Articles

Posted on

IMP #2 – Time Travel

Who doesn’t expect time travel to occur? It’s all over our science fiction. In any real, fun, and good science fiction, time travel is explored in at least some minor fashion. Need I list all of the fiction of our time that explores the possibility?

Doctor Who
Back to the Future
Terminator
Stargate
Harry Potter
Meet the Robinsons
Primeval
Men in Black
Star Trek
Star Wars: Rebels
Avengers: Endgame

Anyway…you get the idea. Certainly you can think of a list much longer than my own. The point is, time travel is one of those things that we don’t understand…yet. Science will, again, uncover it sometime in the near future and it will be great. All we need is that miracle scientific breakthrough, the magic key that allows us to do what no man has done before. Is there an ethereal Time Vortex, an element of physical space waiting to be traversed? A spacial wormhole that is warped, perhaps by a black hole, that we need to go through? Is it left to magic? Or do we rely on a more intimate connection with a universal force that transcends the body? Or, more obscurely, do we have to find a way to traverse the quantum realm, a degree of physical existence that is so unpredictable we might be able to navigate from one time period to another?

We could, of course, debate all of these minute elements of physical science, but at the end of every single line of debate we will necessarily end up at a question of metaphysics. What, even, is time? Is it an element of reality controlled by a stone? Sorry, that was my last rhetorical question poking fun at a movie…maybe…
But, seriously, is time an underlying force of physical reality? Is it another dimension of space, meaning that it can be traversed with the right vehicle?

For the present article, I have to admit, I will be relying heavily on the philosophical backbone of Edward Feser’s own blog about time. While I have not read his book Aristotle’s Revenge (but I probably should), I am not sure whether Feser directly addresses the matter of time travel. He does have, thought, in that previously linked blog post, a picture mentioning time travel…

Either way, when wondering about time and time travel, one has to conceptualize what the actual nature of time is, and what the consequences of that conceptualization would be.

What exists? You, at the time of reading this, but I may or may not. I might have suffered a tragedy and perished, but if you’re reading this then you certainly exist. But if I have already died, then I no longer exist. My body might exist in some decaying fashion, but that would be all. My person would not exist (in the physical world). When I have drawn a triangle in the sand, it exists. When the ocean washes away the triangle, it no longer exists. I am, of course, speaking of existence in the most strictest of terms. Either something exists or it does not.

If something, like that triangle, used to exist but no longer do, do they exist somewhere else? Most readily I answer: no. Memories of things are not the things themselves, and if they no longer exist in the physical world then they no longer exist. They don’t come back. It’s the terrible notion of death that plagues us all. They don’t keep existing on some back burner somewhere, hiding from our point of view until we want to ‘travel back in time’ and see them again. That beautiful (or terrible) first kiss only happens once. Peanut butter and jelly, mixed together, do not come apart again and into their original containers.

There is certainly evidence of the past having existed, but the point is that it no longer does. Were it not for human memory, were it not for human reason that can deduce temporally anterior causes, there would be no existence of the past, as far as we were concerned. If the past no longer exists, then how can we travel to it?

Similarly we can think about the future. The future is that which is yet to exist. In many ways it is so dependent on the individual choices that there are an almost infinite amount of possible ‘futures’ to go towards. The reality, though, is that one ‘future’ will come true out of all of them, and only one. Once that future comes it will exist, but the future does not exist until it does come.

This idea is explored by St. Augustine in his Confessions. The future is not a year from now, the past a year back, and the present a current year. The whole year does not currently exist. The future is not a day from now, the past a day back, and the whole present day that currently exists. The future is not a minute from now, the past a minute ago, and the present the whole current minute. The future is not a second from now, the past a second ago, and the present the current second. The present is but a fleeting moment, and yet the present is all that exists.

Feser, in his above article, argues that Aristotelians should be presentists, believing that the present is all that exists. The past is no longer accessible and the future isn’t accessible either. All a person has dominion over is the present. Why is that?

Here we answer the question of what time is: itself is nothing. Time is but a measurement of change. Remember what Aristotelian change is? We look at the reduction of potency to act. That change is the movement of future to present. Once that act suffers another change, that act moves into the past and it no longer exists. That is all time is.

So what would be necessary to traverse time? Is it a question of finding the right physical channel? Nope.

This is an impossible modern possibility: we will never be able to physically travel to the past and we will never be able to “travel” into the distant future.

To be able to travel in time means needing to transcend the reduction of potency to act, but can we ever do that? The sheer act of traveling in time, the idea at least, is itself a reduction of potency to act, not a transcendence of the movement of change itself.

At best, even if we could manage some level of transcending material change, existing sans-materiality, the type of time travel would never be something of a material journey – it would have to be an immaterial journey. As the past is only known through memory, we would essentially have to travel within someone’s memory. Once we were there, all we would be able to see is the immaterial. Here, essentially, think like Assassin’s Creed – going into “genetic memory” (a ludicrous idea, by the way) and reliving past experiences. But that isn’t really time travel, is it?

Of course, we are always traveling towards the future, and as we pass moment to moment one might argue we are time traveling into the future. One could even conceive of traveling to the future by means of some deep sleep that somehow preserves our bodies. But usually when someone talks about traveling to the future, an inherent sequiter is ‘and also traveling back to the past.’ But, as already argued, there wouldn’t be a return journey. So would it really count as “traveling” to the future?

In the end, the most resolute conclusion we can come to is that time travel is not, and never will be, possible. No future discovery of science will unveil the means for us to transcend causality and change, for if a subject of study transcended change, science would never be able to study it. Every moment preoccupied about the past or future is another moment of the present that is wasted.

Carpe diem.

Posted on

IMP #1 – Transplanting Human Consciousness

This is one of the most fantastical ideas of the current time. In almost any successful sci-fi franchise or story, we see this idea of an ability to transplant human consciousness. It seems like such a cool idea! A human person has limits, right? We aren’t infinite creatures. If we have limits, then we can scope out those limits and quantify them, creating the ability to transfer personhood out of the body and into a computer. Well luckily we have science, a methodology whose whole aim is to scope out limitations, that will one day provide us with an answer to what those limitations are.

In terms of physiology, we’re pretty covered. We know the most inner workings of the human person. A lot of medicine isn’t necessarily about figuring out what the nature of the problems are, just what pieces are working together to cause a problem, and figuring out what pieces to put together to solve the problem. There are, however, a few key modern issues. Even though we have identified that neurons are the substrate of the human brain, the vehicle of thought, we have no idea how they work together to help us sense our world. Scientists have no understanding of how human consciousness manifests itself in this web of neurons, but one day they will. When they do, we will be able to transfer our human consciousness from body to body, or body to machine. Then…we would be immortal. We would transcend the need for a physical body.

The manifestation of this science fiction reality can be especially seen in a few modern pieces of cinematography: Amazon’s Upload, Netflix’s Altered Carbon, and Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie (2015).

In Amazon’s TV series Upload, a man is facing death, and has the option of being uploaded into a sort of virtual ‘heaven.’ He will have the ability to interact, in some contorted manner, with people back in the real world, but his new reality will become one that is totally fabricated by programmers. His consciousness is transferred out of his physical body and into the new computer that is his home.

Netflix’s Altered Carbon, a dystopian tale of a very dark complexion, is a futuristic film noir. The basic premise lies in the fact that, in the future, people are implanted at a young age with a ‘cortical stack,’ a hard drive that is inserted into the spine at the neck. Everything about a person’s memory is stored within that hard drive. Should that person die, then the stack can be planted into another body, degradingly called ‘sleeves,’ and the person’s life can continue on, albeit in a different and perhaps uncomfortable way. The show largely explores the exploitation of such technology.

Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie explores the ability of not only transferring human consciousness, but the creation of artificial consciousness (a theme to be later explored on its own). While most of the movie explores the consequences of creating a real and artificial intelligence, it also deals with the necessity of transferring consciousness between artificial and real bodies. [Spoilers] Multiple people die, but they are ‘saved’ by being transplanted into robots, and go on living in new bodies.

This is an impossible modern possibility: we will never be able to transfer human consciousness from one body to another, or from one body to a computer.

“Now Robert you aren’t a scientist, how could you possibly know that we won’t ever be able to do this?”

There are certain philosophical principles that we can know, and know to be true, that stand and say this. For the longest time in human history, it would not have been a feasible idea to distinguish a person from his body. The notion of a mind exists indistinguishably from his body. This all changed when Renè Descartes unwittingly founded modern philosophy. His famous phrase, Cogito ergo sum [I think therefore I am], comes from a philosophical idea that the center of human existence lies in the mind of a person. This mind is all that we can possibly know. Anything beyond our minds, the real world and our own bodies, for example, are distinct from our minds and therefore we are not able to be sure about their existence. There is an impossible divide between us thinking, therefore existing, and being, physically. For Descartes, God is a necessary being because he supposes God is the only reason that we can trust that what is around is truly there.

