Open for Isness

If we dig down to essentials, everything depends on a principle of openness. 

How so?

Well, think of the barest knowledge, which is dependent upon the mind -- whatever that is -- being open to being or reality. Or, consider life itself: an organism is first and foremost a dynamic system that is open to the environment. Likewise human relationships: humans are intrinsically open to one another, i.e., intersubjective. 

Now, each of these is a Deep Mystery, for we have no idea how openness comes to exist in a causally closed universe. Feser quotes a number of thinkers who are honest and intelligent enough to acknowledge this -- for example, philosopher Jerry Fodor:

Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything could be conscious.

Note that consciousness is always of something, i.e., a relationship. How does relationship exist unless this is already a relational cosmos? Nor are we talking about merely exterior relations, like billiard balls bouncing off one another. 

Rather, consciousness is not only interior, but in rational beings has an interior relationship to that which it knows. In other words, we are able to extract the intelligible form from the "interior" of what we know. How does intelligibility get inside things? How even is there an inside?

Likewise, philosopher Alva Noë writes that science

lacks even a back-of-the-envelope concept explaining the emergence of consciousness from the behavior of mere matter.... how consciousness arises out of the actions of neurons, or how low-level chemical or atomic processes might explain why we are conscious -- we haven't a clue. We aren't even really sure what questions we should be asking.

"I think the time has come to admit candidly that we cannot resolve the mystery" (philosopher Colin McGinn). Of the existence of rational beings, Fodor admits that "it is very difficult to imagine any answer to the question that is not teleological."

Ah, now we're getting somewhere, because teleology implies openness to a transcendent form or nonlocal attractor. Or, a relationship between immanence and transcendence (or even is and ought) within which potential is actualized.

As for Life Itself, 

we don't have any account of how [it] springs forth from the supposed primordial soup. This is an explanatory gap we have no idea how to bridge (Noë).

There are even "card-carrying naturalists like Francis Crick who say that it seems almost a miracle" (Thomas Nagel).

It is clear to me that both life and consciousness are literally impossible within any reductionist paradigm. It doesn't mean -- yet -- that we need to make an appeal to God, only that we need a different paradigm. 

One superficially appealing philosophical paradigm is pansychism: if everything is a little bit conscious, then consciousness is no longer a mystery. 

The problem here is that the existence of the universe itself is also a mystery -- in other words, no one knows what is prior to the Big Bang, nor why this primordial event is so teeming with information. To say it is also permeated with consciousness only deepens the mystery.

Besides, how does the attenuated consciousness of atoms in the void evolve into the full consciousness of rational humans? The principle of sufficient reason still demands a cause that is proportionate to the effect, nor does the lower account for the higher. 

How is there even a high and low? This obviously implies a vertical scale, but how does verticality come to exist in a horizontal cosmos?

Another popular approach is to simply deny the existence of life itself. Which only a living thing could do. Likewise, it takes a conscious subject to deny the existence of consciousness. A subject can pretend to be an object, but an object cannot pretend at all.

So, what is the answer? Feser doesn't exactly say. He mostly debunks the various philosophical nonstarters and nul de slacks before concluding with this: that 

the very possibility of science presupposes the reality and irreducibility of the conscious, thinking, embodied subject. Hence, we cannot coherently eliminate that subject from our conception of the world, especially not in the name of science.

In short, "the problem is with naturalism and not with Aristotelianism," for the latter provides "the true metaphysical foundation for the very possibility of that science."

The true metaphysical foundation? Yes, as far as it goes, but it still has some explaining to do, for it doesn't account for the existence of interiority, openness, relationality, intelligibility, or verticality. 

In thinking about those big five, are any of them reducible to the others, or are they all necessary? Could they be reducible to a single principle, and if so, what would it look like?

Well, it might look something like the Trinity, which is certainly open, relational, and intersubjective. It is also logocentric, accounting for a principle of intelligibility. And although the three branches are coequal, there is a hint of verticality, in the sense that the Father is the eternal source or fount of the other two. 

But verticality really comes into play with a principle of creation, so I think we need to add it (creativity) to our Big Five. This would explain how it is that the creator creates a cosmos that is itself creative -- not to mention interior, open, relational, intelligible, and vertical, i.e., hierarchically ordered. (We forgot to mention the existence of freedom, but that is perhaps an entailment of rationality.)

In any event, we are always open to alternative theories of how the cosmos is irreducibly open for isness.