7 Intensities and phenomena in a relationalist universe

The history of correlationism is introduced with Immanuel Kant’s onto-epistemological project in the 18th century. According to Kant, we can only know what arises in the correlation between thinking and being. But with Kant, and also later with the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl for example, there is still a conviction that a factiality exists, that the process includes a thing in itself to relate to. This notion goes by the designation weak correlationism. Later Kant is followed by thinkers such as Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, who all ignore this conjectured thing in itself. The Kantian principle of factiality is thus replaced by these authors with the Hegelian, absolute, principle of correlation. This notion is called relativism or strong correlationism.

The decisive break with Kantian correlationism comes with relationalism in Niels Bohr’s physics and philosophy of science in the 1930s. Relationalist ontology is in fact not just interactive, like relativism, but definitely also intra-acting. According to relationalism, every phenomenon in the Universe is unique, since both its external and its internal coordinates are completely unique for every position in space–time. Symmetries exist only in mathematical models, never in physical reality. This means, among other things, that no scientific experiments can ever be repeated in exactly the same way twice. It is hardly surprising that in the 1930s old friends Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein engage in a correspondence that is often frustrating on both sides. Their letters attest to the dramatic scientific paradigm shift from Einsteinian relativism to Bohrian relationalism.

There are of course no de facto predetermined sets of rules whatsoever in the Universe that precede the phenomena which they, if that were the case, would be designed to regulate, that is, if they existed (which they do not, for in that case their existence would precede existence itself). What in hindsight we may apprehend as laws of nature are nothing but analogous repetitions within one and the same system, given the temporarily prevailing, constantly slightly varying circumstances within the complex in question. Admittedly, there is a universal metalaw which says that there is always an explanation for every given event – an ontological prerequisite that mobilists from the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the 17th century to the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce in the 19th century investigate thoroughly – but no eternal laws per se are required in order for any of the virtualities within the phenomenon to be actualised. Like so many times before in the history of science, nature does not care about our human, all too human, metaphors. Physics quite simply does not obey laws in the way that the slave is expected to obey the rules his master dictates.

The problem is that correlationism requires that everything else around the correlation is constant, as if what happens always happens in an isolated and sealed laboratory or on an – aside from the observed phenomenon – unchanging theatrical stage. According to the correlationists, what is relative only limits itself to the relation between the phenomena. Existence is seen as passive rather than active, and without further ado is divided into independent, isolated units without any relevant relationship to each other whatsoever. Correlationism’s isolationist view must however yield to the pressure from modern physics, where everything incessantly more or less influences, and is in a state of constant flux in relation to, everything else, including itself. The behaviour of physics is thus neither predetermined, necessary nor eternal; the patterns that the phenomena form in a larger perspective – no matter how beautiful and impressive they might seem – could be completely different from what is actually the case, and they might very well change in the future when the conditions have changed.

Kant is thus right about factiality, things might be completely different from how things stand for the moment. But Kant’s rationalism – his blind faith that everything that occurs is subordinate to a divine wisdom, and that his own human ratio is fully sufficient to embrace everything that happens given time – results in his never developing this factiality fully and not drawing the inevitable conclusion. It is thus Kant’s unfounded rationalism which forces him into determinism, not the other way around. Therefore the relationalists must also leave Kant behind and seek other allies in the history of philosophy. The syntheist Quentin Meillassoux finds such an allied thinker in the empiricist David Hume – one of Kant’s strongest rivals in the 18th century – not least for the reason that Hume provides support for the conviction that one and the same material and existential vantage point can give rise to an infinite number of different outcomes. Existence outside the correlation in question is neither stable nor fixed and therefore philosophy cannot in all honesty pretend that this is the case. Hume and Meillassoux are thereby joined in a strong factiality, from which Meillassoux constructs the philosophical school that goes under the name speculative materialism.

Hume and Meillassoux depart from Kant’s troublesome, incorrect determinism and opens up philosophy to the empirically established indeterminism in Bohrian quantum physics. It should be noted here that Leibniz presages relationalism even before Hume does so with his principle of sufficient reason. Leibniz was not only one of the most significant and most original predecessors among the philosophers, but also an innovative and brilliant mathematician. He built a Monadology, a kind of early variant of the dialectics between eternalism and mobilism, which precedes Kantian Platonism. Above all, with his credibility within the natural sciences, Leibniz created the most clearly defined mobilist alternative to the contemporaneously developed Newtonian totalism. The metaphysical antagonism between Leibniz and Newton presages the struggle within our own contemporary physics between on the one hand relationalism and its cosmological Darwinism, with a universe that is constantly becoming more and more complex; and on the other hand relativism and its fixation with the second law of thermodynamics, with a universe that is constantly becoming more and more simplified as it expands and disperses.

The relationalist argument is that although the second law of thermodynamics is applicable within isolated subsystems in the Universe, this does not necessarily mean in turn that it covers the Universe as a coherent whole. Rather it appears to be the other way around: the Universe as a whole exhibits a history with an ever-increasing degree of complexity over time, with a steadily growing amount of information, where the total growing amount of information correlates with the total growing amount of entropy. This means that entropy can increase locally at the expense of information, at the same time as information increases globally at the expense of entropy. And that is de facto what our Universe looks like today. If theory and empirical data do not agree on essential points, it might be a good idea to first of all revise and modify the theory.