Later interpreters of Descartes would like where Descartes was going in his work, but would find the appeal to divine intervention a bit appalling, and would ignore it. Except if you ignore the thing that Descartes says holds the person together, then it creates a bit of a philosophical problem. This is known as a classical philosophical problem, the mind-body problem. It’s funny to call it a classical problem, as it only began with Descartes (~1600 A.D.). And of course, when modern philosophy has gone on as long as it has, and it hasn’t ever found a good solution for how to describe the human mind, it generally just gets kicked to the curb. We can observe the body – we can’t observe the mind. So let’s accept that the body exists, but we’ll forget about the mind until science turns something else up.

Ray Jackendoff, author of Foundations of Language, addresses the mind body problem in his own work about linguistics. He essentially argues that there is some reality of the mind, but not an immaterial mind that (wimpy) religious people appeal to. Nay, he instead appeals to a material mind that somehow exists collectively between the mass firings of neurons. He calls it the f-mind, the functional mind (this is a metaphysical fallacy of conceptualism, but I am not addressing that here). He doesn’t even prefer a term that maintains some use of the word ‘mind,’ as he thinks it maintains bad implications for understanding a very physical and material person.

In essence, what we have leftover in the current time and in the current thought of popular society is the notion that people are just a complicated sum of physical truths. We are a materially composite person, and a coincidentally existent creature that just so happened to evolve above other kinds of animals. The notion of a ‘mind’ is an illusion we have given ourselves about ourselves, because in truth we are just a complicated computer program – a calculable and predictable physical person. Again, we just have to seek the bounds of our physically limited reality and, once we do, we’ll be able to transfer our human consciousness out of our weak products of evolution and into stronger bodies of our imagination. We will beat evolution at its own game.

It’s just progress, guys.

Remember what I said about Descartes, however. The supposed ‘classical’ mind/body problem only originates in the 17th century. What about before? Were we just in a time of darkness and ignorance? Positivists might have you think that, those who think science and science alone will answer all of our questions and problems. But if we look into the depths of philosophical wisdom from the middle ages, and even our Greek ancestors, we would see that the answers to this question existed for a long time.

I’m going to suppose you already know what an Aristotelian Form is, as I described in my article here.

Since every changeable thing has a form, we can recognize that humans, as changeable things, have immaterial forms. This is logic that we have had since Aristotle, at least 1900 years before Descartes! Not only is this logic that stood alone on Aristotle, it was reinforced in a most dramatic way in the 1200s by a theologian and philosopher named St. Thomas Aquinas (much to the disappointment of other church members). Initially Aquinas faced backlash from using pagan philosophers to bolster his arguments, but the truth of the arguments eventually won out, and he is recognized as on of the greatest philosophers of all time, as much as theologian.

The notion of a form that underlies the human body, that exists indistinguishably from the body, that is an immaterial mind, is nothing like what modern philosophers suppose it to be. It is not a physically bound aspect of reality. While we, as humans, can gain dominion over the physical realm and even of the physical body, we have a very limited control over the immaterial realm of reality. We can obviously flex the powers of our own mind, but we are limited from directly interacting between our minds and other things in reality. We have to mediate what occurs in our minds through our bodies into reality. As much, since our minds are our forms, everything about our specific reality, most especially our body, is inherently tied to the form that gives us literal shape. Aquinas says that our inherent design is to exist in exact cooperation with our material bodies. Should we be lacking in our bodies, our natural bodies, then we would always be lacking. We would experience a bit of confused existence, unable to perceive things through a sensory body that doesn’t exist.

Since the only immaterial thing we have control over is our own form, no amount of cooperation between other people who also are metaphysically limited from controlling forms that are not their own will solve the problem. That is, it is metaphysically impossible for us to transplant another immaterial form. We can’t even transplant our own immaterial form. No technology will aid us in the project, either. Our technology, our fabrications, all exist solely within the physical realm. These physical technologies can only help but work in the physical realm that they were created within.

The immaterial forms of reality, and the immaterial forms that are our minds, exist beyond our physical grasp, and metaphysically lie out of our reach. There is no hope for us to one day transplant our consciousness.

Memento mori [remember you die].

Our physical bodies will ultimately fail. Funnily enough, though, I have some philosophical hope for you. You see, human forms are not the same as other forms in reality. A triangle’s form exists in tandem with the physical triangle that takes its shape, and when the physical triangle is gone, so does that instance of a form. Metaphysically speaking there isn’t much that happens with a triangle. Humans, though, have a bit more going on for themselves. Within the mind, the immaterial part of a human, there are multiple powers at play. The very act of change, the reduction of potency to act, happens all within the human mind (I elaborate on this here). This means that the human mind is metaphysically capable of subsisting beyond the death of the physical body. So, just because we can’t sustain our physical reality doesn’t mean we stop existing when we die. But what happens to the mind once it is separated from the body at death?

Meh, go ask a Catholic**.

**St. Thomas Aquinas

Posted on

Assuming Equal Intelligence

It’s funny how everything comes back to philosophical questions. There can be an assumption, at times, that philosophy is only for the far off and unimportant nerds. Really, though, philosophy underlies everything we do. It is a description of who and what we are, why we function, why we exist. Here, specifically, I am going to explore how philosophy is relevant to human intelligence.

So, first, I begin with a question. Is everyone equal? Society tells us that. Our country says that. Religions say that. It is, ultimately, a true statement. But in what ways exactly are we equal? For example, are all humans equal in intelligence? Postmodern philosophy (or epistemology, if you like) suggests that everyone is equal as much as Christian philosophy and theology does, as much as common sense suggests as well. Postmoderns, though, explain human equality differently than other philosophies. More specifically, they react to the notion of equality in different ways than other philosophies.

More or less, Postmodern philosophy suggests that all humans are equal in value and that all humans, more or less, have the same abilities and rights. They attribute the wild diversity of specific people to a combination of nature and nurture. Certain biological factors and certain environmental factors collide to create the unique experience of any one human person. All people are alike at the most basic level of their humanity, but they are victims to a chaotic world that subjects them to a number of (mostly unwanted) experiences, forcing us to change and become more and more unique. For the Postmodern, life is violent and gloomy. When it comes to intelligence, specifically, Postmoderns would view all humans as being capable of the same level of intelligence, but would attribute the result state of intelligence to whatever worldly factors produced that person.

Now, keep in mind that intelligence here does not mean ‘knowledge,’ per se. Intelligence means, here, more of a notion of ‘ability to reason.’ You might not know the constructive details of a car, but you are really great at conflict resolution for your friends. You might not know how a rocket works, but you can describe the complex organic chemistry of an animal’s body and how to fix a broken organ.

The idea of viewing all people as being capable for the same intelligence but not being in a resultative state of that exact intelligence is a notion shared by Christians, as well. God made everyone equal in value and potentiality, but how we are actually manifestly present in ourselves makes us different from other people. But these two groups of people do not assume the same explanation for how people come to have different intelligences. In the Christian mindset there is an idea of free will, an idea that has plagued many modern philosophers (but not older ones, necessarily). Postmoderns view people as complete victims of their experiences, but Christians view people as reactive agents that have power to choose their own lives.

How do these differences matter? So what if there are different reasons behind the matter? They both agree that all people are equal in their capacity for intelligence!

The ends do not justify the means.

You see, let’s take this seemingly abstract philosophy to a real field of consequence: schools. How our administrations understand ideas of equality will wildly shape their implementation of school policies. What our government officials deem necessary for school will depend on these ideas, too.  Do we think children are complete victims of their experience or do we think that they are active agents and have a role in how they turn out as adults?

I would argue, currently, that much of school administration across the country assumes the prior, that children are essentially complete victims of their experiences. They see children as not having any control over what happens to them, and think about their own pasts as children as being controlled by external events that mattered to them. Part of our nation’s discussion around systemic racism is centered in the postmodern mindset, that African American children are entirely victims of their circumstances. The Postmodern reaction to the issues of systemic racism and systemic education is that we need to flood peoples’ lives with opportunities. If enough opportunities are provided then people who are disadvantaged will use those opportunities to pull themselves out of their situation. It’s just a matter of providing the overabundant amount of opportunities.

But here we must acknowledge, in Postmodern thought, a fallacy around free will. The fallacy is that ‘if opportunity is provided to subject y, then subject y will be super grateful and seize that opportunity. But this fallacy, this assumption about the human experience, is false. A person’s desire to seize an opportunity is anything but guaranteed. And here what might change is not just a matter of circumstances, but the simple desire on the part of the person to either seize or not to seize.

So what does this have to do with intelligence? Well first, let’s begin with the idea that everyone is equal in their capacity for intelligence.  Generally everyone agrees with this statement. There are some obvious exceptions, like biological and mental impairments, where the rule of capacity is ruled out, but, more or less, people are capable. Intelligence is also not something that you are delivered on a silver platter when you’re a baby. Intelligence has to grow over time.

How, then, does intelligence grow over time? Like a plant? No, of course not. It grows through experiences of a person. As someone experiences and lives through reality, their intelligence can grow from those situations. But intelligence is not guaranteed. In all instances of an opportunity for intelligence to grow, people have to choose their reaction to whatever their situations are. If a person chooses, they can accept the education presented before them or they can reject it.

Over the course of time these choices (which might be something like 35,000 a day), affect the overall growth of intelligence. A fallacy that Postmoderns make, and therefore something like what our school systems make, is that choice is not important when it comes to understanding someone. When we think about students, for example, we do not as much consider what the role of willpower has when it comes to education.

