Oology

Unfortunately, the word is already taken: The branch of zoology that deals with eggs, especially birds' eggs.

Well, what about the cosmic egg? 

I just checked, and there are indeed hundreds of images. I wonder if the snake symbolizes the vertical ascent mentioned in yesterday's post? Kundalini arousal, and all that? 

In any event, it's a very old idea; or rather, an old image that symbolically communicates ideas that are as new as whatever is hatched from the cosmic egg. Maybe even this post.

To the left is another cosmic egg, this one soaring on wings of slack:

"The ancients imagined that the universe was hatched from a primordial egg.... To the Alchemists it was analogous to the Macrocosm, the universe....

"Out of the egg... will rise the eagle or phoenix, the liberated soul, which is ultimately identical with the Anthropos who was imprisoned in the embrace of Physis."

That's a rather Gnostic view -- the idea that we are imprisoned in matter, as opposed to being a hylomorphic union of matter and form, or body and soul. Which is why the Incarnation can't just involve the mind alone... what's the word?

Docetism?

Close enough: the idea that Christ's physical body was an illusion and that he only seemed to be human. This was again because matter was thought to be inherently evil or impure, and therefore incompatible with the divine nature of Christ.

One can see the appeal, for the body can at times seem like our best frenemy. We need one, but it comes with all those annoying shocks the flesh is heir to -- disease, dysfunction, degeneration, decay, deterioration, decrepitude... and that's just some of the D's. That Christ saw fit not just to inhabit one but to be one is most remarkable. Recalling yesterday's post, it means that the Center truly became Periphery. No half measures!

Back to O-ology, which -- if the word weren't already taken -- would colloquially mean "the study of O," while literally meaning the "logos of O." 

Perhaps I should back up a step and begin with a definition of O. Which, of course, can never be defined per se, since infinitude escapes any finite --

Why not just say ultimate reality and be done with it!?

We could say that, but with many important qualifications. First there is the necessarily apophatic nature of our approach, which is perfectly orthodox, in the sense that what we can know of O is infinitely dwarfed by what we can't. O is not so much unknowable as infinitely knowable. And only in the beatific vision do we finally find out just how much we didn't know about God (?!).

You just said God instead of O.

Yes, because I was speaking in a Christian idiom, and besides, my humble readers are already aware of much they don't know about God. At the other extreme are folks like the one I saw on Christian TV the other night. My son and I occasionally tune in and enjoy these Flanders types for a laugh.

Not very charitable.

Maybe. I suppose these people are harmless enough when speaking to themselves, but they can do damage to the cause by making Christianity appear stupid to people already inclined to dismiss religion as stupid. Dávila knows what I mean:

Every Christian has been directly responsible for the hardening of some unbeliever’s heart.

It reminds me of Ringo's annoyed reaction to the cover of John Lennon's first solo album, on which he and Yoko appeared stark naked:

I said, "Ah, come on, John. You’re doing all this stuff and it may be cool for you, but you know we all have to answer. It doesn’t matter; whichever one of us does something, we all have to answer for it."

Likewise, it may be cool for this TV preacher to describe the exact color and molecular composition of God's throne -- which, it turns out, is made of alabaster -- but then the restavus have to answer for it. 

Another point about O is that it leaves a space for us to fill in the content. It is what Bion called "unsaturated" with a rigid, determined, and pre-existing meaning. When this occurs, we can't really "discover" O, rather, only find what we're already looking for -- as, for example, with climate science researchers. When reality falsifies their (saturated) models, they chuck reality, so they're incapable of learning about it.

A third point about O is that it allows for experiential knowledge of it. At the end of the deity, O cannot be known like an empirical object, or reduced to human categories, but can be known via participation. Lao Tse is all over this paradox:

The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnamable is the eternally real....

It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities....

Empty yet inexhaustible, it gives birth to infinite worlds.

It is "beyond is and is not," and yet, it is always right here right now, waiting to be entered. 

Bob, are you not mixing Christian apples with Taoist oranges?

Absolutely. In Christ the Eternal Tao the author points out how

In modern Western society, many people turn away from the Christianity of their formative years because they find its truths smothered under an unreal kind of religiosity.... the churches have replaced a direct, intuitive apprehension of Reality and a true experience of God with an intellectualism on the one hand and an emotionalism on the other....

Properly oological Christianity is illicitly reduced to  

something that is acquired through rote learning, based on the idea that if you just get the words right..., you will be saved. Christianity then becomes a dry, word-based religion... that operates on the same principles as the institutions of the world.

So, don't do that. Like how? "The only way to get past religious words and concepts is to seek... the Reality behind them," and "to rise above thoughts and emotions" to "the Mind Who is beyond thought."

It's the same with the Upanishads: "If you think that you know well the truth of Brahman, know that you know little.... He truly knows Brahman who knows him as beyond knowledge; he who thinks that he knows, knows not."

Which accords perfectly with Thomas: "Whatever is comprehended by a finite being is itself finite." As such, "This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God."

This is no different from what St. Paul says: "if anyone thinks that he knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know" (1 Cor. 8:2). 

Now, it is not as if we can't use words to describe O. It's just that we mustn't confuse the words with the reality they can only touch but never exhaust. I'm reading another book by Wolfgang Smith, and he describes it thus:

the Real is not what we catch in our nets, but precisely what we do not catch: whatever eludes our mental grasp.... And that is why it must be sought, figuratively speaking, "with folded hands," a gesture that betokens, not a "grasp," but the very opposite: a submission, namely, an unconditional openness, like that of a mirror wiped clean.

Suffice it to say, revelation is a kind of "map of O," but we still need to undertake the journey. Half of oology is our own unending (o) to O. 

