Using Dialogue to Think

To develop my Personalist Philosophy I had to think things thru carefully. To do this I wrote a book. This book is a modern novel that tells a story, but the main character is Socrates, so there are Socratic dialogues. True to form, this forced me to think deeply about things.

From the Logic of Limitless

Structure in the non-physical universe

Socrates says, “you’re advancing further than your present argument supports. What about structure in non-physical things? Abstract things are all instances of structure, but they are not made of elemental atoms. Where does their structure come from?”
Eleazar says, “that depends on what sort of non-physical things we are talking about. There are abstract things which are human creations made of language, such as archegete and monotheism. These language abstractions arise from a physical context of operations. Separated from that context they become cyphers. There are other things that emerge from physical reality and exist as abstract realities. These are real non-physical things. They have reality independent of human language but their reality is fully dependent on the physical situation from which they emerge. In this group are number, sum, and the foundational realities of structure, movement and function.”
Socrates says, “I wish to discuss the abstract things that exist independent of our thought and words.”
Eleazar says, “keep in mind that I will be using language to describe them. These things exist as real things apart from words and thought, but to discuss them we must use words and thought.”
Socrates says, “I can see the sense of that. We shall use the words made for these things to discuss them.”
Eleazar says, “all abstract realities are grounded in physical reality. Abstract things such as number arise from physical reality. Proper use of language requires us to keep abstractions of every kind grounded in physical things because everything real about them has a physical origin. Number has its origins in collections of things and so do sub-concepts derived from number, such as sum. A sum is the total number of things in one or more collections subjected to a mathematical operation. Sum is an example of an abstract thing being grounded in operations involving real or potential physical things. Likewise, geometry is the abstract description of real or potential physical objects. Abstract realities emerge from the physical universe. The structure of non-physical realities emerges from their relationship to the universe of physical things. Abstract things get their structure from the real or potential physical things from which they emerge.”

Personality Emerges from the Particle Level

Eleazar says, “In the world of things, structure and function translate upwards. Things get their structure from the atoms they consist of, but a things function is not the sum of the atoms it consists of, instead its function is to be the thing it is. Emergent Wholeness is now seen in the things function, to be the whole thing it is. It is the nature of every greater than the sum of its parts thing to function as the thing it is.  Function on this level emerges from the collective particle movement within the structures of all its atoms. So the single function of being a thing emerges from all the distinct instances of particle movement within all of its atomic structures. Being is not some sort of random accident. It is the result of the processes I am calling Emergent Wholeness operating at the particle level enabling whole things to come to be and function as the things they are. All being is embodied being, be it inert or living.
Alcibiades asks, “what is it that makes one thing living and another thing inert? What causes life?”
Eleazar says, “life is caused by the same operations that form inert things, the combination of its physical atoms into functional being, but in living things function in the form of a purposeful homeostatic personality emerges and operates processes that maintain the life of the organism.”
“Atomic structure and particle level movement make us reconsider the word thriving and to what things it applies. Particle movement drives the continuous operations going on in the matter a thing consists of. So, beneath the appearances of perception inert things thrive. The inert things being emerges from the collective function of all its atoms and in this way it purposefully thrives as the thing it is. At the particle level an imperceptible thriving underlies the nature of inert things as well as the living.”
“Living beings are collections of atoms from whose collective structure and movement a purposeful homeostatic personality emerges. An instance of homeostatic personality emerges as function from the collective movement within the physical beings atomic structure. An instance of homeostatic personality is a real abstract thing but the visual meaning of the word emerge must be avoided here because all personality is embodied. In one very limited sense an instance of personality is an autonomous thing, but operationally it is intertwined with the living things physical being. Personality as a real abstract thing is coincident with the collection of atoms it emerges from, and its emergence is an ongoing process. Life is a process, born of function, thriving and purpose operating at the particle level. Life is an operation of Emergent Wholeness that happens when the collective function of a physical thing animates it with homeostatic personality. 
“In very simple organisms this personality is entirely homeostatic and one must strain to see the rudiments of personality in its operation but they are there. We don’t give an individual pond slime cell a name and keep it as a pet but the living purposes that keep it alive are organized according to the life principle of mind, heart and will personality structure.”
“Personality is the fourth foundational reality. Rocks do not have a homeostatic personality but the lichens growing on them do.” 
Alcibiades chuckles, flexes his muscles and says, “I am the rock.”
Eleazar says, “no, you are Alcibiades, because that is who emerges from the present collection of atoms you consist of.”
Socrates says, “I think I understand. Is it correct to say that Alcibiades’ personality is an instance of Emergent Wholeness, the abstract foundational reality we are calling personality emerging as an embodied personal being? In your cosmology is Alcibiades’ personality a non-physical thing operating coincidentally with his physical aspect.”
“Yes,” says Eleazar, “and that is a good way to begin rethinking personality from what it is conventionally conceived as being. From there we can begin thinking about what personality really is.”
“In conventional thinking human personality is the conscious self. What we think, the feelings we express, the desires we experience, and the determinations formed by our conscious self. In conventional thinking the strongest manifestations of our conscious self are our intentions. In everyday social life we use the intentions we perceive in others as a basis for meaningful interaction with them. A heuristic perspective like this is useful for living in the moment but because all heuristics generate error it is not useful for philosophical discernment.”
“Much of our complete personality is not available to our conscious mind. The homeostatic part of our personality is subconscious. Our conscious self knows we are breathing, but only pays attention to breathing when it has reason to. The homeostatic part of our personality pays attention to every breath. It’s a different form of paying attention. It’s an aspect of human personality characterized by consistency rather than change. The homeostatic personality maintains stability as our bodies age and our personalities evolve. The sole intention of the homeostatic personality is to maintain our being.”
“The conscious self is diverse. One day it’s ambitious, the next day it’s lazy. Is that who we really are? Because the conscious personality is reined in by the homeostatic personality, which is the more valid conscious self, the one reined in or the one gone off to some temporary extreme? Aren’t we much more the homeostatic personality that keeps the conscious personality alive? Perception is enthralled by the dramatic conscious self and this enthrallment hides the deeper reality of who we really are. The less dramatic aspects of personality may not single us out as individuals but they do play the more substantial role in our being what we are.”
“To form an accurate idea of what personality really is we need to examine where it comes from and how it develops. Personality has its origin in atoms combining into things that get their structure from the atoms they consist of. For a concrete example let’s look at Socrates. The abstract personal entity which is Socrates’ personality has organized itself within and as a result of the physical entity that is Socrates’ body.”
“The human being, Socrates, began developing in his mother’s womb and has been moving through time since then. The life of Socrates has been a bodily process coincident and corresponding with the processes of his homeostatic personality. Within Socrates’ body, as it grew, the conscious personality of Socrates developed.”
“Individual human life is a single unified process involving both physical and non-physical aspects of being. The subconscious personality of Socrates regulates and is regulated by bodily functions. The homeostatic personality and the homeostatic bodily processes corresponding to it maintain the balances necessary to his physical and psychological life. On the conscious level Socrates experiences the universe as an individual human being moving bodily through time and space. He is shaped by this experience which is also in many ways shaped by him.”
“Being a conscious person what he feels about his experiences has a crucial role in shaping his own personality. Alongside every bodily experience is a conscious mind, heart and will interfacing with itself and the world. The conscious personality processes the details of life while the homeostatic personality operates the organism.”
“The abstract inner realities of personality emerge from embodied experiences and so do complex social realities. Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, being the physical offspring of Sophroniscus, relates to his father physically before anything else. All the social realities of their relationship emerge from the physical relationship of their embodied beings. All the social realities of our very complex cultures emerge from the relationships of embodied human beings to one another. Our understanding of every social phenomenon must be grounded in the realities of embodied beings to be meaningful. Embodied human beings are the atoms of social reality.”
“The non-physical processes of Socrates’ being are coincident with and correspond to physical processes. Thus, the physical bodies development, all the life processes of Socrates’ body and its movement through spacetime are the primary means by which the conscious personality of Socrates comes to be. The crucial reality in the creation of Socrates, the human being, are the lifelong processes of embodied being. The same processes in another body created Alcibiades and both of you are individual personalities by reason of your separate physical beings and separate life processes.”

