That seems to me a kind of backwards fundamentalism. The text must mean what you think it means, even if its author didn't understand it that
way.

Yeah, I see your point. If it were just me saying these things you would be absolutely correct. But if God truly is speaking through the Church then I would be quite mistaken not to heed those teachings and interpret scripture accordingly (and indeed I have never found the Church's position to be at odds with a sensible reading of scripture). Remember that within scripture itself even Satan quotes scripture, Thus, there should be more than mere surface meanings and clearly-stated positions. There should be a final and trustworthy authority.

Why can't the core fact about the text be that "the metaphysical affirmation of creation rests upon an idea of divine supremacy which is identical with the biblical idea," as McKenzie says?

I have no qualm with that as you've stated it. I just think that it is also something more. I've had enough "aha!" moments with scripture when people explain to me something I've never understood before that I have come to expect a great, un-mined richness therein... layers upon layers, meaning upon meaning, all of it seamlessly integrated into a beautiful and coherent whole. I just have a sense that even in the ancient words of Genesis can be found meaning and truth which could not have been known of old, but only though the microscope of the Church,

Nevertheless, I hold that the Genesis account must be consistent with creation ex nihilo, whether or not the ancient human author saw it that way.

That seems to me a kind of backwards fundamentalism. The text must mean what you think it means, even if its author didn't understand it that way. Why can't the core fact about the text be that "the metaphysical affirmation of creation rests upon an idea of divine supremacy which is identical with the biblical idea," as McKenzie says?

I linked this earlier, I guess you didn't read it.

No, I didn't (Sorry!). I'm struggling just to find time to reply at all... I don't know how you guys do it! :) I will try to have a look at the entire link later (in addition to what you reproduced).

Just fyi I'm pushing this hard because it, in my opinion and the opinion of many others, is a major conflicting piece of background information.

I think it is a mistake to read Genesis in the literal-historic sense and then wield any inaccuracies among the "background information" against the principal message of the text.

But in any case, you don't have to go as far as the flood to do that. The simple creation of day and night before sun and earth does the trick. (OR it's a clue that the ancient author didn't intend to write in the purely literal-historical sense!)

My position is that God did not seize the mind of the ancient author and order every detail of his writing (or transcribing of oral tradition) to be free of every inconsistency. Instead, he inspired the author to reveal certain truths about God and our relationship with him, subject to the interpretive authority of the Church he would later establish.

Now, with a valid authority to interpret all this (which, as I hold, is the Church established by Christ) we can weed out what was intended for our belief and what was not. (This is not always easy, which is precisely why we have a magesterium.)

If I were to reject that authority then I might be more nervous about things: if not the specific conflicting historical details then at least the variety of doctrinal interpretations.

But I do not expect scripture to stand alone. In fact, there never was and scripture without a human authority to stand beside it. The pentateuch came to its final form along with Moses; the following Old Testament books alongside God's established priests and prophets; the New Testament by the apostles to whom Christ granted the authority to "bind and loosen", whom he specifically sent to "preach to all nations", and to whom he gave the authority of right judgment : "If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector." (Mt 18:17)

God did not simply leave a book. Scriptures are a part of the story, not the whole. That is why Catholics also hold as dear tradition ("There are also many other things that Jesus did, but if these were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world would contain the books that would be written. --Jn 21:25; "So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter," (2 Thess. 2:15)) and the teaching authority of the church. ("You, then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and
what you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful
men who will be able to teach others also," (2 Tim. 2:1-2))

And I really don't understand why you seem so anxious to defend Genesis as depicting creation ex nihilo.

I do not argue that the ancient author(s) of Genesis must have understood that God created ex nihilo, or that they necessarily were trying to convey that point.

However, I do hold that scripture is inspired by God, and thus cannot contradict itself on matters of theological doctrine (I am not speaking here of strict historical or scientific matters, particularly regarding the most ancient of biblical texts).

Who would expect the metaphysics of ancient Hebrews to be identical to the more modern understanding?

I wouldn't. But as I said above, I would expect the doctrinal teaching of their inspired texts to be consistent with the whole of revelation.

It is no more a threat to Catholic beliefs to say Genesis does not assert creation ex nihilo than it is to say God didn't create the world in six days and rest on the seventh.

I agree completely. Nevertheless, I hold that the Genesis account must be consistent with creation ex nihilo, whether or not the ancient human author saw it that way. And I think that it is. At the very least, it does not teach the opposite.

Lots here, and thanks for it, so just one initial reaction to be going on with.

For me there is no worthwhile mind-body problem. Most importantly there is no missing data, no new data that is introduced by the astonishing experience of being conscious. (I shall not talk of qualia in deference to Dennett who is allergic to them).

I have no problem that our dashboard of instruments doesn't identify orange-just-there as R240, G075, B020 or Strawberry as Aromatic Amine A 172 Aromatic Amine C 222. Our senses evolved separately and needed quality distinction one from another (though later we evolved to muddle them up a bit to achieve metaphor and improved problem solving...and the curious idea we could possibly understand something!) What is possibly more interesting is the colour pink (and all non monochromatic colours) are singular experiences and not compound (redblue say). This flows from our need to use spectacular data compression techniques every where to prevent sensory overload. Retinas produce "jpegs" with an eightfold compression over the RAW rod output. (This also makes eyes moveable connected by much thinner optic nerves.) Metadata replaces data in its storage with categories rather than specifics, turning us in one swell foop into Homo Memorator, Man the Narrator. Metadata replaces data everywhere. A single shade of pink replaces a whole range of different Redblues, which we can therefore no longer distinguish. Jpegs aren't quite as good either. But memories with category tags....we stumbled into something good there.

So, I have yet to see a problem with unaccounted for data in our experience of consciousness....

