The Limits of Science to know Reality without a Thing-in-Itself

Mind, Matter, Will, and Being

Lightning in A Bottle
“'Yes.' Omar sighed. 'When it comes to recovered memory, some opt for minimum coverage. They wake up in a dark room with a flashlight in their hand, and have no interest in knowing how they found the flashlight without first having a flashlight.'” ~from Chapter Two of Icarus Transfigured

When it comes to lightning in a bottle, science’s explanation is always in terms of the bottle and never the lightning. Science can examine, at a distance, the electricity of the brain, but it cannot tell you how this inscrutable neural chemistry creates thoughts, memories, and perceptions—or even what thoughts, memories, and perceptions are in themselves. By its reductivist credo, it must equate process with what things are in themselves, and insist the latter is materially reducible from the former.

To this end, reductivists are not dualists when it comes to the brain: that is to say they do not believe mind and matter are separate things. Simply put, mind is a biochemical byproduct of matter, and nothing more. However, there is no clear empirical demonstration of this, for though science holds that thoughts arise from neurochemical processes, what is demonstrated when it tinkers with brain chemistry is not the direct creation of thoughts but rather the direct creation of physical processes that trigger feelings and impulses that lead to thoughts. Beyond this, thoughts—even manipulated thoughts—cannot be isolated as things-in-themselves under a microscope.*

Schopenhauer also argued mind and matter were identical, but he means something entirely different by his claim. For him, mind and matter are metaphysically the same thing, not physically the same thing as science contends. It is mind alone that imposes the idea of differentiation on mind and matter, for mind is not only a precondition of matter in thought, but also a precondition of itself as thought. When we seek to examine mind or matter as an exercise, we are, to use Schopenhauer’s analogy, trying to see the eye that sees everything but itself, and resultantly we cannot find mind in matter or matter in mind because mind is both the barrier and the medium by which we conduct the exercise.

“In short, I, as a perceiving subject insisting on an object to contemplate, impose duality where none transcendentally exists. This difficulty can be appreciated when, like Hume, I go to look for myself in my thoughts and find only the thought of myself looking for myself. I must be a perceiver to have a perception, but I can never know myself outside the act of perceiving myself as a perceiver. It is yet one more intractable infinity loop that cannot be resolved by logic or experience. ” ~from Omar's letter, Chapter Seven of Icarus Transfigured

Thought is transcendental but not strictly noumenal by our human perspective, as it has phenomenal reality in the dimension of time: that is, ideas in a forward succession as we generate them. Regardless, these ideas do not have necessary or determined order as they appear to our consciousness, which means that which instigates their arrangement (a willing reason) does not itself adhere to the laws of causation, which determine a cause and effect temporal sequence. This is to say, the interplay of ideas and ideas, and ideas and actions, displays free association that is not simply transcendental by experience but also noumenal: i.e., the will that wills lies outside the plane of causality.

“For since reason itself is not an appearance and is not subject at all to any conditions of sensibility, no temporal sequence takes place in it even as to its causality, and thus the dynamical law of nature, which determines the temporal sequence according to rules, cannot be applied to it.” ~Immanuel Kant

What Schopenhauer grasped that Kant did not was how this willing aspect of the mind was a window onto the noumenal realm: What was knowable about the unknowable thing-in-itself was it possessed will, which only a willing mind could conceive as an idea. Deductively, will is not simply a mysterious description of how matter operates, but it is essential to the very character of mind that displays a more complex version of it as a seemingly independent feature. This can be appreciated if you think about the nature of intuition: What causes us to have spontaneous insights into things? Especially insights that spring from nowhere with no logically connected phenomenal stimulus to prompt them? My intuition is not caused by anything—it simply is. Because this independent feature (call it reason) is not determined by causality at the level of actualization,* the same applies to the will that wields it. Resultantly, the will of mind, like mind itself, cannot be found in the black box of the causally reductive physical brain.

Let us put this in scientific terms: If one proceeds from a purely mechanical model in replicating the brain, one would not have consciousness. This can be likened to building a radio receiver where no one has yet conceived of a radio transmission. The machinery of the radio does not simply self-generate in intuiting a purpose for itself where it can have no prior knowledge of a purpose. Means and ends must coincide and evolve together out of the darkness, where one half is in the phenomenal sphere and the other lies in the noumenal. Intuitive will, being transcendental, is the connecting thread between what is seen in consciousness and what is not seen in unconsciousness.

