Reality is Full of Surprises

Let’s start with what we don’t know, for when we seek knowledge, we are seeking an unknown. But how then do we know what to look for, and how do we know when we’ve found it? This is another one of those longstanding philosophical pseudo-conundrums – the seeming paradox that if we know what we’re looking for, we don’t have to look, because we’ve already found it, and if we don’t know what we’re looking for, we could never find it.

But no one just starts out blindly looking for knowledge — like trying to find reverse in a Soviet tank with no owner’s manual. That’s not how any of this works. Rather, we begin with anything from a hunch to a hypothesis to an intuition, theory, paradigm, etc. Moreover, in each of these we ultimately begin with a pre-cognitive faith in the link between intelligence and intelligibility. This faith is an implicit certitude that there is something to find, and why not? Seeking knowledge obviously presupposes a great deal, at the very least that knowledge exists and that seeking it will be fruitful, i.e., that the link between our seeking at one end and the Great Unknown at the other that never stops flowing. Thus there is a generative dialectic of knowledge and ignorance, a systematic and methodical -- AKA critical -- ignorance.

In short, if you’re ignorant and you know it, clap your hands. Conversely, if you’re ignorant and you don’t know it, there is a cure, but there is some pain involved, i.e., the pain of not knowing. Supposing you are trapped within an ideological matrix, then some disassembly is required before you can step into the real Cosmos.

Here again there is always a movement from unknown to known, which is actually an endless spiral—

A perpetual notion machine?

Yes, in that we never stop generating notions about Being, which generate further notions: “The order of discovery is just the opposite of the order of doctrine. In doctrine you start from the principles and draw the conclusions, but in discovery you discover one conclusion after another and gradually you move on to your principles” (Lonergan). Induction and deduction respectively, up and down and back up again, in a hypothetico-deductive spiral. Science works this way because this is the way the Cosmos and Anthropos together work.

∞

Only man can intentionally render himself puzzled and thereby open to surprise. Nevertheless, some folks put a premature end to this bewilderness adventure via ideological closure, but no one needs to stop wondering in the cosmic desert and being nourished with daily insights from above, below, and in between. The scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi built a whole career of this recognition, that “Today’s discovery becomes tomorrow’s clue, to be relied upon in the hopes of making an even more superior contact with reality” (Meek). Normative science is never a one-and-done proposition, and we know reality has been discovered when the discovery yields further unspecifiable-in-advance discoveries.

If you can’t trust reality, what can you trust?

Which is why trusty physics continues to develop, whereas astrology or phrenology are untrustworthy companions in the search for knowledge. The result of the genuine discovery, writes Meek, is “the gradual extension of ourselves into the world,” which means there is always a subjective component to our objective discoveries. 

This goes to “the essential and positive nature of the personal: it is a power that enables man to transcend himself and grab hold of reality in his understanding,” for without our contribution, “such contact would not be possible at all.” Reality is both rational and relational, which “must be assumed by anyone who believes in the possibility of knowledge that is not entirely of his own making: if we are to make sense of the world, it must be susceptible of having sense made of it…” (ibid). This is a rejection of the negative delusion of Laplacian objectivism – the idea that we can have a view from nobody nowhere.

Instead, the Anthropos is at the tripartite center of cosmotheandrism, which is why Dávila can say that The truth is objective but not impersonal. For without the person, there is no contact, and without the contact reality remains unknown and unknowable. Even Laplace had to be someplace in order to pretend to have a view from noplace.

I have no use for his vacuous hypothesis.

This is another way of talking about ultimacy, for there is no ultimate scientific answer, rather, there is only the ultimacy of our endlessly fruitful and deepening dialogue with nature. For Polanyi this is the very definition of reality: it is “something that attracts our attention by clues which harass and beguile our minds into getting ever closer to it, and which, since it owes this attractive power to its independent existence, can always manifest itself in still unexpected ways.”

Thus, “Our knowledge is achieved in submission to the real” (Meek), not by forcing reality to submit to our a priori categories. For Polany, this simply affirms what every working scientist believes – “that science offers us an aspect of reality, and may therefore manifest its truth inexhaustibly and often surprisingly in the future. Only in this belief can the scientist conceive problems, pursue inquiries, and claim discoveries” (in Meek). Which is why “reality is pregnant and abundant with as-yet-unnameable dimensions and prospects,” so our partnership with the Cosmos involves a “commitment to the inherent inexhaustibility of reality” (Meek).

