Are You Experienced?

Of course you are, but what is experience? What is it like? It is not like anything, for there is quite literally nothing to which it can be compared, and anything to which we compare it presumes its existence. Experience is irreducible to anything less, because anything less than experience is nothing. It’s a genuine brain teaser, for what could the Cosmos be like with no one there to experience it? Supposing you imagine it, you are pneumabombing yourself into the picture.

It is also impossible to imagine how experience could have “emerged” from inanimate matter, thus the temptation to say it was there all along, e.g., panpsychism or panexperientialism. But a purely bottom-up emergence is just another cover for a purple haze of ignorance. To declare that something emerged tells us nothing about how, much less why, it emerged, and in any event, how can the greater emerge from the lesser, especially if what emerges is categorically different to that from which it emerges? How does matter become the experience thereof? How does an interior subject launch out of an exterior object?

There’s no such thing as a free launch, much less a deterministic launch into freedom.

Since it is metaphysically impossible to derive transcendent experience from immanent matter, then our only option is a top-down explanation in which vertical causation exerts an influence from above. In contrast to horizontal causation, which occurs in time, vertical causation is instantaneous, transcending space and time. Ultimately, reality is the vertically caused act of being, or the celestial business of terrestrial isness.

We surely know experience exists because we know it on a first hand basis from the inside. Hartshorne – much more on him later – maintains that experience, and the experience thereof, “provides the clue to the nature of reality,” and therefore “we must begin with human experience.” Seriously, where else could we possibly begin? Even the physicist, like anyone else, begins not with knowledge gained from abstract physics, rather, with his concrete experience of the corporeal world.

Who puts absence of experience at the top of his résumé? It’s supposed to be a curriculum vitae, not a curriculum mortis.

Materialists, eliminativists, positivists, you name it. Nevertheless, experience has a leg up on any alternative, so “it would be silly to refuse to take advantage of the fact that in ourselves we have the one individual piece of nature which we know in its individuality from two sides: externally, quantitatively, and by behavioristic observation and test, and also internally, qualitatively, by immediate intuition” (Hartshorne).

This is necessarily true, with no possible loophole, unless one descends into the self-refutation of experience denying experience. This denial obviously requires a verification-event, and the event is proof of the experience of being. To argue that experience is not ontologically real is a performative contradiction, because it eliminates the subject required to voice the claim.

In any event, why throw out our one great advantage before we even begin? In fact, trying to exclude experience from metaphysics is utterly self-defeating, because there’s nothing left to experience and no one to experience it.

In addition to being Absolute and Infinite, cosmotheandrism affirms that O must be a kind of Primordial Experience, or in the parlance of the timeless, I am that I am. Am goes to Being, and I goes to the experience thereof. Nor could there be experience of an entirely static Be that is not eternally Be-ing, which goes to our second Axiom: if to Be is the absolute pole, then Be-ing is its complementary infinite pole.

Of note, we cannot begin with mere experience, rather with the experience of experience. Other animals have experience, but the Anthropos is the being who has been lifted out of mere experience in order to experience it. Not to be presumptuous, but this makes us suspiciously godlike, since the Be-ing of O must again be an eternal experience of experience: whatever other properties inhere in the Absolute principle, they must include experience. Thus experience begins at the top, because what is the alternative? Experience is a prolongation from above, not a discontinuous leap from below. It is the point of intersection between Anthropos and Theos, where the “image of God” indwells us. Our Absolute principle includes the experience of experience, so our self-awareness is a localized spark of the Primordial I AM.

In both baseball and metaphysics there are several ways to reach first base, and the experience of experience is one of them, since nothing can be known or conceived in its absence. It is both our keyhole into wholeness and the key to the whole. In facr, everything in existence is imbued with a more or less attenuated degree of interiority, which is precisely why everything -- including matter -- is intelligible to the intellect.

Or, one might say that intelligibility is intelligence embedded in matter -- for example, all those mathematical equations that govern physics. Which is in accord with what Einstein says of the laws governing the universe: “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are mere details.”

But here again, this presupposes experience in both Einstein and in whom he calls the Old One. For if Einstein seeks to know the thoughts of the Old One, this presumes experience at two fundamental levels. By seeking the ultimate rationality and order of the Cosmos, Einstein is implicitly affirming that his Old One is not merely a static principle but a Primordial Knower and Experiencer of the order. 

So, our Theos is no doubt a mathematician, but like any other mathematician, not reducible to the math he understands. Besides, mathematics has no causal power of its own. Even a Theory of Everything isn’t a cause of anything, rather, an abstraction from what has already been caused. We may ascend from concrete world to abstract math, but not vice versa, for pure math can’t even account for itself, let alone everything else.

Now, recognizing this principle is easy, but the consequences are profound. Meaning that we have a job to do, and only the Anthropos can do it: to endeavor to know all there is to know about all there is. We may want to know the secrets of the Old One, but are they knowable? Signs point to yes, because the Old One actually wants us to know them. It is why intelligible Easter eggs are hidden everywhere in the Cosmos, just waiting for us to discover them. Put it this way: it would make no sense for us to have the experience of hunger if there were nothing to eat. Nor does it make sense for us to hunger for knowledge of ultimate reality if ultimate reality doesn’t exist or if we can’t know it.

You – or Einstein, rather – keep talking about the secrets of the Old One, but shouldn’t it be the Eternal One?

Good catch. But just as old can have no meaning in the absence of young, the abstract term “eternal” is literally meaningless in the absence of its more concrete twin, the temporal. For the very existence of meaning requires two terms and a mediator between. Here again, all metaphysical concepts exist in polar contrast, and to the extent that we know them, that makes three.

If we speak of the Old One we implicitly allude to the Young One, for the One must be the oldest and youngest thing there is: it has always existed but is as fresh as the present moment, otherwise we -- and the Theos -- would die of monotony. 

One might say that the Absolute is beyond old, while Infinitude is always new, i.e., a novel iteration of absoluteness, of be-ing in contingency and time. As explained by Viney & Shields, “the concept of contingency must have some role to play in any categorical scheme that can merit serious consideration,” or in other words, “the polar conceptual contrast of necessity cannot be well defined in pure abstraction from contingency (and vice versa); for instance, ‘necessity’ is that which has ‘no alternative.’”

Thus there is no metaphysical alternative to alternatives, so contingency is a necessary entailment of the Absolute. Old necessity and new contingency are polar contrasts and cannot be defined in pure abstraction from one another. For to define necessity in isolation from contingency is to commit the fallacy of monopolarity by denying its essential, defining opposite.

Supposing there is a Theos, then the Absolute pole would go to its essence, to its unchanging character, while the Infinite pole would go to creation, which is to say, alternatives. Therefore, the Absolute must generate Contingency as a necessary consequence of its own unrestrictedness (i.e., Infinite potency). And a Theos that cannot create a contingent world is less than a free one that can.

Thus the classical monopolar definition of Eternity as a purely static, atemporal Theos is inadequate because it defines timelessness in pure abstraction from concrete temporality, and the present moment is precisely where Eternity bisects Time. This is the unity of the Old One (necessity) and the Young One (contingency/novelty).

This turns our restless search for the damn key to the world enigma into an act of communion, for to know the world is to participate in the Experience of Experience that the Theos has of its own creation and creativity. If secrets are buried everywhere, then science, philosophy, and art are all forms of divine archeology. We aren’t just observing matter, we are, as Einstein implies, reading the inbreaking news of the Old One.

So uh, are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced? Well, I have. Ah, let me prove it to you. In the next post, because we're just getting started...