Are You Experienced?

Of course you are, but what is experience? What is it like? It is not like anything, for there is quite literally nothing to which it can be compared, and anything to which we compare it presumes its existence. Experience is irreducible to anything less, because anything less than experience is nothing. It’s a genuine brain teaser, for what could the Cosmos be like with no one there to experience it? Supposing you imagine it, you are pneumabombing yourself into the picture.

It is also impossible to imagine how experience could have “emerged” from inanimate matter, thus the temptation to say it was there all along, e.g., panpsychism or panexperientialism. But a purely bottom-up emergence is just another cover for a purple haze of ignorance. To declare that something emerged tells us nothing about how, much less why, it emerged, and in any event, how can the greater emerge from the lesser, especially if what emerges is categorically different to that from which it emerges? How does matter become the experience thereof? How does an interior subject launch out of an exterior object?

There’s no such thing as a free launch, much less a deterministic launch into freedom.

Since it is metaphysically impossible to derive transcendent experience from immanent matter, then our only option is a top-down explanation in which vertical causation exerts an influence from above. In contrast to horizontal causation, which occurs in time, vertical causation is instantaneous, transcending space and time. Ultimately, reality is the vertically caused act of being, or the celestial business of terrestrial isness.

We surely know experience exists because we know it on a first hand basis from the inside. Hartshorne – much more on him later – maintains that experience, and the experience thereof, “provides the clue to the nature of reality,” and therefore “we must begin with human experience.” Seriously, where else could we possibly begin? Even the physicist, like anyone else, begins not with knowledge gained from abstract physics, rather, with his concrete experience of the corporeal world.

Who puts absence of experience at the top of his résumé? It’s supposed to be a curriculum vitae, not a curriculum mortis.

Materialists, eliminativists, positivists, you name it. Nevertheless, experience has a leg up on any alternative, so “it would be silly to refuse to take advantage of the fact that in ourselves we have the one individual piece of nature which we know in its individuality from two sides: externally, quantitatively, and by behavioristic observation and test, and also internally, qualitatively, by immediate intuition” (Hartshorne).

This is necessarily true, with no possible loophole, unless one descends into the self-refutation of experience denying experience. This denial obviously requires a verification-event, and the event is proof of the experience of being. To argue that experience is not ontologically real is a performative contradiction, because it eliminates the subject required to voice the claim.

In any event, why throw out our one great advantage before we even begin? In fact, trying to exclude experience from metaphysics is utterly self-defeating, because there’s nothing left to experience and no one to experience it.

In addition to being Absolute and Infinite, cosmotheandrism affirms that O must be a kind of Primordial Experience, or in the parlance of the timeless, I am that I am. Am goes to Being, and I goes to the experience thereof. Nor could there be experience of an entirely static Be that is not eternally Be-ing, which goes to our second Axiom: if to Be is the absolute pole, then Be-ing is its complementary infinite pole.

Of note, we cannot begin with mere experience, rather with the experience of experience. Other animals have experience, but the Anthropos is the being who has been lifted out of mere experience in order to experience it. Not to be presumptuous, but this makes us suspiciously godlike, since the Be-ing of O must again be an eternal experience of experience: whatever other properties inhere in the Absolute principle, they must include experience. Thus experience begins at the top, because what is the alternative? Experience is a prolongation from above, not a discontinuous leap from below. It is the point of intersection between Anthropos and Theos, where the “image of God” indwells us. Our Absolute principle includes the experience of experience, so our self-awareness is a localized spark of the Primordial I AM.

In both baseball and metaphysics there are several ways to reach first base, and the experience of experience is one of them, since nothing can be known or conceived in its absence. It is both our keyhole into wholeness and the key to the whole. In facr, everything in existence is imbued with a more or less attenuated degree of interiority, which is precisely why everything -- including matter -- is intelligible to the intellect.

Or, one might say that intelligibility is intelligence embedded in matter -- for example, all those mathematical equations that govern physics. Which is in accord with what Einstein says of the laws governing the universe: “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are mere details.”

But here again, this presupposes experience in both Einstein and in whom he calls the Old One. For if Einstein seeks to know the thoughts of the Old One, this presumes experience at two fundamental levels. By seeking the ultimate rationality and order of the Cosmos, Einstein is implicitly affirming that his Old One is not merely a static principle but a Primordial Knower and Experiencer of the order. 

