Search for (the truth of) life

Extraordinary, that we humans in advanced civilization are out there in the solar system, in our galaxy and beyond, with sophisticated instruments (telescopes of various kinds, space probes, spacecraft, rovers, etc.) looking for life, all on the assumption that life somehow emerged from matter. Hence a search for the purported building-blocks of life: water, certain elements, certain compounds, etc. We'd even like to do better than just hypothesizing that life emerged from complex chemical processes by actually making it ourselves, but have so far drawn a blank. No self-respecting scientist would dare to question this preconception of 'emergent' life essential to the paradigm.

We even send out DVDs and other inscriptions just in case and in the hope that some intelligent form of life out there, just like us, will pick them up and decipher them as the product of an intelligent civilization on Earth.

Why this wild goose chase? Do we know what life itself is? And do we know who we are ourselves? It seems to be unquestionable that we are a species of animal in a long line of evolution over millennia and even millions of years, hence a kind of what. This puts us into some kind of continuity with other animals. 'Animal' is synonymous with 'living being', i.e. a being endowed with (an) anima that animates it. But what is anima? Itself a kind of being? Or only a mode or way of being of which living beings partake?

Synonyms for 'anima', the Latin translation of Greek ψυχή (psyche), include 'breath (of wind)', 'soul', 'life', 'deceased soul', 'mind', 'psyche'. For modern materialist science these are all no-go areas, since its raison d'être is to reduce, i.e. lead back, all phenomena to material causality. That is why life has to be conceived as somehow 'emerging' (spontaneously?) from material processes as self-moving matter. Non-living matter can only be moved by something else called an 'external force'.

Modern materialist science is sceptical even of this conception of life as self-moving, since it denies any spontaneity of movement. It asserts that movements of living beings that seem to be spontaneous are materially caused by hidden physical processes in the organism. It denies that animate animals have anima. Is a living being then a being only apparently self-moving and self-replicating through automatic, non-living physical processes? Quantum indeterminacy is even roped in to explain the purported illusion of spontaneous movement. After all, quanta are supposed to be physical entities, so ostensibly material causes are not abandoned for this kind of explanation.

When it comes to evolution theory, that today is very much the accepted orthodoxy in modern science, strangely, breaks in the chain of materially causality are not only possible, but necessary. For, the genetic DNA governing the reproduction of a living organism is said to spontaneously mutate. DNA itself is prone to making mistakes when it reproduces itself. Moreover, teleological cause is also clandestinely re-introduced after having been banned as an inadmissible Aristotelean residue early on in the Modern Age. The telos of living beings is quietly assumed to be the striving to keep on living. Random genetic mutations may enhance a given species' chances of survival, hence fulfilling the telos of life by chance. Loser species in this survival-of-the-fittest struggle (only fortuitously uncannily akin to familiar capitalist free-market competition?) eventually go extinct. Evolution is thus hit-or-miss, lacking rigorous material causality and is also teleological. These anomalies do not seem to unsettle evolution theory's adherents one bit.

Modern science is concerned with explaining one thing in terms of another or others to construct a theoretical model whose empirical truth (i.e. correctness) can be provisionally affirmed until it is falsified by new 'facts' that may even force a paradigm shift to a new explanatory model. This is supposed to be how truth is empirically established, without ever asking for the truth of the phenomena themselves. The scientific gaze is always looking away from the phenomena themselves, taking them to be self-understood. Science's mission is to explain movement so as to theoretically master it predictively, no matter how weirdly construed the model. If it works, it's true.

Seems we're stuck with this dogmatic thinking as long as modern science maintains its grip on our mind and thus hegemony in the world. The truth of the phenomenon of life requires another kind of thinking. My own approach in On Human Temporality is hermeneutic-phenomenological and is restricted first and foremost to us humans. After all, we are most intimately familiar with ourselves. To be alive, in the first place, is to belong to the openness of three-dimensional time. Our psyche is, in the first place, this temporal belonging, and the first determination of human life as self-moving is the free, spontaneous movement of the understanding mind within the temporal psyche. Starting with the openness of three-dimensional time already breaks with material causality because three-dimensional time itself is nothing physical. The fixation of modern scientific thinking on material, physical movement is also broken to encompass other kinds of movement altogether. The living self-movement of our physical body can only be approached step-by-step on an accretive path of thinking to develop a concept of the empsyched, and thus entimed, body. The kinds of movement of which we humans partake are not exhausted with mental and bodily movement; they include, crucially, our living sociation with each other in kinds of mutually estimative interplay through which our genuine whoness is constituted. In today's world, this mutually estimative interplay is subverted by the unbridled valorization movement of thingified value.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Our Brains, Our Selves by Masud Husain

Our Brains, Our Selves (winner of the 2025 Royal Society Science Book Prize, supported by the Trivedi Family Foundation)

Masud Husain, Professor of Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow at New College, Oxford

Here an excerpt from the book's blurb: "Is it our background that creates our identities? Or our families, where we lived, how we were brought up and educated, the jobs we’ve held? Yes, all of the above, but more fundamental than any of these is our brain. This is never more evident than if we lose even a single one of our cognitive abilities. People who develop a brain disorder can find that their identity, their sense of self, can undergo dramatic changes.

