The Less Than Jolly Heretic, 4th Edition [preview 2]

Chapter Five: The Godly Universe

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Note: throughout this account I will be utilising the expression ‘God’ (or, in some cases, as is more common to my thoughts, ‘Gods’ – this idea still appearing to me as what is effectively a qualitatively variegated, multipolar unity, where different aspects of a whole are represented in collective, albeit still within the framework of the same underlying One-ness dipole – a loose analogy to the Trinity of Catholic thought could be made, just for example i.e. I utilise Gods as a singular noun in practice). However, by this usage I must make it very clear that I am not referring to the ‘personal’ Yahweh God of Judeo-Christian mythology – or indeed his son Yeshua/Jesus Christ – nor in fact to any other known human god or pantheon of gods as described in world holy texts. Similarly, when I refer to ‘Nature’, with a capitalised ‘N’, I mean more by it than simply a collective term for the plants and animals of the natural world. More than any stricto sensu monotheism, this ‘Pagan monotheism’ on my part is better understood as a unitary panentheism, mirroring the words of Heraclitus in Fragment 32 that “the wise is only one; it is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus”, and, from Fragment 33, “it is the law too, to obey the counsel of one”. After all, as Maximus of Tyre asserted in The Dissertations, “there are numerous gods, children of God, who share his power”. Unlike Cassius Maximus Tyrius however, I do not consider the Gods accessible to reason alone – far from it in fact. Furthermore, one could draw parallels to the Gottgläubig principle in National Socialist Germany, and particularly to Heinrich Himmler’s invocation of ‘Wralda’: the “higher power that had created this world and endowed it with the laws of struggle and selection that guaranteed the continued existence of nature and the natural order of things” (Ziegler, Herbert F. (2014). Nazi Germany's New Aristocracy: The SS Leadership, 1925–1939. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. pp. 85–87)

I enjoyed the great outdoors as a child, and I continue to enjoy escaping people when I can and heading off into the woods and across the open fields alone until it's just my thoughts and the wild. I had used to walk alone at night also, deep out in the night-time woods and along the lanes and fields of the countryside, partly to overcome my crippling fear of darkness, although admittedly, it's far more psychologically intense and oppressive when I am indoors in poorly lit rooms or cells of any sort or walking down corridors and hallways in the darkness, presented with the horror of every open portal into the deep unknown fearfulness of the pitch black. I still take a late-night walk, now and again, for just an hour or two, as far from people as possible.

Despite that fear of darkness, I used to find pressing interest in the exploration of caverns and deep abandoned places, both a little amateurish potholing by the waterfalls of wild France and also a far broader, more detailed investment in SCUBA diving, particularly reef wall dives, balanced in grains of sand against the blue, 50 metres below the surface waves, with no end discernible below. Still, it’s the forest that calls to me more than the waters, and I have come to the conclusion over the years, having experienced both, to unequal degree, that there is something unnatural – as if that wasn’t obvious! – about venturing beneath the waves, or indeed, to some degree, deigning to fixate on the endless blue-grey boundary zones of the sea at all; a definite marker in place, as if by obvious physical world encouragement to return to the neglected familiarity of one’s inner lands, a territory far better suited to meditative exploration (and very beautiful beneath the unimpeded sunlight that sustains it).

I find woodlands sacred and numinous. The near-antithesis of a liminal space, if still distantly relatable. Revealed religion, Christian or otherwise, holds nothing for me. I've referred to myself as an atheist for many years with regards to all that, much as ‘apostate’ is probably a better way to express what I do not believe in, the false dichotomy of 'theism or atheism' – even applied outside of monotheism – not quite allowing for the expression of what I do believe.

These days, following a comprehensive loss of faith, I am an apostate from Catholicism, and Christianity in general, and have freed myself of that pedagogic religious brainwashing and the anti-European self-abnegation that serves as a prerequisite for loyal service to a subversive enemy's cruel god figure.

There's something I feel and enjoy, though. Something cosmological in nature, profound and all-encompassing. Something to sense quietly and not to pinpoint too much or share with anyone else (much as I am attempting, for once, to do so here). I still don't know how to convey it. A moving sense – an aesthetic impulse, existing in a different domain from hard rationality, and indeed despite it – perhaps akin to what inspired Akhenaten's radical solar Atenism, or some of the concepts in the older high classical science fiction (or visionary semi-fiction, such as the writings of T. Simmons Mackintosh in The “Electrical Theory” of the Universe: Or, the Elements of Physical and Moral Philosophy), but always with a European's private musings, in a European mind. I don't accept human gods or goddesses, certainly not as they are currently believed, especially not Middle Eastern monotheism or any textual dogma that functions as an ideology.

I find my most profound sense of the spiritual when immersed in deep forest, moving unhindered between the branches, taken aback by the cool softness of the quiet air and the magnificence of the trees stretching above and all around me. As I wrote once in my diary, back in August 2023:

I went for a long walk into the Mistley woods today with Abby. A large, beautiful, hilly woodland. The centuries-old trees were awe-inspiring, stretching numerous and tall into a thick leafy canopy, natural colonnades of elms and hazels and ash trees and the giant desiccated trunks of ancient English oaks, and I appreciated that opaque softness to the misty air, and the brilliant white sun in a pale off—white sky falling into the pastel clearings in straw—hued beams, from between dark rain-clouds in pleasing chiaroscuro, an abundance of subtle green shades to the deeper foliage and a coldness and freshness to the forest air, up and down hills and beside little freshwater trickles, away from people and everything urban and modern, the only sound being the creaking of branches, the chirps and calls of birds high above, and occasional rustling in the leaves; and that intangible natural sound beyond placement that one only experiences in the very depths of woods when anything of human imposition is no longer present. Perhaps the private sound of the woods themselves, essentialised. There were black and white cows sheltering in the gloom among the chestnut trees at the edge of the lower meadow. Some young rabbits grazed near the blackberry brambles. A cricket hopped across our path and into the ferns. I relish time in the woods as a somehow sacred feeling. Relaxing as much as the only experience that brings me genuine psychological healing, rarely present in my life…

It was a good day for me. Still, I find my deepest experiences come always alone; a comfortable solitude, beneath the trees and the farther sky. It's only in these moments that I truly find the Gods.

I grow tired of the nihilism of atheistic deterministic materialism, exhibited in practice in all areas from pharmaceutical exploitation of mental health to antinatalism under the gloomy cosmological model of universal ‘Heat Death’, and in all the fanatical obsessions of our society with this aforementioned AI research - a gimmick of a long-entrenched research program, and an incoherent vision for the cheap, autistic anti-compassion of intelligent enough computer gamer hipsters and their futurist global utopias, and all their ‘televised sports fan’ consumers, those dead to interpersonal communication and the Principle of Life, with no great care applied between themselves to understand and nurture each other. All those who like humans as robots, and machines fed on external algorithmic instruction as embryonic human gods to sweep their warehouses and tell them what to think next, some obvious tautology there, surely?

Where is that self-awareness, love, or beauty? Where are the feelings, emotions, and compassion? This brittle, insensate atrocity is a testament to the waste of misplaced intelligence and a holy zealotry of flawed wishful thinking.

I have tried and failed to talk about it to my father, always overridden by this fatal, antitheistic reductionism, snarling, tut-tutting, all rote scientific detail, always the already known and the recently already known of the orthodox, bare fact after fact after fact, as if all in concrete, and caged definition, and no love. I'm used to being made to feel very silly from the outset, as if that's just another given, somehow better for me to listen in schoolboy silence to his trademark monologues and swiftly deviating misunderstandings, his blind, dead, mindless universe of cold rock and chemicals, much like himself, a simulation of life in red teeth and claws, a jar of soup hurtling in complicated mechanics to the fall of night.

Talking to him on this matter is like drawing back the lead bricks shielding a radioactive hazard, taking the extended exposure damage full to the face. One can often get their hopes up, approaching each new conversation with the possibility of warmth, open mindedness, and basic human respect, but I am swiftly let down.

I had wanted to report to him about the initial optimism I'd gleaned from the physics-inspired philosopher George Woodward Warder in his grand cosmological theory documented in The Cities of the Sun, and his further awed speculations in The Universe a Vast Electric Organism, where he states his profound belief that: “First – creation was wrought out by the agency of electrical forces, operating on invisible elementary matter, controlled by the intellectual impulse of an infinite power”, and goes on to declare that:

Atoms are absolute potentialities, creative rather than created conditions of the elements, and have the power of inherent energy or life motion. All tests show the atom remains the inscrutable source of creative power, and the basis of all chemical activity, and must be the basic principle of world building, life motion and life energy. In all operations of chemical transmutations no material is lost and no power wasted, and, by the law of the conservation and correlation of force, both energy and material must exist as correlatives. This places the nature of matter upon the same basis as the origin of power.

Warder posits, in a chapter titled Man is a Soul Clad in Air, that the ‘one great question’ – “What is Life?” – can be answered “through the fact that electricity is able to affect protoplasm in a more universal and effective way than any other form of stimulus,” drawing the inference that “if electricity is able to affect protoplasm in the form of currents, it ought to do so in the form of ions, which is an electrically charged atom, or group of atoms,” thus creating a new discipline of his own, titled electro-physiology, in which Warder claims that the whole foundation of physiology and medicine may be reconstructed, as we now possess control over the phenomena of life “more masterful than anybody has yet dared to dream.”

He goes on to observe that nerves consist of what is called a colloidal solution (matter resembling gelatin held in solution in water before it is “jellied”) and that these colloidal particles in the nerves carry charges of positive electricity. He further observes that when the nerve particles pass from the colloidal condition into a state of gelation, the nerve experiences a stimulation or becomes active, and that this is produced by the action of atoms or ions bearing negative electricity.

