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Neutral Monism -Second Page
Caution!! This page still under reconstruction
In its scope, depth, and intrinsic nature, the weltanschauung I'm proposing is the very antithesis of the Positivism or Secular \Physicals currently dominating the social fabric. What we're presently being offered is what must surely pass as an ultimate exercise in Franciscan penury. They have sought to capture the larger Reality less through an imperialist campaign of territorial expansion as through a contraction so precipitous as to threaten a 'black hole' annihilation. At times it seems as though they are trying to explain everything with nothing
Let's start by examining the insufficiency of its attempts to come to terms with its own legitimate domain of Natural Law before passing on to the outrages perpetrated upon the deeper aspects of Reality at large. Natural Law (i.e. physics and its dependent disciplines) lacks both primitive self necessity and any modicum of a reason for being. As it stands, physics cannot 'bring itself to ontology'; it can't even boast of an ontological density of " 0+ ". Ransack the trappings of the lex naturalis all you like, and you'll find among its postulates, axioms and assorted primitives, no principle of self-necessity or self-sufficiency; Its presence is at peril because its foundations do not exclude the possibility of Nonbeing, that is, as to why there should be something rather than nothing. Likewise, rummaging among its foundations will disclose no hint of purpose -of why it should be here at all.
These two lacunae must be filled from elsewhere, that is from domains that Positivism prohibits and forbids. Self-sufficiency and self-necessity can be guaranteed only by a Reality grounded upon the Ultimate Invariant of Being -an abstraction so all-inclusive as to contain the category of Non-being within itself. If it didn't, it would be at its mercy, so that indeed there might indeed have been Nothing rather than Something. [As we shall see this necessary inclusion has dire consequences which it is the mission of organic evolution to confront and work its way through]. And the reason why you'll find no principle of reason-for-being is not that there is none such, but rather that it is instrumental or utilitarian, hence pointing outside of its own province of Natural Law. Such meaning can only be conferred upon it by resources residing within a larger context. So, what is its significance? The answer is that this 'first category' -of matter- is here to serve the second -that of Agency, Consciousness, Mind & Life. This implies or at least strongly suggests that incarnation is essential to life, and further, it would be as necessary for an Eternal Being as it is for us. This notion goes back at least as far as Plotinus in the West; two of its more vocal advocates in recent times have been Miguel de Unamuno and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Positivism strictly speaking isn't at all concerned with meaning; however, once they have closed the door of the laboratory at night, to enjoy a glass of 'mild and bitter' at the local pub, meaning does come in for some cautious discussion among philosophically inclined scientists -with conclusions that at times are disarming for their surreal inversion of the commonsense perspective. Thus one theory of the origin and significance of ethics is that it is a set of drives which have somehow been contrived by the germ plasm and foisted upon us -in the interests of survivorship and competitive advantage. Now let's just stop for a moment to catch our breath. What is being suggested is that mind and consciousness and the kind of delicacy of introspections over matters of Right and Wrong are here to serve a germ plasm which is nothing more than a set of macromolecular configurations absolutely devoid of any trace of consciousness, agency or mind. So, finally, mind is here to serve matter. These notions are being advocated by some very intelligent men who have attracted a substantial following of qualified professionals, so we're not talking about a lunatic fringe, in the ordinary sense of the word.. What the hell is going on? My speculations on these matters may be found at The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.
The most urgent piece of business that must be tackled immediately is the ontological crisis. The total lack of any modicum of ontic self necessity and self sufficiency demands than an enduring connection to the realm of Transcendence be installed and maintained. Were this to be interrupted for a single instant, the entire cosmos -and us along with it- would plunge irretrievably into the bottomless pit of Nonbeing. This requirement lays upon the physicist of conceiving an appropriate bridge configuration. Clearly, whatever speculations he may come to entertain in his attempts to reach towards the Holy Grail of 'closure' must be consistent with this demand. However, I found the constraint to be a 'green herring' (courtesy of Cairn-Smith) by pointing out the direction I should be taking. It suggested how three aspects of the physical world -Quantum waves, the (neo)aether (or inertial manifold) and fermionic particles might be organized into an interface -a 'nascent' zone- coupling the realm of Potentiality to that of Existence. Though rough and ready, my approach is essentially formal -though I use the ideas of mathematics only 'metaphorically' which carries me just far enough to make my point (if you want to be unkind, you could accuse me, with some justification, of making a virtue of necessity). The idea in question may be found at this nascence link [add a bookmark] I claim no more than that it illustrates the sort of things we should be thinking about. The kind of thing I have in mind is far more important than what I have in mind.
