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Plato
This requirement of a – conscious or subconscious – underlying metaphysics as a platform for all philosophical argumentation means that all speculation must start from an occasionally declared but at times concealed theological assumption. The two main alternatives that crystallise out from Antiquity and onwards are laid bare in the antagonism that arises between the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, where Plato launches the dualist tradition, which prizes cosmos over chaos, the idea over matter, and also foreshadows thinkers such as Paul, Saint Augustine, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and among contemporary thinkers Alain Badiou; while Aristotle represents the monist tradition, where chaos precedes cosmos and matter is primal in relation to the idea, and foreshadows thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alfred North Whitehead, Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze. Dualism postulates that the idea itself is divine and as such separate from the worldly, and thereby secondary, matter; while monism postulates that the One, that which binds together everything in the Universe, and within which all difference is comprised of discrete attributes within one and the same substance, is the divine. Of course equivalent conflicts can be found in the history of ideas outside Europe. A clear and illustrative example is the Chinese antagonism between the followers of the dualist Confucius and the monist Lao Tzu.
Nothing ever happens twice, since every moment is completely unique and the relationships that surround a phenomenon at a specific moment are constantly in a state of flux, and they will not either ever reappear in the same configuration again. In the enmity within philosophy that has existed between mobilists and totalists ever since disciples of the mobilist Heraclitus clashed with the totalist Plato’s adherents in Ancient Greece in the 5th century BC, it is now Heraclitus’ successors who appear to be our contemporaries. The results from experimental metaphysics that are based on the ideas of Niels Bohr indisputably place themselves on the side of mobilist relationalism. Plato’s world of ideas is nowhere to be found outside of his own neurotic fantasies. Thus the universal laws that Kant, Newton and Einstein presume to be primary in relation to the Universe’s physical existence do not exist either. In reality, habits that resemble laws arise in and with the Universe and physics. There is quite simply no mysterious set of rules built into physics before its genesis, since no external prehistoric builder of such laws exists.
However, the problem is that the phenomenal and indisputable utility of mathematics in the most diverse of contexts has blinded humanity repeatedly throughout history and tricked humans into making the most fatal mistakes. The subconscious attraction in Plato’s dualist philosophy – when it becomes widely accepted in ancient Greece in the 4th century B.C. – probably lies to a large extent in Plato’s religious aspirations, and it is of course also these that later make Platonism Judaism’s perfect partner when they together constitute the two main ingredients in the aggressively dualist Christianity. Paul is the Greek Jew, the hybrid between Moses and Plato; Pauline Christianity is ancient Egypt’s cosmological dualism, resurrected through the reunification of its Judaic and Greek branches (comparable to ancient Iran’s cosmological monism in Zoroaster, represented by Heraclitus among the Greeks).
But it is important to understand Plato’s philosophical temperament. He constantly and neurotically seeks exactitude: the incontrovertible definition. Since life is chaotic and boundless, and since death really is the only thing that is precise, indisputable and definite, the inevitable consequence is that the Platonist is most profoundly a death worshipper. If predecessor and rival Heraclitus is the Iranian Greek who worships life, Plato is the Egyptian Greek who worships death. Heraclitus accepts and embraces the open-ended infinity of existence and of life. Plato, on the other hand, hates both openness and infinity, and it is in mathematics that he finds the magic weapon that will enable him to force the chaotic world, which is impossible to determine and define exhaustively, into one single preordained and limited totality.
This means that physical reality, according to Plato, is merely a chimera: a world of shades populated by imitations of secondary quality. The real reality is instead the pure and elevated world of ideas, accessible only to those philosophers who think along the lines that Plato himself designates. Here, or course, the chaos and impermanence of the physical world does not prevail; rather, everything is regulated by mathematics’ preordained and eternally valid laws. As a predictable consequence of this, Plato also advocates philosophy’s enlightened despotism as the most desirable form of government. He has no sympathy for the Athenians’ democratic and thus intersubjective experimental work. Without insight into and understanding of what is true, the ruling collective can only lead the state astray.