In effect, Warder puts forward the idea that the entire human organism is controlled by electrical forces, writing “all this accords with my theory of electrical creation, and proves, as I have contended for many years, that man’s body as well as the universe is an electrical organism.”

Linking life together into a profound, interconnected whole, he goes on to say, in his beautiful, poetic style, reflecting monism, that:

The Creator has never made but one pattern or type of a thing that exists, and that is the electro-magnetic. ... [S]uns and worlds, man and all animal and vegetable organisms, are electro-magnets … The electrical combination of positive and negative atoms weaves the visible structure that envelops the soul. The electric currents from the lungs and stomach enter the blood, and set the human battery in organic operation and create and continue human life.

Warder contends that electricity is “the active, energetic, and all-pervading ultimate force in nature”, and is controlled by a more refined and ultimate spiritual force. In his words:

It is the medium and ever active agent in invoking all visible forms and substances; the medium which produces all affinities and repulsions in matter, gyrating from the lowest to the highest elements and from globe to globe, and constitutes the invisible controlling element whose results are known as laws.

And later, in yet more scintillating prose:

Electricity is the guardian and executive of the invisible laws of nature. It is the suspension bridge spanning the darkness and chaos of space between suns and worlds. Man is the product of the perfect unfolding of nature’s invisible electrical laws, and aggregate atomic elements; and unites within himself all the elements and forces of the combined and harmonious universe. He is an epitome of the universe and an atom of deity.

These days, George Woodward Warder’s scientific method would be considered pseudoscience. Still, he had given me enough ideas to work with. The accuracy of his outdated science is not the point in understanding that I gleaned from his work. Instead, I realised that there is more to living matter than inert mechanism, and, seeing beauty as my foundation (for one has to begin somewhere, and Warder’s lines had touched my spirit), blended that visionary Victorian awe, bordering on science fiction, with The Natural Principles and Analogy of The Harmony of Form and The Geometric Principle of Beauty Analysed by David Ramsay Hay, in which he explains that:

Proportion in its simplest mode is to form what time is to music, or measure to poetry; but in its more complex mode, it is to form what grammar is to language, or harmony to music. Proportion may lie in the relative size of two or more objects – the relative dimensions that the length bears to the breadth of an object – the relative obtusity or acuteness of various angles – and relative degrees of curvature in various objects, or in the parts of one object, or, it may be, in the general relation that various forms bear to one another in rendering their combinations harmonious. Proportion is, in short, that geometrical quality in forms and figures by which they are rendered pleasing to the sense of sight, independently of their use or any other consideration.

Developing this idea further, along broader contextual lines, I refer to The Divine Proportion: A Study of Mathematical Beauty by H. E. Huntley, published by Dover Publications, which states in its marvellous opening chapter “The Texture of Beauty”, on page 11:

It is difficult to define beauty, as we shall see; but there is much impressive testimony to the importance of the emotions that beauty calls forth ... Richard Jeffries wrote:

The hours when we are absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live....These are the only hours that absorb the soul and fill it with beauty. This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance.

Beauty is a word which has defied the efforts of philosophers to define in a way that commands general agreement. Yet it does not need a philosopher’s wisdom to utter a few meaningful words about it. One incontrovertible statement might be: beauty arouses emotion. ... [W]hether beauty is subject or objective or both is an unresolved metaphysical problem.

Briefly, and not wishing to detract from the sublime quality of Huntley’s evaluations, the thought occurs that, if one is to refer to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, and his concept of Master morality – referring primarily in this suggestion to On The Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and, to some degree, his posthumous anthology The Will to Power – then beauty, it would seem, is indeed both (ostensibly) subjective, just as morality itself is a subjective matter, and also objective – subjective in that the Overman as holder of Master values represents his own unqualified (and with no need – how could he be else?) standard of goodness, truth, and beauty, but, moreover, objective in that this sole understanding, in his possession alone, is the benchmark by which all else is measured, there at the pinnacle of evolution, displaying by his own form the reality of this definitive answer, for beauty itself describes truth, and there is no distinction between his pure cohesion of body and the accompanying cohesiveness of his thoughts. After all, as Huntley writes, on page 21, quoting from The Education of the Whole Man by L.P. Jacks:

What then is the vocation of the whole man? ... [H]is vocation is to be a creator ... [A] creator of real values. ... [I]f you ask me what motive can be appealed to, what driving power can be relied on, to bring out the creative element in men ... there is only one answer I can give; but I give it without hesitation – the love of beauty, innate in everybody, but suppressed, smothered, thwarted in most of us...

Early in the chapter, on page 14, Huntley describes that which is fundamental to a working hypothesis concerning beauty in its widest context, expressing the need for:

Recognition that the aesthetic experience is an emotional, rather than a rational mental activity. Merely to state this basic fact is to realize that we shall not make much progress in understanding without admitting the relevance of what has been called “the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century” – the subconscious mind. ... Though psychologists have found this topic a fertile source of differences of opinion, they are agreed concerning its importance in interpreting mental activity. It is invoked to explain such phenomena as hypnotic trance, dreams, narcosis, dual personality, mental disorders and much more. Its value for our present purpose is that it provides a clue to the understanding of aesthetic feeling.

He goes on:

The dipstick of introspection cannot plumb this layer of the psyche. Unconscious activity is only exceptionally recognized by the individual, despite the fact that unconscious motivation is one of the prime facts of life. In the unconscious are stored countless forgotten memories which, while they cannot be recalled at will, are nevertheless made manifest in dreams, in hypnotic trance and through other means.

Huntley goes on to describe the collective unconscious, according to the work of Carl Jung, which forms a lower strata of the psyche even than the personal unconscious. Here lies the source of instinctive behaviour – the impulse to act without conscious motivation – inherited rather than decided upon, determined only by the history of our race. What Jung refers to as ‘primordial images’ or ‘archetypes’ are instinctive response patterns formed at these low levels of the psyche during the tens of thousands of years of evolutionary history passed through by primitive man, our most remote human ancestors, by the occurrence (and constant recurrence) of shared – universal – emotional experiences: fears and the flight from threats, traumas and calamities, the predations of hunger and thirst, the movements of storms and ocean tempests, the alternation between day and night and the changing of the seasons, laughter, and pleasure, and the sanctuary of home and companionship.

If one is to assume then that the evolution of these potentialities of the psyche through geological ages runs in parallel to the development of the nervous system, and of the brain, it would appear then that – accounting for all of history – the emotional life we share with the higher animals must precede intellectual development, associated still as it is with the primitive areas of the nervous system (in these ideas I find a passing resonance to the work of the theoretical biologist Danny Vendramini as documented in The Second Evolution: The Secret Role of Emotion in Evolution, and, particularly, his theory of ‘teems’, as documented in his other work Them and Us: How Neanderthal Predation Created Modern Humans, a point of interest that would require further extraneous thought).

We must then conclude then, confirms Huntley, that the personal unconscious as well as the collective unconscious is both the arena of the emotions as well as the storehouse of emotive memory complexes.

He writes, concerning aesthetics, on page 17:

[T]he aesthetic experience consists in the levitation from the unconscious to the surface mind of a memory complex activated by an association mechanism sequential to the visual or aural contemplation of the beautiful object. ... The complexity of this defies analysis, but it will make our meaning clear if we point to a few specimen experiences which have been familiar to both men and animals for a million years.

Huntley then goes on to express the aesthetic appeal of colour contrasts, as shared by some other vertebrate animals, quoting the writings of Dr. W. H. Thorpe on the bower birds of Australia and New Guinea. As Thorpe noted, these birds build bowers for courtship, decorated with brightly coloured fruits and flowers which remain uneaten and are replaced when they wither. Curiously, they are observed by experimenters to stick to one particular colour scheme, for example, a bird using blue flowers would disregard a yellow flower, were the experimenters to insert it, whereas a bird using yellow flowers would not tolerate a blue one. As Robert Bridges remarked “Verily it may well be that sense of beauty came to those primitiv bipeds earlier than to man”. Huntley concludes that, given this observation, we should not then be surprised if mankind’s collective unconscious is deeply stirred at the sight of flowers, carrying such an inheritance from the lower creation.

Again, considering the beauty of music, Dr. Thorpe remarks that it is perhaps plausible that those intervals which are considered acceptable to the human ear remain in fact those intervals first offered to the ancestors of man by bird song. After all, the fundamental intervals of human and bird song are the same.

Returning instead to beauty as a creative impulse, Huntley delivers his final arguments for a truth of vital importance. As he writes on pages 20-21:

Man is by nature a creator. ... [M]an is born to create: to fashion beauty, to originate new values. That is his supreme vocation. ... If it could be expressed in one word, that word would be empathy. The German equivalent is Einfühlung – “feeling into”. ... The act of creation and the act of appreciation of beauty, is not, in essence, distinguishable. This is true whether the lovely object is a work of art, a musical composition, or a mathematical theorem. In the actual moment of appreciation ... The beholder experiences those precise emotions which passed through the mind of the creator in his moment of creation. ... [T]he meaning of empathy ... should be understood by all who seek the aesthetic experience. ... He is, in fact, in Kepler’s phrase, “thinking God’s thoughts after Him”.

In which case, why not the human body also? It seems to me that if these emotions upon viewing a work of human art can rouse such affinity with its creator, why not us too, before the presence of the Gods themselves?

What purpose is there for our bodies yet – and for all other life – and how is it tied to beauty and perfect form? How was this achieved biologically, and through what process of evolution, to what end? Can this process be helped along, by our prudent fortitude and strength of will, nudging ourselves mindfully towards perfection? What, after all, is the relationship between ourselves and the universe, at a foundational level and up from that? And what role does (our) consciousness play in it all? Still difficult questions for me, despite the elucidation of the above.