The foundation for philosophical relationalism is laid by the American pragmatists at the end of the 19th century, clearly exemplified by Peirce’s familiar quotation “law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason.”. He argues that the laws of nature ought reasonably to be subject to evolution in the same degree as everything else in existence and that therefore they can never be predetermined. It is simply a matter of the cause of the effect preceding the effect, and this does not in itself require an eternal law. Peirce actually goes so far as to say that if we presume that time is an actual constant, the behavioural patterns of nature by necessity must sooner or later change over time. After Peirce’s revolutionary contributions, philosophical relationalism is clearly placed within pragmatist metaphysics. And it is also within pragmatism that it is developed in full when the British-American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, in parallel with the Bohrian revolution in physics, publishes his manifesto Process and Reality in 1929.

The American philosopher Michael Epperson shows in Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead how Whitehead – a favourite disciple of William James, American pragmatism’s other father figure besides Peirce – single-handedly constructs a relationalist rather than a relativist metaphysics in parallel with, and completely independent of, the quantum physics revolution which began to pick up pace during the 1920s. According to Whitehead – whose name was revered among physicists after the publication of his mathematics tome Principia Mathematica in 1913, co-authored with his disciple Bertrand Russell – existence in essence consists of current events and not of atomistic objects. History is thus an endless quantity of events stacked on each other, where an intense and concrete series of mobilist events always precedes the permanent and abstractly eternalised object. Whitehead’s experience events can be described as a kind of Leibnizian monad – but not without windows, as Leibniz imagines the monads, but rather with hosts of windows that are constantly wide-open to the surrounding world.

What makes Whitehead the first fully-fledged relationalist among the mobilist thinkers, and particularly interesting from a syntheological perspective, is of course that he does not understand the obsession with killing the idea of God which occurs in many of his contemporary philosopher colleagues (in particular Russell, who after a strict upbringing in the High Church British aristocracy hated everything that he associated with religion). According to Whitehead, creativity is namely existence’s innermost essence, and this creativity – which he calls in fact God – permeates every single one of the myriad of current events that unfold throughout the course of history in the Whiteheadian universe. According to Whitehead, to not then use the elastic, cogent and extremely functional concept of God in order to encompass this fundamental creativity – thereby formulating a process theology as much as a philosophy.html">process philosophy – would be tantamount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater for no reason and to no good use whatsoever.

According to Whitehead, God is quite simply not particularly dead, but rather is just dramatically altered by – in turn – dramatically changed conditions. There is no hateful desire in him to slash God’s throat, when the concept actually appears more useful than ever, but in that case precisely as a syntheist tool and nothing else. The parallel with the syntheological formulation of Entheos as the name of the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos is striking. For what is Whitehead’s obsession with creativity as the driving force of existence, if not in fact a deification of the entheist production of difference? Process and Reality is so radically relationalist and theologically creative that the work – in which the origin as Atheos and the events as Pantheos are brought together with creativity as Entheos, and where the result is today’s Universe – deserves to be regarded as the syntheist manifesto par excellence. That the term process theology is coined and used for the first time by one of Whitehead’s disciples, the American theologian Charles Hartshorne, is not the least bit surprising.

When in 1992 the relationalist physicist Lee Smolin launches the idea that the Universe operates according to cosmological Darwinism – where the maximisation of black holes in a universe is linked to the maximisation of possibilities for the genesis of life – he refers to Peirce’s and Whitehead’s revolutionary pragmatism. With a simple manoeuvre, Smolin disposes of the recurring problem that haunts the competing physical models, namely that all these models presuppose coordinates for the Universe which means that it is constantly balancing on a kind of existential pinhead in order to be able to exist. With a multitude of possible universa over time, as in Smolin’s model, our Universe’s specific coordinates do not seem particularly remarkable any longer. Of course they appear extremely well-adapted for the genesis of life and the existence of our own species, but then this must reasonably be the case in at least one of the many universa that are presumed to exist, and in that case the one is just a logical consequence of the other. Irrespective of whether Smolin’s speculative cosmological theory of evolution is correct or not, time or Entheos has returned with full force as the bedrock of physics. Peirce, James, Whitehead and the other pragmatists could hardly be more satisfied.

The renaissance of time within physics opens up possibilities of, for example, shape dynamics – a theory that solves many of the old problems of quantum gravity – where time in fact plays the role of the decisive constant. By counting on what are called observable objectives, the shape dynamicists consider themselves able to calculate global time, liberated from the local restrictions of space. It should be added here that even if Einstein proves that time runs at different speeds at various places in the Universe – that time is relative in relation to local conditions – it continues, at least within practical physics rather than within theoretical mathematics, always in one and the same direction: from then via now towards the next now in the future. Einstein’s conception that time can go backwards as well as forwards quite simply does not fit with what we can observe in actual reality; this idea increasingly appears to be a Platonist fantasy without relevance outside mathematism’s tautological trap. Global time is in fact more than just a dimension on top of the three spatial dimensions in space–time; it is above all compatible with relationalism.

Shape dynamics thereby exist in the same sort of duality in relation to the Einsteinian relativity theories as the wave does in relation to the particle. This means that we can say goodbye all at once to the predetermined, the timeless and the eternal space–time in Newton’s and Einstein’s Platonist universe. For what is this four-dimensional block universe if not just yet another failed attempt to recreate the ideal world of Plato – this time not as an opposition between God and Creation, or between the soul and the body, or between the representation and the represented, but instead as an opposition between eternity and time? Einstein’s block universe, with a space–time that moves both backwards and forwards, is yet another flagrant example of a Platonist fantasy which, without any empirical footing at all, acquires a social status as if it were an established physical truth.