Mind exists (persists) in time as a fact, but the “matter” (or appearance) of our individual thoughts, so to speak, cannot be shown to exist physically in space. In the Kantian/Schopenhauerian view, mind is not something separate from its physical incarnation (brain matter), but another dimension of the brain that cannot account for itself in spatial representation. This is why science cannot—nor will it even be able to—show not only how mind as a thing-in-itself emerges from neurochemicals, but also how it materially structures understanding.

As we will discuss in the next round of entries, it is proposed that the mind must be a machine in a very literal sense, one operating according to complex algorithms. Roger Penrose, one of the most distinguished physicists of his generation, argues against this, and using arguments that mirror Kant’s view that the essential wiring of consciousness is synthetic and not formally logical. (Penrose offers examples we have already covered, namely the Halting Problem and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, to make his point.) Those who rebut his argument accuse him of ignoring details, since their defense centers on the intricacies of brain physiology and computer science and our growing knowledge base of both. Tellingly, there is nothing in this defense on how the two can or should converge. Again, details are not “big picture”—neither in lurching piecemeal assemblages nor as ends in themselves. So it is less a task for Penrose to refute the empirical minutiae of brain physiology and algorithms point for point, and more a task for believers in artificial intelligence to remove the deal-breaking obstacle of paradox-generating reductive logic.

“Man’s practical occupations are as cataloger and mapmaker. The science of the brain is itself a glorified form of mapmaking, for the brain is not so much the point of departure for our understanding as the point of arrival. Psychology, beyond positive pharmacology, is barely a second cousin to neurophysiology. Whereas the latter must make do with maps, the former must make do with postcards. ” ~from Omar's letter, Chapter Thirteen of Icarus Transfigured 

(*We may point to hotspots in an MRI brain scan and say atomic activity “here” corresponds to particular thoughts “there”, but this causality is like linking light coming in under a door with the door itself. What we see in brightly lit regions in the brain is not the actual “stuff” of our thoughts. Excited atoms no more explain a reminiscence of a crayon drawing from childhood than excited atoms explain a living organism. Yes, electricity “appears” to link the two, but something profound is missing in the explanation; and the missing part is inescapably connected to the black hole of sensibility, where time and being share a degree of relationship less articulated by space and being.

Science is forced to rationalize the world from its splintered spyglass perspective: to assume that the mechanics of things is explanation enough to account for their being. In its areas of expertise, science does amazingly well, but its imagination is that of a reverse enigineer who deduces process from being, not being itslef. Do we become God in manipulating genes, where our creation of genes is not from scratch but from pre-existing genes? Is anyone but a scientist convinced that manipulation of this order is the thing-in-itself?)

(*Again, there may be a loose causal link between certain biological impulses and the character of certain thoughts, but the actual order and content of these thoughts is unique to each individual.)

Automobile, Futurist painting by Balla

Where Metaphysics and Physics Overlap
One of Schopenhauer’s great insights was in explaining how it was mind and matter can function seamlessly together, as when an acrobat’s will and body move as a single thought through space, and without requiring the acrobat being conscious of any one body part or its location throughout the gesture. For Schopenhauer, as mind and matter are one in the same as a noumenal concern, so too are causation and matter as a phenomenal concern. It follows from this that as mind wills matter, matter wills mind, and the two cannot be separated in a cause and effect relationship in experience. (English philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, characterized this enigmatic state of affairs as “the ghost in the machine”, although the idea originates with Schopenhauer.)

To repeat, we never see mind when we look at object relationships, even though mind prefigures establishing these relationships. Thus, we can say matter and causation are the same thing scientifically, even though here we are mixing apples and oranges in comparing an object to an idea; and yet, transcendentally speaking all objects are ideas. Science would consider it odd to say matter and causation are the same thing, but in their own vocabulary they readily grasp how mass and energy are the same thing. (And, subsequent to reason, energy is “the stuff” of thought where ideas “exist”.)