In other thoughts, as if to upend what appears to be reality, what is a particle when we have not measured it? It’s hard to know. Outside of our senses, what indeed can be said of the probability waves of quantum physics? I don’t think I could know the answer to that. We must never forget that the electron is neither a particle nor a wave separate from the field but is instead a set of properties of the field from which it emerges, and without detaching from this field, as a manifested, objective state of a conserved form that the field takes, retaining all of its characteristics – but I cannot address this matter. I think I can at least approach my more minor questions in baby steps, a total beginner with a quest for understanding.

After reading Warder, I thought back also to my early speculative readings from The Reflexive Universe of Arthur M. Young, where he describes the universe as beginning with the nature of light, as pure quanta of action, unattached to any object, with a photon, the ultimate unit of light, seen only once, as its detection is its annihilation and where the downward evolution of matter itself is a “fall into determinism,” a loss of freedom occurring in steps from:

The condensing of the original energy of the photon into mass to form a charged particle, then the joining of opposite charges to constitute a neutral atom, then of atoms to form molecules, and finally the compaction of molecules into inert objects.

However, he explains that there still exist higher forms of organisation, acting in a process of ascent to an unclear future, some impenetrable return. In general terms, that clouded future interests me, if only for the potential of the present.

I went on to read Young’s The Geometry of Meaning and The Foundations of Science: The Missing Parameter, lingering with his lines on the "Role of Order", where he writes that David Bohm’s ‘implicate order’ (i.e. the ontological quantum theory idea that there exists a metaphysical pre-geometric ‘enfolded’ order from which the natural manifold topology of spacetime emerges, which Bohm refers to as ‘pre-space’ and which acts as a means of understanding both matter and consciousness, with matter representing a stable enfoldment and unfoldment along a more easily discernible spacetime trajectory, whereas in the case of consciousness, memories exist in a non-localised fashion, enfolded within every region of the brain: not tied to discrete cells or atoms, for example – this theory based itself to some degree on the holonomic brain theory put forward by neuroscientist Karl Pribram) which suggests that order is there in the beginning. Thus, this deprives the initiating principle (photon) of its innovative power. There is a fundamental dichotomy between the initiating principle and the relationship structure resulting from it. The photon, which epitomises total freedom (uncertainty), hence necessarily epitomises a total absence of order.

Young also notes that atoms, like plants, have radical symmetry and that particles with their difference of charge or spin require the symmetry of right and left hand to describe their behaviour (the famous right-hand rule to determine the direction a charged particle will move in a magnetic field).

Young cannot establish that photons have no symmetry, but remarks that “the whole nature of the photon or quantum of action is to effect a change of state, a quantum jump, and this could not be due to symmetry because symmetry only echoes itself.”

As he admits:

This reasoning led to the simplest and most drastic conclusion I reached: The uncertainty of the photon, or of the quantum of action, is its capacity to cause something new to happen. It is the basis for free will and the ongoing dynamic which drives the universe ... The electron, as Heisenberg first pointed out, is uncertain in position or momentum. The observer cannot predict it. But it is still there, whereas the photon, once observed, no longer exists. It has no future to predict; it is complete uncertainty.

Again, Young has the gathering feeling of overoptimistic pseudoscience about him – as an admirer of the writings of Heraclitus, and indeed Friedrich Nietzsche, I have no problem with Young’s adoption of process philosophy, only I wish he had not made quite so much effort to couch his ideas in hard science, and the presentation remains misleading and wishy-washy: his comments on symmetry seem to blur the metaphorical and the actual without suitable acknowledgment of the category error, and, technically, symmetry is the operation, not the result (much as his partial rejection of determinism is what may be of use later in my argument, when I explore the work of Philip Goff). However, I did note that in Cycles of Time, Roger Penrose also refers to photons (and other effectively massless particles/fields) propagating smoothly from an earlier Big Bang phase into the current post-Big Bang phase, suggesting that, in a sense, their choice as active quantum instigators of the universe may not be all that far-fetched. As Penrose eloquently explains:

Photons, and their interactions with charged particles, do need space-time to have a null-cone structure – i.e. a conformal space-time structure – in order that their equations can be formulated but they do not need the scale factor that distinguishes one actual metric from another, consistent with this given null-cone structure.

Penrose goes on to inform us that it is probable that when energies get higher and higher, rest-masses become more and more irrelevant, and physical processes become dominated by conformally invariant laws. He suggests that close to the Big Bang, probably down to around 10-12 seconds after that moment, when temperatures exceeded about 1016 K, the relevant physics is believed to become blind to the scale factor (Ω), and conformal, and thus all physical activity would, at this stage, be insensitive to local scale changes.

Penrose asks what kind of region this ‘pre-Big Bang’ phase might be and suggests that we should examine the extremely remote future, when all black holes ought eventually to disappear, even if the process takes 10100 years. By this point, the physical contents of the universe would consist mainly of photons from greatly red-shifted starlight and cosmic microwave background radiation and from Hawking radiation (i.e. faint black-body radiation emitted outside a black hole’s event horizon due to quantum fluctuations: a paired particle creation, with one particle escaping and one being dragged in) carrying away the total mass energy of the enormous black holes as low-energy photons.

It is clear, disturbingly, that most scientists nowadays expect the universe to enter a terrible final stage, with the final paltry remnant of tiny black holes disappearing, with exponential expansion, and with the universe cooling dramatically and emptying until it reaches a barren eternity. It is a terrifying and depressing prospect, given life at all. Chillingly, one could, to some degree, understand antinatalism under this paradigm were it accurate.

Thankfully, Penrose proposes that this may not be the future that the consciousness-equipped universe faces. He suggests that there is a physically actual region of space-time before the completely smooth, spacelike 3-surface described mathematically by Todd’s proposal (see the work of John ‘Jack’ Todd at the National Applied Mathematical Laboratories) that itself extends to a conformal space-time before the Big Bang, existing as the remote future of a previous universe phase that extends beyond our smooth spacelike future conformal boundary – our eternity – (and eternity does not matter to massless particles such as photons and gravitons) to become the Big Bang of a new universe phase, the universe as a whole considered as an extended (and infinite) conformal manifold, each phase appearing as an entire expanding universe history.

Returning instead to the discipline of biology to develop my personal amateur research further, I read The Biophilia Hypothesis of E. O. Wilson and Stephen K. Kellart, The Biocentric View of Ludwig Klages, and Gregory Bateson’s epistemology of the sacred, Ernst Haeckel’s The Wonders of Life, and On Growth and Form by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, having just read Mind and Nature by Hermann Weyl, the books of cosmic philosophy of Henryk Skolimowski, and Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origins of Mind by Charles L. Lumsden and E. O. Wilson, taking from all these researchers and passionate academics, and grasping for the weave of a vast teleological hopefulness, the puissance of collective Aryan will atop a bounteous cosmos, the only pieces with which to solve some primordial riddle, and yet beholden to something greater and of the same universal whole; something that is not us. I will refer in more detail to some of this research later.

Indeed, it had become clearer to me then that, near unavoidably – yet unacceptably – I was still working under that benighted scientific mindset, as if embarrassed somehow to relinquish it, effectively blind-siding myself the while to the knowledge that it was not quite suited to this task – enough had been covered by that domain of thinking for the moment, and there was something vital I had missed.

After all, as Oliver Griebel remarks on in his opening chapter to Both One and Many, page 5:

Modern materialism ... with its “theories of everything”, which certainly isn’t afraid itself of fixed sets or static orders of things, nevertheless mocks the world-as-a-whole whenever this notion is meant to really acknowledge everything, all kinds of entities and phenomena, not only the ones that natural sciences feel able to pin down and quantify, but also the ones that social and human sciences and indeed common sense would insist have to be seriously discussed, especially what living beings are and what influences them.

As a last gasp of orthodox thinking, I should add that, much as I now cannot conceive of Christianity’s intelligent design or anthropocentrism, I still tentatively consider a whole-part degree of holobiont symbiosis to life inside the universe, a vast ecosystem functioning via autopoiesis across the nonlinear dynamics of open complex systems, and in a single quantum field, with discrete protoexperiential qualities as a universal constant of a universe-wide panagential fundamental consciousness below the mathematics of physics even, perhaps again best described by fields, with what we describe as particles merely vibrations in this field, and biological mechanisms evolving to convert these potential events (aggregates of quantum proto-consciousness) into actual human-like consciousness, and that universe cyclical, as stated above, in a homogenous, isotropic expansion of path-connected spacetime sequences (the metrics of the Standard Model displayed in the conformal boundaries of Penrose diagrams compressed down into a conformally regular spacelike hypersurface that can be passed across) and with a unified appreciation, grounded by some reluctant – still personally unsatisfying – acknowledgement of Alfred North Whitehead’s famous conclusion that intrinsic properties are “intrinsically unknowable”, in other words, they ‘just are’, fundamentally, and irreducible.

That’s just my own loose speculations for the moment. I would have to put a lot more work into it were I to potentially be able to advance them, and anyway, there are enough contemporary thinkers by now to refer to instead; those with a firmer contribution to make to this discussion. As final summation of this ‘stub’ idea though, and as Werner Heisenberg beautifully expressed, “The universe is not made up of things, but of vibratory energy networks that emerge from something even deeper and more subtle.”

However, to return instead, with some prudence, to Griebel’s ideas, further on down page 5 of Both One and Many (a position that partially contradicts my amateurish brain-storm above):

We ... need a holism reaching beyond both modernist and postmodernist thinking. However, not a holism in the one-sided sense some thinkers are using it, that is, reducing individuals to the wholeness they are part of. Many-one thinking says that the world or cosmos or Being is both unifying, through coherence and relationship and meaning and spirit, and at the same time essentially plural, home of distinct individuals that cannot be reduced to the cosmic and spiritual unity encompassing them.

