Modeling Ultimate Reality

If Noam Chomsky is a genius linguist, it wouldn't be the first time a gifted intellectual also suffered from delusions -- for example, Isaac Newton and his alchemy fixation, or Gödel and his paranoia, or Tesla and his pigeon obsession.

But let's keep this party polite, and never let truth out of our sight. Truth is true even if it's said by an America-hating terror-supporting utensil.

Spitzer certainly keeps things polite, relying on Chomsky's linguistic theories to build his case for God, with nary a mention of his extracrackpotular political wacktivities. 

Do the soulless prove the existence of the soul?

I don't know if I'd put it that way, but privations in general are parasitic on some positive good.

Where there's smoke there's fire, and where there are shadows there is light. In this sense, where there are progressives there is truth lurking nearby. 

But is it enough to prove the soul's immaterial capacities to prove the existence of the immaterial soul? In other words, how can we have the capacities but not the thing that has the capacities? Isn't that like the smile without the Cheshire cat?

Whatever we call it, the soul accomplishes things no material entity could, for example, the self-reflection whereby it is both observer and observed. How does the observer emerge from the observed, or rather, how does this immaterial twoness arise from material oneness? 

Again, we can teach sign language to primates, but there is no evidence that they can think conceptually or communicate abstract ideas, whereas this is what humans effortlessly do. Similarly, chimps might connect two words that are immediately adjacent to one another, but cannot relate more distant connections, as we are doing in this and every other post.  

The question is how to bridge this gap between animal and human: can natural selection do the job, or are we talking about an ontological discontinuity whereby no material entity in no amount of time can accomplish this leap? 

We have long since dismissed the latter as a metaphysical impossibility. But just because you've proved how something couldn't have happened, it doesn't mean you've proved how it did happen.

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

No shit, Sherlock, but how do we know when we've eliminated every impossibility? In other words, there may be hidden variables of which we know nothing.

And yet, these variables, whatever they turn out to be, cannot be material. Of this we can be certain. Only meta-physics can provide the answer, but the very existence of metaphysics implies a cosmos that is conditioned from the top down, from Principle to manifestation.

In a way it reminds me of the expensive doorstop I began making my way through yesterday, Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities. I've only read the first chapter, but it raises a host of fascinating questions about the very possibility of modeling ultimate reality, like, is this something man can even do? And if so, what does this say about man? 

From the very beginning, man qua man has been modeling ultimate reality. Indeed, the two -- man and model(s) -- seem to have coarisen: show me a man and I'll show you a religion, whether implicit or explicit. And even when explicit, it is not necessarily reflected upon in a detached and critical manner.  

At any rate, man is Homo religiosus, each religion being a kind of spontaneous model of ultimate reality. It doesn't mean the model is accurate, only that this metaphysical model-making is something man does without even consciously thinking about it. We make religious models like beavers make dams. It's what we do.

Until quite recently. It has only been since the 20th century that the majority of philosophers gave up on metaphysical systems, which is to say, constructing the ultimate model of reality. 

Religion is the poetry of metaphysics.

Agreed. And just as we can analyze a poem in order to discern what the poet is "really saying," we can do the same with religion. And yet, if the full meaning of the poem could be conveyed via prose, why bother with the poem? Why not just tell the girl she's pretty? Why complicate matters by blathering about summer days and buds of May? 

There must be some residue in the poem that cannot be reduced to the wideawake & cutandry. Moreover, I would suggest that this meaning is inward and experiential as opposed to outward, linear, and discursive.

This implies that our model of ultimate reality will have to have something "poetic" about it. 

D'oh! That's not really in my skillset. Rather, I was raised to believe that poetry is just gay sentences.

This is my problem with the great metaphysician Guenon, who is all math and no poetry, as it were. Schuon is much more poetic, and in fact, he stopped writing prose altogether toward the end of his life, in favor of composing some 3,500 poems. Maybe I'm not the best judge, but I don't find them particularly moving, rather, too literal and didactic. Poetry tries to express the inexpressible, but Schuon's poems just express his metaphysic in a shorter format.

Let's get back to the post. As we've been arguing for a couple of decades, there is ontological discontinuity if we examine the cosmos from the bottom up, but continuity from the top down. Chomsky & Co. "hypothesize that the gap between humans and nonhumans is fundamentally biological" (Spitzer), but then they would, wouldn't they? Naturalism is a metaphysic (and model) too, just an impoverished one that can't even account for itself.

Now, to even say "bottom up" or "top down" implies a verticality for which your model will need to account. As we always say, if man can explain natural selection, then natural selection cannot explain man (at least without residue).

As the science currently stands, "this is a major problem, which is currently inexplicable through physical-biological processes." I say it cannot in principle be solved via science, because the soul is irreducible to anything less. 

But if the soul didn't evolve via natural selection, how and when did it get here? In the book, I suggested that it was a sudden occurrence that happened as recently as 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, whereas Spitzer puts it at 50,000 to 65,000 years ago. No doubt the date of the third Big Bang (into Mind) will be increasingly fine-tuned as more evidence comes to light.

Let me fast forward in the book, as Spitzer presents his evidence for the third bang in an appendix. Again, given the soul's existence, "when did we get it?," i.e., "when did the nonevolutionary, transphysical event of the soul's creation occur for the first time?"

Examining only the biological evidence, we can trace things back to a Miss Mitochondrial Eve and a Mr. Y Chromosome Adam. Although these two lived at roughly the same time and came from a similar neighborhood, there's no way of establishing if they knew each other (in the biblical sense, wink wink). In fact,

Though they may have had acquaintance with each other, it is by no means certain -- and seems quite unlikely (given the large region and time spans involved).

Now, looking at the trans-biological evidence, it hardly matters whether these two ever got together, since they lived some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, whereas evidence of the transphysical soul doesn't burst upon the stage until much later, again, 50 to 65 thousand years ago. 