Teacher: “Man, all my kids bombed the test.”

Admin: “Well how did you teach your lesson? Did you present the material in a fun and engaging enough way? Did you make sure that all 30 of your students were paying attention to you for 100% of your class?”

[uhm, hello, Atlas Complex anyone? My first year as  a college TA my supervisor taught us about the Atlas Complex, and about not giving ourselves the Atlas Complex, and here I find it’s about the only thing administration encourages in its teachers. In brief, student success = 100% teacher responsibility]

Let’s think about a situation. Let’s gather, in our minds, a large group of people (not necessarily students) who have the same level of intelligence. For the sake of a standardization element, even a terrible one, let’s use the notion of IQ. This large group of people, say 100, all have a high intelligence. They are all at home and they’re just living their lives. You present all 100 people with the option of: reading a philosophy book, reading a romance book, watching a movie, or taking a nap. Each of these things affects intelligence in a different way. Arguably a philosophy book (a good one, anyway) challenges the intellect the most and a nap most definitely does not (while maybe everything else lies somewhere in between). Are all 100 really intelligent people going to choose the thing that increases their intelligence the most? No! Why would they? Because they have a choice!

Even in a situation in the modern classroom we find this same struggle. I present a group of 30 students with a task, to work on vocabulary recognition with a technique called Columns (a modified version of flash cards). This opportunity presents students with a really great way to study class content. But there are a multiplicity of choices on the students’ part with how to react to the material. They can do it all the way, following all of my seemingly arbitrary guidelines, they can do part of it, they can do the bare minimum and do it totally against the rules, or they can just opt out (I’ve seen all of these reactions, if you can’t tell). The students choices on how to react to the assignment affect their intelligence and affect their education. I did my part as a teacher: it’s graded work, it’s relevant to what we’re learning, I gave them plenty of time in class, etc. But how they choose to react is on them.

If you wanted to chart a graph of human intelligence, based on capacity, it might look like a graph with a vertical line. Everyone is on the same level of intelligence. But if you instead make a graph with human intelligence, based on actual (current) intelligence, you would more likely see what is called a Standard Deviation curve.

It’s almost like we were already aware of these facts…

The Postmodern reaction is, essentiallly, to push aside this curve of standard deviation, and to forget the participation of the person on the opposite side of the opportunities. Again, you just have to get enough opportunities out there and then everyone will be taken care of. In fact, just as admin asks the teacher “Well what did you do so that everyone failed?” the assumption is that opportunities have to be forced on the disadvantaged.

When it comes to education, for example, we have to force students to take up the opportunity for education so that they can be raised to a relatively equal level of intelligence. Except by doing this they are inherently putting aside the extremely valuable notion of free will!

In St. John Henry Cardinal Newman’s work Grammar of Assent, he expounds on the delectable saying:

“A man convinced against his will
Is of the same opinion still.”

His exposition around this saying relies on the fact that even though you could possibly provide the most convincing logical argument, or (in a school setting) set up the most materially motivating principles for completing study with integrity, you are not going to receive an organic and natural result. Your own results are an artifice for your own gain at the end of a short time (if even that), but not earning any long term benefit for anyone.

In short, it is well to assume equal capacity for intelligence. It’s never too late for someone to learn anything. But it is absolutely right to assume inequality of intelligence in a population, simply because human beings have free will. It is not right to assume which person has lower or higher intelligence just because you don’t like them, but it is absolutely true that people with lower and higher intellects exist. It is also entirely fair to expect that in a situation like a classroom, not all students are going to excel in education and be intelligent.

Instead of falsely pretending that all people will excel in education, let’s presume that some people just aren’t going to make it that far. Not everyone needs to get a full high school education. We can help people become fully productive members of society without that much education. But liberal education is also good, and those who can should go as far in their education as is possible. Access to apprenticeships should be way easier, and students should have access to starting them sooner. We also should learn, as a society, to be accommodating to such an idea as varied intellects. People who don’t get as much education as someone else shouldn’t make less money arbitrarily. Especially if they go through an apprenticeship and become really skilled at a certain task, but even if they aren’t necessarily skilled, a person shouldn’t have to worry about feeding their family. Inasmuch, they shouldn’t be shamed because of choosing a professional apprenticeship instead of carrying on with a high school or university education. They’re still people, and valuable people at that.

We are a singular race of people with the power of free will, of making choices, no matter how hard the consequences might be. I think we can act like it, too.

Posted on

#5 – What Relevance This Thesis Has

This is the fifth article where I explain my thesis work, Thomistic Linguistics, in more chewable pieces. Here are the summative premises so far that I have explored in my articles:

#1: Everything that changes, that suffers a reduction of potency to act, has an immaterial formal cause, or an essence, just like the oak tree, and this formal cause actually and truly exists.

#2: We have forms, just like every other changeable thing, but our forms are unique and more noble because of the power of reason. Our reason is a complex existence of potency and act not just between our formal and material causes, but right within our formal cause.

#3: Words are primarily concoctions of sounds, sensory phantasms, and passiones animae are the Aristotelian forms of our words. Passiones animae are real and immaterial forms, but they are unique to one man’s experience as they relate themselves to real and immaterial forms of the outside world.

#4: Mankind’s active intellect is always shaping itself to some intelligible species for knowledge’s sake. In order to use language, word phantasms map themselves to a passio animae, and when we communicate we are communicating these passiones animae in order to communicate larger ideas. Acquiring a language is not just a discussion about learning the phantasms, but syncing their connection to passiones animae, something children struggle with less than older humans because they generally don’t have many logistical obstructions to prevent them.

The conclusion from all of these premises? That mankind has an Aristotelian form, and this form is integral to an explanation of the human phenomenon of language. Without this form, language doesn’t work. But if this form is such an important part of how we look at human existence, why haven’t you heard about it before? Why isn’t it talked about it your typical science classroom?

Because you actually have heard of it, just under a different name: the soul. For Aristotle such words would have been entirely interchangeable. In fact, according to this language, we may even be so bold as to say that animals have souls and plants have souls. Here, the soul refers to this foundational form that is the primary agent of something changeable. It is exactly because of the connotations of the word soul that you are not likely already familiar with this topic.

The inclusion of the soul as a point of discussion was commonplace up until the age of the ‘enlightenment,’ the 1600s. Around this time philosophers such as Descartes, Hume, and Bacon began come about and shove off the ideas handed down to them by their philosophical predecessors. They decided they didn’t like the ideas of the past and forged their own roads of study. We think of the problem of the soul as the problem of the ‘ghost in the machine,’ but the only reason this is even a problem is because of philosophers like Descartes. Before these “classical” philosophers we had ready answers for such questions, but with the advent of new thought, of a focus on material wealth and study, these answers were blotted out of secular memory. Metaphysical questions were set aside in favor of more physical questions.

Philosophers after Descartes and others, who assumed some sort of the existence of a mind, or soul, put aside the philosophical contemplations of the mind put forth by Descartes, saying that there was a ‘ghost in the machine’ problem with his work, and discredited the notion of a soul as non-provable. Can we see it? Touch it? Taste it? Hear it? Smell it? No? Then how can it exist? Clearly the things that exist are the things that we can sense (if we truly can sense). Descartes said the only thing we can trust to exist is our own mind, but for those who followed him not even that was good enough. The only thing we can trust is the physical world, because it shows us regularity through our senses.

Materialist and individualist thinking began to be more and more commonplace. Assumptions that the soul exist faded out into history or were accorded to a matter of religious faith.

For me, now, to suggest that the human soul not only exists, but that a true linguistic study is incomplete without its consideration is

absurd.

I have no scientific evidence. The soul does not have an observable and measurable effect on the brain. We can’t see who’s pulling the strings, how the strings are attached, what pushes what button – except in arguing that out the battle would already be lost.

The scientific method can’t reveal everything about knowledge to us. Logic and reasoning themselves must inform a measure of our thought. This is why my thesis is relevant. It proposes, with serious argument and practical evidence, the definitive existence of the human soul and its tie to the existence of language.

There is no one, and I mean absolutely no one, seriously investigating the relationship between the human soul and language. For a world that doesn’t believe in immaterial things, and an academic world that would never support investigating it, the nature of the human mind is an enigma that has become a ‘classical’ philosophical problem.

EXCEPT IT DOESN’T NEED TO BE.

There is no reason for the soul to not primarily be at the core of any investigation into linguistics. If moment to moment existence and use of human language is reliant on the human soul, the form of a person, then it matters when studying human language. At the end of my thesis I explore exactly how the soul supports further language study, and exactly why it needs to be included. The answer to modern man’s questions about the nature of the mind exist right within our grasp, right underneath our finger tips. All we need do is reach out and grab it.

Posted on

An Ode to Liberal Education

To thee that would bring us out,

To show us richer life;

Where we have wasted our brightest sprouts,

And only increased our strife,

Cultivate in spite of their pouts,

For the farmer is desperate for your scythe.

 

Alternate title: “WHY AM I EVEN SENDING THESE KIDS TO SCHOOL?”

