It's more that you seem to deplore modernity, see it as a step backwards somehow — Janus

Generally not, except in this specific regard. The solution surely comprises recognizing it. At least that is a starting point.

the physical is not merely mechanical and mindless as has been assumed by the scientific orthodoxy. — Janus

My point exactly!

The problem, though, is always going to be finding clear evidence for such a thing, and being able to develop a clear model of just what might be going on — "Janus

Evidence and models are again appeals to empiricism, don’t you see? Not all philosophical analyses can be expressed in those terms.

As for whether there is a ‘crisis of meaning’ I think it’s axiomatic, but I wouldn’t want try and persuade those who don’t agree.

As it is the basic argument of this thread has a clear provenance in the sources quoted.

the physical is not merely mechanical and mindless as has been assumed by the scientific orthodoxy. — Janus


My point exactly! — Wayfarer

Actually on second thought "scientific orthodoxy" seems a bit strong. "Popular image of the scientific view" seems more apt. What individual scientists believe would not be so easy to discover. Also science has done very well with mechanical models so the methodology is useful, even though it comes up against limits in some areas.

Evidence and models are again appeals to empiricism, don’t you see? Not all philosophical analyses can be expressed in those terms.

As for whether there is a ‘crisis of meaning’ I think it’s axiomatic, but I wouldn’t want try and persuade those who don’t agree.

As it is the basic argument of this thread has a clear provenance in the sources quoted. — Wayfarer

It is scientific evidence which is motivating Levin's work, and he constantly says that mere speculation won't do for definitive views. On the other hand we all have our own inventive beliefs about the nature of things. The difference between you and me seems to be that I don't take my own intuitive convictions to be reasons for anyone else to believe as I do.

When you say you think the crisis of meaning is axiomatic I think you misuse the term. What is axiomatic is what is self-evident to anyone, and that others disagree shows that the belief in a meaning crisis is not axiomatic. Also the belief in the meaning crisis is a conclusion you have reached on the basis of what you take to be evidence and is hence a conclusion, not an axiom.

What you claim as a "provenance" is just a compendium of others' intuitive convictions that trot out regularly apparently because you find them copacetic, chosen simply because they align with your intutions. Why would you expect that to count as convincing evidence to the unbiased?

You need to understand that the search for meaning is far more open today than it has been in the past. — Janus

How so??

Realistically, how many paths to meaning can a particular person explore? I think the openness you speak of is illusory at best, for most people. Because most people, even in first-world countries, simply don't have the social and economic means to explore different paths to meaning without this having an adverse effect on their ability to earn a living.

You say we cannot return to a traditional mindset, and of course I would agree that we cannot, but would add that even if we could it would not be desirable. — Janus

But we'll have to, or we'll be miserable.

The "predicament of modernity", the "modern crisis of meaning" is, in my view, the consequence of too many people too readily embracing socialist, liberal, humanist, democratic views, and then realizing the hard way that they can't live holding those views without also becoming miserable, and, more importabntly, without failing in life. It's a case of cruel optimism. It's not necessarily that socialist, liberal, etc. views are wrong per se; it's that if a person doesn't have a sufficiently comfortable socio-economic status, holding those views and trying to act in accordance with them will become a source of said person's misery and downfall.

In the spirit of normalizing social and economic austerity, we'll have to go back to the type of mentality people (probably) had in feudalist times, and see ourselves as fully defined by our current socio-economic status and the precarity that comes with it.

explore different paths to meaning without this having an adverse effect on their ability to earn a living. — baker

Many people find their meaning in earning a living―that is, in their profession.

But we'll have to (return to a traditional mindset) or we'll be miserable. — baker

You are speaking, and can speak, only for yourself.

The "predicament of modernity", the "modern crisis of meaning" is, in my view, the consequence of too many people too readily embracing socialist, liberal, humanist, democratic views, and then realizing the hard way that they can't live holding those views without also becoming miserable, and, more importabntly, without failing in life. — baker

As compared to - what? Traditionalist, conservative, undemocratic, illiberal? I would rather hope that authentic values can be realised without that.

The point of the argument in the original post is an analysis of how philosophical and scientific materialism came to be such a dominant force in globalised Western culture, and it's consequences for the 'meaning crisis'. I'm trying to articulate a very specific process initiated by Descartes' dualism of 'mind and body' and Galileo's separation of 'primary and secondary' qualities. This leads to the self-contradictory conception of the mind as a 'thinking substance', which, when rejected, leaves only the 'extended substance' of matter/energy as the causal basis of manifest reality.

You're correct in saying that all of this is intrinsically bound up with the emergence of liberalism in politics and economics. But this whole complex of views is also now being called into question by many currents and movements within Western liberal democracies themselves. Accordingly the dominance of materialism can no longer be assumed. People are exploring or re-exploring all manner of philosophical ideas and value systems outside the bounds of Western liberal democracy without however having to literally overthrow it.

