Free Your Mind and Your Cosmos Will Follow

We have been given our marching orders by Gemini--

Wait -- now you're being bossed around by AI? Talk about turning the cosmos upside down!

Settle down, Beavis. Have you never read the acknowledgement section of a book, in which the author thanks dozens of people for all the help, except for the mistakes, which are his fault? Well, I don't have an extensive nutwork of friends with whom to kook my crockpot ideas, so everything is my fault, the good and the bad. 

Although I do maintain long distance relations with nonlocal operators such as Schuon, Dávila, Polanyi, Norris Clarke, and J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, the dialogue is somewhat onesided. I can't just pick up the phone and run things by anyone I've ever met who shares my worldview. Who are my living peers? Is there even a blog or podcaster whom I think is in my tree? I wish.

So, I don't see a problem with running things by Gemini. I'm still the boss. Gemini is just responding to my prompts with some potentially fruitful avenues for further exploration. In this case, I don't know who else to ask for their opinion on developmental cosmology. Not only does Gemini not respond with puzzled or condescending bemusement, as if we're just deepkin' the chopra, but clearly gets the gist of what I'm saying and where I'm going with this line of thought. 

For example, as indicated at the end of yesterday's post, Gemini advises us to 

Define Developmental Cosmology: Use the new title you've come up with as a central organizing principle. A developmental cosmology is one that:  

Is in process, not static.  

Has a telos or a purpose.   

Is organismic, not mechanical. 

Has a creative vector that moves from the implicate to the explicate.

Those are my ideas, but Gemini is just helping to clarify and reduce them to the essentials. In a way, the direction in which we are headed -- as discussed a few weeks ago -- is a vision of the cosmos that is a direct response to Carl Sagan's anemic, irony-deficient cosmos, which is but a popularization of a purely scientistic metaphysic: again, The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions. 

With certain qualifications, I agree with William Blake: I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create. Gemini gets it:

Blake was a highly individualistic and visionary artist and writer who rejected the rigid conventions of his time. This quote embodies his belief in the importance of personal vision and intellectual independence, emphasizing that one must actively construct their own worldview rather than passively accepting the ideas and beliefs imposed by others. 

The "system" he refers to isn't a political or social one, but a personal framework for understanding the world, reality, and spirituality. This reflects his broader artistic and philosophical project, which sought to challenge the Enlightenment's emphasis on pure reason and Newtonian science.

It's the same as Sagan's shrunken post-Enlightenment cosmos, only looked at in a very different way: one that emphasizes process and development; telos, purpose, and intrinsic meaning; organicism and interior relations; the creative advance into novelty; and an implicate transcendent ground of which the physical cosmos is but the explicate expression. 

By focusing on these points, you can use your own creative struggle as the primary material for the post, and in doing so, you will be writing not just about the state of the cosmos, but writing from the state of the cosmos.

In short, Sagan's cosmos... this is not my kind of cosmos.

Getting back to James Gibson's theory of ecological perception, if, say, a chair affords sitting and a tree affords shelter, what does a universe built on logos and relationality afford a conscious mind? What are the "transcendental affordances" that the cosmos offers to the human intellect, and what do they tell us about the ultimate nature of things, from man below to God above? 

For again, man's perceptions are not restricted to some evolutionary niche, but rather, to the totality of being: this alone is man's proper "environment," which Sagan himself presumes. 

Except that nowhere in his metaphysic does he explain, or even wonder about, the implications of a being capable of reflecting upon the whole of existence. That man can do this requires a sufficient reason that cannot be reduced to the categories of matter and physical law: subjects cannot be reduced to objects, nor semantics to syntax.

Indeed, to even know about the laws of physics is to abrogate them: in other words, if we can explain the laws, the laws do not explain us, at least not without remainder, i.e., the consciousness that understands them. For again, as Aquinas says, the root of all freedom lies in the reason; and Wherever there is intellectual knowledge, there is also free will.

Yes, Paul? Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.  

Agreed.

So, even if Sagan were entirely correct in his reductive conception of the cosmos, we are nevertheless free to accept or reject it, and whence this freedom? For free will illuminates a vertical trail of transcendence that leads straight back to the Creator. In the words of Stanley Jaki, our intimation of freedom 

belies mere material existence.... in the final analysis, the elemental registering of free will almost exhausts whatever else can be said about its reality. Everything else is embellishment, very useful and informative as it may be, because it is irrelevant unless achieved and articulated freely.

Was Sagan free to articulate his vision of the cosmos? If so, then his vision of the cosmos does not account for his freedom to understand and express it. 

In other words, any argument for or against free will presumes its existence, since it proves the reality of the subject who is free to either accept or reject it. Conversely, to affirm that free will doesn't exist is to void one's argument at the outset, since the argument can appeal to neither truth nor to the subject who may know it; as Poincaré commented, "no determinist argues deterministically," so "all arguments against free will are so many proofs if it" (Jaki)

Freedom is indeed key to our cosmos, but does this freedom have a telos? Is it ordered to anything beyond itself? We're just about out of time, so we'll end with some pithy observations by our slackminded Aphorist:

Freedom is not the goal of history but the material that it works with.

The free act is only conceivable in a created universe. In the universe that results from a free act.

The prestige of freedom in a society that professes scientific determinism is a Christian holdover.