I write this article in what I can perceive is only the beginning of the economic crisis caused by COVID-19, the novel coronavirus. Teaching in a public school has given me insight into education in ways that I never expected. I had of course attended a few public schools here and there (as well as private and online) but I was never attuned to my surroundings. When you’re a smart kid in school you know that other kids aren’t necessarily doing the same things as you, but you rarely pay them any heed. You put your head down, look at your own life and problems, and focus there.

The putting-my-head-down approach has probably bitten me in the butt at this point. Now I teach public high school and I wonder if all the things I’m seeing really popped up in the last seven years or if it was always this way and I just didn’t happen to see it. Our public education system is messy and gross – something I’m sure you’ve heard other people complain about before. But why be so cliché?

I couldn’t have articulated it myself until recently. By happenstance I recently was reading St. John Henry Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University. You’ll remember this if you read my previous article “What does St. John Henry Newman say about Learning a Language?.” Previously I focused on how Newman might have answered the question of foreign language instruction, but now I’m turning my scopes towards a larger issue: American education.

Where do I have to start? Unfortunately it goes way back, back to the Roman Empire. From that time, we have teachers such as St. Augustine talking of these methods, and they were standard for the longest time. They contain the Trivium and the Quadrivium (three and four):

  1. Grammar
  2. Dialectic
  3. Rhetoric
    ↑Trivium – Quadrivium↓
  4. Arts & Music
  5. Empirics
  6. Mathematics
  7. Geometry

These seven areas constituted the liberal arts. What is the goal of such an education? The first impulse we have is to say “well, it’s to know the content from these subject areas.” But that isn’t what our western predecessors say about it. St. Augustine says in his De Ordine that the Liberal Arts are meant to free us from materialistic thinking. The word ‘educate’ comes from two Latin words: ex– [out] and ducare [to lead]. To educate someone means to lead them out…from where? From materialistic thinking. Through what? Through the artes liberales. The free arts, the arts that free us.   In other words, it elevates the mind beyond simple matters of the material and brings it into the realm of the immaterial, as well. I would like to take particular note of what Newman thought a liberal education was:

“Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentleman, it is will to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life; these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University…Surely it is very intelligible to say, and that is what I say here, that Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence” (Newman, pg. 120-121, The Idea of a University)

Go back and read what Newman considers it ‘well’ to be. Do any of those things seem practical to you? Absolutely not! A delicate taste most certainly does not itself put food on the table. Newman talks in his book about the notion that knowledge should be sought for knowledge’s own sake. We ought to know simply to know. That knowing and increase in the intellect creates someone with a gentleman’s sort of quality, but they result from seeking knowledge with no ulterior motive.

How appalling to the modern mind! Why would we seek out something if we are not to use it to increase our material gain? Newman wrote in the middle of the 19th century and is still quite relevant in his critiques of those who would only educate for economic principles. The truth is, liberal education was the standard for education for the longest time. This idea of going to school to know things simply to know them was the expectation for education going all the way back to the time of the Romans…but that doesn’t seem to be what we have now, right?

Correct. In the early 20th century educators considered this inefficient and wasteful. Someone should walk away from an education with the ability to do things and to learn with more skill-based focuses. So expectations changed. But only ever so much. You see, when someone comes up with an idea, it usually comes about from a previous way of thinking and is only modified to accommodate a new level of expectation. What I mean to say is that even with the significant changes in education beginning in the 20th century, our model of education is still that of the Liberal Arts. Things are made out to be a bit more practical nowadays, but the notion that one should be learning about more of their native tongue and how to master it as much as math and arts or other extracurriculars is still the fundamental approach to how educators build our educational systems.

Except not.

Capitalist thinking, and especially modern and post-modern capitalist thinking, views units in an economy as agents interacting with supply and demand. Everyone, from the multi-national corporation to the individual, operates life under the assumption that he will buy what he needs to survive and thrive and sell what he has (or can do) for other people to buy from them. This interaction of selling and buying is foundational thought.

“Hey son, do this chore.”

“Sure dad, what do I get when I finish?”

The absolute worst part about this materialist thinking is that it has infected our systems of public education.

“All children must get an education.”

“Sure, government. What do my kids/me get when they finish?”

The answer ‘well they know things now’ isn’t an answer that will fly, exactly. The standard modern answer (in my opinion)?

“They need a high school diploma to get a job.”

The most basic notion of education is that it is a certificate for someone to say “ah, you’re grown up now. You’re now capable of fully and autonomously participating in real life.”

This contractual notion of exchange permeates education on every level. If you don’t believe me, just go read my article “I Need That Grade.”

Right now, more than ever, I believe this underlying thinking is being exposed. Kids aren’t coming physically to school because of COVID-19. If they have access to technology they are likely participating in distance learning with their school. Their teacher is working to come up with lessons to send through technology and then grade the work in return (get it?). And this contractual exchange is being exposed and ridiculed by parents. Kids, already exacerbated by a flawed system, are forced to try and fit the mold from an even more difficult position. Parents are tired of it. They didn’t sign up to educate their child! (They did, but they don’t believe they did). The exhausting effort to make sure their kids still get good grades is paramount. But, again, I already wrote about the grade part. Go read the other article if you aren’t following.

What this situation ultimately exposes is that not many people understand the why of education. They have grown up being taught that it is necessary, and that properly functioning members of society need it, but who the heck knows why we do it? Certainly we know that doctors and lawyers need to get advanced degrees that specify in knowing lots of detailed skills, but plumbers don’t need even a bachelor’s degree and they know lots of detailed skills? I don’t know, quit asking me. Sometimes I wonder if even the people in charge of our public education understand the ‘why’ of education. In a recent email I was encouraged to be lax with students, to give them ‘just what the students need to know and be able to do’ to get by the rest of the academic year. What even constitutes the body of knowledge that one “needs” to know?

In this delicate situation of trying to educate from home, parents are saying ‘this is enough. This is too much to handle from home. Just stop for now, pick it up again next year.’ I even had a parent email me (and all the rest of her son’s teachers) and ask

“What standards [state mandated learning goals for students] are you teaching through the rest of the school year? I just want to make sure my son is being taught what he needs to move on and that he’s not just being given busy work.”

In America in the 21st century, you don’t go to school just to go to school and to learn things. That’s dumb. There needs to be a product. Education means you need to acquire a skill, to acquire useful information. It’s either to get on to the next course or it’s to use it for some skill. Skill-based education is not inherently negative, but a skill-based education is not liberal. It is not freeing of the mind, it only ensnares it further in the materialistic thinking of the world. Most unfortunately that product of modern public education, in this case a high school diploma, requires grades. When you’re focused on perfecting your grades, what aren’t you focusing on?

Probably not cultivating your intellect.

Probably not a delicate taste.

Probably not a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind.

Probably not a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life.

In short, we are not focusing on becoming gentlemen and ladies. I know…it sounds archaic. Who wants to be a gentleman anymore? Who talks of becoming a lady? It sounds pretty useless. It doesn’t sound like it’s going to earn me anymore money. But ladies and gentlemen (if you consider yourself to be in this category) we must put aside these talks of money, and products, and contractual exchanges. If we have a liberal education, then let us have a liberal education. Let us disavow of grades as we have them. If a society is lacking in its number of gentlemen and ladies than it is worser for it. By all means should we teach and offer skill-based instruction and education for our students. We need technicians, plumbers, farmers, and soldiers; but these deserve and need to become gentlemen as much as the lawyers and doctors. Instead of teaching our children to skate by with as little ‘education’ as possible, let us encourage them to engage in it as much as possible.

Not because good grades are what matter the most. Not because it is a burdensome requirement to participate in society.

But because knowing knowledge is good for its own sake.

“Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentleman, it is will to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life; these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University…Surely it is very intelligible to say, and that is what I say here, that Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence” (Newman, pg. 120-121, The Idea of a University)

Posted on

#4 – How Language is Acquired and Used

This is the fourth article where I explain my thesis work, Thomistic Linguistics, in more chewable pieces. In my last article, #3 – Language as Man’s Passions, I argued that words, as we know them, are phantasms that exist within the human brain but rely on passiones animae, immaterial forms, to actually exist as knowledge.

This finally gives us the flexibility to talk about how language is implemented and even acquired. Usage is easiest to lay out, first. Just as a real world object (that changes) is reliant on forms to provide its own consistency and direct future changes to itself, words are also reliant on forms. Without these forms, these passiones animae, words are just a bunch of meaningless sounds.

As each word is received into the human brain either through the eyes as written language or through the ears as spoken language, the human brain holds on to that sensory phantasm. Just as that content of our sight is restructured in our brain, so the input we have received from others is restructured in our brain. Assuming these words are not new, the active intellect shapes itself to the passio animae that it associates with the word. The passio animae derives its shape from the passive intellect and what it previously understood is on display in the active intellect. Should any new information be presented in the sensory experience that adds knowledge or divides knowledge, then the passio animae is further composed or divided, as Aquinas says. Either more virtual forms are added to the passio animae or the set of virtual forms found within the passio animae are divided and separated. Otherwise there is no alteration to them and the active intellect moves on to the next word.

