Q-&-A

We're back. What a fine Spring Break in the sun it was, in Arizona! 

And what a reality-check, to come home to this morning's hard freeze. But as James William Buffett said, you've got to take the weather with you wherever you go.

In Experience class tonight we face a fascinating convergence of topics: conversion, de-conversion, shifting dynamic centers of personal energy, Darwinian spirituality, an "arch of experience"...

So let's see if I can answer some of my own questions. 

• Have you experienced a significant (de-)conversion? What precipitated it? How did it change you? Not exactly, but in retrospect I suppose I did have something like a conversion experience when I discovered philosophy. Nothing very specific stands out as the instigating trigger, just a growing sense that my undergrad academic studies in poli-sci were shedding more heat than light. Reading Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Philosophy had a lot to do with that dawning recognition, alongside Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection. A few years earlier I'd stopped going to my family's Southern Baptist church, but full de-conversion awaited my encounter with the language and critical spirit of philosophy.
• Do you interpret "soul" in an "ontological sense" (as naming an existing and self-subsistent entity) or do you prefer to describe it in some other "phenomenal" terms (like Buddhists and Humians)? What do you think of Michael Shermer's definition of soul as a pattern of information"? I agree with Shermer, "whether there is an afterlife or not, we must live as if this is all there is. Our lives, our families, our friends, our communities (and how we treat others) are more meaningful when every day, every moment, every relationship and every person counts." So, soul to me means living in the shadow of finitude and realizing that I must take nothing and no one for granted. All things must pass. 
• How would you characterize "the habitual center of your dynamic/personal energy"? That's Jamesian language for what I usually call enthusiasm or "delight," the ideas that are "hot" and animating for me, the "things that make life worth living"... I made this list a long time ago, I still  stand by it: baseball, Beatles, beer, Britain... and I should have added the idea of evolution as a natural-historical unfolding of some of the implicit possibilities of life. And that brings us to the next question,
• Do you agree that Darwin was a great spiritual teacher? Why don't more of us appreciate the "grandeur" in the evolutionary view of all life as inextricably related? I do! We're all related! And at least here in the south, the grandeur is muted by misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Darwin was not a Social Darwinist. He was not a militant atheist. He was a methodical scientist who saw the deep spiritual significance of life's universal relatedness. 
• Have you had a recurrent experience of anything like Darwin's sandwalk? Every morning, every day. You've got to walk your path, if you want to think your best thoughts.
• What do you think it would be like to stand under an Arch of Experience, "a way for us to really feel what it's like to be the other"? It would be a revelation, or rather an unending series of revelations. It would be like firing one after another volley from the POV gun. It would be the greatest civilizing, empathy-awakening force we could possibly know. It just might end the NRA.