A long time ago, Robert Lawrence Kuhn and I were both members of the same benign Christian cult, the Worldwide Church of God (WCG). That church was led by Herbert W. Armstrong and it published the PLAIN TRUTH (PT) magazine. Beginning in January 1972, a series of articles written by Kuhn were published in the PT. Those articles were entitled Why the vast difference between animal brain and HUMAN MIND? All of this comes back to me now as Kuhn is again turning some heads with a paper that was recently published.
Wikipedia says nothing about Kuhn’s life in the 1970s. To the best of my knowledge he exited the cult around 1977 or 1978. His career after that has been extraordinary. He became very successful in three very different fields and today I have a great amount of respect for this remarkable man.
I rediscovered Kuhn in the years after I too had exited WCG. I had discovered the joys of surfing the internet and I was hungry for knowledge. I stumbled upon Closer to Truth.
Closer to Truth is a continuing television series on PBS and public television stations, created, executive-produced, written and hosted by Kuhn, and produced and directed by Peter Getzels. The series premiered in 2000 and is in its 19th season (Closer to Truth: Cosmos. Consciousness. Meaning/God). It offers conversations with leading scientists, philosophers, theologians and scholars on topics such as cosmology, physics, philosophy of science, consciousness (brain/mind), and philosophy of religion. Kuhn's presentation, "Asking Ultimate Questions", serves as the foundation of Closer To Truth.
The Closer To Truth website is awesome, well worth exploring. The tone of Kuhn’s interviews is in stark contrast to the confrontational style common in today’s highly polarized world. To the best of my knowledge, Kuhn is now agnostic on many subjects, a stance that I often hold myself.
But before becoming a successful TV producer, Kuhn went into the mergers and acquisitions business, one of the most challenging areas in the world of finance. I have wondered where Kuhn got the capital for that venture, certainly not from his salary as a writer for the PT. I suspect that he had inherited wealth. And it seems that he became even wealthier, able to do whatever he wanted with his life.
The third arena in which Kuhn succeeded is as a world class expert and consultant on China. He has written a couple of books drawing on this expertise. To the best of my knowledge, he is fluent in Mandarin.
Lately I am seeing several people I follow respectfully pointing to a recent paper written by Kuhn, A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications. The paper is 142 pages long and I do not have the academic background to appreciate it. The best I can do is to skim it and to continue to follow more accessible writing such as that of Gregg Henriques who wrote about The Hard Problem of...Psychology? - How psychology was the first science of consciousness.
I love the conclusion Kuhn comes to in his Reflections on consciousness.
Me, I just don’t know ...
If Kuhn, a galaxy brain, does not know, where does that leave average and ordinary people like me? I do not have the intellectual capacity to fully absorb and retain the information in Kuhn's paper. And then I scroll through the 12 pages of References which Kuhn has probably read and understood. This leaves leaves me in awe of galaxy brains and I am grateful for people like this. And I am at peace with myself, content to explore difficult territory as best I can.
Here are links to two short articles written by Robert Lawrence Kuhn.
There Are Multiple Answers to the Question of Why the Universe Exists
Toward a Taxonomy of Possible Explanations
In Farewell to 2023: A Message from Robert Lawrence Kuhn he states,
...the world has had a fracturing, dispiriting year and I’d been growing melancholy about, well, humanity. Group pitted against group—national, religious, racial, ethnic, age, gender, socio-economic. (We can blame social media for exacerbating our differences but not for causing them.) Moreover, Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine, numerous interstate and intrastate conflicts, and, most worrying, laudable patriotism degenerating into malignant nationalism globally. Then, October 7: Hamas’ horrific massacre and all the tragedies that followed and follows (I have friends and remote family in Israel; I have friends in the Arab world, especially in Saudi Arabia).
It was not at all my original intent, but we now see that perhaps CTT can play a tiny-tiny part in forging a more tolerant, more harmonious world, perhaps uniquely so, by addressing universal mysteries of the human condition, aspiration, and spirit that unify all of us.