Again recalling Kant, causation is never perceived in objects. It is only conceived in the mind synthetically as arising out of actions where objects are involved: objects as objects do not cause themselves. At a subatomic level, matter as energy is always active. Indeed, at this level our concepts of space and time begin to break down along with our notion of causation, for there is no larger differentiated context (apart from measuring radioactive deterioration of specific particles) in which we can even detect a time flow. This is proto-causation, where incorruptible energy is not subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Here we begin to see in an empirical sense what Schopenhauer means by matter being causation-in-itself. Causation-in-itself is only a way to describe the potentiality latent in matter, as causation cannot arise prior to matter assuming a mode of action in space and time where the Second Law of Thermodynamics plays out. Before space and time are applied, what will become causation in experience exists in matter noumenally (outside experience) as will. At the place where we join the event as spatial/temporal/causal witnesses, will (to the degree we can objectify it) has become energy. Thus, in much the way energy and mass are physically one in the same, will and matter are metaphysically one in the same. As pointed out by Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer hit upon this idea in the century before Einstein came up with his famous equation for mass and energy.

As pointed out by Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer hit upon this idea in the century before Einstein came up with his famous equation for mass and energy.

Will, Élan Vital, and The Limits of Ontology in Science
Though indirect, something of the Noumenon can be determined within the confines of empirical experience: namely, Will. From Schopenhauer’s perspective, this Will is unconscious and blind in itself. As animate or inanimate matter, it provides metaphysical motivation for all the Laws of Nature, but it cannot intentionally direct outcomes beyond the irreducible fact of itself in all things. Physical outcomes are determined by Laws of Nature, even if the ontological impetus behind phenomena cannot be discovered. However, through mind, Will gains another dimension in which to realize itself, and where space, time, and causation dictates limits to matter and its physical processes, mind exhibits a degree of freedom. This gives living organisms limited autonomy to act in Nature, yet because the Will is the only will (as determined by the philosopher) the nature of all living organisms is bound by it.

Free will and determinism aside, the crucial aspect of Schopenhauer’s concept of Will is its core noumenal dimension. Henri Bergson’s Vitalism paralleled much that was explored earlier by Schopenhauer, as with how immediate experience and intuition were equal to or greater than rational and scientific thought. This is keenly demonstrated in aesthetic experiences, where, by Bergson’s measure, they strike closer to underlying reality as qualitative experience than what science gets at through quantitative experience. Bergson was right in thinking his élan vital (vital impetus or force) linked to consciousness, yet the invisibility of it, emerging as it did in an age of growing scientific prowess and materialism, was belittled as an unnecessary assumption about the nature of physiology: A steam locomotive required coal and not will to be explained. However, the physiological distinction does not negate what is demonstrated by organisms but not shown to be in organisms: that is, an ontology that accounts for both an impetus to be and an impetus to do.

(*We do not doubt the existence of gravity in absence of a force carrier on the grounds that we see its effects. Similarily, we should not doubt the existence of will because we cannot physically locate it in matter, since here too we see its effects. Indeed, all the essential forces of Nature, including will, lie beyond our plane of direct perception. Quarks and bosons have structure as deduced by mathematics; Will lies deeper in the pool.)

Science Goes in Search of Metaphysics
“In truth, Lovelock’s principle has merit, though as a science it has few facts on the ground to support it, much like the giant who is too large to get under a microscope but is nevertheless appreciated for providing shade at picnics. ” ~from Omar's letter, Chapter Twenty-six of Icarus Transfigured

One may reasonably argue physical matter adheres to the Laws of Physics without requiring the notion of a will, but the internal logic of molecules in no way addresses the blunt reality of a living organism that possesses many magnitudes of complexity greater than its underlying molecular structure—a structure that, in turn, employs its own logic of locomotion and choice. Yet Natural Selection rejects the idea of a will before the fact of a thing, even if one can, in instances of living organisms, talk about the appearance of will after the fact. Accident, where all else is excluded, may follow its own logic in a chain of events, but it is only by the in medias res crook of reason we divorce blind Evolution from its many sighted fruits.