Through the stories of seven of his patients, acclaimed Oxford University neurologist Masud Husain shows us how our brains create our identity, how that identity can be changed, and sometimes even be restored. ..."

How does an eminent neurologist get from noting that "People who develop a brain disorder can find that their identity, their sense of self, can undergo dramatic changes" to showing "how our brains create our identity"?? If our brain is in order, can we be assured that we will have all "our cognitive abilities"? Is the movement of the mind synonymous with cognition?  In BBC4's Start the Week on 08/11/2025 the author even claims that "the self is an emergent property of the brain". 

Whatever happened to the insight that the material brain is an organ of the self? Hence that, if the brain is damaged, the self itself has problems?

In conventional, dry logic this inversion in syllogistic argumentation is called confusing a necessary condition with a sufficient one. A necessary condition (a healthy brain) does not suffice as a sufficient condition (e.g. for generating an identity, a self). Why is this confusion absolutely necessary? Because the ostensible necessary condition is a material one, whereas our identity is a characteristic of our immaterial psyche (or soul or consciousness) with which modern, materialist-empiricist science — and neurology in particular — has insuperable difficulties coming to terms, imbued as it is with an absolute will to power over all kinds of movement, including that of the mind itself. This absolute will to power has to latch on to material causes to be effective.*

Without the dogma of material causes as ultimate causes of psychic phenomena, among others, modern science would suffer a fatal intellectual blow. Therefore it has to espouse logical nonsense. Why is it that nobody points out that modern science wilfully inverts normal logic? Because it is dangerous to do so. The dogma of a one-way causal track from matter to any other phenomenon, be it psychic, social or what-have-you, is an ontological foundation of today's historical world. Empiricist scientific methodology cannot detect the dogma because it is too shallow, being able only to rig the questions it investigates to be compliant with its preconceived dogma. 

Beware s/he who questions this shaky foundation! S/he will not be burnt at the stake on Campo dei Fiori like Bruno was in 1600, at the beginning of the Modern Age, but instead suffer the fate of being complacently ignored by the powerful institutions that be (e.g. Oxford) and by the millions they continue to induct into this topsy-turvy, tunnel-minded way of thinking. From their perspective, the questioner has to be regarded as some kind of nutter. You're a leper crying in the wilderness, and others make a wide berth around you.

Nevertheless, there remains an exit from this inverted modern world for those brave few intrepid and capable enough to revise their own beloved, quietly indoctrinated prejudices right down to the interpretation of the most elementary phenomena. Hard, slow work!

* Hence the collapse of the mind into the brain (conceptually) already in the 19th century and the incipient interpretation of brain activity as computation that today AI can emulate and surpass as we slide ever deeper into the dictatorship of the algorithmically driven cyberworld. Note that, according to the blurb, "Masud is Editor-in-Chief of Brain, a leading international journal of neurology. First established in 1878, Brain is widely considered to be the most influential publication in the field..." The second half of the 19th century is the age of declared, virulent positivism, the march of progress in the physical sciences and the emergence of controversial Darwinian evolution theory that spooked English Christianity.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Western mind's dementia

A philorock song about the Western mind's dementia:

Mind Change.

For those who cannot swallow the status quo and are aware (and wary) of the multiple false alternatives on offer in response to a world in crisis. A crisis is a situation demanding a decision, but we Westerners want to have our cake and eat it too. In German the equivalent is, 'Wasch mich, aber mach' mich nicht naß' (Wash me, but don't make me wet).

A major symptom of dementia is forgetfulness.

The adequate response to our Western loss of mind and its seemingly immovable complacency is to do a da capo back to the roots of philosophical thinking with Plato and Aristotle in order to revise and recast their fateful interpretations of key elementary phenomena. Our dementia resides in our being unable to see any alternative to these fateful castings, or any point in attempting them, and so we just go on thinking in the same ruts, even while the depredations of the Medium of valorization are reaching ever new heights and its latest technological accomplice, the cyberworld of algorithms bent on monetization, has been unleashed upon us.

As the famous pithy line from Wagner says: 

"Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug."
"Only the spear that opened the wound can close it."

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.