Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Fri Dec 27, 2024 4:38 am
BigMike wrote: ↑Fri Dec 27, 2024 12:32 am
Alexis, your response is a smokescreen of intellectual posturing, couched in vague platitudes and high-minded abstractions that do little to disguise the hollowness of your argument. You dress up your position with references to "symbolism" and "synthesizing approaches," but the substance is as shallow as the "shallow secularism" you seem so desperate to dismiss.
Dismiss? No. Acknowledge, understand are better terms. I don’t dismiss secularism and I do not dismiss the radical form of it that animates your approach.
Man as symbol-maker is an important point for a better understanding of Man.
The people I get the most from in the realm of bridging the conflict between religious views and “secular” views are, indeed, synthesizing minds. I
value synthesis.
Let’s call it what it is: an elaborate dance around the fact that you can’t meaningfully engage with the core critique of your worldview. Secularism doesn’t need your approval or your condescending acknowledgment of its limitations.
I do not think you could (fairly) state what my worldview is. You seem to me too full of your own. OTOH, I think I could very easily state for you what yours is. Because it is quite simple. Reductionism reduces complexity to bits that are easy to express and to influence people with. And ideologies are often similar.
Secularism may not need
my approval, but it can certainly be examined by qualified minds aware of the full gamut of the issues. And it is examined. And critiqued.
It stands as a framework grounded in reason, evidence, and empathy—not in the crumbling scaffolding of outdated religious dogma or the “symbolic content” you claim to grasp but clearly haven’t wrestled with on anything more than a surface level.
You are referring to your own position as “a framework grounded in reason, evidence, and empathy”, however I see many flaws in your position that in my view need to be addressed.
…the crumbling scaffolding of outdated religious dogma or the “symbolic content”.
This is an idea, a reality, that deeply concerns me and a problem I am involved with. It needs to be examined in depth.
A “scaffolding” can be described as descriptive order around something. You offer a “scaffolding” in the presentation of your understanding and conclusions.
You lament the "collapsed" religious models of the past and pine for some vaguely defined "proper religiousness," yet you offer no coherent vision of what that might entail. Instead, you retreat into an intellectual fog, pontificating about "layers of symbolic content" and "well-prepared intellects" as if that absolves you of the burden of making an actual argument. It doesn’t.
No. I see those “collapsed” systems as scaffolding sets that enabled entire realms of understanding and value-definition to come onto the scene. I don’t “lament” the collapse of old orders of view — like the Great Chain of Being — but I do not flippantly dismiss the
meaning content in them.
And your defense of IC is laughable. "Better informed than many"? That's the faintest of faint praise, especially in a space where shallow, self-referential reasoning and unsupported assertions are commonplace. IC's arguments are just as flawed as yours—cloaked in a veneer of intellectualism but ultimately devoid of substance. His smug dismissal of secularism is no more thorough or "better grounded" than your attempt to deflect criticism with appeals to complexity and nuance you haven’t demonstrated.
It is not faint praise when the name of the game is to be informed.
So let’s drop the pretense: you’re not engaging in honest inquiry here. You’re propping up a worldview you’re too invested in to question, all while taking potshots at secularism because it challenges the foundations of your belief. If your ideas can’t stand on their own merits without hiding behind vague rhetoric and intellectual name-dropping, then maybe they aren’t worth defending.
Wait, I think you mean the inquiry I am involved in is not the sort that you favor, find needed, admire, etc.
If anything I value an “amphibious” approach to understanding intellectual history and the world of ideas.
Your position, your style, is far too brash, too certain of itself, too much tending toward domination and dismissal. You are “a sign of the times” in that sense.
But you are
wonderful for what you stimulate as far as these recent conversations go. You are an “emissary of the age” in that sense.
Alexis,
If there’s a central point where you and I diverge—where your worldview and mine seem to be speaking entirely different languages—it’s in your persistent failure, whether deliberate or not, to fully grasp what is fundamental to my perspective: that human behavior, thought, and action are all rooted in deterministic processes, including the profound capacity for learning and memory. This isn’t a peripheral detail in my view; it’s the core. And it’s precisely this that you either misunderstand or resist engaging with.
You speak of man as a "symbol-maker," emphasizing the value of synthesis and the layering of symbolic content as a means to bridge the divide between secular and religious worldviews. Fair enough, but what you consistently overlook is the foundation upon which all of this symbolic and intellectual activity rests. It’s not transcendental, it’s not mystical, and it’s not free-floating. It’s physical. The human brain operates deterministically, shaping every thought, symbol, and conclusion through the interplay of neural processes, conditioned by experience and memory.
Here’s what I don’t think you’ve fully acknowledged: when I argue for a deterministic view, I’m not reducing humanity to something simple or mechanical; I’m explaining how complexity emerges from deterministic processes. The richness of symbolic content you value—the scaffolding of meaning you believe has collapsed—arises because humans have the capacity to learn, store, and adapt information. And here’s the critical point: that learning and memory are physical processes. Memories are encoded in the brain as changes in synaptic connections, strengthening some pathways and weakening others. These changes, in turn, alter future actions and perceptions.
This is not a reduction to simplicity; it’s an explanation of complexity at its most fundamental level. Yet you seem to resist this view, instead favoring what you call a “synthesizing” approach—one that invokes abstractions and symbolic frameworks without reconciling them with their deterministic underpinnings. You value the scaffolding, the symbolic richness, but you don’t seem to grasp—or perhaps you dismiss—the mechanism that builds and sustains it.
So I’ll ask you directly: do you acknowledge that learning and memory are physical processes, encoded in the brain as changes in synaptic connections? And if you do, how do you reconcile this with your resistance to determinism? You claim to value complexity and nuance, but the nuance here is clear: what we learn and remember today physically changes us and deterministically influences what we do tomorrow. How does this contradict determinism? What part of this do you find insufficient in explaining human behavior or the construction of meaning?
Your critique of secularism, your concern for collapsed religious scaffolding, and your emphasis on symbolic content all strike me as attempts to hold onto frameworks that feel richer or more human than the deterministic view I present. But I’m not dismissing humanity or richness; I’m explaining how it arises, why it works, and why it’s consistent with a deterministic worldview. If you think this view lacks substance or value, then you’re failing to engage with its profound implications: that even in a deterministic world, we learn, adapt, create, and act in ways that matter—not because we’re free from causality, but because we’re so deeply and wonderfully bound by it.
Your unwillingness to address this directly—your deflections into abstractions and critiques of my “brash” style—suggests that what you truly resist isn’t my worldview but the challenge it poses to yours. If you can’t engage with the fundamental role of learning and memory in shaping human behavior, then you’re missing the very foundation of what you claim to be synthesizing. And that’s the gap between us: I’m not dismissing complexity; I’m explaining its roots. You, meanwhile, seem determined to keep those roots obscured.