One of the earliest shots fired across Evolution’s bow was James Lovelock’s Gaia Principle. The Gaia Principle takes a holistic view to ecology, where an attempt is made to explain the balance between biological organisms and the ecosystems they share. This balance arises, according to the principle, from cooperation that is neither reductive nor atomized as a thing into itself, yet somehow comes about where organisms work collectively on their environment to maintain a status quo. Other than proposing feedback loops and naturally occurring algorithms, the scientific nature of the cooperation is not clear. Regardless, the principle was an attempt to account for a finetuning found in natural phenomena.

Reality is simply too orderly and prone to extraordinary coincidence to be “just happening” without rhyme or reason; and if material reductivism gives no account for the rhyme or reason, then what does? At some level this is appreciated in science, especially where mind is given due consideration beyond being the mere “residue” of living organisms. Culture, which in turn is the residue of mind, has a remarkable dynamic; and from the record of history, it displays predictive aspects, which science would be remiss in ignoring. Richard Dawkin developed the idea of the meme, where ideas follow their own evolutionary track, though this insight barely rises above a level of anemic descriptive of culture, where an obvious comparison between mind and matter via the analogy of Evolution was bound to be made. Even more daring this—and even Lovelock’s Gaia Principle—, we have Kevin Kelly’s scheme of the technium, where technology and ideas appear to will themselves. In his theory, a technological idea tends to have many authors at roughly the same time, and appears only when other technologies are in place to make it an obvious next step. He stops short in embracing a metaphysical will behind materials and ideas, yet hints at a kind of convergence of the two that appears more teleological than happenstance. Like Lovelock, he really cannot say what he scientifically means by his self-propelling forces.

What Kelly and Lovelock propose is not so farfetched when you see how synchronous ideas flow naturally out of a nexus of Schopenhauer’s Unconscious Will and Hegel’s Unconscious Idea.

“The comic strip character Dennis The Menace featuring a young boy in a red and black striped shirt debuted on March 12, 1951 in 16 newspapers in the United States. Three days later in the UK a character called Dennis The Menace, wearing a red and black striped jumper made his debut in children's comic The Beano. Both creators have denied any causal connection.”~Quoted from Wikipedia on Synchronicity

Every idea, in Hegelian fashion, has its day, from triceratops to Jimi Hendrix to iPods. Yet as reductivists must admit by their reasoning, there can be no true point to reality since only circumstance and serendipity explain beneficial complexity. Evolution, which is deduced as a plays-no-favorites competitive process from empirical evidence, is barely capable of thinking past its evidence; and it is only in the form of a Hail Mary Pass (namely, the late emergence of willful consciousness in living organisms) that order can be imposed on chaos as a secondary consideration. Why do ideas progress as they do? Because, scientific reason goes, blind Evolution accidentally grew a brain. Regardless, some in science are at least willing to describe the intractable problem, if not embrace the only possible answer.

Matter, Antimatter, and Preference
Current physics tells us that for every negatively charged electron created in the early Universe, there had to be its opposite: a positively charged electron, or positron. Unfortunately, when matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate one another. As all opposite particles eventually find each other, how is it that we come to have any Universe at all after such mutually assured self-destruction? The thinking is this: for every billion particles that are destroyed by their counterparts, there is one extra particle to survive; and it in turn went on to make up the Universe we presently find ourselves in. This one extra particle of matter per billion* is yet one more mystery, since asymmetry is obviously needed for any Universe to exist.

Add to this the idea that all living molecules found on Earth are left-handed when viewed structurally. This means the Universe showed not only a preference for matter over antimatter, but also a particular orientation for how it constructs life. Are these conditions too mere accidents in a Universe of just-so accidents? The very notion of preference either indicates a blunt scientific fact, or willfulness in selection. Again, only a metaphysical will can explain such preferences.

Asymmetry is presented by some cynical scientists to refute the romantic notion that cosmic symmetry underlies reality: Asymmetry, it is argued, is not only needed to make the Laws of Thermodynamics work, but everything else, too. However—and perhaps because of its “romantic” underpinnings in the human heart—symmetry is not trivially a hobgoblin of our logic. Although I have (and will further) undercut science’s attempts to find symmetry in its own line of reasoning where it offers such symmetry as analytical proof, I only do this to remove symmetry from an earthly sphere, where it is more aesthetic than demonstrated, so it may be better understood in its true sphere of identity. The symmetry we seek in all things is a transcendental longing for our noumenal half, even if we have difficulty finding examples of said symmetry in our phenomenal world of appearance.