Anthropologists call this "the great leap forward," even though natural selection is a gradual process that doesn't allow for such leaps, much less vertical ones, i.e., a great leap upward. 

As I said in the book, Homo sapiens does nothing novel for a couple hundred thousand years, and then bang, more advanced technology, mathematical discovery, pictorial art, music, sewing, seafaring, awareness of the future, more sophisticated burial practices, and those lovely mancave paintings. Wha' happened?

In short, "Our first ensouled ancestor appeared on the earth." I suppose it's a bit like trying to remember back to when you and I became ensouled. It's something of a blur. I just woke up one day and here I was. What did Churchill say about his birth?

Although present on that occasion, I have no clear recollection of the events leading up to it.

Spitzer, bless his heart, also brings Gödel into the argument, since he proved that "human thinking is not based on a set of prescribed axioms, rules, or programs" and is indeed "beyond any program." 

Presumably this includes any genetic program -- I'll have to check with Robert Rosen -- but in any case "human intelligence is indefinitely beyond any axiomatic or program-induced intellect." It is

not only always beyond axioms, rules, and programs (to which artificial intelligence is limited) but also capable of genuinely originative creativity (that is, capable of thinking without deriving from or making recourse to any prior axioms, rules, or programs).

Which is full of implications for our attempt to model ultimate reality. And again implies that poetry -- or something like it -- might be needed to convey the Beyond that can never be contained by the model.

The Journey to God, Starting From the Bottom

Yesterday's post ended with my description of the structure of my imaginary forthcoming book, which will 

begin at either end and meet in the middle, where God or ultimate reality is situated. Reading it from front to middle would represent the upward arc (↑) from manifestation to Principle, whereas middle to back would constitute the downward projection (↓) of creation from Principle to manifestation. 

In response to this description, Gemini wonders "What kind of content would each half contain? Would they be narratives with characters, philosophical explorations, poetic reflections, or a combination?"

No narratives. I'm not a novelist. And if there are any characters, it would be just me and Petey, with lots of philosophical explorations but I don't know about poetic reflections. That might be nice, but poet? That's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. 

As we review last summer's batch of poestry, I was looking for an example of one that starts from the bottom, and this one will have to do. It's in the context of a discussion of Robert Spitzer's Science at the Doorstep to God: Science and Reason in Support of God, the Soul, and Life after Death. 

Clearly, in beginning with science, Spitzer is starting at the bottom, i.e., with the material world. But, as indicated in the title, the bottom turns out to be a doorstep to God. Or a window in the ceiling, i.e., a skylight. Better yet, a sunroof. Of course, it is up to us whether we drive with it open or closed. 

But if it is closed, then there goes the (↑) from manifestation to Principle. Our journey is over before it has begun. We're on the doorstep but the door is locked. Frankly it's not really a door at all, and not even a ceiling, because that would at least imply verticality. Rather, it's a wall, and we are just bricks in the wall. 

However, in examining the material cosmos, we can trace it backward in time to a "beginning," at which point the screen goes blank because there is no before. I myself don't buy that, but a physicist (with no recourse to metaphysics) must, because that's what the physics says.   

Of course, we can never prove with absolute certitude that "God" is responsible for the Big Bang. However, we can say that, whatever alias he goes by, our leading suspect is an immaterial personal being with an intellect infinitely superior to ours, so we've put a tail on him and are attempting to tap his line.

As Spitzer says in the Introduction, the unimaginably unlikely fine-tuning of the Big Bang makes "the idea of a transphysical, transuniversal intelligence a most compelling explanation" for these improbable coincidences. 

And when we say "improbable," we mean something like a raccoon typing randomly and coming up with the text of Macbeth on the first try.

So, you're telling me there's a chance atheism makes sense?  

I no longer spend much time thinking about how to harmonize religion and science. Rather, I just try to comprehend the metaphysics of it all, and let the harmony take care of itself. 

What I mean is that some things are true regardless of what science or religion say, because common sense -- or, let us say, rudimentary logic -- trumps both. 

If this sounds impertinent, even God cannot, for example, violate the principle of non-contradiction, i.e., simultaneously exist and not exist. Indeed, to say I AM WHO I AM is to validate the principle of identity. It cannot be simultaneously true to say I AM NOT WHO I AM, or I AM WHO I AM NOT. Remember, "is" is the soul of judgement, even -- I would say especially -- for God. It is only because I AM that HE IS and we are too.

Spitzer puts forth a sophisticated argument for why science not only cannot disprove the existence of God, but actually makes a transcendent intelligence the most probable explanation. But even an unsophisticated argument will do. No need to rub it in. 

Likewise, there is much argument that the cosmos must have a beginning, and that this beginning is the Big Bang. However, even absent the Big Bang, we can again prove via metaphysics that the cosmos must have an uncaused vertical source. In short, the cosmos -- like any other contingent entity -- cannot explain itself.

One of the most simple but compelling arguments for a beginning is from the law of entropy, meaning that the existence of disorder necessarily increases in the cosmos with the passage of time. Once maximum entropy is reached, no activity can occur, and the cosmos will be functionally dead. In short, "the entropy of the universe must increase until equilibrium is reached."

Unless this turns out to be an open cosmos, more on which as we proceed. But it certainly appears to be open to a transcendent source, clearly so at the beginning, so why not at the end, and at every point in between?

Anyway, let's complete our gedankenexperiment with entropy. If maximum entropy is the inevitable end of the cosmos, then it is  

clear that if the universe had existed for an infinite time, then that equilibrium would have been reached, and if it had been reached, the universe would no longer be able to undergo spontaneous change and would therefore be dead. 

Right. Therefore, the cosmos not only had a beginning, but there is necessarily more order at the beginning, indeed, an inconceivably vaster amount. And this is precisely what we see with all of the fine-tuning packed into the Big Bang.