And on page 6:

...in order to build a broad new philosophy current together beyond strict old-time religion, materialism, and relativism, I suggest, an encounter with spirituality ... has to take place. Yet this won’t be possible unless rather spiritual-minded people stop rallying with materialists, bashing their shared bogeyman-preconception of God. The so-called theistic concept of God, which separates the Divine from the world and beings and persons, is definitely outdated. But panentheistic and cosmic-holistic approaches ... certainly are not. What indeed could be more natural than calling a self-aware wholeness or One... God? Unfortunately, in continental Europe, and even more so in the English-speaking world, whenever the word “God” is mentioned, many if not most people automatically understand “the Lord of the Scriptures”, God, as Christian (and other monotheistic) confessions or theologies see “Him”.

As Griebel explains, the idea of a self-aware Spirit (or Being, or Coherence) of the world does not need to be justified via any particular tradition, authority, or revelation. He leaves the matter of self-awareness open, suggesting that there is no pre-conditional need why the Many-One should be endowed with reflexivity – that is, loosely speaking, being aware of itself; knowing that it is, knowing what it is, and knowing what it brings forth – as opposed to existing as the no-self ‘void-Spirit’ i.e. one lacking selfhood, and, ultimately, unaware that it exists, and over what it is. However, if we consider that there exists a complementary duality between the Many and the One, it is perfectly sound still to suggest that the One can be aware of itself and the Many it encompasses, whilst the Many inside the One can only be more or less conscious (and self-conscious), depending on what kind of life-forms they are, and what their relation to the One, to themselves, and among themselves turns out to be. Thus the Many-One is/are both aware and unaware of itself/themselves, rather their neither aware nor unaware.

Wishing (perhaps with a mild desperation) to improve my personal speculation above, just a little, and in relation to the beginnings of the cosmos, I acknowledged that it's hard indeed to shake off the all-powerful personal deity programming at times if one is considering a Limited Designer hypothesis. Wanting to evaluate that possibility for a while, I turned instead first to the work of Philip Goff, seemingly a proponent of what is effectively the no-self God hypothesis (or at least a panpsychism that grants the universe itself, by its own laws, a seemingly fundamental teleological requirement to fulfil, yet no conscious choice: it is clear in his wording that he is closer to straight atheism), who says in Why? The Purpose of the Universe:

We need not locate this moment before the existence of our universe. In the first 10-43 seconds of our universe, known as the Planck Epoch, our current physical theories break down ... Recall that when the laws of physics leave it open which option from a range of possibilities will transpire, a teleological law aimed at life will ensure that the possibility most conducive to life will be actualized. In our envisaging scenario, the possibility most conducive to life was the universe emerging from the Planck Epoch with fine-tuned constants.

Goff reminds us in an inverted echo of Stephen Hawking’s famous pessimistic – or simply humble; realistic given the context of this chapter – pronouncement on a final theory, that “For a Russellian panpsychist, it is consciousness that breathes fire into the equations.”

He continues his argument by again suggesting that in the Planck Epoch – that first split second of the universe where our current models of physics break down – it was indeterminate what values the constants of our universe would have. We know then that there must be something underlying the mathematical structures identified by physics, otherwise our universe would contain no consciousness.

It feels as though mathematics, when utilised at the exclusion of other tools of human thought, has become no more than a sandbox discipline with regard to the universe. Imposing additional symmetries; extra dimensions; extra fields; or larger group theory groups may aid us specifically in formulating potential questions for the future, but mathematics alone provides no definitive answers, becoming instead a metaphysical exercise all of its own (and perhaps – as far as consciousness is concerned – best left to one’s free time).

Writing also in a slightly more atheistic capacity, Thomas Nagel has also addressed the topic of cosmic teleology in his book Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, explaining that the idea of teleological laws is coherent, and quite different from the idea that a purposeful being produced the means to ‘his’ ends by choice. He confirms that in spite of the exclusion of teleology from contemporary science, it shouldn’t be ruled out a priori. Nagel confirms that, formally, the possibility of principles of change over time tending towards certain types of outcome is coherent:

In a world in which the non-teleological laws are not fully deterministic ... natural teleology would mean that the universe is rationally governed in more than one way – not only through the universal quantitative laws of physics that underlie efficient causation but also through principles which imply that things happen because they are on a path that leads towards certain outcomes – notably, the existence of living, and ultimately of conscious organisms.

He emphasises the irreducibility of conscious experience to the physical, believing instead that the role of consciousness in the survival of organisms is inseparable from intentionality: from perception, belief, desire, and action, and finally from reason. He reasons:

The generation of the entire mental structure would have to be explained by basic principles, if it is to be recognised as part of the natural order.

Nagel believes that teleology is a naturalistic alternative that is distinct from all three of the other candidate explanations for the existence of conscious life: these being chance, creationism, and directionless physical law. He acknowledges that to avoid the mistake that Roger White finds in the hypothesis of nonintentional bias (see: Roger White, “Does Origin of Life Research Rest on a Mistake?” Noûs 41 (2003), 475), teleology would have to be restrictive in what it makes likely but without depending on intentions or motives. This might have to involve some conception of an increase in value through the expanded possibilities provided by the higher forms of organisation toward which nature tends i.e., not just any outcome could qualify as a telos. Value is an explanatory end, but not one that is realised through the purposes or intentions of an agent.

In Nagel’s words, teleology means that in addition to physical law of the familiar kind, there are other laws of nature that are “biased towards the marvelous” and this means that some natural laws would be temporally historical in their operation. He states that natural teleology would require two things:

1. That the non-teleological and timeless laws of physics governing the ultimate elements of the physical universe are not fully deterministic. Given the physical state of the universe at any moment, they would have to leave open a range of alternative successor states, presumably with a probability distribution over them.

2. That among those possible futures there will be some that are more eligible than others as possible steps on the way to the formation of more complex systems, and ultimately of the replicating systems characteristic of life.

We are informed that any teleology requires that successor states in this subset have a significantly higher probability than is entailed by the laws of physics alone because they are on the path towards a certain outcome. Teleological laws would assign higher probability to steps on paths in state space that have a higher “velocity” toward certain outcomes (see: John Hawthorne and Daniel Nolan, “What Would Teleological Causation Be?” in Metaphysical essays. New York: Clarendon Press (2006)). They would be laws of the self-organisation of matter, essentially, or of whatever is more fundamental than matter.

Finally, he adds that some laws of nature would apply directly to the relation between the present and the future, rather than specifying instantaneous functions that hold at all times, and that:

A naturalistic teleology would mean that organizational and developmental principles of this kind are an irreducible part of the natural order, and not the result of intentional or purposive influence by anyone.

As it seems to me that both Goff and Nagel are wary of in their work, I, too, recognise that any God concept is unfortunately, by force of habit now, hard to extricate from viewing as a human-like consciousness, albeit a hugely powerful one 'above us' in a human hierarchy. It can be quite a mental break to utterly step outside that traditional framework whilst still considering a genuine universal consciousness. A profound puzzle, and a clouded one. As Carter Phipps writes on page 112 of his 2012 book Evolutionaries, reflecting on a meeting with Howard Bloom:

Unfortunately, as Bloom mentioned, as soon as you start invoking the word ‘mystery’, people tend to get nervous and think that the next thing you are going to do is start invoking supernatural forces and ancient omnipotent deities to explain it.

We need a discipline that considers this universe-wide early-onset teleology as much as it remembers to consider our own consciousness, progressing knowledge of what may be a genuine partial symbiosis (to phrase the One-Many in a more laboured way), echoing Warder's prior words on 'atoms of deity', and not merely the fall to a genuflecting New Age worship that slots the cosmos into the framework we are accustomed to adopting when approaching the Christian god (and one sees this in all permutations of starry-eyed countercultural hippie – their latent Neochristianity and lingering pseudo-Christian modes of worship never quite papered over by desperate, contrived appeals to the occult and the well-publicised esoteric); the “many-coloured esotericism” that dismayed Oliver Griebel in his student years just as much as the “crude and brute materialism” of those analytic philosophers who “spent immense intellectual energy denying the human mind any freedom and power of its own”.

 own”. So far, there doesn't seem to be an academic discipline that can further this topic; theoretical physics has made its progress, tried and tested by now, and up against a wall, but ultimately, it's closer to a matter for a biophysical eco-philosophy – I personally think neurophenomenology comes pretty close – and one in acknowledgment of the cosmologist Paul Davies' writings on a new set of biotonic laws for understanding cosmic evolutionary complexity in The Cosmic Blueprint, to expand a new thermodynamic principle, not that this unnamed discipline has yet been created.