(*Again, we have a “miracle” being defined strictly by statistical odds and not by the extraordinary nature of what is actually happening. To repeat, science believes only in the luck of blind mathematics, and so is content with the austere appeal of this one-in-a-billion answer. Here, asymmetry, as a philosophy, is the most plausible [and convenient] explanation.

Calling asymmetry a theology, where science employs it as explanation, is fair, since one unstated objective in pointing it out is to undercut the “fable” that a Perfect Creator [being supposedly bound to perfect symmetry in the scientific imagination] could have no other choice but a symmetrical solution in how He created the Universe; and since the Universe is demonstrably asymmetrical, this suffices to refute the idea of a Perfect Creator. Somehow, it is reasoned, asymmetry favors randomness as architect, yet this does not take into account how asymmetry also appears to be the preferred path to irredeemable chaos.)

 

Mind, Matter, Will, and The Finetuned Universe

Problems with a Matter-based Universe
Einstein said that if we remove matter, space and time cease to exist. Yet we need not appeal to Kant to undermine this matter-centric view of the Universe; quantum physics does it for us.

By expanding our definition of reality to include mind, it is not a question of removing space and time with matter but removing them with mind. Space and time may indeed go away with the phenomenal concept of matter, but they were never real in themselves to begin with. In removing matter, we are only removing its phenomenal ideation, not its noumenal identity, where it and mind are identical. We know from quantum physics that an observer, as a thinking, perceiving subject, affects the state of subatomic particles by the very act of his observation of them. Mind, by this god-like demonstration to alter the underlying structure of matter at a microcosmic level, is therefore something that cannot be left out of a complete account of reality at a macrocosmic level. Its inclusion renders the materialist view insufficient in understanding the nature of the Universe.

Mind/matter duality is not simply a paradox in our experience and logic, but scientifically speaking it undermines the materialist’s desired goal to join quantum physics and gravity in a unified field theory. This unity of reality does not arise from seeing the Universe as being wholly matter-based, but as a co-creation of mind and matter, which is a transcendental unity that can never be scientifically investigated. As a consequence, a part of the picture is missing, and gravity and quantum mechanics cannot be reconciled since mind is seen as affecting only one set of components but not the other.

The compelling argument for mind being a principle player in reality lies not merely in its quasi-mystical nature, but in the strength and creativity of the very ideas it generates. From the discovery of the processes of the Natural World to the intricacies of self-creation found in mathematics, technology, philosophy, and the arts, it boggles the mind when it pauses to consider its own accomplishments. As Hegel would agree, we see not only structure in history through these ideas, but also a kind of identity to the ideas themselves: an ontology that, once brought to light, seems to have always been with us.

Observers in A Fine-tuned Universe
“Why should blind laws conveniently favor order over chaos, especially given Chaos Theory prides itself on providing theorems that show chaos is not only inevitable, but determined? Complexity Theory has tried to find method in the madness, but has only turned up artful fractals, which naturally exhaust at the level of infinity. ” ~from Omar's letter, Chapter Twenty-six of Icarus Transfigured

It is not simply an assertion to propose that the Universe appears to be fine-tuned, but because appearance is reality for science, the Universe is fine-tuned.

The dynamic of any debate is greatly improved by the narrowness of its scope. For example, the advantageous nature of stable particles in creating a stable Universe need not make the leap to anything else: i.e., the advantage of life over non-life, the advantage of intelligent life over simpler life, etc... Yet as scales of chance move up the cosmological ladder, they become more and more unlikely to the human imagination when we try to deduce the whole from its parts. Yes, the Universe is hostile once you get outside the shell of Earth’s delicate atmosphere, but this dire state does not strengthen the claim nothing is fine-tuned about the Universe. It only magnifies the improbability we should be here at all without something on the order of an extraordinary accommodation being made.

