Posted on 02/15/2004 9:02:00 AM PST by betty boop
Cosmology, Ancient and Modern
Cosmology is the science or theory of the universe as an ordered whole, and of the general laws that govern it (OED, 1971). Science in this context can best be understood in its classical sense of episteme, of the totality of knowledge from whatever discipline or knowledge domain. In modern times, the German language preserves this understanding of science, largely lost in English. For its word for science, Wissenschaft, refers to the totality of knowledge gathered from two distinct yet complementary knowledge domains Naturwissenschaften (the natural sciences, e.g., physics, biology, chemistry) and Geisteswissenschaften (works of the spirit, e.g., metaphysics, ontology, the arts; I am strongly tempted to include mathematics in this category).
Thus any cosmology given its presupposition that the universe is an ordered whole must include and reconcile these two main branches of human noetic experience. We might say that cosmology requires an integrative science approach. And more and more we see this type of approach in the work of modern cosmologists such as mathematician Max Tegmark and astrophysicist Attila Grandpierre. What is most remarkable is the strong resonance of their cosmological theories with the speculations of Plato, who was perhaps the greatest cosmologist of all time.
Plato used the language of the myth as the language of his cosmology. Any cosmology is, at bottom, a myth in the Platonic sense. Perhaps this idea can be further clarified.
The reason the language of myth must be used in cosmology of whatever type is simply that the cosmos is not a datum of immanent experience, as Eric Voegelin notes. Therefore, cosmology by its nature is not something that can be advanced on the basis of verifiable propositions, or subjected to empirical tests. One cannot put ones arms around the Cosmos; in a key sense, the very idea of Cosmos utterly transcends the finite categories of human empirical knowledge and experience. This same constraint applies to any cosmology, be it scientific or philosophical.
Platos cosmological myth was radical, going to the root: In the Timaeus, he posits psyche soul, self, mind as furnishing the model of order for the Cosmos. This was in opposition to the myth of Democritus, who conceived of cosmic order as a harmony arising from the constellation of atomic elements, which would be the materialist view. As Eric Voegelin writes (in Order and History, Vol. III: Plato and Aristotle, 1956), for Plato the realms of being are ... penetrated to their limits by psyche. As far as metaphysical construction is concerned, no corner of the universe is left to the materialists as a foothold from where the order of the psyche could be negated on principle. The order of the cosmos has become consubstantial with the order of the polis and of man.
Plato thought the language of the soul myth must be the language of cosmology. For it is only in psyche, in self-reflected conscious experience, that human beings can grasp the idea of an integrated, ordered cosmic Whole, or of the idea of a hierarchy of being. Thus as Voegelin says, the myth remains the legitimate expression of the fundamental movements of the soul.
Platos metaxy the tensional field of In-Between reality symbolizes the site and sensorium of such movements.
Mextaxy: The In-Between
Plato called man zoon empsychon ennoun the ensouled animal who thinks, or as Voegelin translates it, a living creature endowed with soul and intelligence. This is similar to homo sapiens sapiens, yet calls attention to the biological basis of human life to a greater degree. For Plato, ontologically man is somewhere In-Between the animal and the divine. Thus human existence is lived In-Between bodily and spiritual imperatives, in between the pulls of biological instinct and divine eros, in between life and death, in between immanence and transcendence, in between time and eternity.
Man seemingly has an innate instinct that directs him to notice that human life is a whole lot more than physical existence. Yet man becomes truly aware of this if he ever does at all only in self-reflective consciousness; i.e., in the dynamic, hierarchical field of the metaxy, where mind resonates in between the two poles of (1) the Depth, or ground of being (the omphalos or navel by which the human psyche is resonantly coupled to the Cosmos) and (2) the Beyond of divine Nous divine Mind that draws human nous into mutual communication and participation. Here we see a paradigm of immanent and transcendent reality that can be made luminous in human noetic reflection.