Platonism is the first exhaustively formulated totalism, and it exercises a powerful escapist pull by stressing a stable, symmetrical and thoroughly regulated alternative to the obviously defective and imperfect life that we live in the everyday. The rising aristocracy thus obtains a brilliantly designed free gift – which it then in turn can pretend to bestow on the cheated and cowed peasants and slaves in feudalist society – namely eternal life, the paradisiacal world where a reward for patiently endured poverty and toil awaits the one who has submitted without complaint to every whim and order of those in power. Plato allows himself to be seduced by mathematics’ promises of symmetrical perfection and eternal validity. And if mathematics is perfect and eternal, in the sphere of mathematics existence must also be perfect and remain perfect forever. The consequence is that if existence in the mathematical sphere is already perfect, it no longer has any reason to allow itself to be changed. A change in something that is characterised by perfection can of course only lead in one direction, namely to a deterioration, in the form of imperfection. Since time requires change in order to exist – duration is change stacked on top of change – this must mean that time is an illusion.
However, the problem with this very thing is that Plato’s world view is based on an entirely idiosyncratic and untenable premise. His own autistic neurosis when faced with the shapeless multiplicity of life forces him to devote himself to beautiful reveries of a make-believe world where everything is perfectly ordered (which is easy to effect, since it is only make-believe). But as it turns out, there are plenty of evangelists in the growing feudalist society that are of the same temperament as Plato and who eagerly want to spread his hierarchical ideology. His message is received with joy and appreciation by the Greek and later the Roman aristocracy. By accepting Platonism’s false premise and furthermore emphasising the strict logic that later ensues from his imaginary premise, this doctrine is spread with devastating efficiency. Platonism also attracts the great masses with its promise of the perfect paradise that one ought to be able to attain if one only thinks and acts correctly, and it is so incredibly practically arranged that by definition it is out of reach of every form of empirical study.
When Paul later launches Christianity, thereby placing Plato’s parallel theory of ideas beyond death, there is unfortunately no Heraclitus at hand to call his bluff in this bizarre and seemingly endlessly generous promise, which is issued without any risk or cost whatsoever on the issuer’s part. Platonism thus wins a crushing victory. And Alain Badiou, unfortunately, makes the same mistake as his predecessor Plato. He is tempted by the aura of perfectionism of mathematics to cultivate an aspiration of being able to discover the eternal laws of physics before the physicists themselves do so. But his view of mathematics’ relationship to physics is, unfortunately, both historically and ontologically incorrect. It is physics that is primary and real, and it does not follow any mathematical laws per se. Or as Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel laureate in physics, expresses it: “A law of nature is nothing other than a condensed description, assumed and available in advance, of the regularities that an observed phenomenon displays during the period of observation.” Therefore the mathematical laws, when they are applied to physics, cannot either be anything other than, in the best case, just approximations; they can never be physically, but only mathematically, and thereby basically tautologically, exact.
Like so many Platonists before him, Badiou makes precisely this mistake. He falsely assumes that the eternalism that his own perception produces is more real than the mobilism that one’s perception is constantly confronted with from all directions in one’s physical surroundings. Badiou thus thinks in a closed or anthropocentric way, rather than in an open and universocentric way, when he investigates the ontological status of mathematics. Exactly as Plato did 2,300 years ago, Badiou lets his own neurosis get in the way of his philosophical perspicacity. It is one of syntheism’s most important tasks to eliminate the whole idea of eternal, external laws with an assumed origin in an eternal, external world to which we have no access. This is superstition rather than science.
Historically speaking, syntheism returns to McGilchrist’s right cerebral hemisphere and its enormous, unexploited potential to build the new Renaissance rather than the new Enlightenment. It does this from a conviction that eternalism without mobilism is both misleading and self-destructive. Eternalism (the world of rationality) must be subservient for its own sake to mobilism (the world of reason); otherwise eternalism results in totalism, the blind faith – since the days of Parmenides and Plato – in all motion being illusory, and therefore it is the eternalist reproduction of the mobilist reality that is the only actual reality instead of the other way around. Thus syntheism also includes entheism, Taoism’s fundamental idea – which was launched by Lao Tzu in Axial Age China in the 7th century B.C. – that change per se, and thereby also its by-product time, is what is fundamental to existence. According to Lao Tzu, change over time is anything but illusory, and thus mobilism and not eternalism is primary in existence. Taoism’s idea of yin and yang as an ontological foundation is summarised under syntheism’s concept of Entheos.