Providing an enduring nascent bridge between Transcendence and Existence still leaves us saddled with the burden of accounting for how the cosmos was brought into existence at the moment of the 'big bang'. To claim that this was simply an unexplained random event stemming from some kind of internal instability within the depths of Being is too abrupt and leaves too much unsaid. It would imply a short circuit of sorts, given the modal, metaphysical and formal disjunction between the two realms -between cause and the effect. Featureless Being stands above time and space since both of these must willy nilly issue from it. In addition it stands modally aloof from both of the categories of spirituality and materiality, and also of infinity over finitude (of space, time [NOT Minkowskian space-time] and numerosity). It is at a higher level of modal invariance that has all deeply sequestered within its depths.
Hegel, I believe must be given the credit for coming up with a solution -although others such as Jakob Böhme had been hinting at something of the sort. I am speaking here of Hegel's dialectical method (or 'logic' as he termed it). It is his great contribution to philosophy which continues to stand its ground regardless of whatever doubts one might entertain about much of his gigantic edifice. His process is reminiscent of the 'symmetry breaking' so endeared of physics. It is through an analogue of his dialectic that I have come to add the needed extra spans to the nascent bridge connecting the domains of Transcendence and Existence. I have postulated that Being first cleaves to produce the two great branches of Logos; the μ-division upholding the first category of time space and materiality and its ψ counterpart underwriting all of the subjective attributes of the second category. This is seen as a protracted process which ends up defining a Platonic configuration -a complex protomanifold. This is followed by a sundering of actual, completed infinity, to eject finitude (which must yet remained tethered to it; the 'uncompleted' infinity cannot stand on its own). .
Time itself is caught up in its transformations, which are of it, rather than in it. It takes its primal origin from an eternal 'Now' by an epigenetic process.
Now let's turn to the question of meaning -of how Natural Law may be constituted in order to satisfy its assigned mission. What has always been a thorn in the side of the mainstream physicist has been the 'Anthropic Principle'; the cosmos seems to have been put together in such a way as to make the emergence of intelligent life possible. How can it be, asks the positivist, that natural laws which traffic in no such notions should happen to produce a universe so constituted? A lot of things have to be just right. Were neutrons 0.2% heavier they could decay into neutrons thus disturbing atomic stability. If the electromagnetic force were just a few percent weaker there would be no hydrogen hence ruling out the formation of 'normal stars. If Pauli's 'exclusion principle' were not in force, there would be no chemistry to speak of -certainly nothing from which protoplasm could take origin. If the cosmological constant were smaller than it is, the expansion of the cosmos might come to a premature halt, thereafter to start its implosive convergence before enough time had elapsed for the right kinds of stars to evolve and life to take root. If the weak interaction were stronger, supernovae would no longer throw out the heavier elements many of which are seemingly essential to protoplasmic life. Many other examples might be cited. To say that the cosmos just happened to carry this daunting potential of producing intelligence is an odd fringe benefit of grounding laws which have no such idea in mind clearly pushes coincidence beyond the bounds of acceptability. So they had to come up with something. This has been one of the justifications for 'multiple universe' theories that propose that we're just one of a possibly infinite number 'out there' and that naturally enough the one in which we find ourselves is natural precisely that having the needed characteristics making this emergence possible. With such non-Occamian brute-forcing one can prove anything,
A matter of great methodological interest is that of just how one goes about exploring this metamathematical formalism that starts at a mystery rather than ending up in one. How does one get one's hands upon a discipline that takes origin from a Unity that is an invariance of the All? Certainly not by the kind of deductive rigour familiar to mainstream mathematics. I cannot but believe that the process is essentially intuitive in a much deeper sense than that guiding the creative but conventional mathematician. Articulate structures are brought into existence in which the only guiding discipline is the their effectiveness in making sense of how the world actually came to be brought forth from Being's unitary invariance. Surely it is no coincidence that many of those active in the field have been both mathematicians and mystics -the name of Cusanus comes readily to mind. Mathematics has traditionally been the left brain's game; perhaps its now time for the right hemisphere to take a hand in the game. But it would be no job for a Leibniz. Just consider his system of monads, isolated and mutually incommunicado -not to mention the crisis of their constitution of space itself., and compare this with the kind of thing that panentheists, for example, have in mind. The Eastern mind is much more apt to find itself comfortable with this kind of thing, so that I was quite surprised to come across a website that discusses the problem of developing sets of what I would call meta-axioms for formal systems which hang from a holistic origin. I have not studied what this site has to offer, although a list of candidate axioms sound encouraging e.g.