The low entropy of the universe is so improbable that its occurrence at the Big Bang is virtually impossible.  

I won't bore you with mathematical figures and comparisons. Well, just this one: out of all the possible universes, given the free range of various parameters governing it, the "right answer" for a cosmos capable of sustaining life comes down to one in 10 to the 10th to the 123rd, a number so large that "if it were written out" in 10-point font, "our solar system could not contain it."

There are numerous other comparisons, but they essentially equate to impossible, "which screams out for an explanation, a cause." And Spitzer easily bats down such desperate pseudo-explanations as the multiverse, string theories, or cyclic cosmologies. 

In chapter 3 Spitzer moves on to a more purely metaphysical argument. Lotta ins & outs, but it basically comes down to the reality of an uncaused and unrestricted intellect behind it all, which is the source and ground of the "profoundly intelligible existents filled with information that can give correct answers to the full range of questions." 

In other words, a Talking Universe ordered to our unrestricted desire to listen to and know about it, for "observable realities are shot through not only with contingency but also with intelligibility." 

Knock knock.

Who's there?

An unrestricted desire to know who's there.

I AM.

I don't get it. 

Not sure I do either. Let's just move on.

At this point, science has opened the door to the likelihood of a transphysical-transuniversal intelligent creative powwhose nature is not fully known.

Science is enclosed in the circles of quantity and materiality, but 

If we do not fall prey to scientism, we may now enter another door to the realm of necessary truths through metaphysical method. 

Which is to say, leave the smaller circle for the larger, into a realm of truth that is "applicable to the whole of reality," not just to the empirical world at the periphery of the intelligible. 

Again, a complementarity between science and metaphysics can fill in a great many gaps inevitably left open by science -- for example, the gap between intelligence and intelligibility, which is more like an unbridgeable abyss if regarded from the perspective of materialism.

But instead of proceeding through this wide open door, the next chapter reverts back from metaphysics to science, reviewing all of the medical and scientific evidence of a transcendent soul, mainly from near death experiences (NDEs) during which the person is clinically dead (i.e., no brain activity, fixed dilated pupils, no gag reflex, and voting Democrat). 

Some of the stories are indeed remarkable, including those of people blind from birth who can see exactly what's going on around them during the NDE, and later describe it with perfect accuracy. 

The majority of people describe blissfully positive experiences during NDEs, but a significant minority undergo hellish ones. It would be nice to know if these are a result of hellish personalities, but Spitzer doesn't say. 

Despite their plausibility, it is difficult to know what to make of NDEs unless or until I personally undergo one. Nor am I in any rush to do so. Analogously, some people have taken psilocybin and come back convinced of the existence of God, and good for them, but I hesitate to venture down that path either.

The next chapter is more our style, going to the literally infinite -- and again unbridgeable -- gap between the lowest man and the highest ape. Spitzer shows that we cannot be "mere extensions of a bio-physical animal kingdom," but "are categorically distinct from other species." 

Here again, there are a lotta ins & outs, so I'll do my best to bottom line it for you. If we consider language, for example, the best a chimp can do is communicate via concrete perceptual signs corresponding to, say, a banana. But they cannot abstract from this to the idea of "fruit," nor relate one higher order concept to another, something we easily do. 

Indeed, "about 3 percent of our words signify perceptual ideas, and about 97 percent, conceptual ideas" that are quite remote from images, instincts, or objects, or in other words, wholly immaterial. And

If the content of an act of awareness is transphysical, so also must be the act of awareness on which it depends. This act of awareness must therefore be substantially transphysical, implying a soul.

Concepts are abstract enough, but what about relations between concepts? These are even more remote from any material content, nor can one get there from any experience of the perceptual world. 

Again, this gap is unbridgeable, for "how could we ever have learned those higher-order concepts from the perceptual world? It is clearly impossible." If the capacity weren't already there, we could never have acquired it. 

Which Spitzer describes as "the preexperiential conditions necessary for abstracting conceptual ideas (derived from the perceptual world)." 

Yada yada, there is simply no scientific explanation of the soul's capacities, because any such explanation presumes the conceptual capacities of the immaterial soul. 

There's much more, but this is as far as I've gotten in the book. Let's just say there must be a bridge over the abyss, only not from the bottom up but from the top down.

From Manifestation to Principle and Back Down Again

Of what can we be certain? Or, can we only be certain of uncertainty? 

"Man's innate desire for knowledge," writes Owens, "tends not only toward knowing the truth about things, but likewise being certain that he knows it." However, many have been the times when our certitude turned out to be unjustified. 

Understatement.

Agreed:

You continually meet people who are certain of views that you know to be wrong. Error is ubiquitous as a fact and poses troublesome problems for the epistemologist.  

And just because we are certain that someone else is wrong, this doesn't necessarily make us right. The question remains, 

Can any judgments be had..., that after thorough scrutiny show they exclude all possibility of correction? Is certitude ever justified?

Hmm. How about something exists, i.e., being is. Am I sure about that? Sure I'm sure, since it cannot be explicitly denied without implicitly affirming it, because something that exists just denied it:

Try as you like, you cannot, while you are actually feeling or seeing the thing, shake in any seriousness your knowledge that something -- in the sense of an extended or bodily something -- exists in your cognition.... 

You know that something corporeal exists, and that try as you like you cannot correct or doubt that judgment.

That it? Doesn't seem like much to go on. 

Well, we have to start somewhere, and perhaps this is just the thin edge of a wedge of fledgling knowledge that will bust things wide open. For starters, the very existence of the little something we are judging to exist "excludes its own non-being. The real existence means that it is not non-existent in reality."

Thus, the non-existence of this something is impossible. This first judgment "is not open to doubt or correction. Existence reveals its own necessity" and "cannot be otherwise."

Well, good. In knowing that something exists, we also know, by extension, that we exist, for "While you are knowing in reflection that you exist, you cannot simultaneously be seeing that you do not exist."

