Tom: David, welcome to the podcast.

David: Thank you.

Tom: I’m looking forward to diving into some deep questions with you, but I had a personal question I wanted to ask, and it was this: When did you first fall in love with baseball?

David: Uh, I may have been in the womb for all I know. Those were great years to be Orioles fans. I was born the year before the 1966 World Series. There’s a certain baseball lineage on my father’s side. It’s been a lifelong passion.

Tom: So, you grew up in the Maryland area, watched the Orioles play, and did you play baseball yourself?

David: Yeah. Oh yeah. Religiously, uh, it was the only game I cared about. If I was forced to play football, it was under protest. You know, for high school, I was pretty, I was pretty good. I don’t think I was ever slated for the big leagues. I mean, I remember at the age of 10 being behind home plate when Jim Palmer was pitching, and, when I saw what his exploding fastball and his sharply breaking curveball looked like. I realized that I wasn’t destined to face major. It was a sobering experience.

Tom: Yeah. A different game altogether from what we grew up with. So, we learned a little bit about your deep love of baseball from the earliest age. Tell me a little bit about your interest and passion philosophy. How did that begin to develop?

David: My real primary interest in life was always writing. It was literature first. But in my undergraduate years, I became fascinated by religious studies and philosophy, and I was already a student of classics. So, I would say sometime in my early twenties.

Tom: Well, I wanna kind of dive into some of these questions that you’ve probed in your books. They’re questions that I’ve enjoyed studying in my brief study of philosophy as an undergraduate. I feel like in the 17th century, there’s so many different ways to look at reality and explore. But I wanted to step back, and kind of ask these bigger questions. First of all, the way that we tell history as a culture, in our society, it’s very common to describe the sort of big picture of history as follows. In the beginning was the Big Bang. A lot of matter and energy. And after some billions of years after matter became complex enough, life sprung into being. And after certain billions of years, as life became complex enough, mind and consciousness, including primates and humans, sprung into being. Do you feel like just the basic framework that I articulate is this a coherent version of a way we might investigate the world that we find ourselves in?

David: Well, that’s one way of telling the story in terms of a material history that’s demonstrable. I mean, from what we can tell, there was a big bang. There was an initial singularity, and, material existence did acquire complexity and local complexity and so on and so forth. The question is whether at those higher levels of organization or at any level of organization at all, it’s coherent. To speak of this purely in terms of fortuitous emergence from purely material causes so that atoms become molecules. Molecules become a chemical basis. chemistry becomes biology, biology becomes consciousness, and all that is sheerly under the momentum of physical forces and the reducible back to those forces.

Right. And I think that, despite rumors to the contrary, all the good arguments are against a pure materialism or pure physicalism of that sort, if you seriously look at the phenomena of life and mind. And in my most recent book, I’d add language to that it’s impossible to take the emergentist mechanical materialist philosophy as sound that form and consciousness are, prior realities that don’t simply emerge, but then in fact form that material history in some way.

Tom: Yeah, I think that most of us are familiar with a couple ways of viewing reality, but maybe only two. And, it seems like on the menu these days we’re only offered materialism or dualism and religious people might be dualists, and serious thinkers might be materialists. Can you tell me, are there compelling alternatives even on the menu that we could explore?

David: Yeah. And before the 17th century, those other options were, were more or less the philosophical lingua franca. There was materialism of a kind, sort of Democrat in Aism, say in the west. But since the 17th century, we seem to have decided, at least, and especially in anglophone countries, I should point out, that the choices are limited to strict materialism of the sort we’ve just been discussing. Dualism of this rather chimerical sort, if you like, in which two totally discontinuous substances are united. One is mechanical nature, wwhich is then somehow haunted, so to speak, by an immaterial soul. The third option that occasionally crops up is that of a kind of idealism in which the material world is itself a simply, an apprehension of mind, the mind of God in which we participate as a separate mind. And therefore there isn’t really a physical substrate in addition to mind, but that’s a boutique position that’s always been a minority, but that’s it.

Those are the options we’re given. Whereas, in antiquity in the Middle Ages, no one thought of nature as a machine to begin with, of, um, soul and consciousness in much more expansive terms as a principle of life. That’s also the organizing principle of perception and mind, because what good is a dualism anyway?

What does it explain? At the end of the day, you’re, you’re still left with an enigma that needs to be grounded in some more embracing unitary principle. And if you just say, well, it’s the will of God. Some dualists of the 17th and 18th centuries were so-called occasionalists. They believed that the two substances didn’t even really interact because there’s no way you can have an interaction between the material and the immaterial if you think of matter as a machine and mind as pure materiality.

So, by the will of God, these two streams or these two modalities of reality were just kept in consonance with one another. So, it seemed like your perception of the heat of the fire and the fire itself were one phenomenon. But in fact, these were just a fortuitous, divinely ordained consonance or pre-established harmony between the material realm and the mantle realm.