But in the 5th century B.C. totalism arrives and with it also alienation across a broad front in the history of ideas. It is ideas about reality and not physical reality in itself which are the focus for the totalists. The belief in the unlimited possibilities of rationality is proclaimed by Socrates and relayed by his disciple Plato, diligently noting it all down. Deductively reasoning science is everything, and art is worthless or something even worse and must, according to Plato, be expunged from society. Physics is subordinated to mathematics. Pre-Socratic monism ends up under attack. The totalists instead construct a strictly dualist world view. The eternal soul is separated from the corruptible body. The left hemisphere overshadows and dominates the right one, if we once again see the development from McGilchrist’s perspective. The human being is no longer associated with either her body or her environment. A human being who has been alienated from the image of her incarnate self, who sees herself as a constantly inflamed, internal hotbed of conflict instead of as a harmonious whole, is easily reshaped from the tribe’s incarnation of its members into an isolated peasant slave in the fields and in the pastures of the cattle herds, constantly on the lookout for some kind of abstract healing through hard work. It is important to understand that alienation serves a purpose and that it produces an identity that generates an extensive enjoyment without pleasure.
Totalism is driven by the self-sacrifice myth, the libidinal connection to self-hatred. What is brilliant about totalism is how for the first time in history it denies the human being’s feeling that the whole of her is greater than the sum of her many different constituent parts. Totalism appears with reductionism as its faithful side-kick. A whole, according to reductionism, can always be deconstructed into ever smaller components without the phenomenon’s mental weight or value being affected. Thus, the human body can be reduced to just body parts; the body itself has no value as an emergent phenomenon according to the totalists. Therefore, Plato can contend that the body is inadequate to define the human being. He picks out of humans that which arises as an indisputable surplus when the various components are combined, and converts this into a separate magnitude with unique and obviously completely fictitious properties: the soul. If the body parts cannot speak or think for themselves, while the body as a whole and as a unit talks and thinks, it must be a matter of a contribution from the outside. It is this soul, added from the outside, not the emergent body that talks and thinks. After this manoeuvre, Plato returns to the body. The fact that there even exists a feeling or a thought in conjunction with the whole body’s status as – in fact – an entire body only goes to prove, according to this line of argument, the existence of the soul.
According to Plato, the soul is allied with the higher world of ideas, while the body must be content with being connected to the lower-tier, corruptible material world. The soul never changes; it is the constant which stands firm at the centre of the body’s capricious emotional turbulence. From this dualism, all of human existence is then divided up into the categories eternal ideas and corruptible matter. This dualist escapism is a perfect fit as the ideology of patriarchy: the man is calm, balanced and constant, just like the soul, while the woman is reduced to an irrational and volatile emotional tempest, just like the body. Power must therefore fall to the man who, by definition, is of course of a higher standing, and the woman must be subordinated to him in order for society not to collapse under the pressure of internal instability, all in accordance with dualism’s self-perpetuating, circular reasoning.
Just like syntheism, as a whole transrationalism and its basic condition can be viewed as both a logical deduction and a historical conclusion. There is no rational foundation per se for naturally limited human rationality to ever have the capacity to comprehend everything in a constantly expanding universe. Plato’s and Kant’s variants of rationality get caught in their own trap; they are both per se founded on a blind faith and not on any kind of rationality. Humanity has repeatedly surrendered itself to rationalism as a social ideology, but the results are frightening. Sooner or later, rationalism – in spite of considerable achievements in civilisation – invariably degenerates into totalitarian utilitarianism. Therefore Plato is quite correct in claiming that a consistently practised rationalism must develop into a dictatorship. Anything else is impossible.
Before the arrival of totalism, man apprehends himself as a cohesive whole. There is no need to separate an eternal soul from a corruptible body. Although he is mortal, man is part of a natural cycle where life and death are both natural and necessary, regularly recurring fixed points. Above all, everything hangs together with everything else in a monist universe. Totalism destroys this harmony between mankind and her environment. In conjunction with the mobilist Heraclitus being overshadowed by the totalist Plato as an influential thinker in ancient Greece in the 4th century B.C., we can easily note totalism’s ideological victory, at least temporarily, and from this follows also alienation’s invasion – as rapid as it is destructive – of man’s conception of himself and the world.
Pantheos is the Universe as the divine. Because there is something rather than nothing – there is after all a life, a world – this something is equivalent to God: the Universe is God. If God exists, God must be the Universe. It would be pointless for an existing God to be separate from the Universe, since God does not have any need whatsoever to be a soul of any kind, separated from a body. The Universe is in fact characterised by expanding bounty, not by a struggle over insufficient resources, like life on Earth, which means that God never has to be manipulated away from an infirm body of limited durability in order to live on somewhere else, liberated from this body. Consequently God is immanent rather than transcendent, and physics is not some substandard representation or copy of divine mathematics, which totalist thinkers from Plato during antiquity to Alain Badiou in our own era are constantly drawn to believe. God is physics and physics is God. Mathematics is merely the human being’s approximatic tool for trying to catch up to, describe and thus understand God. Pantheos is infinite multiplicity beyond infinite multiplicity, the multiplicity of multiplicities as the One. Pantheos is Spinoza’s god, and the syntheists celebrate him at midsummer, which is followed by the Panthea quarter.