If one remembers the example from the previous article about the oak tree, where a man sees an oak tree and abstracts an intelligible species that resembles the form of the oak tree, then one will also note that the phantasm of a word acts as a middle point between the passio animae and the real form in question. There are these three main components, then.

  1. The real form that exists in the world that the human is attempting to perceive or relay communication about
  2. The word around that form (an orthographic or phonological phantasm as compared to a visual phantasm in the oak example)
  3. The passio animae, which while itself is a form, is only a copied form.

The shaping of the active intellect into the various passiones animae that come rapid-fire through the human experience (language is a very quick process, mind you) is momentary and passing. Do we really only process reality one word at a time?

The short answer is no. A word equals a passio animae but a passio animae does not equal a word. As for a single concept many virtual forms work together to compose a single, unified, intelligible species that the active intellect receives for comprehension, so many collaborative passiones animae work together to form a larger, more unified concept. This is the nature of a sentence, for example.

So that’s how we use language – as a concert of passiones animae to communicate knowledge, and specifically as phantasms that act as substitutes for other kinds of phantasms (like images). Because of the substitute nature of language, the encoding, it functions differently than other phantasms, almost like a shortcut to passiones animae (not that other phantasms aren’t active or present, they just aren’t necessary).

So how would someone learn language? Is it different between your first and your second language? No!

I’ll discuss in my next article some of the relevance of how this notion affects modern fields of study, but first let me articulate how language acquisition works in light of the human form. Babies don’t already have words when they are born. They don’t have very much function at all, to be specific. But they do have the basic components for whatever they need in life (typically). When it comes to language they have:

1.) Neurons connected to sensory organs

2.) Clustered neurons in the brain as a sensory center

3.) Rational intellects.

As babies grow and develop their sensory organs, the intellect shapes it up along the way. They perceive what is good about the world or what is good for them and they move towards those good things, discover that they have the will power to move towards those things, figure out how to direct their material body to accomplish these tasks, etc. They learn. When it comes to language, they first have to pair knowledge about the real world, for which they can form passiones animae without the use of words, with new phantasms, normally words that they are supplied with by their parents or caretakers.

As the babies grow into children and into adults their intellect, the amassing of many many passiones animae occurs. Alongside the growth of the intellect in general, words become attached to the passiones animae and they can use the words to communicate them. Further they can even use words and their passiones animae to puzzle about new passiones animae that are not abstracted from experience but from within their own intellects.

“I know what a red ball is, and I know what a green pyramid is…what if there was a red pyramid?”

My firm understanding of language acquisition here is that the method of acquisition of a language does not ever change. Obstacles may impede it at certain areas of life (not necessarily biological), but its method is consistent. New words and a new system of grammar are usually built up around pre-existing passiones animae or, it may be so, that new passiones animae are formed around new words, composed or divided from other passiones animae that are known. The connections between phantasms and passiones animae are not brought about in a day, though, and neither were they brought about in a day for young children. It takes 5 years for children to cement a decent library of word phantasms (and grammar, but more on that in the future, I promise) in connection to all their proper passiones animae. These children don’t already have a language in their brains and they are desperate for a solid method of communicating with others around them. There is no reasonable expectation that the acquisition of a foreign language after childhood should not take at least 5 years, if not longer, since there are many more life obstacles impeding that progress. Children, generally, are not obstructed in their first 5 years the way a high schooler or college student is.

This is the fourth premise for my thesis:

Mankind’s active intellect is always shaping itself to some passio animae for knowledge’s sake. In order to use language, word phantasms map themselves to a passio animae, and when we communicate we are communicating these passiones animae in order to communicate larger ideas. Acquiring a language is not just a discussion about learning the phantasms, but syncing their connection to passiones animae, something children struggle with less than older humans because they generally don’t have many logistical obstructions to prevent them.

Next time: 

What is the conclusion to draw from all of these premises? Why is this a relevant matter for today’s world?

#5 – What Relevance this Thesis Has

Posted on

#3 – Language as Man’s Passions

This is the third article where I explain my thesis work, Thomistic Linguistics, in more chewable pieces. In my last article, #2 – The Formal Cause of Man, I argued that the immaterial substance of man is a form containing many virtual powers, making it very noble. The crown of the form of man, so to speak, is reason.

Now, the following images which I am going to use entirely butcher the inherent simplicity of the idea of an Aristotelian form. So one must remember even as I break things down into components we are talking about a thing that exists simply and not in complex parts (other than in the distinction of potency and act, that which could be and that which is).

I have already established that knowledge exists in man via forms, but that’s not the whole picture. Possessing a form is just one part of a more complex image. Even the notion of possessing a form is a little misleading.

 

Brace yourself, this may actually be the hardest part.

 

Let’s trace man’s rational capacity as it maneuvers the acquisition of a new form. First man exists somewhere. The man looks out and sees an oak tree. This poor fellow has never seen one before. As he perceives the tree, light is bouncing off of the tree and is reflecting into the man’s eye balls. The light does a weird upside down trick and plants a pretty upside down light-picture on the interior of the man’s eyeball. Nerve cells in the eye are triggered by the onslaught of light and thus fire according to what light is hitting them. If light of a certain wavelength hits an area, a cell that corresponds to that wave length will fire.

These nerve signals travel back into the occipital lobe, where the image is translated into neuron firing. Scientists believe that the image is somehow painted on to the neurons in some fashion. The pre-frontal cortex also has some role in maneuvering the man’s attention to not see literally everything that hits the eyeball, but to just focus on the tree in the image.

So far so good. But everything is sensory. The image of a tree exists within the brain, something Aquinas calls a phantasm. But there’s nothing about the brain that abstracts a pattern, or a form, because there needs to be the immaterial place for that form to abstract to. Enter man’s own immaterial form.

The active intellect perceives the image of a tree as housed within the human brain, but how does it get the form of an oak tree? Does it juice it out of the image and make form-juice? No – there needs to be a step between material and immaterial existence. Rather than there be a direct transfer, like we would talk about a physical channel between locations A and B (like a nerve between the eye ball and the occipital lobe), we now have to think about two terminals. One terminal, the brain, is sensory information. The other terminal, the intellect, is abstract form information. The mind abstracts intelligible characters, and these, amassed, collectively make an impression upon the moldable intellect. Altogether they make the intelligible species, formal content in and of itself. Here the active intellect actually receives the intelligible species as a formal cause, and then shapes itself around the species it perceives to exist within the image.

Woah. Think about when you’re learning to salsa dance from a youtube video and you’re trying to mimic the exact moves of the expert salsa dancer and you completely suck at it. Yeah, like that.

The active intellect does its best job to shape itself around the intelligible species it perceives and then the passive intellect receives the whole of the active intellect into itself and remembers said form. Note: the actual form that existed in the oak tree does not literally translate or transpose itself into the human intellect, lest the original tree stop existing. So is it a form that the human understands at all? Yes! It has to be. Since the active intellect (a form) is that which is molding itself to what it perceives, the end result is a form that becomes understood.

Aquinas has an important phrase around this matter:

“Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur”

“For the received is in the receiver according to the mode of the receiver”

“For the received [the form of the tree] is in the receiver [the man’s intellect] according to the mode [the shaping of the active intellect passing into the passive intellect] of the receiver” (Summa Theologiae, 1st Part, Q. 84, Art. 1)

So might there be another name for the form that enters the active intellect? Yes. The whatness of the object is the primary focus of the intellect. This whatness, the quiddity (Latin quidditas), is composed of the various intelligible characters discernable through the senses. These intelligible characters work together to form an intelligible species. As the intelligible species is received into the intellect, though, it becomes something that the intellect in fact receives, or suffers. For this reason it is called a passio animae, or a passion of the soul. There are various degrees to which the passio animae may match the true form of the object in question, but it still retains the general essence of what is perceived.

You see, the actual form of an oak tree contains within it many virtual forms (that of root, leaf, chlorophyll, etc.) that unless the man has any in-depth knowledge pre-existing the observation of said tree, he does not know exist. Therefore the passio animae of the oak tree may shape around the collective virtual forms of leaf, root, and bark, but not of chlorophyll. The intelligible species is less noble than the form it was attempting to imitate, but the man has still understood a real form, and it contains the same quiddity of the object in question. Remember from the previous article what Aristotle and Aquinas echo about the nature of forms in reality:

“For this reason Aristotle, Metaphy. Viii (Did. Vii, 3), compares the species of things to numbers, which differ in species by the addition or subtraction of unity. And (De Anima ii, 3) he compares the various souls to the species of figures, one of which contains another; as a pentagon contains and exceeds a tetragon” (Aquinas, Summa, Q. 76, A. 3).”

So the passio animae in a man, based on an oak tree, a real attempt at understanding it, contains a good portion of the form perceived, but maybe not the true whole of the form.

Man’s knowledge is therefore imperfect. If man’s passions mimicked the whole of the form immediately upon beholding the oak tree, he would have a perfect knowledge of not only that specific oak tree but the pure form of oak tree, but we know from experience that this is not the case. Knowledge can be amended through future education. This is the whole of the topic of Question 85 in the First Part of Aquinas’ Summa Theologia. Passions, either abstracted from observation or recalled from memory, are subject to modification, specifically “composition and division.” Over time man may compose a more noble form of the passion in question or he may divide it into other forms. Composition and division, according to Aquinas, is the process of reason within man.