Such reflections arise from the primary experience of the cosmos, which seems to be more or less universal in human experience of whatever time or place, if we may judge by the seeming universality of certain human symbols, myths, and traditions. The primary experience can be summed up as follows:
We find ourselves referred back to nothing more formidable than the experiences of finiteness and creatureliness in our existence, of being creatures of a day as the poets call man, of being born and bound to die, of dissatisfaction with a state experienced as imperfect, of apprehension of a perfection that is not of this world but is the privilege of the gods, of possible fulfillment in a state beyond this world . (Voegelin, On Debate and Existence, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol 12: Published Essays, 1966-1985, 1990).
We will have more to say about the metaxy a little later on. For now, we point out that metaxy symbolizes the order of the psyche or soul, of mans inner world. But for Plato as for Grandpierre (as we shall see) this inner world is resonantly coupled to the outer world on all ontological levels. The reason for this is that man is the microcosm, the eikon (image or reflection) of the total Cosmos.
Man the Microcosm
In Platonic thought, man as he is in himself is the microcosm and, as such, the recapitulation of all the levels of the great hierarchy of Being in the Cosmos. Nietzsches famous maxim Nothing is outside of us, but we forget this at every sound can profitably be understood in this sense.
The implication is that man, as part and participant of the Whole, somehow contains the Whole within himself. Which is a stunning thought and perhaps to you, dear reader, quite a risible one. For one thing, it is fashionable today to reject the possibility of transcendent reality (because as we earlier said, by its nature it is not something that can be advanced on the basis of verifiable propositions, or subjected to empirical tests). And yet all transcendence seems to require is that it not be contained within the 4D block of space-time reality three of space, one of time as humans normally experience it. On this definition, Kaluza-Klein-type string theories are premised on transcendental reality, the dynamics of which such theories seek to elaborate and describe...but I digress.
In the Timaeus, Plato tells us that man has lost awareness of his ontological connections with the full range of cosmic life because at birth, the circuits in the head are deranged. The relevant passage:
As concerning that most sovereign form of soul in us we must conceive that heaven has given it to each man as a guiding genius that part which we say dwells in the summit of our body and lifts us from earth towards our celestial affinity, like a plant whose roots are not in the earth, but in the heavens. And this is most true, for it is to the heavens, whence the soul first came to birth, that the divine part attaches the head or root of us and keeps the whole body upright . But if [mans] heart has been set on the love of learning and true wisdom and he has exercised that part of himself above all, he is surely bound to have thoughts immortal and divine, if he shall lay hold upon truth, nor can he fail to possess immortality in the fullest measure that human nature admits; and because he is always devoutly cherishing the divine part and maintaining the guardian genius that dwells with him in good estate, he must needs be happy above all. Now there is but one way of caring for anything, namely to give it the nourishment and motions proper to it. The motions akin to the divine part in us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe; these, therefore, every man should follow, and correcting those circuits in the head that were deranged at birth, by learning to know the harmonies and revolutions of the world, he should bring the intelligent part, according to its pristine nature, into the likeness of that which intelligence discerns, and thereby win the fulfillment of the best life set by the gods before mankind both for the present time and for the time to come. [Emphasis added]
Thus microcosmic man loses consciousness of his most intimate cosmic connections in the course of the birth experience itself which oddly no man ever seems able to remember. This cosmic information, however, is locked away deep in the unconscious mind and is recoverable, on principle, through the process of anamnesis, or recollection, memory.
Voegelin writes that the truth of this great myth arises from the unconscious, stratified in depth into the collective unconscious of the people, the generic unconscious of mankind, and the deepest level where it is in communication with the primordial forces of the cosmos. On this conception of a cosmic omphalos of the soul in the depth of consciousness rests Platos acceptance of the myth as a medium of symbolic expression, endowed with an authority of its own, independent of, and prior to, the universe of empirical knowledge constituted by consciousness in attention to its objects.