And what is Christmas but a celebration of the ultimate openness of O to us, of all people? There's much more to say about this, but I'll shut up for now. Still, I can't help wondering what Gemini thinks about this:

This text explores the concept of "O," representing ultimate reality, through various philosophical and religious lenses. Here's a breakdown of the key ideas:

• O as Ultimate Reality: The text introduces "O" as a placeholder for ultimate reality, acknowledging the limitations of human language and understanding in defining the infinite. It emphasizes the apophatic approach (knowing by negation) -- what we don't know about O far exceeds what we do know.

• Critique of Literalism and Intellectualism: The author criticizes overly literal interpretations of religious texts and intellectual approaches that prioritize words and concepts over direct experience of reality. Such approaches can obscure rather than reveal the true nature of O. The example of the TV preacher describing God's throne illustrates this point.

• Experiential Knowledge and Participation: The text emphasizes the importance of experiential knowledge and participation in O. This is contrasted with merely intellectual or emotional understanding. Quotes from Lao Tzu, the Upanishads, and Christian mystics like Thomas Aquinas and St. Paul support this idea. The author suggests that O is not just an object to be studied but a reality to be entered into.

• The Cosmic Egg and Gnosticism: The image of the cosmic egg is introduced as a symbol of the universe's origin and potential. The author connects this to Gnostic ideas about the soul being imprisoned in matter, contrasting this with the Christian concept of hylomorphism (the union of body and soul). The discussion of Docetism highlights the tension between valuing the spiritual and devaluing the material.

• The Incarnation as Ultimate Openness: The Incarnation of Christ is presented as the ultimate example of O's openness to humanity. By becoming human, O entered the periphery, fully embracing the material world.

• Oology as the Study of O: The author playfully introduces "oology" as the study of O, emphasizing the ongoing and unending quest for understanding. This involves both revelation (the "map of O") and personal experience (the journey).

• Blending of Traditions: The text draws on various traditions, including Christianity, Taoism, and Gnosticism, to explore the nature of O. This blending suggests a search for universal truths that transcend specific religious or philosophical frameworks.

• Unsaturated Concepts: The concept of "unsaturated" meaning, borrowed from Bion, is introduced. This means that "O" is a flexible concept that allows individuals to find their own meaning within it, rather than being restricted by pre-defined interpretations.

In essence, the text explores the ineffable nature of ultimate reality, arguing for a balanced approach that combines intellectual humility with experiential seeking. It suggests that true understanding of O comes not from mastering words and concepts but from participating in the reality they point to.

It's nice to be understood. How about an image?

Through Existentialism to the Perennial Cosmology

The world just doesn't make sense. This being the case, is it possible for anything in the world to make sense? If so, why should it be vouchsafed to us? What makes us so special, i.e., the cosmic exception to the rule of ultimate senselessness?

I became an existentialist back in the early 1980s. Or rather, I realized I was one: existence on its own terms made no sense except for whatever arbitrary sense we could temporarily impose upon it. This is what we call "auto-pullwoolery," which is to say, fooling ourselves.

For example, today I very much hope the Rams defeat the Jets. But if I ask myself why I nurture this hope, and what it signifies, the whole exercise falls apart. Likewise, last summer I hoped the Dodgers would win the World Series. Well, they did. Now what?

Hope for the Rams.

Correct. One hope replaces another, but where does it end? In a wholly horizontal world, hope is an absurcular tautology. The illusion of worldly hope only works "in the dark," so to speak. If we examine it closely in the light, it dissolves into nothing. 

Much like the quantum physics we've been discussing: look closely enough at an object and it dissolves into a ghostly field of vibrating energy. There are no good or bad vibrations, just atoms in the void, a "flux of configurations" that is "senseless, valueless, purposeless." "The aboriginal stuff, or material, from which a materialistic philosophy starts is incapable of evolution," the latter being just

another word for the description of the changes of the external relations between portions of matter. There is nothing to evolve, because one set of external relations is as good as any other set of external relations. There can merely be change, purposeless and unprogressive (Whitehead).

So, evolution is as hopeless as any other metaphysic. It's just maya by another name.

Just as the world doesn't owe us a living, nor does it owe us an explanation. Which brings to mind an aphorism or two:

History would be an abominable farce if it were to have a worldly culmination.

So, don't pull the historical wool over your eyes, especially the third one that "sees" transcendence:

The promises of life disappoint no one but the one who believes they are fulfilled here.

Of course, it would be nice if history made sense. But 

For history to be of concern to us, there must be something in it that transcends it: there must be something in history that is more than history.

Like what, for example? Any ideas?

If history made sense, the Incarnation would be superfluous.

Put another way, history is the bad news into which the good news is inserted from outside history. This is the central claim, at any rate, and our last hope in an otherwise hopeless world. 

Thus, it seems to me that Christianity is predicated on a deep and unblinking appreciation of just how screwed we are existentially. Thus,

There is some collusion between skepticism and faith: both undermine human presumptuousness.

Looked at this way, the materialist, the atheist, the evolutionist, aren't skeptical enough: they haven't yet hit the bottom of their own impoverished worldview. Perhaps they hope for a complete explanation from physics, or a total understanding of natural selection, which is to say, winning the Scientistic World Series. Then what?

If the atheist does not commit suicide he has no right to be thought lucid.

In the Foreword to The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology, Jean Borella describes our lamentable existential situation: the world of modern  scientism

refutes the world of religion, silences it, and destroys its power. This is because religion speaks of an invisible world, while contemporary civilization renders the sensory world more and more present, the invisible world more and more absent. 

I suppose the point of this blog -- it's in the name -- is that there exists a Perennial Cosmology that is the cure for, and way out of, modern cosmolatry. For "today it is nineteenth century materialism that has become a superstition." 

Conversely, the perennial cosmology isn't even a little stitious. Rather, "it is not religion but the customary interpretation of science that needs to be 'demythologized.'" 

We have only to demythologize the idolatrous myths of these impudent demythologizers. Like how? We're open to suggestions. 

