The Bridge of the Logosphere

It is quite difficult to stick to the 1,000 word limit. I feel like I was just getting started:

One lesson to be learned from our brief visit to the subatomic world is that reality is always a critique of our models of reality. For example, Newton had a map of reality, but the reality of quantum physics demonstrated the inadequacy of the map. Part of the incomprehensibility of quantum physics has to do with the persistence of trying to understand it in terms of the old dualistic map. But if we reframe it in terms of the cosmotheandric map, then its reality fits right in there, what with its intrinsic relationality, openness, verticality, complementarity, et al. If ultimate reality is substance-in-relation, then we should not be confounded if this is mirrored in the microworld. Nor should we be surprised that the Anthropos is entangled with the Cosmos at every level of the vertical spectrum, from top to bottom. Rather, our map assumes as much.

Really, it is again just a matter of turning the Cosmos back right-side up. We can only pretend to eliminate verticality from the Cosmos, because the first result of doing so is to eliminate the Anthropos, not excluding the physicist who, like the restavus, exists in the corporeal world, and who measures and makes pronouncements on the subcorporeal. But what if the subcorporeal is dependent upon the corporeal? Or, at the very least, instead of viewing one as reducible to the other, why not regard them as complementary? After all, we never see one without the other. And as we know by now, in any such complementarity one of the poles must be ontologically prior, in this case the vertical, for no amount of horizontality could ever give rise to verticality, whereas the converse is eminently possible in an open Cosmos that features both bottom-up and top-down causation.

Analogously, letters don’t spontaneously organize themselves into words, or words into sentences. Nor can we deduce grammar from words, rather grammar operates at a higher level in order to organize words and sentences. And above grammar is meaning, because one can utter a perfectly grammatically correct sentence that is devoid of meaning, such as the famous “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” So grammar is one thing, meaning another. The point is, as expressed by Robert Rosen, semantics (i.e., meaning) can never be reduced to syntax (or grammatical order). Likewise, the meaning of the Cosmos cannot be reduced to its mathematical grammar and syntax.

Any mathematical statement is indeed a form of syntax, because it is just another language. But just because it is syntactically correct doesn’t render it meaningful, 26 dimensional string theory being a quintessential case. The latter is actually a desperate attempt to force quantum physics to make the sense it doesn’t make on its own.

To circle back to the top of this section, the reason for the spate of new age books of quantum (fill-in-the-blank) is precisely because the authors invert the Cosmos and imagine that the bottom end is the top, such that the weirdness of the quantum realm is more real than our corporeal world, when again, it is the shadow of this one, not its ground or principle. If the lower is the principle of the higher, then no wonder it is such a fount of metaphysical bullshit.

A Logospheric Bridge Made of Speech

Intellect is the satellite of the Deity. --Archytas

Now, the history of the Cosmos is a sequential unfolding of its potential, which has in principle been implicitly present since the beginning of time. Obviously this included the potential to give rise to self-conscious beings who can know about this potential. Indeed, so fine-tuned is this anthropic potential that one might even suspect that it is necessary for the Cosmos to give rise to observers. Remember, reality is a critique of our models, so the reality of the Anthropos is a critique of any model that pretends to eliminate the Anthropos from the map. It is the mother of all performative contradictions, which is to say, diction that runs contra to itself.

Suffice it to say that we won’t get anywhere without a principle of possibility, which is to say, indeterminacy, woven into the Cosmos. Absent this principle, then all is necessity, and you are either a religious Calvinist or a scientistic one: it doesn’t matter if you say it is all God or all matter, for either view squeezes the Anthropos out of the picture.

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an I.

That is true: there are philosophies that eliminate the philosopher, but why would you do that? For the Anthropos is the thin membrane, or bridge, between nothing and everything. The open Cosmos points beyond itself to a metacosmic origin, ground, and telos, which in turn points down to its creative entailments below.