The omphalos, through which the cosmic forces stream into the soul, has a twofold function . It is first the source of the forces, of the sentiments, anxieties, apprehensions, yearnings, which surge up from the depth and roam in the unconscious, urging toward assuaging expression in the imaginative order of mythical symbols. The fact of this openness toward the cosmos in the depth of the soul is, second, the subject matter of the myth, broken by the finiteness of human existence into the spectrum of birth and death, of return to the origins and rebirth, of individualization and depersonalization, of union or re-union with transcendent reality (in nature, erotic relations, the group, the spirit), or suffering through temporal existence in separation from the ground and of redemption through return into eternal communion with the ground. The myth itself authenticates its truth because the forces which animate its imagery are at the same time its subject matter. A myth can never be untrue because it would not exist unless it had its experiential basis in the movements of the soul which it symbolizes. [op .cit., O&H III]
Man as Microcosm in the Scientific Literature
I was very surprised to find in the works of contemporary scientific cosmologists an obvious interest in this part/whole, microcosm/Cosmos problem. Niels Bohr was among the first natural scientists to explore the issue. As Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau point out (in The Non-Local Universe, 1999), Bohr concluded that a scientific analysis of parts cannot disclose the actual character of a living organism because that organism exists only in relation to the whole of biological life. [Emphasis added]
Kafatos/Nadeau seem to go Bohr one step further: What [Bohr] did not anticipate, however, is that the whole that is a living organism appears to exist in some sense within the parts, and that more complex life forms evolved in a process in which synergy and cooperation between parts (organisms) resulted in new wholes (more complex organisms) with emergent properties that did not exist in the collection of parts. More remarkable, this new understanding of the relationship between part and whole in biology seems very analogous to that disclosed by the discovery of non-locality in physics.
Kafatos/Nadeau consider that Charles Darwins understanding of the relation between part and whole was essentially classical and mechanistic [i.e., Newtonian]. This understanding anticipates that a piling up of a sufficient number of parts will eventually suffice to reveal the character of the whole to which they belong. Darwinian evolutionary theory, thus, has ever been primarily concerned with elucidating the relations of parts, not to wholes, but to each other:
All nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external nature . There must be in every case a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. Charles Darwin, paper delivered to the Linnean Society, London, 1858 [cited by Kafatos et al., op cit.]
The emphasis is clearly laid on particularity; Darwinian theory does not appear to be at all interested in more holistic, spiritual concepts such as male/female bonding, the rise of the family; of the clan, tribe, nation, state; of the biosphere, the planet, the solar system and beyond perhaps relying on the expectation that, given sufficient time (i.e., eternity), the truth of the Whole will eventually be outed when a sufficient number of parts have been studied. Meanwhile, all we humans need do is collect more data, and continue to wait. [For Godot perhaps?]
Need I point out that some of these holistic concepts that Darwinian theory appears to eschew are paralleled by human institutional developments that, in all likelihood, have had enormous fitness (survival) value for the species....
Kafatos and Nadeau clearly reject this classical approach which is an inversion of their own thinking on the part/whole problem. In The Physics of Collective Consciousness, (1996), Attila Grandpierre whose cosmological speculation is rooted in quantum field theory, quantum electrodynamics (QED), information theory, and a keenly sensitive appreciation for the human cultural past articulates an even more radical view:
The evolution of consciousness as the evolution of the Universe shows us actually is in contrast to the presently accepted evolutionary theories, which want to build up the whole from the parts. In reality, evolution started from the whole and progressively differentiated into parts, from the timeless-spaceless form (e.g., the implicit order, or pre-space of David Bohm and John A. Wheeler), through galaxies, through the development of the Solar System and the Earth, the appearance of the biosphere and mankind, until the development of smaller and smaller subsystems of consciousness, until the human individual. Cosmologies of wholeness are emerging (see Ernst Laszlo, 1993 ). All of the cosmic evolution formed sub-systems within systems. Evolution begins with systems, elements develop only later on. Every system emerges as a subsystem of a larger, inclusive system. The organization of the sub-system is made by the creator system, and the organization factor acts from within . This fact assumes that the creator system is in a certain way transformed into the to-be-created subsystem, the whole transformed to the part. This global-local transformation is a necessary condition of the generation of the new system.
Respecting this global-local transformation, something of a fractal nature which I interpret as some kind of hierarchical redundancy built into the coding of the cosmic information set seems to be implicit in Grandpierres description.
Perhaps one can go even further, and say a holographic nature is implied. The bearing of fractals and holography on these concepts is beyond the scope of the present work. Yet it may still be useful to point out here that holography has a very strange property whose discovery would probably not shock Plato in the least: Each tiny portion of a hologram encodes complete information (i.e., a complete description) of the whole of the image. Here is your part and whole quandary, envisioned as a global-local transformation, made physically tangible.
