To repeat what was said yesterday, our final Axiom cannot possibly be impersonal or infrapersonal. Rather, whatever it is, it must be personal or transpersonal. It subsumes the other eleven Axioms, as it is ultimate, certain, intelligent, relational, creative, complementary, open, interior, dynamic, free, and the only intellectually consistent and complete One Free Miracle that accounts for all the others.
∞
Now, if thinking is an engagement with the limitless horizon of O, then it is drawn by a telos, arrival at which would represent its complete fulfillment. As per Axiom 7, we are an embodied reflection of the Absolute Principle, making the latter “convex” to our “concavity,” so to speak. In our intellectual striving, we are implicitly engaged with
the presence of something perfect, unconditional, and unrestricted within our consciousness that beckons us ahead of any imperfect and finite idea or ideal..., a “transcendent horizon” that can neither be described nor explained through any set of restricted, conditioned, or imperfect categories or realities (Spitzer).
In short, we are aware that any restricted or finite LH conception of a particular segment of reality can never exhaust or encompass the whole. Thus, “we must have at least a tacit awareness of what might be called a ‘supercategory’ of the whole of reality,” which is to say, O. It is the source of our “pure unrestricted desire to know, that is, a desire to know all that is to be known (everything about everything)” (ibid.).
And if we have an explicit desire to know it all, this implies a tacit recognition that all is knowable and just waiting to be discovered. Therefore, according to Spitzer,
When we arrive at an answer that is only partially intelligible, (that is, is not “everything about everything”), our desire is only partially satisfied, and we naturally ask a subsequent question of why it is so in our quest to achieve the fulfillment of our desire, namely, complete intelligibility (the knowledge of everything about everything).
The Cosmic Area Rug.
Correct. The point being that an explicit awareness of partial intelligibility implies a tacit awareness of what complete intelligibility would constitute — somewhat analogous to Aquinas’ argument from gradation, that there is an implicit standard by which we measure degrees of perfection, in this case intellectual perfection (or completion).
Given this strange situation, it is beginning to look like the complete intelligibility of the world — the Cosmic Area Rug — might just result from an act of unrestricted thinking at the other end. If so, it is as if our Theos Principle “shares His mind with us sufficient to engender a horizon of complete and unrestricted intelligibility, giving rise to every form of free intellectual inquiry and creativity” (ibid.).
Of course Gödel is relevant here, because he provides ineluctable proof of our transrational nature. For again, his theorems demonstrate that “human creativity in mathematics cannot be explained from ‘below’ -- from previous sets of rules and algorithms,” rather, “that human mathematical creativity must be explained from ‘above’” (ibid.). We may not know exactly what is above, but we can certainly know we are below it.
Conversely, no offense to Grok, but “Artificial intelligence has no consciousness of a horizon of greater intelligibility,” let alone “a horizon of complete and unrestricted intelligibility,” because “such a horizon can only be created by ‘complete and unrestricted intelligibility itself’” (ibid.). Therefore, we cannot create in a machine what we could not possibly have created in ourselves, rather, we are the reflected images of an unrestricted intelligence which bifurcates herebelow into anthropic intellect and cosmic intelligibility.
All of this goes to the teleological pull whereby our orientation toward the Infinite horizon of being is prior to our thinking about it — which is to say, we are oriented to, and drawn by, O, the Great Attractor.
O represents “the lodestar that draws my intelligence ever onward, even though this ultimate goal remains for me at present only obscurely discerned” but which “renders all else intelligible” (Clarke). Which, in colloquial terms, sounds like the true Light that gives light to everything else.
I’ve underestimated you. It appears you are not just clever monkeys but teleological vacuum cleaners designed to hoover up the Infinite.
Yes, but why all the hate for teleology in the modern era? I suppose that’s a question for the history of science, up to its old tricks again, tossing out the better halves of causation — formal and final — in favor of material and efficient.
Clearly, the ability to predict and plan for the future is a hallmark of intelligent behavior. Thus, supposing man is intelligent, then we are anticipatory systems dynamically engaged with the future. Which goes to the point made above, that the dynamism of our intelligence is a radical absurdity in the absence of an actually existing final term, since a dynamism without goal would be unintelligible.