Tom: Like, yeah, pure synchronicity, like tracks laid down on…

David: Right. And, both of these are confining ontologies. But you see why then the default ultimately becomes materialism. Because this is what happened in the 17th century, is the mechanical view of nature was broadly accepted. That is that everything that can be investigated scientifically is on the mechanical side, and that’s what science deals with. And then on the other side, there’s this completely discontinuous realm of soul and God, and thinking substance, and science has nothing to say about that. But of course, no one in the sciences, any more than a philosopher is, ultimately going to be content with that sort of dualism, you still want an explanation. And so, ultimately, the mechanical philosophy was created by removing from our picture of nature anything mind-like, but then the same mechanical philosophy and the same science wanted to understand mind as well. And the only way that now it could do that was by trying to incorporate it into the mechanical picture. So, a picture that existed solely by excluding the mental, now had to account for the mantle. Again, it sounds plausible at first.

What is consciousness except complex sensation? What is sensation, except complex stimulation and response? And you think you can reduce that to biological features, which can be reduced to chemical features, which can be reduced to atomic features. The problem is when we undertake that reduction, what we find is that there’s no way of reconstructing the phenomenon from the material basis in a way that’s plausible. We have plenty of people in the sciences and in philosophy who tell us as well. But then you actually think about it, what mind does, what language does, what life is, what organic systems are. You find that this explanation not only fails to account for it adequately, but in fact is pretty much demonstrably false.

Tom: Yeah. So, material materialism has its proponents in comparison with dualism.

David: Dualism actually has a lot of proponents who are consciously dualistic. In America, quite a few people who are evangelicals who are in analytic philosophy, and they’ve adopted this picture

Tom: Mm-hmm.

David: Actually, thinking about its implications, and they’re substance dualists and they really think that what Christianity or whatever tradition they’re in teaches is that we are mechanical bodies inhabited by immaterial spirits. And that the commerce between these two things is purely in a divine will. again, a sort of explanation that doesn’t explain anything, but there are also dualists who don’t know their dualists. You get a lot of these among those who think they’re materialists, but who, imagine for instance, that consciousness could be uploaded onto a digital platform, because in some sense, they still believe without thinking it through, that their mind is in no way related to the organic system of the body or, This is just a platform. This is just a mechanical that runs a program. Well, what is this, other than the new dualism, it’s the notion that a mysterious sense, a certain stream of electrochemical impulses to which the platform is merely a fungible sort of agent rather than the actual event of that consciousness could be transferred?

Tom: I hadn’t thought about it before. If you are able to upload your consciousness to some software, in that sense, your mind, your consciousness, is, uh, sort of substrate independent, and it is in a sense separable from its material basis. And that, in a sense, sounds like perhaps a form of dualism of a certain kind.

David: Oh, it, it is. And it’s an unreflective one because somehow. You have to be asserting the identity of thought with a certain particular stream of electrical impulses, while at the same time thinking that it has a content that is indifferent to its material instantiation. So, if I could transfer my consciousness to a digital platform, I would still remember and miss my dog, and there are any number of reasons why it’s incoherent. I think it can be demonstrated just by a scrupulous phenomenology that what mind does is not what software does. And that this is just a  category confusion and, sadly, Peter Thiel or whatever other billionaire is investing fortunes in this is, is going to be disappointed because he’s never actually be able to transfer his mind to a virtual space.

Tom: I wanna ask you specifically about life. We kind of talked about

the mechanical philosophy and

David: Mm-hmm.

Tom: of,

you know,

David: Yeah.

Tom: parts. the materialist perspective and the way that we tell this scientific narrative, life is a relatively recent phenomenon

 it seems to be very fragile and it seems to be very rare, like in the terms of astronomers looking out into the universe that life is more the exception to the rule of a lifeless physical reality. And I wonder if we were to take that, perspective, how does that shape how you might view life itself, either in human life or life on our planet as, we’re really the exception to a lifeless, a

mostly lifeless

David: Yeah.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

David: How do you know it’s lifeless though? I don’t mean, how do you know that there aren’t other civilizations out there? How do you know thatthe principles that inform us as living beings don’t inform the whole structure of the cosmos.

 for ancient people, the stars had souls. The whole thing was this sort of glittering company of living beings of various kinds. the sun had consciousness. Uh, well, we don’t necessarily have to believe that though. Neither should we just discount it, But the question is how does anything become what it essentially isn’t? Or can it only become what potentially, and therefore in a sense it really is. And I would say the latter. I say there are any number of good, logical arguments where it would be incoherent to say that life.

