A First Crack at the Improbable Dream

Lecture 3 of Understanding and Being is called The Dynamic Aspect of Knowing, but since when has knowing ever not been dynamic? It is always in process, partly because “the pursuit of knowledge is the pursuit of an unknown.” Even supposing we could somehow exhaust the unknown, we couldn’t know it. Besides, that would make us omniscient, and we know that’s a nonstarter.  Don’t we? 

Don’t we?

There are any number of things we don’t know -- or about which we do not understand their nature -- but can nevertheless plug in like algebraic variables to get things done. Who cares if we don’t know what they are? What is the nature of light, exactly? Electricity? Doesn’t matter, so long as they behave themselves. 

I remember Whitehead saying something to the effect that there aren’t actually laws of nature, rather, habits. Turns out those habits will eventually change as the universe expands, but for now we can rely on Mother Nature being pretty OCD about her routines. 

Lonergan uses the example of predicting the break in a game of pool, in which case you have to consider the weight, mass, and velocity of the cueball, then figure in an infinite number of possible trajectories, then the interaction of fifteen other balls and how loosely or tightly they’re packed together, then the distance between them and the bands, and how they’ll rebound and interact with each other…. 

Soon enough the number of variables approaches an infinity that is in principle unspecifiable, which is why you should never play pool with a climate scientist. 

We know the billiard balls obey the Law — the laws of physics — but knowing these laws is of no use in making exact predictions, since the interaction of variables redounds to an infinitude of possibilities. There is no general solution to the problem of the pool break.

Now do reality.

Correct. Which is interesting, because it shows the necessary limits of necessity. Or perhaps the necessity of probability, which, it turns out, is present all the way down to the quantum level, which is “governed” by statistical probability: it seems that in our cosmos, it’s habits all the way down.

But what is the relationship between probability and intelligibility? For if the best we can have is probable knowledge, doesn’t this imply the universe is fundamentally unintelligible? All of science would be analogous to a weather report: look for gravity, with a chance of falling bodies. Nor could a theory be falsified, since anything can happen: improbable doesn’t mean impossible.

However, some things are so improbable that it is more rational to appeal to the miraculous. For example, if we flip a fair coin and it comes up heads 100 times in a row, that so far exceeds the limits of probability that, at the very least, we need to posit a totally unknown variable to account for the defiance of nature’s habits. Analogously, for 13.4 billion years the cosmos had the habit of being lifeless. What happened?

As it turns out, there are two main variables which ultimately reduce to one, and with these two we can figure out all the rest.  

The first variable is Man, i.e., the existence of self-conscious persons. Of course, as with the billiard balls, even the most complete knowledge of the laws of physics cannot get from there — the situation at Planck Time 13.8 billion years ago — to here — where we are thinking about Planck Time, and of what a long, strange journey it’s been since then. 

Supposing someone were there at the beginning, he would rightly say the emergence of human beings is impossible — or maybe as likely as a break in pool resulting in the balls ending up in the perfect triangle with which they started, only hovering slightly above the table, and wondering about how they got this way. Definitely possible. But how likely? 

But truly truly I say to you: there is no General Law that says we cannot begin at the other end -- at our end of the telos-scope -- with the presence of self-conscious intelligences, such that there can be no laws that would prevent their presence, plus a nonlocal telos drawing the existing laws in this direction. Then what we see back there is intelligible instead of one damn miracle after another. Or better, one miracle instead of an infinite number of them.

This is somewhat difficult to describe, because I just thought of it, but the universe as we know it is a backward projection emanating from and leading back to us. In a sense, this is both literal and trivial, but I mean it in a deeper way than that. I think. 

Einstein said something to the effect that the most surprising thing about the universe is its intelligibility, but it turns out its intelligibility is just the far side of our intelligence. The two go together like form and prime matter, in that we never see one without the other. Prime matter itself is just a formless nothing that can’t even be imagined. 

To ask that first (?!) of philosophy — Why is there something instead of nothing? -- is to ask why there is anything other than a formless ocean of not-even prime matter. Not only is that not what we see, but if that were the case, then there would literally be nothing to see and no one to see it. Ever.

But look at all the things seen by intelligence -- which turns out to be a back- and downward projection of intelligence itself, all the way back in time (to the initial singularity of the Big Bang) and down in space (into the quantum world). 

Which goes to the second variable alluded to above, which we’ll call O to avoid unintended associations. Ultimately this world of ours is a projection from O, but not like a movie projected onto a screen, for it is more like a projection that simultaneously projects the screen it projects upon. What would this be like, and is there anything analogous to help us wrap our minds around it?

Best I can do at the moment is imagination, or maybe dreaming. Think about the structure of dreaming: it is at once a projection, but of what and onto what? And from whom? There are sharply drawn characters, dialogue true to the characters, plots, sets, architecture, and scenery, conflict, drama, etc. Clearly there is form, and a kind of lawfulness punctuated by constant surprises (even though we are their author). 

What is to the dream as the screen is to the movie?  Whenever we are faced with a paradoxical dualism, there are only two ways out: down or up. Going downward involves reducing one side to the other, while going upward means resolving the complementarity into a higher unity.

Now, the variable O is meant to stand for the highest possible unity from which various transcendentals and primordial complementarities flow. 

My timetank is getting close to E, but I want to say that the Son is like a projection of the Father, sharing the identical substance, but like a “screen” onto which the Father is known to himself (in a manner of speaking).  

As it so happens, this book I’m rereading by De Koninck touches on this very subject, and with his timely assistance I will make a second attempt at this subject tomorrow. Let’s just say that the cosmic area rug and its weaver are definitely not-two. Lotta ins & outs, but we see in its exterior patterns the interior pattern of the one who never stops weaving it. This whole subject may be impossible, but I can do better.