Immediacracy, could you please specify what, exactly, you would like to add to our understanding that does not exist according to the "materialist" paradigm as you understand it? So far you have been using terms that are very open to misunderstanding. Example: "Logos." Within the context of Pythagorean/Hermetic/Platonic and neo-Platonic thought, "Logos" has a specific and detailed meaning: a harmonizing proportion that integrates the material world with the World of Forms/the higher realm that exists outside of Plato's Cave. The Logos is the principle of "divine intelligence" or "universal order" responsible for making the Cosmos an ordered, "lawful" (as in natural "law") realm rather than a formless chaos.
I'm guessing that most of the atheist posters here would likely reject the existence of a World of Forms or the idea that our experience of "reality" is nothing but shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave, a collection of imperfect projections of the perfect Forms in the higher realm. So, people who are familiar with this concept of the Logos would see your use of the term as advocating this sort of world view and reply that you're asserting all sorts of woo. You may or may not be using "Logos" in this fashion. If you're not, then the term is basically undefined and we have no way of knowing what you're actually talking about.
Now, I'm going to try to offer my best "translation" of what I think you might be saying. Please correct me where I'm wrong:
>ahem<
The materialist-reductionist paradigm operates on the principle that a complete understanding of reality can be gained by breaking things down to their smallest component parts. With a complete understanding of the component parts ("matter") we can in principle gain a complete understanding of all material entities (such as life forms, people, and symphonies) without needing to apply any terms or principles that do not refer directly to the fundamental particles of matter, such as "meaning" "consciousness" "purpose" "experience" "thought," and so on. Given a Grand Unified Theory that explains the nature of the very most fundamental component/s of matter/energy/spacetime--the sought-after "equation that fits on a T-shirt," we could basically understand "Life, the Universe, and Everything" without making reference to any non-material terms or principles. We will have succeeded in reducing everything to matter-in-motion, and the language of consciousness is rendered irrelevant.
This paradigm is incorrect. There are principles and properties that can be demonstrated to exist, but which cannot be reduced to the behavior of fundamental particles--or alternatively, these properties and principles must, in some sense, be inherent within the fundamental particles. An analogy demonstrated by Buckminster Fuller:
Take a cotton rope, and braid one end into a nylon rope, which is in turn braided into a hemp rope, which is in turn braided into a PVC rope, so that you have one rope composed of several different materials. Tie a slip knot in one end. Then, move the knot down through the various materials--through the cotton, nylon, hemp, and PVC until it has passed through the whole combined rope. What is the
knot made of? It should be apparent that the knot is not reducible to any of the materials of the combined rope. The knot could be embodied in a wide range of materials, as a 3-D computer graphic, or even a set of topographical equations on a blackboard. Each material embodiment of the knot is a
special-case manifestation of the knot which, regardless of the material being used, possesses certain properties such as shape and the ability to "slip" along the material (with some variation in ease depending on a material's flexibility and friction coefficient).
The knot itself is a pattern integrity, a generalized operating principle that transcends but includes all special-case manifestations of it in matter. It is non-material, yet it "governs" the behavior of matter whenever it appears physically in a special-case manifestation. The behavior of the knot cannot be predicted by observation of fundamental particles in reduced isolation. There are many examples of such generalized operating principles which apply to all special-case manifestations but cannot be reduced to any particular special-case manifestation or to fundamental particles. "Triangles are self-bracing" applies to all special-case manifestations of "triangle" whether they're made of wood, metal, or toothpicks and gumdrops. This principle cannot be deduced from observation of a single piece of metal, wood, a lonely gumdrop, or a hydrogen atom.
Instead, the principle emerges from the synergetic
[1] integration of multiple material components, and it is irreducible. "Life" is a self-perpetuating pattern integrity that maintains itself in a non-equilibrium state by tapping into an entropic gradient (such as that between the Sun and empty space, mediated by the atmosphere, water, and land of the Earth) to create a localized, special-case anti-entropic region of higher order. While it is not in any sense supernatural, life also cannot be understood completely by the reductionist methodology of breaking it down to, and isolating, its material sub-components. If we knew nothing about life, we would not be able to deduce its existence by observing the behavior of a hydrogen atom, or superstrings, or whatever ultimate fundamental entities the hydrogen atom is composed of.
Therefore, higher-order synergetic pattern integrities such as conscious life forms cannot be fully understood within the limits of materialist reductionism, but must be approached on their own terms. The language of consciousness--"meaning" "purpose" "qualia" "experience" "love" and so on--is genuinely meaningful and refers to real properties of higher-order pattern integrities. They are not mere illusions fostered by a Cosmos that is really only of fundamental matter-particles in motion. The fact that these things cannot be dissected with reductionist methodology does not make them any less real. Rather, the inability of reductionism to make sense of them demonstrates the limits of the reductionist approach.
Furthermore, these generalized operating principles of Universe (known and unknown), and the synergetic integration of all of them, are, as far as we can tell, metaphysically "necessary" or in some sense "built in" to Universe. Taken in total, they form an inventory of real "things" that are embodied in,
but not made of, matter, yet also not "supernatural" or "magical." They are demonstrably real, yet they do not fit within the OMM paradigm. Therefore, the OMM paradigm is limited/flawed, and a different paradigm must be applied if we are to have an accurate understanding of Universe, especially of non-material, emergent, synergetic realities such as consciousness.
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So: is that pretty much what you're getting at?
Everyone else: Does the above attempted interpretation/explanation make any more sense to you than what Immediacracy has been saying?