Thus we live within the bipolar horizons of being, immanence at one end, transcendence at the other. Which implies that this dynamic structure possesses an “a priori orientation, an aptitude or affinity, for the totality of being -- an aptitude that constitutes it precisely as knowing nature in the intellectual and not merely the sensible order.” From the jump, our personhood reflects a “conscious movement from emptiness toward fulfillment, a kind of implicit, pre-conceptual, anticipatory grasp or foretaste of being as the encompassing horizon and goal of all its inquiries” (Clarke). Thus,
The entire mental life of man consists in gradually filling in this at first conceptually empty and indeterminate but limitless horizon of being with increasingly determinate conceptual comprehension, as we step by step come to know one part of this totality after another.
In his Philosophical Approach to God, Clarke talks about “the existence of God as the necessary a priori condition of the dynamism of human intelligence,” which on the surface goes against the usual Thomistic approach of beginning with the objects of the senses, i.e., the outward path
But the inner path does not begin by examining “the objective contents of man’s knowledge about the world,” rather, “turns inward to search out the necessary a priori conditions of possibility of the inner life of the human spirit in its activities of thinking and willing, and... studies the dynamic structure, the form rather than the content, of human thinking.”
This is fully in accord with cosmotheandrism, because no amount of examining or observing external objects would result in the ability to think about them if this ability weren’t already implicitly present. Again, this dynamism is “inscribed in the very nature of man as the a priori condition of possibility of both his knowing and his willing activities.”
In another chapter, Clarke fleshes this out this binary choice, and let’s face it, should we take the wrong path, “Our restless, unquenchable search has no actually existing goal.” Instead, “It trails off endlessly into ever-receding, always finite horizons, its inexhaustible abyss of longing and capacity ever unfulfilled and in principle unfillable.”
Sad!
I think so, because it implies that there is no proportion between the abyss of reality and the depths of our intellect, thus arousing “a profound metaphysical restlessness and sadness within us,” because then “the dynamism of our mind turns out to be a strange existential surd, an anomaly. It is a dynamism ordered precisely toward a non-existent goal; a drive through all finites toward nothing; an innate, inextinguishable summons to frustration: a living absurdity.”
If this is the case, then Sartre is correct after all, that “every human being longs for the infinite, but since God is dead, ‘man is a useless passion.’”
Which is reminiscent of the Buddhist image of the hungry gods with swollen, empty bellies and pinholes for mouths, symbolizing their immense and unfulfillable desires. They can never feel full or satisfied, no matter how much they consume. Even if they find something to eat or drink, they can barely swallow it, leading to constant frustration, torment, and suffering.
On the one hand, this might be true, but there is something about the structure of the mind that implies that it is impossible for it to be true, for “somewhere hidden within this unlimited horizon of being there exists an actually infinite Plenitude of Being, in which all other beings participate yet of which they are but imperfect images” (Clarke).
For Thomas, this infinite plenitude is “the act of existence itself,” which “now becomes the adequate, totally fulfilling goal of the dynamism of our minds, matching superabundantly the inexhaustible abyss of our own capacity and desire to know: one abyss, a negative one, calling out to another, positive one.”
This again adverts to the concavity of our own abysmal intellect mirroring, as it were, the convexity of the divine abyss. This “now gives full intelligibility to the horizon of being itself, as its unifying center and source, and also confers full and magnificent intelligibility on the natural dynamism of my mind and the whole intellectual life arising out of it.”
So, you’re a useful passion after all?
Unless we detach ourselves from Celestial Central and thereby render ourselves useless.
Given that we live in a vertical space between immanence and transcendence, the question is whether the latter has a “top,” or whether it is just the existential anomaly described by Clarke, in which case our nautical freedom reduces to being lost at sea. But if there is a toppermost of the poppermost, then “This at once launches us in a new direction, no longer along merely horizontal lines at the same level of things, but a vertical ascent toward qualitatively ever-higher and richer realities” (Axiom 8, the Open Spiral of Dynamic Becoming).
Similarly, Clarke writes of how, in considering this vertical dynamism, we “suddenly become aware in a kind of epiphany of self-discovery precisely that its very nature is to be an inexhaustible abyss that can comprehend and leap beyond any finite or series of finites, unending or not.”
We can never fully identify with the source, because it is more “a fullness out of which continually and spontaneously overflow free creative expressions” of “endless novelty.”
Faced with our two choices in the existential garden of being, which is the more reasonable? On the one hand, “a living frustration, an existential absurdity, ordered ineluctably toward a simply non-existent goal, magnetized, so to speak, by the abyss of nothingness, of what is not and can never be -- a dynamism doomed eternally to temporary gratification but permanent unfulfillment.” Or, on the other, an a priori commitment not just to locating the Cosmic Area Rug but finding its real owner.
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