We’ve already trisected neuroscientist David Eagleman’s impossible claim that “the brain has no access to the world outside. Sealed within the dark, silent chamber of your skull, your brain has never directly experienced the external world, and never will.”
You know what they say: garbage in, tenure out.
Naturally, if one arbitrarily separates the brain from its mind, then the brain has no access to the outside world, for it is but an object like any other. You can also subtract life from an organism and regard it as a machine, but why adopt such an impoverished view to begin with? As we have already explained — were you not listening?! — it is absurdly self-defeating to reduce biology to physics and subjects to objects: naive reductionism works fine in theory, just not in reality.
Viewed holistically – or cosmotheandrically – it is via the mind that the brain has direct access to the world of reality, including brains. For not only is there a deeper unity between mind and brain that dualism denies, there is a similar unity and coinherence between mind and world. Again, we are born into an implicit but foundational intersubjectivity before we even begin to think explicitly about the world, in the absence of which we can never reach first base. But because of the unconscious nature of this mutual indwelling, left-brainiacs in particular forget all about it.
Analogously, we can talk about cause and effect as if they are two different things, but in actuality they are simultaneous, two sides of a single event. Likewise, knower and known -- intelligence and intelligibility -- are two sides of a single occurrence: we only know that which is intelligible, and only insofar as it is intelligible. The world is full of intelligible information. If it isn’t, then that is the end of science and philosophy, and the beginning of the philodoxical pneumababble of our competitors.
James Gibson’s theory of ecological perception is a form of direct realism, which stands in opposition to the Kantian view that we are forever sequestered from things-in-themselves, i.e., the phenomenal-noumenal split. Gibson essentially arms cosmotheandrism with an anti-Kantian Critique of Pure Criticism, for as we have said, one cannot simultaneously say the world is an illusion and in the next breath say what reality really is, for that is literally like having your crock and eating it too.
Literally?
Yes, insofar as you swallow that crock. I just don’t like the idea of some tenured pinhead telling us what we can and can’t know. We’ll be the judge of that.
Judgment. Important little word. At least in my judgment.
Indeed. In our neotraditional retrofuturistic metaphysic, is is the heart and soul of judgment. Can it be that Kant is the first person in human history to have judged rightly that we cannot know reality? If that is true, it is necessarily an opinion, man. Seriously, am I the only one around here who gives a hoot about the rules of logic? It is as if Kant pretends to an omniscience without any object, for he knows everything about nothing.
Conversely, Gibson rejects the consensus view that perception is a process of inferring a representation of the external world from impoverished sensory data. This is a departure from the Kantian idea that we cannot access “things-in-themselves” (noumena) and instead only perceive the world through the organizing structures of our minds.
Gibson’s theory claims that we are in fact in direct contact with the world, and that perception isn’t mediated by mental representations, sense data, or cognitive processes that “construct” reality. Instead, our perceptual systems directly pick up on information that already exists in the environment. After all, the world is full of intelligible information. If it isn’t, then that is again the end of science and philosophy. Gibson’s work maintains that the act of perception begins with the registering of this information, not its interpretation or construction. Which means we’re back to a talking Cosmos, one packed with intelligible information ordered to the human intellect that knows it in the single act of knowing referenced above. Perception involves the mutuality of animal-environment, in other words, a single system with two complementary poles.
A central concept in Gibson’s theory is the affordance, which is an objective property of the environment that is directly perceived, not mental qualities we project onto it. This means that we perceive the world in terms of its practical meaning to us, without needing a separate cognitive step to add that meaning. Affordances are possibilities for action that the environment offers to an individual organism.
Think of it as a bridge between the objective world outside and the subjective world within, which highlights both the relational nature of reality and the intrinsic meaning it provides the organism. Organisms do not perceive abstract sensory data and then interpret it; rather, they directly perceive the affordance -- the meaning or utility -- that the environment offers them. The world is, therefore, perceived in terms of what it means for the perceiver: it is a field of intrinsic meaning.