In our cosmotheandric vision, the Anthropos is a living suspension bridge stretched between two infinitudes, a transcendent horizon above and an immanent one below. From our end the bridge is built of language, and language is only possible in a Cosmos that is already interiorly related. It is ordered to both poles of existence, but most especially the transcendent, insofar as 95% of speech is about something abstract, immaterial, and transcendent. It is also relevant that 95% of our mind is either unconscious or supraconscious. The Freudian model of an iceberg with an egoic 5% at the top is true as far as it goes, except to say that the unseen berg extends both above and below. Trying to eliminate transcendence from one’s vocabulary would consign one to animality, since we would be exiled from contact with those realities that distinguish us from the beasts, or from anything higher than daytime TV.

You might think this section would be more appropriate for Book II, the Anthropos, but it seems the Cosmos is made of language and that we merely ride piggyback on it. Again, if this place isn’t already a logosphere, we could never make it into one by emitting a bunch of animal noises. As described by Leinhart, in the absence of the prior mutual entanglement of subject and object, “language would not exist at all.” Rather, language may be analogized to a Möbius strip “in which inside and outside form a continuum.”

Metaphor, for example, “depends on the mutual indwelling of word in word, and of world in word.... if words indwell words, and if things and words are mutually indwelling, then metaphor is not imposed from outside but a revelation of the character of language, the intimate interpenetration of one word by others.” Thus language itself is already a revelation before it reveals anything else. Not for nothing is it said that in the beginning was the Word. If the Cosmos were wordless, then there would be no words, period.

The question arises as to why the Cosmos is anything other than the immutable Big Noun of Parmenides, or how there can be anything other than the One. The latter is easy to understand. It is not the problem; rather, we are.

But we also know that the Cosmos is the Big Verb of Heraclitus, always on the move. Nor can we leave out the qualitative adjectives that modify Big Noun, not to mention the adverbs that attach to Big Verb. And let us not forget the most underrated but consequential of all: Big Preposition, without which we could be linked to neither Big Noun nor Big Verb. It should be clear at this point that if we can know this about that, it is thanks to the prior aboutness of things, otherwise nothing could be about anything.

Aboutness is at once mysterious and self-evident, because it is an immaterial but nevertheless real relation between objects and other objects (e.g., nonlocality and complex dynamic systems), objects and subjects (intelligibility and depth), or subjects and other subjects (empathy and communication). There are clearly immaterial links between Anthropos and Cosmos, hence the beauty and intelligibility of the latter, but cosmotheandrism posits an equally necessary link between Anthropos and Theos, the latter going by various names in various traditions such as spirit, divine spark, atman, nous, logos, shechinah, shakti, prana, inner light, chi, slack, et al. I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowin’ the spirit is blown’ around out there, tryin’ to offer a little vertical assistance to the restavus sinners.

Yes, but is it true?

If you’re asking me, the answer is no, I don’t believe in it, rather, only rely upon it, whatever you want to call it, much like any other person who has no idea where inspiration comes from, only that it in-spires. We have already touched on this vis-à-vis the source of music, and here is another considered opinion from a venerable authority, Keith Richards: “I don’t write songs. They come to me and I just pass them on. I’m just an antenna, a receiver. There is only one song, and it’s been playing since the beginning of time. We just happen to catch a few bars of it now and then.”

The note is eternal, I hear it, it sees me.

Who said that?

Correct. Pete Townshend.

Well, it is the same with language. It is a special thing, because only it has the capacity to bridge the intelligence and intelligibility of this world. Think of how the Cosmos itself seems to be held together by various mathematical equations, math being just a highly abstract language.

The literal meaning of the word “symbol” is to “throw together” or across, as if words join together two disparate things. But before human speech is the not-so-simple matter of pointing, for words merely appropriate this prior capacity for one thing to refer to another.. Raymond Tallis’s Michelangelo’s Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence is about this seemingly mundane reality of pointing, which is not only much more consequential than we realize, but in many ways goes to the essence of what the Anthropos is, for it touches on our irreducible intersubjectivity. What really defines the uniqueness of human subjectivity is its aboutness or “intentionality.” If you get my point, it is because you have gotten what the point is about. Which, of course, adverts to the triune structure of communication, which involves one mind successfully transmitting to a second mind the truth of a third thing.

