I call it "One Mag" or "Maggie" to
downplay the portentous title
"Seán Ó Nualláin throws open the windows of the house
of scientific theory to admit the fresh wind of a courageous new
multidisciplinary set of ideas about the nature of consciousness and its effort
-- pursued through us -- to know the universe. In doing so, he exhibits a
creative rather than a restrictive rationality as well as a sense of humor, welcoming artists and lay people as
well as scientists and other scholars to a sanguine and surprising view of the
future of knowledge." - Jack DuVall, president, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict
(or Jack DuVall, co-author, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent
Conflict)
"From
first page to the last, a sustained and dazzling burst of light illuminating
the fundamental questions and the presumed “answers” within the
scientific, philosophical and spiritual world now radically changing
before our eyes."
--Jacob
Needleman, Author of An Unknown World: Notes on the Meaning of
the Earth
"This book covers an enormous range of topics, from syntax
and semantics in biology and the need for teleology in evolutionary
explanations to the integration of scientific knowledge with a spiritual and
holistic understanding of the universe. The book will certainly provoke those
like myself who believe that science must preserve its independence from
religion and politics. Yet, Seán Ó Nualláin boldly endeavors to envision a
science of the future that is integrative of different ways of knowing. "
Carlos Montemayor SFSU
“‘One Magisterium’ is an uncommon approach and thematises how nature
becomes aware of itself in one of its species - the human mind and
consciousness. Sean O Nuallain transcends naturalism, objectivism,
scientifism and the dogmatic belief states of various religious
traditions. He looks at nature from a variety of perspectives, uniting
them into an ontology of active contemplation on who we are, how we
think, how we are able to express, describe and understand things. He
is aware that if quantum mechanics meets social sciences (or
biosemiotics) meets molecular biology all will result in a coherent way
of living in peaceful harmony with nature as an obligatory consequence. The
method which Sean ONuallain is devoloping is consequently ‘bionoetics’,
at one with the universal laws of nature without embracing scientific
reductionism but looking at the whole. New generations of science,
fine arts and spirituality, being freed of former dogmatic traditions,
will be able to do justice to this approach.”
Guenther Witzany, Buermoos, Austria
One Magisterium: How Nature Knows
Through Us
by Seán Ó Nualláin
A breathtaking call for higher
education reform
One Magisterium provides extraordinary
insights into the current state of consciousness research presented
by Foundations of Mind conference organizer, Seán Ó
Nualláin. One Magisterium is an ambitious and complex book
that goes beyond merely reporting on some of the most exciting
scientific findings to directing our attention toward the importance
of establishing a "noetic language" for each dimension of
reality that we humans experience. Packed with frequent references to
Ó Nualláin's previous writing and the works of many of
the world's greatest philosophers and scientists, One Magisterium is
a feast of big ideas as they come together in extraordinarily
creative new ways at the frontiers of science where physics,
philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics and biology
intersect.
Ó Nualláin is a visionary
and academia survivor who makes the salient point that it is time to
rethink the "magisterium"--the area of teaching authority
to address the way scientific and religious truth have been
dichotomized. It's all well and good to separate scientific facts
from morality--up until the point that we see society and ecosystems
unraveling from the damage from such schizophrenic double-think.
Humanity needs a story describing the facts of existence that also
includes a sense of morality and meaning. When meaning is divorced
from knowledge, terrible things can--and do--occur. At this time when
many of the world's finest institutions of higher learning are in
danger of being detrimentally influenced by corporate and other types
of controlling interests, many destructive category errors are being
made as science attempts to cover higher achievements of subjective
human experience.
Rather than allowing the academy of
higher education to continue sliding into various forms of disarray,
Ó Nualláin suggests we consider a nobler higher of
placing higher education in the care of those we entrust to do more
than simply inculcate knowledge, but with those who improve our
capacity to learn. Ó Nualláin explains, "Historically,
both of these processes have occurred in a religious environment; it
is not unfair to say that we have yet to work out how to frame the
drive for understanding in a purely secular context." The
framework of such a Magisterium thus provides a framework from whence
noetic action, morality, and aesthetics reflect a hierarchy of value
emanating from a Divine Source.
Ó Nualláin calls for a
new paradigm with the foundation of what he calls Bionoetics,
envisioned as being "the study of how we as biological organisms
can come to know, including coming to know about the cosmos in the
most abstract, mathematical sense." By examining the Mind as
manifest in the context of interacting between organism, populations,
and species with the environment through space and time, a harmonious
creative fusion becomes possible. Who we are and how we connect with
and communicate with other aspects of creation is becoming such an
important matter that its study deserves better care than to be
caught amidst the pointless battles between evolutionists and
creationists, for example.