At the center of every human investigation lies the enigma of being, of how individual thoughts connect to a whole to form not only the substance of our thoughts and actions but also the nodal point that constitutes a distinct identity that is aware of itself while it thinks and acts. Science, to the degree it contemplates existential matters, begins with an “observer”, assuming being and its activity as preconditions for an observer. From here, it leapfrogs over the unfathomable connectivity of mind, matter, will, and being to get to a fine-tuned Universe, where conditions are favorable to allow for the observer’s existence. When the observer and fine-tuned Universe are looked at as bookends in this way, what we see is an extraordinary chain of coincidences between them. Logic so applied, being hermetic by definition, can only suggest causal relationships between things and never the ontological necessity that prefigure them. In a thorough metaphysical view, there are no coincidences, for the observer and the fine-tuned Universe are the same thing because mind and matter are metaphysically the same thing. No true barrier exists between mind and matter outside the one imposed by a point of view (the observer). Thus, a fine-tuned Universe is precisely that.

True, we cannot freely will what we observe as phenomena, as much of the Universe is inhospitable to our biological needs, yet we are nonetheless the thinking aspect of the Universe. One of the consequences of this is, in absence of a perceiver (an observer), the Universe, as it is understood in perception, does not exist. It is not a question of a fine-tuned Universe allowing for an observer, but (if one insists on a pecking order) of an observer allowing for a fine-tuned Universe.

Approaching this difficult idea from a different direction, physicist John Wheeler argued effect may indeed precede cause as a matter of mind, in the way the history of the Universe is only an effect after is it so conceived as a cause. Mind not only chooses between wave and particle states on observation, but it can also delay this determination until after an experiment is conducted, effectively uncoupling cause and effect from a determined time sequence. Mind, by this demonstration according to Wheeler, is made the retroactive creator of reality. More mind blowing still: If an observer is needed to collapse waves into particles to make them concrete reality, then what kind of Cosmic Mind is needed to collapse quantum flux into a universe?*

This is to say that, whatever the Universe is in itself, it is that in-itself state with or without an observer to observe it. If we remove the observer as an oppositional idea required to see the Universe as something out there, we must remove any notion of space, time, or causation. Consequently, there is no Universe where there is no point-specific observer—there is only The Noumenal Thing-in-Itself.

(*According to philosopher Bishop Berkeley, what I do not perceive immediately in my mind, be it milk in my refrigerator or the Universe beyond the sun, exists ideally in the Mind of God. A Cosmic Mind becomes the placeholder for reality.)

The Anthropic Principle: You Are Here
If one holds that the Copernican Principle is true in denying man any special standing in the Universe, then what manner of explanation can account for a complexity that is as delicately balanced as it is higher?

For the Universe to escape chaos and establish order, the entropy of the early universe must have been very low. Paradoxically, low entropy is less stable than high entropy, because high entropy tends to uniform disorder, which is not conducive for order to emerge. Still, the Universe miraculously exists.

Many regard it a pointless question to ask how we got here if here is where we find ourselves. If reductivism, where married to logical positivism, is to be the practical place to start, then we must begin with the idea that science provides sufficient reason to explain any phenomenon, and no special circumstances are required for natural processes to play out, regardless where they lead. The Anthropic Principle was born to point out the obvious fact of our possibility, though for the sole purpose of clouding the equally obvious fact of our improbability.

The Anthropic Principle comes in two versions: a weak form that emphasizes the unlikely fact we should live in an agreeable neighborhood in a Universe favorable to the emergence of life. This view can be put as follows: “where conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist.” In the strong form of the principle, the emphasis is on the uncanny fact that the laws of physics governing our Universe favor the emergence of life: For example, were the strong nuclear force to be two-percent stronger, then stars would burn through their fuel in minutes and not millions of years, and resultantly life could not have emerged. From the just-so stability of atomic particles to the “Golden Age”* of the Universe we presently find ourselves in, two competing camps have found common cause in using the Anthropic Principle to point out these improbable states: theistic advocates for Intelligent Design, and nontheistic advocates for multiverses.