 

 

If you made it this far, congratulations. You’ve only a bit farther to go.

 

Now, Aquinas himself informs us what a human word is:

“For in the first place there is the passion of the passive intellect as informed by the intelligible species [real world forms]; and then the passive intellect thus informed forms a definition, or a division, or a composition, expressed by a WORD. Wherefore the concept conveyed by a WORD is its definition; and a proposition conveys the intellect’s division or composition. WORDS do not therefore signify the intelligible species themselves; but that which the intellect forms for itself for the purpose of judging of external things” (Summa Theologia, Prima Pars, Q. 85, Art. 2, Reply to Objection 3).

WORDS = PASSIONES ANIMAE

Aquinas echoes Aristotle, and says repeatedly that intelligible species, the things our intellects form around to understand real forms outside of ourselves, cannot exist without phantasms. Remember the phantasm of the oak tree is what our random man used to abstract the quiddity of an oak tree. Phantasms are the purely sense, brain-based, images that our brains put together. But phantasms aren’t just visual images; they are the things put together by our multiple senses. They could be any image unique to the sense of taste, hearing, or touch, or all of the senses together. The intelligible species (or formal composition of the intelligible characters of the quiddity) behave as act and form which gets passed into the potency of the intellect. This is the same as how the act and form of the quiddity of an object gets passed into the potency of the sensory brain. Conversely for language production, the active intellect uses the remembered intelligible species as act and form to pass into the potency of the sensory brain. Except this all happens within the unified human person. The intelligible species makes an impression on the intellect, which is then a passio animae, and a true concept, to which is equal a word.

Because phantasms can be arranged by any multiple senses, we come to recognize that human words are phantasms, phantasms that are reliant on intelligible species to even exist. Without passions, human language doesn’t exist.

This is the third premise for my thesis:

Words are primarily concoctions of sounds, sensory phantasms, and passiones animae are the Aristotelian forms of our words. They are real and immaterial forms and work to make immaterial concepts, but they are unique to one man’s experience as they relate themselves to real and immaterial forms of the outside world.

Next time:

How exactly do we use these abstract notions in every day language? How do we acquire a language?

#4 – How Language is Acquired and Used

Posted on

I Am Still Pro-Life (Feat. Paige Skipper)

In other words, we tell people that sex is necessary but babies are bad.  It is an ugly trap indeed.

Hello! I’m Paige, Robert’s wife. And despite miscarrying twins and a traumatic birth, I am loudly pro-life.

Let’s get right to it, shall we?

The fact that we even have to engage in a debate over whether or not certain human beings count as human beings is absurd. The fact that we think we can arbitrarily decide when an existing human becomes a human is absurd. The fact that we think it is okay to place one person’s right to bodily autonomy over another person’s right to life is absurd; one is clearly more precious than the other.

And yet, here we are. There are a million factors contributing to this attitude, ranging all the way from selfishness to cruelty, but today I want to tackle what I think is a major factor: ignorance.

I often hear pro-choice people claim that nobody actually wants an abortion and that women only seek them out of desperation. While this is demonstrably not true, desperation and societal pressure clearly influence many women toward aborting their babies. There are so many voices that tell women our dreams and careers die as our children are born, that it is irresponsible to have babies until we are “well established” by others’ standards, and that the resulting physical changes that come with pregnancy and childbirth are unnecessary and even cruel to “force” women to undergo if not explicitly desired.

That is a lot of noise assaulting the ears of shell-shocked women who have missed a period. As a culture we have told women that pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering are unattainable things we cannot handle until other people decide we can. We tell women that their lives are entirely and forever forfeit if they have a baby.

Did you read that correctly? Our culture, decades after our foremothers fought to end cultural entrapment, tells women what they can and cannot do. We tell women that they cannot handle having babies, and thus put pressure on them to seek abortions. The pro-choice argument often spins that in reverse by claiming that the pro-life gang tells women what they can and cannot do by telling them they can’t have an abortion. Thinking about it for a second makes it clear where the pro-choice argument gets it wrong, though. If you are old enough to access the internet, stumble upon this article, and read this far through, I’m going to assume that it is not a revelation to you that babies are a result of sex. Yes, babies are a result of sex; sex results in babies. Intervention is required to prevent sex from resulting in babies, because babies are the natural end of sex. When a person, regardless of gender, consents to have sex, they are thereby consenting to the possibility of creating a baby. There is no other way to look at it. Trying to be “safe” by using pills or condoms or both give you a good shot at not getting pregnant, but neither are guarantees. I shouldn’t have to list any examples here proving that young women, men, girls, and boys are pressured into having sex; turn on the radio, open up Netflix, look at the advertisements popping up everywhere you turn, and you will find sex e v e r y w h e r e. Glamorized, sensationalized, and set as an expectation. In other words, we tell people that sex is necessary but babies are bad, so every effort needs to be put into preventing the creation of a baby as you participate in the aforementioned necessary sex, and if the little bugger manages to slip by anyways, abortion is watching your six. It is an ugly trap indeed.

Empowering women definitionally looks like helping them discover their power, not telling them they don’t have enough and thus need to kill an innocent baby to stay afloat.

Because we don’t have a culture of empowering women, there are a lot of roadblocks put in our way that make having a baby scarier and indeed more difficult. Our healthcare system, lack of maternity leave, lack of education, and insistence that children are a nuisance who belong anywhere but here make it hard for mothers to navigate participating in society while also thriving in their motherhood. The pro-choice argument says the solution is to allow women to end pregnancies even though they cost innocent human lives. The pro-life approach, also clearly pro-women, says that the solution is to change our culture to support women when they become pregnant.

 

It’s clear, then, that despite miscarrying twins and a traumatic birth, I did not waver for a second.

 

That’s what Robert invited me here to talk about. I am his wife, and he has walked beside me through it all. My relationship with my body disintegrated when I was diagnosed with epilepsy, and I had reconciled it just in time for me to get pregnant with my eldest daughter.

She’s two and a half now. She knows all the lyrics to every Elsa song, could eat nothing but chips and dip with a side of olives all day and every day in total contentment, and sometimes pees on the floor. She’s beautiful.

Being pregnant with her was rough, to say the least. My center of gravity was thrown off majorly as my body decided to carry her entirely in the front, to the point where if you looked at me from behind I didn’t look pregnant. I was tired basically all the time. It felt like my body looked different every time I walked past a mirror, and feeling like a stranger in your own body is a surreal experience. She was born after an eighteen-hour labor. It was a textbook birth, no complications and no intervention necessary. The hospital I gave birth in was great: I was allowed to have as many people in the delivery room as I wanted (which resulted in quite the party, with a minimum of five people besides me hanging out at any given moment) and my daughter was immediately laid on my chest skin-to-skin for a full hour before a doctor touched her. Then Robert and I brought her home, and ever since we have basically been pressing random buttons and hoping things turn out right.

I breastfed her for fifteen months. This meant that after 36.5 weeks of donating my body to her via pregnancy, and then eighteen hours of the worst pain I had experienced up to that point, I also donated my breasts to her for over a year. I was her sole source of nourishment for a while. My body bore the incredible responsibility of producing food ‘round-the-clock for her as it also carried out my normal day-to-day tasks.

All of this put that reconciliation my body and I had done into jeopardy.

Then I got pregnant again. I was ecstatic, for sure, confident that any issues my body and I might have would be solved soon. But at my first ultrasound I found out I was having twins, that they were 10 weeks along, and that their hearts had stopped beating.

The ground fell out from under my feet. I hadn’t even considered the possibility. I had been caressing my stomach, talking to them, talking about them, while they were dead inside of me. I had never felt that hollow.

But I wasn’t given the opportunity to mourn, because I had to protect them first. My doctor wanted to usher me over to surgery where they would be removed from me and treated like medical waste. Human beings. Treated like medical waste. That’s how disgusting our society has gotten. That is the result of our insistence that women aren’t strong enough to have babies.

Robert and I had to navigate figuring out the most ethical thing to do for them and sign so much paperwork to ensure their tiny, tiny bodies were treated with dignity and sent to the funeral home that cremated them for us for free. (Shout-out to Beggs Funeral Home!)

I shared the experience on Facebook and many people offered their condolences; including my loudly pro-choice friends. And let me tell you, that was more insulting than anything I had experienced before. People who thought that either my babies weren’t people or, even if they were, I should have been allowed to kill them if I wanted to, were trying to offer condolences for the fact that they died. That lack of cohesive logic hurt me deeply, especially in the immediate aftermath of the incident. If I had chosen to kill my babies they would have supported me, but since it wasn’t my choice it was a tragedy. If I had chosen to kill my babies they wouldn’t have actually been babies, but since it wasn’t my choice they suddenly were. That kind of warped logic is what happens when we try to piece together a philosophy that allows people to have as much sex as possible with zero consequences.

But I pulled myself together. It was a long process, but I did it. Robert and I gave them names, my family helped me make a shadowbox with their urn in it, and I mourned them.