There is sheer genius evident in One
Magisterium's premise that the time has arrived for us to take heed
of all we have learned and recognize the importance of levels of
being; humanity's future depends on it.
Cynthia Sue Larson
Correctly formatted, SK's review can be found here;
http://www.interaliamag.org/imagining-possibilities/one-magisterium-review-by-stuart-kauffman/
He ends the review with what for me is a gratifying comment;
"At the heart of this book I am unable to review in the sense of stating or summarizing, is O’Nuallain’s deep humanity. He longs for us to seek that full humanity, he longs to enjoin us, provoke us, evoke us, confuse us, poke us to awake. One Magisterium is a sprawling, confusing, provoking masterpiece."
Review: Stuart Kauffman FRSC
Sept 11, 2014
How to “review” this sprawling, brilliant, eclectic, myriad, mosaic, welter of issues and ideas, most brilliant and an interwoven tapestry?
I begin, non-standardly, with lines from the Exposition and Introduction, having read O’Nuallain’s stunning, confusing, evocative book.
1. Einstein Ricci and Riemann tensors, and mind able to understand this
2. Mathematics and theatre troupe authentic dialogue with external reality
3. Participatory universe in which our choice of what to observe has objective consequences as nature gets to know itself through us.
4. Syntax intrinsic to biology yet also semantics in biology and ontological distinctions
5. Natural language processing by computer, NLPBC. NLPBC fails:
6. Protein, structure but also function
7. Biological explanation is teleological: heart’s purpose is to pump blood.
8. Consciousness: resonance between neural process and the intentional object. Mystery of attention.
9. Social and Political worlds. WAR AGAINST ABSTRACT NOUNS LIKE “TERROR”. MASSIVE SPYING.
10. Science and religion in Anthropic principle universe?
11. Un-reducibility of folk psychology to eliminative materialism.
12. Third person statements yet also Buddha metaphysics, psychology ontology and path of self- integration.
13. Mania for identifying particular human activities with physical locations in the brain.
14. Brains capable of manipulating tensors of 4th order, FRMI are scalars. This localization reduction is greedy and doomed to failure.
15. Academy-industrial complex
16. Evolution as a subset of emanation
17. Science versus first person experience
18. Biology is in at least as deep a conceptual muddle as Cognitive Science
19. Evolution as a symbolic process, with syntax.
20. Spirituality and action.
To review this sweep is beyond my capacities. Reading it made the hairs on the back of my head stand on end, awed at its range, its ambitions, its hopes, its daring.
If I cannot review, the best retreat of scoundrels is “musings”. Sean has set me to musings. These are my musings of course, triggered by O’Nuallian.
First, why might “syntax” be critical to biology? One thinks of the most obvious “code” the genetic code. We all know: DNA is transcribed into RNA, processed sometimes into messenger RNA, then translated into protein. OK, but we also know that translation requires not only the ribozyme, but also the set of encoded protein enzymes that each properly load the appropriate transfer RNA with the “right” amino acid to that tRNA such that via its anticodon site it then binds to the “right” nucleotide triplet codon for the “right” amino acid for that position in the forming protein. So we all know that the emergence of the code, which self consistently specifies the synthesis of the “encoded” protein enzymes that, by loading the right tRNAs, instantiate the “code”. This system is what I will call “collectively autocatatalytic” , yet more. It is collectively autocatalytic in that virtually all steps are protein catalyzed reactions, save the ribozyme itself. If other RNA molecules play catalytic roles that does not obviate my point.
But the code IS more than just collectively autocatalytic, it is also, as O’Nuallian would insist, syntatic. Why?
The next point is that molecular reproduction does NOT depend upon template replication. Gonen Ashkenasy, after a post doc with Reza Ghadiri who had made the first self reproducing protein, made a set of nine peptides which forms a “collectively autocatalytic set”. Here each peptide catalyzes the formation of a second copy of the next peptide around a cycle of the nine different peptides. No peptide catalyzes its own formation, the set of nine peptides as a WHOLE catalyzes its own formation out of exogenous building blocks. As such, it constitutes a Kantian Whole, where the parts exist (in the universe) for and by means of the whole. Organisms are Kantian wholes in t heir worlds, with a “functional closure, or better a functional sufficiency, with one another. We yet lack the concept of functional wholes, although autopoesis comes close. More we can imagine and are not far, probably, from the spontaneous formation of collectively autocatalytic sets. Nilesh Vaidya and Niles Lehman made a system of halved ribozymes which could form hybrid ribozymes combining the recognition site of one with the catalytic site of another in a Mg++ solution and found the spontaneous emergence of a single autocatalytic hybrid ribozyme, then loops of 3, 5 and 7 collectively autocatalytic hybrid ribozymes. Of course these are evolved RNA molecules. Efforts are underway to randomize these RNA sequences and test for the spontaneous formation of collectively autocatalytic sets of RNA, or of stochastic peptides, or both. Placed in a budding liposome, one might get a protocell, that can evolve to some extent.