Principle of Authentic Reality
You may find this site at: http://www.kheper.net/realities/emanation/emanation.htm
All of these vertiginous matters have been explored to some depth in my The New Monadology that I hope to install in a separate Website early in 2004..
The diagrams which follow complement those to be found in
chapter 6 of the present website.
The first -on the left- rubs home the very small part of the Larger Reality
that is contributed by the material cosmos
As the figure indicates, the realm of existence is upheld by two irradiant influxes taking their origins from the two arms of Logos. That passing up from below -in support of materiality is the more fundamental It must be ongoing, without interruption Were it to cease for a single instant, the whole of cosmic reality and the beings within it would plunge irretrievably into the bottomless pit of Nonbeing. In contrast, the ψ-Emanation from ψ-Logos appears only in support of conscious, subjective states; it vanishes during sleep and narcosis
The sleeping mind lacks the second category and as such is a strictly material entity -though configured within a substratum more subtle than crass matter. Regardless, it rests -if indirectly- upon the brain, enjoying no modicum of independence.
In summary, then, this figure portrays the domain of Natural Law -as currently accepted- as residing within the innermost layer of a concentric series:
Transcendence > Conscious Mind > Exotic manifolds of Dispositional mind > Conventional Materiality
The second, shown directly below, tells much the same story. The leftmost figure displays a more subtle Platonic irradiances -which contrast sharply with the total lack of any such contemplated by secular physicalism -as a glance at the image alongside makes clear.
The Direct Impact of Neutral Monism upon Science.
My Weltanschauung impacts Natural Science in two contrasting ways. The first has nothing to do with its ontological or metaphysical departures at all -being equally and fully applicable to the status quo philosophical stance. It is strictly within the Science camp, dealing with the extensions needed to natural law as part of the extra support needed to account for the performances delivered within the organic realm. You will find a fuller account in chapter 6 [add bookmark] What follows is a brief summary of the matter. Incidentally, according to my reckoning, these proposed extensions to classical physics call for little change in their basic constitution; All that is required is some kind of added resonance characteristic (a kind of extension to aromaticity or orbital conjugation which is a firmly established feature of organic chemistry).
An extension to Natural law is necessary to provide mind with a basis for memory that is sufficiently commodious and which sustains the richness of internal inter-connectedness -in which everything seems to be connected, rather directly, to everything else. Also it must be capable of supporting much more than 'know how' and 'know that' plus a microcosmic image of the immediate world in which we live. Even more than this it must also sustain the characteristics of individual personhood, such as those of inclination, drive and temperament. Nevertheless, the corpus of memory -or 'dispositional mind' as it is better called- is in itself strictly a machine which has at its head the mechanism of agency as a part of itself. The mind asleep is strictly a physical or 'scientific' object, though one crafted within an exotic 'phase-changed' extension of conventional matter. But what about its performance when it wakes up from deep sleep and becomes alive and conscious? Consciousness aside, are the manifestations every kind from start to finish- entirely those of a mechanical nature? Let's look first at operations of a very conservative, well established kind, where such embarrassments as those of creativity, progressive self-organization and true learning may be set upon one side, for the moment. The machinery of memory (or 'dispositional mind') is normally insufficient because of the 'play' of mechanical sloppiness to be found throughout the length and breadth of its structure. To deliver its performance with its demonstrated proficiency, this slop must be taken up in a way that 'impedance matches' the situation immediately at hand. Again, speaking in strictly formal terms -disregarding whatever may be the meaning of conscious concomitants- the machine is aligned by an ongoing 'Gödelian' input of Platonic origin -that is, coming from the extra-existential realm of Transcendence. Close the Gödelian window and the machine would run erratically, though not completely out of control. A good example here is provided in everyday conversations. Language runs on sloppy logic that is very similar to the looseness within the mental machine. Take a look at Gödel & Creativity
I am entirely beholden to Penrose for the insights presented in the above paragraph, though I am quite sure that he would be less than delighted with most of what else I have to say, within Neutral Monism.
