Friday, December 09, 2022

Clues to the Woo Wooniverse

What if the universe is analogous to a hologram, such that the whole is somehow present in each part? Too woo woo, or not woo woo enough?

Come to think of it, how even is holography possible?
When a photograph is cut in half, each piece shows half of the scene, but when a hologram is, the whole scene can still be seen in each piece. This is because, whereas each point in a photograph only represents light scattered from a single point in the scene, each point on a holographic recording includes information about light scattered from every point in the scene (Wiki).

Oh. Like what Whitehead says about the cosmos:

each volume of space, or each lapse of time, includes in its essence aspects of all volumes of space, or all lapses of time.... in a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus, every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.

Prof. Wiki adds that

The physical universe is widely seen to be composed of "matter" and "energy".... a current trend suggests scientists may regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals. Bekenstein asks "Could we, as Blake memorably penned, 'see a world in a grain of sand,' or is that idea no more than poetic license?," referring to the holographic principle.

Woo woo or true clue? Well, in order for this to be a literal universe and not just a giant closet full of random and unrelated stuff, 
it is not enough that it be composed of parts and that these parts physically constitute a whole; it is also necessary that all the individual parts be oriented toward that one in which all together can exist, that each of the principal parts of the universe should be the entire whole, that each of these universes be in some fashion all the others (De Koninck).
Thus, like a hologram, in that each part nevertheless contains the whole, albeit in an attenuated form. It’s certainly how DNA works, each cell containing the blueprint for the entire organism. That’s beyond weird, and yet, because we all learned it in 7th grade biology, we take it for granted. 

But what if we could travel back in time prior to the scientific revelation, and tell people their bodies are composed of billions of microscopic units, each one containing the information needed to build the whole body? Who among them wouldn’t want to buy some pot from you? 

Traveling back to the present, you could spend all day explaining to me how digital technology works, but I'll never understand how a laser light shining on an aluminum coated piece of plastic results in the soul of a musician being present between the speakers. How is the one translighted into the other -- in particular, the billions of bits into the simple presence of the artist, accompanied by the aesthetic unity within the perceiving subject? I'm sure there's a *rational* explanation. Reminds me of what Whitehead said about 19th century physics:
the secrets of the physical universe were finally disclosed. If only you ignored everything which refused to come into line, your powers of explanation were unlimited.     
Anyway, a holographic universe would admittedly solve a great many philosophical problems. But does it unsolve as many others? I can’t think of any at the moment, but I’m not thinking very hard. We’ll ask again later. Meanwhile, let’s go with it.

The operative phrase is that each of the principal parts of the universe should be the entire whole, and the operative word is be, as in what is the caseOn the one hand we might ask how this can be, but on the other, how can it not be the case? 

For example, what is knowledge but the presence of the object in the mind of the rational intellect -- not the material thing, as when we perceive it with the senses, but its abstract essence, i.e., form? We know this happens, or we couldn’t know anything. The question is, by virtue of what principle is this knowledge possible, and without which it couldn’t happen?

Backing up a bit, we first have to decide whether knowledge of reality exists, and we won’t bother arguing with folks who don’t believe it exists, because why are they even arguing, and over what? Let the dead bury the tenured.

Actually, things have sunk so low in our day that we do have to argue with these neobarbarians -- for example, that biology is real -- but we won’t do so here. For we not only believe in science, we believe in the higher principle that renders science itself possible. 

Come to think of it, absent this higher principle, we see how readily science betrays itself and degrades into the fool’s mythology of scientism or the tool’s pathology of anti-science. 

Speaking of the Weirdness, it's weird enough that the cosmos suddenly came alive 4 billion years ago and began touching itself. For every form of sensory perception involves increasingly subtle forms of touch, from surfaces and temperature to molecules contacting the nasal membrane to sound vibrations banging the eardrum and photons tickling our cones & rods. 

At the extreme, light vibrations that have traveled billions of years land on the retina and contain information that allows us to reconstruct the origins of the cosmos. If that’s not weird, then nothing is.

Something that happened billions of years ago is not only entangled in the now, but is decoded via the intellect? Light traveling all that way to get here is one thing, and the information in the light another, but the intellect capable of unpacking that information is just woo woo. 

None of this would be conceivable -- let alone actual -- “if being were not transcendentally accessible to intelligence” (ibid.). This goes to what must be the Principle of epistemology: that there is a link between being and knowing, and it is the intellect. 

We have heard from the wise that Creation is the nexus between time and eternity. But from our end, intellect is their nexus, insofar as it attains to a timeless truth reflected in it. Which ultimately explains how man is the conscious link between Creator and creation. 

The second law of thermodynamics speaks of dissipation, of an inevitable loss of information. Yes, there are said to be local exceptions, such as the emergence of life. Okay, but there also seem to be nonlocal exceptions, such as the growth and maturation of the intellect described above. 

Is it possible that maturation is a quality of the universe as such, not just one of those local exceptions we call “life”?  

If there is a "maturation of the cosmos,” its measure would be the degree to which “all its parts are united and lived,” ultimately "in the intelligence of man, in which it can realize this explicit return to its First Principle”:
Let us imagine the initial state of our universe as a pure exteriority. The world was so to say entirely outside, separated from itself, imprisoned in itself and its own obscurity. It is dead, empty, an abyss of division. But intelligence must appear. This demand is written in from the beginning (ibid.). 
Either it was or it wasn’t. Turns out it was there all along: again, first in intention is last in execution, and here we are. You might protest that it took a long time, but relative to what? Walking on water wasn’t built in a day.

If there is developmental psychology, it is only because there is development. And if there is development, it is only because there is a hierarchy and a telos. And if there is a telos there is a standard. But if there is a standard there is an Absolute. And if there is an Absolute, its most immediately accessible modalities are the True, Good, Beautiful, and Unity (or multiplicity-in-unity and vice versa).
The universe in expansion from the physical point of view rebounds on itself in life.... It arrives finally at man in whom the world succeeds in uniting all the degrees of cosmic being, and in thought in which it touches and compenetrates itself (ibid.).
My spellcheck doesn’t like that word: compenetrate. Nor do I, because we're talking about something more woo woo, which is to say, intersubjectivity, which is precisely the interior space in which we live, move, and have our being, and without which we couldn't be persons. It is how we are able to read the withinness of everything from matter to animals to poems, music, faces, etc. It’s why the cosmos has an endless depth for us, instead of being only surfaces with no intelligible interiority.

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