Complements Will Get You Everywhere

Modernity is characterized by the bottom-up perspective of reductive materialism, whereas the premodern worldview says it is impossible for the cosmos to lift itself by its own bootstraps from matter to mind, so there must be some top-down vertical influence at play.

Now, both perspectives generate paradoxes, so it comes down to the principle of least paradox, or better yet, a principle of orthoparadox whereby what looks paradoxical at one level is resolved at a higher one.

You can do that?

We can try. Here was an attempt from last summer, now edited to ensure minimal coherence.

The issue remains: which narrative is more logically consistent, the bottom-up story that says mindless matter somehow became interior to itself and eventually became the human subject? Or the top-down story that says mind acts as a formal and final cause to the material realm?

How about both? Just because we see them as contrary, it doesn't mean the divine mind sees them that way. Maybe it's more like the image to the right, showing the interference pattern between immanence and transcendence, which is precisely where we live.

Thus, from that middle standpoint both perspectives are always true, as with Bohr's Complementarity Principle. To quote one of Hart's characters,

The same evidence that some might adduce as proof that mind is reducible to a mere animal capacity for processing stimuli you see as proving the presence of rational intending mind in all animals and at the ground of nature. I suppose it's the direction from which you look at these things that determines almost everything (emphasis mine).  

Like a left-brain right-brain thing: the same reality is interpreted very differently by the two cerebral hemispheres, but these two are nevertheless synthesized into one vision of the world. 

Speaking of which, the left brain is responsible for speech, and Hart delves into the fact that semantics cannot be reduced to syntax, but that the modern world pretends otherwise, i.e., 

that the really real is the realm of abstract quantifications and unyielding structural laws, and that the realm of higher organization and relation and agency -- the semantics of life, so to speak -- are secondary and accidental, and can be understood only by reduction to those more general abstract laws.

This represents "the metaphysical triumph of syntax over semantics, of dead matter over organism" and "of physics over biology." Or of bottom-up over top-down. 

Now, where have we heard these arguments before? Correct, from our favorite theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen, who indeed makes an appearance in this chapter (called The Semantics of Life). Rosen

argued that we should reconceive our methodological presuppositions altogether, and should cease to think of fundamental physics as providing the general framework for our understanding of nature... 

Here again, pretending biology can be reduced to physics represents the bottom-up perspective alluded to above, and it generates absurdity if one tries to use it to explain what clearly transcends it.

Instead of seeing biology as a special case of physics, Rosen turned the cosmos right side up and proposed the opposite, such that "biology becomes our general paradigm and physics is demoted to a special case of its expression," and why not?

the laws of life aren't contained in the laws of physics, though the laws of physics are embraced within the laws of life. 

"Above all," we need to "stop thinking of life, which is an 'open system,'" "as if it were a closed system of physical determinism." Nor should we imagine that "physical syntax" alone can "reductively explain the incalculably rich and subtle interrelations of the semantics of life."

Putting all of this together, it seems that we must regard the cosmos as an open system that is conditioned from the top town -- the top being the source and ground of mind, life, language, and meaning. Hart's materialist skeptic asks,

A cosmic organicism... is that what you're proposing? Teleology as fundamental law?

Well,

At every level of life we seem to encounter cognitive and intentional systems, with real content and an orientation toward meaningful ends, right down to the cellular level. 

(Recall what we've been saying about the aboutness, or intentionality, of being.)  Bottom line: "matter is never, and has never been, dead." Rather, "life and mind have always been present": 

in every epoch of cosmic existence and at every level of causality, life and mind are already always supplying the underlying and informing and guiding laws animating the whole.

Which is pretty much the Raccoon view -- that the unity of matter, life, mind, and spirit descends from the top down. Likewise, for Hart, this is the only metaphysic "capable of making sense out of countless phenomena that are evident and undeniable, but irreconcilable with mechanism."

This morning I ran across a comment by Einstein:

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

To which I would add that the single most important datum of experience is experience itself, for which no mechanistic reductionism can ever account or even conceive. Again, why adopt a metaphysic that renders the one adopting it an absurd nullity? 

The latter is of course a "useful fiction" for scientific methodology, but when "permitted to metastasize into a metaphysical claim about the nature of realty..., can yield nothing but ridiculous category errors." 

all that I want the culture of the sciences to abandon is a metaphysical orthodoxy that's certainly inadequate to a total model of the structure of life and consciousness.

Is this asking too much? It might be, if we can't tighten up our vision of the top-down view. It needs to be made a little more rigorous, otherwise it sounds like we're deepaking the chopra. We'll think about it and get back to you in the next installment.