I have a lot of homework at the moment. A quick scan of the Sean Carroll has me possibly agree with him. Top and bottom in the brain's case, though, rather begs a question about what is critical and what mere finessing. My favourite parts of the brain are mixing bits where top meets bottom and critical meets finesse; the associative corteces driving metaphorical thinking, perhaps, the hippocampus adding visceral value to memories and the anterior cingulate cortex where fight and flight action meets, now-hang-on-a-minute-lets-put-the-kettle-on-and-think-about-this....(and a sense of humour) reside.

I see most such philosophising about mental processes becoming increasingly redundant in the face of actual knowledge about brain function. A lot of such theories one way, the other, or neither are going to have to put up or shut up.

A lot of our concerns about mind are antique, riddled with antique conceptions of its possible form. Free will/determinism is not the question to ask and always nets a botched answer. (On a good day I may co-operate and say I'm a compatabilist....but, so what?) The right questions are... have I thought about this enough to be happy to own all of my actions that result from it? Have I got the right answer? After two affirmatives I should need nothing else.

Self organised criticality became a proper area of neurological study about 6 years ago when the sensing, computing and mathematical capability first started to come together in adequate forms. The ideas are old but instances of marginal stability had been studied elsewhere (in the cochlear, heart beats, and epilepsy and migraines as an indicator of a line crossed.) Here's a chatty discussion of the (very young) field

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/criticality-in-biology/

My view is that consciousness is a marker of current salience and what is framed by it are those details that may go on for longer term storage if they make a re-appearance or two in that same salient frame. It does not in any sense drive actions directly, but acts rather as (part of) an active post hoc narrator. This is the brain generating the categorising, meta data memory tags that make for ready retrieval of memories with their editorialised values (courtesy of the hippocampus) built in. This salience frame gets used for much memory refinement and rehearsal to try and ensure the unconscious brute does what we appear to want.

Self-consciousness is part of a self model generating process to create compact and up to the second models of ourselves to be used in simulations of future outcomes for known or unknown encounters.

I'm not sure in either case that self organised criticality has a big role to play...perhaps in quickly getting alternative category tags for memories...perhaps for achieving the monte carlo type analyses we want from simulations of encounters.

Edit 10 hrs (part of)

Feser definitely makes it very easy to attack his ideas for non-philosophical reasons. I suggest starting with his blog post, Chomsky on the mind-body problem. Possibly, his blog post Davidson’s anomalous monism might be interesting. What might be helpful here is that Davidson tries to take an in-between position, between physicalism and the hylemorphic dualism which Feser espouses (along with Aquinas and the Thomist tradition). The paper you identified might also be good; I haven't [yet] read it. I could stand to understand this topic better, myself. I'm not happy with just reading Feser, but I haven't gotten around to finding anyone who takes his (or the Aristotelian-Thomistic) ideas on the mind-body problem seriously. So much to read, to investigate!

Is the essence of Feser's position here that Universals are real and not synthesised in brains?

Possibly; I would be a bit more careful and say that there seems to be some connection between formal and final causation, secondary qualities, and universals such that they are not merely fictions somehow invented by humans. It's not clear whether some or all of them are necessarily mind-independent, as if they could exist without any mind whatsoever. Then again, God is said to sustain the very existence of reality, so mind-dependence does not imply all of the common definitions of 'subjective'.

The strongest thing I can say is that Feser, and I, reject the mechanistic conception of causation and reality. It is a useful model in some domains, but neither of us thinks it can possibly be ontologically true. It is the mechanistic portrayal of the brain to which I, and I think he, would most strongly object. Get too far away from a mechanistic model, and one might converge on hylemorphic dualism without necessarily identifying it as a dualism. Hylemorphic dualism is certainly very different from Cartesian dualism.

If so how does that stand with the use in AI of vertical inference stacks with evolutionary (self iterating/learning) visual recognition programs "discovering" useful output inferences like edges and objects for themselves?

I suspect Feser would question your use of 'useful'. If that word merely means what is conducive to the propagation of genes/​memes, perhaps he would be ok with it. But if there is any claim as to accessing truth—that is, not merely adapting to one's [ever-changing] environment—then he might ask, "'useful' according to whom?"

Rosen looks really interesting. I will probably buy it though I worry it misses a lot of recent neuroscience on the very many near-chaotic systems that seem (among other things) to enhance detection of artifacts in noisy environments.

Rosen most strongly criticizes the mechanistic understanding of reality as being omnicompetent, and especially as being sufficient to distinguish 'life' from 'non-life' (hence the title: Life Itself). The neuroscience you describe may well break with what Rosen means by "mechanistic"; he provides formal definitions (matching them up with Aristotle's four causes), so a rigorous analysis should be possible. I find myself wondering whether his "mechanistic" is also ruptured by ideas such as expressed by Nobel laureates Robert B. Laughlin in A Different Universe and Ilya Prigogine in The End of Certainty.

Thanks for the details. To what extent is this a situation of finding more and more efficient causes, thereby denying the existence of, or negating the need for, any formal or final causes? The general idea I get from what you say is an insistence on 'reductionist' causation, a view shared by Sean Carroll as can be seen in his [rejection of] Downward Causation.

Your use of "sit on the edge of chaos" and "sit on the edge of stability" intrigue me; where would I go to learn more about this? I am barely acquainted with the concepts of stability and robustness in control theory. The sense I get—which might be totally wrong—is that of being maximally open to new and/or more intricate patterns without going haywire.

I also wonder whether what you say is accurate for consciousness and subconsciousness, but possibly not for self-consciousness. Is this possibly the case? Self-consciousness certainly seems to make possible things that are not possible with the other two (if they make sense as being distinct from self-consciousness, instead of the same thing in comparison).

i agree with everything you said.