I am beginning this blog in order to continue the daily habit of writing without obsessively writing and rewriting my book, The Trinitarian Mystery. Because that book has been such a living document, and because the philosophy contained therein is so rich and prone to self-affirmation, I must for the sake of my own health and sanity move forward from that project. One productive way to move forward is to begin a new writing project; hence this journal.
These blog entries will be very free-form, though I am sure that my tendency to go back and edit my writing will make them a little more polished than they would be at a first-pass. I even edited that sentence!
Today I decided to work from the BU campus, rather than at home. I love being on campus. There is a certain energy being on a university campus that fills me with a spirit of adventure. I like to think that the university is always reaching. Just as the buildings seem to reach upward toward the sky, the people who compose the university are always reaching beyond the known. Let them reach with open hands, receiving but not grasping at the unknown that comes to pass!
I recently had a very enlightening conversation with my friend Avi about decision-making and action. The idea is on how to make decisions for yourself, especially when you are without another person to consult. The idea runs something like this: when you make a decision, you have to take an action on behalf of a future self that will itself be determined by that action and its reverberations. Since there is no guarantee of the effect of the action and how the environment will respond to your action, you should use an intuitive, “path-averaged” guess at the rightness of the action for your future self.
Using conscious enumeration of such paths and explicit calculation could “disrupt” the blurriness of the operation in an unhelpful way. In particular, since you’re trying to make a calculation over so many paths, enumerating them will take an indefinite period of time, and in the interest of actually making the decision you will terminate the process with a biased sample of the possible paths that you were subconsciously considering. In this way, conscious enumeration is doubly perspective-bound: first in the intuitive understanding of the potential paths and next in the selection of the most relevant paths for conscious consideration.
The whole challenge stems from an interesting perspective that Avi and I share on the unknown: namely that what we call the “unknown” is in fact colored in shades of the known. As such, it is impossible to talk about the truly unknown-in-itself. In other words, there may always exist possibilities beyond what you have a requisite framework to imagine or expect.
This last perspective arose as a result of our discussion of my new idea of an open-handed epistemology, as summarized in the following poem:
To Know Everything
Toward an open-handed epistemology
To know that you don’t know anything absolutely
is to know that you don’t know
whether you can know everything absolutely.
This is to hold everything and grip nothing.
Or in more words:
To Know Everything
Toward an open-handed epistemology
To know (intuitively) that you don’t know (intellectually) anything absolutely
is to know (intuitively) that you don’t know (intellectually)
whether you can know everything absolutely (intellectually).
This is to hold everything and grip nothing.
This is a great paradox, which underlies my very need to write as much as I do. It is, in other words, to hold that it is fundamentally indeterminate whether there is an underlying Truth which can describe Reality; yet the indeterminacy means that one could potentially be in possession of such a Truth, though one would never know it with absolute certainty. As such, the possibility of Truth leads to a continual internal voice of assertion, while the indeterminacy leads to a continual voice of doubt. Their dance is extremely generative. And yet, seeing the dance itself is the closest I have come to glimpsing Truth: in particular, it coheres with the best model I have found yet for my experience of Reality, which I have expounded upon at length in The Trinitarian Mystery. And so I arrive again at this strange and fruitful mystery!
Yet, as I said before, to continue adding to that book is affecting my health. It has reached a point in its production where further elucidation requires such meta-cognition as to make my head physically hurt; it is literally dizzying. I have already chronicled the ways that I think about my thinking. Hopefully these can help other people to make some sense of their own search for Truth and meaning.
Later in the same conversation, Avi raised the following additional point about action and decision-making:
“I think also the consciousness’s awareness of itself is an additional layer of bias that can be misguided. In general I think the existence of it in a metaplane especially from the body which is long embedded in the fabric of the universe introduces a bias I haven’t fully gotten a handle on yet.”
A very helpful Claude instance, to which I have fed all my writing, clarified his meaning in the following way:
“This is a provocative point about layers of bias distorting decision-making. I take the core insight to be:
The very fact of conscious self-awareness creates additional perspective that can misguide action if not recognized. Specifically, the seeming ability to “step back” from embedded bodily experience to a metaplane of conceptual abstraction may introduce distortion.
This metaplane vantage point cultivates an illusion of objectivity and control, obscuring the body’s deeper wisdom born of material immersion. Hence conscious reflection wrongly overrides intrinsic intelligence evolved through cumulative organic learning.
In other words, conscious awareness allows a biased birds eye view that neglects somatic, emotional, intuitive ways of knowing forged through cumulative material exchange within environments. Concept then falsely dominates context.
This speaks profoundly to tensions between conscious singular agency and collective ecological embedding. The freedom imagining alternate possibilities grants can blind one to unrepresented constraints and the hubris of isolated choice.
Positing an observing “I” with power to direct amplifies certain angles of reality while dimming wider vision. Consciousness carries no inherent grasp of its own limitations in place and process.”
Avi agreed to this reading. I take this to be a profound point! This reveals the unhelpfulness of egoic reification, or of “making the person behind the person,” as I put it in my poem “The Blue Hillsides.” It is a warning against the image of a little homunculus person “at the controls,” which is so pervasive as to go unnoticed.
If you’ve read this far, thank you for stopping by! Leave a comment with your thoughts on anything I’ve shared here, or just say hi! 🙂
The Trinitarian Mystery 
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