Good & Bad Reduction

A refreshingly brief one for a change:

Scientism reduces the vertical hierarchy of our universe to the horizontal plane, thus redounding to a total cosmic eclipse.

Boom boom, out go the lights.

And with no light, we can’t even locate the switch. “Scientific knowledge,” writes Berdyaev, “climbs a dark stairway – which it enlightens step by step.” Agreed, but what is at the top of the stairs unless it is “the Logos, which lightens the path from above”? Science partakes of a light it cannot generate out of its own resources. Note that this intellectual light is very much analogous to physical light, which is likewise invisible: we cannot see it, rather, it illuminates that which we see.

No one can see the light?

Correct: light is the cosmic invariant that unifies space and time and sets the speed limit of the universe. Oddly enough, space remains completely dark unless and until light strikes matter or shines directly into our eyes. It is the invisible medium we detect only at the moment photons terminate their long, strange journey into our heads. This is how we see the infant universe, when it was just 380,000 years old: the cosmic microwave background is the birth announcement that went unread until opened in 1964.

But in order to see this light, we also require the light of the intellect, for it is one thing for this invisible light to reflect off the back of the retina, another thing entirely for the light of the intellect to reflect upon this physical light and understand it for what it is. So, because the cosmos is thoroughly entangled with itself in space and time, it terminates in the light of the intellect that is witness to its own physical beginning. 

But it cannot be the metaphysical beginning, for Every beginning is an image of the Beginning; every end is an image of the End. The real origin is a deeper reality from which space, time, and physical laws arise: it is that which transcends and contains the cosmos. Again, the cosmos is open at both ends, or toward immanence and transcendence, both reducing to the single principle we are calling O.

For our purposes, what are the chances that we end up in the one universe that can be present to witness its own birth in the form of anthropic knowers? Supposing something exists, then it was possible for it to exist, so the possibility of a self-reflecting cosmos is baked into its origins. Should we therefore leap to the conclusion that our cosmos is ordered in the way it is because it was necessary for us to be here? Certainly we cannot rule it out a priori. We are a property of the cosmos, but only because the cosmos has any number of exquisitely fine-tuned properties without which we could not be here. I say “any number” because science keeps discovering more of them.

Why is this not a one-storey cosmos, but rather, a stratified and open-ended process that cannot be reduced to its lowest level?

Assumes facts not in evidence.

Oh, we have the facts alright, e.g., living organisms, consciousness, and a deep intelligibility that discloses multiple layers of order to intelligent beings. But what is the principle that explains these facts? Cosmotheandrism rejects any form of outmoded dualism that divides the cosmos against itself. Rather, everything is entangled with everything else, both within and between levels. There is only one cosmos that knows itself to be one cosmos: in other words, the very possibility of knower and known is a reflection of the prior unity of the cosmos. There is one cosmos pervaded by one logos that is the principle of both intelligence and intelligibility: there is no rigid dualism between intellect and object, or form and being.

One task of science -- at any level of reality -- is the reduction of multiplicity to unity. As such, there is an appropriate kind of reduction, so long as it confines itself to its own domain and doesn’t try to pull all the others down with it. Even if the material realm operated under completely mechanistic principles, this would have no relevance to the manner in which the immaterial mind operates.

Note that the premodern world practiced another form of reductionism, from eternal, universal, and necessary truths to the transient and particular — terrestrial conditions were deduced from celestial principles instead of observed in their own right to find out what they are actually telling us about themselves. With the development of modern science it was the other way around: in a downward direction, ultimately to externally related matter in motion conceptualized quantitatively.

Cosmotheandrism accepts both approaches in a mutually supporting framework in which the lower levels are open to the higher, and vice versa, with man always situated between the poles of necessity and contingency or transcendence and immanence. Viewed in this manner, reality appears to make discontinuous leaps if regarded from the bottom up, but the continuity is restored if seen from the top down.