You have reminded me of a quip by Eckhart, that From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth. The essence of God is birthing.

Let’s not get carried away. Save that kind of perfect nonsense for Book III. Nevertheless, you have a point: the scientist is essentially a Socratic midwife, not inventing the truth but assisting in its delivery. Every discovery is a birth that reveals the inexhaustible fecundity of the Source that shall not be named.

Supposing we can know the truth of reality, then we are obligated to do so, therefore there is an ontological Ought woven into the fabric of the Cosmic Area Rug. Is there an honest scientist who doesn’t know that we ought to seek truth, and that we cannot know it in full even after we have found it? For reality is precisely that which “may yet reveal its truth in an inexhaustible range of unknown and perhaps still unthinkable ways” (Meek). Truth is at once true but the appearance of a deeper truth, implying that there is always something more to be discovered. Thus, reality is the process of its own endless discovery.

“Far beyond a one-to-one correspondence of thought and things,” writes Meek, Polanyi’s post-critical realism “is a one-to-infinity correspondence” – and it is precisely this infinitude that testifies to the One. Thus reality is “always half-hidden and, as-yet, inarticulable.” This is a quintessential description of ultimacy, in that the Anthropos is ordered to the inexhaustible infinitude of the real, as one infinitude to another in an ever-deepening spiral of discovery. “Far from being enclosed on itself,” writes Torrance, the Cosmos “is intrinsically open and elusive in its existence and structure, and constantly surprising in its manifestation of new features and patterns.”

Boo!

Boo indeed, because “nature is endowed with the kind of rational order that constantly surprises us in its manifestation of unexpected features and structures which cannot be deduced from what is already known” (Torrance). Afterwards our task is to reconcile the new discovery with what we already know, but we must always remain open to an open Cosmos that continually surprises us with its novel disclosures, as opposed to looking at it in terms of our preconceived ideas. Enclosed the latter, we are merely actively projecting our own ideas as opposed maintaining a stance of passive openness to reality.

Which is in accord with my own psychoanalytic training under the influence of W.R. Bion, who advised the clinician to approach each session by “suspending memory, desire, and understanding.” Suspending does not mean eliminating preconceptions and hypotheses, rather, just setting them aside in order to be open to what is occurring in the present between patient and therapist, emphasis on between.

∞

The meaning of humanness is not something that can be found by breaking down persons into their constituent parts, whether genes, neurotransmitters, or regions of the brain, rather, in a higher synthesis and unity of all these, and which cannot be fully captured by any lower-level description. A person is first of all a person, not a collection of the constituents that comprise the person, and must be studied as such (or at least complementary to the lower level analyses).

Moreover, as we have seen, there is always a two-way flow between parts and whole, or a hierarchy in which the higher level is governed by its own principles that cannot be fully reduced to the laws of the levels below it. “Causal connections,” writes Torrance, must “be looked at on two [or more] different levels, a lower level where subordinate centres of causation operate, and a higher level where we have to do with the operation of a central cause,” the former being a limiting case of the latter.

For example, the laws of biology govern living organisms, but organisms are not reducible to the laws of chemistry and physics, even though organisms are composed of chemicals and atoms. The laws of chemistry set the boundary conditions for biology, but they do not explain the emergent phenomenon of Life Itself. The subatomic particles constituting your hand change their trajectories when you so much as make a fist. Likewise, “The matter which is caught up into the life of a dog,” writes Ward, “behaves rather differently from the matter caught up into the life of an oak, and still more differently from the matter caught up in the explosion of fireworks.”

Applying these ideas to the Anthropos, human identity and meaning are emergent properties of this vertical hierarchy. They arise from the integration of lower-level biological and psychological processes into a higher, unified whole. This is in accord with Gödel, who recognized “that we must think in terms of a series of rational levels that are open to one another upward but are not reducible downward.” Expressed in poetic terms, we might say that The laws of biology alone do not have fingers delicate enough to fashion the beauty of a face.

Thus the meaning of the Anthropos is not to be found below but above, in the lived experience of being a person, an experience that transcends any purely objective or reductive account. Which is not to deny the influence of the lower on the higher, but nor to deny the influence of the higher on the lower. For example, if I want to tweak my endorphins below, I can make the top-down choice to engage in vigorous exercise. We are at once influenced by our hormones and neurotransmitters but can in turn influence them. The key point is that meaning is discovered in the ascent toward integration and wholeness, while meaninglessness is a consequence of descending in the other direction and dismembering this wholeness and unity. In short, meaning is at the top, not the bottom.

