Reviews for Faces in the clouds

The average rating for Faces in the clouds based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-07-19 00:00:00 George Lucas Stewart Guthrie is the sort of person for whom academics feel compelled to guard their theories with disclaimers, caveats, conditionals, parentheses, reservations, footnotes, and the plethora (yes I am using that word) of other defense mechanisms part and parcel of ivory prose. He is also the sort of person who doggedly insists on sieging these fortresses, regardless of how long it takes, and on doing so with honor; no Trojan horses here. The tightly argued book, with nearly a thousand footnotes derived from dense and diverse source material, has the air of a magnum opus. It seems to represent the culmination of one man’s life work. A life dedicated to advancing one single idea:For many people, religious anthropomorphism consists of seeing God or gods as humanlike. In contrast, my claim is that God or gods consist in seeing the world as humanlike. [p.178]For a lay reader like myself to challenge or dispute such a statement invites criticisms such as “Read it again, more carefully this time” and “You’re not really getting what he’s saying.” In fact, if you do not reflexively make—or at least intuit—these objections to amateur content-level critiques of high-caliber works, you ought to recalibrate your thought process; I’ll let you puzzle out why. Instead, an abstracted focus on form and structure yields more insights. Here I suggest Faces in the Clouds as a shining example of how progress is made in mature intellectual disciplines: slowly and painstakingly. Dry though the text is, one cannot, upon reaching the end and absorbing the material, shake the feeling that something truly original has been created. “If only we could… tie it all together.” What philosopher has not dreamed of such completion? Guthrie has managed just such a feat, within his own confines, of course, but nevertheless substantial and one hopes to his satisfaction. The question, as always, is: “What after?” Surely Guthrie wished for an audience, to be received, to be acknowledged, to be, as it were, immortalized for finally Figuring It Out after so many years of Toil and Trouble, and assuming he were (he wasn’t, and hasn't been), the question remains: “What after?” And seeing that he wasn’t, correct or not he may be, still the question: “What after?” And if he were correct, did actually figure it out, not just for himself but for you and for me and for those insufferable pencil pushers whose approval he knew could only be won through mind-numbing logorrhea… “What after?” A general approach to that question eludes us for the purposes of this review, however I will suggest an interesting (but by no means necessary) ethical consequence of Guthrie’s thesis, the real crux of which is that—though he understandably never just lays it out—because we all animate and humanize the world around us (for reasons as diverse as wish fulfillment, group cohesion, predictive model building, and good humor), we are all, to some degree, religious. It’s not that there are no atheists in foxholes, it’s that there are no atheists. And so not only is man the nature of religion, but religion is the nature of man. Will I now be converting to Christianity, now that I have, so to speak, seen the light? In light of my prior reasoning, you’d be right in thinking such decisions accrue probability, however the answer is a firm no. Appetizing though such courses sound, the digestion question is holy separate. It would take many years to un-grok the significations I associate with the word “truth”—a core term in my personal ontology—assuming such a thing were even possible; and know that even if I somehow did convert, in name, it would only be a front, a façade, a fake, in fact. The better conclusion is that reading this helps me empathize with the religious by showing me the ways in which I am religious. Herein lies the ethic; apply at your own behest, results may vary. Of course, this only makes sense if you accept Guthrie’s theory, which is, in the final reckoning, liable to fail if you reject even one of the dozens of definitional givens in his conceptual edifice. But I have no qualms admitting that it is, in toto, a fine piece of engineering. Favorite Quotes “[T]rying to understand religion by its functions is like trying to understand an animal by its effects on an ecosystem: not totally unproductive, yet off the mark all the same.” [p.33] “What we see depends on what model we use. Looking at the starry night sky, the Greeks saw lines constituting particular constellations, because these configurations of stars fit particular stories of interest to them. Other peoples tell other stories and hence see other constellations and lines. Our perceptual world rests not upon the back of a giant turtle that rests on another, and so on, but on interested guesses all the way down.” [p.43] “Understanding implies some correspondence between the models we form and the phenomena we understand, but not between the phenomena and our minds as wholes.” [p.82] “The higher the level of hypothesis a cue can prompt… the more efficient the process, both in computers and in organisms… The higher the level of successful interpretation, the more information we gain. If we can guess, for example, that something near us in the bush is an elephant, we do not need to test whether it is herbivorous or has four columnar legs, a trunk, and floppy ears.” [p.101] “An illusion—a failed or erroneous interpretation—does not necessarily mean that the perceptual guess leading to it is irrational.” [p.111] “Much of what passes for knowledge… compounds four kinds of errors: those intrinsic to human perception, those bred by idiosyncratic experience, those caused by the inadequacies of ordinary language, and those created by philosophic speculation. These four constitute an anthropocentric, self-perpetuating system of beliefs that obstruct, skew, and color our world.” [p.160] “Gods are uniquely intelligible if we define intelligibility as the ratio of information yielded to assumptions required. They give much explanatory return for little investment… This principle, that efficiency in explanations is the ratio of effects predicted to hypotheses made, underlies Occam’s razor: do not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily.” [p.189] “The most determined modern attempt to rid religion of anthropomorphism belongs to Paul Tillich. Trying to eliminate the disease, however, he kills the patient.” [p.183]

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-17 00:00:00 Josh Brunsell Piaget divides ideas about consciousness into four stages. Children in the first stage (typically up to six or seven years) think anything that is somehow active is conscious. Clouds and wind are conscious because they move and the sun and moon are conscious because they give light. Similarly, a wooden bench feels being burned, a wall feels being knocked down, and a string feels being twisted. Anything that is the seat of some action, feels it. In the second stage, from six or seven years to eight or nine, children limit consciousness to things that move: sun, moon, wind, fire, bicycles, and clocks, but not stones or chairs. In the third stage, from eight or nine years to eleven or twelve, children limit consciousness even further, to things which move of their own accord, including most moving natural phenomena but not such things as bicycles and boats. After eleven or twelve, children usually attribute consciousness only to animals, although sometimes to plants as well.