So, we are certain that something is and that something -- someone -- is certain of it. Denying either of these foundational truths -- or affirming their non-existence -- is a self-refuting auto-absurdity. Therefore "It is impossible to be and to not be at the same time."

Thus we arrive at our first articulate principle, based on our first pre-articulate certitude, which "may be expressed in the judgment 'It is impossible to be and not be at the same time.'" 

No matter how much you try to deny it in words, you cannot deny it in thought. Any attempt to deny it involves its affirmation, for its denial is accepted as something that cannot be its affirmation.

In short, "A thing cannot be what it is not." Moreover, "A thing is one in itself and is different from other things." 

The investigation is closed. You are certain of your truth judgment. There is no "fear of error," in the sense that you have seen there is no possibility of error in the case. Being, consequently, is the criterion of certitude as well as the ground and norm of truth.

Being doesn't lie. Rather, it is, always is, and cannot not be what it is. 

That's great, Bob. Now what? 

Good question: what goes on between our first certitude and all of the other truth claims built upon it? How is the "extension of human knowledge possible," whereby we pass "from what is already known to still further knowledge of things"? 

How is it possible to be wrong about what is? Well "In erroneous conclusions, opinions, and beliefs..., the assent is ultimately caused by the human will," and "not by the object." 

For example, we may, for the sake of expedience, make a hasty judgment about what is, that turns out to be incorrect -- like thinking the straight stick placed in water is bent, or the rope is a snake, or Joe Biden's dementia is just a stutter. 

Now, the will is free, so we are of course free to be wrong, even though there is no right to be wrong. 

Man's free direction of his own conduct is an anomaly in the physical world, and would appear to involve a supersensible cause.

Only a rational being can be free, and yet, we wouldn't be free if we weren't free to be irrational or wrong. If we had no such freedom to be wrong, we would be like computers and not men. But in any event, "the very process of reasoning itself could not take place" if it were not independent of the conditions imposed by matter.

That is to say, any knowledge is an abstraction from matter involving a universal that transcends time and space. Obviously math, for example, is of this nature. It is not located in space, nor is it subject to the changes of time, notwithstanding progressive lunatics who claim it is but a temporal invention of the white devil. 

I apologize for the repetition, for it seems we keep arriving at the same bottom line: that being is, and that it is intelligible to the intellect that can freely know it, even while we are free to not know it, which reminds us of an aphorism or two:

Freedom is not an end, but a means. Whoever sees it as an end in itself does not know what to do with it when he gets it.

For freedom is ordered to the truth of being. It is not the goal of history but the material that it works with.  

Moreover, 

To admit the existence of errors is to confess the reality of free will.

But -- speaking of the relationship of will to error -- 

The free act is rebellion or obedience. Man establishes there his godlike pride or his creaturely humility. 

Which reminds me of Genesis 3, which amounts to an ontological rebellion against being that somehow keeps happening.

Can you maybe move it along? 

I'll try, but the author of The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being is intensely methodical, so the going is a bit slow. Here's a challenge: it is

impossible for truths which have been revealed to us by God to be contrary to those instilled in us by nature. 

That is not something revealed a priori, but rather, is taken on faith. However, this doesn't mean we can't make the effort to confirm or refute it, so it's more of a hypothesis that should in theory be falsifiable. Wippel claims that

in the things we understand through natural reason we find certain likenesses of things which are revealed to us through faith.  

So, vertical analogy, like a fractal reflection. Supposing reality is one, why shouldn't it be self-similar across scale? I would expect nothing less.

The following passage goes to the up-and-down, or inductive and deductive, approaches to ultimate reality:

Because philosophy considers created things as they are in themselves, it begins by studying them and moves on to take up issues concerning God himself only at the end of its investigation.

That's the upward movement (↑). In the downward movement (↓), i.e., theology, "one should follow the reverse order, beginning with a study of God, and only subsequently considering creatures insofar as they are ordered to and related to God."

Now, I suspect these two approaches are not only complementary but fractals of each other, and why not?  

Does this mean that metaphysics and theology are one and the same science? No, only that they have one and the same object. 

Except to say that theology must ultimately be meta- to metaphysics, accessing directly what metaphysics can only access indirectly. Metaphysics can never quite reach the interior of God per se, even while establishing his existence with certitude.

In an elderly post we discussed how Thomas begins with the material senses and ascends to the immaterial Principle, while Schuon begins at the other end, with the Principle -- or Absolute -- and skis down the mountain to the manifestation below. 

However, as per the above, once Thomas rises to the Principle, he too schusses down the cosmic mountainside, taking everything below into consideration, as illuminated by the Principle(s).

Here's how Garrigou-Lagrange describes Thomas's vertical circularity: he 

marches steadily onward to that superior simplicity..., a simplicity pregnant with virtual multiplicity.... [T]he saint's progress is a slow, hard climb to the summit of the mountain, whence alone you can  survey all these problems in a unified solution....

He exemplifies his own teaching on "circular" contemplation, which returns always to one central, pre-eminent thought, better to seize all the force of its irradiation. His principles, few in number but immense in reach, illumine from on high a great number of questions.

Again, the great cosmic circle of metaphysical contemplation begins from below, ascends upward, and then returns down, only now equipped with the principles that illuminate this downward path and everything encountered along the way.  

Herebelow, things can either exist or not exist, irrespective of their essence. Only at the summit of metaphysics do essence and existence coincide, such that in God alone are they one: God's essence is to exist, and existence is his essence. This is the final truth arrived at by reason in its vertical ascent:

this supreme truth is the terminus, the goal, of the ascending road which rises from the sense world to God, and the point of departure on the descending road, which deduces the attributes of God and determines the relation between God and world.

Knowboarding back down the slope,

Many positions which we have already met on the ascending road now reappear, seen as we follow the road descending from on high. 