So, our Theos is no doubt a mathematician, but like any other mathematician, not reducible to the math he understands. Besides, mathematics has no causal power of its own. Even a Theory of Everything isn’t a cause of anything, rather, an abstraction from what has already been caused. We may ascend from concrete world to abstract math, but not vice versa, for pure math can’t even account for itself, let alone everything else.

Now, recognizing this principle is easy, but the consequences are profound. Meaning that we have a job to do, and only the Anthropos can do it: to endeavor to know all there is to know about all there is. We may want to know the secrets of the Old One, but are they knowable? Signs point to yes, because the Old One actually wants us to know them. It is why intelligible Easter eggs are hidden everywhere in the Cosmos, just waiting for us to discover them. Put it this way: it would make no sense for us to have the experience of hunger if there were nothing to eat. Nor does it make sense for us to hunger for knowledge of ultimate reality if ultimate reality doesn’t exist or if we can’t know it.

You – or Einstein, rather – keep talking about the secrets of the Old One, but shouldn’t it be the Eternal One?

Good catch. But just as old can have no meaning in the absence of young, the abstract term “eternal” is literally meaningless in the absence of its more concrete twin, the temporal. For the very existence of meaning requires two terms and a mediator between. Here again, all metaphysical concepts exist in polar contrast, and to the extent that we know them, that makes three.

If we speak of the Old One we implicitly allude to the Young One, for the One must be the oldest and youngest thing there is: it has always existed but is as fresh as the present moment, otherwise we -- and the Theos -- would die of monotony. 

One might say that the Absolute is beyond old, while Infinitude is always new, i.e., a novel iteration of absoluteness, of be-ing in contingency and time. As explained by Viney & Shields, “the concept of contingency must have some role to play in any categorical scheme that can merit serious consideration,” or in other words, “the polar conceptual contrast of necessity cannot be well defined in pure abstraction from contingency (and vice versa); for instance, ‘necessity’ is that which has ‘no alternative.’”

Thus there is no metaphysical alternative to alternatives, so contingency is a necessary entailment of the Absolute. Old necessity and new contingency are polar contrasts and cannot be defined in pure abstraction from one another. For to define necessity in isolation from contingency is to commit the fallacy of monopolarity by denying its essential, defining opposite.

Supposing there is a Theos, then the Absolute pole would go to its essence, to its unchanging character, while the Infinite pole would go to creation, which is to say, alternatives. Therefore, the Absolute must generate Contingency as a necessary consequence of its own unrestrictedness (i.e., Infinite potency). And a Theos that cannot create a contingent world is less than a free one that can.

Thus the classical monopolar definition of Eternity as a purely static, atemporal Theos is inadequate because it defines timelessness in pure abstraction from concrete temporality, and the present moment is precisely where Eternity bisects Time. This is the unity of the Old One (necessity) and the Young One (contingency/novelty).

This turns our restless search for the damn key to the world enigma into an act of communion, for to know the world is to participate in the Experience of Experience that the Theos has of its own creation and creativity. If secrets are buried everywhere, then science, philosophy, and art are all forms of divine archeology. We aren’t just observing matter, we are, as Einstein implies, reading the inbreaking news of the Old One.

So uh, are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced? Well, I have. Ah, let me prove it to you. In the next post, because we're just getting started... 

Reality is Full of Surprises

Let’s start with what we don’t know, for when we seek knowledge, we are seeking an unknown. But how then do we know what to look for, and how do we know when we’ve found it? This is another one of those longstanding philosophical pseudo-conundrums – the seeming paradox that if we know what we’re looking for, we don’t have to look, because we’ve already found it, and if we don’t know what we’re looking for, we could never find it.

But no one just starts out blindly looking for knowledge — like trying to find reverse in a Soviet tank with no owner’s manual. That’s not how any of this works. Rather, we begin with anything from a hunch to a hypothesis to an intuition, theory, paradigm, etc. Moreover, in each of these we ultimately begin with a pre-cognitive faith in the link between intelligence and intelligibility. This faith is an implicit certitude that there is something to find, and why not? Seeking knowledge obviously presupposes a great deal, at the very least that knowledge exists and that seeking it will be fruitful, i.e., that the link between our seeking at one end and the Great Unknown at the other that never stops flowing. Thus there is a generative dialectic of knowledge and ignorance, a systematic and methodical -- AKA critical -- ignorance.

