Conscience; Fiducial Conscience

I read L. John Van Til's Liberty of Conscience: The History of a Puritan Idea. I can't say I followed it very closely, but it did introduce me to thinking about conscience.

My idea of conscience is that it is an intuition which in some way is the voice of truth or God, but isn't necessarily infallible. It could be the voice of God because a person has trained themselves to think the way that God does, so they naturally react the way he would. Or, it could be the voice of God because when they see something, God directly causes them to feel that way about it. It could be the voice of truth, because by thinking through and experiencing the way things are, we come to react to things intuitively according to how they really are. Or, it could be the voice of truth because some truths are conveyed intuitively, directly. (Or it could be that God or some other being tells us these truths directly.)

What is interesting about conscience is this ambiguity as to what produces it. Normally when we talk about conscience, we are talking about moral conscience (sometimes also intellectual conscience). Your moral conscience tells you that something is wrong. Should you do it anyway? There's some chance that your conscience is malformed. But it could be well-formed and thus in touch with reality. And it could be the voice of God telling you not to do something. It is never totally safe to ignore your conscience, although it may be fallible.

Another variant of conscience, beside intellectual and moral, which I am making up here, perhaps is new, is "fiducial conscience". We have a sense that certain things are trustworthy or not. It's an intuition, and thus it can't be fully justified in words. It is not necessarily irrational, as I define "rational", but it is not fully legible. It is produced by the same kinds of things as moral conscience. Should you trust your fiducial conscience? Probably, although it may sometimes be wrong.

Some matters may only be resolved by appeals to fiducial conscience. You sense that something is wrong but can't put its wrongness into words -- some people who trust your intuition based on prior experience should trust your intuition, and probably you should just on the basis of it being your own fiducial conscience. But this doesn't scale up as aptly as verbal, textual reasoning and evidence. It is less suitable for governing a nation or even a congregation of a church, although it is reasonably well-suited for governing an individual or group of close friends and family. (And, perhaps many of the individual votes that are cast in nations or churches depend on people's experiences and leadings from God that inform the "black box" of their conscience.)

The concept of conscience allows us to both trust and not overtrust intuition, and potentially have some idea that we can train it.

What the concept of conscience introduces is that everyone is a witness to the truth, in a way that they are uniquely qualified to be. They can experience intuitions that no one else does or can look into and debunk. However, these intuitions and witnesses are only binding on those who trust them, and by default the only person who (probably) should find them binding is the witness themselves. It is not the case that these intuitions are necessarily reflective of the truth, but they may be and it's hard or perhaps impossible in some cases to completely rule them out.

There is an absolute truth, and we can partially know it, and to some extent each of us is in a unique position to know the truth. I guess this could be a midpoint between "everyone has their own truth and perspective" and "there is one absolute, objective truth".

Reason and Budi

Epistemic status: quick thoughts, haven't tried to think through all the implications in depth.

I can't remember if I've written any of this in this blog before, but I have an idea of what reason is: the interrelationship of all truths, and/or of all evidence -- and, "evidence" being anything which people perceive, whether with senses, noetically, or in any other form that may exist. Reason is the process for coming to the whole truth.

Today I read an article about Indonesian philosophy, which discussed budi. It says at one point

The Great Dictionary of the Indonesian Language defines budi as an 'inner faculty which integrates reasoning and feeling to distinguish between good and evil.'

The article also mentions that Indonesian philosophy is integrative, mentioning how its Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam are seen as one thing, in a sense, which perhaps has some parallel to my definition of "reason".

How can budi and my "reason" interrelate? Perhaps budi is being present to the moment or situation which connects to one's reasonings and feelings? This presence enables you to see how they all add up to form some kind of moral judgment. You actually see them for what they are. Or maybe it's like if the world is full of 2's, and 4's, but without budi, you can't see when two 2s makes a 4, as though budi supplies the +'s and ='s needed to say "2 + 2 = 4"? So then budi is an embodied faculty which allows a person to form a more integrated truth, and thus is necessary to connect to or seek the whole truth, the ultimate goal of reason.

The whole truth is made up of sub-whole-truths, which contain the whole truth within some limited area. Each sub-whole-truth requires that the person looking at them have budi or something like it, in order to understand that reality, if that reality contains any kind of intuitive content. Perhaps merely to integrate reasoning with reasoning requires something akin to budi, although this is getting further from the definition given. Also, perhaps budi only applies to cases where good and evil or right and wrong are being distinguished. But good/right and evil/wrong (or "value and disvalue", perhaps) are woven into maybe literally everything, and thus (almost?) always are needed to know the truth of anything.

