Aporia - Theoria

All that follows is almost pure conjecture on my part, so be warned! What would it be like to view the universe from the outside? That is the first question. We might describe this as the ‘view from eternity’ or a ‘God’s eye view’. By definition, there can be only one universe, so the idea of seeing it all at once is at least conceivable. It might be that this outside view of the universe would tell us nothing that we don’t already know. We might, in other words, be able to figure out all that can be known about the universe from the ‘inside’. But it might be that the universe, considered all together as ‘the One’, is quite different from the way it seems from the inside – from our point of view amidst ‘the many’. However, we are led to the conclusion that any question we may ask about the One – if indeed it is something more than just the sum of all the parts of the universe – any question would be impossible to formulate, let alone to answer. So that is our rather uncomfortable starting point. The One – and potentially the universe taken as a whole – is unknowable in principle. You might justifiably consider this a rather useless piece of information. But I offer it because it is the reality behind all our knowledge and reasoning. All that is offered up as ‘truth’ must be done in the light of this fundamental base of ignorance. I stress this, because, whilst this fundamental limit to knowledge is often paid lip-service, it is often ignored. Instead we bring a set of assumptions about truth and knowledge to questions before we even begin. It is difficult to even be clear about what those basic assumptions amount to. But, for now, I’ll leave this matter aside. There needs to be a split in the world before we even have a chance of knowing anything. The yin-yang symbol below offers us a version of this first split. The outer circle is the One. The two inner shapes might be described as formlessness and form or chaos and order. Not only must there be more than one thing to exist before we can be aware of anything at all – there must be some movement or change or flow. The two shapes in the yin-yang symbol – like two fish in a bowl – are flowing into one another. Order flows out of chaos – form flows out of formlessness. But what causes the flow? We might conclude that it ‘just happens’, or we might conclude that there is some agency involved. So, if you were wondering where is God in all this, here is the place where we see God’s work. It is Spirit – the Great Spirit – that is the agency bringing order out of chaos. It’s what I’m calling top-down causation. Before the theologies of the various religions, we have this metaphysical notion of agency around the first split in the cosmos. Or, if you are an atheist, you’d probably want to deny agency here and say that the split just happens. The world we experience is of course on just one side of this split – it is the world of form. But we face another dilemma at this point. It’s generally accepted that we do not see things directly, we only experience the qualities of things. And we do not even see qualities in isolation, we only ever see them in the context of other things. So, in a sense, all our perception is governed by quality and context – or quality and relation. We do not see ‘things-in-themselves’. It might be that there is some reality underneath the qualities that we see – some ‘ultimate substrate’. Or it might be that there are only qualities and relations. If there is an ultimate substrate, then clearly it is not matter. The thing-in-itself must relate somehow to the flux of energy that is at the root of matter. It must take account of the constant flux between chaos and order – formlessness and form. So it could be that the ultimate substrate is not a physical thing such as energy, but rather the way the flux of energy is organised. It is not ‘substance’ as we would normally understand that word, but it is form. I don’t mean form in the sense of just three-dimensional arrangements in space. I mean form as an ordering principle. The flux between opposites was described as a harmony by Heraclitus – he used the word ‘logos’. The same idea is expressed in Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist traditions. The harmony between emptiness and fullness – formlessness and form – could then be an abstract principle of order. (In Stoicism, and from Heraclitus, logos is the organising principle. It is perhaps equated with the One-And-Many in Plotinus. Meanwhile pneuma is the principle of flux or change – thus, potentially, the Great Spirit. But this ordering principle need not be supernatural. The universe might not need this distinction between natural and supernatural phenomenon that we so often impose on it. But it would be true to say that any ultimate meaning could still be described as’ theological’ in the broadest sense of the word. There is yet one further split to deal with before we arrive at last in more familiar territory. It is the start of a process called ‘emergence’. In quantum theory there is the first rung on the ladder of emergence (although formlessness to form might reasonably be considered the truly first stage). The world hovers in an ‘unresolved’ state, a cloud of quantum possibilities, until something causes it to jump or collapse into a resolved state – an ordinary particle – matter. We don’t know how this happens, and indeed we cannot even give a coherent map of this happening, but we are very sure that this is how the universe works – about as sure as anything in science. It might be tempting – faced with this little jump of emergence, from quantum possibility to observable matter – to regard it as the same as that earlier flow we examined – the flow from formlessness to form. Is quantum possibility the same as formlessness? Or, alternatively, is the quantum world already within the world of form? Yes, possibly, but I don’t think this question can be answered. There might be two steps here, or only one – and we might never figure this out. Emergence continues, and here we see an interesting mirror of the stages described earlier. From particles we get atoms – the chemical