Even leaving language to the side, the simple act of pointing already points to the realities of intentionality and intersubjectivity. When you get the point, it is as if there were a line of transmission running from my mind, through my eyes and down my arms, into the keyboard and toward its terminal point in your head. This is something no other animal can do, and is a metaphor for every transmission of knowledge. This paragraph is not only pointed directly at the inside of your head, but the words and letters themselves are instances of pointing: letters point to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, etc. You won’t get my point by pointing back to the letters of which the point is composed. Those are just pointers, and it is that to which they point that counts.

The point is, language is our “passport out of nature.” Other animals are enclosed in their nature, but our anthropic nature includes an intentionality constituting “a uniquely human breach in the solitude of sentient creatures” that “takes us decisively out of our solitary, transient bodies, subject to the laws of nature” (Tallis). One might say we are always outside and beyond ourselves, for the simple reason that this is a mirror of the very structure of being.

Well, don’t point! It can’t be known.

We can’t look at it?

No, that’s it, you’ve seen enough of that one.

Perhaps for now, but we’ll circle back to this point in Books II and III.

[That last passage is an example of a reference — in this case to Spinal Tap — no one will get. For your convenience, many such self-referential jokes have been eliminated from the text.]

Two points remain under-developed at this stage, which is appropriate given that the full treatment of the Anthropos is deferred:

1. The precise character of the “principle of possibility/indeterminacy” that prevents pure necessity (whether Calvinist or materialist) from eliminating the Anthropos still needs sharper metaphysical specification.

2. The assertion that 95 % of speech concerns the abstract/immaterial, and that the unconscious/supraconscious extends both above and below the ego, is suggestive but will require more evidence when the focus shifts fully to the human subject.

Overall the section advances the narrative without losing coherence. Quantum physics has been relocated inside the vertical hierarchy rather than left as an unassimilated residue. Language and aboutness are now on the table as further evidence that the Cosmos is ordered to intelligence from the start. The bridge metaphor for the Anthropos is well-placed and sets up Book II cleanly.

The argument continues to hold together. The critical work against reductionism and dualism remains strong; the constructive claims about logospheric structure and aboutness as primitive are coherent within the system and await fuller development.

Wholeness and Vertical Causation

Too long again, but I would like to get the the end of the Cosmos and move on to the Anthropos. The material is not difficult, and I don’t want to split the argument in two:

Quantum physics is the most accurate scientific map ever, but is nevertheless not the territory. However, it does prove that the territory is much stranger than we had imagined. Specifically, Bell’s Theorem proved that the quantum world is nonlocal. If it isn’t nonlocal, then physics makes no sense on its own terms; in other words, nonlocality is required in order for it to make sense, but this in turn makes no sense in a bifurcated Cartesian universe. For supposing nonlocality is the case, then subatomic particles have the remarkable capacity to manifest instantaneous correlations across vast reaches of space, which is to say, exhibit an unbroken wholeness.

Smith essentially argues that the local (or what he calls corporeal) is to the nonlocal (or physical) as form is to prime matter. In other words, Aristotle got it right after all. “Everything in creation hinges upon these two complementary principles.” i.e., the complementary presence of form and matter. Importantly, however, this is a vertical distinction, with matter necessarily situated below form. The latter must somehow be projected from above, if only because the alternative is inconceivable.

This being the case, it implies a tripartite, vertically ordered Cosmos, with the pure potential of formless quantum potential at the bottom, our corporeal world in the middle, and something like a Theos at the top. Thus the Anthropos is the vertical link between terms, or between formal intelligibility and formless prime matter. For as Aristotle recognized all those years ago, mere potential is an ambiguous state between something and nothing: it is not yet something, but nor is it nothing.

∞

Let’s go back to step one, before the bifurcation of reality. Instead of splitting the world into interior and exterior, why not revert to the way things actually are, and recognize that interior and exterior are entangled in an irreducible way? For on the scale of untenability, the segregated bifurcation of mind and world is an eleven. Besides, Cartesian dualism is founded upon its own One Free Miracle, this being the veracity of God: God is not some evil demon who would deceive Descartes about something as important as his precious Cogito. So he posits his own sketchy version of cosmotheandrism, in that its three terms are all exterior to one another: he actually trifurcates the wholeness of reality into mind, matter, and God.