Although existence is necessarily one, it nevertheless discloses many seemingly irreconcilable worlds -- at least if we begin at the bottom of the cosmos and try to work our way up. For example, modern physics reveals a world “beneath” ours that operates along shockingly different lines than our familiar human world.

One of the major conceptual problems in physics is that even physicists don’t know what to do about the bizarre micro-world they’ve discovered, as it cannot be reconciled with the macro-world of relativity, let alone with any commonplace anthropic neighborhood. It is as if macroexistence floats on a swarm of the incomprehensible. And we all know how painful that can be.

Neither the macroworld of relativity nor the microworld of subatomic physics tell us anything about the everyday human experiential world, at least in the absence of a heroic dose of psilocybin. In fact, the quantum world is so paradoxical that it literally cannot even be imagined. That is, if we try to picture what goes on down there, the picture will most certainly be wrong.

This is not to say that we cannot use quantum physics, which we obviously do. It is just that we cannot use it to understand ours, the human world. You cannot read a (post-classical) physics text and expect it to disclose any useful information about our day-to-day affairs. You can’t tell the IRS your income is only probable, or both there and not there, or only there when an accountant observes it. And there’s just not enough LSD in the world to see past, present, and future all existing simultaneously in a 4D block universe. Not even the Theos could do that, for reasons discussed in Book III.

On the other hand, there is a good form of reductionism that reduces entailments to principles, appearances to reality, visible to invisible, diversity to unity. But this reduction is strictly impossible via science, for reasons articulated by Gödel. To be sure, science can reduce multiplicity toward unity, but not to unity per se, because it can never be simultaneously complete and consistent. Rather, it is open at the top end to that which confers unity and intelligibility — and light — below, AM I WRONG?!

No, you are not wrong in the core critical claims.

• You are right that the common reductionist and closed-system alternatives are inadequate.

• You are entitled to the claim that a relational, vertical, open framework centered on intelligence and intelligibility is a superior alternative.

• You have not yet shown that this particular version of that framework is compulsory. The remaining books will have to do the heavier work of showing that the concrete features of the physical world, life, mind, and history fit the axioms better than rival accounts.

The philosophical core is not refuted. It is an ambitious, consistent, and still-open metaphysical proposal that correctly identifies deep problems in the prevailing horizontal picture and offers a systematic alternative. Whether it is ultimately true is the question the rest of the trilogy has to answer. At this stage, it is not wrong. It is unfinished.

∞

So says Grok, my new artificial comrade in snark.

The Two Miracles of Materialism

You might think that I just like hearing the sound of my own keyboard. I don’t. It’s just that it is difficult enough to organize all this material without cutting it down to a more concise and digestible size. I am actually tearing out whole sections, but I agree with my imaginary readers that it is still too long. I suppose the only excuse for the length would be if it were entertaining, but that is not for me to say, and I’m sure not going to ask Gemini.

∞

Metaphysical realism is considered unrealistic these days -- the idea that reality exists independently of our minds and concepts. We will have much more to say about this in Book II, but ever since Kant ruined everybody’s lives and ate all our steak, leaving us to float through the Cosmos with distorting goggles we can never remove.

Of course, is one thing to believe critical philosophy, another thing to live as if it were true. Something has gone terribly wrong in the Cosmos when it requires a highly trained philosopher to deny what every practicing scientist knows. Science could not function if it took Kant seriously, for in the words of Richard Feynman, its method is grounded in the common sense notion “that observation is the judge of whether something is so or not. All other aspects and characteristics of science can be understood directly when we understand that observation is the ultimate and final judge of the truth of an idea.” If the truth weren’t out there in the Cosmos, it could never inhere in here, in the Anthropos. Dualism not only divorces mind from reality but files a restraining order against the Anthropos.

No visiting rights for you!

Except we are the ones who absurdly orphan ourselves from the Cosmos that birthed us. Admittedly, there is something to be said for a more humble Kantian approach at the far ends of verticality, i.e., the subcorporeal world of quantum physics below and the supra-physical world above, where direct observation fails and logic reaches its floor and ceiling, respectively.