As a final reflection on the need for at least some development of thought along biological lines, I will make reference to the critical paper by Derek Gatherer in BMC Syst Biol. 2010 Mar 12;4:22 titled “So what do we really mean when we say that systems biology is holistic?” which states:

Thomas Nagel has presented a taxonomy of modern antireductionism(s), which he divided in the first instance into two kinds: epistemological and ontological (Nagel T. In: “The Limits of Reductionism in Biology” Novartis Foundation Symposium 213. Bock GR, Goode JA, editor. Chichester.: John Wiley and Sons; 1998. “Reductionism and antireductionism”; pp. 3–14.) Epistemology being the branch of philosophy dealing with what can be known and how we know it, epistemological antireductionism is the recognition that some phenomena are too complex to be comprehended by human, or even computer, intelligence. Nagel's examples include a performance by a pianist – a description of every event in the performance at the quantum physical level, or possibly even at the muscular physiological level, would be overwhelmingly complex. The epistemological antireductionist is a holist because complete reductionism is technically impossible. ... Nagel's second category is ontological antireductionism. Ontology, the study of what objects exist, or what is correctly defined as an object for study, is more familiar term for biologists, having become incorporated extensively into systems biology and bioinformatics. Ontological antireductionism is the argument that there are certain things, entities or laws, that reductionism can never capture, even if we transcended the epistemological limitations. Regardless of any hypothetical complete description of the pianist's performance it would fail to answer some questions one might have about the performance. Likewise, the ontological antireductionist would maintain that even if we could transcend Bremermann's Limit and derive a complete description of our irreducibly complex network, there would still be things that would remain unknown about it. Nagel then divides ontological antireductionism into two kinds, constitutive and descriptive, which give different reasons for this failure. Constitutive ontological antireductionism declares that there are fundamental things involved in the pianist's performance other than the particles described in the complete quantum mechanical description. One might insist that there would be some spiritual or musical aspect of the pianist's performance that could never be explained by the reduction to physiology or physics. Whatever the merits of such an argument in music theory, in our systems biology network example this would be tantamount to vitalism, and so can be effectively neglected. Explanatory ontological antireductionism, by contrast, accepts that the physical description of the pianist's performance is the full description, but holds that there are emergent laws pertaining to that description that are not derivable from the laws governing the ultimate physical level, or aspects of a complete description that are not captured at the physical level. There is usually the implicit assumption that such emergent laws are in principle non-reducible, not that we merely fail to reduce them based on our current knowledge. Nagel's example of how such an emergent law could arise requires us to differentiate between physical states or events and facts about the world. One might acknowledge that every physical event has an explanation in terms of physics, but that a fact can have many physical descriptions that satisfy it...

I think it is clear by now, that there is something very wrong with modern day thinking. Nagel – for all his teleonomic insight, has done a great disservice to our understanding of reality, quick as he is to dismiss spiritual ideas – in knee-jerk ‘common sense’ fashion; along with over 99% of the latter-day scientific crowd: and as with AI’s ‘success’, and a bio-reductionist ‘explanation’ for psychological dysfunction, where such ideas spread like wildfire among this unthinking mass of ‘nothing but’ scientists, relinquishing true open-mindedness for patent groupthink; somehow lacking in the intrinsic psychological – psychohistorical – qualities needed to approach the matter fairly: for example, to unhesitatingly pursue a developmental research pathway that begins, for once, by taking seriously (if not necessarily agreeing with) the transcendental dualism of the botanist Johannes Reinke, as presented in his The World as Reality, published in 1899 – according to the monistic philosopher and naturalist Ernst Haeckel in The Wonders of Life – let alone referring to others, of a strict German Romanticist inspiration, such as the Göttingen school in late18th Century Germany, as described in the book Vital Forces, Teleology and Organization: Philosophy of Nature and the Rise of Biology in Germany, by Andrea Gambarotto, though admittedly perhaps not the arrogant, unpolished theories of Hans Dreisch, specifically his non-spatial proposals on the autonomy of life, and thus his neo-vitalist philosophy for a qualitative entelechy, as delivered in his 1908 Gifford Lectures on The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, and, particularly his 1912 Theory of Order (just as one can readily discard his later work; a spurious extended ‘investigation’ into parapsychology). His reliance on the supernatural and the miraculous in his pretentious canon renders him a poor candidate for the purposes of evaluating my worldview.

Ernst Haeckel himself may be a good (or better) beginning, writing as he does in The Wonders of Life, in his chapter 4, “The Science of Life”, that:

The words “substance” and “God,” “soul” and “spirit,” “sensation” and “matter” are used in the most different and changing senses. This is especially true of the word “materialism,” which is often wrongly taken to be synonymous with monism. The moral bias of idealism against practical materialism (or pure selfishness and sensualism) is forthwith transferred to theoretical materialism, which has nothing to do with it. ... Theoretical materialism (or hylonism), as a realistic and monistic philosophy, is right in so far as it conceives matter and force to be inseparably connected, and denies the existence of immaterial forces. But it is wrong when it denies all sensation to matter, and regards actual energy as a function of dead matter. ... Democritus and Lucretius traced all phenomena to the movements of dead atoms, as did also [Paul Thierry – Baron d’] Holbach and [Julien Offray de La] Lamettrie in the eighteenth century. This view is held today by most chemists and physicists. ... [T]hey will not allow these movements a kind of (unconscious) sensation. ... [T]hey will not hear a word about a “soul” in the atom. ... Naturally, I am not thinking of anything like the elaborate psychic action of man and the higher animals. ... [W]e must rather descend the long scale of the development of consciousness until we reach the simple protists, the monera. ... This monistic metaphysics, which recognises the absolute dominion of the law of substance in all phenomena, but confines itself to the study of nature ... is, with all its theories and hypotheses, an indispensable part of any rational philosophy of life. To claim, as [Wilhelm] Ostwald does, that science must be free from hypotheses is to deprive it of its foundations. But it is very different with the current dualistic metaphysics, which holds that there are two distinct worlds, and which we find in a hundred forms as philosophic dualism.

Indeed, in a slightly different line of thinking, as the philosopher and psychologist Ludwig Klages wrote in his 1930 essay “On the Value of Science”, reflecting on the biases that hold us back from our meaningful contemplations, as compiled in his book, The Biocentric View:

[W]hat does one mean, precisely, by the word ‘science’? One must also evaluate with some judiciousness the nature and worth of those other extant values with which science competes for preeminence in our lives. When we overhear some naive soul hold forth with such canting nonsense as “science has already decided...” and so forth, we must beware that we ourselves do not succumb to the false notion that science, as the highest of all values, is uniquely endowed with the capacity to generate categorically valid judgements. One can hardly conceive a more hollow proposition. ... The more apodictically certain the scientist is as to the ultimate validity of the procedure whereby he has alighted upon his experimental findings, the less valid will his deliberations turn out to have been in the final analysis.

As Klages observes later on, we must recognise that this Western will-to-objectivity should – indeed must – never be erroneously promoted to the position of being an absolute guarantor that the researcher who possesses it will enjoy a successful outcome in every bit of research he may choose to perform. After all, erroneous notions will persist in tempting the research to ignore certain inconvenient realities, one especially troublesome fact for a beginner being that behind the conscious purposes that he assures himself act as his mental motivations when confronting intractable problems, the “driving forces” of a man’s personal interests are oft-times still at work in the depths of his unconscious, from which emerge those ‘gentle whispers’ inviting the man to false philosophy; those unconfessed and scarcely recognised messages transmitted by these driving forces.

Indeed, Klages acknowledges that throughout Western history such lures have clouded the will-to-objectivity and by this action compromised the intellectual probity of scientific investigators. He adds that these quite savage criticisms launched continuously against the sciences, are not, upon closer scrutiny, aimed at science in general, only against the particularly tendentious and ill-considered manner in which science has developed during the post-Renaissance period – since Auguste Comte’s time, the orthodox scientist has explicitly assured his audience that his mission as he sees it is for the ultimate enslavement of nature to the demands of man’s will. Here is the science that seeks to discover the laws that regulate nature by analysis of the physical forces and chains of causality, solutions determined by a statistical analysis of the relevant data. The sole imperative governing this approach is the compulsion to quantify the entire natural world and constrain its processes under a will-to-cognition.

On the other hand, Klages explains, there exists a “radically different perspective on cognition”, its earliest manifestation arising in the golden age of Greek philosophy, and which, despite the crippling influence of repugnant church authorities, exerted a profound influence upon Medieval scholasticism and the speculative metaphysicians of the Middle Ages. However, when the initial question as to the primary object sought by any researcher is broached, Klages notes that it is the experimental scientist, he who brags insistently that his view of reality is clear, who suddenly announces that “his empire now embraces every conceivable formulation of distinctions which, we are stunned to be informed, must always remain beyond the sphere of man’s non-experimentally derived competence!”.

As Klages reflects:

How clearly this insight reveals the strange fear that obsesses materialistic scientists, namely, the haunting dread that every estimation of value and quantitative sanity will be shattered to a million fragments at the very instant when we admit the possibility that man may actually possess an intellectual faculty that enables him to make genuine discoveries of a metaphysical nature! The discoveries that have been achieved by scientists who espouse a methodological formalism based upon an alleged universally applicable quantifiability of everything that exists, are no more significant to the goals of genuine science than so many additional tools at a work-site.

In a nutshell, we are far too quick to dismiss on hearsay these days, and there is almost a neurosis level to the denial. Gatherer’s error is as avoidable as it is crass, perhaps granting us more of a reflection on the likelihood of him subscribing to the insidious – yet prevalent enough so as to be standard – post-Enlightenment ideology of secular humanism than as an ‘obvious’ rebuttal of that mutually considered absurd.

Gatherer’s final remarks solidify this scathing acknowledgement, as he leaves us with the idea that:

If we go beyond mere complexity to an insistence on an ontological antireductionism that requires the formulation of novel emergent or biotonic laws, then we are still within the realms of the currently comprehensible.

And (with the mildest concession, but no underlying appreciation of his scientistic arrogance – much as, irrespective of this, and perhaps bizarre upon an initial reading of such, I near-totally agree with him!):

Likewise, we are now in a position to test [Robert] Rosen's theories about non-computable network structures, and to search for real biological examples of them. Just as experimental programmes were essential to the victories of mechanism in the 1910s and neo-Darwinism in the 1930s, only those theories that immediately suggest relatively easy experiments will be winners.

Despite his confidence in claiming a monopoly over the realistic when approaching his discipline, in the fiercely secular and rationalistic manner long encouraged by modern universities in the West, and despite me myself subscribing to a form of explanatory ontological reductionism, these pronouncements do little, really, but illustrate his desire to claw back more of the same, dragging all into the reach of his by now (self-)limited tool-set, profane, formulaic, and, from the perspective of a biology that still acknowledges life at all, in any soulful articulation, incorrigibly wrong.