One final thing needs to be said about the mind qua machine. I have been speaking above only of conservative performance. What about the mental growth processes of personal ontogenesis and progressive self-organization? Once more, we are in need Gödelian assistance, this time not to make appropriate mechanical alignments but to augment and extend its structure. fortunately this is done on-the-run; there is no need of shutting down the machine while this occurs. However, the latter is no longer true when speaking of the discipline of formal education focused upon leaning of every kind.
So much for the proposed additions to the canon of Natural Science. In the remaining paragraphs I will give a brief outline of the impact of the metaphysical and ontological aspects of the Weltanschauung. First of all is the need to connect the realm of existence to that of Transcendence. The figures already given is suggestive of the kind of topology that is involved; for a more detailed account, see chapter 6.. Not so far mentioned, however, is the kind of impact their necessity may have upon the scope of Natural Law needed to sustain them. As suggested in chapter 6, it leads to some ideas about the relative roles and relationships of space (as neoaether, NOT as Einstein's space/time), wave functions and particles.. What I have arrived here is a neorealism taking origin from David Bohm's Weltanschauung, though differing from it in important respects.
Secondly is the requirement that cosmic evolution shall be able to converge to a unitary Being (Omega) who shall be enabled to terminate cosmic existence. It is to be anticipated that the increasing take-over of the cosmos by organic forms bring out features of natural law that are not evident at the present juncture. Although no doubt there is life elsewhere in the cosmos, though I would have thought it unlikely that up to this point, there has been no local large-scale take-over of the inorganic planetary (and perhaps stellar) environment. But regardless, some of the speculations I have made, about the relative roles and significance of leptons and hadrons may carry implications that are testable at the present time.
Last, but definitely not the least, is the remarkable coincidence that at the present 'moment', Ω = 1. This is exactly what is called for (among other things) if there is to be an omega convergence under conditions where the time scale in question is completely unknown. This is something upon which I would gladly 'bet the farm'. At the moment of writing, observations of some anomalous galaxies suggests that regardless, space is actually hyperbolic so that as cosmic time proceeds we must anticipate the precise inverse of a convergence hence ruling out an eschatological future. However, there is at least one other explanation for the phenomena which fits the facts equally well. It has been proposed that the velocity of light 'constant' c is not as inviolate as formerly proposed but underwent a progressive shift in its value, during the earliest stages of cosmic evolution.
Speculations of the Formal Configuration of Reality (and its Evolution).
The real backbone of my Weltanschauung is provide by a novel formal framework to which I have assigned the appellation 'Metamathematics". I do so, however, with the knowledge that a discipline of that name was already in existence. I am referring, of course, to David Hilbert's Metamathematics that bears little relationship to what I have in Mind. Hilbert's was a discipline through which mathematics could hold a mirror up to itself, to its nature and constitution. In my expropriation of the term, I am addressing formalism at its very broadest -that which takes origin from the ultimate Invariant-above-of-all-invariants that is the formal aspect of the watershed. of Being. It is quite unlike conventional mathematics for the way in which its hidden structure hangs from a unitary apex, top-down wise, as opposed to a bottom-up equivalent grounded upon a slender set of axioms, postulates and other primitives. This 'unit' is that of the logician rather than the number theorist, in that it is the unity of the All. The structure and configurations hidden within it display such 'topological' features as anamorphic inversions, Möbius one-sidedness; and analogues of the Mandelbrot set. The transformations to which is subject are both within and between Modes or Categories, many of them being of the character of the 'symmetry breakings' so dear to physicists, but unlike them are 'epigenetic'. This means that at each transformational step, the antecedents are not lost as their consequences are brought into existence, but persist after the fact.
It has become evident to me in retrospect that what my contemplations here have been mostly about has been the provision of a workable substratum of what might be called 'Böhmian dynamics'. Plotinus, Böhme, Berdyaev and others have laboured under the limitations imposed by 'linear' temporal and sequential regimens. Plotinus, for example was bothered by the contradiction that on the one hand Being was in need of the benefits conferred by incarnation, but that these came at the price of the loss of eternity -which could only be re-entered through a process of withdrawal; the same door provided both entrance and exit. To reap the benefits of both realms calls for an eschatological process that is recuperative and recapitulational. As Berdyaev and others have put it, some kind of subsidiary recirculatory loop is called for. This would very definitely imply that the emergence from eternity and its later reentrance were through very different kinds of doors. My proposed formal underpinnings are developed chapters 7 and 8 of my forthcoming The New Monadology.