And now of

course we’re reducing life to the notion of a mechanical phenomenon that is super vet on a cellular phenomenon that’s super vet on a chemical phenomenon and so on down. But super vet, that’s one of those words that’s often used, especially in anglophone philosophy to cover over a una in your logic. because super vet means it’s doing something you wouldn’t be able to predict from your picture of the prior ingredients of that effect.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

David: but that is there and therefore must be somehow dependent on that, purely wholly dependent on that material substrate and therefore supervenes. But what does that mean? Whereas the Aristotelian claim in the past would be No. There, there are different forms of description, which we call causes. these causes are not mechanical causes. What he’s saying is that, there are levels, there is a hierarchy of reality in life and in all things that exist in which the higher, more formal level constraints the lower level formally, whereas the lower level constraints, the higher level materially, and we see this in the structure of life, we like to think that life can be explained as a slow emergence just from single celled organisms, which is in its material history. Undoubtedly true life on this began, with divisible cells that could reproduce themselves but it’s whether that hierarchy can emerge from a purely physical basis that becomes very, very. Logically, parlous for anyone who tries to, to map out how this works, I’ve seen physicists do it and philosophers do it and made some noble attempts. But again and again, this always involves jumping over some causal chasm

 And when you get from that too. The actual phenomenon of mind, and that means mind, both as all it wants is consciousness as intentionality, as radiation. you find that you’re trying to explain the smooth transition between two descriptively, utterly discontinuous levels of reality, and then just using, say the word vence or emergence as a way of, obscuring the problem This was not a problem for ancient philosophy because they weren’t thinking purely in terms of mechanical causation. Again, the Aristotelian system is not about the mechanics of reality

it, it, uh, is levels. How would you describe something? And when you describe it, say a tree in terms of its material nature, but in terms of its formal nature, what a tree is in terms of how that tree successively begins here and can only end here if it reaches its full potential. Right?

Therefore, all of reality thus is being described in mind, like terms, in terms of intentionality, in terms of form, and all that. And that’s why no one actually outside the sort of like the hard and fast atheists actually believes that, that these questions have been answered, uh, satisfactorily.

Curiously enough in the life sciences right now, this is more and more an accepted view, they have movement like systems biology or biological relativity and others that says that the structure of life is so irreducibly hierarchical and is based on forms of recursive causality. that it’s impossible to regard as emergent just from chemistry. that in fact, we should start thinking of the laws of life. Fundamental, and this gets me back to hours ago, or whenever it was, when you asked this question about life being a recent phenomenon.

One of the great biologists slash philosophers of the last century was Robert Rosen, and he wrote a famous book, Life Itself, which is a difficult read, but a brilliant one. And he would be a good example of someone who looked at the structure of life and said, you know, we’ve been working, and this is part of the law of mechanism and part of, Galileo telling us, the scientific reality that we can measure is not one of phenomena, but one of quantities. Right.

Therefore, from this prejudice, we’ve evolved the notion that the basic laws of physics are the laws that should ultimately be able to explain everything because we assume bottom-up causation.

Rosen said no in hi to his mind. The laws of life are fundamental biology, and the laws of physics are simply limiting conditions, and that the science would be reoriented from the ground up as presuming life and mind, perhaps as fundamental. And so, what you see as the dead cosmos that preceded life on this earth is, in fact, already part of the living hierarchical system of life. In it’s inchoate but directed final causality, towards these hierarchical structures, which in operation do seem to be quite often irreducible. And that does seem to be guided even by internal mechanisms of self-correction and self-creation, and intentionality that go beyond the exigency of merely material causes and material needs.

Tom: I’m gonna kind of step back, to our kind of higher level again. We’ve talked a bit about materialism, we’ve talked about dualism, and in your books, you kind of put forth a third option where fundamental reality is mind-based. So what I’d like to ask you about then is if the mind is what’s fundamental, and the mind can, in some sense, exist independently of matter. What are brains for in a mind based reality.

David: Again, you’re presuming that there’s this thing called matter that is, mechanical reality in and of itself. I mean, I think of matter as a modality of mind, of intentionality and of perception, and even of proprioception. And, you know, the reason consciousness emerges in the weak sense is that it appears ever more and more in reality. It is because there isn’t this ultimate division between mind and matter.

Tom:

David: Now, I do believe, yes, mind may not be reduced to or inhabit or express itself as the limited material modes. We know that’s true. I don’t think of the God is a big fishbowl in which we’re swimming, for instance,

Tom: Mm-hmm.

David: But for us, yeah, brain, flesh, these are all part of a material upon a formal cause. That is, these material things are constrained formally by mental calls, but the mind is constrained materially by them. And in that way, we are the particular persons and things we are.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

David: The question isn’t, you know, what our brain’s for is if these are exchangeable sets of radio equipment, but rather what your brain is for and what my brain is for. And, in your case, it is the expression of. This marvelous reality that allows you to be the creature you are, the being. You are the person you are. Just as mine allows me to be this one in a modality that are distinct but kindred and, in some way, together, participate in a higher call, but also enjoy a particularity of its own kind.

