Of Dreams and Time

The Bible tells of Joseph the dreamer, whose brothers envied him and kidnapped him and sold him into slavery. The story goes on to tell of Pharaoh the dreamer, who saw seven fat cows and seven skinny cows and put all Egypt under Joseph's rule. Joseph reveals the metaphysics behind it all in Genesis 45:5-8.

I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life.... God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God.

This tale doesn't fit the modern worldview. The "experts" agree that we live in a universe of time and space and matter and energy, governed by natural laws that leave no place for dreams or deities. The consensus is that God is dead and chance is king and dreams are just coincidence.

This means that science doesn't just conflict with the first few chapter of Genesis--modern materialism contradicts the clear teaching of Scripture from start to finish. It may be easier to pick a fight over whether the world was made in "six twenty-four hour days" or not, but the real question to be resolved is whether God acts within time and space. If He does, then something in our physics is either false or incomplete. If He doesn't, then the whole Bible is in error, not just a few verses here and there.

The biggest hole in modern physics has to do with time. Mainstream physics says there is just one timeline, and it is guided just by chance. Picture a single, kinky thread writhing through fifteen billion light-years of empty immensity--then have it accidentally wind up on the one small bit of all this void that isn't empty, and you've got the best that modern science has to offer to explain how we got here.

David Deutsch is a secular physicist, but not in the mainstream. His picture of the universe makes more sense to me--he fills the void with timelines until there isn't any emptiness left. If there is some small statistical chance that particles could come together into self-replicating structures, Deutsch's multiverse will find it. If every possible world exists, then this one does--and so does Harry Potter's. But that goes way too far for mainstream physics.

John Wheeler offered a different option. The man who coined the term "black hole" believed the future could cause the past. (That sounds bizarre to the ordinary layman, but so does the rest of quantum physics.) Wheeler's participatory anthropic principle sketched out a way for future minds to create their own past. In Wheeler's model, there is only one thread through fifteen billion light years of time and space, but it isn't "kinky." It marks the shortest possible path from pure possibility to actual intelligence.

The story of Joseph doesn't make sense in two of these three models (one "kinky" timeline, all possible timelines, or one "guided" timeline). In the mainstream model, dreams don't come true. The stories in Genesis are just that--stories, myths made up by later generations around some campfire. In Deutsch's multiverse, the story may be true but it doesn't mean anything. Sure, Pharaoh dreamed of seven fat cows and seven skinny cows--in this timeline. But he dreamed of six fat cows and thirteen tadpoles in another. If everything happens, nothing matters.

In a world where the future causes the past, however, dreams fit nicely into physics. The dreams are essential to the outcome. If the outcome comes first, the dreams help make it happen. The most astonishing coincidences aren't coincidences at all in a "participatory" universe.

Rationalism, Empiricism, Subjectivism

John M. Frame suggested a new framework for knowing what knowledge is in 1982. (This philosophical sub-discipline is called "epistemology.") He begins by listing three general types of epistemology throughout the history of philosophy:

The first tendency is rationalism or a_ priorism, which I shall define as the view that human knowledge presupposes certain principles known independently of sense-experience, principles by which, indeed, our knowledge of sense-experience is governed. The second tendency is empiricism, the view that human knowledge is based upon the data of sense-experience. Thirdly, there is subjectivism, the view that there is no "objective" truth, but only truth "for" the knowing subject, verified by criteria internal to the subject.

I tend towards empiricism, myself, with a healthy respect for rationalism, but I have long despised "subjectivism." Frame's description of subjectivism convicts me of intellectual snobbery:

Then comes the third member of the triad, human nature, which correlates with philosophical "subjectivity." Self-knowledge has always been philosophically difficult. As Hume and Wittgenstein especially have pointed out, the self is not one of the things we see as we look on the world. Yet it is through our­selves that we come to know everything else. All we know, we know through our own senses, reason, feelings, through what we are. And it is thus in knowing other things that we come to know the self. The self seems to be everywhere and nowhere. We know it, but only as we know other things.

Frame does not take two opposing principles and merge them into one synthesis, as Hegel would do with his dialectic. He affirms three different perspectives as co-equal--like the three dimensions of physical space.

My approach to knowledge, up until now, seems two-dimensional at best? Has my epistemology been just a cardboard cut-out with no subjective depth to it?

The Observer

Perspectivalism has me looking for thirds to every old dichotomy. There is a perceiving subject for every fact/value distinction, and a moral actor who decides between deontology and teleology. Frame and Poythress articulate this triad as "subject, object, norm."

Who is this "subject"? Does the "subject" really make any difference to what we know and do? Is the "subject" important enough to sit side-by-side with physical reality and natural law?

Rene Descartes brought the "subject" into the center of this philosophy when he said, "I think, therefore I am." The observing self provided the first fact for Reason (the norm), which used it to deduce Reality (the object).