elements. And here’s the interesting thing – the mirror of previous discussions. All the sub-atomic particles are identical, yet each chemical element is different. So, all protons are the same, all electrons, all neutrons. But, combined together, the different characteristics of the various elements emerges. How does that happen? All the properties of an element are not somehow hidden inside every identical sub-atomic particle. Instead, it is their arrangement that creates the difference. And that is the mirror. The quality of the sub-atomic particles, plus their relation to other particles creates the elements. Quality and relation – the same split that we examined above. We could say that substances mirror the quality and relation dualism of the universe. A similar process occurs at the next stage of emergence. The elements combine to create chemical compounds, all with properties different from their constituent elements – emergent properties. Add together enough substances, in the correct relation, and we get the next jump in emergence – life. Here again there is a mirror to our previous discussions. Out of chaos came order. Somehow, out of an initial chaos, order appeared in the universe. But, left to itself, a universe of just matter would gradually sink back into chaos. Life reverses that process, on a localised scale. The universe as a whole may still be running down, but life creates small pockets of order. So it mirrors the next stage back in our earlier descriptions. Substances mirror the quality plus relation/context dualism of the universe. Life mirrors the form/formlessness order/chaos duality. Close on the heels of life is our next emergent property – consciousness. Once again there is a mirror. Remember that with the earlier order out of chaos stage we suggested that there may be a third thing – a cause for the flow from chaos to order – an agency. Well, with consciousness we have agency on a local scale. Conscious beings are mind plus body plus relation – mirrors to agency, quality and context. Of course – and as with the earlier discussion – you may again deny the existence of agency. In other words, you may deny the existence of free will. We might state it as: there just happens to be creatures who are deluded into thinking that their actions change the world. But the contrary to this is that agency DEFINES us – to be conscious at all means to have agency. And if you wish to put a religious spin on this, we could say that all conscious beings are ensouled and that all change wrought by the agency of conscious beings is the work of spirit. We are each drops in the ocean of the Great Spirit. But, arguably, it is not necessary to involve the supernatural for this still to be true. It is sufficient to have quality, context, consciousness and agency. And if you’re willing to accept this difficult thought – the two processes that we see mirrored here in consciousness (chaos to order via agency compared to agency via individual conscious beings) are not two processes at all. They are the same process. UPWARD EMERGENCE AND DOWNAWARD CAUSATION ARE ONE AND THE SAME. And, the most difficult thought of all: the reason this is the case is because of the One, where there is no distinction between past and present. The most serious and profound split is yet to come. Emergence continues ‘upwards’, or ‘outwards’, we might say, from individual creatures to ecosystems, the whole biosphere, and perhaps beyond. Our knowledge of these things is in its infancy, but we can at least safely say that an ecosystem is more than just the individual plants and animals that it contains. However, there is another sort of emergence going on with ourselves – with humans. Let us, for simplicity’s sake, call it human culture, or the cultural economy. It is the emergence of this – sitting alongside the ongoing emergence of ecosystems – that is really the key thought that will take us forward into further investigations. To add a little more detail: As creatures we receive the qualities of the world through sensation. We filter our sensations according to context, and this is perception. By agency, we act on our perceptions. But the action of most creatures, and indeed most human action, is by impulse. It is spontaneous and direct. We retain a memory of past perceptions, and our resulting impulsive actions as ‘image’. But here the learning stops. For the most part, each individual creature must learn from scratch, building up its own stock of experiences from nothing. With some creatures though, and most notably with humans, there is a further stage. Image is converted into symbol – in other words, the stored experience of individuals is somehow transmitted to other creatures. And this we call culture. One final thought on emergence. If the natural process of emergence continues onwards and outwards, then we might expect the universe as a whole to have emergent properties beyond what we discover of its constituent parts. This answers one of the questions right at the start of the work. The idea suggests that, yes, ‘the One’ has properties beyond what we could ever discover from viewing the universe from the inside. Before closing, there is one further observation to make about what is set out above. We could say that it all ‘just happens’ – this is just roughly how the world works – there has not been any judgement in our descriptions as to whether it is all a good thing or a bad thing, or just neutral. But there is something peculiar about the world that we observe that is the first clue to a lot of further thoughts. The universe contains symmetries of various types – and it is even suggested that the symmetries go all the way down to fundamental particles that we’re not even currently certain really exist. We tend to regard these symmetries as elegant and beautiful. But there’s a catch. Symmetries are sometimes broken – and indeed it appears that symmetries MUST be broken to allow the world of form to exist at all. As the fuller yin-yang symbol tells us, there’s a little chaos lurking in the world of form, as well as form imminent in the original chaos. That will be the starting point for the next writing.