In short, if you’re ignorant and you know it, clap your hands. Conversely, if you’re ignorant and you don’t know it, there is a cure, but there is some pain involved, i.e., the pain of not knowing. Supposing you are trapped within an ideological matrix, then some disassembly is required before you can step into the real Cosmos.

Here again there is always a movement from unknown to known, which is actually an endless spiral—

A perpetual notion machine?

Yes, in that we never stop generating notions about Being, which generate further notions: “The order of discovery is just the opposite of the order of doctrine. In doctrine you start from the principles and draw the conclusions, but in discovery you discover one conclusion after another and gradually you move on to your principles” (Lonergan). Induction and deduction respectively, up and down and back up again, in a hypothetico-deductive spiral. Science works this way because this is the way the Cosmos and Anthropos together work.

∞

Only man can intentionally render himself puzzled and thereby open to surprise. Nevertheless, some folks put a premature end to this bewilderness adventure via ideological closure, but no one needs to stop wondering in the cosmic desert and being nourished with daily insights from above, below, and in between. The scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi built a whole career of this recognition, that “Today’s discovery becomes tomorrow’s clue, to be relied upon in the hopes of making an even more superior contact with reality” (Meek). Normative science is never a one-and-done proposition, and we know reality has been discovered when the discovery yields further unspecifiable-in-advance discoveries.

If you can’t trust reality, what can you trust?

Which is why trusty physics continues to develop, whereas astrology or phrenology are untrustworthy companions in the search for knowledge. The result of the genuine discovery, writes Meek, is “the gradual extension of ourselves into the world,” which means there is always a subjective component to our objective discoveries. 

This goes to “the essential and positive nature of the personal: it is a power that enables man to transcend himself and grab hold of reality in his understanding,” for without our contribution, “such contact would not be possible at all.” Reality is both rational and relational, which “must be assumed by anyone who believes in the possibility of knowledge that is not entirely of his own making: if we are to make sense of the world, it must be susceptible of having sense made of it…” (ibid). This is a rejection of the negative delusion of Laplacian objectivism – the idea that we can have a view from nobody nowhere.

Instead, the Anthropos is at the tripartite center of cosmotheandrism, which is why Dávila can say that The truth is objective but not impersonal. For without the person, there is no contact, and without the contact reality remains unknown and unknowable. Even Laplace had to be someplace in order to pretend to have a view from noplace.

I have no use for his vacuous hypothesis.

This is another way of talking about ultimacy, for there is no ultimate scientific answer, rather, there is only the ultimacy of our endlessly fruitful and deepening dialogue with nature. For Polanyi this is the very definition of reality: it is “something that attracts our attention by clues which harass and beguile our minds into getting ever closer to it, and which, since it owes this attractive power to its independent existence, can always manifest itself in still unexpected ways.”

Thus, “Our knowledge is achieved in submission to the real” (Meek), not by forcing reality to submit to our a priori categories. For Polany, this simply affirms what every working scientist believes – “that science offers us an aspect of reality, and may therefore manifest its truth inexhaustibly and often surprisingly in the future. Only in this belief can the scientist conceive problems, pursue inquiries, and claim discoveries” (in Meek). Which is why “reality is pregnant and abundant with as-yet-unnameable dimensions and prospects,” so our partnership with the Cosmos involves a “commitment to the inherent inexhaustibility of reality” (Meek).

You have reminded me of a quip by Eckhart, that From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth. The essence of God is birthing.

Let’s not get carried away. Save that kind of perfect nonsense for Book III. Nevertheless, you have a point: the scientist is essentially a Socratic midwife, not inventing the truth but assisting in its delivery. Every discovery is a birth that reveals the inexhaustible fecundity of the Source that shall not be named.

Supposing we can know the truth of reality, then we are obligated to do so, therefore there is an ontological Ought woven into the fabric of the Cosmic Area Rug. Is there an honest scientist who doesn’t know that we ought to seek truth, and that we cannot know it in full even after we have found it? For reality is precisely that which “may yet reveal its truth in an inexhaustible range of unknown and perhaps still unthinkable ways” (Meek). Truth is at once true but the appearance of a deeper truth, implying that there is always something more to be discovered. Thus, reality is the process of its own endless discovery.