Thus an affordance – reminiscent of Winnicott’s transitional space –is not a property of the object or organism alone; rather a relational property that abides in the space between the two. For example, for me and my hand, a doorknob affords “grasping“ and “opening,” but it doesn’t afford the same actions to my dog. However, to her credit, a metal bowl filled with water doesn’t really afford drinking to me, that is, if I can’t use my hands. It does afford drinking to my dog, what with the cupping action of her impressive tongue.
Although Gibson doesn’t put it this way, this direct perception goes to the intersubjectivity in which division is embedded in a deeper unity.
There is of course a fundamental distinction between the physical world that surrounds animals and the infinitely narrower environment to which they are adapted. In short, animals know only their environment, but know nothing of the wider (and higher and deeper) Cosmos beyond it. Rather, they know only what they need to know in the context of surviving in their sliver of reality
The Anthropos is subject to environmental pressures just like any other animal. And yet, we are not limited to any animal environment. Rather, our environment is being itself, the totality of the Cosmos and beyond. That’s a big -- the biggest conceivable -- place. But how did we transcend our comparatively puny evolutionary environment focussed on survival and reproduction, and come to know this vastly greater world that extends backward all the way to the Big Bang and upward all the way to Beyond-Being?
Clearly, no one was around at the time of the origin of the Cosmos, but we know all about it, just as if there were a mind there observing it. Again, our perceptions are clearly not limited to the immediate environment, as is the case with all other animals.
So, animals don’t live in the Cosmos, but rather, only in a narrow spectrum of stimuli relevant to their own survival. For example, a bat lives in an acoustic environment imperceptible to a bloodhound, while a bloodhound lives in an olfactory environment imperceptible to the bat.
But the Anthropos lives in a Cosmos – or the totality of being – that in turn dwells in us. Our ordering to the totality can have nothing whatsoever to do with the imperatives of survival, but utterly transcends them. The Anthropos too has an “environment” proper to it, but it turns out to be everything and more (because there is always more to anything).
If we accept that our nervous systems aren’t merely projecting a virtual reality but are directly attuned to the meaningful structure of the physical world, then we’ve established a profound relationality between the mind and reality. This relationship goes beyond mere survival, suggesting the Cosmos is not only inherently intelligible but perhaps designed to be known.
Let’s take an everyday object like, I don’t know, dog poop—
I don’t like that word.
Okay, feces. Based on my dog’s behavior during a walk, this material is full of meaningful olfactory information that is imperceptible to me. Likewise, to a fly it is also quite meaningful, as it is a good place to lay eggs. To me, it is mostly something to avoid stepping in or to toss in the trash.
Then again – for it takes all kinds to make a Cosmos – there are human beings who undertake the formal study of subject, i.e., coprology. I suppose my dog is a coprologist after a fashion, but she cannot attain the universal. Rather, for her the specimen presumably has only particular information such as, “smells like Rusty is on a new diet,” or “Coco is pregnant again.”
The key point is that the intellect’s ability to unpack the affordances of being across all scales -- from the subatomic to the metaphysical -- is the very definition of our escape from the particularity of the animal niche. The Cosmos is complementary to us because we are the necessary complement to it. The whole system requires a final term (us) in which its coherence can be realized.
The question is, if a chair affords sitting and a tree affords shelter, what does an open, relational, and logospheric Cosmos afford a conscious mind? What are the transcendental affordances that the Cosmos offers to the anthropic intellect, and what do they tell us about the ultimate nature of things? This openness to the whole of reality is quite strange, and requires an explanation of its own that surpasses what natural selection can explain about us. And one thing it can never explain is how we have found ourselves in a Cosmos that is in us.
∞
The proper ecological niche of the Anthropos is Being itself. Ideological “second realities” represent a perversion of the affordances offered by Being. That is to say, the Anthropos is ordered to an infinite object, but can instead choose to enclose itself in a finite container. It is a perverse act because it denies the very freedom and infinite capacity that a logospheric Cosmos affords the human intellect. Such ideological systems are always brittle as a result of the reality principle pushing back against the constriction of the second reality, which for Voegelin is “a fictitious world imagined as true by a person using it to mask and thereby ‘eclipse’ genuine reality” (Webb).