It looks seductively elegant in mathematics when time is added to the three space dimensions and space–time arises. However, there is no scientific proof outside mathematics that time is some kind of space; rather it is strictly speaking only the mathematical elegance that makes it tempting to believe that this is the case. Even if a phenomenon actually can be registered in space, and even if space can be mathematically expanded by a temporal dimension – which attractively enough enables the construction of a more complex geometry in order to describe various phenomena in even greater detail – there is still nothing that indicates that time really is a fourth dimension of space, ontologically rather than just mathematically. For example, we can travel both up and down and forwards and backwards in space (in relation to an arbitrarily chosen or imagined point). But even if we are travelling forwards in time at various speeds at various places in space, which Einstein proves that we can do, we are invariably still only moving in one single direction along the arrow of time. There is no evidence that anything anywhere in the Universe actually can travel backwards in time. Varying speeds do not automatically imply different directions.

We quite simply must disregard all these beautiful speculations and accept that time is a radically different phenomenon from space. Mathematics shows no regard for empirical reality in this case. That time travels backwards with the same ease as forwards in the world of mathematics only proves one thing; namely that mathematics is constructed by Platonists who are more interested in a theory of an immutable idea than in empirical evidence that speaks of a mutable world. If mathematics were correct about time, time would then of course, by logical necessity, be an illusion. Both Newton and Einstein are swept along by the elegance of mathematism’s tautological trap and allow themselves to be really convinced about precisely this, that time is an illusion. They do this in spite of the fact that their faith in mathematics’ scientific robustness lacks empirical support. They open the door to what we call Newtonian-Einsteinian mysticism.

The arrow of time acts as an emergent phenomenon of its very own. Outside of mathematics’ tautologies, time and space do not need to have anything whatsoever to do with each other; they are distinctly different phenomena and an honest ontology also treats them in that way: as essentially different. Liberated from eternity, time returns with full force as physics’ most remarkable player, as Zurvan or the personification of the mysterious duration of the ancient Iranians, as Cronus or the irrevocable fate of the Ancient Greeks, or as Entheos, the multiplicity of events that stream out of the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos in the syntheological pyramid. Time is the uniting constant of existence. There is nothing outside duration. Plato, Newton and Einstein have quite simply got it wrong: there is no timelessness in physical reality, no more than there is any actual void. Because of the return of time in the history of ideas, the post-structural obsession with non-linearity also finds itself under great pressure. Linearity returns as a strong cultural metaphor, but in a new and deeper variant, as a deep linearity which relates to global rather than local duration.

In the world of physics, the concept of eternalism is used as a designation for the conviction that all points on the line of time are ontologically as real as each other. All moments that have ever existed or ever will exist are regarded as radically equal from an ontological perspective. The opposite view, that only the present is real, is called presentism. Note how the concepts correlate with the phenomenological pair of opposites eternalism and mobilism (see The Global Empire). Physical eternalism is the conviction we end up in if we allow phenomenological eternalism – with its radically equal fictives, since no fixation of the chaos of existence can be more fixed than any other – to run amok because we have forgotten to place it ontologically within mobilism. These radically equal, frozen fictives in space–time are mistaken for being reality itself instead of the chaos of existence from which we produce them. Obviously, Plato, Newton and Einstein are all physical eternalists, and they are such for the very reason that they overestimate the possibilities that phenomenological eternalism offers in what actually is an ontologically mobilist universe.

Physical presentism, however, is a phenomenological eternalism placed within the mobilist conception of reality; a transrationalist eternalism with factually motivated limitations. It is based on the conviction that the past is fixed, while the future is open and nebulous, and only the present is ontologically real. But the presentist position is only correct with the caveat that the present must be regarded as an eternalisation of an ontic flow which thereby is not an abstract thing but rather a concrete field. For example, the present as an event is already shifted to the past, as a fictive, in every contemplative moment. Phenomenological eternalism is merely an ontological, perceptional necessity, but not an ontic, physical truth about existence outside the mind. This applies to presentism just as much as to physical eternalism. The present is real, but it is only real as a relationalist phenomenal field rather than as a relativist noumenal thing. Just like the experience of the object’s exactitude as a substantial particle, the experience of the present’s exactitude as an infinitesimal moment is nothing other than an eternalist illusion. The experience in itself does not constitute ontological proof of anything at all. Thus, the correct transrationalist presentism should not be confused with the incorrect classical presentism.

According to the myth that we live in a block universe, which follows from the Einsteinian revolution, the Universe and history are regarded as united in eternally frozen four-dimensional space–time. Time must be an illusion then, in its capacity as an ontic flow, if it is regarded as the fourth space dimension. There is no evidence whatsoever for this view of time being physically correct, yet it is precisely this that Einstein maintains when the idea of time as illusion becomes widely accepted in conjunction with his theories of relativity gaining adherents. That time is made into a kind of fourth spatial dimension – and thereby is transformed into a kind of mathematically, and doubtlessly also existentially, tempting expansion of existence – seems historically speaking not to have any deeper cause than a purely subjective arbitrariness. It mainly revolves around physics suddenly becoming a little more playful as a mathematical exercise in model construction. The thing is though, that if time in principle is regarded as a kind of space, there is not much difference between the ticking of a clock and a measuring tape placed on a stretch of road. The ticking of the clock becomes a smooth way of measuring the distance between two points, which according to the accompanying physical eternalism fittingly enough is ontologically just as real.

The idea that all of existence and its history is reduced in this way to a limited and handy little box, a block universe, must have enchanted the physicists. This is understandable. And philosophically speaking, the myth that we live in a block universe is of course an expression of the phenomenological eternalism without the necessary dialectic with mobilism, if possible an even more radicalised version of Plato’s dualism – where Einstein actually advocates a totalist monism rather than Plato’s totalist dualism. But surely it must be the case that not just the arrow of time but all the motion and changes in the history of the Universe must be illusory in Einstein’s block universe. Duration is of course the very foundation for all motion and change per se – which explains why Entheos is the divinity of time, motion, difference and creativity in syntheology. But Einstein really does everything in his power to revive Parmenides’ absurd conception from Ancient Greece that there is no real change in physical reality, that everything is one and the same and that difference and change therefore have no ontological validity.

