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12:41

(In »Truth as an act – the road to the fourth singularity«)

Quentin Meillassoux formulates his radical utopianism in L’inexistence divine, a work published in instalments which, at the time of writing, is not yet complete. According to him, the history of the Universe contains three decisive leaps that cannot be understood as any originally built-in phase transitions – as totalists from Plato to Einstein imagine them to be – but rather as contingent emergences that suddenly appear from nowhere and out of anything, and which radically change existence, without thus having any mysterious qualities at all. Physics does obviously obey certain specific laws in our part of space–time, but physics per se does not obey any preordained laws whatsoever – it is instead radically contingent. For example, the Universe as a whole can evidently expand considerably faster than the speed of light, which the existence of cosmic inflation proves with abundant clarity. The laws of physics, or rather its behaviour or habits, can therefore change however and whenever, and without us being consulted about the matter. Otherwise, these behaviours would be compelled to precede the physics that they are deemed to regulate and the natural sciences have never found any support for any such mystical non-material pre-existence of the laws of nature. This is quite simply a matter of a somewhat embarrassing logical error, and a projection of this kind of bizarre metalaw of existence means if anything a depressing return to Newton’s unfounded assumption of an external creator of the Universe, which this creator thus precedes (which of course constitutes the beginning of an unspeakably tedious and meaningless regression without end: who created the creator, who created the creator of the creator, and so on).