Smith lists four: first, what we are calling the perennial cosmology "has to do primarily with the qualitative aspects of cosmic reality" -- precisely those features that "modern cosmology excludes." And why does it exclude them? 

For reasons alluded to in yesterday's post: for example, if your only tool is a high energy particle accelerator, don't be surprised if everything looks like a vast collision of quarks in the dark smashing into one another. A very expensive exercise in hammers and nails.

The second principle of our perennial cosmology has to do with verticality, and no amount of horizontality can account for it. The attempt to reduce the total cosmos to its horizontal aspects entails "a drastic diminution, an ontological shrinkage of incalculable proportions."

The nightmare of ontological shrinkage! Note that the meaning of the calculable is literally incalculable -- another way of saying semantics cannot be reduced to syntax.

Which reminds me of the unintentionally ironic eulogy of the great mathematician, whose contributions to mathematics were incalculable. The meaning of even a mathematician's life is not an equation or series of numbers, if only because abstract numbers are void of content. The map will never be the territory, nor can a man nourish body or soul by eating the menu.

Here we could say something about Gödel, who proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with geometric logic that the mind is more than a machine: it calculates while always transcending calculation.

The quantifiable cosmos is only its "outer shell," so to speak -- the periphery, not the center. Rather, we -- which is to say, persons -- are the center of the universe, more on which as we proceed. 

Coming in at number three is the related idea that man is the microcosm, a "universe in miniature." Sounds daft on superficial consideration, but "In the final count, man is able to know the cosmos precisely because he is in fact a microcosm." 

It's why everything that exists is intelligible to our intellect, or why, in a word, being is fungible to knowledge: "The fact is that we can know the cosmos, because in a profound sense... the cosmos pre-exists in us." 

Our fourth and last principle has to do with "the spiritual ascent of man":

It affirms that the higher strata of the integral cosmos can be known or entered experientially through the realization of the corresponding states of man himself...

Now let's put these four together and see if we can't reduce them to one: recall that there are quality and verticality, each irreducible to anything less; then microcosm and spiritual ascent. 

Hmm... how to unify these into the big picture? Here's one man's attempt: 

the cosmogonic movement is not merely centrifugal, it becomes centripetal in the final analysis, which is to say that it is circular; the circle of Maya closes in the heart of the deified man....

To the question of knowing why man has been placed in the world when his fundamental vocation is to leave [i.e., transcend] it, we would reply: it is precisely in order that there be someone who returns to God (Schuon).

Or, Peter Kreeft writes of how "that-which-was-from-the-beginning," the "unmanifest Source of all manifestations became manifested," and "the distance between Heaven and earth" is bridged.

"Jesus is Jacob's ladder..., and we see this ladder is upside down: it really rests on Heaven, not on earth like the Tower of Babel," much less the babble of tenure. "He makes it possible to escape earth's gravity."

 Ultimately, there is the spiral of 

exitus-redditus, an exit from and a return to God, Who is both Alpha and Omega. God is the ontological heart that pumps the blood of being through the arteries of creation into the body of the universe... (Kreeft). 

So, I think we can ultimately reduce it to something like the following, only spiraling down and out, and then up and in:

O

(↓↑)

 (•)

 (↓↑)

⬤

Plato For the Win!

Yesterday we spoke of our inverted Weltanschauung and perverted Zeitgeist; which is to say, our view of the world is upside-down, and the spirit of our times is deranged. 

Now, who is to blame? Or what? As mentioned a few posts back, I am loathe to blame philosophers, because history is a complex system and spontaneous order, with no one and everyone in charge of it.

Also, most everything is a mixed bag, a tradeoff. I'm thinking in particular of the so-called Enlightenment, which certainly lit up some things but relegated others to the shadows. Including, ironically, the most luminous things. 

Who lights a candle to look for the sun?

Enlightenment Man, that's who, with his grab bag of flickering isms: materialism, mechanism, reductionism, rationalism, empiricism, relativism, Kantianism, Marxism, et al -- and even the "Christianism" which was its reaction, which is to say, a diluted Christianity excised from the explicit science to which it gave birth and the implicit metaphysics it preserved. The three solas are comparatively dim bulbs.

Way back in the day, Plato said Science is nothing but seeing. But what is sight? Human vision is not like a camera, which records only surfaces. 

Rather, it can see what it doesn't see, for example, the dark side of the moon. We don't literally see it, but in seeing the bright side, we know it's there. In other words, we can't see the totality of a single object, even though we know -- unlike animals -- that there's always more to what we see.

Analogously, with the tools of science we see the bright side of the cosmos. But here again, there's the other side which we cannot see, the noumenon. By this we do not intend a Kantian bifurcation that encloses us in phenomena with no possible contact with the real, rather, a different mode of vision -- a transpersonal seeing "within" or "beyond" the surface.

Our current worldview doesn't view the world at all, i.e., in its integral wholeness, rather, is a certain diminished view that brings into being a broken world of imaginary fragments. We can try to put the fragments back together in a multitude of ways, hence all the arbitrary isms that do just that. 

For example, imagine viewing a painting with a microscope of infinite power, which would at once reveal "everything" and "nothing." More generally, the tool determines what we shall find.

This is the paradox at the heart of quantum physics, and why "no one understands it." The experimental set-up determines what we see, but again, what determines sight? Sight is the unseen side of anything we see -- put another way, the subject is the mysterious dark side of any object it perceives. 

But whence the intellectual light with which we see -- or enlighten -- intelligible objects? This primordial light is perhaps the most important thing that has been overshadowed by the Enlightenment. It's the central sun we've exchanged for the scientistic candles that light the surface or periphery. 

No one can see the cosmos, and yet, we see it just the same in seeing anything. In other words, every intelligible existent is the visible side of a cosmic area rug that extends over a transcendent horizon of total intelligibility. Which is why any truth speaks of all truth. One might say that science is embedded in omni-science, as part is to whole.

