The How and the Why of this Haunted Cosmos

I want to briefly follow up on the idea that something analogous to Multiple Personality Disorder "happens at a universal level" and that "the one universal consciousness could, as a result, give rise to many alters with private inner lives like yours and ours. As such, we may all be alters -- dissociated personalities -- of universal consciousness."

Now, as Stanley Jaki reminds us, "'exact science' deals only with numbers and measurements of material change," whereas "theology measures nothing." Quantities and qualities. Horizontal and vertical. Object and subject. Exterior and interior. Reason and intellection. Effect and cause. Many and One.

Any comprehensive account of reality requires both sides of these related complementarities; ultimately they may be reduced to Creator and creation; or, if you're not ready to make that leap, to Principle and Manifestation, Absolute and relative, Ground/Source and echo/prolongation.

These also relate to the How and the Why, science going to the former, theology to the latter. Along these lines, I've mentioned this story in the past, of the young scientist

who gave a factory tour to Lord Kelvin, arguably one of the greatest scientists of his time. The factory created equipment that measured the effects of electricity and was built by Lord Kelvin himself. Unfortunately, the young man giving the tour was not aware of this fact.

After the young man spoke in great detail of all the equipment the factory made and how these gadgets measured electricity, Lord Kelvin complemented him on the tour, but wanted to ask one last question to his tour guide, "What is electricity?" When the young man was unable to answer this question, Lord Kelvin consoled him by explaining that both he and Lord Kelvin were equally ignorant of the answer to this question.

The moral of the story is that it is one thing to measure how electricity behaves, but it's a completely different thing to understand what electricity actually is at its essence. Fr. Jaki would use this story to argue that science and theology should not be combined, but rather they should stay within the parameters that each naturally adhere to.

In short, science can tell us pretty much everything about electricity except what it is. Which equally applies to everything, or to every conceivable thing.

Including the mystery of diversified human subjectivity. The idea that it is reducible to a vast case of Multiple Personality Disorder comes straight out of Scientific American, but there is nothing remotely scientific about this. And yet, it is nevertheless able to conceal this fact by hiding behind the prestige of Science, which is one of our two most successful and influential religions in our time. In order for one's idiocy to be truly comprehensive, one needs both scientism and progressivism, which are analogous to (faux) doctrine and (perverse) method.

Was that last sentence a little over-the-top? Well, think of the global warming racket: it is pure scientism, but it animates thousands of practitioner-activists to do what they do, AKA practice their faith in the real world. Likewise, transgenderism is just pseudo- or anti-science. And yet...

There is no physics without a metaphysics. Physicists don't like this idea, which results in a naive collapse of the two, or an elevation of former into the latter. A physicist imagines he is qualified to discourse on metaphysics by virtue of being a physicist, but it is obviously not so: physics is about quantities, metaphysics about qualities or principles.

Yesterday a thought floated into my head: A Principle is worth a thousand facts. And as Dávila says, Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest.

Therefore, Ha Ha.

Now, what would be one of the four or five invulnerable p's that allow us to make fun of our Scientistic American and his MPD theory? In reaching for a principle to account for the mystery of subjectivity, he latches onto MPD. But what is the real principle?

Most people will say "God" and let it go. But this is just a shorthand way to convey essential metaphysics to a large and diverse collective, few members of which will have the time, inclination, or ability to study metaphysics. They are by no means wrong, but some people are built in such a way that they keep asking Why? (And recall that Why? is to theology/metaphysics as How? is to science.)

Consider just that last parenthetical remark: science -- or scientism -- would quite literally have us believe that the Why? may be fully reduced to the How? In this (anti-)metaphysic, knowledge of how something works is sufficient to explain why it exists. But this doesn't even suffice with mechanical objects. For example, I can know how a watch works, but that doesn't explain why someone wants to know the time, let alone what time is, and why it is. Why time?

An alliterative way of posing the problem is to say that for scientism, semantics may be reduced to syntax; in other words, meaning may be reduced to grammar, message to means. Which means that no meaning is possible, since the meaning of any statement about the world would be reducible to its arrangement of words.

Which is literally like trying to understand a melody by examining its notes. In fact, just yesterday I heard a haunting melody -- Autumn Leaves, performed by Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis. You can pause the video and examine the melody note by note, but none of these notes conveys the haunt. Indeed, the haunt just disappears. Does this solve the problem? Does it satisfy your curiosity about the haunter and the haunted?

Speaking of which, we clearly live in a haunted universe, no? Everything speaks to us, just as if it's haunted by subjectivity, intelligibility, and muffled cries for help. Cries for help? Sure. Objects want to be understood, and we desperately want to understand them. And certainly people want to be understood. But why? Because of some quantitative formula accessible to the physicist?

Please. Let's get back to the question of invulnerable principles, which really go to the Why? of things. Here, try this on for size: "The question of the 'why' of creation has given rise to many speculations. We have more than once answered them in the course of our expositions" (Schuon).

Were you not listening?

the cosmogonic projection has as its ultimate cause the infinitude proper to the Absolute. Now, to say infinitude is to say All-Possibility and consequently the overflowing of the divine potentialities, in conformity with the principle that the Good wills to communicate itself.

Really, creation -- including the cosmos -- is God's overflowing from his own center -- which is everywhere -- to the periphery, right down to matter, which is like a crystalized echo of His intelligence (hence its intelligibility). God is at once transcendent and therefore immanent, which is why He is farther than we can imagine and yet closer than our own heart, via His prolongation into the soul and intellect.