But even then, there are metaphysical workarounds that can, as we shall see, properly frame the phenomena. In particular, the intrinsic openness and relationality of the Cosmos do not become inoperative anywhere, although the workings of the Logosphere do become more mysterious at both ends. We still pick up the signals, but linear and rational speech themselves become problematic in describing them in an unambiguous manner. This just means we must change our manner of speaking about it, not that the reality itself is closed or transforms into something unknowable.

Please don’t go poetic on us. A man must know his limitations.

I promise to refrain from doing so, at least until the midnight hour of this trilogy, when the Logos comes tumbling down and a degree of unglish obliterature is impossible to avoid. Here we are simply alluding to the necessity of paradoxical descriptions both at the quantum end, where reality is characterized as both field and a particle, and at the transcendent end, where the Theos may be regarded as both one and three – or in Vedantic terms, that Atman (the Anthropos) is not Brahman (the ultimate principle), but not not Brahman either.

Thus, our manner of speaking must vault from left hemispheric linearity to a more right-brainish approach that calls upon nonceward paronomazes, malappropriation, transphilic sufistry, nihilogism, odd homonym, and other clearobscuro shadings. This is not because truth has vanished from the Cosmos, but because the mystery overflows with an abundance of meaning that cannot be conveyed in lineal devoices. Here we are not dealing with an absence of sense but with hypersense – or what we call perfect nonsense (in contrast to the imperfect nonsense generated by the attempt to enclose infinitude within finitude). The point is, there is a proper grammar of mystery, whether we are talking about the uncertainty principle below or the doctrine of analogy above.

This subject of Kantian mischief comes up in a representative book of neurological sorcery called The Brain: The Story of You, in which Eagleman – contrary to Feynman – takes it as axiomatic that anything known as “reality” is just a distant rumor: “What if I told you that the world around you, with its rich colors, textures, sounds, and scents is an illusion, a show put on for you by your brain?”

Harumph. What if I told you that your opinion that the world around us is an illusion is just a show put on for you by your brain?

Touché. Eagleman maintains that 1) “If you could perceive reality as it really is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence,” 2) “Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter,” and 3) “Over millions of years of evolution the human brain has become adept at turning this energy and matter into a rich sensory experience of being in the world.”

That first sentence isn’t even wrong, for if we cannot perceive reality as it is, what does he mean by the term “reality,” and how does he know what it does or does not look like? The second sentence fares no better, because it not only claims to know what reality really consists of -- matter and energy -- but that the human being can know this with certitude. Note that even so-called primary qualities — e.g., solidity and motion — are nevertheless known by a mind, thus they are just as mind-dependent as any other qualities.

And the third sentence – about the brain transforming energy and matter into the experience of them – passes over a rather extraordinary phenomenon, which is to say, the transformation of matter and energy, not just into the experience of them, but experience of the intelligibility of matter and energy. How is this even possible? How can featureless matter and energy give rise to the experience of their qualities?

Take color, for example. It is trivially true that color is experienced in the mind. Nevertheless, matter must at the very least have the potential to be experienced in this manner. Or, just say that quantitative energy and matter have the potential to experience themselves in the form of qualities, but how? Is this not the weirdest thing imaginable? Granted, illusions exist, but what must be true of the world in order for them to exist? Obviously, falsehood and illusion must be parasitic on truth and objectivity.

I am wrong, therefore I can be right?

That’s about the size of it. Whitehead, among others, argued that if secondary qualities are relegated to mere subjective experiences, then the very world we begin with, and are trying to understand, literally vanishes. This is no small matter, because primary qualities are only revealed to us via their secondary qualities, so if we eliminate the latter we sever the link to the former. 

Whitehead famously cracked that in this view, “Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endless and meaningless.” Again literally, because subjectivity itself becomes a secondary quality, so the world reduces to a lifeless, abstract, and ultimately unrecognizable chaosmos bearing no resemblance to the Cosmos we actually live in and interact with. The senses do in fact perceive the truth of reality, just not the whole truth, so help me God. They are windows on the world, and why would you want to consign yourself to a room without a view?