Thus, if the cosmos

were even remotely what the physical sciences declare it to be, it could not be "viewed" at all. To speak seriously of a "worldview," one needs consequently to assume the incompleteness of our physics-based scientific knowledge (Smith). 

To what can be seen through physics needs to be added what is in principle not seeable through it. Smith has in mind irreducible wholeness, which in turn implies vertical causation, when physics by definition sees only the horizontal parts. But you can spend your entire life in search of a sphere in Flatland, and will never find one.   

Unless you know how to look at circles, i.e., see the dark side from which visible circles are a declension.

Plato for the win!

Correct: the light is coming from outside the cave. Moreover, the call is coming from outside the cosmos, i.e., from the transcendent horizon of total intelligibility alluded to above.

Switching seers for a moment, I want to touch on a book called A Metaphysics of the Christian Mystery -- which I do not recommend, because I only understood about ten percent of it. I think something must have been lost in translation. Which is to say, about ninety percent. Nevertheless, parts are clear, for example,

ideologies constitute "the true mythologies of the modern age." Any philosophy, moreover, disconnected from its roots (from the enigmatic question "Why and how do I think?") runs the risk of being reduced to an ideology. 

I'll bite: why and how do I think? In giving it some thought, I don't. For example, I'm not thinking about this post, rather, thoughts merely arise -- from somewhere -- and it is more a matter of catching and transcribing them. Some editing is required, failure of which results in a train wreck. But I'm more of a middleman between thoughts and post. 

Middle earth?

Yes, in the sense that earth is indeed the center of the cosmos after all, certainly with the arrival of Homo sapiens. Analogously, the center of Flatland is not a point equidistant from the sides, rather, any place bisected by the sphere. In other words, in rising above the merely physical cosmos, this is an infinitely deeper center than any mere sun, star, or galaxy.

To reach its true objective philosophy must thus transcend its own constructs, relinquish its own logic and its very thought in order to take possession of that which is beyond logic, beyond all thought (ibid.).

In other words, into the Great Attractor just over the vertical horizon. This is the place where knowledge converts to being and vice versa, otherwise we could have neither. Well, being would still be being, but we couldn't know of it. 

To the incompleteness of reason... corresponds "its natural demand for a supernatural completion in the intellective and even supra-intellective order"; intelligence "is supernatural by nature," "its essence is metaphysical"; "the intellect (nous) is already something divine." 

Bold claims. Nevertheless, 

the intellect enables the human being, in his present state, to intelligibly make contact with realities that ontologically surpass him... 

That's the ever-present dark side of our knowledge, except that it's not really dark at all, rather, the very source that lights up the surface and renders it visible to us.

We haven't yet reached the End, only the end of the post. We'll end with this:

The fact is that our physics-based sciences as such can tell us nothing about being: they are literally and incurably blind to "that which is."

You might say that a particle collider is the biggest candle ever invented, but it will never find the sun, since it is at the other end, i.e., outside and beyond the quantum shadows dancing on the walls of the cave.

Get Your Filthy Anschauung Out of My Welt!

This is yesterday's post sifted through the filter of today. In other words, it ended in another brainwreck, when things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and mere anarchy is loosed on the cosmos. 

Then it's hard to relocate the durn center from which the post proceeded. I can try to put it back together, but this is a top-down or "exterior" exercise that feels very different from the insight-out process of giving birth to the post. The nonlocal portal is more or less closed for isness.

It sounds pretentious to say that every post is a kind of "automatic writing," and a critic would no doubt call it BS masquerading as even more of it. Being that I am simultaneously the liberatory and the gliberator, we're always poised on that fine line between surprising discovery and pretentious nonsense. But like any good experiment, we don't know the results in advance. 

Automatic writing,

also called psychography, is a claimed psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing. Practitioners engage in automatic writing by holding a writing instrument and allowing alleged spirits to manipulate the practitioner's hand. The instrument may be a standard writing instrument, or it may be one specially designed for automatic writing, such as a planchette or ouija board. 

So, it's not that. Besides, "There is no evidence supporting the existence of automatic writing, and claims associated with it are unfalsifiable. Documented examples are considered to be the result of the ideomotor phenomenon." Ideowhat?

The ideomotor phenomenon is a psychological phenomenon wherein a subject makes motions unconsciously.... The phrase is most commonly used in reference to the process whereby a thought or mental image brings about a seemingly "reflexive" or automatic muscular reaction, often of minuscule degree, and potentially outside of the awareness of the subject. 

Not that either. Maybe it's just free writing, "in which a person writes continuously for a set period of time with limited concern for rhetoric, conventions, and mechanics." It is "comparatively formless or unstructured" and "often produces raw, or even unusable material."

As the cliché goes, we write in order to find out what we think. Nor is this the royal we, because no post is simply what I think. I abandoned that approach within weeks of starting the blog in 2005. That is, I quickly exhausted the modest storehouse of what I knew, which called for the desperate measure of pouring out what I don't. 

That explains a lot.

Let's call it pneumography. Anyway, on to the post -- which is still flawed, but we tried: 

For readers who obviously aren't golfers,

The term worldview is a calque of the German word Weltanschauung, composed of Welt ("world") and Anschauung ("perception" or "view").

And I suppose every welanschauung reflects its zeitgeist, i.e., 

the "spirit of the age," an invisible agent, force, or daemon dominating the characteristics of a given epoch in world history. 

So, what is the invisible geist haunting our zeit, and the implicit anschauung that dominates our welt? 

Bor-ring. Another post about scientism? Just because it -- or reductionism, materialism, dualism, subjectivism, relativism -- is wrong, it doesn't make you right.

That's true: if no one understands quantum mechanics, how can this essential darkness illuminate what is superessentially above and beyond it? 