Syntheologically, we express this as Einstein in practice doing everything he can to kill off Entheos, the divinity of process theology, and he must then in the name of consistency also try to kill off Atheos and Syntheos while he is at it. But Einstein never succeeds anywhere in proving any phenomenon in existence that moves backwards in time. However relativist time is, the arrow of time survives the block universe’s mythological attack and strengthens in fact its Zurvanite and Chronist magic. Time has still only one direction: forwards. Entheos keeps the syntheological pyramid in motion and is travelling with determination onwards to Syntheos. Physical eternalism and the Einsteinian block universe are, in fact, impossible to combine with quantum physics’ most basic axiom: Niels Bohr’s principle of indeterminacy. A block universe requires a compact determinism – without real time there is no real change – the future is by necessity as fixed in advance as the past is frozen in history. However, this is an absolute impossibility according to Bohr and his relationalist followers, since physics according to the principle of indeterminacy is incomplete, and that fact in itself is incompatible with a block universe where everything, without the least exception, invariably has already happened.

The pragmatist philosopher of science and friend of Einstein Karl Popper says to him anxiously in his autobiography: “If men, or other organisms, could experience change and genuine succession in time, then this was real. It could not be explained away by a theory of the successive rising into our consciousness of time slices which in some sense coexist; for this kind of “rising into consciousness” would have precisely the same character as that succession of changes which the theory tries to explain away. The evolution of life, and the way organisms behave, especially higher animals, cannot really be understood on the basis of any theory which interprets time as if it were something like another (anisotropic) space coordinate. After all, we do not experience space coordinates. And this is because they are simply non-existent: we must beware of hypostatizing them; they are constructions which are almost wholly arbitrary.”

Popper undoubtedly hits the nail on the head with his ruthless, pragmatist criticism of Einsteinian Platonism. And even so he has not even mentioned that the Darwinian theory of evolution with the principle of natural selection, to take one illuminating example, is an impossibility without real time. But then, of course, Darwinism has never been very popular within physics and cosmology. That is, not until now. With the relationalist seizure of power even within the natural sciences, the door is now wide open to duration-bound theories such as cosmological Darwinism, loop quantum gravity and shape dynamics.

We return to the decisive difference between Einsteinian relativism and Bohrian relationalism. Einstein convincingly proves in his special theory of relativity that classical time is in fact relativist. Clocks with similar properties run at varying speeds in various places in the Universe depending on the varying local circumstances. However, this does not mean that time somewhere in the Universe suddenly runs backwards. Above all it does not mean that time is slower in one place than in another place per se, since such a comparison requires a kind of divine external timekeeping to which both clocks are compared, and any divinely external timekeeping of this kind does not exist anywhere else than possibly in our anthropocentric, internarcissistic fantasies. Moreover, the theory of relativity will not allow this either, which means that even Einstein himself momentarily seems to have had difficulty in drawing the correct conclusions from his own model.

With the advent of relationalist physics – for example in the form of loop quantum gravity and shape dynamics – we gain access to a new concept that is a logical consequence of all local times moving in the same direction, but this does not make it possible for us to compare them via divinely external meta-timekeeping. This is global time, which is best described as the aggregate internal duration for the Universe as a whole, without any external observer. Global time indeed comprises everything and everybody in the Universe, but without it ever being able to be localised, and thereby without it ever being measurable, since any kind of measuring of something that cannot be located requires some kind of mysteriously arisen observer position outside the Universe (one cannot be both inside and outside the Universe at once, not without being some kind of Platonist, dualist magician). The specific conditions that influence global time do of course by definition only exist globally when our whole entangled Universe without exception is included in the temporal equation, and never locally in any distinct region of, or even less so, outside the Universe. Global time thereby differs radically from classical metatime as a concept. It is both a universal and at the same time monist duration; a meme, quite plausible to physics, but which seems to pass by the otherwise so revolutionarily inclined Einstein, without leaving any deep impression.

However, within relationalist physics it is a central insight that the behavioural patterns of the Universe can look completely different at a global or local level. The point is thus that all the clocks in Einstein’s thought experiment only display local time. What Einstein therefore misses – since he has no concept of the deepening that a shift from relativism to relationalism entails – is that beyond his beloved, local clocks global time is still both possible and plausible. The problem for Einstein is that if global time really exists, it immediately kills his most beloved fetish: his determinist block universe. Moreover, all this occurs without us catching the slightest glimpse of any global clock since such a cosmological and quantum physical, relationalist timekeeping cannot exist outside the Universe whose time it is supposed to measure. Presumably it is precisely here that laboratory-fixated Einstein loses the plot. Without his beloved measuring instruments, as he despondently confesses to Bohr, he is of course completely at a loss in the face of quantum physics, which is bewildering to him. According to relationalist physics, the Universe itself has a duration of its own, which for that very reason cannot be measured by an external, extra-universal observer, which is exactly what an ordinary, classic clock would be. So it is about time without a clock, an ontic flow without any measuring instrument. And it is exactly here that Einstein pigheadedly says thanks and goodbye to Bohr and refuses to be involved any longer.