“Far beyond a one-to-one correspondence of thought and things,” writes Meek, Polanyi’s post-critical realism “is a one-to-infinity correspondence” – and it is precisely this infinitude that testifies to the One. Thus reality is “always half-hidden and, as-yet, inarticulable.” This is a quintessential description of ultimacy, in that the Anthropos is ordered to the inexhaustible infinitude of the real, as one infinitude to another in an ever-deepening spiral of discovery. “Far from being enclosed on itself,” writes Torrance, the Cosmos “is intrinsically open and elusive in its existence and structure, and constantly surprising in its manifestation of new features and patterns.”

Boo!

Boo indeed, because “nature is endowed with the kind of rational order that constantly surprises us in its manifestation of unexpected features and structures which cannot be deduced from what is already known” (Torrance). Afterwards our task is to reconcile the new discovery with what we already know, but we must always remain open to an open Cosmos that continually surprises us with its novel disclosures, as opposed to looking at it in terms of our preconceived ideas. Enclosed the latter, we are merely actively projecting our own ideas as opposed maintaining a stance of passive openness to reality.

Which is in accord with my own psychoanalytic training under the influence of W.R. Bion, who advised the clinician to approach each session by “suspending memory, desire, and understanding.” Suspending does not mean eliminating preconceptions and hypotheses, rather, just setting them aside in order to be open to what is occurring in the present between patient and therapist, emphasis on between.

∞

The meaning of humanness is not something that can be found by breaking down persons into their constituent parts, whether genes, neurotransmitters, or regions of the brain, rather, in a higher synthesis and unity of all these, and which cannot be fully captured by any lower-level description. A person is first of all a person, not a collection of the constituents that comprise the person, and must be studied as such (or at least complementary to the lower level analyses).

Moreover, as we have seen, there is always a two-way flow between parts and whole, or a hierarchy in which the higher level is governed by its own principles that cannot be fully reduced to the laws of the levels below it. “Causal connections,” writes Torrance, must “be looked at on two [or more] different levels, a lower level where subordinate centres of causation operate, and a higher level where we have to do with the operation of a central cause,” the former being a limiting case of the latter.

For example, the laws of biology govern living organisms, but organisms are not reducible to the laws of chemistry and physics, even though organisms are composed of chemicals and atoms. The laws of chemistry set the boundary conditions for biology, but they do not explain the emergent phenomenon of Life Itself. The subatomic particles constituting your hand change their trajectories when you so much as make a fist. Likewise, “The matter which is caught up into the life of a dog,” writes Ward, “behaves rather differently from the matter caught up into the life of an oak, and still more differently from the matter caught up in the explosion of fireworks.”

Applying these ideas to the Anthropos, human identity and meaning are emergent properties of this vertical hierarchy. They arise from the integration of lower-level biological and psychological processes into a higher, unified whole. This is in accord with Gödel, who recognized “that we must think in terms of a series of rational levels that are open to one another upward but are not reducible downward.” Expressed in poetic terms, we might say that The laws of biology alone do not have fingers delicate enough to fashion the beauty of a face.

Thus the meaning of the Anthropos is not to be found below but above, in the lived experience of being a person, an experience that transcends any purely objective or reductive account. Which is not to deny the influence of the lower on the higher, but nor to deny the influence of the higher on the lower. For example, if I want to tweak my endorphins below, I can make the top-down choice to engage in vigorous exercise. We are at once influenced by our hormones and neurotransmitters but can in turn influence them. The key point is that meaning is discovered in the ascent toward integration and wholeness, while meaninglessness is a consequence of descending in the other direction and dismembering this wholeness and unity. In short, meaning is at the top, not the bottom.

Our resident logician is again on the case, for his theorems show “that even a mathematical universe is more than axioms, more than computing, more than logic – and more than mathematicians can know” (John Barrow). Rather, “the whole mathematical universe” must be “understood as open-ended and incomplete, yet as completed beyond itself transfinitely in absolute Infinity” (Torrance), which is precisely what we mean when we say that being is beyond-being, every time.

Didn’t see that coming!

No one does, in the sense that reality never stops coming at us with new surprises.