Well, I am told that even people who believe in God struggle to comprehend the Trinity. Expressing it in terms of quantum physics mitigates this somewhat, in that it shows how the world itself can likewise be at once continuous and discontinuous, local and nonlocal, i.e., wave and particle: what looks like a contradiction is a complementarity. Analogously, if the Persons are "particles," the substance is "wave."

That's it?

You're putting me on the spot. However, if the Trinity is the ultimate reality, then everything should be stamped with its imprimatur, no? Ultimately, it is not only why there's such a thing as a we, but why the we must be prior to the I.

But God says his name is I AM.

True, but I AM implies WE ARE. Besides, if God is love, then at the very least there must be a beloved, unless God is the first and last word in metacosmic narcissism. If love is selfless concern for the other as other, then otherness must be built into God: God must have his own Other.

Couldn't this Other be the creation?

Could be, but we say the very principle of creation is located in divinas, in the generation of the Son from the Father. This being the case, then creation is a word from our eternal Sponsor, hence the irreducible intelligibility that infuses things -- you know, all this Light that lights up the world from the inside out. 

That's very poetic, but -- 

No, it's as literal as literal can be. Intelligibility is to intellect as light is to eye. The eye doesn't have to prove the existence of light in order to see.

The point is, no one understands quantum physics because they don't know what understanding is -- or what is is.

What is it? 

For starters, it is us -- or we rather, in the act of understanding, i.e., the union of intellect and intelligibility in the act of knowing. 

Like anybody could even know that.

Like anybody could not know that and still know anything. The very possibility of knowing truth is gorounded in the ceaseless actualization of the Father's knowledge of the Son in the eternal remurmurance of his Word. 

The eternal collapse of God's own wave function?

Something like that. As you know, I dropped out of high school physics. But if even Gemini can come up an image for it, maybe there's something to it:

For reason itself, whether it knows it or not, only derives its power of knowing from the liberality of a God who is the "Father of lights," and from a Word who is the "True Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man" (Bérard).

Why are we even talking about this? Because we're reading chapter 3 of Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology, called Subcorporeal Physics and Vertical Causation. 

Why is there such a thing as vertical causation? It must exist, otherwise there is no explanation for intellect, free will, creativity, disinterested love, i.e., all the things that make us human. These are quintessentially top-down phenomena, and where there are phenomena there are -- or is, rather -- the noumenon.

Hallow, noumenon!

In philosophy, a noumenon is knowledge posited as an object that exists independently of human sense. The term noumenon is generally used in contrast with, or in relation to, the term phenomenon, which refers to any object of the senses.

And God, hallowed be his noumenon, is independent of the senses, but not entirely so, since he is omni-present. There is no knowledge per se at the level of the senses, but nor is perception not knowledge (i.e., of appearances, precisely). My dog knows a lot of things without knowing she knows them. 

After all, who among us really knows what a bone is? Man is surely a knower, but when all is said and done, we cannot perfectly know the essence of a single fly, let alone an electron, hadron, or quark, so, to say no one understands quantum physics is par for the curs, and every dawg has his deity.  

Just because you think of a pun, it doesn't mean you have to share it with the restavus.

Can't be helped. Automatic writing is automatic.

Yada yada, the reality of vertical causation in the corporeal act of measurement "impacts the physical to the point of affecting its very laws." 

The fact is that our scientistic Weltanschauung is not only oblivious of all but the crudest aspects of our cosmic reality -- i.e., the quantitative -- but is inverted as well: in our moments of scientistic orthodoxy, we are literally "standing upside-down." 

Indeed,  

The very "instantaneity" of vertical causation militates in fact against the "flat" cosmology of the evolutionist Weltanschauung, which simply has no room for anything "vertical."

In the words of Bérard,

ideologies constitute the true mythologies of the modern world.... To reach its true objective philosophy must transcend its own constructs, relinquish its own logic and its very thought in order to take possession of that which is beyond logic, beyond all thought....

Here we see knowledge converted into being in precisely the same way that being is converted into knowledge... 

Pneumography? We'll try to regroup tomorrow... 

The Way Things Are and Why They're That Way

Sincere question: why isn't the philosophy of holism more popular? Since it is self-evident to me, there must be a flaw in it somewhere.

If reductive science analyzes wholes into parts, holism situates the parts in the whole and the whole in the parts, and why not? For practical purposes everyone is a holist, since we don't treat people as aggregates of mechanical parts, much less as ghostly fields of insubstantial energy. 

However, now that I'm thinking about it, psychotic persons are prone to just these tendencies, perceiving reality as an incoherent jumble of disconnected parts haunted by ethereal projections of ghostly forms, i.e., hallucinations. Are they the sane ones after all?

Gosh. Now that I'm thinking about thinking about it, there was a movement in the 1960s that tried to do just this, not only normalizing psychosis but regarding it as a kind of higher mystic awareness of reality. 

Before ever undertaking the formal study of psychology, I remember reading R.D. Laing, who "regarded schizophrenia as a normal psychological adjustment to a dysfunctional social context," 

a transformative episode whereby the process of undergoing mental distress was compared to a shamanic journey. The traveler could return from the journey with important insights...

Mental patients aren't crazy, rather, the world is. 

Two words: Luigi Mangione.

Good point: large segments of the left regard him as a hero instead of a psychopathic killer. "As you would expect, Democrats are most likely to condone cold-blooded murder." 

And as you would expect, "Politically, Laing was regarded as a thinker of the New Left." 

Our larger point is that if the quantum world were the real world, and if we were adapted to this world, we would literally be psychotic. 

Indeed, if we were to even put everyday scientism into practice, we would undoubtedly be arrested or hospitalized. Scientism isn't a rational map of the world, rather, a metaphysical disease. Its cure is holism.

