Yesterday's post reflected on the idea that it takes a cosmos to raise a man. Which reminds us of the old adage that First in intention is last in execution. Looked at this way, the purpose of creation is the existence of self-conscious beings capable of knowing and returning to their creator.
We know that the possibilities of life and mind are encoded into the big bang, and that if just one of the many parameters of the big bang were changed one iota, then we wouldn't be here.
This could, of course, be a coincidence, but what a coincidence! In philosophical terms its called the cosmic anthropic principle, of which there are weak and strong forms. I suppose we're advocating for the strongest possible form, since we mean it quite literally: again, that man is the raison d’être of the cosmos.
Come to think of it, if man isn't the raison, then I can think of any other possible raison. It reminds me of when the biologist J.B.S. Haldane was asked what nature reveals about God: that The Creator must have an inordinate fondness for beetles.
But there is quantity and there is quality. Sure, God makes a lot of beetles, but so what. He also made entomologists, and the gap between insects and people capable of knowing and reflecting upon them is literally infinite.
Yada yada, the Strong Anthropic Principle:
"The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history."
"There exists one possible Universe 'designed' with the goal of generating and sustaining 'observers'" (Wikipedia).
The previous two posts touched on the part-whole structure of the cosmos, without which the world wouldn't be intelligible to intelligence. Which in turn reminds me of what Norris Clarke writes about ours being a participatory cosmos, knowledge of reality being an especially intimate case of participation.
By participation, Clarke means "the basic ontological structure of sharing in the universe." Again, each thing participates in the All, as part to whole; or, as Whitehead put it,
We habitually speak of stones, and planets, and animals, as though each individual thing could exist, even for a passing moment, in separation from an environment which is in truth a necessary factor in its own nature.
Thus, to repeat what was said in the previous post,
Science is taking on a new aspect which is neither purely physical, nor purely biological. It is becoming the study of organisms. Biology is the study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms.
But "participation" already hints at personhood, since it is an entailment of persons, and persons are by definition irreducibly intersubjective.
For Whitehead, the doctrine of evolution "cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental for nature." In other words, if organism is fundamental and not just epiphenomenal, then neither biology nor physics are what we (they) think they are.
Can't get more participatory than this: "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" (ibid.).
Knowledge of anything presupposes the existence of that single thing under investigation. But the investigation also presupposes a single mind capable of knowing this one thing it has selected or abstracted from the whole.
And the unification of these two -- intelligible object and intelligent subject -- presupposes a higher unity that is the source of both, i.e., the unity of the object (that which makes it one) and the unicity (i.e., interior oneness) of the subject.
In short, "To be is to be together." And in the end, "psyche mirrors nature and nature mirrors psyche, each in its own way" (Clarke). This is not a metaphor; rather, it is why metaphor exists, or even why language itself exists: everything is at once outside and inside everything else.
I suspect we're arguing for a right-brain perspective to supplement the left-brain view, the former being more organic, processual, participatory, and context bound. But that's it for this morning.
2 comments:
We habitually speak of stones, and planets, and animals, as though each individual thing could exist, even for a passing moment, in separation from an environment which is in truth a necessary factor in its own nature.
This touches on a conversation my daughter and I were having last night regarding multiverses. It's fun as a thought experiment, but in reality the circumstances for the particular instance of each individual person are such that any change - a different event in a different but parallel universe, say - would render our own existence there impossible. On the other hand, however, given that the mind can potentially contain a universe, whenever we participate in a story we are indeed creating a multiverse, even if only within our own minds.
Julie the lefties thought for a time that the human mind could directly affect happenstance; we though it was crock. When it was tested, this was found to be factual.
There is a proven direct effect, albeit weak, produced upon events in time-space simply by thinking about a desired (or feared) outcome in an organized or concentrated way. The cosmos replies to this force to the best of its ability, usually producing a similar but not exact outcome. The care taken to make ensure something happens is endearing actually.
This weak "creator" effect needs to be factored into any discussion of an entangled cosmos.
We did not like it that lefty was right. But we had to go with it, because facts are facts.
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