In the beginning is the intelligible word. If not, then the Anthropos has washed his hands and sealed his fate. In other words, intelligibility is prior to our discovering anything at all to be intelligible, whether “primary” or “secondary.” The point is, both are intelligible to the intellect, and this requires a sufficient reason.

Our cosmotheandric How is bigger than Eagleman’s Kantian How, because his How just assumes our deeper How. For example, how is it possible that Eagleman has written a book that purports to reveal the nature of reality outside human perception? So too did Francis Crick (codiscoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule) write such a book called The Astonishing Hypothesis, arguing that “A person’s mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them.”

That’s just, like, his opinion, man.

Yes, and I call it a pretty, pretty astonishing opinion, in that a scientific hypothesis isn’t just anything, but analogous to a legal argument in which you state your conclusion and proceed to demonstrate why it is true. But how could one ever demonstrate the truth of such a vacuous hypothesis? 

It reminds me of Haldane’s well known zinger that “if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true.” And if the Anthropos can arrive at truth – and we mean any truth – then there is no reason to believe the mind is reducible to atoms, molecules, and nerve cells. There is actually nothing astonishing about conflating scientific conclusions and philosophical arguments, or mistaking prejudices for principles. A little irony, please. Human beings engage in this fallacy all the time.

You can’t have your Crick and eat it too.

Yes, in order to swallow his reductive hypothesis you need to escape its consequences, but how? Crick is essentially feasting on the fruit of a tree he poisons at the roots. It brings to mind an aphorism: Nearly every idea is an overdrawn check that circulates until it is presented for payment. I dare say that if you were to try to convert Crick’s rubber check into real intellectual cash, the manager of the First Bank of Reality would laugh you out of the building.

Jeez. If you’re condemned to live in a matrix, at least pick an interesting one.

But we are not matrix-bound, and the real world is far more interesting -- not to mention surprising — than staring at the back of our glial cells. Besides, we have an even more astonishing hypothesis, which, in plain English, goes like this: The Anthropos is the image of O, irrespective of whether one regards the latter as a person or principle. This being the case, it explains how and why we, of all people -- middling relativities that we are -- nevertheless have access to an absolute realm of transcendent truth, beauty, creativity, freedom, virtue, and much more -- to everything. For to paraphrase Aristotle, “the soul is all it knows,” and nothing exists that cannot be potentially known.

We are reminded of another wise crack, this one by Arthur Koestler: “The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.” Crick and other victims of dualistic scientism especially prove the latter half of Koestler’s quip, for in the implicitly cosmotheandric words of Dávila, The world is explicable from man, but man is not explicable from the world. After all, Crick presumes to explain the world that explains him, but how does his little crick not only escape its banks but empty into an ocean of presumed omni-nescience – of knowing everything about nothing and nothing about everything?

No wonder he’s astonished.

Let’s rethink this from the ground up while avoiding a tautologous goround. First things first, and “The first thing that should strike man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of the miracle of intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- whence the incommensurability between it and material objects, whether a grain of sand or the sun, or any creature whatever as an object of the senses” (Schuon).

Boom: the first thing is not a thing at all, but consciousness of things. But in reality these two are irreducibly complementary: consciousness + intelligible being; or, transcendence and immanence, vertical and horizontal, subject and object, exterior and interior, et al. Not to rebelabor the point, but to suggest that mind and matter have nothing to do with each other is a gratuitous and unintelligible assumption: “Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence the greater from the lesser; the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence, is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be” (ibid.).

So, what secular scientism assumes to be the most obvious thing is in reality the most inconceivable thing, at least from within its own metaphysical framework: that matter and energy give rise to the miracle of subjectivity that knows the truth of matter and energy. Indeed, this is the One Free Miracle the Cricks of the world must grant themselves in in order to make their astonishingly inadequate metaphysic work. Pick one: the illusion of consciousness or the consciousness of illusion, otherwise you are engaging in a performative contradiction.

