Bionoetics: Life and Mind; Religion/Spirituality and Science
Keywords:
Bionoetics, University, Consciousness, Transcendent, Noetic, NuminousAbstract
Science deals with "knowing that", third person knowledge which can be presented to the individual consciousness and verified.. It is argued here that science becomes more veridical once it reflects ontology - differences in levels of being- in its methodology. Skills learning deals with "knowing how", and often we practice to make skilled movements unconscious. The arts follow science in the schema here in what is fundamentally an attempt for Being to know itself through us, but the means are more various and less precise. Above all, the scheme here eschews the facile reductionism inherent in subjectivism and aesthetic, moral and epistemological relativism
There is also a third category of experience, relating to social processes in which we are objects as well as subjects and a fourth i.e. biological processes that secure our continued existence, and both of these are exigent in that they demand we consider ourselves as objects. It is argued here that treatment of these categories of experience should be part of the true content of religion considered as the exaltation of humanity by immersion in the sacred.
No attempt is made to supersede the sacraments like confirmation/bar mitzvah that introduce the neophyte to a new level of participation in the community. These are steeped in useful algorithmic compressions of folk psychology applied to a particular culture. It is argued that a new chapter in humanity's dialogue with the cosmos can be opened with this reconstrued science, arts, and religion.
To summarize in two sentences; It is argued that our experience oscillates between "alienated" and "centered" movements and that we should try and live in the "centered" process. This distinction is explored at the levels of sensorimotor experience, mentation, emotion, conviviality, power, and spirituality.