Personality the Fourth Foundational Reality

“The individual self is shaped by many diverse processes resulting in an individual human personality, a strangely hard-edged non-physical thing. As a hard-edged abstraction conscious human personality is unique because it is the opposite of one single thing. Structure is structure, number is number, and other hard-edged abstract entities are likewise one consistent thing but not personality. Conscious human personality is a world of disparate cognitions continuously self-organizing into an individual personal identity characterized by mind, heart and will. There are reflective aspects of our conscious personality that play a small role but these are only a tiny part of the self-organization that operates within our being. Personality structure is a special form of purposeful organization which in operation creates an individual identifiable self that has a discernable outline. I’ll never struggle to see where the personality of Socrates ends, and the personality of Alcibiades begins. The complex processes that make this possible are the mysterious personality organizing operations of Emergent Wholeness.”
“We see the results of this organizing principle in all the various instances of personality. The self-organizing processes of personality formation operate similar to practical omniscience, where a greater than sum objective whole operates by subjective awareness of the parts. Thus, limited personality is formed into a greater than sum whole from a limited set of parts, while the universal process forms Limitless Personality from a limitless set, that is from everything in all time. From this perspective the distinction between Limitless and limited personality is seen in substantial empirical terms. The holistic operations of personality emergence are informed by function emerging from every atom of the beings physical aspect and the organizational principle that I have been calling personality operates using that. Personality is a very small common word for something vast and incomprehensible when we begin thinking of it in this way, but it’s the only word we have for it.”
“Function is at the heart of being. Every inert thing exists to be what it is. Every living thing strives homeostatically to be what it is. Every conscious being strives to be the individual that it is. We see the rudiments of this in animals and it finds its fuller expression in conscious human personality. As operations of Emergent Wholeness, being and personality emerge from processes operating at the particle level. That may sound simplistic but in operation it’s infinitely and eternally complex.”
“Personality, homeostatic and conscious, is the fourth foundational reality. Like structure, movement and function personality’s role as a foundational reality is treated as an underlying assumption in conventional heuristic thinking. Humans are social by nature and adept at using a vast array of interpersonal heuristics. Ordinary social functioning in human societies is intuitive, and complex. Being heuristic by nature our social abilities hobble accurate philosophical calculation.”
“Like so many other things we have discussed today looking beneath the common underlying assumptions is key to understanding the processes of reality. Our own individual personality pervades our understanding of the universe so we never question our own individuality. We know we are distinct and assume everyone else is too. If this were not the case, individuality would be regarded as miraculous. Personality structure as part of the processes of Emergent Wholeness has a foundational role in the process of living things coming to be, existing for a time and passing away. By analyzing the foundational role of personality in the processes of reality we can recognize the homeostatic nature of the universe and begin to see the particle universe as the physical aspect of God’s Being.”
Alcibiades says, “I grasp what you are saying but I am not sure observations about the operations that create our personalities can be extended out to the entire universe.”
Socrates says, “Alcibiades makes a good point. Unlike a concrete mathematical principle which can be proven, personality as an organizing principle is very abstract.”
Eleazar says, “yes, personality is an abstract thing and the complexity of particle mapping even the most simple embodied human being for even a brief period of time would be daunting if not impossible but that is not our only source of proof.” 
“As we did with structure, movement and function, fiction can be used to test whether personality is a foundational reality or not. A fictional world without structure is impossible and so is one where there are living characters without mind, heart and will personality structure. Aries, might be said to be without feeling, but this is just an allusion to the sentiments of the god of war being unlike our own. Personality is a more diverse entity than structure, movement or function so a storyteller could create a character without will, a sort of ultimate slave, but that characters fictionally nonexistent will would prove the experiment by its conspicuous absence. In any world, fictional or real, where social beings operate, mind, heart and will personality structure will be a foundational reality.”

Freedom and Conscious Human Personality

Socrates says, “so, conscious personality, the thinking mind, the feeling heart and the self-determinations of human will emerge from vast diversity into a single self-conscious human identity because of the foundational realities operating in the universe.”
“Yes,” says Eleazar, “and the development of conscious personality onto the framework of homeostatic personality introduced a freedom and creativity into our world that simpler completely homeostatic personalities do not possess. In homeostatic personality the mind, heart and will structure thrives within an ever changing environment but the homeostatic personality is not free in the human sense of that word. Each plant is individual in the sense that no two plants are exactly alike, but not because a self-conscious personal identity is formed by its life cycle. The self-conscious aspect of human personality is a very special form of Emergent Wholeness.”
“Conscious personality can absorb many of the temporal causes experienced in its environment rather than react to them as a purely homeostatic personality must. Then, rather than reacting by instinct, conscious personality can choose to act as it wishes, including the ability to do nothing at all about a cause to which a purely homeostatic personality would be enslaved. Of all the many things setting humans apart from other animals, our capacity for resisting the force of causes and making personal choices is the most profound. Intention independent of external cause is a most human trait.”
“But plants are not slaves,” says Socrates.
“No, they are not,” says Eleazar, “but they are not creatures of choice either.”
“What about animals?” says Alcibiades. “Horses have a will of their own. A good rider shapes the horses will to his own desire and avoids fighting the horse whenever that can be avoided.”
Socrates says, “Alcibiades, this is no time to complicate things. Obviously there are degrees of consciousness and right now we are discussing human consciousness. Let’s stick to that.”
Eleazar says, “because conscious personality developed from homeostatic personality we see a gradient from the fully conscious down to the fully homeostatic.”
Socrates has a thought and asks, “what about Limitless Personality? In concrete reality is there both a homeostatic and conscious aspect to God’s Personality, or is that just part of your descriptive language?”