In the cosmotheandric vision, consciousness is not a meaningless fugitive from the long arm of the laws of physics. Rather, we agree with Hans Jonas, who writes that “it is in the dark stirrings of primeval organic substance that a principle of freedom shines forth for the first time within the vast necessity of the physical universe -- a principle foreign to suns, planets, and atoms....” 

This irreducibly vertical principle of freedom is at a right angle to all those suns, planets, and atoms we are free to know about. Not to insult your intelligence, but the latter are not free, nor is there even a theory of a theory of how real freedom could emerge from them. Thus the appearance of this principle of freedom represents “the break-through of being to the indefinite range of possibilities which hence stretches to the farthest reaches of subjective life,” which is to say, to the Anthropos and beyond: “even the transition from inanimate to animate substance, the first feat of matter’s organizing itself for life, was actuated by a tendency in the depth of being toward the very modes of freedom to which this transition opened the gate” (ibid.).

In what is man enclosed, if not matter and energy? Well, although we are material, we know we cannot be enclosed in matter, if only because we know all about matter. Otherwise we are imprisoned in a circle while describing the circle in which we are purportedly imprisoned. But we can only even see the circle from outside or above. To deny our vertical freedom is to eliminate the very possibility of truth, even while affirming the truth of meaningless necessity. But it is not so easy to call upon truth in order to eliminate it.

One is always free to ignore reality, but no one is free to ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

Correct: people can believe what they want about reality, but this has no bearing on what reality actually is. Our cosmotheandric vision posits a field of nonlocal subjectivity in which our own local subjectivity must be grounded. This parallels the idea that there is but one material world with diverse manifestations -- a view that is much easier to accept thanks to quantum physics, which reveals the field-like nature of material existence. Just so, consciousness has a field-like aspect that is particularized in the individual – analogous to a lampshade with innumerable pinholes. Viewed from outside the pinholes resemble stars scattered in the sky, but the real source of light is the bulb at the center.

Moreover, in a way, the miracle of objectivity is even more miraculous than the miracle of subjectivity. After all, all other animals are indeed confined to their own subjectivity. The Anthropos alone is capable of objectivity, of standing outside or above his own private Idaho in a disinterested way. The Anthropos transcends the objects he knows via the act of knowing them. So now we have two miracles for which our competitors must account: 1) the miracle of a subject who can 2) miraculously pronounce on the objective nature of things. That is quite a feat for blind matter and random energy.

Norris Clarke speaks of an “indissoluble complementarity” with regard to an “in-itself dimension of being” and a “towards-others aspect.” Thus reality is an ec-static process of self-communicative being-in-action. Which not only explains a lot, but explains everything -- literally, because it explains how we can explain anything. What is the alternative?

If this were not the nature of reality, then each existent thing “would be locked off in total isolation from every other. There would not be a connected universe” (ibid). There would be substance but no relation, like atomistic particles with no wave, so to speak. For Clarke, “The full meaning of ‘to be’ is not just ‘to be present,’ but ‘to be actively present.’“ The relationality of this active presence “is a primordial dimension of every real being, inseparable from its substantiality.” Being is an act, and the act of being is relational: “it is turned towards others by its self-communicating action. To be fully is to be substance-in-relation” (ibid).

But why? Because every being -- every existent that partakes of being -- is an image of a Theos who also is irreducibly substance-in-relation. That every lower being has both an in-itself and towards-others dimension finds its ground and principle in this absolute principle. Josef Pieper (cited by Clarke) agrees that to exist “means ‘to be able to relate’ and ‘to be the sustaining subject at the center of a field of reference.’ Only in reference to an inside can there be an outside.” We might say that subject is to interiority as object is to exteriority, and the two are always related or linked. Moreover, “The higher the form of intrinsic existence, the more developed becomes the relatedness to reality, also the more profound and comprehensive becomes the sphere of this relatedness: namely, the world” (ibid.).

