It Takes a Cosmos

We're toying with the idea that man is the raison d’être of the cosmos -- that the cosmos exists for the sake of man, rather than vice versa. On the one hand this seems crazy, but on the other, it does illuminate a number of otherwise impenetrable mysteries, in particular, the mystery of subjectivity:

The first thing that should strike man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the incommensurability between the miracle of intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- and material objects, whether a grain of sand or the sun, or any creature whatever as an object of the senses (Schuon).

Now, as mentioned a post or two ago, the Universe is by no means "an object of the senses," rather, of the intellect. The senes alone tell us nothing about the the ordered totality of objects and events that is the Universe. 

Then again, how do we come to know of the existence of the Universe if we do not begin with the senses? This leads us to suspect that the order of the cosmos is analogous to a hologram, whereby the whole is somehow present in each part. 

Yesterday's post ended with the idea that "creation is essentially a communication." Well, perhaps each part of the cosmos speaks of the whole, which is to say, contains information about it -- which is precisely how holography works:

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).

Which very much reminds us of what Whitehead says about the cosmos, based on the then new ideas of quantum physics:

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.

Says Prof. Wiki, 

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.

If we can see the world in a grain of sand, it is because we can see the whole in the part. Certainly this is true of organisms, each part of which contains genetic information about the totality. 

And to bring Whitehead back into the discussion, he remarked that "Biology is the study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms." Which implies that cosmology must be the study of the largest organism. Or second largest.

In order for this to be a proper universe and not just a giant pile of random and unrelated stuff, it isn't sufficient for it to 

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).

We know that DNA contains the blueprint for the entire organism. But the very possibility of DNA is rooted in the part-whole structure of the cosmos. In the absence of this prior implicit structure, biology itself would be impossible. 

Although life has only existed for four billion years or so, thanks to the part-whole structure of being, we have access to events that long precede this -- even to the very origins of the cosmos, in the form of light vibrations that have traveled billions of years to arrive at the back of the human eyeball.

In other words, an event that happened billions of years ago is not only entangled in the now, but is decoded via the intellect.

This goes back to the idea of creation as communication. From and to whom? To us, obviously. The question is, "from whom?" 

Let's think this through. Here's a thought:

Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others.

Which I suspect goes back to a trinitarian metaphysic, in that the Son-Word is a kind of metaphor of the Father. But we're out of time, so, to be continued...