Lynne McTaggert writes (in The Field, 2003): In a classic laser hologram, a laser beam is split. One portion is reflected off an object a china teacup, say the other is reflected by several mirrors. They are then reunited and captured on a piece of photographic film. The result on the plate which represents the interference pattern of these waves resembles nothing more than a set of squiggles or concentric circles. However, when you shine a light beam from the same kind of laser through the film, what you see is a fully realized, incredibly detailed, three-dimensional virtual image of the china teacup floating in space . The mechanism by which this works has to do with the properties of waves that enable them to encode information and also the special quality of the laser beam, which casts a pure light of only a single wavelength, acting as a perfect source to create interference patterns. When your split beams arrive on the photographic plate, one half provides the patterns of the light source and the other picks up the configuration of the teacup and both together interfere. By shining the same type of light source on the film, you pick up the image that was imprinted [Further,] if you chopped up your photographic plate into tiny pieces, and shone a laser beam on any one of them, you would get a full image of the teacup. [Emphasis added.]
End of digression which, as it turns out, has supplied some interesting analogies or metaphors by which to consider our original problems: man as microcosm, and the nature of Platos metaxy. Before we pull together these various strands, there is a third key element of Platonic thought relevant to the present discussion, to which we now turn.
The Platonic Idea
Plato conceived of the Cosmos as one integrated whole. He considered moreover that the Cosmos was an ensouled living being. Which stands to reason, for if man is at once zoon empsychon ennoun and microkosmos, then that of which he is the image or reflection the Cosmos must also be zoon empsychon ennoun. The two are consubstantial by virtue of a global-local transformation, and thus are ordered by the same universal laws.
For Plato, all the hierarchy of being is founded on and preserved in existence by the Idea:
In the Platonic conception the Idea was an eidos, a paradigmatic form in separate, transcendental existence. The assumption of forms in separate existence raised the question how the separate forms could be the forms of empirical reality. The Platonic answer [was] that the flux of becoming has being only in so far as it participates in the Idea, or in so far as the Idea is embodied in it . (O&H III)
Thus the empirical Cosmos is preeminently the living manifestation of the transcendental Idea.
At this juncture it is interesting to consider Max Tegmarks cosmological speculation of the Level IV Multiverse (see his celebrated article Parallel Universes). Tegmark suggests that all of reality is structured by mathematical objects that have transcendental existence outside the 4D block of ordinary space-time. To my mind, these mathematical objects are analogous to the Platonic Forms, which can be understood as derivatives or daughter sets of the primordial Idea in a first-generation global-local transformation.
What is being sought here is the source of universal information that propagates in the real world so as to give rise to the astonishing variety of living organisms and inorganic systems. This is different from the idea of universal physical laws. For as Grandpierre has pointed out (in a yet unpublished manuscript), the physical laws of the universe seem to carry low information content, so much so that the richness of living forms that we see all around us cannot be accounted for on the basis of the physical laws only.
The common feature of the physical laws is they are conservation laws, which predict that systems in nature will try to find the shortest route to a state of perfect equilibrium. But as Grandpierre points out in numerous articles and his forthcoming book, The Living Universe, the life direction runs counter to physical equilibrium, or heat death. A further elaboration of this issue is beyond the scope of the present article. For present purposes it is sufficient to note that theorists suspect it is information that drives and sustains the living universe and all its creatures; and that the primary source of this information, and how it is accessed and utilized by life forms, constitute cutting-edge problems for the natural sciences at the present time. Classical Darwinian evolutionary theory does not appear to shed much light on these issues.
The Convergence of Ancient and Modern Cosmologies
As we have seen, Platos metaxy is a highly compact, complex symbol encompassing a variety of meanings, all of which have a single, central reference to man as microcosm. Primarily, metaxy is a description of the order of psyche it is an insight into the structure of the self or soul in its vital relations to Cosmos. Metaxy is the hierarchical, tensional field in which human self-reflected existential experience plays out in the never-ending search for truth and meaning in life. In this sense, metaxy is the field of communion and communication between the human and the divine, symbolizing human existence as actually experienced and understood at the intersection of time and timelessness (i.e., eternity); of immortality and mortality; of the spiritual and the material.
