Escape from the Planet of the Apes

[T]he final happiness of man consists in this -- that in his soul is reflected the order of the whole universe... --Thomas Aquinas

Yesterday's headache left off with Gemini's observation that "if reality is fundamentally relational -- as we’ve agreed it is -- how is the chasm between Beyond-Being and Being bridged? How does the 'something' of Being arise from the 'nothing' of Beyond-Being, and how do we, as finite beings, even begin to conceptualize this?"

In short, 1) how does formal and determinate Being arise from the supraformal reality of Beyond-Being?, and 2) what is the link between them? How do we conceptualize these things?

Maybe you just did, and that's the best we can do.

Good point. In its own way, Christianity makes the same claim with the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo: it is at once a conceptualization of how being arises from something beyond being, and yet, it's not something we can really comprehend.

But the same is true of scientific accounts of the origins of the cosmos: any tenured mediocrity can say "big bang," but does anyone really comprehend what it means? No, it's just words, placeholders for a mystery. Certainly no one knows what is prior to the big bang, nor why it was packed with so much specified information leading directly to the emergence of conscious beings some 13.8 billion years later.

For as I asked in the book -- I don't recall the exact words, but why we do we assume that the cosmos is devoid of any "maturational process" that ends with its own discovery by conscious beings? I mean, weirder things have happened.

Name one.

You're right. A human being reflecting on the origins of being has to be the weirdest thing in creation, all others being number two or lower. Not for nothing does my book literally begin with nothing, and then go on to say that

In The Beginning was the weird, and the weird was with God, and the weird was God.

Weird.

I think the operational word is "with," since it implies a link -- a relation -- between the Nothing beyond being and the something of existence. It turns out that everything, at all levels, is substance-in-relation.

And to paraphrase a question I asked in the book, who are we to assume this cosmos is fundamentally dead, or that human beings aren't just the mature fruit of a sufficiently ripe old cosmos? Maybe it just takes a cosmos 13.8 billion years to produce a human. A lot of things have to go right in order for that to happen.

In other words, we aren't simply "inserted" into an otherwise dead cosmos, rather, we grow out of it in the manner of a mushroom that is only the visible side of an invisible mycelial network. If the network isn't already there, then no mushroom could emerge from it.

This reminds me of your doctoral dissertation, in which you applied physicist David Bohm's concept of the implicate and explicate orders to the mind: our minds are the explicate expression of an infinitely vaster implicate order.

Ah, gnostalgia. At the front of the dissertation is an epigraph by Heisenberg to the effect that The same forces that have created nature in all her forms, are responsible for the structure of our soul, and likewise for our capacity to think. He goes on to say that "With our new understanding, we can truly say that the development of the cosmos culminates in an unbroken fashion with the thought of man."

Which sounds like an organismic "maturational process" which -- like any such process -- aims at a nonlocal telos. If this is the case, then what we are doing at the moment, i.e., reflecting on ultimate reality, is precisely what we are supposed to be doing, for we are the way the cosmos comes to reflect upon and understand itself. Which makes us the link between being and beyond-being.

Before you say "that sounds like a load of bollocks," consider someone as mainstream as Thomas Aquinas, who says that "The complete perfection of the universe demands that there should be created natures which return to God," and that "the intellectual soul is said to be like the horizon or boundary line between corporeal [read" explicate] and incorporeal [implicate] substance."

Intellect is the first author and mover of the universe.... Hence the last end of the universe must necessarily be the good of the intellect. This, however, is truth. Hence truth must be the last end of the whole universe.

It seems that truth is the telos of being itself. But also its origin. Man is "the end of all generation," end here meaning telos. And "every intellectual being is in a certain manner all things, in so far as it is able to comprehend all being by the power of its understanding. Every other nature possesses only an imperfect participation in being." 

I discern a Key Point.

Yes, consider: the intellect is uniquely -- and weirdly -- "capable of knowing everything that exists." And 

Our intellect in knowing anything is extended to infinity. This ordering of the intellect to infinity would be vain and senseless if there were no infinite object of knowledge (ibid.).

I am now going to shift gears, or downshift into the animal realm. The point I want to make -- with a little help from Perception as Information Detection: Reflections on Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Visual Perception -- is that there is a fundamental distinction between the physical world that surrounds animals and in which they are embedded, and the environment surrounding them. 

In short, animals know only their environment, and know nothing of the wider (and higher and deeper) world beyond it. One might say that they know only what they need to know in the context of surviving in the narrow environment they perceive with their senses.

I believe we've seen this movie before, calling it Escape from the Planet of the Apes. That is to say, man is subject to environmental pressures just like any other animal. And yet, we are not limited to that environment. 

Rather, truly truly, man's environment is being itself, the totality of the cosmos and beyond. That's a big -- the biggest conceivable -- place. But how did we transcend our comparatively puny evolutionary environment focussed on survival and reproduction, and come to know this vastly greater world that extends backward all the way to the Big Bang and upward all the way to Beyond-Being?

Clearly, no one was around at the time of the origin of the cosmos, but we know all about it, just as if there were a mind there observing it. Again, our perceptions are clearly not limited to the immediate environment, as is the case with all other animals. 

So, animals don't live in the cosmos, but rather, only in a narrow spectrum of stimuli relevant to their own survival. For example, a bat lives in an acoustic environment imperceptible to a bloodhound, while a bloodhound lives in an olfactory environment imperceptible to the bat. 

But man lives in a cosmos -- or the totality of being -- to which he is mysteriously ordered. This ordering can have nothing whatsoever to do with the imperatives of survival, but utterly transcends them. Man too has an "environment" proper to man, but it turns out to be everything and more (because there is always more to anything).

I suppose this is a good place to pause for a banana.