For the latter camp, it is less about emphasizing how the Universe is fine-tuned or how our situation requires special accommodations within it, and rather about how the Anthropic Principle comes into play simply because there are a multitude of parallel universes. Since all possible combinations of physical constants would be exhausted by multiplicity, our favorable combination would exist at any rate. In other words, it is not a matter of fate consecutively rolling the dice a million times to get a one-in-a-million chance universe, but it can roll the dice a million times concurrently. We, therefore, are not lucky that an inhabitable universe should arise in a sequence of a million random throws, because opportunity does not wait on a right time but a right place: temporal sequence need not apply. (Numbers aside, it is impossible to see how undetectable universes are an improvement over an undetectable Intelligent Designer.)

More crucially from science’s perspective, things like “special parameters” do not seem so special when you get rid of the inexplicable in quantum physics and insist on a literalist interpretation of “natural” reality, even if what you end up with makes no natural sense. Thus, believing in the existence of splintering parallel universes is more reasonable than believing in what you actually see: i.e., particles that are more phantom than real. For literalists, the Many World Interpretation is admittedly inelegant (and untestable), though infinitely preferable to the quasi-mystical (albeit testable) Copenhagen Interpretation, if only because it allows for inexhaustible chances to get it right by a buckshot approach to creating parameters. Otherwise you are left with mystery, and mystery has a nasty habit of looking like miracle.

This reductive end-run around improbability is only attractive as a mathematical hedge, since no empirical evidence of any parallel universe is offered. From the standpoint of Occam’s razor, Intelligent Design has far fewer moving parts. It may be as improbable as parallel universes, but it is more comprehensive to the imagination because it accounts for everything, and not just opportunity.

(*If one accepts that space and time do not apply to the Noumenon, and that we, as observers, are natural extensions of that Noumenon, then there is no age but a Golden Age.)

The Copernican Principle: You are Here
The Copernican Principle holds that, if the Universe is cosmologically constant and homogeneous, then we geographically occupy no privileged place in it. This gave rise to The Puddle Analogy: A puddle would think itself special by virtue of it being a puddle, since, by definition, it could have no notion of another puddle where it sees no other puddle. A puddle, therefore, cannot have certain knowledge of its uniqueness.

This argument is more a parable about conceit than a demonstration of fact. Life may exist elsewhere in the Universe, but this, to date, is only conjecture. Conceit does not make extraterrestrial life more likely simply because science judges conceit’s presumption to be morally indefensible. Regardless, even if other life should exist in the Universe, there is no reason to suppose that its existence disallows for finetuning as a general idea. More to metaphysics of the matter: The miraculous fact of a thinking puddle that reflects on its own puddleness is assumed for the sake of the analogy, and with no explanation for how we get to such a thing.

Regardless, what we have in this debate between accident and no-accident is a self-reinforcing tautology, where an observed universe is equal to an observer, even if how we get to this place is contested. Reductive science has never made a convincing case for the reality we experience being the sole product of the lowest common denominator of randomness, and though many in the anthropic camp have their own materialist agendas in pointing this out, they have nevertheless turned a spotlight on the weakness of the Copernican case. This being said, our just-so Universe is not the result of a coin toss, or a lowest common denominator of randomness. It is the outcome of a self-directed metaphysical will, which, because it is immaterial, creates frustrating and unsatisfying tautology for the materially minded.

An Object Lesson in Being and Will
“Regardless, what limits our knowledge on one level binds our souls on another. Schopenhauer and Kant provided a metaphysical foundation for something the Buddhists had known from antiquity: Everything in the Universe, from every atom to every galaxy, is—transcendentally speaking—the one same thing. We perceive this thing as being something other than ourselves, but this is only an accident of our birth. As children of Prometheus, we pay a price for having stolen fire from the gods: amnesia every time we go to look for ourselves in our thoughts. ” ~from Omar's letter, Chapter Seven of Icarus Transfigured

Above the level where quantum entanglement occurs, one wonders what role space and time play in defining or limiting the identity of living organisms.

I am reminded of a story I once heard about the discovery of an ailing plant long believed to be extinct. As it was the only specimen of its kind, a cutting was removed and flown to the other side of the world in hopes the plant could be nursed back to health and the species saved. Some time past with little progress, but the effort was eventually rewarded. One day a researcher came into the lab to discover the revitalized plant had bloomed. Shortly thereafter, it was discovered that the dying plant on the other side of the world had likewise recovered and bloomed—and at precisely the same time.