But one hesitates to even call the latter an "ism," because it's just the way a normal human sees the world. For example, we effortlessly see faces without having to add the sum of mouth + nose + eyes. 

We don't assemble parts into the whole, rather, we have to disassemble the whole in order to see it otherwise.

Of course, another characteristic of mental illness is the perception of "false wholes," for example, a conspiracy theory that imposes connections between things that aren't connected at all. Candace Owens is the reigning champion, although Tucker Carlson isn't far behind.

(Un)fun fact: I'm reading a book on Nazi Germany and the Jews, and in the 1930s, some Germans were so unhinged that they thought Nazism not only didn't go far enough, but was controlled by the Jews.  

Our next chapter is on the subject of irreducible wholeness, and if we're on the right track, then the attempt to reduce irreducible wholeness is a kind of insanity. For example, it would be a kind of "musical insanity" to reduce a symphony to a series of isolated notes, and regard these as more real than the symphonic whole.

Nevertheless, this is "the rationale of our fundamental science -- physics namely -- to break entities conceptually into the smallest spatio-temporal fragments and thenceforth identify them with the resultant sum":

Our very conception of "science" -- of rationality almost -- entails the reduction of wholes to an assembly of parts.... the implicit denial of irreducible wholeness has virtually become a mark of enlightenment (Smith).

The cure is rather simple, really: don't elevate scientific methodology to an ontology. In reality, there is a complementary relationship between part and whole, analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, one and many, left brain and right. 

It all starts with nominalism, which denies the existence of universals -- of essences -- regarding the latter as mere names of things. This "became the implicit credo of the modern age -- its religion almost, one might say -- at least in the Western world" (ibid.).

Which is again a crazy ideology that no one could actually put into practice and avoid prison or institutionalization. One assumes that even Richard Dawkins doesn't treat his wife as a skin-encapsulated melange of selfish genes. Then again, he's been married three times, so perhaps this is the issue. Maybe his current wife's genes are less selfish? 

But Dawkins is hardly alone, for

to minds steeped in the Zeitgeist of our age, the very idea that there may be something "beyond" the spatio-temporal smacks of the unbelievable, the utterly fantastic (ibid.).

Nevertheless, some form of holism not only "makes sense" but "may well be in essence the only ontology that does."  

Really, it comes back to the question of the one and the many, and which is more real? I'm with Peter Kreeft: "The Trinity is the ultimate reconciliation of the one and the many." It implies a dynamism of parts in the whole and the whole in the parts, and that's just the way it is, and why it's that way.

Eh, we didn't get far today, but it's time to disembark from the bus...

The Whole in Our Heads, Part One

Cold opening from the Adventure Thru Inner Space:

And still I continue to shrink! What compelling force draws me into this mysterious darkness -- can this be the threshold of inner space?... This vast realm, THIS is the infinite universe within a tiny speck of snowflake crystal.

And there is the nucleus of the atom! Do I dare explore the vastness of ITS inner space? No, I dare not go on. I must return to the realm of the molecule, before I go on shrinking... forever!

Eh, let's go on anyway. Quantum mechanics may be difficult, but it's not scary. Then again, man fears what he doesn't understand, and no one understands quantum mechanics, ergo...

An incomplete in high school physics.

This next chapter is called Irreducible Wholeness, and the first thing that pops into my noggin is that whole and part are complementary, and that's all there is to it: no one needs a degree in physics to know that a whole consists of parts not only ordered to the whole but with the whole somehow contained in the parts -- for example, each cell in the body contains the genetic blueprint for the whole organism.

Now, how is this even possible? In other words, how does the universe create wholes out of parts? We concluded (in the Coonifesto) that it can only be because the cosmos itself is already a whole -- which we implicitly know, hence the name Cosmos. No amount of horizontal shuffling of parts can result in the emergence wholes from parts, much less life from matter or transcendent minds from immanent shuffling. 

It is what it is -- and more to the point, what is cannot be a function of what isn't and can never be.

Unless we are granted that One Free Miracle discussed a few posts ago. Hypothetically it could occur in an infinite amount of time, but the earth is only 4.5 billion years old, and life appeared no later than 3.7 billion years ago, leaving us with only an 800 million year window of shuffling. But chance itself has no positive power to create anything, since it is parasitic on order, and where did that come from?

Besides, if the universe were infinite, then it would have already reached heat death -- maximum entropy -- an infinite time ago, and we wouldn't be here.

Now, the quantum realm is not so much infinite as in-finite (i.e., non-definite), which is to say, unspecified until the act of measurement discussed yesterday. Nevertheless, I suspect that man is, as it were, stretched between poles of infinitude that mirror one another, so to speak. The so-called "bad infinite," or infinite regress, is a function of the good kind. Infinitude only looks bad in a universe turned upside down.

Now, according to Smith, irreducible wholeness

is incomprehensible to physics per se, for the very simple reason that its modus operandi hinges precisely upon the reduction of wholes to the sum of their spatio-temporal parts. 

So, physics makes wholes disappear under its aspect, nevertheless, the parts are only there in relation to the whole physicist. If the physicist were only an agglomeration of parts, there would be nothing to know and no one to know it.

We say the mystery of physics is always dwarfed by the mystery of the physicist. 

But everyone, by virtue of being someone, is a mysterious whole; and 

the idea of irreducible wholeness goes hand in hand with that of vertical causation, which in fact "admits no parts" at all.

"It can therefore be seen" via the "eye of the intellect"  

that, on the one hand, it takes vertical causation to produce an irreducible whole, and conversely, that it takes an irreducible whole to exert vertical causation.

A tautology? Only if we collapse vertical to horizontal, which at once reduces wholes to parts. In reality, "no deterministic, random, or stochastic process can give rise to 'complex specified information.'" 