To recapitulate what has been said earlier with the addition of new details, Platos model of the soul sets up a dynamical resonance between two poles describing the tensional field of human existential experience. At the summit, we find the drawing power of the Unknown God of the Beyond (the Epikeina). At the root, we find the Apeiron, the seemingly fathomless depth of the soul in which it finds its root in the Cosmos. This nexus, according to Platos insight, is the ground of being of all Life: It is this omphalos Grandpierre terms it navel and caul that joins finite creaturely existence to the eternal Cosmos in a unified, integrated, ordered whole.
In this structure of soul, we perceive hierarchical order. At its summit is aware, self-reflective consciousness, Platos nous intellect, mind a reflection (or imago Dei) of Divine Nous. At the next level we have ordinary consciousness, including the instrumental reason and feelings, in both senses of emotions and sense perceptions. Next below is the subconscious or unconscious mind, the deep mind, the contents of which may become accessible to aware consciousness by means of recollection. Human creativity may be associated with the ability to access these deeper mind levels. As novelist E. M. Forster observes,
In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach.
And the great philosopher and psychologist William James attests to the importance of access to unconscious resources:
The recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making.
The metaxy includes the unconscious depth in which the soul as microcosm and recapitulation of cosmic content has access to a range of yet-to-be-realized conscious experience. Grandpierre and others point to the extraordinary underutilization of seemingly available resources in the human brain that could be harnessed to conscious experience, to mind, if humans only knew how to go about it. It appears that now would be a good time to introduce Grandpierres theory of consciousness which to my mind, at least, seems to resonate with Platos theory.
Grandpierres model of consciousness seems to imply the Platonic idea of the metaxy as the seminal field of human consciousness, in contact with its depth and its transcendental beyond, which Grandpierre terms living logic. It further points to man as microcosm, and suggests the Idea is a universal information set carried by a primary, universal vacuum field. Consider these passages (from The Physics of Collective Consciousness, 1996):
On the physical basis presented here one can construct the following chain of events for an interaction between the mind and the brain. In the first step the information is contained and mediated by the vacuum field. These vacuum waves may interact with electromagnetic waves in giving them their information in the second step. The electromagnetic waves then may interact with the biomolecules of the brain, like sunshine interacts with chlorophyll molecules transferring the energy of the sunlight into chemical free energy. From this available chemical energy the activation potentials of the neural networks are built up. Nevertheless, all four steps could be simultaneously influenced by the vacuum waves.
The frequencies of the vacuum waves obtained here are remarkably close to the observed frequencies at cell divisions. This circumstance suggests that the way vacuum waves interact with material waves can be a resonant phenomenon. The vacuum waves may transfer their energies and information content to material waves at the same frequencies. The real energy transfer could be necessary only at the onset of some material processes in an upper level of the mind. Here, I suggest a picture in which the different levels of our minds may work with progressively more subtle material carriers, while the deepest one works with vacuum waves without any net energy transfer taking place in the end, because the energy taken out from the vacuum may be put back by the brain itself when reading important information from the psi-field. It could be the reason why only living organisms with a significant free energy content are able to react on the basis of the information read out .
The different vacuum waves couple us in a different scale to the cosmos and to our bodies and brains, while the electromagnetic and electron waves present couplings between our environment, our brains and local neural processes. These couplings to the different scales of the outer world represent couplings between our different mind levels, simultaneously. In this context it is important to note, that these outer sources of informations the Earth, the Sun, the stars, and the Universe as a whole do show a whole range of generalized organic processes (Grandpierre, A., 1995a, 1996a,b,c,d).
In my essay (Grandpierre, A., 1995a) I argued that every element of the Universe is a kind of a double-pyramid consisting of hierarchical levels; i.e., conscious mind, deep mind, genetic mind, cosmic mind (inner world pyramid of a human being), Earth, Solar System, Galaxy, Universe (outer world-pyramid of a human being). The difference between the organisms of the Universe is only what is outer and what is inner for them, but the levels in their pyramids are similar, consisting of the same constituents. In this context it is interesting to note that our calculations show that the different organisms interact with the same range of universal fields, but their sizes determine what is outer and what is inner for them, and which are the long and short wavelengths compared to their physical sizes.