Descartes left the "subject" behind once he got his feet on the familiar ground of philosophy, but his younger contemporary Blaise Pascal had more interest in the "subject." Pascal, who said, "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing," is often claimed as a forefather of existentialism.

I'm not ready to write about existentialism yet--although I delight in the great "Christian existentialists" (Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky), I could never force myself to take existentialism itself seriously before Frame and Poythress showed me how. So let me jump to something that I actually believe in--quantum physics.

In the weird world of quantum physics, what we think of as "reality" is arguably less real than the observing self. Twenty-first century scientists believe the laws of physics govern time, space, matter, and energy, but this does not result in a single predictable world. Instead, physical realisty and natural law produce a "wavefunction of the universe" which includes all possible worlds. The "actual world" that you and I observe is a collapsed subset of that wavefunction. Most quantum physicists say the act of observation causes the wavefunction of possibility to collapse into any one actuality.


Who is this Observer? Does the subject matter? And should I master existentialism or quantum physics to find out?

I feel like Odysseus, sailing between Scylla on one side and Charybdis on the other.

But if Truth lies on the other side, I must sail on...

Am, Is, Be

Perspectivalism provides a live alternative to the three dead ends of modern ethics. John M. Frame explains how perspectivalism can operate as a "metaethics" that unites teleology, deontology, and existential ethics.

I first grasped the concept of perspectivalism as it applied to ethics, which seems to be a natural starting point for people who have struggled with the frustrating state of that discipline these days. Frame says:

Although I published my epistemology before my ethics, I developed the threefold scheme in ethics before applying it to epistemology. Ethics is its natural home, and I think the ethical applications of it are more easily understood than the applications to epistemological theory.

Here's Frame on the three schools of modern secular ethical theory:

1. Existential Ethics: Existential ethics is the view that ethics is essentially a matter of human inwardness, a matter of character and motive....

2. Teleological Ethics: ...The teleologist sets forth one relatively simple, objective goal for ethics which, he thinks, no human being can legitimately question. That goal is usually called “happiness” or “pleasure”...

3. Deontological Ethics: The third tendency is toward “deontological ethics,” or an ethic of duty.

Frame calls these different "perspectives," and labels them "self, world, and law." It seems to me that each of these perspectives has its own grammar--"I am," "it is," "you be!" To stretch the grammatical observation just a bit, one might even argue that each has its own grammatical mood: interrogative, indicative, and imperative.

It is easy to draw the analogy between the indicative mood, physical reality, and teleological ethics. Each is about "facts, "about what "is." It isn't hard to see the correlation between the imperative mood, the "logos," and deontological ethics. Each is about "values," what "ought to be."

Having got this far, symmetry begs us to explore the possible relationship between the interrogative mood, subjectivity, and existential ethics. In the interrogative mood, I ask "Am I?" instead of asserting "I am" (in the indicative) or commanding "Be!" (in the imperative).

There's something about that question--"Am I?"--that hints at depths to come.

What is Perspectivalism?

What Is Perspectivalism?

"Perspectivalism" is a post-modern way of thinking about thinking that has been articulated by Vern Poythress and John M. Frame. Frame's brief Primer on Perspectivalism outlines the method.

Frame starts by observing that every (human) act of knowing takes place from some limited perspective. Recognizing this makes us more humble about the extent our own knowledge and more eager to increase it.

One way to increase our knowledge and our level of certainty is by supplementing our own perspectives with those of others. When our own resources fail us, we can consult friends, authorities, books, etc. We can travel to other places, visit people of other cultures. Even to get a good understanding of a tree, we need to walk around it, look at it from many angles.

It often happens that someone’s idea will seem ridiculous when we first encounter it; but when we try to understand where that person is coming from, what considerations have led him to his idea, then our evaluation of it changes. In such a case, we are trying to see the issue from his perspective, and that perspective enriches our own.

Perspectivalism Is Not Relativism

Perspectivalism seems safer than absolutism and wiser than relativism. Friedrich Nietzsche captured the core of relativism in The Will to Power:

There are many sorts of eyes. The sphinx too has eyes; consequently, there are many sorts of "truths," and consequently there is no truth. (Will to Power, section 540)

Perspectivalism does not confuse the blind stone eyes of the sphinx with the many sorts of eyes that really see.

Perspectivalism Is Not Absolutism

Perspectivalism is not absolutism because it does not confuse any (finite) individual's ideas with "Truth." This is not to say that Frame and Poythress deny the existence of absolute truth--they are both theology professors (Poythress is at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Frame is at Reformed Theological Seminary near Orlando). Perspectivalism distinguishes between the finite perspective of any created being with space and time, and the ultimate perspective of the Creator of space and time.

The Power of Perspectivalism

This humble but hopeful theory of knowledge could be a breakthrough in epistemology (which seems to have fallen on hard times recently). It could also provide a "grand unified theory" of ethics, by fusing deontology, teleology, and existential ethcs.