Limitless Emergence as Universal Causation

Eleazar says, “within the operations of personality there is a homeostatic to conscious gradient, but the subtlety of gradients confounds explanation so I chose to refer to each end of the gradient as a broad aspect of personality. The precise answer to your question then is that homeostatic and conscious are just words we have made for things as we see them. The thing personality is one thing in all living beings but your question reminds me of an important distinction. Unlike the gradient from homeostatic to conscious, Limitless Personality is not just the top level on a gradient scale of personality limitation. Limitless is a unique form of personality, distinct from limited persons. There are structural similarities but God’s personality has no place on a gradient of personality limitation.”
“Mind, heart and will frame the structure of Limitless Personality but the operations of these characteristic features are infinite and eternal. Limitless Personality is complete personality. God’s Personality is complete because the operations of Limitless Personality are eternal and infinite while limited personality operates locally during brief periods of time. The behaviors of limited personalities are heuristic because every limited personality is incomplete while Limitless Personality being complete behaves in all-encompassing ways.”
Socrates says, “I think your description of Limitless Personality and Being far exceeds the word complete. There is a static quality to complete and also a temporal quality, a thing is complete now, was complete in the past or will be complete in the future. Also, at some time a complete thing was or at least could become incomplete. This is the nature of the term.”
Eleazar says, “complete is an ordinary word, and my meaning may exceed it but it’s the best word we have, so I use it. There is no better word. We must describe things in the limited language we have and ordinary words have inherent meanings that operate in that language.”
Socrates says, “I feel that my personality is a complete thing, despite the fact that I am a limited being.”
“It is,” says Eleazar, “you are one complete, entire thing, but you are not the complete universe and the Limitless Personality that emerges from it. So in that sense you are not complete. This is quibbling over the subtleties of language. Can we back to the discussion?”
“Let’s do that but thank you for clarifying your meaning. I believe that added something to the discussion.”
Eleazar pauses a moment and says, “homeostasis in limited beings enables thriving within an external environment. With God, nothing is external. The universal process we see operating in our world and the universe beyond is all within the Being of God. We cannot expect the universal process to be a form of homeostasis we easily recognize. To our immediate perceptions, the universal process does not resemble the homeostatic processes operating in our own being and its environment. However, the homeostatic character of the world of things explains what we see every minute of every day. We live in an operational world of seasons and cycles. A universe that by routine operation is ever changing while forever staying similar. We live in a homeostatic universe.”
“The homeostatic aspect of Limitless Personality is the universal cause that explains the world of things in terms of infinite and eternal causation. Emergent Wholeness beginning at the particle level and ending with the emergence of the Personality of Limitless Deity from the totality of the physical universe is the operation of universal causation. In an operational perspective of the physical universe a whole emerges from the structure and movement of its parts and at the level of eternal and infinite totality that whole is God. The world of local, temporal and limited things including limited beings all have their being within the Limitless Being of God.”
“My explanations have proceeded in two directions, from limited to Limitless and alternating back again but the universal process of reality unfolds in only one direction, from Limitless to limited. Our planet and the world of things which we experience is not eternal and infinite. It is a creation of the universal process by which things come to be, exist for a time and then pass away. Our world and all the things in it are creations of the homeostatic processes operating within the Being of God. Preceding the local and temporal causation of our world is universal causation operating as Emergent Wholeness within the Being of God.”
“God is complete in a very special sense of that word. As you pointed out, my use of the word complete in the context of God and Limitation goes far beyond its ordinary meaning. The complete universe is dynamic, it’s infinite and eternal in scope and it changes over time. This exceeds the ordinary stationary meaning of complete as a concrete term. There is a totality of all things that for our immediate consideration operates in the present, but must also be understood to have always operated and to continue operating for all time to come. This eternal totality is what I mean when I say God’s Personality is complete.”
“Limitless Personality is not limited personality with the limitations removed. Limitless Personality behaves in all-encompassing ways because it is eternal, infinite, and complete. All the behaviors of our limited personalities are heuristic because we are local, temporal and incomplete. We need mental shortcuts because we lack the complete thinking of practical omniscience. We are prone to frustration followed by negative emotions because our limited intentions are often thwarted. Negative emotion is inevitable when personality is incomplete. The moral universe, which being human we must consider, is not one of good versus evil, rather it is one Complete Being with many incomplete beings within it. In an ultimate moral reality we are not wrong, just incomplete. This benign perspective releases the inevitable moral pressure which the frustrations of limitation generate in our being. I was raised in a hyper-moral religious tradition and this perspective came as quite a relief.”