At this stage in my account I wish to linger for a brief while on my concluding words to chapter 4, to better express this need on our parts to step away from the allure of the objective and the second and third person, in order to come to a fuller understanding of perceptual experience, and particularly, to the deepest idiosyncrasies of consciousness. For this, I refer to the initial guest essay contained in The View From Within: First-Person Approaches to the Study of Consciousness, edited by Francisco Varela and Jonathan Shear, in which Pierre Vermensch describes first the history of introspection (defined, in the words of Alfred Binet, 1894, as: “the act by means of which we perceive directly what takes place in us, our thoughts, our memories, our emotions”) from the emergence of psychology at the beginning of the 19th Century, remarking that:

The primacy accorded initially to introspective methodology may appear very naive today. But what is truly naive is to think it so. One has to realize that this introspection was already the result of a difficult initiative, demanding a reflexive conversion, a first epoché [a gesture of suspension with regard to the habitual course of one’s thoughts, brought about by an interruption of their continuous flowing, for example, Epekhô, ‘I stop’ as Michel de Montaigne used to say in his Essais]. ... There is nothing naive about the suspension of the natural attitude which gets us involved in the perceptual spectacle, with a view, for example, to grasping its actual unfolding. ... Moreover, these authors did not allow themselves to be limited by one single method. All of whom I have cited, even the oldest of them, were very knowledgeable about the physiology of their time and about its connection with the psychic. They were also well informed about the need for indirect methods to study children, the sick, animals, in short, those who did not have access to speech.

He goes on to narrate that the beginning of the 20th Century marks:

...the great period for the mobilization of the methodology of introspection, which will now be presented as scientific and entitled ‘systematic introspection’, ‘experimental introspection’. It is employed with great intellectual enthusiasm in the context of a rigorously scientific experimental psychology of complex intellectual activities. ... The subjective experience in question is now better defined ... specific tasks are now proposed, tasks which circumscribe, both with regard to time and the object, the experience under examination. ... [This is] a revolution which enables this research to be supported by what is now known as the experimental set-up and control techniques. The tasks are the same for everyone and they take place under identical conditions ... and in accordance with precise instructions. In addition, the definition of these tasks will lead researchers to introduce independent variables. The researchers pay close attention to the methodological problems bearing upon the description itself. ... The need to break the description down into smaller units to facilitate formulation is already beginning to be felt (Watt, 1905).

Vermensch then explains the origin of the problem in this field of research, one that was to have catastrophic consequences further down the line for the developmental history of psychology (and psychiatry also, very much: modern psychiatrists could learn something from this cautionary example):

A part of the difficulty raised by description and by the problems associated with attention to subjective experience is surmounted by working with subjects who are trained in this kind of experience ... [but] this very training may render them less suitable as subjects, since they may already be sympathetic to the hypothesis of the observer. This latter question is one which keeps turning up: is experience even desirable? If yes, then who is supposed to have developed it? The person who is the subject, making possible better access to any description of subjective experience, and/or the researcher, thereby improving [the researcher’s ability] to guide and to follow the subject (in a non-inductive manner) in the latter’s attempt to accede to and to describe his or her experience?

Having later explained in detail the full ramifications of research done by the Warzburg school, with special reference to Douglas Watt’s pivotal 1905 experiment, the author speaks then of the birth of a long tradition of research which continues to this day, and which insists on studying cognitive-functioning from a problem-solving angle. A decision had been made to instead study ‘the higher functions’ and to try to define tasks and problems, with a view to studying intellectual functioning with reference to goal-directed and productive activity, in order to establish a relationship between what a subject has done, what that subject said he has done, and the properties of his final response (or even of intermediary responses, provided that observable traces were available).

As Vermensch states as the reason for this sweeping change, noting that the relationship between figurative and operative activity – between representation and cognitive activity – remains a problem to this day (and complicated by numerous new theories – what Edwin Boring emphasised in 1953, i.e. that verbalisation can be considered as good as being introspection, displays only that this distinction is forever lost on critics, a clear indication of the lack of understanding of data proceeding from introspection):

The work of the Warzburg school all pointed in the direction of the possibility of a non-evocative [i.e. without accompanying images – not necessarily just visual representation – gathered from our sensorial modalities]. ... [Edward B.] Titchener’s theory (1909) ... claimed that all mental activity was accompanied by sensorial representations. But he distinguished between representations relating to the content of a thought and those accompanying the execution of a mental act. ... The problem was not the methodology but the fact that the data bore directly upon a major problem for which the emerging scientific psychology of the day was not yet prepared. The data was not too weak, methodologically speaking, but too ‘strong’ for the theoretical and epistemological framework at the disposal of the researchers. They were unable to do much more than take up a position for or against associationism. The expectations were so strong and so evident that the apparently contradictory results which they obtained could not be integrated at the time.

Indeed, Vermensch continues, across the century, introspection as a methodology now had to be regularly justified and defended, with manuals and tracts of the time generally taking a very cautious view. At the same time, studies of problem solving multiplied rapidly, and took centre stage in providing the paradigm for the study of cognition. References to introspection began to disappear. Discussions of method took priority over the accumulation of verbalisations i.e. over the results of introspection. Verbalisation eventual took the place of any taking into account of the introspective act which might promote an awareness of the experience. From 1934, in fact, with the research of Claparéde, a procedure emerged instead known as ‘thinking aloud’. Only the public, objectifiable, scientific results of introspection – that is, verbalisations – were considered, issuing as they did from a pierce of behaviour, even as an essential part of what took place with the subject as he described how he proceeded had been lost. Now innumerable questionnaires were developed, asking intimate questions, but not being in the slightest concerned with the way in which the subject went about answering them.

Indeed, by the work of Ericsson and Simon in 1984 with their popular book Protocol Analysis, introspection was described as non-scientific altogether, with their emphasis being, in response to critics, that descriptive verbalisations concerning the subject were possible without it. It was now ‘scientifically correct’ to collect data of this kind. They spoke of verbal encoding, and of simultaneous verbalisations, but behind all this still managed to forget that the subject has to have access to something to even be in a position to describe his mental acts: the contents of his representations, and in consequence, introspection certainly is present and made use of!

I will not quote more from Varela’s anthology, as it remains an extraordinary piece of work (and a real treat to read through) and I do not wish to spoil it. However, I seriously recommend readers who have taken an interest by now to consider picking it up. As the book itself acknowledges on its rear cover “the study of lived subjective experience is still at the level of Aristotelian science”, and this really must be addressed for the sake of the future and ourselves altogether, the “greatest challenge”, in the words of David Chalmers, to ever face the science of consciousness. The difficult part, of course, from this perspective, is establishing a suitable methodology for gaining regulated access to – and transmitting – first-person experience so as to train better researchers from now on. Phenomenology holds many valuable clues, but itself can only go so far, this practice remaining, for the moment, unspecified (although I personally consider that keeping diaries of honest autobiographical record helps considerably).

Returning to Both One and Many, there is much I should acknowledge, but have not. Again, the second chapter, composed by John Heron (and referencing his book Feeling and Personhood), holds some otherwise unavailable insights. First, grasping a basic metaphor for the unorthodox – yet natural – spatial state we are referring to for our spiritually defined universe is imperative:

There is the polarity of plane and point: a single plane is an infinitude of points. Another [metaphor] is the infinite sphere whose centre is anywhere and everywhere.

As Heron narrates, another radical complementarity is that of involution and evolution, expressed through the metaphors of descent and ascent. The descending involution embeds the One in the embryonic Many and through the ascending evolutionary hierarchy (an entelechy) emerges a differentiated development of the Many in the One.

The One is enfolded in the Many, not dissolved, and, importantly, the Many progressively manifest, but do not disappear into the One. All higher levels are latent in the lowest.

I disagree very slightly with Heron’s spiritual perception here. I would argue that the Many may progressively manifest, dependent on the original conditions of their Being, differentiated as it is in kind as much as in individuation, as, much as all within the Many that is worthy of life retains this fundamental potential, one cannot escape the observation that there are some species among the total life of the cosmos that do not seem, on observation, to be in any way godly, lacking both in the aesthetic beauty I referred to at the start of this account and also, more importantly, in behavioural perfection (again, in an aesthetic sense that requires compassion to be fully interpreted).

For example, the parasitoid wasps superfamily, known to utilise the living bodies of Lepidoptera larvae as the hosts for their own instar larvae, oviposited into the unsuspecting larva’s body only to hatch and fill its form, the parasitoid larvae being in possession of incomplete digestive systems with no rear opening, thus preventing the hosts from being contaminated by their wastes, so they can continue to devour the creature from within until they are ready to pupate.

A reflection on this devastating behaviour – butterflies are surely one of Nature’s most beautiful (and useful) creations – leads me to wonder if it is really so obtuse to declare that parasitoids may, in the manner of spiders, offal-dwelling spotted hyaenas (known for grisly attacks on lions, above and beyond their necessity to feed), sadistic honey badgers, and indeed some other animal types, in some fashion lack what I can only refer to in humans as ‘racial soul’. As best as I can suggest, it is not that they lack the potential offered to them by the One, only that they have no means by which to actualise it, and thus remain, an inclusion on technicality within the multitude of the interconnected Many, but in some sense superfluous to that; forever ‘dead wood’ (although not damaging to the ‘red in tooth and claw’ aspect of evolution’s mechanisms – my ‘primordial riddle’ above being an entirely different matter of course; one which seems to require a deliberate action-by-choice on our part). Later, if we are brave enough to, it may be worth noting that this same argument could be applied to humans; or specifically to non-Aryan races (much as the modern Aryan too leaves much to be desired).