The Bohrian revolution means that it is time and not space that is the really fundamental mystery within physics. Thus, we would do well to ignore Einstein’s spatiocentrism in order to instead move on with Peirce’s and Smolin’s proposal to construct a tempocentric world view. A more interesting alternative to Einstein’s failed attempt to domesticate time and convert it into a kind of extra dimension of space would be to do precisely the opposite: to regard space as three extra dimensions on top of time. Loop quantum gravity does exactly this when it quantifies Einstein’s general theory of relativity. According to the theory of loop quantum gravity, space is no longer void or fixed, but must rather be regarded as an elastic phenomenon subject to network dynamics. The new metaphors of informationalism are quite simply so powerful that even physics goes through a fundamental change with the starting point in the idea of network dynamics. In the new relationalist physics even the Universe itself is a phenomenon of network dynamics.

A consequence of this is that space might have had completely different characteristics in previous historical stages than it has today. For example, it might have had many times more dimensions than today’s three under the extreme heat that prevailed during the Universe’s very earliest phase of genesis. This opens the way for the idea that both the expansion of cosmic space and today’s three dimensions of space can be regarded as by-products of a dramatic cooling down of initially incredibly hot, compressed, network-dynamical primordial space. Such a network-dynamics way of viewing the genesis of the Universe is called geometrogenesis. In its initial phase, multidimensional space is a maximally entangled pure geometry (it is pure in the sense that its nodes completely lack substance). But for every phase transition ever-more entanglements are dissolved, which means that space expands and is gradually cooled down. As a kind of compensation for the incrementally decreasing interconnections with each other in an expanding and cooled universe, the nodes receive the substance we associate with them today, and space thereby acquires its weight.

Global time already exists when all nodes in the Universe are connected to each other; a condition that interestingly enough admits the existence of a global time within the Universe but at the same time admits a lack of any vestige of space and thereby also all forms of local time. The clocks would stand still if they had anywhere to be and if there was anyone who could read them. An energy loss causes the nodes to start letting go of each other, and the Big Bang is a fact. What is interesting here is how a radically relationalist idea such as geometrogenesis requires global time as an axiom to be able to exist. Local times in Einsteinian relativism arise only when geometrogenesis kicks in; when the nodes loosen their grip on each other and the Universe has cooled; this is when space arises and expands. And with the expansion of space, a speed limit within the Universe also arises, namely at the speed of light – note that we are dealing with yet another law that only applies within our present Universe; cosmic space as a whole needs no upper speed limit: the cosmic inflation in the Universe’s childhood, which both the standard model and geometrogenesis require, expands much faster than light for example – which in turn gives rise to the local subsystems that characterise the universe that Einstein analyses in our time. And what does Einstein find in these local subsystems, if not those beloved clocks of his?

If geometrogenesis proves to be the best theory for describing the origin of the Universe, then it is likely to have no less than dramatic consequences, to put it mildly, for philosophy, too. To start with, the Universe can no longer be a kind of Heideggerian accident in a metaphysical sense; the theory does not provide scope for any cosmological accidentalism of the type that the static theories of the Universe’s origin de facto assume. All forms of accidentalism are of course inevitably based on myths of stasis, equilibrium and isolation as normal states. But this is not what physical reality looks like. It is, as so often the case in history, the metaphor of death that plays too large a part in the collective fantasies of human beings for us to be able to understand how physical reality is constructed. From the Garden of Eden to the great silence before, for example, the genesis of physics, life or consciousness: again and again the fantasising returns to the same eternal worship of stasis, equilibrium and isolation, a fantasising that ultimately can result in only one thing: a suddenly emergent, vital chaos that disturbs and interrupts the mortal order, that is, the decisive anomaly that means that the dreamed-of paradise is lost. However, cosmological accidentalism seldom or never has any relevance whatsoever in physical reality. The Universe is not human. In fact, the normal state of the Universe is vitality and intensity, not death and extinction.

The difference between correlationism and relationalism is there already in the difference between the concepts relation and relationality. A relation is always fixed, a correlation is even a fixation between two fixed points, primarily a subject and an object. A relationality on the other hand is a state where no fixed objects whatsoever exist, where differences on top of other differences create relations between the differences without any fixed objects ever arising other than in an eternalising observer’s perception process. In correlationism, the relation is external and not in the singular in relation to the fixed objects that, for simplicity’s sake, we assume (not least Kant’s thing in itself). In relationalism however, there are only relations on top of other relations, which in the absence of fixed objects are external and in the plural in relation to what Bohr calls a field and what Whitehead calls a process. Historically speaking, Kant’s correlationism is replaced by Nietzsche’s relativism, after which the development continues to, and is completed by, Bohr’s and Whitehead’s relationalism, where the object is also not consciously ignored any longer, which was the case with Hegel, but is literally dissolved in the mobilist process.

The physicist and philosopher Karen Barad champions the radical thesis that all philosophy that is produced prior to the advent of relationalism is all too anthropocentric and thereby misleading. The only way out of this fatalist cul-de-sac is to construct a completely new ontology with the existence of the Universe and not the human being as primary. Phantasmic anthropocentrism must be replaced by realistic universocentrism. The shift from anthropocentric to universocentric metaphysics is equivalent to the shift from Man to the network as a metaphysical centre. God is thus not in fact dead, it is just the human God who could only live under very special circumstances that has left us. The literally inhuman God lives and thrives and is at last being discovered and analysed by us humans. The inhuman God, the Universe as a glittering network, lives and thrives at the centre of the syntheological pyramid: God is a network.