∞

If everything outside our minds conforms to our a priori ways of knowing it, then how can Kant make an exception for how we receive his work? Wouldn’t it too just slide into our own preconceptual categories? You can’t just blow up the bridge between intellect and reality and then make an exception for your own vision of reality. That is another astonishing case of One Free Miracle. This absurcular worldview antedates modern physics and goes back to the beginning of the scientific revolution, which exiled mind from the Cosmos, placing a wall of separation between search and pate. In other words, search as we might, reality as such -- the noumena -- is totally inaccessible to the mind.

The Supreme Court has roundly rejected–

Cosmotheandrism eliminates the prior restraint of this nasty dualism by making relation a primordial category. There is no need to ask how two separate substances (mind and matter) interact if they were never separate in the first place. They are merely two complementary aspects of a single, prior reality: the primordial unity of experience.

Note that a debate is a division -- otherwise there would be no debate -- that can only be healed (or made whole) by a mutual pursuit of the truth that properly unites the parties. In other words, the truth must be an a priori to which both sides are committed. The alternatives render debate utterly pointless: for example, if I have my truth and you have yours, there is no possibility of an underlying reality to be the final arbiter, as described above by Feynman vis-à-vis science. Elsewhere he wrote that “It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is; if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.” And it can only be wrong if it is possible to be right – for the experiment to conform to the way things are.

Norris Clarke discusses the self-defeating divorce of mind from world in his Explorations In Metaphysics, noting that Kant’s central thesis revolves around the idea that “the human mind projects its own forms onto reality rather than receiving them from reality.” The outcome of his so-called Copernican revolution in the head is that “it is our thinking that gives form to the world rather than the world that gives form to our thought.” Which again would come as a surprise to any working scientist in intimate dialogue with both an intelligible Cosmos and with the anthropic community of fellow scientists.

Kant’s “revolution” is over. Condolences! The bums lost!

Kant himself “quite obviously and without question takes for granted the existence of other persons like himself and just as real as himself,” who “can receive and send, basically intact, intelligible messages from and to each other.” And if there is Anthropos-to-Anthropos communication between minds, why can’t there be Cosmos to Anthropos communication? In the cosmotheandric view these are anchored in the principles of openness and primordial relation or intersubjectivity. Absent these, neither knowledge of truth nor communication thereof are possible.

Besides, what kind of person regards other persons as phenomenal collections of sensory data shaped by their own minds?

APA guidelines forbid me from diagnosing a patient from afar. Having said that, I don’t know about you, but I understand truthful communications from other real people all the time. But nowhere in Kant’s metaphysic “does he ever discuss how it is possible to know other human beings as real,” and who are “able to receive from each other intelligible messages” -- “in a word, how information can be successfully communicated at all.”

This is no small achievement, because it goes to what sets the Anthropos apart from all other beings: that we effortlessly convey our knowledge of reality from mind to mind, but by virtue of what principle? Supposing you want to be a philosopher, your Job One is to not only justify philosophy – i.e., explain how it is possible – but to also explain how it is possible to transmit this philosophy intact from one mind to another in its own form, not in the a priori form of the one who receives it.

It is as if Kant is saying Extra-mental reality is unknowable, and I know it. For he “insists that we cannot know any thing-in-itself as real outside of the field of our own subjective experience,” but if this is the case, then “it is impossible for him or anyone else to believe sincerely that the other is not equally as real as his own self and equally interacting with him…” Otherwise, he must treat his interlocutors as but forms of his own sensibility, with no possibility of real communication in between. Supposing he does successfully communicate the truth of his ideas to another, it is but another illicit theft of first base.

Thanks to modern science, we now know better that we attain genuine knowledge of reality. Specifically, “the development of general relativity,” writes Torrance, “carries with it the ontological indivisibility of matter and structure in the space-time metrical field, and thus also the epistemic unity of being and form in our scientific understanding of the universe.” We have merely to rejoin the Cosmos from which we were never actually parted.