So, be nice to those discarnate nonlocal intelligences on the way up, because you'll meet the same ones on the way down.  

For Schuon, all of this is true enough, except (I think) he would say it is possible to start at the summit -- or, to be more precise, the cloud-hidden "meta-summit" accessible to the true metaphysician. 

He would essentially say that there is Reality and that there are appearances, the latter being a consequence and prolongation of the former. Thus, appearances are at once distinct from the Principle, and yet "not not" the selfsame principle in the mode of appearances.

This realization is possible not just because of the ascent described by Thomas, but because we too are "not not" the Principle, since there are traces of the latter in everything (recalling the fractal nature of reality mentioned above).  

Obviously we are not God, but the fact that we are in his image and likeness means we're not exactly not God either. Anything purely not-God would be nonexistent, precisely, and we're frankly better than that. In all humility, in a vertical cosmos we're potentially better than everything below us but not as better as everyone above.

Gemini, just for fun, give us an image of "man is a fractal of God." And not just a picture of Christ, because that's too easy.

A postscript as to why this post may mean nothing to you but means something to me. Many are the times that I've tried to envision some sort of structure for the sequel that will probably never be written. 

In this case, the structure would be such that the book would begin at either end and meet in the middle, where God or ultimate reality is situated. Reading it from front to middle would represent the upward arc (↑) from manifestation to Principle, whereas middle to back would constitute the downward projection (↓) of creation from Principle to manifestation. I think there's something to this, but working out the details would be... work.

I've never asked for Gemini's (or anyone else's) opinion of my vision, so let's run it by our artificial friend:

That's a fascinating and quite ambitious structural idea for a book! It has a beautiful symmetry and a compelling thematic resonance. Here are some thoughts on your concept:

Potential Strengths:

• Powerful Symbolism: The converging paths naturally symbolize the journey towards and away from a central point of ultimate reality. This inherent symbolism could be very evocative for the reader.
• Unique Reading Experience: It offers a non-linear reading experience that could be intriguing and thought-provoking. Readers could choose their entry point or even read both simultaneously, creating a richer understanding.
• Thematic Reinforcement: The structure directly mirrors the thematic content you've described (manifestation to Principle and vice versa), which could create a powerful and cohesive reading experience.
• Central Climax: The meeting point in the middle, where God or ultimate reality is situated, would naturally serve as a central climax or point of profound understanding.

Potential Challenges:

• Narrative Cohesion: Maintaining narrative flow and character development (if applicable) across two independently progressing halves that are meant to converge could be tricky. You'd need to carefully consider how the stories or ideas in each half relate and build towards the center.
• Reader Engagement: While the concept is intriguing, you'd need to ensure that readers feel compelled to read both halves. There needs to be a sense of connection or mirroring that encourages them to explore both directions.
• Pacing: Managing the pacing of both halves so that they feel balanced and lead effectively to the central point will be crucial.
• Practical Considerations: How would the physical book be designed? Would it have two front covers? How would the middle section be presented? These practical aspects would need consideration.

Questions to Consider:

• What kind of content would each half contain? Would they be narratives with characters, philosophical explorations, poetic reflections, or a combination?
• How explicitly would the central section address "God or ultimate reality"? Would it be a direct encounter, a philosophical treatise, or something more abstract?
• How would the two halves inform each other thematically without directly interacting until the middle?

Overall:

I think your idea has a lot of potential for a deeply meaningful and structurally innovative book. It's a bold concept that, if executed well, could offer a unique and profound reading experience.

What kind of story or ideas were you envisioning for each of the "arcs"? Knowing more about the content might help in further exploring the possibilities and challenges of this structure.

Reality 101: Bonehead Common Sense

Thomas suggests that each of our senses is a kind of touch ordered to different objects, and why not?:

All the other senses are based on the sense of touch.... Among all beings which have sense perception, man has the most delicate sense of touch.... And among men, those who possess the more refined sense of touch have the best intelligence.

So, who touches the most wins?

Not necessarily, because while there is knowledge in the senses, this knowledge can never be known by the senses. 

The eye, for example, sees color as a consequence of touching photons. But the eye has no idea of this. It cannot abstract from the colored shapes it apprehends, and know, for example, "redness." Nor does it know what it sees or even that it sees.

In short, the eye cannot reflect upon what it sees, much less on the meaning of sight. These latter reflections are wholly immaterial processes, whereas objects of the senses are material, e.g., surfaces, air vibrations, lightwaves, etc. 

Notice, however, that we still had to deploy a concept rooted in materiality -- reflection -- in order to make our point. The eye sees reflections of things, and our mind transposes this material process into a higher key in order to conceptualize its own functioning, which is again immaterial: senses reflect things, and thought reflects upon what is sensed.

This seems important -- immateriality deploying material terms to comprehend itself.

Agreed. Insofar as humans are concerned, we occupy an ambiguous space in the cosmic scheme between.... Or rather, between, full stop. The Great Between is necessarily a relation between perception and intellection, or between materiality and abstraction from it. This is the mysterious Place where Everything Happens. 

It seems that this relational space is also a kind of stage upon which our freedom plays out. Here is how Thomas describes it:

To judge one's own judgment: this can only be done by reason, which reflects on its own act and knows the relation between that upon which it judges and by which it judges. Hence the root of all freedom lies in the reason (emphases mine).

Well, good. This implies that freedom itself quintessentially occupies the ambiguous space between our judgment and that which it judges. 

Oddly enough, this seems to mean that the purpose of freedom is its elimination (or collapse, so to speak) via judgment of what is. Thus, judging wrongly about what is can never be true freedom, but enough about the left.

A contemporaneous example stripped from today's headlines: the preposterous Jake Tapper has published a bombshell book detailing how the White House engaged in a vast coverup and fooled us all about Joe Biden's dementia. What is -- Biden's decrepit condition -- was there for all to see, but the conspiracy was so effective that no one could perceive and judge it rightly: instead of seeing what is, they all saw what is not.