Again, where does all the information come from? If it can't come from below, it must come from above -- whatever "above" means. Formlessness cannot produce form, and yet, the corporeal world we inhabit is full of them. Unless you are a soph-defeating nominalist, in which case forms and knowledge of them are equally impossible.

Don't cut off your parts to spite your whole?

Correct: "a part of an irreducible whole participates in its wholeness." 

Wholeness is a part-icipation trophy?

Yes, because "without irreducible wholeness there is no being as well." In the transcorporeal quantum realm "we are no longer dealing with existent things," rather, with possibilities, probabilities, and potentials, which are only in turn known via real corporeal instruments wielded by real embodied physicists:

Man is no longer just an "onlooker," as Heisenberg perspicaciously noted, but assists in a way to produce what he observes.  

Too woo-woo? Or not enough? Eddington concluded that "the mathematics is not there till we put it there." "The ineluctable fact," writes Smith, 

is that the transcorporeal domain derives whatever reality it appears to have from the corporeal, and this takes place... by the strategies of the physicist. 

To be sure, we do not create the potential. But we do literally "bring it into being," in the sense that "these putative particles actually receive whatever reality they possess by way of interaction with corporeal objects," for again, prior to observation the particles "are something 'midway between being and nonbeing.'" 

Bottom line: "'atoms' of whatever description do not add up to or yield being -- for the simple reason that being does not reduce to a sum of parts!" 

All things are born of being. Being is born of non-being -- Tao Te Ching

Which I take to mean infinitude at both ends (top and bottom) with intelligible being in between.

Adventure Thru Inner Space

Reset: we're gazing in ponderment at Wolfgang Smith's Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology, and are now up to chapter two, The Measurement Quandary. 

We probably won't spend a lot of time on this quandary, because it makes no sense to build a worldview based on the opinions of a physicist that no doubt clash with the opinions of other physicists, and who am I to arbitrate the dispute? 

Besides, why would you descend into physics in the hope of ascending to God?

That's different: if it's good enough for Christ, it ought to be good enough for us. In other words, the Son descends to the farthest reaches of matter before circling back to the Father. 

And as far as we know, the quantum realm is the farthest -- and certainly the most far-out -- dimension. Recalling the image of the circled dot, it is as if the dot becomes circumference that the circumference might become dot.

Christification is dotification?

Why not? For example, in John 3:13 we read that “No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” Therefore,

It is only by becoming fully Christ-like as partakers of the mystical body that we can be “one in Christ," and those who ascend into Heaven are “heirs according to promise.”

Then again, the Incarnation presupposes a body, and one of the implications of the Measurement Quandary is that there are no bodies down there, precisely, living or otherwise. Nor are there any substances, rather, just a Deepakian sea of quantum energy with a tendency to exist. And no one knows what energy is, either. 

Sounds like incoherent pneumababble with the word "quantum" thrown in.

Correct. Again, in the words of the venerable Richard Feynman, 

Therefore, even if I had completed high school physics, it would have resulted in an ontological incomplete.

ISWYDT: you're alluding to Heisenberg's Uncertainty and to Gödel's Incompleteness.

The uncertainty principle, also known as Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle, is a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics. It states that there is a limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known. In other words, the more accurately one property is measured, the less accurately the other property can be known.

The more you know, the less you know. Which goes to the heart of the Quandary under discussion:

A worldview based upon physics is bound, therefore, to exclude the "qualitative dimension" of the cosmos -- not because it is not there -- but because this science is categorically incapable of grasping that dimension, that aspect of the world (Smith).

It seems there are no qualities down there until we make them so via measurement. But measurement is not from "within" that dimension, rather, from "above." In Smith's parlance, our measurement is a "corporeal" imposition, so to speak, into the merely "physical":

An ontological distinction is thus to be made between the spatio-temporal world as perceptible, and the world as conceived by the physicist: the two are by no means the same.

Therefore, "the act of measurement" categorically transcends "the world of physics." It is as if there are two worlds, for example two tables, "namely the one I can see and touch, and the other one made of 'atoms in the void' which I cannot."

Adams in the void?

Yes, we'll get to that. But the measurement quandary does indeed place man in a kind of void unless we avoid a certain Cartesian dualism that exiles us there. 

In other words, we're going to need a bigger cosmos in order to properly situate the spooky quantum world. It cannot be the "cause" of us, because horizontal causation results only in more horizontal causation enclosed in itself.

What confronts us in the act of measurement is a transition between two distinct ontological domains: from the physical to the corporeal that is. 

But the corporeal cannot be reduced to the physical. This is a problem physics per se cannot solve, because the corporeal domain is not conceivable from the perspective of the physical. In other words, we begin, as we must, with the everyday forms of the corporeal, but these dissolve into a buzzing sea of nothingness within the physical-quantum realm.

I'm trying to avoid incoherent pnumababble with the word "quantum" thrown in, but it's hard. 

No worries:

Nevertheless, onward and downward --like that Adventure Thru Inner Space they used to have at Disneyland. Good times:

The problem is, if we could actually go there, we wouldn't be there, precisely.

A quandary indeed.

Unless we introduce another principle, a meta-physical one that can be perceived by the intellect, but not with the biggest and best microscope in the world:

Here again, the microscope is ineluctably located in the macro (corporeal) world. 

But we have only to turn the cosmos bright-side up in order to see that quantum physics has nothing to say about vertical causation, because "its equations simply don't reach that far":

The crux of the matter resides in the fact that the physical realm -- the "world" in which these equations do cut ice -- is limited, and that the act of measurement cannot be consummated within that restricted domain.... there is literally "a world of difference" between the two -- a gap physics cannot span .

In other words, a world of difference between these two worlds, the physical and the corporeal. From our side of the divide (the corporeal) we can know of it, but it can know nothing of us, no matter how much pneumababble with the word "quantum" thrown in. 

That's the end of the chapter but not the end of the ride. Much more to come.