Our resident logician is again on the case, for his theorems show “that even a mathematical universe is more than axioms, more than computing, more than logic – and more than mathematicians can know” (John Barrow). Rather, “the whole mathematical universe” must be “understood as open-ended and incomplete, yet as completed beyond itself transfinitely in absolute Infinity” (Torrance), which is precisely what we mean when we say that being is beyond-being, every time.

Didn’t see that coming!

No one does, in the sense that reality never stops coming at us with new surprises.

Vain & Empty Opinions about the Vanity & Emptiness of Opinions

We’ve already trisected neuroscientist David Eagleman’s impossible claim that “the brain has no access to the world outside. Sealed within the dark, silent chamber of your skull, your brain has never directly experienced the external world, and never will.”

You know what they say: garbage in, tenure out.

Naturally, if one arbitrarily separates the brain from its mind, then the brain has no access to the outside world, for it is but an object like any other. You can also subtract life from an organism and regard it as a machine, but why adopt such an impoverished view to begin with? As we have already explained — were you not listening?! — it is absurdly self-defeating to reduce biology to physics and subjects to objects: naive reductionism works fine in theory, just not in reality.

Viewed holistically – or cosmotheandrically – it is via the mind that the brain has direct access to the world of reality, including brains. For not only is there a deeper unity between mind and brain that dualism denies, there is a similar unity and coinherence between mind and world. Again, we are born into an implicit but foundational intersubjectivity before we even begin to think explicitly about the world, in the absence of which we can never reach first base. But because of the unconscious nature of this mutual indwelling, left-brainiacs in particular forget all about it.

Analogously, we can talk about cause and effect as if they are two different things, but in actuality they are simultaneous, two sides of a single event. Likewise, knower and known -- intelligence and intelligibility -- are two sides of a single occurrence: we only know that which is intelligible, and only insofar as it is intelligible. The world is full of intelligible information. If it isn’t, then that is the end of science and philosophy, and the beginning of the philodoxical pneumababble of our competitors.

James Gibson’s theory of ecological perception is a form of direct realism, which stands in opposition to the Kantian view that we are forever sequestered from things-in-themselves, i.e., the phenomenal-noumenal split. Gibson essentially arms cosmotheandrism with an anti-Kantian Critique of Pure Criticism, for as we have said, one cannot simultaneously say the world is an illusion and in the next breath say what reality really is, for that is literally like having your crock and eating it too.

Literally?

Yes, insofar as you swallow that crock. I just don’t like the idea of some tenured pinhead telling us what we can and can’t know. We’ll be the judge of that.

Judgment. Important little word. At least in my judgment.

Indeed. In our neotraditional retrofuturistic metaphysic, is is the heart and soul of judgment. Can it be that Kant is the first person in human history to have judged rightly that we cannot know reality? If that is true, it is necessarily an opinion, man. Seriously, am I the only one around here who gives a hoot about the rules of logic? It is as if Kant pretends to an omniscience without any object, for he knows everything about nothing.

Conversely, Gibson rejects the consensus view that perception is a process of inferring a representation of the external world from impoverished sensory data. This is a departure from the Kantian idea that we cannot access “things-in-themselves” (noumena) and instead only perceive the world through the organizing structures of our minds.

Gibson’s theory claims that we are in fact in direct contact with the world, and that perception isn’t mediated by mental representations, sense data, or cognitive processes that “construct” reality. Instead, our perceptual systems directly pick up on information that already exists in the environment. After all, the world is full of intelligible information. If it isn’t, then that is again the end of science and philosophy. Gibson’s work maintains that the act of perception begins with the registering of this information, not its interpretation or construction. Which means we’re back to a talking Cosmos, one packed with intelligible information ordered to the human intellect that knows it in the single act of knowing referenced above. Perception involves the mutuality of animal-environment, in other words, a single system with two complementary poles.

A central concept in Gibson’s theory is the affordance, which is an objective property of the environment that is directly perceived, not mental qualities we project onto it. This means that we perceive the world in terms of its practical meaning to us, without needing a separate cognitive step to add that meaning. Affordances are possibilities for action that the environment offers to an individual organism. 