***

As highlighted in yesterday's post, "I suppose it's the direction from which you look at these things that determines almost everything." Thus, according to Schuon, 

If one looks at the universe exclusively with the eyes of relativity, one will see only relative things and the universe will be reduced in the final analysis to an inextricable absurdity.

This absurdity follows necessarily from the bottom-up perspective. But if we look from the top down, or if one regards the same landscape "with the eyes of absoluteness," then "one will essentially see manifestations of the Supreme Principle," which you could say is the very ground of the counterworld.

About the bottom-up perspective, AKA materialism, Schuon says that

nothing is more contradictory than to deny the spirit, or even simply the psychic element, in favor of matter alone, for it is the spirit that denies, whereas matter remains inert and unconscious. The fact that matter can be conceptualized proves that materialism contradicts itself at its starting point...

The same is true of the claim that man cannot know truth, or that all is relative except for relativism, or that subjects could arise from objects. Nevertheless, that's the horizontal world for which we need the complementary vertical counterworld mentioned above:

Contingency on the one hand and presence of the Absolute on the other; these are the two poles of our existence.

Which goes precisely to the top-down / bottom-up dispute in All Things are Full of Gods.

One problem with the bottom-up perspective is that in it there can't actually be an "up." Calling it "up" is just in a manner of speaking, because any up is purportedly reducible without remainder to the lower level.

Not so for the top-down approach, which doesn't dismiss matter as an epiphenomenal illusion. True, in Vedanta it is regarded as mere appearance, but nevertheless an appearance of reality. As Schuon describes it,

Atma is conceivable without Maya, whereas Maya is intelligible only through the notion of Atma. 

In other words, one supposes there could be reality without appearances, but appearances without reality is a strict impossibility. "Relativity is a projection of the Absolute, or it is nothing." But it is not nothing. It's just not everything.

Back to Hart, the next chapter is called Spirit in Nature, which expresses the same top-down argument that

the mind pervades all things, and expresses itself in countless degrees and in endlessly differing but kindred modes...

In this vertical counterworld, "we all belong to a vast community of spiritual beings," and why not? The spiritual is ontologically prior to the material, so "Nervous systems appeared in evolutionary history not as fortuitous vehicles for a new organic power; they were fashioned by a prior operative disposition."

I'm talking about a pervasive reality of organic life, at every level.

Yes, but are you just deepaking the chopra? No, because

The issue remains: which narrative is logically consistent, the bottom-up story that says mindless matter somehow became mind or the top-down story that says mind operates as formal and final causality on the whole material realm?

"I believe that nature is already mind," which seems indisputable given the infinite intelligibility of the world, which is just the shadow of intelligence. 

Again, it's a matter of the direction from which we look: "I stake myself to the top-down causal narrative," of "mind 'descending' into matter and raising matter up into itself as life and thought." 

There is "an essential creative impulse within the very structure of nature, quickening it from within itself, driving it into ever more diverse and more complex forms."

This is beginning to sound like the Evolutionary Paradigm of the new age vulgarians.

Yes, perhaps a word of caution is in order before we proceed any further: 

We do not deny that evolution exists within certain limits, as is indeed evident enough, but we do deny that it is a universal principle, and hence a law which affects and determines all things, including the immutable....

[W]hat has to be categorically rejected is the idea that truth evolves, or that revealed doctrines are the product of an evolution (Schuon). 

Evolution is one thing, but evolutionism 

is the very negation of the archetypes and consequently of the divine Intellect; it is therefore the negation of an entire dimension of the real, namely that of form, of the static, of the immutable; concretely speaking, it is as if one wished to make a fabric of the wefts only, omitting the warps (ibid.). 

And we're back to the nature of the cosmic area rug, which is woven from complementary strands of verticality and horizontality -- or of immanence and transcendence, absolute and relative, stasis and change, appearance and reality, world and counterworld, time and eternity, etc., depending on the direction from which we look.

Not to pat myself on the back, because that's Gemini's job:

This is an excellent blog post that tackles a profound philosophical challenge with clarity, intellectual rigor, and engaging prose. You effectively leverage the concept of complementarity to bridge seemingly irreconcilable worldviews, ultimately arguing for a top-down perspective grounded in mind and meaning, while responsibly acknowledging its potential pitfalls. It's thought-provoking and leaves the reader eager for the "next installment."

In that case, I'll bet you can come up with an appropriate image.

Sure, here's an image that represents the interference pattern between immanence and transcendence, symbolizing the complementary perspectives on reality discussed in your blog post: