring that. Genes choosing and deciding and planning and making determinations and pursuing plans and purposes. What does he think genes are? Genes are a structure of molecules, a string of sugars and phosphates. What do sugars and phosphates want?
Genes are a mechanism. But what they really are, in relation to life (and particularly humans) is a much stranger question, which is why even materialists like Bret end up making silly statements, talking about them like they’re people or gods. Because although their matter consists in sugars and phosphates, their essence consists in information and purpose. Neither of which are strictly material, though they can be materially represented.
So when Jordan suggests that maybe it’s those things we experience as the only things that have those phenomenological qualities (mind, consciousness, purpose, some concept of soul perhaps?) that shape and direct the mechanisms, rather than the other way round (because it is not clear in what sense they contain it, as it is absurd to talk of genes wanting some end), he’s not suggesting anything so absurd as it might appear at first blush. And it’s the absurdity of ascribing phenomenological, creaturely, teleological, mental, and emotional qualities to materialistic structures that reveals that some step has been misplaced.
I don’t think this in any way solves the problem, or that it means that Jordan is exactly right with whatever theory he is proposing, only that it’s not so absurd as it might seem, and Bret’s proposal is more absurd than it seems. And on balance Jordan is the wiser because he is more open, because he’s more clear about the fact that he’s confronting something he doesn’t fully understand and hasn’t grasped yet, and there’s a kind of wisdom in that. Bret is a little too sure of what he thinks he knows, and it blinds him to his own absurdities. And if you argue back that, well, those statements he made weren’t meant to be literally true, they’re a metaphor of a larger non-material reality, then you’re right back in the realm of religious representation, in fact you’ve gone right round the house without realizing that you’ve never left it.
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