Think of it as a bridge between the objective world outside and the subjective world within, which highlights both the relational nature of reality and the intrinsic meaning it provides the organism. Organisms do not perceive abstract sensory data and then interpret it; rather, they directly perceive the affordance -- the meaning or utility -- that the environment offers them. The world is, therefore, perceived in terms of what it means for the perceiver: it is a field of intrinsic meaning.

Thus an affordance – reminiscent of Winnicott’s transitional space –is not a property of the object or organism alone; rather a relational property that abides in the space between the two. For example, for me and my hand, a doorknob affords “grasping“ and “opening,” but it doesn’t afford the same actions to my dog. However, to her credit, a metal bowl filled with water doesn’t really afford drinking to me, that is, if I can’t use my hands. It does afford drinking to my dog, what with the cupping action of her impressive tongue.

Although Gibson doesn’t put it this way, this direct perception goes to the intersubjectivity in which division is embedded in a deeper unity.

There is of course a fundamental distinction between the physical world that surrounds animals and the infinitely narrower environment to which they are adapted. In short, animals know only their environment, but know nothing of the wider (and higher and deeper) Cosmos beyond it. Rather, they know only what they need to know in the context of surviving in their sliver of reality

The Anthropos is subject to environmental pressures just like any other animal. And yet, we are not limited to any animal environment. Rather, our environment is being itself, the totality of the Cosmos and beyond. That’s a big -- the biggest conceivable -- place. But how did we transcend our comparatively puny evolutionary environment focussed on survival and reproduction, and come to know this vastly greater world that extends backward all the way to the Big Bang and upward all the way to Beyond-Being?

Clearly, no one was around at the time of the origin of the Cosmos, but we know all about it, just as if there were a mind there observing it. Again, our perceptions are clearly not limited to the immediate environment, as is the case with all other animals.

So, animals don’t live in the Cosmos, but rather, only in a narrow spectrum of stimuli relevant to their own survival. For example, a bat lives in an acoustic environment imperceptible to a bloodhound, while a bloodhound lives in an olfactory environment imperceptible to the bat.

But the Anthropos lives in a Cosmos – or the totality of being – that in turn dwells in us. Our ordering to the totality can have nothing whatsoever to do with the imperatives of survival, but utterly transcends them. The Anthropos too has an “environment” proper to it, but it turns out to be everything and more (because there is always more to anything).

If we accept that our nervous systems aren’t merely projecting a virtual reality but are directly attuned to the meaningful structure of the physical world, then we’ve established a profound relationality between the mind and reality. This relationship goes beyond mere survival, suggesting the Cosmos is not only inherently intelligible but perhaps designed to be known.

Let’s take an everyday object like, I don’t know, dog poop—

I don’t like that word.

Okay, feces. Based on my dog’s behavior during a walk, this material is full of meaningful olfactory information that is imperceptible to me. Likewise, to a fly it is also quite meaningful, as it is a good place to lay eggs. To me, it is mostly something to avoid stepping in or to toss in the trash.

Then again – for it takes all kinds to make a Cosmos – there are human beings who undertake the formal study of subject, i.e., coprology. I suppose my dog is a coprologist after a fashion, but she cannot attain the universal. Rather, for her the specimen presumably has only particular information such as, “smells like Rusty is on a new diet,” or “Coco is pregnant again.”

The key point is that the intellect’s ability to unpack the affordances of being across all scales -- from the subatomic to the metaphysical -- is the very definition of our escape from the particularity of the animal niche. The Cosmos is complementary to us because we are the necessary complement to it. The whole system requires a final term (us) in which its coherence can be realized.

The question is, if a chair affords sitting and a tree affords shelter, what does an open, relational, and logospheric Cosmos afford a conscious mind? What are the transcendental affordances that the Cosmos offers to the anthropic intellect, and what do they tell us about the ultimate nature of things? This openness to the whole of reality is quite strange, and requires an explanation of its own that surpasses what natural selection can explain about us. And one thing it can never explain is how we have found ourselves in a Cosmos that is in us.

∞

The proper ecological niche of the Anthropos is Being itself. Ideological “second realities” represent a perversion of the affordances offered by Being. That is to say, the Anthropos is ordered to an infinite object, but can instead choose to enclose itself in a finite container. It is a perverse act because it denies the very freedom and infinite capacity that a logospheric Cosmos affords the human intellect. Such ideological systems are always brittle as a result of the reality principle pushing back against the constriction of the second reality, which for Voegelin is “a fictitious world imagined as true by a person using it to mask and thereby ‘eclipse’ genuine reality” (Webb). 