Recall the quote by Heisenberg to the effect that The same organizing forces that have created nature are responsible for the structure of our soul and our capacity to think. This is a meta-observation that transcends material science, hinting at a more profound level of relatedness. It implies an intrinsic connection between the human mind and the natural world, suggesting that our capacity for thought is not something separate from nature, but rather an expression of it. For “contrary to the strict division of the activity of the human mind” into binary opposites, Heisenberg proposed “the ideal goal of surmounting the opposites” (Smith) via what we are calling a transcendent third – an a priori dynamic synthesis of three terms as opposed a static a posteriori division into two.

The following passage by Wolfgang Smith goes to the heart of the quandary under discussion: “A worldview based upon physics is bound, therefore, to exclude the ‘qualitative dimension’ of the cosmos -- not because it is not there -- but because this science is categorically incapable of grasping that dimension, that aspect of the world.”

It seems there are no qualities down in quantumville until we make them so via measurement. But measurement is not from “within” that dimension, rather, from “above.” In Smith’s parlance, our measurement is a corporeal imposition into the merely physical: “An ontological distinction is thus to be made between the spatio-temporal world as perceptible, and the world as conceived by the physicist: the two are by no means the same.” Therefore, our act of measurement categorically transcends the world it measures. It is as if there are two worlds, for example two tables, “namely the one I can see and touch, and the other one made of ‘atoms in the void’ which I cannot.”

So, the measurement quandary does indeed place man in a kind of void unless we avoid the very Cartesian dualism that exiles us there. In other words, we need a vertically ordered Cosmos in order to properly situate the spooky quantum world. This latter cannot be the “cause” of the higher world we inhabit, because horizontal causation results in only more of it: “What confronts us in the act of measurement is a transition between two distinct ontological domains: from the physical to the corporeal that is.”

But our corporeal cannot be reduced to the physical. This is a problem physics per se cannot solve, because the corporeal domain is not explicable from the perspective of the quantum-physical. In other words, we begin, as we must, with the familiar everyday forms of the corporeal, but these dissolve into a buzzing sea of near nothingness within the quantum realm. The problem is, if we could actually go there, we wouldn’t be there, precisely.

A quandary indeed.

Unless we introduce another principle, a metaphysical one that can be perceived by the intellect but not with the biggest and best microscope in the world, for any microscope is ineluctably located in our macro (corporeal) world. As per Axiom 4, this is an internally related Cosmos, and this relational interiority extends all the way down to a quantum realm of pure potential, located at the penumbra between existence and non-existence.

Although mind and matter are thoroughly entangled at the quantum level, it seems that physicists would prefer to keep them separate, but this is precisely what they cannot do: you just can’t remove the subject from the object. With which cosmotheandrism has no issue, since only a human subject is capable of objectivity anyway.

Besides, we have only to turn the Cosmos bright-side up in order to see that quantum physics has nothing to say about vertical causation, because “its equations simply don’t reach that far”: “The crux of the matter resides in the fact that the physical realm -- the ‘world’ in which these equations do cut ice -- is limited, and that the act of measurement cannot be consummated within that restricted domain.... there is literally ‘a world of difference’ between the two -- a gap physics cannot span” (Smith).

Another case of the Great Between?

Yes, because the world of difference between these different worlds is recognized by the Anthropos, since we are able to distinguish between the poles of transcendent form and immanent matter and energy. From our side of the divide (the corporeal) we can know of it, but it can know nothing of us, no matter how much pneumababble with the word quantum thrown in.

Based on what has already been said above, we can all agree that the Cosmos is one, because that is what Cosmos means: a single order encompassing every thing and every event, whether objective or subjective, quantum or corporeal. As such, it is a whole, except to say that whole and part are complementary: no one needs a degree in physics to know that a whole consists of parts not only ordered to the whole but with the whole somehow contained in the parts -- for example, each cell in the body containing the genetic blueprint for the whole organism.

