The Rediscovery of Reality?

What happened to reality? Where did it go? And why? And how do we get it back?

Excuse me, but I'm a bit of a history buff, and it looks to me like it's never been particularly popular. To put it mildly. 

Well, they say humans have had a tenuous relationship to reality ever since the so-called fall. Or at least "fallenness" is a way of talking about this universal vulnerability: we all fall short of the glory of reality.  

I don't like to blame philosophers, because who even reads them anyway? To the extent that a misguided philosopher is the "spokesman for an era," it's often because the era itself was already off course: in an age dominated by science, you get scientistic philosophers. In a nihilistic age, deconstruction. They don't lead, they follow.

It reminds me of what John Lennon said about the Beatles supposedly being spokesmen of their goofy era:

We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow's nest of that ship.

No one would pay attention to deconstruction in an age of common sense realism. Just as no one pays attention to common sense today. 

Sometimes a philosophy arises in opposition to the spirit of the age, like romanticism during the Enlightenment, or existentialism in response to rationalism, or analytic philosophy in response to idealism.

But each is a partial views of total reality -- a reminder that a philosophy is generally true in what it affirms but false in what it denies. 

I myself am a materialist, but surely not only a materialist. If a philosophy isn't capacious enough for both subject and object, empirical and rational, quantity and quality, form and matter, existence and essence, then it's not big enough for me. The Word transcends and includes all of them and more. 

These preluminary thoughts were provoked by a book I'm reading called Physics and Vertical Causation by Wolfgang Smith. In it he fingers Descartes as patient zero, what with his division of the world into matter and thought, with no way to reunite them. But in reality, they are self-evidently united. We just don't know how.

In Descartes' defense, it is superficially plausible that the material and immaterial are mutually exclusive substances. And yet, every time I decide to move my hand, and it moves, it's proof enough for me of vertical causation -- of mind influencing matter in a top-down manner. 

But I'm a simple man. Unlike Smith, I'm not a physicist. And yet, many of his arguments hearken back to things I've been writing since my doctoral dissertation in the late '80s, which almost makes me think I ought to take myself more seriously. 

For Smith, horizontal causation is temporal and quantitative, best described (or perhaps assumed, rather) by the classical physics of Newton. But vertical causation (VC) "is something by nature invisible to the physicist, and hence proves to be incurably philosophical." It "does not act in time; one can say that it acts instantaneously."

How can it act instantaneously if it is constrained by the speed of light?

That right there is an example of something I addressed in the book -- Bell's theorem, nonlocality, instantaneous communication between subatomic particles, and all that. I even suggested that thought operates in this manner, i.e., faster then the speed of light, but I'm just a psychologist. Stay in your lane, softhead!

But Smith is a hardheaded physicist, and he agrees that VC "proves to be ubiquitous" in the cosmos, and that "nothing whatsoever can in fact exist without being 'vertically' caused." 

Smith takes us through a brief history of quantum physics, but it seems to me that Whitehead grasped the revolutionary metaphysical implications as early as 1925, in his Science and the Modern World. 

It thus came about that the most perfect physics the world had ever seen turned out to be "a sort of mystic chant over an unintelligible universe," in Whitehead's telling words (Smith).

In short, physics left us "with something that can no longer be pictured or conceived at all -- except possibly in mathematical terms" (ibid.). Well, we're gonna need a bigger picture, that's all: "not only a brand new physics that works, but also a new understanding of what physics is: that is to say, how it relates to reality" (ibid.).

Quantum physics is a fine map -- even the best scientific map ever -- but it is not the territory. However, it does prove that the territory is much stranger than we had imagined, ultimately "that ordinary objects must be nonlocal." Specifically, Bell's Theorem "proved -- to everyone's utter amazement! -- that actually there are no local objects. In a word, reality is nonlocal."

Well, either it is or it isn't nonlocal. But if it isn't, then quantum physics makes no sense on its own terms; in other words, nonlocality is required in order for it to make sense, but this in turn makes no sense in a Cartesian universe. 

The bottom line is that ordinary physical objects "must be nonlocal," and thereby "have the capacity... to communicate with other such objects instantaneously." It is only up to us to arrive at a philosophy in which this is conceivable.

It certainly isn't conceivable with the old Cartesian philosophy, which Whitehead called "not only reigning" but "without rival. And yet -- it is quite unbelievable." Smth also quotes Heisenberg to the effect that "today in the physics of elementary particles, good physics is unconsciously being spoiled by bad philosophy."

Today we have the equal and opposite problem, of good science being consciously spoiled by the plague of woo woo philosophies in the name of quantum physics -- of relentless deepaking the chopra. How do we avoid that?

With good philosophy?

Correct. Smith's book is rather brief, but to make a short story even shorter, he essentially argues that the local (or corporeal) is to the nonlocal (or physical) as form is to prime matter. In other words, Aristotle got it right after all. "Everything in creation hinges upon these two complementary principles." i.e., the "foundational duality of form and matter." 

Importantly, however, this is a vertical distinction, with form situated above matter. The merely physical universe of quantity is actually "below" what he calls the corporeal plane of everyday formal objects. Qualities are "from above," and ultimately "transmit the light of supernal essences into this nether world."

So, it's really a tripartite vertically ordered cosmos, with the pure potential of formless quantum potential at the bottom, the corporeal world in the middle, and something like God at the top: expressed visually, something like O <--> (•) <--> ⬤, only in a vertical configuration.

Smith prefers the image "of a circle in which the circumference corresponds to the corporeal world, the center to the spiritual or 'celestial' realm, and the interior to the intermediary" -- maybe something like this?

I'm pretty sure we're only getting started. To be continued.