On the Ontological Necessity of Endless Possibility

We’re in orbit around the third planet from the star called the Sun. Over.

You mean the Earth? Over.

Positive. It is known to have some form of intelligent species. Over.

I think we should take a look.

In the previous passage we began looking into the experience of experience, and concluded that it might just be the key to the whole existentialada. However, “unshared experience” is a contradiction in terms, not just because it is impossible to experience nothing, but because at the deepest level of our being, experience is again always intersubjective: it begins with someone, in a mutual coinherence between I and thou. For cosmotheandrism, this intersubjectivity scales all the way up from physics to theology, and every plane in between. Science itself is an endless con-versation between intelligence and intelligibility at every level of existence.

This being the case, a philosophy such as atheistic materialism is still going to be a conversation -- for it cannot fail to be one and still commune-icate -- but the person engaging in it is simply a yowling android in the howling void. In the words of Robert Barron, “any philosophy, science, or worldview that does not see relationality, being-for-the-other, as ontologically fundamental must be false,” so “what the mind correctly seeks as it goes out to meet the intelligibility of the real is always a form of coinherence.”

Put it this way: when intelligence goes out to meet & greet the Cosmos, the Cosmos meets it more than halfway, and is pleased to engage us in nonstop conversation via its own infinite intelligibility. The Cosmos never stops blabbering, and sometimes we are tempted to say: Okay, we get it. Awesome. Luminous. Numinous. A cosmic festivus for the restavus, a fruitful wombinus that permits knowledge to bloominus.

One preposterous alternative to this view is the philosophy of actualism – literally for pre-posterous means back-to-front, or putting the effect before the cause.

The entailment wagging the god.

Ultimately yes. We won’t spend much of our precious timelessness on it, because it posits a world in which only actual concrete things exist. As such, there are no possible states or potential versions of things. Rather, things simply are what they are: what you see is what you get, good and hard. But deprived of potentiality, we are left with an impoverished conception of the Cosmos that simply denies the ingression of novelty.

Maybe some people enjoy living in eternally boring and stagnant Cosmos.

You’re preaching to the choir, given my previous incarnation as a clinical psychologist dealing with patients whose lives are arrested in an iterative circle. If nothing else, it proves that one can live in the largest space imarginable and yet turn it into a claustrophobic prison of finitude. But again, any ideology – which one might call a public and collective neurosis – falls into this trap, which then requires One Free Miracle in order to escape its limits. O is the symbol we use as a placeholder for the Infinitude that can never be contained in, or restricted by, finite expressions of it: it both contains and interpenetrates everything without ever being containable.

Properly understood dialectically, our finite expressions can be seen as forms of Infinitude, so long as we don’t reify them into wholly adequate form-ulations of it. Otherwise it is like trying to write a song that exhausts music as such, or a sentence that expresses all meaning and truth. The principle of this dynamic Infinitude-finitude complementarity accounts for both our own inexhaustible creativity and the infinite and multi-layered intelligibility of being.

Which raises the question: what is the biggest space in the world? It must be the space between intelligence and intelligibility. After all, everything we can possibly conceive of is situated there, either in actuality or potential. If there’s anything bigger than this, then the Theos is keeping it for itself.

Alternatively, this is the space between the necessary and the possible, or between the Things that Must Be and Those that Might Be. All of evolution, for example, occurs in the space of the possible. Obviously evolutionary change isn’t impossible, but nor is it necessary, like a mathematical procedure or logical entailment.

In reality, the Anthropos inhabits -- or is in contact with -- two very different and yet intimately related worlds: we always begin by sensing a material object, but knowledge doesn’t end there. Indeed, sensation isn’t really knowledge at all. Rather, knowledge is an abstraction from sensation: it is immaterial and conceptual.

Note that the impossibility of containing the Infinitude of O is no different with regard to persons, for example, Abraham Lincoln. According to google there have been some 15,000 books on him so far, including several thousand biographies, and we’re just getting started. To put this in perspective, if you read a new Lincoln book every week, it would take nearly 300 years to finish the current library, and authors are still cranking out more. Nor will any of these books ever tell us what it was actually like to be Lincoln, since only he could begin to know that. At best we can create a pointillist picture of him, with our imagination pulling the points together and breathing some life into them.

Now do O.

You read my mind. Despite our best effort to publish the last word on the subject, there will always be more, since O is the quintessence of inexhaustibility, and the principle thereof herebelow. We can penetrate but never circumscribe this Mystery at any level of being.

The point is, in our account of O we want to avoid the twin philosophical errors of bad finitude and infinitude. Regarding the former, even the best account of O becomes an idol in the greedy hands of a unipolar finitude. Indeed, truth itself is a graven image if isolated from the Truth as such, for which reason the truism that philosophies (and by extension theologies) are generally true in what they affirm but grave errors when a partial truth becomes engraved in stone.