But to what extent? Here is O’Nuallian’s insistence on syntax. An RNA or peptide or both in a set of protocells will have a hard time evolving novel RNA or peptide or both or other molecules and having to maintain collective autocatalytic closure. In sharp and obvious contrast, once encoded protein synthesis via the genetic code had evolved, it became far easier to explore a wide range of novel RNAs and proteins, hence functionalities, which presumably strongly abetted the capacity of evolution to create novelty. The syntax of the code, law-like, is an enabling constraint that does not itself cause, but ENABLES far wider evolutionary exploration.
But now we need to include a new idea: Enable. O’Nuallian is close but does not discuss it explicitly. Much of evolution is enabled, not caused.
Second, I join O’Nuallain on 2. Mathematics and the theatre troupe are both in authentic dialogue with external reality. I borrow from Richard Melmon, who is, in fact, my close cousin, the idea already in Rousseau, not Hobbes, that language probably evolved from metaphoric to propositional. Assume this is true, or true enough. Perhaps as Michael Arbib argues, language evolved from gestures. That too will do. “Juliet is the sun!” Is this metaphor, so rich, either true or false in the sense in which the proposition: “The cat is on the mat” true or false? NO. Propositions are either true or false, Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle. “Juliet is the sun” is neither true nor false in the propositional sense. More, do you think any set of pre-stated propositions could exhaust the meanings of a metaphor such as “Juliet is the sun”? I think we all answer, “NO”. Pause…From propositions, true or false, we easily get logic: “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is a mortal.” The premises logically ENTAIL the conclusion. From entailment and number we get mathematics, first number, then simple addition and subtraction in counting, then 0, then negative numbers, then the real line, then irrational numbers, then algebra with equations and variables, X = Y squared, then analytic geometry, then differential and integral calculus, then topology then……Ricci Tensors. Mathematics, so far, is derivative of entailment and propositions, bought at the price of carving the world into categories, “cat” and “mat” where, however, ostensive definitions are famously ambiguous.
Some musings: Could we mathematically PROVE that no set of propositions can exhaust the meanings of a metaphor? I think not. If mathematics derives from propositions, and if metaphors are not propositions, not true or false, how can we use true or false propositions to prove that no set of propositions can exhaust the meanings of a metaphor which is not “true or false”? If not, the world we know and live in, exhorted by metaphors, is rich in ways beyond propositions. I think all art, including the comedy improvisational troupe co-creating a skit they cannot prestate, is metaphoric, and often a co-creation none could know before-hand. So is evolving life.
Yet we also invented and do manipulate 4th order tensors. O’Nuallian and I would probably agree that the mystery of how we may invent and do this is not explained by consciousness itself, whatever and however that is.
One must love his 3, but only on some interpretations of quantum mechanics. Presumably this is not true for the multiple world interpretation in which measurement is not real. If real, I too love “participatory universe” rather as John Archibald Wheeler may have wished it, and Whitehead in Process and Reality tried for.
His 7: Biological explanation is teleological: The heart’s purpose is to pump blood. Yes, most of us agree. But how? The heart jiggles water in the pericardial sac, which is a causal consequence of the heart, as well as pumping blood. Why is one causal consequence the “function” of the heart the other causal consequences are not? This distinction, if acceptable, seems to render biology not reducible to physics, where ALL causal consequences (in classical physics) all happen. I think “function” is justified in biology basically because above the level of the set of atoms, most complex things will never exist, complex living things do exist as Kantian wholes, and the function of a part is its causal consequence(s) that help maintain the whole. Once, function, Darwin gives us a teleology without a designer, as we all want to believe, if not creation scientists.
His 16: evolution as a subset of emanations. Yes, Yes. Consider the evolution of diversity of the biosphere and the economy, the latter over the past 50,000 years as we pass from 10,000 goods and production functions to billions. How and why? Both seem to be emanations into the very possibilities what the evolving biosphere or we have already created.
If I cannot “review” O’Nuallain’s book, I can close with two major issues he stresses. First, the academic-industrial complex. He is right, we are rendered good citizens, too much for the power purposes he stresses. Spirituality. We are so lost to it in our technocratic modern world of aps and zaps.
At the heart of this book I am unable to review in the sense of stating or summarizing, is O’Nuallian’s deep humanity. He longs for us to seek that full humanity, he longs to enjoin us, provoke us, evoke us, confuse us, poke us to awake. One Magisterium is a sprawling, confusing, provoking masterpiece.