Cadenza: the 'God' Question Reexamined
As have so many others, I baulk at the very word because of the way in which both denotations and connotations inseparable from its popular use severely constrain and delimit the field of options. In its usage within the major theisms of the West, certain attributes and characteristics are taken to be inseparable from divinity. For example, God, as a living person: :
The problem, I believe is that the wrong question is being asked, simply because the form in which it is customarily stated forecloses upon too much of the territory. It is important that we start by standing sufficiently far back. It's not primarily a matter of Eternity versus finite existence or of the order of appearance of the dramatis personae upon the stage where the saga of the processing of Reality is played out. Nor is it necessarily about divine personhood at all, as this is normally understood. Rather, it has to do with the relationship between holistic and the pluralist aspects of Reality This is where the conversation should start. Where one goes from here is largely a matter of how strong one takes the association to be between the holistic and particularistic aspects. The accompanying figure presents four such possibilities as a graded series.
The
second image illustrates the softening of classical theism proposed by the 'process'
theologians. Each individual participates in the divine nature; they
enjoy a degree of ontological commonality and interdependence. One might
refer to this as the weak form of panentheism. Finally, the third image
in the sequence depicts the ontological consequences of taking a further
step beyond Process theologies in the direction of classical 'identity'
monism. More than
In retrospect, I have come to see that something of this kind of relationship is what Jakob Böhme had in mind many centuries ago.
In the scenario that I have adopted, there can be no question of a primary grounding of Reality upon a divine living person (or monads of any kind or number). Any such possibility is ruled out by the fact that no actual entity whatsoever can be self-necessary, self-sufficient and self sustaining This is simply because only some kind of neutral, all-embracing monistic abstraction can be self-necessary. Such a concept partakes of the nature of an invariant, while the life stream of a divine Being (as of any person) would be a covariance of something more general than itself. Once again, Reality at its most basic were grounded upon an actual eternal Being, then it would immediately evoke its opposite hence causing Reality to bifurcate into dualistic personhood -something that clearly, is unacceptable. Quite to the contrary, I take the Eternal, Holistic Being to appear only at the end of the journey -so that He is the Omega of reality but not the Alpha. Such notions will please almost no-one. Theists will object because they take a denial of 'Alphaship' would undermine His perfection. And in the positivist world-view Transcendence of any kind is anathema; any question of there being an eternal Person is the ultimate 'non-negotiable' premise.
The theist also feels that any question of God's dependence upon us would undermine His perfection and self-sufficiency. But again, this overlooks the significance and the role of Nonbeing in the scheme of things. As Tillich has so strongly insisted, manifest perfection cannot be given in advance but only as a consequence of the transcendence of Nonbeing. If a divine person could exist without having passed through this proofing process, he would lack resonance and vitality. So as it turns out, Nonbeing is the ultimate oxymoron -it is a precious bane. It must be a constituent of the watershed of Reality, for if it were not, there might have been nothing rather than something. But this necessity comes at a price. If the potential of eternal personhood is to be actualized into manifest being, this negative component must be grasped and drawn into the psyche; this process is not one of cancellation because the act of transcendence turns nonbeing inside-out. When this is done; far from suffering cancellation, Positive being thereby picks up a resounding resonance.