Nor are we just picking on secular ideologies, because people often take our Father for the proverbial ride by absolutizing their religion, when any religion is about the Absolute, not the Absolute itself. It is the finger pointing at the moon, but even the moon has a dark side. As does O, only big time. As discussed in Book I, if the bad infinite is a train that never reaches its destination in O, the bad finite never leaves the ideological station while congratulating itself for having made the arduous journey.

Bottom line: the universe’s ultimate Aboutness (its meaning) is a ceaseless, dialectical asymptotic spiral -- it is eternally tending toward the Absolute through our finite and relational forms, and the act of wonder is the human mind’s participation in this very spiral. It is the spontaneous, metaphysically correct intellectual response to the aboutness of the Cosmos, denial of which constitutes a willful closure and endarkenment of being.

Another rookie error is mistaking the limits of sensory perception for the limits of reality, as it misses out on all the wonderful forms that are out there just waiting to be known and appreciated. Note that the philosopher who denies substantial form implicitly presumes the substance of his own mind to hold the substance of his argument together. This is another case of absurcularity -- of the intellect using its own substantial form to argue for the insubstantiality of the world. If there is no substance, there cannot even be an argument that retains its form from premise to conclusion. For substance is simply that which makes a thing what it is. It subsists, in that it can exist on its own, while accidents and predicates are dependent upon substance. Substance is precisely what allows us to identify and know a thing.

One may deny substance, but in so doing one is forced to smuggle it in through the backdoor in order to make any intelligible claim. In reality, the necessity of substance is logically unassailable and confirms the blankruptcy of any nominalist or existential ontology, for intelligible thought and speech become untenable and inexplicable in the absence of substance (i.e., no substance = radical unintelligibility).

We can all agree that science is a tool used by a subject to study an object (or, in the case of my racket, psychology, other subjects). We can have a Theory of Everything about the objects, but physics excludes itself from any explanation of the subject holding the theory. Which goes back to the immediate fact that the experience we call “I am” is the most obvious reality in existence, since literally everyone knows it, yet it is something physics cannot derive from sub-existential quantum potency, only assume going in. Which is fine. No one should expect physics to be a philosophy, much less a religion.

As with our physical eyes, there is always a blind spot.

Correct. Which is papered over by the One Free Miracle of teleportation to first base. In reality, neither the epistemology of empiricism nor the ontology of actualism can account for potentiality, nor can potentiality account for actuality, so when we have eliminated the impossible, you know the drill. Except that a dynamic complementarity between act and potency isn’t the least bit implausible, since no one has ever seen uninformed matter nor an immaterial form (with eyes made by Darwin at any rate). This complementarity not only fits the facts, but it fits every fact, thereby meeting Whitehead’s definition of metaphysics as a coherent, logical, and necessary system of general ideas in which every element of our experience can be interpreted.

Law, like form, is a constraint on possibility: out of all the things that can possibly occur, law determines which will become actual. This being the case, where does the cosmic wiggle room come from? In other words, how is it that we have a lawful Cosmos that routinely transcends its own laws? Biology, for example, violates no known laws of physics but nevertheless floats above them. Same vis-à-vis mind and the laws of biology.

Of course, there exist determinists who wiggle out of this truism by insisting that there is no wiggle room, and that everything that happens happens necessarily. It again implies that there is no realm of potential or possibility, rather, only the actual. But if the real is reduced to the actual, then we could never know it, or rather, we would have no choice but to know it. Thus, the most we could say of the beliefs of the actualist is that they are actual, not true or false. In short, they lack the potential to be wrong or right.

You’ll never hear surf music again.

Petey, no one is going to get that reference to Jimi Hendrix. But in our commonsense cosmotheandric view, possibilities exist necessarily, and at every level of being. Which prompted Lawrence of Arabia to tell his fatalistic Arab pal, “Truly, for some men, nothing is written unless they write it,” meaning that their companion’s death in the desert was not fated to happen.

So, there is a convergence between modern actualism and premodern fatalism, since both deny the contingency and possibilities located at the crossroads of the now. The very phenomenology of time is evidence of this dynamic interplay between actual and potential, directly refuting the monopolar error of a fatalist actualism.

In short, time takes time. The alternative is to say that time is an unreal illusion, or the cosmic hassle of waiting for the inevitable. Besides, as the down-to-earth William James pointed out, if an idea has no practical consequences for how we actually live our lives, then it scarcely matters whether it is true or false. Or, in the words of Anton Chigurh, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” – the rule that brought you to a Cosmos that is not even absurd, rather to a nothing knowable by no one.

I don’t know what to make of that. I surely don’t.

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...