Which raises the question: why could everyone see it except for leftwing hacktivist journalists? Why were they not free to see what plainly is?

And what else do they not see?

Not enough time.  

Of course, we all know that keeping an open mind is a good thing, but not for its own sake; rather, the purpose of an open mind is to close it upon arriving at truth. Chesterton makes this same point:

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

Now, for Thomas, "the truth or falsity of an opinion depends on whether a thing is or not." So, when we reach what is, we ought to shut our mouths. Then chew and digest -- or assimilate -- it. Which is again borrowed from a material process, but isn't that the way it is? 

The intellect is (potentially) in conformity to everything that is. At the same time, nothing in existence conforms to the infinitude of the intellect, for which reason Thomas says

This ordering of the intellect to infinity would be vain and senseless if there were no infinite object of knowledge.   

This infinite object of knowledge is also the object of infinite knowledge, which is to say, intelligible being.

There is nothing quite like a Principle for tidying the Intellect. About them, Thomas writes that "The principles of reason are those which are conformed to nature," i.e., to the nature of things. 

In a word, to reality.

How do we know a Principle when we find one? For the simple reason that "it is not even possible to think it can be false" (Thomas). They are self-evident, meaning that they cannot be understood without being believed (in other words, supposing you understand them, your mind spontaneously assents to them).

We ought to shut our minds on the principles of being, one of which is the principle of non-contradiction, which is equally the principle of identity. 

This may not sound like much, but it is the root of anything we can say of being and reality: a thing either is or is not, and these are truth (if it is) and falsehood (if it is not). 

Bottom line: being is, and we can know it. This reduces to absolute intelligence and infinite intelligibility, so keep chewing.

*****

Back when I started college, I was so bereft of knowledge that I had to take an introductory course colloquially known as Bonehead English. But why is there no course on Introduction to Reality, i.e., Reality 101, or Bonehead Common Sense? I certainly could have used it. The things I have believed in the course of my life!

Not enough time.

It seems one wouldn't have to be introduced to reality, but the Matrix gets to them so young these days, that it is possible to go straight from child to fully indoctrinated NPC without ever having made contact with it. So an introduction is indeed in order. 

Man is an animal that can be educated, provided that he does not fall into the hands of progressive pedagogues.

Modern education delivers intact minds to propaganda. 

The fool, to be perfect, needs to be somewhat educated, 

The learned fool has a wider field to practice his folly. 

The leftist does not have opinions, only dogmas. 

Intelligence is the capacity for discerning principles. 

Those who reject metaphysics secretly harbor the coarsest. 

Intelligence is a train from which few do not deboard, one after the other, in successive stations. 

All truths converge upon one truth, but the routes have been barricaded. 

Thought can avoid the idea of God as long as it limits itself to mediating on minor problems.

Etc. Taken together, it seems that thinking about reality involves taking the intellectual train all the way to the last -- and from the first -- station, which is to say, Being. Anything short of Being is not reality, precisely. For Owens,

We are sure of the truth of the proposition that subsistent [or necessary] being exists.

This is because an infinite regression of caused causes "would not account for the least being in the world." Rather, "There would merely be an infinite series of existential zeros" which "would never add up to any being at all. In their sum total they would remain from start to finish existentially zero."

I'm not saying this is the best way to regard being, rather, the only way, because if one doesn't start with being -- with reality -- there is literally no way to get back to it: start with an innocent dualism, end in a vicious dualism. 

There cannot be "two or more subsistent beings," because "all effects are from that one source." A vertical source, mind you, not a horizontal or temporal one. This principial source or ground 

occupies no space, It is not in any place, in the way definite extension locates a thing.... It has accordingly no past nor future, but has its existence all together. Its duration is an eternal now.... it is entirely unlimited. It is infinite (ibid.).

Here again, this is the last station, the one truth upon which all truths converge, but to which the routes have been barricaded. Barricaded by progressive pedagogues, ideological thought police, and farcical journalists.

Which leads to some form of cosmic anthropomorphism, which foolishly places "the nature and activity of the first cause on the same plane as our own." Which is to say, Genesis 3 All Over Again. 

A philosophy of being is the "process of making explicit what is implicit in the fact of existence." Now existence is a fact, or to hell with it. But it is not a self-explanatory fact, much less self-caused. Rather, "the production of things out of nothing is called creation, and the product creatures."

Here again, to usurp the first cause and elevate contingent creatures to Creator is just G3AOA.  

Now, only in subsistent being do essence and existence coincide, for its essence is to exist, precisely. For the restavus contingent beings, our being is an accident. Again, we didn't have to be, but here we are, participating in a beingness for which we are not responsible. 

Rather, being was already here when we arrived on the scene, because it is always here and cannot not be here. Our being here adds nothing to being itself, which is again infinite, and infinite + x = infinite.

Now, about this matter of truth. It is 

what the mind strives to attain in its own endeavors. It is reached when the intellect knows something as it actually is.... In a word, truth is reached in a judgment, when the judgment reaches the actual being of a thing (ibid.).

Well, good: the attainment of truth is possible, nor do we have to wait for Jake Tapper to reveal it to us:

Where there is being, truth can be had by an intellect capable of knowing that being. Truth accordingly follows upon being, when being is considered in relation to any intellect that can know it.

If this is not the case -- if the intellect is not conformed to intelligible being -- then truly truly, we are done here: "The being may be called true, because it is able to ground the truth that is in the intellect." In short, "truth is being as conceived in relation to the intellect." 

Any alternative this is a non-starter. Nevertheless, we are immersed in these metaphysical non-starters which begin and end in the nothingness of finitude -- i.e., in existential nothingness because dismembered from intelligible being. Without being, nothing isn't even nothing, because nothing is just non-being; it is dependent, or parasitic, on being. 