Such is the slimness of the margin of positive Being over its negative counterpart that this transformational process can only take origin from the most primitive of beginnings -and this is exactly what the big bang -that launched cosmic existence- gave us. When life started, a few billion years later, it was at the molecular level. From thereon out it was to be a painful uphill process. The stage at which we currently find ourselves confronts us with a vast future reach -up to the unitary Omega being. To get there requires that future life forms must totally reshape the matter of the cosmos to become, ultimately the somatic substratum of Omega and the residual environment captive to it. Equally the odyssey is an axiological one in which the possibilities of evil are confronted and transformed; the potential of innocence becomes the actuality of values and ethical insight. . This truly awful onus -that of creatively transcending as opposed to offlining nonbeing has three aspects. nonbeing intrudes in three ways which call for a creative response; they involve fidelity, ethical rectitude and the courage and perseverance needed to address the great task which confronts us all -and by 'all' I mean all intelligent monads who shall ever come to be. The challenges of axiology have long been recognized, lying as they must at the very root of the existential moment. The call to 'progress' has a checkered history; though these concerns wave disturbed the Western mind rather than its Eastern counterpart. But mostly this has been conceived in differential or incremental terms -an urge to move uphill in the absence of an clear view of what may lie at the summit. Up to this point it has been enveloped in fog. We can sense the 'Grad' under our feet and some notion of the direction in which we feel we should be moving, yet without an ultimate whither. As the reader will know by now, I envisage this in terms of an evolution aimed at nothing less than the complete capture of the cosmos by the organic domain, finally converging to a single Being -Omega'. It is our mission to fulfill this destiny. There is no question here of a divine plan awaiting execution. It falls to our lot to conceive as well as execute the blue print that is called for.
But what's all this about 'faith'? One has but to utter the word to curl the lip of any intellectual worth his salt. In his view it has something to do with a false optimism, a failure to face up to the truth that there's no ultimate meaning; life itself is doomed to ultimate extinction -to leave not a wrack behind. The truth is that intelligent life is some odd and unexpected of natural law which is primarily addressed to no such thing. Some scenarios foresee an oscillating universe that repeatedly emerges from a big bang 'white hole' to collapse back, in the fullness of time, into a black one. Such a fate is far worse than extinction, implying as it does the horror of Nietzsche's 'eternal return' -which would do well enough as a definition of Hell. Faith has been foisted upon the folk mind by those masters of superstition and deception -the theologians guiding the destiny of organized religion. What such theologians as Paul Tillich have in mind is the exact reverse of avoidance. Doubts are something to be squarely confronted and drawn into the depths of one's persona. Belief in ultimate values and in a meaningful future is thereby strengthened. There is no danger thereafter of being captured by its deprivations because it's no longer 'out there' but has been reactively possessed and transformed within us.
Is the Omega I have in mind to be regarded as a Christ figure or Christ equivalent? Hardly, unless one is prepared to stretch the notion beyond a point that few would find acceptable. He is 'one of us' -if in spades. The whole of evolution is an 'inside job' -and this includes its terminal phasing. It is Omega who shall terminate cosmic existence by executing a natural act. In so doing, he opens the door to eternal life for all of us. But he is equally in need of passing through this door -else he would be tapped in the hell of Berdyaev's 'bad infinity'. But even more is involved; without our co presence as aspect of himself, he would be lacking in his ontogeny, hence would be missing the essential resonance of what had to be accomplished before he could make his entrance upon the stage.
The Odyssey of the Larger Reality
The form that the holistic/particularist inequality takes varies in the grand odyssey that passes from the watershed of pure Being to the eternal life that is its raison d'etre. In the large, it is a drama in the form of a play in three acts. From the very beginning, up to the eruption of the cosmic existence Holism was potential only. It was (and for that matter still is) Eckhart's 'Gottheit'. This is no living Being though it is very capable of pre-personal activity, taking the form of an epigenetic unfolding of the watershed of Being. Act two is where we find ourselves at present. Holism has an Immanent presence in every one of us; it is the Source of our existence of which we are directly aware only in acts of mystical reflection or absorption. As the essence of my begottenness, 'He' (or 'It'? -one gropes within the lexicon of English for an appropriate pronoun) is 'closer to me than I am to myself' -if I may steal Eckhart's lightening and thunder for a moment.
The third act opens upon Eternal Life -that of Nous. Here as ever, we have the inseparable co-presence of the Holistic and the individualistic face. In Eternal Life, everyone of us shall be Nous -each from our own point of view -yet one that is in harmony with Nous viewed holistically. This in turn throws light upon the significance of finite existence. Evolution is to be regarded as Nous's ontogeny. {I have here expropriated the term 'Nous' as pointing to an entity that comes closest to what I have in mind.]
The accompanying illustration offers a time-elapsed view of the whole of the processing of Reality -to the ultimate Alpha of featureless Being, through the whole saga of cosmic and organic evolution, passing through the eschatological singularity at the end. We see an emerging eternal life already underway. You may want to take a closer look.