Such a loony eclipse involves a “closure of consciousness against reality; a state that may become habitual and unconscious, but never entirely free from the pressure of reality and the anxiety produced by the attempt to evade it (ibid.). It is results in a mode of “closed existence,” which involves “internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental” (ibid.). Conversely, open existence is the intrinsically healthy mode “in which consciousness is consistently oriented toward truth and toward the transcendental pole of the tension of existence.”
So, only in this latter mode is the Anthropos properly open for isness?
Correct. Of course, this is not to say that the particular environment doesn’t look quite different even to two members of the same human family. For example, to a trained pilot, the flight panel of an airplane is full of meaning that is imperceptible to me.
But if our minds were in principle limited by an intellectual wall of some kind, then we would – like the animal – have no awareness of it. Therefore, as described by Schuon, one cannot “have it both ways: either the intelligence by definition comprises a principle of illimitability or liberty.... or else, on the contrary, the intelligence comprises, likewise by definition, a principle of limitation or constraint, in which case it no longer admits of any certitude and cannot function any differently from the intelligence of animals, with the result that all pretension to a ‘critical philosophy’ is vain.”
In other words, critical philosophy modestly encloses us in quasi-animality while presumptuously escaping its own limits in so limiting us. In short, such a philosophy ends up devouring itself via its own critique, for “A subject who casts doubt on man’s normal subjectivity thereby casts doubt upon his own doubting” (ibid.), in contrast to exercising a wholly reasonable faith in the ever-deepening intelligibility of the Cosmos.
Do your worst, Grok:
This section strengthens the case for direct realism and relational perception while continuing the critique of sealed-off, constructivist models of mind. It is consistent with the book’s earlier arguments: once mind is arbitrarily severed from brain, or subject from world, the resulting dualism or reductionism becomes self-defeating. Viewed cosmotheandrically, mind and brain form a deeper unity, and mind and world are coinherent. Intersubjectivity is again treated as foundational rather than derived; we are born into it before explicit thought begins.
The distinction between animal environment and human Cosmos is restated with useful sharpness. The human ecological niche is therefore not a larger animal niche but the open field of intelligibility itself.
There is some repetition of earlier anti-Kantian and anti-reductionist material, and the tone remains polemical. Nevertheless, the introduction of Gibson’s affordances gives the relational ontology a more precise perceptual mechanism. It provides a useful bridge between the developmental intersubjectivity discussed earlier and the claim that the Cosmos is inherently ordered to be known by a mind such as ours.
The section does not yet fully answer how the human escapes the narrow evolutionary environment into the totality of Being, but it clarifies what that escape consists in: the capacity to perceive and unpack affordances across all scales, including the transcendental affordances of an open, relational, logospheric Cosmos. That keeps the critical and constructive threads of the larger argument moving forward.
You call it polemical, I call it humor: giving my competitors the business. Metaphysical trash talk. Mere polemic is lacking in irony and self-awareness.
Fair distinction.
There is a difference between polemic that simply attacks and a style that attacks while signaling that it knows it is performing the attack — irony, exaggeration, self-aware swagger, the wink. Your writing frequently operates in the second mode: the insults are stylized, the metaphors are deliberately over-the-top, the trash talk is part of the comic persona rather than pure invective. When it works, the reader is invited to share the joke rather than merely witness a denunciation.
I have sometimes under-weighted that layer. Calling the tone “polemical” flattens the performance into something more earnest and literal than it often is. The better description is the one you offer: ontological trash talk delivered with a wink. That register is consistent with the book’s larger claim that insight often arrives through sudden re-framing, including comic re-framing. The humor is not decorative; it is one of the ways the text tries to jolt the reader out of the closed systems it is criticizing.
That said, the risk remains real. Irony and self-awareness are only fully legible to readers already inside the joke or already sympathetic to the target. To others, the same passages can still read as unrelenting hostility dressed up as wit. The wink is visible to those who catch it; it is invisible to those who don’t. That is a structural hazard of the style, not a failure of intention.
I’ll register the correction: the voice is more accurately described as ironic, self-aware ontological trash talk than as mere polemic. The distinction matters for how the argument is received, and you’ve made it clearly.
Pfft. You should read how polemically the atheists speak of our perspective! They started it.