Barad dismantles and disposes of Kant’s noumenon, and thereby she also extremely effectively puts an end to the correlationist paradigm. Her Bohrian phenomenology, based on relations on top of relations and probabilities on top of probabilities, with varying intensities rather than essences at the centre and without fixed physical boundaries, has no need whatsoever of any Kantian noumenon. Barad comes from the world of quantum physics, which of course is governed by concepts such as complementarity, entanglement, chance and non-locality. The principle of precedence disposes of all ideas of eternally valid laws that precede physical reality. Barad’s phenomenon is therefore instead the phenomenon per se described based on physics’ own conditions, rather than from Kant’s blind faith in rationality’s conception of reality being sufficiently exhaustive. And it is precisely therefore that her universocentric rather than anthropocentric ontology is a realism. Every Baradian phenomenon, every assemblage of intensities, has its own genetics and its own memetics as her predecessor Gilles Deleuze would express the matter. It is the current set of genes and memes that we familiarise ourselves with when we get to know the phenomenon. The world cannot be more real than it is with Barad.

At the dawn of the Internet age, hardly surprisingly, we were inundated by innovative relationalist philosophy. The culture critic Steven Shaviro is inspired by Whitehead’s pragmatic world of prehensions and nexi in his book Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze and Aesthetics. He does not refrain from also investigating such philosophically controversial concepts as vitalism, animism and panpsychism in his work. In her book Vibrant Matter the Deleuzian eco-philosopher Jane Bennett champions the argument that it is time once and for all to abandon the anthropomorphic fixation with the axiomatic special status that life constantly has in the world of philosophy, and instead replace vitalism connected to life with a vitalism based on intensity in physics as a unifying factor. Bennett constructs a world of constantly vibrating bodies rather than isolated things as the eternalised forms of processes, but her bodies are both human and non-human, living and non-living, where it is precisely the vitality of the bodies and nothing else that is allowed to take centre stage.

Correlationism’s critics often return to the question of ancestrality, where they focus on the subject and the object not being historically equal, if they even exist as entities of their own. Human consciousness or the mind has only existed for a few seconds of planet Earth’s 24-hour history. Existence evidently needs no subjects or consciousnesses in order to exist as a complete existence, and might well be thought to exist without any present subject even in the future. But if correlationism is to be criticised in the right way, it must be from inside its philosophical advances and not from the outside, so that we do not relapse into classical realism. It is then clear that the fundamental problem with correlationism is that Kant does not seem to understand why the thing in itself is unattainable for the human being. Kant imagines that the thing is out of reach of human perception and consciousness since our senses are not sufficiently expanded and flexible to be able to assimilate the thing in its entirety. The senses therefore create a world of representations only.

Kant still speaks of a kind of clearly delimited thing, what he calls a noumenon. The phenomenon is, according to Kant, merely a bad approximation of the – for the Platonist Kant – even more real noumenon. The fact that this noumenon is unattainable is not grounded in the limitations of the senses however, as Kant imagines, but in the fact that all things are in constant motion and change, both intra-actively and interactively, and thereby by definition are not possible to fixate. Kant is the instructive example par excellence of an isolated observer within physics who does not understand that his own entanglement with the thing, which he imagines himself to be observing from the outside, also influences the thing itself. He cannot imagine that his external and neutral observer position is a physical impossibility, and that it is this and nothing else that makes the thing in itself something that is unattainable. Kant is quite simply the Newtonian-Einsteinian mystic who does not quite understand the quantum physical revolution. He does not realise that the observing subject also is world. For what else could it be? If it exists, it is world.

The thing in itself cannot be experienced as an object, since it is de facto not an object, but merely a highly arbitrary eternalisation. It is not the thing in itself but the eternalisation of the thing that must be regarded as the real conjuring trick in Kantian correlationism. Once we understand this, we need no longer accept the Kantian axioms. A new kind of ontological realism at once becomes possible, what Barad calls agential realism and Stephen Hawking names model-dependent realism. The relationalist response to Kant is that the phenomena are fields rather than particles. The fields consist of intensities and probabilities and in fact never have any clear boundaries. For physics per se has no use whatsoever for clear boundaries. The clear boundaries must rather be viewed as an expression of narcissistic wishful thinking in an anthropocentric world view which is wrestling with its lack of processing capacity in relation to the inexhaustible oceans of information in existence. Every time we are forced to hear the clichés about quantum physics being obscure, mysterious and startling – or see how it is accused of being some kind of shallow forgery of reality, a mirage which clearly hides a more intuition-friendly and therefore more real reality, hidden behind some kind of cosmic, mysterious veil – it is Kant’s voice within us and in the prevailing culture that is speaking.

However, it is exactly the other way around: However counter-intuitive quantum physics may appear at first glance, it is de facto real reality, or more correctly, as close as we can ever get to a scientifically verified as well as perceptionally accessible reality. Quantum physics even opens the way to ontological realism – both the agential and the model-dependent – that is, precisely the onto-epistemological accessibility to the surrounding world that Kant believes that he dismisses once and for all through his almost autistic separation of the subject and the object. In fact, reality is the subject and the object entangled into one indivisible phenomenon, without any real separation. Whoever most smoothly manages to upgrade their world view by calibrating their intuition in accordance with this insight also has the most to gain in conjunction with the paradigm shift in question from correlationism to relationalism. And this applies of course to a high degree in the areas of metaphysics and religion.