I happened upon a sceptical analysis of Michael Levin on Medium - i think you can access it, it opens OK for me in a clean browser. The author says he is PhD, complex systems, physics, CS, maths and philosophy. Interestingly, the critique was developed as a dialogue with Google Gemini. Where I think it's relevant, is in identifying the kind of push back Levin's Platonist ideas will get from other philosophers of biology.

https://medium.com/@AIchats/michael-levins-platonic-biology-fcadcb67c3bf

Cheers, I think I already read that review on Medium. If it was the same one I found it a bit carping―I don't think Levin is concerned with promoting dogma―his statements suggest to me that his idea of a platonic morpho-space is a conjecture that guides him in what to look for in his research. If there is some kind of intelligence, or problem-solving ability in living matter and even in non-living matter, then it doesn't really matter where it comes from or where it "resides". In fact the questions as to where it comes from or resides may be senseless―because unanswerable. Such abilities, if they can be demonstrated experimentally, may simply be in the nature of matter―with any further explanation being impossible. It's like the question 'Why is there anything"―it is not so much to be answered as it is to engender a sense of mystery and awe―an inspiring feeling to enhance the creative spirit.

Edit: I had a look and it was the same review I read previously―I recognized the "cover" image.

Right. It was a pretty dense review, I admit. Of course, I'm highly sympathetic to Levin's neoplatonism, but that critic seemed to have some pretty good points to make about whether his ideas really are able to be validated empirically. (In the book I'm writing, there's a character called Don LeVan who is basically Levin's character.)

The "predicament of modernity", the "modern crisis of meaning" is, in my view, the consequence of too many people too readily embracing socialist, liberal, humanist, democratic views, and then realizing the hard way that they can't live holding those views without also becoming miserable — baker

What had "normalizing austerity" have to do with liberalism or democracy or socialism? Neither do I think there is necessarily some period of history or place or ideology on earth that is immune to this. Even for the medieval serf, there would have been periods of history where it was much harder to survive and make a living, and people would have been more miserable and living below their expectations compared to other periods where serfs or peasants or whoever had it comparatively good.

Sunday Morning

By Wallace Stevens

I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.


II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.


III

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.


IV

She says, “I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.


V

She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.


VI

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.


VII

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.


VIII

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

source

Of course, I'm highly sympathetic to Levin's neoplatonism, but that critic seemed to have some pretty good points to make about whether his ideas really are able to be validated empirically. — Wayfarer

It's a thorny question. What does "validated" mean? If it means verified, then the point seems moot since it is well-accepted in philosophy of science that no theory can be verified. Also, by 'neoplatonism' I presume you are not referencing Plotinus, but just mean 'a new form of platonism'?

I take Levin to be conjecturing that inherent within matter itself is a "space" of possible, potential forms, and a kind of inherent instinctive intelligence and agency that is capable of, to use Whitehead's terminology, "creative advance" whereby novel forms "ingress". The idea is that both living and non-living matter is "organic" or "self-organizing", yet not with any antecedent "purpose" or transcendent mind at work. It certainly seems right to me that there is no strictly mechanical explanation for the mysteries of morphogenesis.

Anyway Levin seems to me to be concerned not with positing metaphysical theories, but only in using his conjectures to guide what to look for in his experimental work. His concern is with the science itself.

A great poem! Wallace Stevens has long been one of my favorites.

I take Levin to be conjecturing that inherent within matter itself is a "space" of possible forms, and a kind of inherent instinctive intelligence and agency that is capable of, to use Whitehead's terminology, "creative advance" whereby novel forms "ingress". The idea is that both living and non-living matter is "organic" or "self-organizing", yet not with any antecedent "purpose" or transcendent mind at work. It certainly seems right to me that there is no strictly mechanical explanation for the mysteries of morphogenesis. — Janus

Yes I meant neo-neo-platonist. Surely there are convergences with Terrence Deacon. The forms can also be understood as constraints or 'forms of possibility'. I mostly have taken in Levin listening to his youtube talks and dialogues.



thank you I will find a quiet minute or 30 to take that in.

Surely there are convergences with Terrence Deacon. The forms can also be understood as constraints or 'forms of possibility'. I mostly have taken in Levin listening to his youtube talks and dialogues. — Wayfarer

If there are convergences, they are not over Levin’s platonism. Deacon is doing almost the opposite. He is trying to show how what looks Platonic; mathematical or mental forms that are ontologically basic and existing prior to, or independently of, physical instantiation, arise only through specific kinds of physical–biological processes. They are not “there anyway,” waiting to be instantiated; they are generated historically.

Well, here is an interview featuring both of them, so I might take the time to listen to some or all of it.