The First Decision in the Cosmic Flow Chart

Picking up where we left off yesterday, we're trying to draw up a cosmic flow chart -- a vertical one, since we already have a good horizontal one, more or less. 

The details of the latter are always being tweaked and fine-tuned, but it begins 13.8 billion years ago. Highlights since then include the unexpected emergence of life some 4 billion years ago, followed by the equally sudden appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens as recently as 50 to 100 thousand years ago, an event so catastrophic that we're still getting used to it. I know I am, anyway.

Knowing what we know about this 13.8 billion year journey from nothing to Bob -- to this post -- the question is, in what do we situate it? 

You can't just say "nothing," i.e., the nothing that is "prior" to the Big Bang. From nothing, nothing comes. But look around, and I think you'll agree that, whatever it is, it isn't nothing.

Is this a conundrum, or worse, an absurdity? Or are we just looking at it the wrong way? 

The latter. For one thing, you need to open your cranium and look with both hemispheres. We just spent like SIX WEEKS explaining how and why you not only have to supplement an LH with an RH view, but how the RH is primary.

In my opinion, LH is to horizontal as RH is to vertical. The question now becomes whether vertical and horizontal are just Kantian projections of our neurology, or if LH and RH are adequations to a reality that is richer than what can be apprehended with one hemisphere alone.

Naturally we hold to the latter, since there is a more fundamental principle involved, this being the mind's adqeuation to reality as such. In other words -- speaking of the cosmic flow chart -- either we can or cannot know reality. 

If we can know reality, then this post continues. If we can't, then we shoot it in head and admit that we can never escape from our dreams of what is actually out there in the extra-mental world. 

If that's the case, then there is no controlling authority over our thoughts and perceptions, and all hell breaks loose:  the 2020 election wasn't rigged, Lia Thomas really is a man, and we have no rights the White House is bound to respect. Who can say otherwise, once there is no reality and no one to know it?

If we can't know reality, then unreality is not only in the driver's seat, it occupies all the seats of power. All this because of one little metaphysical choice at the top of the cosmic flow chart. Of course, for them it is the bottom of the cosmic flow chart, since there is no top. 

In a word, the tyranny of relativism which follows upon absolute subjectivism.

Let's call in some reinforecements from a book I'm reading called The Angelic Doctor, by Jacques Maritain. 

The greater grow the powers of illusion, the more will lovers of truth feel drawn towards the vast light of [Thomas's] wisdom [which] does not want to destroy but to purify modern speculation and to integrate all the truth that has been discovered since the time of St. Thomas.

It is an essentially synthetic and assimilative philosophy which attempts... a work of continuity and universality. It is also the only philosophy which, while rising to the knowledge of the supra-sensible, first requires from experience an unqualified adhesion to sensible reality. 

We'll get to the flow chart. I'm still workin' on it...