Let’s return to one of Jim Palmer’s long essays that I noted some three weeks ago and put off. It seems to go my theme about layers of reality… Humans tend to ‘flatten’ reality and ask questions about the ‘meaning of life’ that simply don’t have answers in the cosmic realm. Only in the local mundane realm. We are like fish who don’t understand all the realms above the surface of the water.
Desconstructionaology, Jim Palmer, 13 Jul 2026: Before We Explain Reality, subtitled “The First Question”
45 screens on my laptop.
For more than thirty years I immersed myself in theology, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, religious studies, anthropology, and the humanities. Like many scholars before me, I was searching for a deeper understanding of reality itself. Yet over time I began to notice something that none of these disciplines quite seemed to name. They all had much to say about God, matter, consciousness, morality, behavior, and culture. They all had something important to contribute. But they also seemed to presuppose something that was rarely treated as a coherent object of inquiry: the human relationship to existence itself.
Once I saw it, I could no longer unsee it.
I’ll intersperse my own comments as they occur to me. First of all: there’s no reason why humans *should* have a close relationship to existence, or reality, except to the degree that we are living, evolving animals, and need to respond to our environment in ways that promote our survival. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here to wonder about such questions.
He begins with “The Metaphysical Assumption” which is that humans think we can look at the universe and draw conclusions about what is real and how to live. As Palmer writes, we skipped the step of wondering what reality is in the first place. He expands on this, at length. One key insight:
The priority of experience over explanation is most visible in early childhood. Long before a child can formulate beliefs about God or reject belief altogether, before they understand philosophy, science, religion, or metaphysics, they are learning trust and fear, attachment and separation, belonging and loneliness. They encounter beauty, uncertainty, dependence, vulnerability, and loss before they possess the concepts to explain them. These experiences do not wait for a worldview to authorize them. They become the lived reality that every worldview will later attempt to interpret.
Which brings to mine my notion of ‘levels’ of reality, and how ‘stories’ or explanations at one level don’t work at other levels. Humans are familiar with several such levels, primarily the difference between childhood and adulthood. Some explanations at one of those levels don’t work at the other. To a lesser extent, the differences between male and female experience. Mostly the same, but crucially different in the details.
Palmer concludes, in his first section:
Humanity has never overlooked meaning, identity, love, grief, or mortality. What we have overlooked is their coherence.
So far so good. He’s using different language, but how explanations work differently at different levels is an example of incoherence.
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And so on. I keep getting bogged down by Palmer’s length essays. Further sections in this piece are:
Existence Before Explanation
The Great Category Mistake — a quote:
We have assumed that understanding reality and developing the capacity to inhabit reality belong to the same enterprise. We have often believed that if we could discover the correct account of ultimate reality, we would naturally become the kinds of people capable of living well within it. The history of humanity offers little evidence that this assumption is justified.
Well, no. Or rather, yes: this is a mistake. We intellectually understand realms of reality, from the quantum to the cosmic, that we will never ‘understand’ in the sense of having intuitive ideas about them.
More sections:
A Different Object of Inquiry — here he brings up the running theme on his blog of “existential health.” He says, “Its object of inquiry is the human relationship to existence itself.” But the examples he cites are all about human relationships, not attempting to understand the universe as a thing beyond human relationships and emotion, which are ultimately about survival of one particular lifeform. There are other realms in reality that are not based on reproductive life.
And then:
What Existential Health Investigates
Why We Failed to See It
The Reach of the Discovery
A Different Beginning
Why This Matters Now
Toward a New Chapter in Human Understanding
I wish he would write shorter posts, or just publish a decent-sized book summarizing his themes. I think he’s on the right track. He just hasn’t found the right vocabulary. Or perspectives.
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Serendipity? Or coincidence.
First, yet another example of the Trump administration tearing things down, in order to protect corporate interests.
JMG, from Courthouse News, today: Science Academy Axes Climate Section From Manual
The National Academy of Sciences on Friday said it had removed the climate science section from its reference manual designed for federal judges, following pressure from President Donald Trump, who claimed the nonpartisan handbook contained “fraudulent” information on climate change.
Because Trump knows what’s fraudulent or not. He knows everything.
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I’ve written before about CMMI, Capability Maturity Model Integrated, a framework for engineering development, that’s been around for decades and that my company strove to meet in the 1990s and 2000s. (I discussed it way down in this post about working at Rocketdyne for 30 years.) In essence it’s very simple: follow documented procedures (don’t rely on the intuition or the faulty memories of ‘experts’), measure the results of your processes, then gradually introduce improvements, and measure those. Forever.
Of course this goes against human nature and intuition. Boeing, for example, changed their policies to emphasize speed of delivery rather than quality, and suffered two 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019. Coincidence?
So today, thinking about my old job and how that CMMI model might have changed, I discovered this, on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia: Capability Immaturity Model (CIMM)
Its levels are:
O: Negligent
-1: Obstructive
-2: Contemptuous
-3: Undermining
This describes the Trump administration. I could give many examples.