As Heron confirms, on pages 31-32:

Modern panentheism affirms the view that while all things are within the divine, the divine is not merely the whole of everything: it includes everything, is imminent in everything and transcends everything. ... [In reference to Paul Tillich] [t]he divine is not a being among other beings, but being-itself, the creative source and ultimate meaning of all natural objects: it is found in the ecstatic character of this world as its transcendent depth and ground.

With further attention turned towards the Many, on pages 33-35, Heron writes:

Some Western enthusiasts for transcendence of the subject-object split in a higher non-dual awareness of reality have written as if, by dissolving the viewpoint of a subject separated from an object, that is the end of a distinct, non-separable psyche. ... There is a hidden assumption ... a metaphysical rigidity. It allows diversity in unity, mutual interpenetration, only to the universe. ... [T]his is an arbitrary restriction ... [given that] when separate subject and separate object disappear, non-dual experiencing is revealed as a unitive field in which there is mutual interpenetration between person and world, distinct and non-separable.

Later he discusses the ideas of some ancient (Hindu – from the time of the Upanishads, rather than the Vedas) texts that in some sense, in these numinous moments (such as my own hard to define times in the woods, alone, or power-walking with our dog), there is no such thing as an experiencer, encapsulated in the argument from transcendental subjectivity. For example, when you look for your self (in this meditative capacity), you cannot see it, because a subject cannot be an object for itself, just as an eye cannot see itself. As soon as you do recognise it, it has become the object to a new, and necessarily unseen, subject – the perceived cannot perceive; the perceiver cannot be perceived. He concludes that the texts suggest that, in these moments, you cannot see yourself because what is seeking and looking is Brahman, i.e. Mind itself. The gap between the experiencer and God is absolutely closed because there is no longer an experiencer ‘in the way’. This renders transcendental subjectivity an infinite regress, where the subject forever transcends any account that can be given of it.

However, as Huron acknowledges, there is a problem here. The infinity of the regress does not disappear simply because one knows its divine origin. Any awareness of Brahman as transcendental subjectivity does not mean the subjectivity disappears, only that one is suddenly aware of from whence it originates. Thus a paradox arises: is the gap closed; am I distinct within an awareness of Mind or not? A person knows that they are one with Brahman at the same time as knowing that they are infinitely other (hence that upsurge of numinous awe at all). The (for me temporary; fleeting) end of that search does not put an end to expansive aspiration i.e. an attunement to that One – it does not put an end to the distinct experiencer, only the separate experiencer. As Huron writes:

The disconnected differentiation of the ego, which is the outcome of illusion, is not to be confused with the unitive differentiation of the transfigured person, which is a mode of divine manifestation. ... [In that case] Mind is only One and not Many. If Mind is also Many, then its Oneness will include Many distinct experiencers.

If a person is not distinct within this transcendent awareness of Mind, how then could they have become aware, let alone report the occurrence? As Huron elaborates, it is indeed important not to be misled by the enthusiasm of ancient texts for ‘Oneness’. We must be careful not to fall for a monopolar bias at work here, which does not do justice to the subtlety of the experience(s). He suggests that it is important that an obvious distinction is made between pernicious and non-pernicious dualities i.e. between separatist, divisive dualities and unitive, complementary polarities: the subject-object, dualistic split of mundane, concept-laden experience being an example of the former, and the person-world unity of experience emergent in the One-Many reality a very good example of the latter. To say something is dualistic is not ipso facto to say that it is metaphysically pernicious, and the One-Many reality is, after all, a non-separatist dualism; a dipolar unity.

As Lawrence Hyde wrote in The Nameless Faith:

There can be little doubt that in a large number of cases the exultation attained by modern eastern yogis is nothing more than psychic in character, in spite of their own belief, and that of their disciples, that they have entered the sublime state of Samadhi. It almost looks, in fact, as if this illegitimate mode of escaping is the oriental equivalent of our excessive concern in the West with the realm of objectivity.

And as Huron concludes:

There is the One, there are the Many, that is the duality, the dipolarity. They are in a state of mutual compenetration, so the One is in the Many, the Many are in the One, all of the Many are in each of the Many and each of the Many is in all of the Many – and that is the non-separatism, the unity. And all this is Reality, that which there is nothing other.

Again, I simply wish that Huron had acknowledged, in further detail that, though there is indeed compenetration between all and each of the Many, this is not necessarily, by intuitive observation, to an evenly weighted degree in terms of intrinsic value. Not all that is life is equally valid, and some beings, or indeed life-forms (if the two terms are not to be taken as synonymous), do feel to a solid evaluation’s sense to be in some tangible manner as good as ‘cut off’ from the divine, not outside the view and reach of the Gods, and yet inept before that presence, and of some detrimental concern to the Many about them, of which they appear to constitute the weakest, more abject division. Ideally, in their absence, this gap would be further closed.

As stated above (although it bears reiteration), neuroscience cannot progress due to our contemporary science and its descriptive limitations; our reliance on a certain scientific way of thinking at all. This purely quantitative vocabulary imposes an explanatory limitation when fully articulating the experiential qualities of consciousness, and it seems unlikely that it ever will be able to explain them given this fundamental divide.

Just as a brief speculative interlude, and as if to clutch at a hybrid perspective that at least acknowledges limited scientific terms, taking what we interpret as the wave function itself during the Planck Epoch as the fundamental consciousness universal fine-tuner for distant consequences, and in conscious decision making, permitting life for much later on in the interim and reduced (by interplay with the rest of its Being – as if to concede control voluntarily; a transmutation – or transmission – of will: the origins of a gifted Becoming) to mechanical behaviour immediately afterward, one can wonder if there is an undiscovered potential for life to actualise, a greater realisation, the wave function and the particles being an expression of matter as much as we are.

As stated, I am not totally beyond the concept of Gods, and indeed favour that perspective greatly over the nihilistic inanity of secular humanism and inert godlessness, but I couldn't relate to Christianity's all-powerful creator figure, much as I can also handle a non-Christian deism regarding this fine-tuning teleology and these fundamental physical laws (albeit nothing so directly and theistically interpreted as, say, Jupiter, or Odin, or Apollo, etc., nothing that is in any way human-like, no 'he' or 'she' or people-characters, even though the latter mythological deities and pantheons don't cause me any harm to tolerate, and indeed encourage the maintenance of better values in their believers – or at least did). Still, nothing so far quite matches what I mean by this. I have not gone far enough.

My alignment is with life and Nature, better understood both mathematically (to the degree it is useful – when a box is filled, one moves to another) and by empirically examining the beauty of reality and the natural world itself, stripped of any desire to analyse or categorise it, and with an eye towards its protection – with a yearning that this mentality could one day be applied by all of us in fact, as loyal planetary stewards rather than competing enemies in a mad dash for supremacy over what is, at root, intrinsically part of ourselves, and better than ourselves (or, at best, given over to indifference, disinterest, and capitalist mercantile impulses – the ready exploitation of that living world that sustains us or otherwise exists freely beyond our presumed dominion), the latter sentiment exemplified by the practice of deep ecology i.e. a fundamental change in our perception of life that facilitates a defence of the natural order by valuing living organisms regardless of their utility to human needs, a more profound conclusion (and initiation) by far than what can be achieved by the promotion of mere mainstream environmentalism; an eco-centric weighting, as opposed to the lingering anthropocentrism bolstered by Biblical teachings, and by the impositions of over two millennia of devastating Christian interference.

I’d still love to come to terms with life at all as a means of fulfilling some cosmic function – perhaps even some duty, to put it another way – that still accounts for chaos and nonlinearity outside of determinism, something we have not yet consciously grasped, not just a system laid out of increasing complexity, that merely being the mechanism. Something from nothing makes no sense to me at all. I am careful when I study primordial nucleosynthesis and the (very) early universe and then the physics and phenomenology of electroweak baryogenesis, and I am always fascinated.

For example, in the 2018 Ph.D. thesis of Kaori Fuyuto, available from Springer Publishing, itself titled Electroweak Baryogenesis and Its Phenomenology one finds the ideas – in my introductory paraphrasing, for we have had enough maths for the moment – that the final asymmetry of particle-antiparticle pair production and annihilation is too small to explain why the present universe still holds particles at all (compare a difference in the number density of baryons and anti-baryons of 1010+1 and 1010 respectively). In order that the universe be created, a difference between the number of particles and antiparticles must have existed by the era that pair annihilation ended. But why does the particle emerge ‘victorious’ from this circumstance? This baryon asymmetry of the universe (BAU) remains an outstanding problem. One might consider the baryon asymmetry to be just an initial condition of the birth of the universe, but this is not so – after all inflation (i.e. the exponential expansion of the universe) would lead to the disappearance of asymmetry, with the total entropy of the universe produced during the re-heating era after inflation.

In addition, one could very well say that matter exists only around us but that distant galaxies are developing from antimatter, implying a separation between the two, thus leading us to expect the emittance of strong gamma rays were galaxies and anti-galaxies to collide. However, such strong gamma rays have never been observed. Even were matter and antimatter successfully separated the – relatively – small mass of the total energy at this horizon would still not explain the present total quantity of matter inside the Milky Way galaxy.

We are, it seems, observing a first-order electroweak phase transition, of a Higgs physics nature, perhaps a matter for the Large Hadron Collider to investigate, if they would like to. However, my gut instinct remains that – despite the author’s vast technical expertise: the mathematics is beyond me past a very certain point, which isn’t an accolade to me to reflect on, to put it politely – this problem will remain insoluble in any understanding that accounts only for the mechanism, and not the ‘why’ of this obscure process, the ‘how’ remaining unsatisfying to me (and potentially wrong anyway given some of Ilya Prigogine’s theorising, included below).