This mystery can be locally appreciated in the behavior of groups of organisms, as when birds in flight move in step, resembling a flag rippling through the air, or ants behave as though a single organism with a single thought. It can be argued from a Schopenhauerian view of Kant, that particles as waves, or waves as energy, or energy as matter, is all that exists as a physical fact.* Put another way, nothing cannot exist, for what we perceive as being nothing (or empty space) is an irreconcilable aspect of the Noumenon. As the processes of phenomena builds up from the molecular level to the level of organic and inorganic compounds, and then finally to living organisms that achieve a degree of consciousness, an underlying single identity is never fully abandoned or forgotten; and no amount of perceived space and time between things and events can cloak the intuited truth of it.

(*It is supposed in the Standard Model that space has physical reality without a physical force: though perceived as empty, it is “charged”, or filled with a Higgs energy field; and when we say “something comes from nothing”, we mean particles gain mass from this field, as in the case of a Higgs Boson. This is not a metric of dimensionality, but a way to describe pre-particle-ized, pre-sensory energy, which must be characterized, at least as a technicality, as undifferentiated.)

Design by Another Name
With concepts like The Anthropic Principle, we see theoretical science, with increasingly less to do, turning its gaze to the semblance of a big picture, yet striving to keep one foot in reductivism while trying to explain the extraordinary circumstances of a being that reflects upon the fact of itself. Where ontology is set aside, an unproductive circular debate ensues involving irreducible tautology. Some may be willing to accept a metaphysical force as an end-run around this dilemma, yet remain skeptical about the existence of A Divine Intelligence. The link to this part of the equation is not a purely causal sequence but a progressive sequence, since the foundation of any view of progress is value, which, like mind/matter, must also be a question of ontology and not mere mechanical process.

The whole is noumenal, while the parts are phenomenal. Science concerns itself with the latter since only phenomena are observed and display causal connectivity. The whole does not cause its parts in strict observation, for the parts share causality only among themselves, where the whole is only deduced as arising from these connections. Yet the whole prefigures causality as a phenomenal matter. It cannot be found as a thing-unto-itself in either physical means or ends.

Still, as the immaterial whole, the whole’s relationship to its parts is not simply that of neutral medium or container, but as its willing half. An analogy can be made here between body and being: We will our bodies, but we do not cause our bodies, or any of their internal operations. And yet, as we will our bodies, our bodies, through their internal operations, clearly will unconscious aspects of us, like our breathing, heartbeat, and many of the impulses that underlie our thoughts. Still, our bodies are made of parts, which cannot collectively or individually direct the whole of our being, since the core concept of myself as a being resides in my thoughts, which as we have concluded are not determined by the causality that defines the functions and appearance of my physical body.

If we extend this analogy from body and being to matter and mind, we can grasp the profundity of the relationship even more: Does mind reflect the will of matter, from which we perceive it to emerge physically? Or does mind direct matter as an object of its own will? Once more, we only construct a cause and effect relationship between mind and matter where we separate them as phenomena, even though this creates a Russell-like paradox for our logic—a paradox that can ONLY be resolved as a matter of metaphysics. The question remains: Even though physical laws are deducible and applicable for all physical phenomena, does this mean they are (paradoxically) as unintended as they are necessary in explaining phenomena?

We see and hear the individual instruments in the orchestra, and what they are playing is harmonious to our ears. Reductive science tells us there has never been a musical score from which they play, and that what we hear is only harmonious because it is the balance of what remains after time and optimizing Evolution have worn away the unneeded dissonance. We may call what we hear ordered and even beautiful, yet these judgments are conditioned in us by a blind process that intended nothing in making noise. The whole, therefore, cannot be a score of any kind, for the parts could not have intended it. Still, we perceive this balance of chaos as being a “score”, and as sounding “harmonious”.

From whence comes this judgment? Even if you accept a reductive view of unintended order in the Universe and our understanding of the Universe, then why should instruments want to make noise even if they did not want to make music? Because value is integral to our ontology, I argue there was never a will to make noise, only music.