All Things Are Full of Gods Quotes

“There are no doubt brain-states associated with every experience, transcendent or mundane; why, then, should the trivial truth that mystical or contemplative insight is correlated with a distinctive set of neural activities be taken as evidence that such insight is merely a psychological state, without a real object? By that logic, the reality that there’s a brain-state associated with hearing a performance of Bach means that I can’t believe in the objective reality of that music. Whatever the case may be, I know this: to imagine that a “science of mind”—a science of irreducible first-person experience—is possible in terms purely of the third-person facts of neurophysiology, without reference to what mental interiority discloses to itself about itself, is worse than folly. The only “science of mind” that might actually reveal the intrinsic nature of the mental would be something like the contemplative disciplines proper to the great mystical traditions of the world’s religions. There can be no real science of mind that’s not, to put it bluntly, a spiritual science.”
― David Bentley Hart, All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life

“So, yes, considered as an algorithm within a language, Merge is indeed an elementary process. But, imagined as some sort of mediation between prelinguistic operations of the brain and language-use, it would be a miraculous leap across an infinite qualitative abyss. It can help explain the extravagant fecundity and power and limitless expressive range of language, perhaps, but it definitely can't explain anything about the origin of language. [...] If Merge is the most basic linguistic operation, it's primordial only structurally, not genetically. It's the complexity of language that generates the simplicity of the operation, and not the reverse.”
― David Bentley Hart, All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life