It's possible to limit yourself to only the sensory world (the sub-whole-truth of the sensed world), and thus avoid the intuitive and perhaps thus budi, but maybe you can't know good and evil that way, and for practical purposes, we need to know some kind of axiological charge of what we perceive so that we know what behaviors will be purposeful, will have a point, with respect to what we perceive. We relate to reality, and this is part of knowing the truth. We, as persons, who have to live. Thus we need to know good and evil -- maybe we have a kind of mutilated budi still in operation in the "fact / value split" West. This budi enables us to see that there is a point in doing things, and what that point is, despite the way our culture suppresses our conscious affirmation of moral realism, the idea that there is a fact as to what values there are. Any sub-whole-truth that connects to practical action requires budi or something like it.

Building Trust in Natural Feelings of What to Pursue

In Romantic Sense of Kinship, I talked about romantic feelings and how they seem to call for action. But this question can be generalized. Other kinds of feelings can call for action. Which should we pursue?

Our natural feelings can be helpful guides to what is good to pursue if our nature has been tuned to be in line with God and reality. If we value what God values and have (consciously and subconsciously) an accurate map of reality and of our ability to act on that map, then we will have good desires and be in a position to act on them. Then we can trust our own intuitive senses of what is desirable to do.

If we have God's values (more or less), then we will be in kinship with him. If we find someone romantically attractive, it will likely be because we share kinship with them, and there's a good chance that their kinship with us will imply their kinship with God. A kinship with someone else that is along the road of values that inherently involve us being kin with God is a good pathway across which to connect, bond with, become loyal to, someone else. So then it is likely that if we sufficiently share God's values, there is a high probability that whomever we fall in love with is either God's particular choice for us, or one of a number of acceptable choices we could make. (This discussion also applies to other forms of friendship.)

With romance and friendship, a lot of the heavy lifting of figuring out if pursuits (pursuits of people) are worthwhile is done by just figuring out kinship. Finding kinship, shared values, is a big part of facing reality in that context. But what about work pursuits? There competence involves more than just fitting the values of the work pursuit with your own values and your own values with God's values.

One way to be competent is in the usual worldly way, and there's a lot to be said for diligently building up your competence in a worldly way. But sometimes you can be more competent by being guided by God, and also, it is very important for your spiritual life for you to love and trust God, and listen to God. Sometimes, your own salvation may be more important than whatever good you would have done for others, for all you know. So it could be best for you to pursue an altruistic method that has attunement with God baked into it.

If you become kin with God, then he can speak to you more richly. As you become kin with God, you develop sensitivities, memories, and understandings, through which God can speak to you. A pipe organ may have many small pipes, and many large ones, shaped in different ways to produce different sounds. If a pipe organ lacks the 32 foot or 16 foot pipes (the longest ones which produce the lowest notes), a piece of music might not be playable, one which relies on bass sounds. Or if it is played, it lacks the bass, and doesn't convey the composer's full intentions.

The better God can speak to you, the better you will become and be kin with him, and sometimes the better decisions you will naturally make in work and friendship.

So if we want to trust our feelings when they say to pursue something, we should become trustworthy, so that our natures are trustworthy. We do so by developing kinship and trust in God and by building competence (and kinship and trust with God can help build competence.)

While He is Near

"Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on him while he is near."

If you want to develop a discipline, get up at 5 AM every morning and do it.

If you want to develop a habit, taste, or delight, catch yourself at a receptive moment and reward it.

If you want to meet a friend in person, you have to do it when they're in town.

You listen to a friend out of discipline and delight, but it is better when there is delight.

You speak to your friend when you do, and say what you say -- that is how he comes to know you. You are not in control of your relationship with God.

Favor

In some settings, I feel favor. Favor is a state in which you can put out a little bit of effort and it's reflected back to you. If you put out a message, you get energy back, in the form of a message, or some kind of action. People give you uptake. You have an intuitive grasp of the situation, and petitions and questions flow out of you in a comfortable way, well-timed and in the right tone of voice. People approve of you, don't read you wrong, trust you -- things are easy, socially.

With favor, I have more of a voice. I can think of more things to say, and I'm rooted, to a certain extent. I can see my place in the world.

Because this is an intuitive thing, it's hard to manufacture. Maybe to find it, you just have to travel from place to place. It helps when you find people with the same background as you, or the same type of brain. People with schizophrenia or related disorders, and bipolar people, are easier for me to connect with. I have bipolar disorder and sometimes identify with the traits of schizophrenia-related personality disorders. It's not like I think "oh, this person is mentally ill too, I'll like them", but something about having been in strange and difficult places mentally makes it so that we're somehow both in tune.