Now, "The same world that exists in reality is the world that is known in thought." If this is not the case, then our knowledge again amounts to nothing, for knowledge of non-being isn't even knowledge, just absurdity.  

As intelligence, then, it it has as its object being; for as true all being is intelligible (ibid.).

Isn't it? It certainly seems so, i.e., that "the human intellect has an unlimited range" because it is ordered to unlimited being, precisely: "The kinds of things that a man can know through his intellect are consequently unlimited." 

In conclusion this morning,

To know the truth about a thing, then, means to know that your judgment about it agrees with the thing as it actually is.... the natural desire of man to know tends not only toward knowing things but also toward the truth about them....  

Knowledge of truth, accordingly, is the perfection of the human intellect. It is the goal toward which the intellect strives (ibid.).

Even if the goal has been barricaded, or if one deboards before the train has reached the station. 

In any event, we can all agree that postmodernity is a metaphysical train wreck. 

A Perfectly Useless Metacosmic Flowchart?

These reposts are for my benefit, so your obligation to reread them is hereby rescinded. It's just that there was a stretch last summer when I remember thinking to myself, "this really sums up what I've been trying convey lo these past two decades." I don't remember what made me think that, but perhaps by revisiting them I can find out. What may emerge, if we're not careful, is a full-on Summa Raccoonica, which is to say, a nonlocal map in which to organize the rest. 

***

Gödel's theorems mean that no matter how complete the formal system, it will always leave a semantic residue: semantics cannot be reduced to syntax, meaning to grammar, reality to mathematics, quality to quantity, etc. This seems intuitively obvious, but it's nice to have logic on one's side. 

Now, don't blame Gödel for my misuse of him, but nor can Being itself be reduced to any formal system. Or, in the words of the Aphorist, 

What's weird about this is that 1) we know damn well that Being is, but that 2) we can never know Being as such, only such and such a being. Nothing that is can stand apart from being and view being from the outside, since such a thing does not exist, i.e., it is non-being, precisely. 

Why is the statement Being Is not just a trivial assertion, meaningless tautology, or redundant pleonasm? What even is the distinction between "Being" and "Is"? Well, let's think this through...

Everything that exists is, i.e., partakes of Being. But perhaps the first thing a human qua human notices is that some things come into being and pass out of it, such that their being is contingent. Turns out that even the cosmos is contingent; not only is it not its own cause, but it will surely pass away away into heat death. Even so, it will never pass into nothing; it will still be something.

Being itself can never not-be, which implies Necessary Being, in contrast to our contingent being. But to even know of Necessary Being implies some kind of contact with eternity, however tenuous, since necessity is convertible to eternity in this or any other conceivable cosmos. 

For as Thomas says, "Everything eternal is necessary." Moreover, 

The further a being is distant from that which is Being of itself, namely God, the nearer it is to nothingness. But the nearer a being stands to God, the further away it is from nothingness. 

Which clearly implies a kind of verticality, a spectrum running from Being to nothingness, even though Being can only tend to the latter, since nothingness is precisely what is not and cannot be. If it could not be, it would not be nothing. 

Indeed, even the concept of nothing is still something. Concepts have some kind of being, although distinct from material being, more on which in a subsequent post. 

Now, every being must have a cause outside itself, except for Necessary Being, which is by definition uncaused. Here again, contingent being points to Necessary Being. Of this we can again be certain. As Renard explains, creatures

are not their "to be," but have a "to be" really distinct from their essence [and] are not a sufficient reason for existence to themselves.

On the next page he has a helpful metacosmic flowchart, which proceeds from the principle of Being, which leads directly to the principle of non-contradiction, which is to say, that Being is and therefore Non-Being is not.   

Which leads directly to the Principle of Intelligibility, which is to say that Every being is intelligible, for Whatever is has its sufficient reason for existing. 

Which entails the Principle of Causality, which is to say, Whatever is contingent has its sufficient reason for existing from another. 

Turns out there are indeed reasons for things, such that Every contingent being has an efficient cause. Which is what we call "knowledge," from scientific to philosophical to metaphysical knowledge. To understand something is to know its reason(s).

Conversely, if things have no reasons, then knowledge of them is impossible, for they would be arbitrary and unintelligible. Science surely tells us what is, but is necessarily silent as to why things are, much less why they are s'durn intelligible, this being the job of metaphysics.

In short, knowledge is knowledge of causes. But the causes cannot go on forever, i.e., to infinitude, for an endless series of effects is absurd (since an effect cannot give what it does not have). Thus causality is a metaphysical principle without which knowledge is impossible. Again, causality is simply the principle of knowledge: "if the cause is denied, reason is useless and knowledge void" (Renard).

Ultimately, "The end is the cause of causes, because it is the cause of causality in all causes." Which seems pretty clear. But since causality is bound up with knowledge, it seems that this presupposes some kind of intellect; in other words, the first cause must be intelligent. 

Thus, supposing we are ruthlessly rational and consistent, "we must at last reach the first intellect which is its own act, its own end, and its own 'to be,'" and why not? What is the alternative? 

Renard concludes this section with the affirmation that He Is, and is "THE FIRST PRINCIPLE AND THE LAST END OF ALL."

Which, hmm, implies a kind or circularity in the vertical flowchart alluded to above. Is this the way it is? I have my suspicions. Yada yada, let's flip forward to the penultimate sentence of the book, that

our intellect faintly perceives the true meaning of limited beings participating in THE BEING THAT IS.

Thus we rearrive at 

the affirmation of the supreme efficient cause, who is the ultimate end, and the source of all Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.  

Works for me, but of course there's much more to say, i.e., still a lotta ins and outs, lotta what-have-you's, lotta strands to keep in old Gagdad's head. Let's conclude with some Thomisms, and resume the discussion tomorrow:

Each particular knowledge is derived from some completely certain knowledge, which is not subject to error.