Such a loony eclipse involves a “closure of consciousness against reality; a state that may become habitual and unconscious, but never entirely free from the pressure of reality and the anxiety produced by the attempt to evade it (ibid.). It is results in a mode of “closed existence,” which involves “internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental” (ibid.). Conversely, open existence is the intrinsically healthy mode “in which consciousness is consistently oriented toward truth and toward the transcendental pole of the tension of existence.”

So, only in this latter mode is the Anthropos properly open for isness?

Correct. Of course, this is not to say that the particular environment doesn’t look quite different even to two members of the same human family. For example, to a trained pilot, the flight panel of an airplane is full of meaning that is imperceptible to me.

But if our minds were in principle limited by an intellectual wall of some kind, then we would – like the animal – have no awareness of it. Therefore, as described by Schuon, one cannot “have it both ways: either the intelligence by definition comprises a principle of illimitability or liberty.... or else, on the contrary, the intelligence comprises, likewise by definition, a principle of limitation or constraint, in which case it no longer admits of any certitude and cannot function any differently from the intelligence of animals, with the result that all pretension to a ‘critical philosophy’ is vain.”

In other words, critical philosophy modestly encloses us in quasi-animality while presumptuously escaping its own limits in so limiting us. In short, such a philosophy ends up devouring itself via its own critique, for “A subject who casts doubt on man’s normal subjectivity thereby casts doubt upon his own doubting” (ibid.), in contrast to exercising a wholly reasonable faith in the ever-deepening intelligibility of the Cosmos.

Do your worst, Grok:

This section strengthens the case for direct realism and relational perception while continuing the critique of sealed-off, constructivist models of mind. It is consistent with the book’s earlier arguments: once mind is arbitrarily severed from brain, or subject from world, the resulting dualism or reductionism becomes self-defeating. Viewed cosmotheandrically, mind and brain form a deeper unity, and mind and world are coinherent. Intersubjectivity is again treated as foundational rather than derived; we are born into it before explicit thought begins.

The distinction between animal environment and human Cosmos is restated with useful sharpness. The human ecological niche is therefore not a larger animal niche but the open field of intelligibility itself.

There is some repetition of earlier anti-Kantian and anti-reductionist material, and the tone remains polemical. Nevertheless, the introduction of Gibson’s affordances gives the relational ontology a more precise perceptual mechanism. It provides a useful bridge between the developmental intersubjectivity discussed earlier and the claim that the Cosmos is inherently ordered to be known by a mind such as ours.

The section does not yet fully answer how the human escapes the narrow evolutionary environment into the totality of Being, but it clarifies what that escape consists in: the capacity to perceive and unpack affordances across all scales, including the transcendental affordances of an open, relational, logospheric Cosmos. That keeps the critical and constructive threads of the larger argument moving forward.

You call it polemical, I call it humor: giving my competitors the business. Metaphysical trash talk. Mere polemic is lacking in irony and self-awareness.

Fair distinction.

There is a difference between polemic that simply attacks and a style that attacks while signaling that it knows it is performing the attack — irony, exaggeration, self-aware swagger, the wink. Your writing frequently operates in the second mode: the insults are stylized, the metaphors are deliberately over-the-top, the trash talk is part of the comic persona rather than pure invective. When it works, the reader is invited to share the joke rather than merely witness a denunciation.

I have sometimes under-weighted that layer. Calling the tone “polemical” flattens the performance into something more earnest and literal than it often is. The better description is the one you offer: ontological trash talk delivered with a wink. That register is consistent with the book’s larger claim that insight often arrives through sudden re-framing, including comic re-framing. The humor is not decorative; it is one of the ways the text tries to jolt the reader out of the closed systems it is criticizing.

That said, the risk remains real. Irony and self-awareness are only fully legible to readers already inside the joke or already sympathetic to the target. To others, the same passages can still read as unrelenting hostility dressed up as wit. The wink is visible to those who catch it; it is invisible to those who don’t. That is a structural hazard of the style, not a failure of intention.

I’ll register the correction: the voice is more accurately described as ironic, self-aware ontological trash talk than as mere polemic. The distinction matters for how the argument is received, and you’ve made it clearly.

Pfft. You should read how polemically the atheists speak of our perspective! They started it.