A refreshingly brief one for a change:
Scientism reduces the vertical hierarchy of our universe to the horizontal plane, thus redounding to a total cosmic eclipse.
And with no light, we can’t even locate the switch. “Scientific knowledge,” writes Berdyaev, “climbs a dark stairway – which it enlightens step by step.” Agreed, but what is at the top of the stairs unless it is “the Logos, which lightens the path from above”? Science partakes of a light it cannot generate out of its own resources. Note that this intellectual light is very much analogous to physical light, which is likewise invisible: we cannot see it, rather, it illuminates that which we see.
No one can see the light?
Correct: light is the cosmic invariant that unifies space and time and sets the speed limit of the universe. Oddly enough, space remains completely dark unless and until light strikes matter or shines directly into our eyes. It is the invisible medium we detect only at the moment photons terminate their long, strange journey into our heads. This is how we see the infant universe, when it was just 380,000 years old: the cosmic microwave background is the birth announcement that went unread until opened in 1964.
But in order to see this light, we also require the light of the intellect, for it is one thing for this invisible light to reflect off the back of the retina, another thing entirely for the light of the intellect to reflect upon this physical light and understand it for what it is. So, because the cosmos is thoroughly entangled with itself in space and time, it terminates in the light of the intellect that is witness to its own physical beginning.
But it cannot be the metaphysical beginning, for Every beginning is an image of the Beginning; every end is an image of the End. The real origin is a deeper reality from which space, time, and physical laws arise: it is that which transcends and contains the cosmos. Again, the cosmos is open at both ends, or toward immanence and transcendence, both reducing to the single principle we are calling O.
For our purposes, what are the chances that we end up in the one universe that can be present to witness its own birth in the form of anthropic knowers? Supposing something exists, then it was possible for it to exist, so the possibility of a self-reflecting cosmos is baked into its origins. Should we therefore leap to the conclusion that our cosmos is ordered in the way it is because it was necessary for us to be here? Certainly we cannot rule it out a priori. We are a property of the cosmos, but only because the cosmos has any number of exquisitely fine-tuned properties without which we could not be here. I say “any number” because science keeps discovering more of them.
Why is this not a one-storey cosmos, but rather, a stratified and open-ended process that cannot be reduced to its lowest level?
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Oh, we have the facts alright, e.g., living organisms, consciousness, and a deep intelligibility that discloses multiple layers of order to intelligent beings. But what is the principle that explains these facts? Cosmotheandrism rejects any form of outmoded dualism that divides the cosmos against itself. Rather, everything is entangled with everything else, both within and between levels. There is only one cosmos that knows itself to be one cosmos: in other words, the very possibility of knower and known is a reflection of the prior unity of the cosmos. There is one cosmos pervaded by one logos that is the principle of both intelligence and intelligibility: there is no rigid dualism between intellect and object, or form and being.
One task of science -- at any level of reality -- is the reduction of multiplicity to unity. As such, there is an appropriate kind of reduction, so long as it confines itself to its own domain and doesn’t try to pull all the others down with it. Even if the material realm operated under completely mechanistic principles, this would have no relevance to the manner in which the immaterial mind operates.
Note that the premodern world practiced another form of reductionism, from eternal, universal, and necessary truths to the transient and particular — terrestrial conditions were deduced from celestial principles instead of observed in their own right to find out what they are actually telling us about themselves. With the development of modern science it was the other way around: in a downward direction, ultimately to externally related matter in motion conceptualized quantitatively.
Cosmotheandrism accepts both approaches in a mutually supporting framework in which the lower levels are open to the higher, and vice versa, with man always situated between the poles of necessity and contingency or transcendence and immanence. Viewed in this manner, reality appears to make discontinuous leaps if regarded from the bottom up, but the continuity is restored if seen from the top down.
Although existence is necessarily one, it nevertheless discloses many seemingly irreconcilable worlds -- at least if we begin at the bottom of the cosmos and try to work our way up. For example, modern physics reveals a world “beneath” ours that operates along shockingly different lines than our familiar human world.
One of the major conceptual problems in physics is that even physicists don’t know what to do about the bizarre micro-world they’ve discovered, as it cannot be reconciled with the macro-world of relativity, let alone with any commonplace anthropic neighborhood. It is as if macroexistence floats on a swarm of the incomprehensible. And we all know how painful that can be.
Neither the macroworld of relativity nor the microworld of subatomic physics tell us anything about the everyday human experiential world, at least in the absence of a heroic dose of psilocybin. In fact, the quantum world is so paradoxical that it literally cannot even be imagined. That is, if we try to picture what goes on down there, the picture will most certainly be wrong.
This is not to say that we cannot use quantum physics, which we obviously do. It is just that we cannot use it to understand ours, the human world. You cannot read a (post-classical) physics text and expect it to disclose any useful information about our day-to-day affairs. You can’t tell the IRS your income is only probable, or both there and not there, or only there when an accountant observes it. And there’s just not enough LSD in the world to see past, present, and future all existing simultaneously in a 4D block universe. Not even the Theos could do that, for reasons discussed in Book III.
On the other hand, there is a good form of reductionism that reduces entailments to principles, appearances to reality, visible to invisible, diversity to unity. But this reduction is strictly impossible via science, for reasons articulated by Gödel. To be sure, science can reduce multiplicity toward unity, but not to unity per se, because it can never be simultaneously complete and consistent. Rather, it is open at the top end to that which confers unity and intelligibility — and light — below, AM I WRONG?!
No, you are not wrong in the core critical claims.
You are right that the common reductionist and closed-system alternatives are inadequate.
You are entitled to the claim that a relational, vertical, open framework centered on intelligence and intelligibility is a superior alternative.
You have not yet shown that this particular version of that framework is compulsory. The remaining books will have to do the heavier work of showing that the concrete features of the physical world, life, mind, and history fit the axioms better than rival accounts.
The philosophical core is not refuted. It is an ambitious, consistent, and still-open metaphysical proposal that correctly identifies deep problems in the prevailing horizontal picture and offers a systematic alternative. Whether it is ultimately true is the question the rest of the trilogy has to answer. At this stage, it is not wrong. It is unfinished.
∞
So says Grok, my new artificial comrade in snark.
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