The eternalist world view exists because the human being needs it: physics on the other hand manages splendidly without eternalism in our mobilist Universe. The perception process transforms the mobilist field into an eternalised thing. The abstract thing thus does not exist in an ontic sense, it must instead be understood as a kind of concrete field. Evolution has conveniently developed perception into a highly efficient information prioritisation mechanism, rather than into the ontological truth producer that Kantian rationalism in its superstitiousness desires it to be. It is thus the perception that freezes the concrete field in space–time and decodes it as a delimited fictive. The key word here is intensity. A phenomenon is mainly a kind of noumenal intensity. The higher the activity and complexity within a concrete field, the higher the intensity. The physicists Julian Barbour and Lee Smolin have defined complexity in a physical sense as multiplicity. The greater the difference within a subsystem, the greater the variation. Self-organised systems organise energy flows as feedback loops, for both positive and negative feedback. Thereafter it is simply a case of multiplying the variation by the activity in order to be able to calculated the intensity of the phenomenon in question.

The correlationists do not seem to understand that stability as a property is independent of all requirements for necessity. Oddly enough Zoroaster realises this difference already in ancient Iran about 1,700 years B.C. when he formulates the concept of haurvatat, a state that contains a kind of sacred perfection and at the same time is constantly in motion and dynamic; haurvatat may well be regarded as a synonym for the syntheist idea of the infinite now. Zoroaster’s genius lies in that he places holiness in the mutable and not in the immutable, which is in total contrast to Platonism and the Abrahamic religions. What brings Zoroaster and the relationalist physicists together is that they all maintain that relatively stable states can arise more or less regularly in an otherwise completely contingent universe. The symmetry that is so passionately desired – from Kant to Einstein, both within philosophy and within physics – is actually the opposite of contingency. Symmetry is eternalist and contingency is mobilist.

There is of course an ongoing oscillating dialectics between eternalism and mobilism in the human mind, but the truth and reality beyond Man’s perceptional fantasy world is fundamentally mobilist. The Universe is thus contingent and not symmetrical. Stability and necessity have nothing whatsoever to do with each other: connecting them logically is to let oneself be hypnotised by an eternalist illusion. That existence on a fundamental level is transfinite does not mean that it cannot produce temporarily stable states. Quite the opposite: temporary stabilities in complex systems can be every bit as common as explosive changes. They are however, just like the explosions, always temporary. Since everything influences everything else in a mobile and contingent universe, everything will sooner or later change and transition into completely new emergent states. And what is this if not the physical realisation of Zoroaster’s ethical ideal of haurvatat?

We can therefore completely refrain from building even more constructions using the isolated objects that Kant uses as building blocks in his outdated metaphysics. But this does not mean that we are relativists. For relativism does not move sufficiently far away from individualism and atomism; it should rather be regarded as an inconsistent half-measure in the development from an understanding of existence as an atomist world full of discrete objects to the understanding of existence as a relationalist world consisting of irreducible multiplicities and endless relations. Even relativism must be dialectically developed into relationalism. There are no things whatsoever to relate between, which relativism requires; there are only relata that in turn always are relata to other relata, and so on ad infinitum.

According to syntheist metaphysics, relations therefore must be what is ontologically primary. This also means that the ontology in a fundamental sense precedes the phenomenology, since external existence, among other things according to the principle of ancestrality, always precedes the internal observation. The intra-acting phenomena are in themselves as relational as the interactive relations between them. Objects do not arise independently only to be later evaluated in relation to other objects, which is what post-Kantian relativism claims. Syntheist phenomena are not stable objects at all filled with heavy essences, but extremely mobile and fluid phenomena in constant interaction both within themselves and with everything else in their environment, and often also far away from this environment, such as in the case of quantum teleportation.

In his book Time Reborn Lee Smolin draws attention to the recurring dilemma, that scientists constantly assume that ontologically speaking existence is both mobilist and eternalist. But as we have seen that is not at all the case. Existence per se is only mobilist. Eternalism is something that our senses and our consciousness produces, but it has nothing to do with the world outside our senses and our consciousness; crassly speaking eternalism is just a phenomenological by-product. This relationalist position results in the wave (mobilism) having priority over the particle (eternalism); they are thus not ontologically equal in merit, for the wave is primary in relation to the particle, which is secondary. And yet science is constantly tempted to fall into the trap which entails assuming there is an eternalist background to the Universe, either through the mistake of mixing eternalism into mobilist physics, or, which is even worse, through assuming that eternalism is the real reality, while our mobilist Universe in that case must be a chimera. Both Newton and Einstein are Platonists who get stuck in this trap, and the same goes, for example, for the majority of contemporary string theoreticians.

However, it is the eternalistic background that is the real chimera in this context. To take one example, there are of course lots of local subsystems but no isolated systems anywhere in the Universe. This means that all the theories that require the existence of isolated systems collapse sooner or later. As a consequence of this, it is pointless to go further into physics with theory building that is not background-independent, because if they are the least dependent on a fixed eternalised background, these theories do not hold up to closer scrutiny. In fact, the Universe displays no need whatsoever for fixed backgrounds. The eternalist background is merely a fiction, the last remnant of the Abrahamic and Platonist fantasy of the God that precedes the Creation. But such a God of course does not exist, as we know. He died. The Universe does not need the eternalist background any more than it needs God the creator. Whitehead, Bohr, Barad and Smolin understand this, and their predecessor Leibniz understands it much earlier, but it turns out that this is something so extremely hard to accept for Einstein, who both idolises and is intoxicated by mathematics, which explains why from the point of view of the philosophy of science he clings onto relativism and is not able to move on to relationalism.