Here it is important to understand that time is probably the most mysterious concept within both philosophy and physics. Even if totalist-oriented philosophers such as Plato and scientists such as Einstein in some strange way were to be proven correct in that time is an illusion, they still do not succeed in thinking of the world without a metatime within which this illusory time is presumed to exist. Even if Einsteinian mathematics succeeds in magically tinkering with time by turning it into an extra dimension in connection with space, and thereby, for example, forcing it to move backwards as well as forwards, there is no proof whatsoever that any such time as an extra dimension in connection with space actually exists in physical reality. Nobody has yet succeeded in turning the uncompromising arrow of time, which inexorably moves from the past into the future through a now which is in constant motion (at the very moment that you speak the word now it has been supplanted by yet another now and has therefore advanced to become a then). This explains why duration stubbornly bounces back as a metatime every time the Platonists try to convert it into an illusion. It is quite simply impossible to get past time, and already with time as god, Entheos thus is necessary in syntheology.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The consequence of this is that, if we try to avoid asha or anchibasie as an onto-epistemological foundation, it becomes necessary to deny all forms of motion at all. This means that all motion without exception must be regarded as illusory. Parmenides is the Greek philosopher who draws this logically necessary conclusion, and with Parmenides the revolt against Heraclitus’ pioneering, counter-intuitive, but nevertheless logical insights is born. Parmenides’ ambition is fulfilled by the physicists Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein when they create a world view where all motion is illusory in a Platonist block universe, where the various forms of laws and determinism in a frozen space–time precede everything else. The problem is however that mathematics does not precede physics. Existence is not primarily mathematical (ideal) and secondarily physical (actual), as Plato claims. It is merely physical. We quite simply do not live in some form of Einsteinian block universe, however tidy this might look on the drawing board; we live de facto in a considerably more complicated Bohrian network universe.
Thereafter we only have to reverse the addition to get subtraction, the temporarily negative addition – neither more nor less. In the next step, we build further with multiplication and division as shortcuts to increasingly complex additions and subtractions. And so on, and so forth. But we never leave eternalism within mathematics, which of course ultimately is applied eternalism par excellence. Mobilist existence outside mathematical construction does not take any notice of this however; it is not the least bit more mathematical than it is eternalist. All such things are merely illusory conceptions that are nourished by our inadequate albeit functional aids for navigating the turmoil of existence. It is important to note here that mathematics does not distinguish itself from physics as some kind of latter-day emergence – no such suddenly arisen mystical degree of complexity is needed – rather, this separation actually occurs right at the same moment that mathematics starts to come into use at all. The structured fantasy sets off in one direction, the chaotic reality in another. We live in a radically relationalist universe – not in a mathematical one. We must not follow the autistic Plato and mistake mathematics’ tempting simplifications and fancy symmetries for endlessly complex reality per se. Mathematics is merely our eternalised way of trying to understand a mobilist environment that constantly evades our descriptions of it, and at the end of the day this must also apply to mathematical formulas per se, which become tangible within Georg Cantor’s transfinite mathematics. According to the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, one of Whitehead’s most prominent disciples, Cantor succeeds in creating a science of infinity. Syntheism can only agree and if nothing else say thank you for the inspiring metaphors.
According to relationalism, as the Swedish philosopher of religion Matz Hammarström claims, an intra-acting interdependence between Man and his environment always prevails. Or to put the matter phenomenologically: there is no real boundary between Man’s near-world and his surrounding world. All phenomena that Man is confronted with already include himself ontologically. Then even epistemology, and ultimately also ethics, must submit to this fact. Knowledge of one’s surrounding world cannot be attained without the human being herself being an integral part of the object of this knowledge, the relationalist phenomenon, whose participation must be constantly discounted in every eternalised calculation. It is here that Plato and his mathematics depart radically from mobilist thinking. For Plato, the duality that mathematics offers is a fundamental given for ontology, but existence contains no such dualities outside the world of mathematics. Phenomena can be diachronic in relation to each other, but that in itself does not mean that they are dual, which mathematics beguiles us to believe. Two phenomena can arise concurrently or in the same area, but never both at the same time. And conversely: if two things occur either at different points in time or in different places, they are thereby automatically always different phenomena.