Tom: I am wondering if one does, read, consider, and reflect on the arguments you make for this third way of looking at reality, does one need to have some sort of belief in a God to adopt a sort of mind-based view of reality, or not?

David:  I do believe that if you pursue,  this reasoning to its end, you do arrive at the understanding of God and the sort of the classical theistic sense that you find in,  philosophical Judaism and Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, all the isms that have any sort of theistic,  contours that,  there is. One principle from which all else comes. And that one is an infinite act, not only of being but of mind,

So yes, I think you can’t avoid theism in the highest classical sense. But whether that gets you to the God of faith or not, that’s a much longer conversation and one to which I have fewer answers.

Tom: Right. I’ve heard that described before as the philosophers. God, it’s a very robust, rigorous definition. Nice and tidy, logical, and there’s a big gap from the God of of revealed religion to the God that one arrives through geometric proofs, or whatever else.

David: Yeah. Geometric. Yeah. Well, there’s a good spino in way of putting it. Yeah. Sort of geometric,

Tom: Yeah, I’m wondering what we can learn from Eastern traditions about mind that we may have overlooked in the Western history, whether through modern science or,

David: Where Indian tradition excelled from early on, and I think this was because first the Buddhism and the debates with Buddhists, that took place in the subcontinent before the Christian era, was in phenomenological investigations of the phenomena of consciousness itself.

We have philosophies of mind in the West before that, in the sense that we had philosophies of spiritual beings who were also bodies, what have you. But actually, consciousness is such, and its enigmas and the things that make it very hard to reduce to material causality. We did not explore in the West until relatively recently; really we had to be challenged by the mechanical philosophy because under the challenge of the mechanical philosophy, we had to start thinking about what is mind, what does it do in India?

Of course this had already happened in Ama Buddhism, a very rigorous approach to trying to break this down into just causal, phenomenal successions streams of causality now of course they’re not strict materialists. But they had a sort of impersonal and non-theistic understanding of the generation of mind through the 12 fold, field of of interdependent co-origination. And because of that, the great schools of Hindu philosophy and the great renaissance of Hindu thought that happened in the common era was always already engaged with this.

And so, they’re incredibly rigorous examination from which there’s still a lot to learn. And then that helps qualify, I think, and helps us see our own tradition in a different light. How we should think of Neo-Platonism, not just as a metaphysics and ontology, but also as pointing towards a certain phenomenology. And some of the rigor of those Indian systems compliment the rigor of these phenomenologists, and other approaches to organic life to mind. Two languages I want to keep insisting that language is an ever-baffling phenomenon is consciousness or organic life.

Tom: I wanna ask next, if we were to adopt a perspective of a thinking that there’s a mind-based reality, fundamentally, what is real is mind, and everything comes from it. Is that going to have some practical implications on how we live our lives and how we kind of view ourselves in this world?

David: I hope so. I think that, let me talk about the mechanical philosophy, even when we think that we believe in God or so, we place that within the perspective of a fairly mechanized view of reality. We see all of nature as disenchanted and dispirited. We’ve adopted this dualistic prejudice. So, we see nature as just a sort of endless reservoir of resources to be exploited by capitalism and by size without much thought to whether it has a numinous or a spiritual dimension and a dignity of its own, worth preserving and loving. And, living our lives online in a virtual space in which we’re all being absorbed into this machinery and reality. More and more isn’t direct contact with the strangeness and the mystery of being and of nature and the beauty of that strangeness and the terror, but rather the sort of prepackaged reality, the virtual sphere, we make up our own realities.

Political, moral, historical, but ultimately economic. What we are being reduced to are parts of an economic machine, which is gradually but relentlessly consuming the natural world, which we’ve decided has no spiritual depth to it. and converting into the abstract realm of value, which is just to say wealth, which exists in a virtual space until we’ve exhausted all of it and the machine runs down.

We treat each other as machines. We treat our world as a machine. We live like machines. And if we’re going to redeem ourselves and maybe even redeem our technology, we’re going to have to stop thinking that mechanism is the ground of reality and get back to what you know, Robert Rosen saw as the true basic laws of life itself, and try to understand what that means.

Tom: Yeah. I’m wondering if the game of baseball can teach us something about reality or about ourselves that would be helpful.

David: Uh, sure, sure. Yes, it’s a spiritual discipline, just like the art of archery and Zen. I have essays on this out there. I have one called A Perfect Game. That’s actually my most often reprinted essay. And I think in some sense, if you go there, you can find my whole spiritual philosophy sketched out on the diamond.

Tom:

Well, David, it was great to talk to you about two of my greatest passions, both baseball and philosophy and so I’m, delighted we’ll be able to cover both topics today, and I wish you well on the days ahead.

David: Well, thank you very much. I enjoyed this.