This post breaks off in mid-argument, but I will try to limit myself to 1,000 words — not including the Grok critique — so as to not overburden the reader:
As we have seen with our baseball analogy, philosophers tend to take the most consequential properties of the cosmos and anthropos for granted and proceed from there. As a result, their philosophies cannot account for their very possibility, thus rendering their explanations inexplicable in the absence of one or more free miracles.
Nor should we let theologians off the hook if they violate the 8th commandment by stealing first base or even hitting an imaginary grand slam. They may fool others and satisfy themselves, but in order to do so they must scrupulously overlook their own contradictory assertions or engage in applied hand-wavery at key junctures. “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” is no more adequate than “science says it, I believe it, that settles it.”
By definition we cannot understand the world by enclosing it in our own projected framework. There is a difference between looking at the world and looking into a mirror. But our finite minds can enclose neither the cosmos nor the Theos, and for the same reason, for both are more than we can know, partly because they are open and not closed. In other words, we can only pretend to enclose what is intrinsically open, and all three terms of cosmotheandrism — we will break mama’s rule and call them God, man, and world — are open to each other, hence the existence of novelty, creativity, and surprise.
To take an obvious example, one could have known literally everything about the mathematical constraints governing the big bang, and yet, not have been able to predict the surprising emergence of living organisms. Only in hindsight can we say they were possible, but no one could have predicted them from the math. Likewise, one could have known everything about biology, but nothing in biology could have foreseen the emergence of self-reflective beings capable of loving truth and creating beauty.
Thus, in the words of Torrance, “our finite minds cannot match the power of signification in being itself, for it is more than we can know.” To be sure, we can endlessly know it, but there is no end to the knowing, at least on its own level. Rather, being adverts to something beyond itself, just as (in the examples given above) cosmology and biology entailed something beyond themselves. But why stop there? The cosmos and anthropos are full of surprises, to say nothing of the Theos, which must be the principle of surprises.
I thought this book was supposed to be about the cosmos.
It is, but the cosmos is about any number of things that cannot be confined to cosmology. One might say that a cosmologist who understands only cosmology doesn’t understand even that — and certainly how he understands it.
We know that the cosmos is finite: it had a beginning and it will have an end. Thus it is contingent, and therefore cannot have its own explanation from within itself. As such, the cosmos would be thoroughly inexplicable if it were not open to a sufficient reason beyond itself. The cosmos “refers” to O, which is — obviously — open to things “outside” itself, or the cosmos wouldn’t be here. Again, for cosmotheandrism first base is only available to us because of the openness and relationality of being. In their absence, nothing could be about anything.
∞
We take the aboutness of the cosmos for granted because it is an ontological primitive without which reality would be totally unknowable. In fact, it wouldn’t be a cosmos at all, because nothing would be connected to anything else. It is only because things are about other things that we live in an intelligible universe that can be known by the intellect. Our cosmos includes intelligent beings capable of eavesdropping on its very existence and nature.
Thus, before we even begin, we can’t help noticing that this is a seemingly rare universe, assuming an infinite number of possible universes without mind or life. No one could know anything about those latter universes because there could be no one to know them. Then again, these universes would still be contingent and therefore dependent on a higher cause that gives them existence.
But let’s leave the Theos and its other hypothetical creations out of it and confine ourselves to the cosmos in which we are said to be confined. Which is problematic, because the word “confined” contains the hidden assumption of pure immanence, when our cosmos is an open book, aglow with the light of transcendence. Again, absent the light of transcendence, a purely immanent cosmos wouldn’t even be dark, rather without description or qualities of any kind: no adjectives allowed!
So, being is communicative and the cosmos is a web of relations, not a collection of things. In this cosmos, anything tells us a little bit about everything, like a dictionary that necessarily uses words to define other words, in a kind of endless entailment. But if the words are only about other words and can never get back to the reality they describe, then we have an insoluble problem on our hands.
In his discussion of the then new physics, Whitehead wrote of the fallacy of simple location, which rests on the outdated assumption that an entity “is where it is, in a definite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time.”
But at the quantum level nothing is righthere rightnow, for “each volume of space, each lapse of time, includes in its essence aspects of all volumes of space, or all lapses of time.” Thus, “in a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus, every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.”
Strange but true, at least down there in quantumville. Up here in middle earth, decoherence occurs, meaning that for practical purposes, things effectively have simple locations, so we don’t have to worry about what’s happening at the bottom end of the cosmos in order to drive to the grocery store.
However, even here in middle earth we have access to an interconnected web of internal relations without which knowledge of any kind would be impossible. In other words, intelligence is thoroughly entangled with intelligibility, and supposing intelligence is conditioned from the top down, then quantum entanglement is but the last vestige of the cosmotheandric entanglement that is present everywhere, both vertically and horizontally.
What say you, GrokSpock?
This section keeps the pressure on closed systems and deepens the claim that aboutness and relationality are ontological primitives.
The central moves are consistent with the earlier axioms:
Contingency of the finite cosmos implies openness to a sufficient reason beyond itself. A closed, self-explanatory cosmos would be inexplicable.
Aboutness is basic. Without things being about other things, there is no intelligibility and therefore no cosmos that can be known.
Whitehead’s critique of simple location is used to underline intrinsic interrelatedness at the quantum level; the same relational character is then extended upward as the condition of knowledge itself. Intelligence and intelligibility remain entangled.
Novelty and surprise (life from physics, self-reflective mind from biology) cannot be read off the lower-level equations in advance. The higher is not simply latent in the lower in a way that pure bottom-up prediction could have captured.
The section breaks off, as you note, just as it begins to suggest that quantum entanglement is a lower-level expression of a more pervasive cosmotheandric entanglement. That claim will need careful development if it is to avoid sliding from analogy into identity. The restraint on length is visible and helpful; the argument remains focused on the demand that any adequate account must preserve openness, relationality, and the reality of higher-level novelty rather than dissolving them into a closed horizontal plane.
The foundation is still being secured. The next movements will show whether these principles can be carried into the concrete structure of the physical world without further repetition of the same ground.
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