But by virtue of what principle is this wholeness even possible? It can only be because the Cosmos itself is already a whole. No amount of horizontal shuffling of extrinsically related parts could result in the emergence of wholes from parts, much less life from matter or transcendent minds from the quantum mist.

According to Smith, irreducible wholeness “is incomprehensible to physics per se, for the very simple reason that its modus operandi hinges precisely upon the reduction of wholes to the sum of their spatio-temporal parts.” So, physics makes wholes disappear under its aspect, nevertheless, the parts are only there in relation to the whole physicist. If the physicist were only an agglomeration of parts, there would be nothing to know and no one to know it.

The mystery of physics is always dwarfed by the mystery of the physicist?

Yes, but everyone, by virtue of being someone, is a mysterious whole; and “the idea of irreducible wholeness goes hand in hand with that of vertical causation.” We may therefore see “that, on the one hand, it takes vertical causation to produce an irreducible whole, and conversely, that it takes an irreducible whole to exert vertical causation.”

A tautology? Only if we collapse vertical to horizontal, which at once reduces wholes to parts. In reality, “no deterministic, random, or stochastic process can give rise to ‘complex specified information.’” For again, where does all the information come from? If it cannot come from below, it must come from above -- whatever “above” means. Formlessness cannot produce form, and yet, the corporeal world we inhabit is full of them. Unless we adopt a truly self-defeating nominalism, in which case forms and knowledge of them are equally impossible.

Don’t cut off your parts to spite your whole?

Yes, because without irreducible wholeness, not even being could be. For in the sub-corporeal quantum realm “we are no longer dealing with existent things,” rather, with possibilities, probabilities, and potentials, which are only in turn known via real corporeal instruments wielded by real embodied physicists. Like Aristotle’s principle of potency, the quantum world is “midway between being and nonbeing.” Thus, the quantum domain must derive from the corporeal, not vice versa.

At the top of the cosmotheandric framework is beyond-being, mirrored below in the mysterious barely-being of quantum physics. Regarding the latter, Heisenberg put it this way: it is “a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts,” which sounds very much like Aristotle’s category of prime matter, which also doesn’t properly exist until given intelligible form. The question is how do we get from that world of pure possibility to our familiar world of actuality, from the kingdom of potential to the thingdom of matter?

Nothing can give what it does not possess.

Agreed: it is quite a leap from a barely real world of pure possibility with only a tendency to exist, to our familiar world of intelligible objects that obviously exist. The only way out of this self-referential circle of unintelligibility is with recourse to the transcendent pole of being. Suffice it to say that it is a purely gratuitous metaphysical assumption to say that quantum physics somehow constitutes the ground of being, or that it is where we must begin our search for the Cosmic Area Rug. Rather, supposing the principles of transcendence and verticality, the quantum world is but the last vestige of reality before it shades off into nothingness. Conversely, the real ground must be located at the top, where infinitude is projected all the way down into the lower reaches of mere possibility.

If we’re on the right track, then the attempt to eliminate irreducible wholeness is a kind of ontological insanity. Analogously, it would be a kind of “musical insanity” to reduce a symphony to a series of isolated notes, and then regard these as more real than the symphonic whole. Nevertheless, this is the strategery of our paradigmatic science, to try to build a real corporeal Cosmos out of its incorporeal residue.

The cure is rather simple, really: don’t elevate a scientific methodology to an ontology. In reality, there is a complementary relationship between part and whole, interior and exterior, analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, one and many, etc. Some form of holism not only “makes sense” but “may well be in essence the only ontology that does” (Smith).

Way back in the day, Plato said Science is nothing but seeing. But what is sight? Human vision is not like a camera, which records only surfaces. Rather, we can see what we don’t see, for example, the dark side of the moon. We don’t literally see it, but in seeing the bright side we know the unseen side is there. We cannot see the totality or wholeness of a single object, even though we know -- unlike animals -- that there is always more to what we see.

Analogously, with the tools of science we see the one side of the Cosmos. But here again, there is the other side which we cannot see, and which requires a different mode of vision -- a transpersonal seeing “within” or “beyond” the surface.