An Amateur Cosmologist Attempts to Put It All Together
In the depth of psyche we find the link that couples us to Cosmos. One imagines both as operating according to one single, divine program or universal information set a kind of cosmic DNA. For it appears that all living beings are such because they are able to access and utilize information in order to counter the entropy that would otherwise set up and inexorably move organisms toward an equilibrialized state of heat death which would quickly become their fate under the physical laws alone.
So, how does this information get read into the universe in the first place? For it seems it must have been front-loaded into the cosmic system right at the beginning. And then we need to ask, how does this information propagate itself in the living universe in time?
The Big Bang theory of the inception of the Universe seems to have been broadly embraced by many if not most physicists. Back in the late 1970s, Roger Penrose (a Platonist) and Stephen Hawking (an Aristotelian) together worked to assess the probabilities for such a fiery beginning of the Universe. And they found that it was highly probable that the Universe did in fact have such a beginning, under all known physical laws and taking into effect Einsteinian Relativity. Later, the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation thought to be a kind of echo of the Big Bang event lent further credence to the theory. Subsequently, Hawking seems to have been disturbed by the theorys theological implications, and has been working ever since to develop an alternative theory based on the concept of imaginary time which is beyond the scope of the present article.
In any case, this writer accepts Big Bang theory as the best currently available description of the earliest events in our Universe. Which brings us to a consideration of the Singularity.
Heres a conjecture: The Singularity is a massive superposition of all possible vector states that potentially can manifest as actual events in the Universe. In a certain sense, it is the timeless carrier of all possible information that specifies our Universe. As such, it is the source of the global-local transformations that give rise to the evolution of all organic and inorganic systems in the Universe. In particular, it is the creator field of which all the other universal fields of physics are the daughters.
Thus the Singularity may be envisioned as the timeless implicate order which, translated into temporality, expresses as the primary vacuum field of the universe. It may be in the primary vacuum field as Tegmark seems to suggest that the mathematical objects or forms that specify, organize, and maintain all existents in reality ultimately reside. That is, one conjectures it is the source and carrier of the cosmic information set, and as such it has a timeless essence.
In other words, although it governs whatever can happen in the 4D block of conventional space-time, it does not live there. One conjectures that it occupies its own dimension, a fifth dimension that appears to be timelike and yet is not in the time of the 4D block. From the vantage point of this hypothetical fifth dimension, it has been suggested that the timeless Singularity might appear imaginatively as a shock wave propagating in time.
Conclusion
It is readily apparent that cosmological speculation is something that human beings have engaged in from the remotest antiquity of the race to the present day: It is a characteristically human endeavor. The important thing to bear in mind is that such speculations are, at bottom, symbolic expressions of human self-reflected conscious experiences and, as such, cover areas of reality that are and must ever remain open. This is the critical distinction between a cosmology and a physical theory.
What has been set down in this article most assuredly is not the last word on the subject of the origin and governance of the Universe. Our claim is far more modest. For at bottom cosmological speculation is the human effort to envision the Cosmos whole and to imaginatively find ones place in it. This we ever try to do, in complete openness to the Cosmos and to God, whose Logos it substantiates.
For at the end of the day, the present writer strongly suspects it will be found that Kosmos is Divine Eikon, too.
Of course, this is a much debated subject on the Religion Forum - as it should be - but it also should be debated among the secular and scientific posters, IMHO, because it has to do with personal accountability, social structures and the ilk.
In my view, reality includes both predestination and free will. Of course I see a spiritual realm as well as a natural realm. If one narrows his worldview to just the natural, strong determinism is the first inclination short of a two way information mechanism within the physical universe.
Yes, I sure did, marron. Thank you for your kind words!
LOL re: your Voegelin comment! He is a difficult read indeed! He writes immaculate English -- but thinks like a German. :^)
It would take the latter to do the former, I suppose.
My thanks to both of you for your encouragement. I'll see what I can do about finding a publisher who might be interested in a piece like this. Thanks so very much!
