NOTE: BECAUSE THE MMA IS A HARD SLOG, FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKLY POST YOURS TRULY IS ATTACHING PRIOR POSTS AS AN APPENDIX TO EACH NEW POST, FOR THE READERS’S IMMEDIATE REVIEW.
2 ~ Light Dawns on the Field of Challenge
So, yours truly declined becoming a neurophysiologist. He saw that the heavy and exciting intellectual effort demanded by that discipline would surely drive out serious grappling with the solution to the much bigger question which the physics in neurophysiology and biological felt experience had set for him.
For the following years of graduate student life and the first few years as an associate professor, strict science became his day job, but it was secondary to his grappling with growing MMA conceptual issues emerging in his mind that were necessary to resolve in order to articulate the relation of physicality to felt experience.
In those years, yours truly easily maintained his stance as a born and raised comfortable agnostic, on good terms with atheists, but with no cultural self identifying experience with religious people of any persuasion or practice.
There is no need to give much of an account of how yours truly reached and eventually entered the Christian space. He wants only say that it was like being pulled backward, slowly, painfully, and inexorably through places he really didn’t like, by interior mental movements alone, without deep relationships with any Christians.
Yet, it turned out, that on one long day, he found himself more or less alone in the center of the Christian space, knowing only this was the place where he had to be to solve his big question. He had no self identifying clues as to what was going on in this space, except for the recently read "Development of Christian Doctrine" by John Henry Cardinal Newman. Fifteen years earlier he had noted a reference to Newman in a footnote of Alfred North Whitehead, most of whose works he had read by then.
And, yours truly must recount one other related, out of the blue and very concrete and profound insight, which stuck him at the age of 15, in the same year when he had taken up Whitehead and Susanne K. Langer as his virtual scientific and philosophic mentors. He was sitting in the high school library, finishing up his reading, and glancing at the exit door, he saw an attractive girl whom he did not recognize, leaning into the door with her books on her hip. In that glance, the out of the blue, the concrete insight stuck.
The insight was that the girl, himself, everyone in the room, the city in which the high school was located, the whole world and the physical universe itself did not have to exist. But it did.
That was a Fact he could neither get around, nor put down. This insight was not religious; it was stark Fact.
Being pulled backward, slowly, painfully, and inexorably through those places that he really didn’t like, eventually brought yours truly to face the mystery of the Divinity. He learned that this mystery is not a Fact, but inscrutably contains all Facts and all mysteries.
The mystery of the Divinity is the supremely good, but daunting mystery, and a Fact around which we cannot get, and without which we do not have life, and have no knowable prospect entering into the hope for life of boundless joy.
This presentation of MMA, the Myth Model of All, is intended for all audiences, secular and religious. This is possible because the MMA is a meta construct that implicitly contains all systematic human endeavors, such as the many sciences, and their Facts, yet the MMA has authority over none, and so is informal, yet informative about all. And, the MMA is always suggestive of the inscrutable mystery of the Divinity, which includes the MMA and all it contains.
The most crucial religious mysteries, for the MMA, are the Christian doctrine of creation and of the internal and external senses. And so, the gist of the MMA is a model of how creation works. Because it is a meta construct, every systematic human endeavor is also present, in principle, in the MMA as a model within it.
(Note: terms which have been written in bold above are examples of terms which will be used in a mostly consistent manner throughout this narrative of the MMA. They are summarized for each post as immediately below.)
New terms: MMA, Fact, meta. See Appendix for a list of all terms. Terms used to frame the MMA account are not defined, but given in an implicit and relational sense. Don’t look up words, look along, them.
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APPENDIX:
PRIOR POSTS MAY BE EDITED, HOPEFULLY FOR THE BETTER.
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The Myth Model of All
Life and death are woven fine, a fabric of the cloth divine— a seminal arrow shot by William Blake that pierced yours truly nearly seventy years ago.
The nominal past of events in which we have taken part with friends, family and enemies, especially in the sweet or bitter "day" of our first contemporaries, is alive and well and still with us, and we with it.
The MMA is project which constructs a model of actual time in which the linear time, which is presumed as common sense to science and society, finds a place of secondary importance.
The theologies of many religious traditions hold both God's eternity and common sense linear time to be true, with the caveat that eternity is more important.
The upshot for yours truly, the author of the MMA, has been the eventual conversion of a comfortable cradle agnostic into "the one holy and apostolic church" of the Roman branch. However, he feels himself to be closer to being a holy fool of its Orthodox branch which cleaves more closely to the original Nicene Creed. Both branches believe that the eternal God was made man in one historical person, Jesus of Nazareth who is both truly human and truly God.
The scientific project which sent me to a place I didn’t want to go, and you may not either, is presented immediately below.
CHAPTER 1
1 ~ The Keystone Challenge Strikes
In the mid 1960's yours truly was a graduate student at the University of Oregon. There, he had passed all of his qualifying exams, and was prepared to study under a professor who had agreed to be his thesis advisor. Under this professor he would develop a thesis problem that would set his career course in experimental population biology.
Unexpectedly, the head of the invertebrate neurophysiology group asked him to join his group. It was a very attractive offer, but it would be a big change in career direction. Yours truly had to think over.
As he mulled over the career offer, out of the blue came a very concrete and profound insight. For decades, this insight has turned itself over and over wrapping up other similar insights up into itself and occupying his prime, or background mental space ever since. Today, transformed over the decades, this insight has become the keystone of the MMA, the Myth Model of All.
The insight concerned the physics of the biological organism's hypercomplex neural physiology. This electrodynamic system is generated by an organism's metabolism. It contains, surrounds, and penetrates an organism internally, to the very atoms and ions implicit in its mass-energy measure. It also radiates a measurable external electromagnetic field.
The unity of its electrodynamic system as the explanation of the organism's complete behavior is in the back of the mind of all serious neuroscientists. That’s because it means, implicitly, that a unified neurophysiological theory would account for all of the behavior and felt experience of all organisms, including humans. Today, given modern computational power, this exciting intellectual project seems, to many scientists, within reach.
It seemed more clearly within reach in the mid 1960s when new means to measure the electrodynamics of single cells, especially that of nerve cells and muscle fibers, were rapidly evolving. And, the door to a cutting edge neuroscience laboratory had been opened to yours truly.
The physical neurological theory that must eventually emerge, through the work of many scientists, could always be framed in terms of existing physical theory, but the details of its yet-to-be-achieved form could not. It could be framed, because whatever final form emerged, it would conform to the fundamental principles of modern physics. Yours truly comprehended the principles of physics well enough to see what any neurophysiologist sees in this regard.
The solid insight he suffered in that moment was that the electrodynamic unity, however it eventually played out, could not be the cause of our biologically felt experience. And, likewise, our biologically felt experience could not be the cause of the electrodynamic unity. That was a Fact, one of those things, around which there was no getting for him.
As a Darwinian biologist with hands-on experience of several kinds of organisms in their habitat, the insight made it clear that felt experience, in some mode, was natural to all organisms, and that the organism's felt experience and the physics underlying neuroscience were two essentially different orders of being, up and down the biological tree of life.
At the time, the concept of fundamentally different orders of being was a strange and difficult idea for yours truly, but even though physics and felt experience are both tightly implicative and correlated, the profound question to resolve was how do these two different orders of being relate in a higher meta scientific mode?
By what unknown, but certainly systematic manner, could one relate two different orders of being? How could that be?
END OF PRIOR POSTS