Anthropo-Cosmology

It turns out that anthropology and cosmology, I and It, are entangled in surprising ways. Recall that the reign of dualism supposedly got underway with Descartes' division of mind and matter. Everyone forgets that even he saw the absurdity of this, for which reason the whole system falls apart without God. The reasoning goes something like this:

"I think, therefore I am."

"Yes, but how do you know that's really true?"

"Er... because God wouldn't deceive us?"

So Descartes sneaks in a -- or The -- first principle at the end, which is pre-posterous (which literally means putting the post- before the pre-). For there is no doubt that the cosmos is intelligible and that man may know it; and that these can only be true because the universe is created. In other words: if the universe is intelligible to us, it was created. If it isn't intelligible, then we cannot know whether or not it was created. And if it isn't created, then we could never know it.

In short, the createdness of things illuminates the intimate relationship between cosmology and anthropology, which are unified in knowledge, or Truth.

Ratzinger:

[O]ur history is advancing to an 'omega' point, at which it will become finally and unmistakably clear that the element of stability that seems to us to be the supporting ground of reality, so to speak, is not mere unconscious matter; that, on the contrary, the real, firm ground is mind.

Mind holds being together, gives it reality, indeed is reality; it is not from below but from above that being receives its capacity to subsist.

There exists a "process of 'complexification' of material being through spirit," through which emerges "a new kind of unity." (I would say "unities," for that is what time -- and evolution -- do: create new and higher -- which is to say, more "dense" and "deep" -- unities.)

We said before that nature and mind form one single history, which advances in such a way that mind emerges more clearly as the all-embracing element and, thus, anthropology and cosmology finally in actual fact coalesce.

And

this assertion of the increasing 'complexification' of the world through mind necessarily implies its unification around a personal center, for the mind is not just an undefined something or other; where it exists in its own specific nature, it subsists individually, as a person (ibid.).

So, the ever-increasing complexification of the cosmos ends -- as far as we can determine -- in the human person. We say this because we cannot imagine something "beyond a person" except for God. We can, however, imagine more of a person, which goes to the sanctification process, i.e., theosis.

There is literally nothing as complex as the human brain-and-nervous-system, what with its 10 billion neurons and 10 to the 14th power synaptic connections. I'm better at myth than math, but if I understand rightly, this means that in this immense social network, each neuron can apparently friend up to 14 others.

That's a lot of synapses, so many that if you were to attempt to compute their possible combinations, it would take longer than this cosmos is going to last. Which is just another way of saying that we'll never run out of melodies, poems, paintings, or jokes. Creativity is forever. Which reminds me:

If God were not a person, He would have died some time ago (NGD).

Now, this cosmoplexification revolves around a personal center, and that's what makes it so interesting (or any other adjective, for that matter, for adjectives can only be relative to persons). Think of all that computing power in the human brain, and yet, it all resolves into the simple, unitary experience of an "I" at the center of the neural storm.

This "I" not only manages to resolve all that micro-neural activity, but it also unifies various macro-brain structures such as left and right cerebral hemispheres, limbic system, language area, etc., plus subjective/vertical structures from the primitive unconscious to the transhuman supraconscious -- all spontaneously and without effort. Rather, it "just happens."

You could say that this is similar to other infinitely complex systems, say, the US economy. For example, at the end of the day, you can hear on the news that the stock market gained or lost this or that amount of wealth.

This latter is presented as a unitary quantity, but of course it's just an abstraction, plus it has no actual center. There is no "I" in the middle of all that economic activity saying to itself "I really cleaned up today!," or "today I really lost my shirt, and it's all Trump's fault!"

A person is the apex of cosmic intelligence, but it turns out -- or so we have heard from the wise -- that the "center" represented by the person actually extends all the way down.

In other words, it is not as if the cosmos evolves to a certain point, and then there appears this inexplicable thing called a person, like the frosting on a cake. Rather, there is a kind of "centration" that is present everywhere and everywhen, only in more or less attenuated forms.

For example, when Jesus says "Before Abraham was, I am," he's expressing our point, albeit more enigmatically. This needs to be understood in the context of other biblical statements such as "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," "I AM WHO I AM," "When He prepared the heavens I was there," and "When He drew a circle on the face of the deep... I was beside him."

Also, in the extra-biblical but orthoparadoxical Gospel of Thomas, Jesus asks, "Have you found the beginning that you look to the end? Where the end is, is where the beginning is. Blessed is the one who stands at the beginning, for the one who stands at the beginning will know the end"; and even more to the point, "Blessed is the one who comes into being before he came into being."

All of these statements go to the idea of the person being anterior to all phenomena; or of phenomena "extending," so to speak, from the Person. Otherwise there would be no phenomena.

Human beings are of course "social animals," but it is possible to be social without being completely interior to, or inside, one another.

For example, bees and ants exchange information with each other and act as a group, but they don't think about it. You might say that the "center" of a bee hive is dispersed throughout the colony, rather than being present in its totality in each bee.

But in the case of humans, the center is in the individual.

The left attempts to subvert and undo this individual centration by forcing people to identify with race, class, ethnicity, gender, and what have you, but this is the very essence of a regressive barbarism, as it recalls a time in human history prior to the emergence -- the revelation -- of the free and autonomous person.

Personhood, although implicit, can only explicate itself in an interpersonal space, i.e., the space between subjects. An old textbook of mine says that "the self, as a conceivable entity, is formed -- or de-formed, or re-formed -- at that place where the Other's view meets with the felt substance of the person" (Wright). As biology makes matter come alive, intersubjectivity renders neurobiology personal.

By unmasking a truth, one encounters a Christian face (NGD).