[Alamo-Girl]

Very, very, very well said, dearest sister in Christ! And a beautiful analogy to the mathematics!

Actually, I think Williams gets the problem right if we understand that it’s the “top” of the hierarchy — level (v) — that “pulls” the rest.

Precisely so!

Truly, Williams' "inverse causality" breaks with the convention of looking backwards in time and changes the dynamics of the debate.

If the investigator only sees the "x axis" - and he is required to do no more to rebut the "irreducible complexity" argument - then he may be inclined to attribute whatever complexity he observes to be a serendipitous emergent property (self-organizing complexity or cellular automata.) The Aristotlean paradigm is serendipitous per se.

For instance, the Aristotlean mathematical paradigm played out in physical cosmology gives us the anthropic principle, i.e. "look no further, we are here so it happened, don't ask why or whether it was even remotely probable." The Platonist mathematical paradigm does not accept hand wringing and asks why this and not something else.

Or to put it another way, when the level of complexity clearly anticipates that which has not yet occurred then it is not serendipitous at all but forward looking. Enter the Platonist paradigm, universals and the "beyond" of space and time.

[betty boop]

....when the level of complexity clearly anticipates that which has not yet occurred then it is not serendipitous at all but forward looking.

...Excellently put dearest sister in Christ! "Inverse causality" in a nutshell!

Thank you so very much for this outstanding essay/post!