Engaging with the Limitless Horizon of Intelligibility

We left off with the idea that thinking is an engagement with "the limitless horizon of being and tending toward the fullness of being as fulfilling goal" -- in other words, that it is drawn by a telos, arrival at which would represent its complete fulfillment. 

Clarke goes on to say that "Man is an embodied affirmation of the Infinite," but it seems to me that this is a kind of mirror image of the teleological infinite described in the first paragraph; the latter is "convex," whereas ours is "concave," so to speak. Our concavity points, as it were, 

to the presence of something perfect, unconditional, and unrestricted within our consciousness that beckons us ahead of any imperfect and finite idea or ideal..., a "transcendent horizon" that can neither be described nor explained through any set of restricted, conditioned, or imperfect categories or realities (Spitzer). 

Recall yesterday's definition of man as a relational substance of a transrational nature. Well, this goes to the transrational part, for we -- Raccoons at any rate -- are "aware that particular (finite and conditioned) manifestations of reality do not exhaust the whole of reality; the whole of reality is much greater" (ibid.). 

Thus, "we must have at least a tacit awareness of what might be called a 'supercategory' of the whole of reality," which we like to call O for short. It is the source of our "pure unrestricted desire to know, that is, a desire to know all that is to be known (everything about everything)." 

And if we have an explicit desire to know it all, this implies a tacit recognition that all is knowable and just waiting to be discovered. Therefore, according to Spitzer,

When we arrive at an answer that is only partially intelligible, (that is, is not "everything about everything"), our desire is only partially satisfied, and we naturally ask a subsequent question of why it is so in our quest to achieve the fulfillment of our desire, namely, complete intelligibility (the knowledge of everything about everything). 

Again, the point is that awareness of partial intelligibility implies a tacit awareness of what complete intelligibility would constitute -- somewhat analogous to Aquinas' argument from gradation, that there is an implicit standard by which we measure degrees of perfection, in this case intellectual perfection. 

Given this strange situation, it's beginning to look like the complete intelligibility of the world might just result from an act of unrestricted thinking, but that's getting out ahead of our skis. However, it is as if

God shares His mind with us sufficient to engender a horizon of complete and unrestricted intelligibility, giving rise to every form of free intellectual inquiry and creativity. 

Of course Gödel is relevant here, because he provides ineluctable proof of our transrational nature. For example, he

shows that human creativity in mathematics cannot be explained from "below" -- from previous sets of rules and algorithms.... This means that human mathematical creativity must be explained from "above"...

Conversely, "Artificial intelligence has no consciousness of a horizon of greater intelligibility -- let alone a horizon of complete and unrestricted intelligibility," because "such a horizon can only be created by 'complete and unrestricted intelligibility itself.'" 

In short, we cannot create in a machine what we didn't create in ourselves, rather, "we are mere restricted beneficiaries of a capacity given to us by a truly unrestricted intelligence." 

All of this is very similar to yesterday's description of a teleological pull whereby our orientation "toward Infinite Being is a necessary a priori structure or condition of possibility of all our thinking." Which is to say we are oriented to, and drawn by, O.

This, according to Clarke, implies that

the dynamism of my intelligence does actually make ultimate sense, is not a radical absurdity, and hence must have some really existing final goal, since an existing dynamism without goal wold be unintelligible.

Nevertheless, "Man is the being who can affirm or deny his own rationality," therefore "free to assume his own rational nature as gift and follow its natural call to total fulfillment, or else to reject this call..." As we like to say, we are faced with a primordial choice between O and Ø.

I would say that O represents "the lodestar that draws my intelligence ever onward, even though this ultimate goal remains for me at present only obscurely discerned" but which "renders all else intelligible" (Clarke). 

Somewhat like the true light that gives light to everything else.