sophiaserpentia | (no subject)

I made this comment in

challenging_god yesterday and wanted to record it here for posterity, and perhaps discussion.

It regards what I am calling "the Neoplatonist Fallacy."

The Neoplatonists believed that the things in the cosmos are like thoughts in the Mind of God. In their view, Mind is the most real substance; manifest form follows from Ideal (or Mental) form.

This is a fallacy, though, because of the way the human brain processes sensory input. Of course things when examined begin to take on the properties of mind, because that is the way the perceptual faculties in the brain break down sensory input.

For example, we have neural pathways that represent the cardinal numbers; a neuron for "one," an neuron for "two," a neuron for "three," and so on. We have neurons for recognizing circles, squares, triangles, etc. These things therefore seem "eternal" because they precede thought; they are central to our experience of the universe.

So naturally when we examine the universe, things appear to be patterned in intelligent ways. We have NO OTHER WAY of perceiving the universe.

Edit. What makes this so difficult to realize is the fact that sensory data is edited so that things seen or heard which do not fit easily into our pre-developed conceptualization pathways is discarded or ignored. Our mind overlooks a great deal of raw input from the outside world in order to quickly develop a real-time sense of the immediate surrounding. It can take a great deal of effort and conscious concentration to learn how to see outside of the neural censor.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I don't think this is properly The Neoplatonist Fallacy because, though I think I understand and agree with your criticism, I don't think it's necessarily characteristic of the Neoplatonic school.

What we're dealing with here is a reified version of these concepts: where the Nous is literally comparable to the mind; the One to "one", and so on - as opposed to being rich allegories for subtle concepts which resist verbal description.

Now, there is a continuum between how concrete versus how abstract these concepts are understood. And I think that part of the problem is that the various Neoplatonists (let alone related groups) occupied a wide spectrum of this continuum; but would use similar language in spite of this fundamental difference. For instance, I believe there were some who saw things as concretely as you depict. There were others who did not, yet still clearly considered things like mathematical axioms as understood in the sensible world to exist comparably in the ideal world. And there were others still who were entirely abstract about it, yet still used the same language.

The Neoplatonists always had, inherited from Plato, a strong divide between the sensible and ideal worlds. And from Aristotle they inherited a soul/body unity with the corresponding division of the soul (mind) into a variety of faculties, some more sensible and some more ideal. So we can expect that even the most concrete-thinking of Neoplatonists would firstly be highly dubious of sensible impressions (contra ideal existence), and also be equipped to understand much of the mind as sensible (rather than ideal simply by nature of being mental).

This background prepares the Neoplatonists to agree completely with your criticism here. Though of course they may yet draw different conclusions; as I'm not sure what solution, entirely, you're proposing here.

One way the mind metaphor of the cosmos might be understood is in the premise that the activity and constitution of a mind are one and the same. We can experience this readily in our mundane lives. For instance, if we realize we are tired and decide to take a short rest from our work, our mind does not remain pristine - untouched by the activity of rest; rather it's constitution also becomes that rest. This creates mental inertia, where the deeper your rest, the deeper you want to rest, and the easier you "think" of rest and harder you consider anything else. Activity and constitution are united, there is no pristine constitution which executes activity.

This is a mental description of the thing described physically as one hypostasis/aeon's "reflection" of another (as well as in dramatic/mythic descriptions, eg. Narcissus); and underlies both Neoplatonic cosmology and theurgy/mysticism understood through the processes of procession/emanation and reversion/contemplation.

Perhaps this shows how a mental allegory of cosmos is powerful, and provides a description of a multiplicity which is arranged logically - but not by the logic we are familiar with. The activity of our mind is oriented in procession towards the sensible world, and so the constition of our mind is the same. The logic we know, then, is the logic of the sensible world and not the logic we speak of when we speak of the cosmic Nous, which we could only ever hope for by changing the activity/constitution of our mind towards reversion/contemplation.

A similar argument, I think, can be made for the structuralist school and linguistic metaphors. Although, especially with the poststructuralists, we do run into thinkers who take linguistic construction as such very seriously. We must use these people to understand the layer of mind to which such things apply, and not to the whole picture.

Thank you for your input. You are clearly much more educated on the specifics of the Neoplatonists than I am. I come to them indirectly, having only encountered them through my research on the Gnostics.

What I have found in examining the Gnostic material matches your statements about the Neoplatonists. Some reified their dualistic mythology quite strongly while others -- particularly in the early stages of the Gnostic movement -- saw dualism on a much more metaphorical level.

If so then I have misnamed the fallacy and will have to search for a more accurate title. The "mentalist" fallacy, perhaps, named after those who consider mind to be more "real" than hyle.

I haven't really proposed a solution to the problem yet. At this point I find that the more I learn about the brain's cognitive and perceptual faculties, the more I am forced to concede can be explained by physiology. This need not however be "distressing" to those who want to avoid reductionism, because as I pointed out in a post earlier tonight, reductionism does not follow logically from materialism -- though there are those who claim it does.

I like your comments about the way activity and constitution relate more closely than people realize. A comment in my "credal summary" states that the stillness of the meditator's mind becomes the stillness which is the divine presence. I hadn't thought about that further, but I seem to be describing a particular manifestation of the phenomenon you are describing.