And then I got pregnant again with my youngest daughter. She is two and a half months old now. She can hold her head up for small periods of time, smiles, and gets very upset when she can’t see or touch either Robert or me. She’s beautiful.

Being pregnant with her was even more rough than my first pregnancy. Rougher emotionally for obvious reasons, but also rougher physically. I was chasing a toddler around the whole time, dealt with extreme fatigue, constant headaches, and gagged every time I changed a diaper or smelled sausage. I ‘dropped’, or ‘lightened’, about two weeks before I actually went into labor, which meant I literally couldn’t close my legs and waddled everywhere because she was so low. I also dilated at least four days before labor began (though it was probably earlier than that) which meant that once labor began it ran. I had my first contraction and my next one about five minutes later. For reference, you are supposed to get to the hospital when they are four minutes apart. After frantically packing, getting to the hospital, passing my daughter off to my grandparents to watch, and lots of squatting while my husband read The Ball and the Cross aloud, my second daughter was born. The whole process took four hours. Four hours between “ow” and “hello.” I couldn’t believe it.

It was also a very smooth delivery. I had chosen to run this race completely unmedicated, which made it even more painful than my first birth. It was truly excruciating, and I could spend several pages breaking the physical sensation down for you. But everything checked out, and no intervention was needed.

Until I went to the recovery room.

I had stayed in the delivery room for a while, holding my daughter unimpeded for over an hour, and then she was weighed and whatnot. My body had been shaking, but both my doctor and my nurse assured me that the hormones and physical exhaustion could cause it and that it was perfectly normal. Everyone thought I was in the clear.

It was probably 3am at this point. After eating something from McDonald’s my family was about to go home. I wanted my mom to help me to the bathroom before she left, so I called my nurse so they could both help me pee and change my pad. I swung my legs off the bed and suddenly felt something falling out of me and down my legs. It was blood. Lots and lots of blood.

Everything happened very quickly after that. The one nurse I had called multiplied into six. I was rushed to the bathroom to sit on the measuring cup they put on the toilet to measure the amount of blood and clots I was passing. Then I was rushed backed to the bed where the nurses pressed and pressed and pressed on my stomach to force all of the clots out, changed the bedpad underneath me constantly in an effort to continue measuring the amount of blood I was losing, and got me on an IV so quickly that the nurse was holding it up on her tip-toes because she couldn’t get a pole fast enough. I was naked, cold, and couldn’t stop shaking. Robert was holding our daughter and my mother was holding my hand down in order for the IV to work.

I think I was in shock. Like, actual, physical shock.

I couldn’t stop shaking.

I was asking the nurses questions to try to understand what was happening. I wasn’t screaming. I don’t think I was even crying. My mom says I was apologizing to the nurses. I was really worried about my cat pajama pants being stained. It felt like hours. I kept thinking about the donation Robert and I had made two months earlier to Partners in Health, an organization training doctors and building infrastructure to lower the extremely high maternal mortality rate in Sierra Leon. If I was there instead of here, I would have died. I kept looking at Robert holding Nora and imagining how he would parent two children without me. I kept repeating the mantra I had clung to throughout the pregnancy and childbirth: this is my body given up for you.

The lead nurse followed her instincts and checked for one more clot, and she was right. After she pushed it out, it ended. They left. I put clothes on. Robert put the big blanket we had brought from home on me. My family left.

And two and a half months later I am in one piece, but still processing the trauma of what happened. All of the effort I had put into befriending my body again, trusting my body, being grateful to my body, had shattered. Delivering my daughter without medication made me feel so powerful. I had never loved my body more than I did in that moment. In that moment I discovered just how strong I am, how capable I am, how Big I am. That high was taken away so soon.

I felt so betrayed. I couldn’t stop shaking.

While I did physically stop shaking in the hospital room, I don’t think I’ve stopped shaking inside yet. My daughter is here and I am healthy. Despite that physical trauma I am able to breastfeed, which means my body is still producing nourishment for my daughter, and I try to remind myself frequently what a miracle and a power that is. It swings like a pendulum: sometimes I feel like a warrior, sometimes I don’t feel anything, and sometimes I feel deep contempt for my very broken body.

And yet, friend…

I will not stop engaging in the marital act with my husband, because it’s really great (sorry, mom) and when it inevitably ends in a baby I will once again embrace that power. I will continue tithing part of our family’s paychecks to organizations that support women. I will continue engaging in debates and discussions to fix the aforementioned roadblocks put in place by our culture that make parenthood difficult, including paid parental leave, healthcare costs, childcare costs, absurd expectations that both parents need to work over forty hours a week to maintain enough income for a household to survive, and stigmas around single parenthood. I will continue setting our family up to foster and adopt children.

And I will continue to be pro-life. Nothing, not even my broken and unreliable body, will stop me from acknowledging the truth that life is precious even when it is inconvenient. As long as I have sex I will be prepared to have a child, because that is how sex works. I will love babies, because they are valid members of our society regardless of how many people claim to dislike them due to their inconvenience.

Let me repeat it one last time:

I am still pro-life, and I will continue to be pro-life, and I will always be pro-life.

Posted on

#2 – The Formal Cause of Man

This is the second article where I explain my thesis work, Thomistic Linguistics, in more chewable pieces. In my last article, #1 – An Argument for Aristotelian Forms, I argued that changeable things all have a form. These forms are immaterial and are, essentially, the more perfect thing from which something derives its nature.

The most difficult concept to accept in the modern time is the unobservable nature of these forms. Science, the scientific method and the fruits of its method, tells us that if it is not observable then it cannot exist, or that there should be no credibility put to its name. Yet the scientific method, when held to such a high standard, becomes something it isn’t. The scientific method itself is not scientifically observable, for example. It is derived first from logical argumentation. Science is within the realm of physical study, while the derivation of the scientific method itself is out of a certain metaphysical reality. Metaphysics is the study of the foundational and logical principles of reality that conceptually allow for the existence of something like physics and science.

Turning the scientific method into a metaphysics is a logical fallacy popularly called scientism, or positivism. If you wish to accept the validity of science, then you have to accept the role of logical argumentation as a legitimate form of exploring knowledge and truth, or you just end up tripping yourself. Logic, such as what is found in the previous article, is not invalid simply because there is no ‘science’ to back it up (even though one might find that to be incredibly disagreeable).

As such, we know that everything that suffers change, or suffers a reduction of potency to act, has a form. Very quickly one will note that if this is true, then humans must have a form just as much as anything else. But is the form of man equatable to the form of a triangle? Or the form of a pine tree? Are there any differences?

Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas both readily address such a problem. Let’s start with the form of a triangle. It is a simple notion – three lines, three angles, all connecting. Nothing of material is defined within its form, either. Consider, though, in comparison, an oak tree. There’s a lot going on with an oak tree: leaves, roots, bark, xylem, phloem, pollen, fruit (or nuts), and much more. That’s quite a bit more complicated than a triangle! Additionally, couldn’t we consider each of the components of a tree as its own form? Surely a leaf, common to many kinds of trees, is its own form? Well, actually, yeah! An oak tree can be barren of leaves during winter, for example, and still be an oak tree. But that is not because leaves don’t happen normally with oak trees, it just happens to not have leaves at that moment. But if an oak tree did not have the form of leaves within it somehow, it just wouldn’t be an oak tree; it would have to be something else.

Aristotle compares forms to numbers, as demonstrated by Aquinas:

“For this reason Aristotle, Metaphy. Viii (Did. Vii, 3), compares the species of things to numbers, which differ in species by the addition or subtraction of unity. And (De Anima ii, 3) he compares the various souls to the species of figures, one of which contains another; as a pentagon contains and exceeds a tetragon” (Aquinas, Summa, Q. 76, A. 3).”

When you look at the number 8, we know that it contains within it a place for the number 4, specifically times the other number 2. But we do not look at the number 8 and immediately say ‘ah look! the number 4!’ Rather we know that within the 8 is the virtual notion of 4, insofar as that the number 8 “contains and exceeds” the number 4. So we can add in more ‘unity’ of smaller and simpler things and come up with something that is more complex.

Rather than calling the triangle simpler than the plant, though, our guiding philosophers do something unexpected. They call the plant more simple than the triangle. What? Why? Because the plant contains more forms virtually within a single form than just the triangle. Do not think of a large moving box that has a bunch of smaller blocks within it. Instead think of gelatin cubes. All of the forms like triangles are rather small. When you compile them, though, and they unify in their strange gelatinous way, they become bigger and better or, as our philosopher guides might say, more noble. The more something can unify a large amount of virtual forms actually within itself, the more noble it is.

So when Aristotle and Aquinas look at nature, they do not see a range of equals, they instead see a sea of less noble and more noble forms. Plants are more noble than rocks. Plants have virtual powers of taking in nutrients, growing and reproducing. Rocks do not have these powers or the virtual forms to achieve them. Animals, though, are more noble than plants. Animals, beyond having the same powers of plants, are also capable of sensing things (including feeling emotion but more basically the idea of seeing and smelling) and locomotion. This finally gets us to humans. Humans are capable of all of these things, yet additionally have the power to reason. This makes the human form more noble than any other form on earth or in the material universe. No other material creature has the power to reason as we.