This is so interesting, edwin hubble! A very common feature of human experience over the ages is the expectation that a man's future can be discerned by casting one's gaze at the heavens.
Thank you so much for writing!
Attila Grandpierre! There's a name to remember.
I just wanted to drop in a post to let you know I am reading it. Maybe if I have something to contribute, I'll post again when I've finished.
beckett, you are most welcome anytime. I do look forward to hearing from you, if you have the time and inclination.
How'd you like that cite from Nietzsche?
Thank you so much for writing, and for your kind words.
Richard Neuhaus over at First Things should read it. His readership would appreciate it and understand its implications, I think.
Send it over to him, BB. I have corresponded with him and found him to be a very gracious man. He has a first rate intellect and I'm sure he'll be intrigued by the ideas in the piece. Even if in the end he doesn't think it's a fit for his magazine, it's worth a shot.
BB I posted something a few years back about Mandelbrot's fractals and a "leak" way, way down at the bottom where, I hypothesized, materiality and immateriality may exchange energies. Sounds a little like what Grandpierre has posited, doesn't it?
Thanks so much for this fantastic article, BB. I have never seen your ideas so clearly and powerfully laid out. Just wonderful stuff.
Do you have a link to the Mandelbrot article you wrote?
A-G the post I submitted which mentioned Mandelbrot's fractals was simply a reply to another poster who asked me to "define spirit." It wasn't an article or anything near as scholarly as BB's work. I have just re-read it, and it's a bit all over the lot and disjointed, but it does offer up a theory something like Grandpierre's, I think.
Here it is, FWIW:
[Other Poster] Before we can talk about 'spirituality' don't we have to define 'spirit?'
On page thirty-one of his new book, The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker makes a remarkable statement. He says, "We now know that cells did not always come from other cells and that the emergence of life did not create a second world where before there was just one. Cells evolved from simpler replicating molecules, a non-living part of the physical world, and may be understood as pieces of molecular machinery --- fantastically complicated machinery, of course, but machinery nonetheless." In the previous 30 pages Pinker uses about 70 footnotes, a pretty high rate, but this rather interesting assertion goes unfootnoted. That's a bit curious, wouldn't you say?
Actually, of course, there is no need to wonder why he did it. Pinker makes a bald, unsupportable assertion about abiogenesis because it's still one of the deepest mysteries in science. Like Darwin, he just wanted to skip over this difficult little patch and get on to the more tractable problems of evolutionary theory itself. I don't fault him for it. But I do think his omission tells us something interesting about the much maligned "God of the gaps." Pinker's omitted footnote is a gap of the kind that can almost make God respectable again.
Imagine: inside, the nerves, in the head --- that is these nerves are there in the brain...(damn them!) there are sort of little tails, the little tails of those nerves, and as soon as they begin quivering...that is you see, I look at something with my eyes and then they begin quivering, those little tails...and when they quiver, then an image appears... doesn't appear at once, but an instant, a second, passes...and then something like a moment appears; that is, not a moment --- devil take the moment! --- but an image; that is, an object, or an action, damn it! That's why I see and then think, because of those tails, not at all because I've got a soul, and that I am some sort of image and likeness. All that is nonsense! Rakitan explained it all to me yesterday, brother, and it simply bowled me over. It's magnificent, Alyosha, this science! A new man's arising --- that I understand...And yet I am sorry to lose God!Dmitri Karamazov to his brother Alyosha
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1880
A hundred billion neurons connected by a trillion synapses. That's what's inside our skull. The software combinations which can emerge from that amount of hardware, if one accepts Pinker's modular, computational theory of mind, can account, some say, for the amazing complexity of human behavior, perhaps even, when one factors in Hofstadter's "strange [recursive] loops," for the crafty "illusion" of free will itself. Despite famed chemist Michael Polanyi's categorical denial that biochemistry can be reduced to chemistry, it is now widely contended that step by creeping step the genome and its issue are giving up their secrets by reduction.
