Exact Science and Science of the Inexact

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance. --Dávila 

Schuon speaks of a "defect of imagination" whereby "One tries to explain 'horizontally' that which is explainable only 'in a vertical sense.'" 

Via a kind of reductive reversal, the very science which only man can conceive presumes to enclose and explain man. Which I suppose is one of the themes of Frankenstein, a manmade creation who turns on the man who created him. 

Anthony Fauci famously proclaimed that I AM THE SCIENCE. Maybe, but I AM is inherently beyond the reach of science, which is limited to IT IS. As the Aphorist reminds us, 

If good and evil, ugliness and beauty, are not the substance of things, science is reduced to a brief statement: what is, is.

And 

Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but unable to explain the consciousness that explains it, will not have explained anything.

So, consciousness explains science but science doesn't explain the consciousness that explains science. 

Well, so what. At least science tries to solve the mystery.

Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery.

And this mystery is indeed insoluble in fact and in principle via scientific assumptions and methods. It's like trying to measure beauty with calipers, or understand a text by analyzing the ink with which it is composed. There are higher levels of meaning that are irreducible to the lower. 

Nothing proves more the limits of science than the scientist's opinions about any topic that is not strictly related to his profession.

So we just give up?

No, but maybe try a new approach, one that isn't doomed to absurdity from the start. 

There are actually certain intrinsic limits at both ends of the immanent-transcendent tension. For example, science can no more say what energy is than it can say what consciousness is. For Voegelin, the immanent and transcendent poles are more directions than destinations, and again, bestwecando is live in the tension between them. Nor can one be reduced to the other. 

There are a number of principles that we -- meaning I -- cannot do without, two of which are verticality and openness. Or just say "openness to the transcendent," which is of course one of the main functions of religion, i.e., to maintain this vertical openness via meditation, contemplation, prayer, ritual, sacrament, et al.

But in reality every remotely normal person is always open to the transcendent in some form or fashion. Language itself becomes incomprehensible without this transcendent pole. 95% of speech is about something abstract, immaterial, and transcendent. Trying to eliminate transcendence from one's vocabulary would reduce one to animality. 

So, language is pretty, pretty important, and how convenient that it's the subject of the next chapter, Language, Code, and Life. Let's see if it gets us any closer to the mystery. We'll start with an aphoristic benediction:

Poetry is God's fingerprint in human clay.

Indeed, "surely you must grasp that language is the very epitome of top-down causation" (Hart), and what is at the top? You don't have to say God, but certainly it involves vertical openness to the transcendent pole mentioned above. 

Whatever the case may be, the "entire substance" of language "lies beyond the physical altogether." It is semantics that conditions syntax from above: "meaning depends wholly upon the irreducibly higher level of symbolic thought." Regarding the language of life,

The physical syntax simply can't generate the semantical meanings; rather, the top-down causality of the semantic level determines the physical ordering that embodies it....

In short, "Life is a semantic structure that colonizes and informs its physical syntax," which is no different from human speech, which uses syntactical structure to convey meaning. And let's be honest,

meaning, intention, semantic content, finality -- all of this has its real existence solely in the realm of mind. If life is code, then life subsists only in mind; but life is code...

Therefore, fill in the blank. 

Life is always already mind? 

That's a bingo. "Mind as such" is

the essential finality, purposiveness, intentionality, cognitive depth, and pervasive consciousness that underlies all nature...

I see. We have a saying around here: Can I buy some pot from you? 

The irreducibility of mind and life and language seems to me all so very obvious that to resist its implications strikes me as sheer perversity.

Yes, but surely a little pot can't hurt?  

[S]ince mind really does exist, in all its evident dimensions and powers, and since it's obviously part of nature, it's well past time.... [to cease] attempting to mechanize the mental and begin instead to undertake the far more scientific and rational task of exploring the mental dimension of nature in the full range of its expressions, and most especially in the structure of life.

Sounds like we're gonna need a bigger science -- or at least a bigger philosophy of science:

the triumph of the mechanistic philosophy and the dismissal of form and finality as figments of a superseded science were decisions not only concerning method..., but also concerning what would henceforth be regarded as fundamental... to our picture of reality.

Analogously, "One can reduce a house to heaps of bricks and lumber and so forth in the hope of understanding its architecture," but "little has been learned except how to destroy a house." 

In conclusion, "The great act of rational intelligibility that runs through all of nature" is just the other side of an "actual intelligence -- even if of a kind we can't imagine." 

Oh, but we can:

The imagination is not the place where reality is falsified, but where it is fulfilled. 

Hmm. Can you say a little more?

Science cannot do more than draw up the inventory of our prison.

But 

Imagination is the capacity to perceive through the senses the attributes of the object the senses do not perceive.

Like God's fingerprint in the clay of human language?