(Yeah I know you think animals can reason too, but the short story is they can’t. Check out this whole article I wrote about the topic.)

The simple form of man (remember gelatin cubes, not moving boxes) contains virtually within himself all of these other forms and powers, the most prized and unique being this of reason.

Aristotle and Aquinas note that something interesting has to take place within man for reason to occur. All other beings less noble than us have a point of achieving the perfection of their form, of realizing their potential. But all of an animal’s, plant’s, or rock’s potential is physically realizable. Even an animal’s emotions are physically manifest things. But is reason similarly realizable within the physical realm of a being? It can’t be.

What is reason? It is the possession of knowledge and the ability to contemplate that knowledge, to mediate from a question to an answer and to an explanation. Man’s knowledge is not some sort of hive mind knowledge, though, and so that possession of knowledge is unique to each person. So how does one possess knowledge and then possess it separately from another person? There must be a place in each person for this knowledge to be possessed, since we so clearly have the capacity for knowing.

Humans can know things in multiple ways. We can know specific things, like what our Aunt May’s ugly dog looks like, and we can know more general things, like what a generic dog may look like. When humans observe and learn these forms of knowledge, they abstract certain intelligible characters from the reality in front of them. When observing the dog, abstract intelligible characters of a small nose, long legs, bushy tail, and short fur all come to the human mind. As a whole, the human abstracts the idea of “Aunt May’s ugly dog,” which has all of these intelligible characters. Aristotle and Aquinas tell us that the human mind comes to possess forms, just like the forms that exist in the world. When a person thinks about a triangle, the form of triangle translates directly into us and we possess that form. We cannot possess it materially, say in our brains, though, because then we would have strangle triangles as neurons, say. No, our neurons are quite limited on what they can turn into. There must be some way that we immaterially possess these forms, as they themselves are immaterial.

Well what do we have that is immaterial? Our own forms of course! So what, our forms are like weird vacuums that suck a form out from it’s primary existence in the material world? Nah, that’s a bit too weird. Plus, if one person sucked a form out of a triangle (therefore obliterating that individual triangle), the person sitting next to him couldn’t also suck the form of triangle out, and we know that isn’t what happens. Both people can get the form of triangle. Aquinas says that our intellects, the powers of reason and comprehension within the form of man, shapes itself around the intelligible characters that we observe through our senses. The immaterial part of us shapes itself around the immaterial notions of the real world outside of us, and therefore we come to possess immaterial forms.

That’s far from the end, though. Because so what? Our forms mirror other forms? Cool. Except not cool! We have to maintain our own integrity with the form of man or else we just turn into a triangle! Therefore we must have a virtual power that transforms itself, just as we contain the virtual form of heart that directs and guides the structure and function of our physical heart. And then so what? We have a virtual power that manipulates itself to mirror outside forms, okay cool. Except not cool! How does the process of understanding happen from just mirroring? It doesn’t. There is another virtual power that stores these immaterial forms so that we can recall them later or so that we can modify them later. There is a memory and active contemplation of forms. Remember that change is a reduction of potency to act? Usually in a material being that potency and act translates only from the formal cause into the material cause. But here within humans we have an instance of potency and act occurring right within the formal cause alone.

Aquinas says that we therefore have an active intellect (which shapes itself) and a passive intellect (which receives the shaped active intellect and comprehends it). No other material creature in the material universe emulates such an ability. We are unique in this way.

This is the second premise for my thesis:

We have forms, just like every other changeable thing, but our forms are unique and more noble because of the power of reason. Our reason is a complex existence of potency and act not just between our formal and material causes, but right within our formal cause.

Next time:

Where does language situate itself into relationship with man’s formal cause?

#3 – The Residence of Language as Quiddity

Posted on

I Need That Grade

“Mr. Skipper, you don’t understand. I need that grade.”

Before engaging with another person, there are a set of precepts that we all have that dictate exactly what the parameters of a discussion are. We know that certain signs will indicate favor with the other person, others disfavor. Some signs will indicate confusion, others comprehension. Most importantly some signs will indicate whether one’s behavior or conversation topic are appropriate for the situation at hand. Similarly for most anything within the realm of human function we find precepts that are parameters, guiding where something can and should go. These precepts are not always ones of which we are conscientious, but usually we have some sense of them.

The epicenter of my thought today is around education and the precepts that we teach our students. Education is never plain cut around the categories under which we achieve it. The subject of my classroom is the language of Spanish, but that is not just what I am teaching my students. I educate them around behavior, etiquette, ethics, and culture as well. Sometimes I even engage and teach about other subject areas like history and literacy. But by the time that students come to me (since I teach high school or advanced middle school), students usually already have a set of precepts around education.

One of the most important of these precepts is the North American grade. I think grading students is a good practice. It helps communicate to the student a teacher’s perception of their education and whether there needs to be any change in regard to how a student interacts with their teacher, or it informs the student where they stand with regards the comprehension or learning of new content material. It also provides a measure of accountability. No one likes to see themselves as being worth less than they feel, and when a grade starts to dip past where a student sees themselves it offers motivation to improve themselves. It also offers others from the outside a look at the way a student is in class. Do they do the work? Do they perform well? Do they do homework assigned to them?

The North American grade, however, has become something more than that. It has become the focus point of a cultural shift, one that deserves a bit of attention. Grades are a tool, serving an end outside of themselves. Just like any other tool from our past, mankind has learned to warp it to serve themselves regardless of the circumstances, moral or otherwise.

Because of the potential cause that grades can serve, a lot of people have come to view grades as an authoritative step in making other decisions and answering key questions:

Can this student play sports?

Can this student play video games?

Can this student see his friends?

Can this student go to college?

Can this student be trusted with responsibility at work?

Can this student receive financial aid for current or further education?

And at first these seem like reasonable questions to answer with educational grades, because the effort and application required to earn good grades in school translates into other situations and can be used as a measure of a stranger’s confidence in a student.

Here’s the kick, though. Our society is losing a sense of morality. Students, parents, everyone. Yeah, sure, be nice to everyone, but life is about what you make it. Follow your dreams. Everyone else doesn’t necessarily matter. Do what makes you happy because no one else will. Authority figures aren’t to be trusted because they don’t know you as an individual. Make your own way.

So when students come into school and they are confronted with educational material, they balk at it. What does learning Spanish have to do with following your dreams to become a football player or a hairdresser? Math class doesn’t make me happy, and no one else you talk to (except your math teacher) goes on about how it makes them happy, so why should you care about it? Authority figures are always misleading, so what point is there to believe that your teacher is actually doing something for your own good? Best to not worry about it. Just make your own way. Survive high school and then you can do what you want.

Except that doesn’t work. Because grades are attached to their behavior at school. Behavior not even meaning dramatic misbehavior, but typical day to day actions. Complete the work? Get the grade. Don’t complete the work? Don’t get the grade (or get half credit). Grades are how you survive high school so that you can finally get on to doing what you want afterwards. High school (and college) are seen as “barriers to entry” for whatever thing it is that students would rather be doing with their lives (or what they think they would rather be doing). Since grades are a “barrier to entry” for getting past high school and into these other things, then we start to revisit those questions from earlier with a bit of a different perspective. When students see grades they don’t see a reflection of their education or their effort towards school work. They see:

I can’t play sports.

I can’t play video games.

I can’t see my friends.

I can’t go to college.

I can’t get a job.

I can’t receive financial aid.

And so I get comments like:

“Mr. Skipper, you don’t understand. I need that grade.”

Instead of these excess questions that people use to evaluate a student’s potential being in excess, they become necessary and are usually the only things relevant to a student. Whether they are actually learning or progressing in the class? Not important. Whether the grade from that class is allowing or preventing them access to other diversions and goods? Totally important. Instead of these questions of access being secondary, as originally designed, they become primary.

THIS IS TERRIBLE.

As our society loses a focus on the value of morals, it loses a focus on the value of things that only exist in the abstract. If it isn’t visible and if it doesn’t produce a tangible effect that brings goodness and happiness to me, then it doesn’t have value.

Our current educational system is based on the notion of a Liberal Education. Before any cranky conservative goes spouting off about how liberal snowflakes are destroying children, let me liberate them from that thinking. A liberal education is that which liberates the soul from materialist thinking (St. Augustine, De Ordine). St. John Henry Newman articulates it in a slightly different fashion in his book The Idea of a University:

“Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence.”

Can we measure a cultivated intellect? Can we measure the degree to which a soul is liberated from materialist thinking?

Probably not.

Grades are a good start, because they have some measure over the engagement of a student with a task or the degree of intellectual excellence that a student can demonstrate, but grades aren’t the end of that image. When material goods are seen as the end of good grades, or when material goods are seen as the end of education, teachers and parents have failed. Right now, in this cultural setting, grades have failed. Students no longer have sight of what an actual liberal education is. They have no precepts for how to engage with it in an actually liberating way. But it doesn’t start with them, it begins with the people administering it. It begins with parents, administrators, and teachers, and those are the people that have the power to remedy this malady.

“Mr. Skipper, you don’t understand. I need that grade.“

Far from it. I do understand. You’re telling me exactly what you’ve been taught.

Proudly powered by WordPress