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.