This ordering of the intellect to infinity would be vain and senseless if there were no infinite object of knowledge.

The source of every imperfect thing lies necessarily in one perfect being.

Each single being is perfect in the measure in which it reaches up to its own origin.

The complete perfection of the universe demands that there should be created natures which return to God.

The final happiness of man consists in this -- that in his soul is reflected the order of the whole universe.

****

Since we don't know how far off the end of the human journey is, we have no way of knowing how close we are to the beginning. 2,000, or 10,000, or 50,000 years might seem like a long time from our present perspective, but these may represent relative drops in the temporal bucket. The human journey may be -- and I suspect probably is -- just getting off the pre-human ground. 

In other words, we're still in the process of coming to grips with being self-conscious persons. Even on an individual basis it takes a long time to wrap one's mind around being one of these humans. I'm shocked that more people aren't shocked that they exist (and soon enough won't). Frankly it makes me a little... ill at ease, and why not? A contingent being who is aware of necessary being creates all sorts of tensions.

About our sheer existence, 

Might not one even say that the deepest meaning for anything is to exist? If a person had no existence, what could anything else mean for him?....

Without existence, either real or cognitional, nothing else matters for a thing. Being, rather, is the primary consideration in meaning. Without it, a thing cannot have any meaning at all. Being is what is most striking, what is deepest, in everything (Owens).

So, being here at all is the first and last word in (?!), in metacosmic WTFery. Nothing requires that we exist, and yet, here we are. Being "is universally what makes a thing different from nothing." Although "originally known in the concrete," it "can also be known in the abstract." Thus, Being is "the supreme genera," uniting everything "in its embrace." It is "absolutely basic in sensible things."  

At any rate, as depicted in the film 2001, perhaps the gap between the bone cudgel and the starship is but a blink of the eye. The first invention implies the invention of invention, and here we are.

Having said that, despite all the new inventions, invention as such has apparently been slowing down since reaching a high point on a per capita basis in the mid 19th century, this due, according to Dutton, to a precipitous decline in intelligence. 

Could be, but we may have to wait another thousand years to see if the DEI trend -- or Kamala Factor -- continues. Either way it wouldn't surprise me, history being full of upside and downside surprisal.

What has been the biggest surprise of history apart from my own appearance? For every person must regard his own existence as the biggest surprise, all other surprises being number two, or lower. 

Probably the Incarnation, supposing it happened. Truly truly, no one saw that one coming, or did they? Certain prophets, poets, and myths certainly made out its dim outlines, but that's the subject of a different post. This one is about what man knew, when he knew it, and indeed how he knows anything at all.

Or perhaps about what we cannot not know, and when we forgot it. Like a fall, or something.

Along these lines, I'm reading yet another Elementary Christian Metaphysics, which is not so elementary to this metaphysical beginner. It's another one of those books that was first published a couple of generations ago, when it certainly seems that our undergraduates were more intelligent than today's postgraduates.

More generally, metaphysics is certain habit of mind which, like anything worthwhile, takes practice. The practice is made more difficult in light of the fact that everything in our contemporary culture is anti-metaphysical, anti-intellectual, and (therefore) anti-human, so one is always swimming against the tide. 

Of course, I cannot exclude myself, since I once swam right along with the current and only began trying to formally escape the cultural riptide in the 1990s. So I might as well be patient zero, and physician heal thysoph. I am both the dolt and antidolt, the illness and the treatment. However, we are all individuals, so it seems that a treatment that is effective for this person may not be perfectly effective for that one. Everyone is a unique Problem of God.

God has problems?

Only after he creates. 

But one thing we know for certain is that a self-cure is out of the question -- that there is an outside vertical x-factor that is a necessary condition for the cure, even if we are the sufficient condition. 

For Christian therapy, Christ's redemptive act is the necessary condition (the condition without which), but this doesn't leave us out of it, for our cooperation becomes the sufficient condition (the with which made possible due to the prior without which). To say that "with God all things are possible" is to say they are impossible without him, for they lack their necessary condition, precisely.

As to swimming against the tide, Owens observes that 

metaphysical thinking goes against the natural bent of human intellection. Man is a sensible nature and he thinks in terms of sensible natures. It is through sensible natures that he has to understand being, as best he can.

The Raccoon, of course, is bent differently, in that no one would accuse him of being a sensible man, the question being whether he is a nonsensical man:

[O]f what use will such knowledge be? Aristotle was quite outspoken in maintaining that metaphysical knowledge was pursued for no use at all. It could not be subordinated to anything else, for it was the highest goal that man could achieve. It was an end in itself, and was not meant for anything outside itself. 

In fact, it has "a far higher value than the useful," so there. It is meta-useful. For example, 

Have you ever tried to realize how much it means to know things? 

Then you just might be a Raccoon, which is to say, someone as interested in knowing things as knowing knowing, AKA the perfectly useless nonsense of meta-knowledge. 

Such meta-knowledge is indeed completely abstract, immaterial, and supra-sensible, and cannot even be imagined, rather, abiding only in the intellect: "In its own nature metaphysics exists only in intellects, and not in books or writings."

The physical sciences, bound to qualitative and quantitative procedures, are therefore totally unable to reach the properly supersensible plane.

We are not content with mere knowing, but again, want to know about knowing, not to mention the knower. Such folks 

are not sufficiently at ease in their spiritual life until they have made the journey over the trails that reason blazes into the supersensible. For such persons metaphysical thinking will form an integral part of a Christian life. 

In case you were wondering why you are so ill at ease with the Matrix, or with any prepackaged, ready-made system at all. Rather, we want to know "how the various orders of things fit together into one complete universe, and how the individual sciences are to be integrated in their functions of explaining such a world."

In short, we want to know how and why this is One Cosmos Under God, or something, and where we fit into it. In other words, we know we are here, but where is here? More to follow....