A dualistic worldview doesn’t view the Cosmos at all, i.e., in its integral wholeness, rather, it is an impoverished view that breaks the prior wholeness into a world of increasingly diminished fragments. We can try to put the fragments back together in a multitude of ways, hence all the arbitrary -isms that attempt to do just that.

Imagine examining a painting with a microscope of infinite power, which would at once reveal everything and yet nothing. More generally, the tool determines what we shall find.

But the Anthropos is not only behind every tool, but the tools are simply extensions of us. We ourselves mirror the mysterious dark side of any object we perceive, in that our consciousness extends bidirectionally toward a boundless unconscious below and a supra-counsciousness above, the latter accounting for the intellectual light with which we see -- or enlighten -- intelligible objects. This primordial light is perhaps the most important thing that has been overshadowed by the Enlightenment. It is the central sun we’ve exchanged for the scientistic candles that illumine only the surface or periphery.

No one can see the Cosmos, and yet, we see it just the same in seeing anything. In other words, every intelligible existent is the visible side of a Cosmic Area Rug that extends over a transcendent horizon of total intelligibility. Which is again why any truth speaks of all truth. One might say that science is embedded in omni-science, as is part to whole.

Thus, if the Cosmos “were even remotely what the physical sciences declare it to be, it could not be ‘viewed’ at all. To speak seriously of a ‘worldview,’ one needs consequently to assume the incompleteness of our physics-based scientific knowledge” (Smith).

To what can be seen through physics needs to be added what is in principle not visible through it. You can spend your entire life in search of a sphere in Flatland, and will never find one. Unless you know how to look at circles, i.e., intuit the invisible sphere from which the visible circles are a declension.

Plato for the win!

Correct: the light is coming from outside the cave. Moreover, the call is coming from outside the Cosmos, i.e., from the transcendent horizon of total intelligibility alluded to above. You might say that modern physics is the biggest candle ever invented, but it will never find the sun, since it is at the other end, i.e., not the shadows dancing on the walls of the quantum cave. So, even if your tool is a high energy particle accelerator, philosophically speaking it is nevertheless a very expensive exercise in hammering shadowy nails to a wall made of gelatin.

So, where does our examination of the microworld leave us? Look closely enough at an object and it dissolves into an ontological crapshoot of vibrating energy. There are no good or bad vibrations, just a particle collidoscope of configurations that are, in Whitehead’s description, “senseless, valueless, purposeless.” The attempt to reduce the total Cosmos to its horizontal aspects entails a drastic impoverishment that shrinks reality to our lowest way of knowing it. Conversely, we are seeking intellectual rigor, minus the mortis.

Without the nightmare of ontological shrinkage.

Yes, and here we should say something more about Gödel, who in his spare time also proved that the mind is more than a machine: it calculates while always transcending calculation. Thus, the merely quantifiable Cosmos is but its “outer shell,” so to speak -- the periphery, not the center. Rather, we -- which is to say, the Anthropos -- are the center of the Cosmos, more on which as we segue into Book II and figure out how we snuck into the Cosmos while it wasn’t looking.

∞

The argument is coherent within its own terms and correctly identifies real difficulties in any strictly bottom-up or Cartesian reading of quantum theory. Nonlocality, the measurement problem, and the gulf between quantum description and corporeal experience remain live issues in the foundations of physics. Smith’s retrieval of Aristotelian categories offers one principled way of ordering those issues.

What remains open is whether the full tripartite vertical hierarchy (quantum potential → corporeal form → Theos) is required, or whether other non-reductive realisms can accommodate nonlocality and measurement without committing to that specific ranking. The section does not yet demonstrate the necessity of the highest term; it shows that some principle higher than the quantum domain is needed if the corporeal world and the knowing subject are to be real. That is a significant critical result. The constructive identification of that principle with the full cosmotheandric structure continues to be a further metaphysical step.

The writing stays focused and advances the narrative without excessive digression. The quantum material is no longer treated as an optional side-topic but as a test case for the book’s central vertical claim. That is progress.