The new relevance of "relevant feature".

I came across the concept of "relevant feature" years ago in a discussion held by Stu Kauffman, a theoretical biologist, where he asked us, "What's the relevant feature of a frog"?
"It jumps"; "it's slimy"; "it's an amphibian" etc. . His answer made my head spin- "it depends on its proximity to a snake or to a fly".

I didn't know why my head spun in that moment, I just knew that it did; until today. For whatever reason, this morning with my cup of coffee and thinking journal opened to today's blank page, I wrote at the top "relevant feature and the art of interpretation". "Where did that come from? Neither had been on my mind of late. What came next surprised me even more.

The next line down I wrote, "The blindfolded men each touching their own part of the elephant" allegory and why I've never "liked" it may have to do something with "relevant feature". I felt the invitational hmmm.

In the allegory, a number of men- let's say six- are blindfolded and led to an elephant where for the first time they will each touch their own part of it. After they each had time to contemplate what they were seeing (witnessing) through their rookie touching, they exclaimed out loud their discoveries. (And as you may already guess, their exclamations differed- to say the least.) I know this analogy is pointing to something worth while, still, something about it has always rankled me in a nagging way. And then I wrote this next.

Each argues their case for their private perception being the "feature of relevance"

    a. None have seen the whole.

    b. None have seen the other parts as the others have perceived them.

At this point I begin connecting all this with my own theological discipline of hermeneutics. A favorite part of theological thinking for me, hermeneutics is the art and science of interpreting (in my case, Biblical texts). Out of the latency of this blank page I could see a new and important hermeneutic principle developing:

The more of the whole one can see, the more one is able to judge which features should be deemed as relevant in regard to a question being posed.  

I can now see why this allegory has nagged me all these years: The men were hobbled by not being able to see the whole!  How would you expect these men to do other wise?!

Of course, this illuminates the question, "what is it to see the whole when we're so trained in only looking at parts? I can see a way, and as this allegory only gets to part of the problem, I now know how to get into the rest of it.

The False Schism

It's become natural in our day to see a schism between religion and science. At heart though, this is a schism between the "naive" and the "sophisticated" and ultimately, between "faith" and "reason".  This sounds right to our ears. In reality though, this differential, "a schism between faith and reason", is off the mark: removing the capacity for faith means that the capacity for reason disappears as well. I'll explain in two thought experiments.

Imagine yourself hopping into your car to get this week's groceries. A task so mundane that you don't even wonder whether or not you'll return safely. Will you? You won't be able to answer that question until you're actually back home and answer out of hind sight. Why can't you know the answer even before getting into the car?

In other words, we humans can see beyond ourselves into the "not-yet" of space time and future, but we can't know the future until it's become history. The question we must decide for ourselves is if this uniquely human perch, is in reality, a feature or a flaw?

Back to the mundane grocery trip and what normally and beautifully takes place every day.

First of all, if you didn't believe in your safe return, you wouldn't even get into your car. To get at such believing, you conduct your act of reason by looking at the road conditions, the car conditions, or even the traffic conditions. The moment you enter your car though, you are actually believing: as long as you remained in your house you will have only been reasoning. Believing has this "pull the trigger" aspect to it.

Oh- and by the way? You latch your seat belt: the brilliance of believing, is that it takes into account that one can never have complete knowledge. (Certainty itself has no such accounting. More on this another time.)

An Interlude on "faith".

If you were reading the New Testament in its original Greek language, you would come across two words that share the same root but differ in their suffix's: PISTis and PISTuo; the first being a noun the second a verb. When we translate these from Greek into English, we translate the noun by the word "faith" and the verb by the word "believe". One could equally say when it comes to the grocery trip, "I believe that I'll return home" or, "I have faith in my safe return". Apart from nuances available to the nature of nouns and verbs in general, choosing one or the other is merely an aesthetic one.

Thought experiment two.

Imagine yourself vacationing around Niagara Falls to escape the heat of the South during the middle 1800s. Being 4:00 p.m. in the afternoon, you're standing among fellow audience members gathered to watch an acrobat perform his wiles on a tight wire strung across one of the area's chasms. The audience is amazed at what this acrobat could do on such a perilous purchase against gravity. Shore side once again, he struts to his pile of props, grabs his wheel barrow and rolling it before the audience asks, "do you believe that I can roll this across without falling?! A man shouts "YES!" "Well then, good sir- hop in!" (our mustachioed acrobat invites while gesturing the pathway to the wheel barrow with a flow of his hand).

There's that "trigger-pulling" thing again.

Reason is not in the business of pulling triggers. In this case, I would hope that it would keep us from getting into that wheel barrow: after all, what's the pay off if having faith in the situation where you do indeed need to make it acrAt most, the proof that you can remain a still and centered load while the acrobat does his business yet one more time. The splat factor is too high for such minimal payback. On the other hand are the Wright Bros. who had to overcome the beliefs of their day, namely, if God meant for us to fly, we'd have wings.

On the other hand, when we marry another, aren't we really getting into each other's wheel barrow?

How can we say that marriage is a deducible task?

The essence of being human is that we have to "pull triggers" and "get into wheel barrows". Being religious or scientific can't remove this essence.

One can always remain in a state of reason and thus remain on the sidelines. Never leaving the sidelines though, misses the mark of what being human really is.

And then their's the notion that being human is the wheel barrow...

M

Intro to The Awe and Awry

We don't just eat— we create. This unique quality that can make any biological organism into a human one, makes for the perch to experience the awe of creation; it also makes for the milieu where creation, along with our creating, sometimes goes awry.

If we all we wanted was relief from the difficulty innate to this human ability to create, we could take a "scientific" route and somehow revert to a life style of natural metabolism where we jettison this profound power of creating, opting instead for an awareness that can't trespass the boundaries made literal by an organism's genetic demarcation.

Or, we could take an Evangelical route. Here, the awry is shunned as a sign of imperfection and awe is reserved for the perfection that is their God— and for the true human residence where perfection reigns that they call heaven. The word they employ for things going awry is "sin"; they then equate "sinning" with evil. For such evangelical thinking, it follows that heaven will be a place where "sin", the very source of human frustration, will be merely a thing of the past when life took place on earth rather than in heaven.

Here's the route I want to take into the awe and awry.

First of all, I consider myself an ardent follower of Jesus. I'm equally ardent about science. So when I don't feel compelled to confine myself to neither Evangelical nor scientific orthodoxy, it's simply because neither orthodoxy has situated itself to see what is perhaps the most astonishing thing to ever be witnessed by means of being human: Creativity.

What's funny is that science is eminently a creative endeavor, while Creationist's identify themselves with the word "create" in its midst: neither properly sees what's going on when "creativity" takes its place in the warp and weft of reality's fabric.

To truly see creativity, is to truly see awe and its sidekick, the awry.