Syntheism embraces an ethics of survival as a counterweight to immortality’s moralism, which is characteristic of the dualist philosophies’ outlooks on life. The Platonist obsession with immortality and perfection attests to its hostility vis-à-vis existence and life, a phobia of change that at its deepest level is a death worship. From syntheism’s Nietzschean perspective, Plato and his dualist heirs therefore stand out as the prophets of the death wish. Syntheism instead celebrates the eternalisation of the decisive moment, the manifestation of the One in the irreducible multiplicity, as the infinite now. All values and valuations must then be based on the infinite now as the event horizon. Eternity in time and infinity in space are not extensions of some kind in Platonist space–time of some kind, but poetically titled compact concentrations of passionate presence, as Heideggerian-inspired nodes in Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism. Eternity in time and infinity in space can only meet in the infinite now, in temporality’s minimised freezing, rather than in some kind of maximised extension. We are thus not eternal creatures because we are immortal, but because we can think and experience eternity as a logical as well as an emotional representation of the infinite, focused to the current moment. Which in turn means that the syntheist transcendence is localised inside rather than outside the immanence.
If spoken language constituted the first dimension in the complex universe of language, written language must have appeared as pure magic when it gained a foothold as the second dimension and in a heartbeat enabled the building of the first civilisations and empires in history. And it is exactly thus – as (dangerous) magic – that Plato portrays writing in the dialogue Faidros. It is sufficient to imagine how impressive the first agricultural temples must have appeared in comparison with nomadism’s unassuming, temporary earthen floors for rain dancing which preceded them. With the arrival of the printing press, humanity entered the third mass medial dimension in the universe of language. Now it was accessibility – written texts suddenly became much cheaper – and the speed of the production of text that impressed to such a degree that the entire activity suddenly shone with a magical glow.
In his work, Badiou in particular discusses the theological revolution that is introduced with Georg Cantor’s transfinite mathematics. The reason why Cantor’s calculations are called transfinite is that with them he proves that a greater cardinality (a measure of the size of a quantity) is always possible. Mathematics can very well provide a number for the totality, but never totalise the number per se. Cantor quite simply proves that mathematics is always open, and then, according to Badiou, there is no reason that physics also could be open either. Cantor’s transfinite mathematics thereby pulls the rug out from under the totalist tradition within philosophy and theology, and at the same time, it confirms the mobilist tradition’s sudden upper hand under informationalism. Zoroaster and Heraclitus all at once appear considerably more contemporary and clear-sighted than Paul and Plato.
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).
The syntheist biologist and complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman investigates the metaphysical significance of emergences in his book Reinventing The Sacred. Kauffman points out that there is nothing built into physics from the start that says that it should emerge and give rise to chemistry, in the same manner that there is nothing built into chemistry from the beginning that says that it should emerge and give rise to biology. Neither chemistry’s nor biology’s future births are in any mysterious way preprogrammed within the Big Bang at the genesis of the Universe. Rather, emergences tend to occur quite suddenly, and quite independently of all previously applying laws of nature. They thereby add an increased complexity to the Universe, rather than just develop something built in beforehand, as the totalist determinists from Plato via Newton to Einstein interpret the function of emergences.
Reductionism quite simply assumes that the Universe and its history follow a preordained trajectory, which in some mysterious way is preprogrammed even in the Big Bang. Bizarrely enough, the actual creation of the Universe must therefore be both well-planned, immediate and long since concluded. Kauffman replies that this absurd idea – the reductionist illusion – arises because philosophers and scientists are fixated on only following the hierarchies from the top down, as if things cannot be anything other or more and greater than the sum of their constituent parts. But if one instead studies the hierarchies from the bottom up along the arrow of time – contrary to the masochistic fantasy of how spiritual power and thereby also physical existence must be structured from the top down – one discovers how suddenly arising emergences change the entire playing field once and for all through contingently introducing new phenomena into existence, which in turn contingently give rise to new paradigms in history. Emergences quite simply generate new laws and rules in at least their own region of the Universe, without these specific behavioural patterns having existed anywhere else previously. Thereby it is proven that the arrow of time is real – rather than illusory, as Plato, Newton and Einstein imagine it to be – and determinism is thus dead.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58