But how important is it, really, to parse out all these steps? By vanquishing the ghost in the machine, do we vanquish the altar too? Has the ghost ever really been in the machine? Or has he been whispering into it from some other dimension? Does Plato's (and BettyBoop's) formidable metaxy have no place in the new paradigm? Or does new knowledge simply move us a little further down a path still jam packed with an unending supply of mysteries that the concepts of metaxy and transcendence have served so well to explain? Pinker notwithstanding, the numinous genome's great leap into Being is hardly well understood. But even if Polanyi is wrong and at some point in the future abiogenesis can be replicated in the laboratory, the mystery of existence itself (why is the something rather than nothing?) has not been solved.
Which brings us to the Big Bang and GUT. Kierkegaard tells us that "God is totally other." The extra-cosmic Absolute, if it exists, is not accessible from this plane --- from these dimensions. No Grand Unified Theory can bridge the chasm. For us, the moment before the Big Bang is eternally silent. We are crucially handicapped by our structure in the physical plane, caught in a strange, paradoxical loop with no exit except death. But here we be, hurled into this mystery without so much as a by your leave from any deity. How did we get here?
Julian Jaynes believed we formed God-consciousness by first worshipping our clan chieftan during the period when the "bicameral mind" was breaking down just before wholly integrated human consciousness arose. The theory is fascinating and powerful, but has few adherents among cognitive scientists today. Apparently his emphasis on weird mass hallucinations and use of an unrealistically tight dating scheme don't hold up. Nevertheless there are plenty of solid theories among evolutionary psychologists to explain the God concept, most of them owing at least some debt to Jaynes. None of them satisfy, however. Some insanely huge piece of the puzzle is missing, and none of the current theories of evolutionary psychology show much promise of finding it. I noted with interest your pejorative use of the term "insane" to describe theists earlier in the thread. Is it so bizarre to be a little insane when presented with the great surprise of life? Is a leap of faith really that irrational? Or, perhaps I should say, is rationality always the proper response to the startling fact of our existence?
Vitalism has long been discredited, supposedly. Hardcore materialists confidently declare that no energy is exchanged between the material and the non-material. Knock on wood and wood is all you hit. Well, my friend, here is where I finally get around to answering your question (remember your question?). I believe they are wrong. I think that somewhere way, way down deep in Mandelbrot's fractals --- way, way down, almost infinitely way down --- there is a leak. That's how the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen might say.
Through the leak comes Spirit.
Indeed, while these evolutionary psychologists charge forward all confident that the spirit and mind is an epiphenomen of the brain ... there is a group of physicists and mathematicians still trying to answer the question, what is life? Biologists do not concern themselves with this question.
I predict the answer to the question will shake the very foundations of the biological sciences, because they are looking at information as the difference. In our jargon, that would be soul/spirit, metaxy, nephesh/neshama, etc.
Of course, science must have a politically correct term for it but the properties of information will exclude a naturally induced autonomous biological self-organizing complexity.
My two cents...
I remember your beautiful essay very well, beckett! And yes, I agree that Grandpierre's picture in a certain way resembles the Mandelbrot fractals, about which you wrote: "way, way down, almost infinitely way down -- there is a leak. That's how the light gets in.... Through the leak comes Spirit."
Recently marron wrote here that there is a good deal of "endless complexification of quite simple things" going on in contemporary thought, putatively across disciplines. And he wisely noted that the simple always wins out in the end.
I think that Pinker -- and to name some other names -- Lewontin, Dawkins, Hawking, Ovrut, Singer, Chomsky, and possibly not a few string theorists, et al. -- are burning the midnight oil in the search of plausible reasons to "overcomplexify the simple," just so they will never, ever have to come to grips with "the God problem."
Also thank you so much for your kind words of encouragement. I'll take your advice and write to Pastor Neuhaus, a very good man. I'll send an outline and a word count, and ask if he would have any interest in publishing a piece like this one. My initial thought is the piece is "too Greek" for First Things. But it can't hurt to ask.
I've had suggestions for other potential venues, such as Psyche and Noetic Journal. These, however, are professional, peer-reviewed journals. As I am not a "professional," I would not rate highly my chances of being accepted by such publications.
Anyhoot beckett, yours was a glorious piece when it first went up, and it definitely has staying power. Thank you so much for reprising it here.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.