However, what this figure fails to preserve is the distinction between transformation and epigenetic constituents -for both processes are present within the larger sweep of time. To illustrate the distinction, we need to call upon the services of Animation
As you can clearly see the early processing of Being and the preservation of the kernel of each conscious instant are epigenetic. The latter is preserved in frozen past time, to be recovered at the eschatological moment. you can also se than there is a closure loop which returns to the beginning of eternal life at each fresh instant; it is this which provides the consolidation essential, if eternal life is to be supportable. Non-epigenetic transformations are universal within the material aspects of inorganic and organic life -including whatever be substratum of dispositional mind. It will also be noted that the bulk of each moment of consciousness -its mantle, is discarded as frame succeeds frame. This is as necessary for eternal as it is the finite flow of conscious time. A full account will be forthcoming in chapters 7 and 8 in the forthcoming The New Monadology website.
The final figure attempts to illustrate how the positivist Weltanschauung views the elapsed time Since there is no true eternity, it must make do with the fatal "everlasting" substitute. Almost all scenarios bring conscious life to an eventual termination, though in some, there are cyclic repetition. Both forms of perpetuity are worthy candidates as models for hell. Also, as the animated version shows, there are no epigenetic aspects. There is only ordinary linear time. Some have sought to press general relativity into usage in support of science fiction time-travel notions, but these can only enter the realm of possibility if the Minkowski manifold be elevated to ontic status. Take a closer look The corresponding Movie makes it clear, the transformational sequence, in moving through time, is strictly of a transient nature; nothing of epigenesis is to be seen.
Wrap up
By way of recapitulation, the following list itemizes the main planks of the platform upon which Neutral Monism takes its stand.
I take Reality to be constituted either of monads or monad instances -which, depending upon what stage of reality's odyssey we are talking about. My monadology, however, departs radically from that originally proposed by Leibniz; there can be few who would want to follow in his footsteps today. What I have proposed no kind of pantheism, nor does it take consciousness to go quite 'all the way down'. Unlike Whitehead, I do not take atoms of molecules to be primitive instances of organisms, though when of sufficient bulk and appropriate organization -as in the case with the more essential molecular species of protoplasm- they can and do serve as platforms from which the needed 'phase changes' can occur. Organisms are indeed wondrously constructed machines but the mechanisms of which they are in need in the exercise of their life styles are in part 'exotic', running on their own forms of logic and within configurations of appropriate groundforms. Matter can only become 'organistic' in proportion as these augmentations take place. That consciousness does not quite go 'all the way down' carries, I believe important implications for particle physics and the way in which material existence is maintained within the Transcendental Source within which it is embedded, or upon which it rides. . Perhaps the strongest impression that my construction of neutral monism has left me with, is this matter of the importance of a logico/formal/mathematical scaffolding (metamathematical, perhaps, is a more appropriate term) or framework within which the system may be configured. I believe it has been the absence of any such that has held back the arrival of the overdue New Paradigm; however, were this in hand, we would still have the rigidity of Positivism. to be contended with. It has seemed to me that my own attempts to fill this void do show the kind of things which need to be done -but this is a matter for the reader to decide. What the world is waiting for is a mathematician of genius who shall be Bourbaki inverted
In reviewing all of the above paragraphs I could hardly blame the reader should he dismiss them as a parade of neologisims -of a kind that would have done credit to some sufferer from hypomania. indeed I would be disturbed if the intellectual saw them as otherwise -it would be proof that I had fallen into serious error somewhere. However, I can but plead that I offer them as no more than a series of hints. If they strike any kind of responsive chord, then I would urge the reader to keep his eye open for a forthcoming website: The New Monadology that deals with all of these matters at length. / Previous Page / Site Overview / Home / |
-vital though its instrumental
function be. The figure also makes it clear that in addition to the
restricted span of its territory, it also lies at the bottom of the pecking
order. What, however, the figure fails to convey is the rapid rate of
diminution of ontological density and significance in passing downwards from
the apex. Being itself overwhelms everything with respect to
ontological density, metaphysical richness, formal subtlety and
axiological capture. However, all of this resides exclusively within
the modality of Potentiality. Its value lies in what its potential
guarantees rather than the quality of its pristine standing. It is in
actual existence that value is manifest.
participants in Holism, individuals are aspects
of the whole, each from a unique viewpoint. The second figure tells
the same story for a set of three individuals. To get from here to
the real World calls, of course, for a giant scale-up in numbers, but the
same relationships would apply.