The Truth of Science and the Science of Truth

I myself used to dabble in theoretical physics -- or rather, those popularized versions that began flooding the market in 1975 with the publication of The Tao of Physics. Now I'm hesitant to do so, because quantum physics is so weird that you can use it to prove just about anything you want, from the multiverse to time travel to creating reality with your mind.

Also, I dropped out of high school physics because a gentleman's C was beyond my reach. Better to take an incomplete and be thought a fool than to complete the course and remove all doubt. 

I'm much more comfortable trying to nail down perennial truths that must be true even for quantum physics -- in other words, a top-down rather than bottom-up approach. 

You can't get from physics to metaphysics, partly because the very pursuit of physics -- or any science -- is already loaded with implicit and unexamined metaphysical assumptions, for example the intelligibility of the world to our intelligence. Or even the existence of time. They say there's no time down there. Nevertheless, it takes time to know that.

[T]he worst metaphysics is generally to be found among those who claim not to have any at all (Smith).

Apparently no one understands quantum physics, no one less so than the one who pretends he does. If only I had known this in high school, I could have explained to my teacher that an F is really an A.

But even if we could understand it, it would leave the understander unexplained. "Understanding" is not reducible to the laws of physics. It reminds me of what Dávila says about history:

 If laws of history existed, their discovery would abrogate them.

Same with any form of determinism, mechanism, or dualism, since we transcend each. 

We've already touched on a number of themes of the book, but let's careen into them in a more orderly fashion, beginning with the preface: "physics proves ultimately not to be the basic science from which, in principle, all others are derived." In short, the very possibility of science is situated in a higher and more encompassing Science.

Which is, of course, the way things used to be: philosophy was queen of the sciences. In which case, who is the king? We'll come back to that one later, but the very notions of king and queen advert to a primordial complementarity at the heart of being, I'll bet.

Yesterday we spoke of how the cosmos is not a monotone, but nor is it a duotone. Analogously, in a stereo system, different information is broadcast from each speaker, which is synthesized in the listener, producing the illusion -- or reality, rather -- of a three-dimensional soundstage.

Back in the 1960s we had bad stereo. For example, in the Beatles Rubber Soul, instruments were to one side, vocals to the other, producing an unrealistic bifurcation that could not be synthesized in the listener. Or, an early Bob Dylan album might have him singing in one speaker while implausibly strumming an acoustic guitar that was ten feet away from him. Call it Cartesian stereo, dividing what is one into an irreconcilable two.

Back when he was a student, Smith wanted to study physics because he believed it to be "the key to understanding the universe." Only after doing so did it dawn on him that it's the other way around,

that in order to "understand physics," one needs first to attain a certain insight concerning the universe: an ontological insight, to be precise.

A good mental stereo capable of reproducing the higher-dimensional image of reality? 

Right brain and left brain?

Surely that must be part of the story. These two are unified in what we shall call a Higher Third. In Smith's case, it is a place where

everything comes together, and one begins to glimpse a previously unsurmised ontological unity and order. One begins to perceive physics in a brand new key... 

Recalling the modulation into a higher musical key discussed yesterday. 

We just spent several posts on the subject of vertical causation, which is complementary to horizontal causation. And as we know by now, in any Primordial Complementarity one of the poles must be ontologically prior, in this case VC. Think about it: although the two are always co-present in any existent, no amount of HC -- even an infinite amount -- could ever give rise to VC.

We can't lift ourselves by our own buddhistraps?

Correct:"the buddhi cannot illuminate itself, since it itself is the object of sight." (We'll return to this question of sight and how to look at it in a subsequent post.)

Smith gives much weight to William Dembski's mathematical proof "that horizontal causation cannot produce what is termed 'complex specified information.'" Now, I dropped out of advanced algebra in high school because a gentleman's C was beyond my reach. 

But I say we don't need any steenking mathematical proof to grasp the bloody obvious. The Beatles are more than the sum of John + Paul + George + Ringo, which can be proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with cold geometric logic by the evidence of their solo careers. 

With the exception of All Things Must Pass.

Correct. But most of that was actually written when George was still a Beatle, as long ago as 1965. 

Now, all those years ago, in the 5th century BC, Democritus concluded that 

According to vulgar belief, there is color, the sweet and the bitter; but in reality, only atoms and the void.

Thus, he was an early adopter of Cartesian bifurcation and of bad stereo more generally: qualities to one side, quantities to the other, and then the rookie error of reducing the former to the latter. For with this bifurcation,

What is being "cut asunder" at one stroke are res extensae or "extended entities" on one side, and res cogitantes or "things of the mind" to the other.

Which, like bad stereo, "leaves the 'real' or objectively existent world enormously reduced and vastly simplified." Again, it analyzes the whole into its parts, and elevates the parts to the whole. 

Now, I did happen to squeak by with a gentleman's C in high school geometry, but even I know that a two-dimensional triangle cannot be reduced to the one-dimensional lines of which it is composed. 

Nevertheless, the Cartesian paradigm worked well enough until 1897, until the discovery of the electron, one of those "atoms in the void" first posited by old Democritus: "The problem"

is that this putative building-block -- out of which all things are supposedly compounded -- turns out, in truth not to exist.

Waitwut? Yes, "Its detectable behavior"

proves to be so bizarre that a leading theorist [Heisenberg] describes it as "a strange kind of physical entity just in the middle between possibility and reality."

But that's not so strange, rather, exactly in accord with Aristotle's description of the realm of potency, which is also not yet something but nor is it nothing. Likewise, a single quantum particle has only a tendency to exist until it is measured. Does this mean we create reality by observing it? I wouldn't go that far, but why not?

Because you're not Deepak?

Yes, there's that. We don't want to monetize our ignorance.

This whole subject is tackled in the next chapter, called The Measurement Quandary. Let's save it for the next post.