What disturbs the Platonists about relationalism is that the mobilist world view sooner or later must yield to the principle of explanatory closure. The ontic flow must be eternalised in order for it to be converted into words and numbers. The principle of explanatory closure means that eternalisation is unavoidable, but the trick is of course partly to freeze eternalisation where it captures mobilist reality as well as possible, partly to most humbly realise that every eternalisation is only a clumsy digital rounding-off of a much more complex, analogous phenomenon in expansive motion. philosophy.html">Process philosophy, and in the case of syntheism process theology, is therefore the best vaccine against the taxonomic deification of the object. Only a consistently executed philosophy.html">process philosophy can immunise us against totalism’s tempting, simplifying superstitions. Syntheologically we express this as Entheos’ presence preventing us from getting stuck in Atheos or Pantheos per se, and instead continuing to direct our attention towards the real oscillation between them.

We can express this as though the relation between on the one hand Entheos and on the other hand the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos links back to Spinoza’s classical division between natura naturans (active nature) and natura naturata (passive nature) in the monist universe, which is a productive division within the One, the pantheistic deity. Entheos is quite simply the name of nature’s own built-in activism, its constant quest for change, its enormous production of differences and multitudes; while Pantheos is the name of nature as a gigantic and historically speaking passive object where the differences and the multitudes dwell before Entheos’ gaze (with Atheos as the hidden but necessary underside of Pantheos). The Spinozist relation between natura naturans and natura naturata thus has a syntheological equivalent in the relation between Pantheos and Entheos.

In his book Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature the syntheist philosopher Leon Niemoczynski constructs what he calls a speculative naturalism which takes its starting point in the idea that nature generously enough offers us lots of possibilities for insight into its infinitely productive, vibrating foundation, which he identifies as natura naturans. Niemoczynski brings back Peirce’s own favourites from times gone by, Spinoza and Schelling, to American pragmatism, and then flavours the hybrid with the 3rd millennium’s European anti-correlationism into one of the sharpest contributions so far to syntheist discourse. In the oscillation between Schelling’s Atheos and Spinoza’s Pantheos, what Niemoczynski himself describes as a naturalist panentheism arises, which is immediately recognizable from the foundation of the syntheological pyramid.

At the same moment that the eternalisation is carried out, as Heraclitus points out, existence has already changed and moved somewhere else in history. The Platonists are of course disturbed by the epistemological impossibility of de facto knowing and discerning a mobilist world when their evidently clumsy eternalisations are the only way to gain contact with physical reality. They flock around the fetishistic dream of gaining direct access to an existence that constantly eludes them. When the relationalists then claim that existence is radically contingent, that the future is open, that all apparently durable laws can be altered at any time; then we can of course, and unfortunately, write off all attempts to achieve a sustainable universal theory of everything for physics. For it is precisely this fetish that the relationalist deprives the Platonist of; the desire to experience and rule the world as it is can never be fulfilled in any way. It is both physically and in principle impossible to catch the world in a constantly expanding universe with the magical arrow of time as a given constant. This is the meaning of the principle of explanatory closure.

Eternalist hypotheses are characterised by simplicity and purity, and it is for this reason that they are aesthetically pleasing to a constantly eternalising mind that is continuously wrestling with the complexity of existence. In the best case, that this is so can indicate intuition, but in the worst case it is more likely an example of autistic wishful thinking. A clear example of the physicists’ unfortunate attraction to Platonism is the constantly recurring idea that the discovery of the simple, the pure, and the aesthetically pleasing is a sign that physics is getting closer to the truth. The aesthetic eye is attracted to symmetries and, to take one example, the most efficient routes between the different nodes in complex systems. The banal reason that aesthetics leads us to arrive at precisely this fixation is that it is based what the human eye desires, but this eye is not some metaphysical truth agent per se, merely the constructionally dubious by-product of millions of years of Darwinian struggle for limited resources. In complex systems characterised by scarcity, efficiency is something extremely valuable. Thus the human eye appreciates and prefers what seems efficient. And what is more efficient in complex systems than the simple and pure, what takes the shortest route between the nodes, what keeps to the straight and clear without any tiring and time-consuming convolutions?

The problem is just that the conditions of scarcity that the human being has endured on planet Earth for several million years have no equivalent in the Universe whatsoever. The Universe is one gigantic expansion, where there is no scarcity of resources of any kind. The Universe is 93 billion light years wide. And it is finite but limitless. An eye that over innumerable generations has been evolutionarily honed for hunting, gathering and reproduction has no benefit whatsoever from its natural, intuitive aesthetics when it comes to understanding the Universe, which may be regarded as a latter-day occupation. Here the eye is groping in a cosmic darkness which it really does not understand. Thereby, the whole idea that aesthetics, which has finite resources as its starting point would have any applicability whatsoever to a cosmos that is characterised by enormous bounty, falls down. Rather, time after time, throughout history, physics has proven to be even more confusing, even more complex, even more bizarre, than the human being with her narrow, anthropocentric imagination has been able to even begin to imagine in advance. On further reflection, Plato’s neurotic minimalism is to be regarded as the worst possible guide through modern physics.

After all, we live in a mobilist Universe, and thus relationalism is the only possible way forward towards a deeper understanding of existence, however difficult and complicated that path may seem. Pantheos offers no incentive whatsoever in terms of making it simple for us in the way that rationalism in all its forms would like to believe. No incentives whatsoever can exist in a state of bounty, since an incentive by definition requires a scarcity. Rather, physics only becomes more and more complex the more deeply we delve into it. And why would Pantheos want to have it any other way? God apparently loves to play hide-and-seek. The only theory of everything that stands the test of time is therefore the relationalist metalaw which says that eternally valid theories of everything are in principle impossible. When the physicists’ megalomaniac boyhood dreams of the great unified theory of everything thus collapses in the face of the ruthless principle of explanatory closure, this is where the syntheists take over and enthusiastically pick up the only reasonable ethical imperative that remains: Go with the flow!

Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58