Credo

The beliefs of the Pharisee are contingent.  They may be revised.

Credo

  • There are necessary epistemological limits to any finite being
  • There are no distinct inner and outer realms of existence
  • Most attempts to understand minds/consciousness/experience (MCE) start with the world and try to derive MCE from it. This is perverse.1
  • The CSP starts with experience and seeks to derive the world
  • Language is intersubjectively constituted. Being linguistic, we interpret the world we meet using linguistic concepts. The world is thus largely collectively constituted. We are also collectively constituted.
  • Autonomy lies in the eye of (some other) beholder

    This postulate is of the nature of Euclid’s fifth axiom. It can be asserted or negated. Either way is fine, as long as no fundamentalism creeps in.

  • The passage of time is a curious feature of human experience. It is not objectively real in any sense.
  • In experience, subject and object are not separable entities.
  • Any useful or satisfying notion of self is not co-extensive with a singular locus of temporally unfolding experience.
  • Agency is a descriptive trick, that can never lead to a closed model.

    The concepts of agency and autonomy are not necessarily linked. They appear to be so in the definition of life though.

  • The use of personal pronouns is tricky.


Mission:  The mission of the Church is not to answer any questions.  It is not to seek the truth.  It is to ask, when we know something, what is it to know that thing.  It is to repeatedly ask what knowing is.  What is it to know?


Notes

  1. In discussing Whitehead’s constructivist account of knowledge in Process and Reality, Isabelle Stengers notes a common critique of the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness: “If consciousness, conscious perception or human intentionality are required by any objective knowledge, then they are what objective knowledge presupposes and thus cannot objectify” (p. 98) Stengers, I. (2008) A constructivist reading of Process and Reality, Theory, Culture & Society 24(4), pp. 91-110

Now, here beginneth the first lesson: