Contradictions: Neuroscience and Religion (Springer Praxis Books / Popular Science)

Author:Musacchio, José M.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published: 2012-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

6.5 Summary and conclusions

Both arithmetic and language are incomplete open symbolic systems containing processes that cannot be defined but are intuitively understandable and essential for communication. Thus, all words must be directly or indirectly grounded in our experiences (the what-it-is-like) which are associated to other experiences that provide their meaning (aboutness). The impossibility of justifying ethics and esthetics by purely abstract principles (or axioms) is also similar to the impossibility of justifying a closed mathematical system. This is because our intuitions and experiences necessarily lie at the core of everything that we can understand. Experiences are the link that gives unity to our symbolic universe. However, this also means that we live in some kind of Platonic cave which is difficult or impossible to transcend. Our genetic endowment and experiences provide all possible meaning to what there is, or to what we can understand. We are complex systems with experiences and symbolic languages which together form a closed system that presumably precludes any emotional interaction with extraterrestrials. The symbolic forms that characterize our culture—such as mathematics, logic, language, ethics, and esthetics—are grounded in our common experiences. This implies, as Rebecca Goldstein has said, that we might be “the measure of all things”, as originally proposed by the Sophists in the fifth century B.C.

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