It’s a pity we no longer have access to over 99% of the historical philosophy and natural science texts of the Greco-Roman civilisation and of their religious writings, much as the little that could be preserved has been, often partial and fragmented (much as even this greatly reduced body of work can always have been maliciously altered at some point in-between then and now, in a subtle way, or indeed extrapolated from with duplicity so the historical deeds of leading Roman figures could be falsified, as is suspected of having occurred with later accounts on the Emperor Caligula and the Emperor Nero, the full writings of Tacitus - a more fair-minded historical writer - having been lost, leaving us only scant remnants). One feels that back then, they could have grasped something that we don’t know see this issue of life and fundamental reality. It’s a great frustration.

As a last, weary capitulation to that computational ‘sandbox’ of potentials, and on a slightly different note, before I move on to a more meaningful conclusion, we can recall that I mentioned the Schrödinger Equation earlier, in my chapter 4, in relation to physical consciousness wave function collapse. Some of my reading touched on the Lorentz-covariant Klein-Gordon-Fock Equation also, in quantum field theory. It’s a quantised version of a relativistic dispersion equation describing spin zero particles, composed of two coupled differential equations in calculus. It usually refers to the position space form.

The general solution is written as a superposition of plane waves obeying the special relativity energy-momentum dispersion relation derived by inserting the Fourier transformation and using an orthogonal function on the complex variables. This satisfies classical motion, giving positive and negative energy solutions for a free particle, separating out the negative energies and picking out the positive frequency from a delta function, with two values of ω for each k, one positive and one negative, to describe a relativistic wave function.

To explore a little more about the Klein-Gordon-Fock equation, one can turn to the paper “Derivation of the Klein-Gordon-Fock equation from first principles” by Anton A. Lipovka, Vola M. Andrianarijaona and Colton H. Davis, in the St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University Journal. Physics and Mathematics. 17 (2) (2024) 150–159, which states in its introduction:

The Klein-Gordon-Fock (KGF) equation, which describes the dynamics of massive spinless particles, is the simplest relativistic equation to describe massive fields. ... [the] KGF equation allows calculation of relativistic corrections, such as the description of particle birth in external gauge fields. ... [the] KGF equation is used because [an] electromagnetic field is described by the ab initio invariant Maxwell equations. In contrast, the Schrödinger equation is not invariant with respect to the Lorentz transformations. ... Unfortunately, [the] KGF equation has not yet been obtained from the first principles. Usually, it is derived from the Schrödinger equation which, in turn, was postulated on the base of following three axioms: i) Required structure of the equation, ii) Postulated existence of wave functions, and iii) Axiomatic introduction of Planck constant as coefficients to achieve the consent between the calculated and experimentally measured quantities. Such an axiomatic approach, ascending to the first work of Schrödinger ... hides the physical meaning of quantum phenomena, provoking the emergence of many different interpretations of quantum mechanics. This suggests that in order to understand the physics of quantum processes, the axiomatic approach must be revised.

The paper goes on to lay out a few different attempts to derive the Schrödinger equation. For example, In Section 3, the Klein-Gordon-Fock equation is derived from the stability conditions, thus eliminating the need for the first of Schrödinger’s three axioms and in Section 4, they derive the KGF equation without relying on Schrödinger’s second and third axioms. Within the framework of this approach, it is demonstrated that wave functions naturally arise when the photon function is decomposed by the complete set of the eigenfunctions of the corresponding Sturm-Liouville problem. They also show that the Planck constant appears in the equation as an adiabatic invariant of a transversal electromagnetic field, if changes in metric tensor are taken into account.

It’s interesting to note, as the paper itself acknowledges, that until recently, there was a glaring discontinuity between the wide use of Schrödinger’s equation to calculate data describing physical facts and the lack of any extant derivation of the equation from first principles (it should be noted that before Schrödinger postulated his equation he worked with a more general-relativistic case and came himself to the KGF equation, but this result was not published). This made it impossible to understand the physical foundations of quantum physics. Again the paper states, echoing the acknowledgement of Michael Lockwood in chapter 4 in relation to the work of Henry P. Stapp, that:

For a long time, the approach jokingly named "Shut up and calculate!" (David Mermin) was dominating, which, in turn, gave rise to many different interpretations of quantum mechanics. This situation inevitably called into question the Copenhagen physical interpretation of the wave functions. The question also arose regarding the nature of Planck’s constant.

One mathematician attempting to derive the Schrödinger equation, Edward Nelson, started from Newtonian Mechanics, and obtained a quantisation from gravity akin to Schrödinger’s equation (Nelson E., “Derivation of Schrödinger equation from Newtonian mechanics”, Phys. Rev. 150, (4), 1079-1085 (1966)). Similar ideas were taken up later by Francesco Calogero, leading recently to the quantum Painlevé-Calogero Schrödinger wave function (Mobasheramini F. and Betola M., “Quatization of Calogero-Painlevé system and multi-particle quantum Painlevé equations II--VI”, SIGMA 17, 081, (2021)). However, the coupling constant of the gravitational interaction is 40 orders of magnitude smaller than that of electromagnetic one. For this reason, it would be unusual to construct quantisation on the basis of gravity. On the other hand, interactions in atoms (which are quantised) are significantly electromagnetic. This suggests that the method proposed by Nelson and Calogero cannot be considered as entirely correct, though it remains of great interest to research, as indeed does stochastic mechanics in general.

But I’m getting beyond myself. I was initially considering relativistic position space propagators for two points in 4-dimensional Minkowski spacetime. Certainly, I could have made a basic error in this idea itself considered at all, and be going down the wrong track, but I only mention it in relation to the Feynman propagator in a free real scalar (Phi) field (the time-ordered correlation function of two scalar fields in a vacuum state), where the free scalar field describing spacetime obeys the Klein-Gordon-Fock equation and the Feynman propagator specifying the probability amplitude complex number for a particle to travel from one place to another is a Green’s Function of that equation (an impulse response defining the response of a linear time-invariant system for time t - t’).

Others, with a much better grasp of mathematics, have covered these issues with far more technical skill, brainpower, and dedication. I merely acknowledge that, unusually, the Klein-Gordon-Fock Equation has causal propagator Green’s functions that are not 0 for a negative t. This suggested that the future could, via the solution’s backwards-in-time antiparticles (carrying an opposing flow of positive energy), affect the past.

However, in contrast to my speculative analysis above (and in a manner that I feel, by conclusion, destroys it utterly), it’s difficult at all to define a ‘present’ by our understanding of time, given the philosophy of time and space’s block universe ontology of eternalism (by which all existence is treated as equally real – space-time described as an unchanging four-dimensional ‘block’, where in the 1967 words of the philosopher Hilary Putnam “any future event X is already real″: Hilary Putnam (1967), Time and physical geometry, vol. 64, The Journal of Philosophy, pp. 140–147, rendering eternalism compatible with the ‘distant simultaneity’ of special relativity. Additionally, Paul Davies considers relativity in his book About Time, stating simply that “The very division of time into past, present, and future seems to be physically meaningless.”), and, especially, the dynamical fields of covariant loop quantum gravity where gravitational time dilation presents time as a variable and not a fixed notion, as opposed to viewing time as an independent background through which states evolve.

Adopting this quantum gravity model also provides a strong quantum effects potential solution to the black hole information ‘paradox’ (i.e. the tension between quantum mechanics and general relativity, where the question remains as to whether information about matter falling into a black hole is lost as the black hole evaporates, contradicting the quantum mechanical principle that information cannot be destroyed, the potential solution being that the information remains coded in the black hole’s structure to be released at the conclusion of the evaporation process).

In this area (i.e. discussing time and determinism) I find myself drawn to the spectacular work of Ilya Prigogine, despite otherwise siding with the Carlo Rovelli perspective. It’s useful initially to note that Euclidean space vector fields (and indeed spinor fields: sections of vector bundles in a complex number-based vector space which transform linearly as the space is subject to an infinitesimal rotation, returning to an original state by rotation of 720° and inverted when the space rotates through 360°, and used to describe the intrinsic angular momentum of fermions) override Bell’s theorem of deterministic causality.

On the other hand, as Prigogine writes in his 1996 joint collaboration with Isabelle Stengers, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of the Universe:

It seems more likely to me that the birth of our universe was only one event in the history of the entire cosmos … we know we are living in an expanding universe. The standard, which dominates the field of cosmology today, asserts that if we were to go backward in time, we would arrive at a singularity, a point that contains the totality of the energy and matter in the universe. However … the laws of physics cannot be applied to a point corresponding to an infinite density of matter and energy… how is it possible to reconcile this event with laws of nature that are time reversible and deterministic? ... in Newtonian physics, even when extended by quantum theory, space and time are given once and for all. Moreover, there is a universal time common to all observers. In relativity, this is no longer the case.

As Prigogine further suggests on the nature of time:

There would have been an irreversible phase transition from a preuniverse that we call the quantum vacuum. This irreversibility would result from an instability in the preuniverse induced by the interactions of gravitation and matter ... We argue that irreversible processes associated with dynamic processes have probably played a decisive role in the birth of our universe ... We have an age, our civilization has an age, our universe has an age, but time itself has neither a beginning nor an end.

He reminds us that:

In contrast to Euclidean geometry, we now have the Minkowski space-time interval. The transition from one coordinate system, x, y, z, t, to another, x’, y’, z’, t’ is the famous transformation that combines space and time. At no point however is the distinction between space and time lost ... as stated by [Hermann] Minkowski, space and time are no longer independent entities, but this does not preclude the existence of an arrow of time.

Later in his chapter, Prigogine writes on Einstein’s association of gravity with the curvature of space-time. As Prigogine goes on to explain, thanks to the Einsteinian revolution, the connection between space-time and matter is expressed by Einstein’s fundamental field equations. In order to go from the basic equations of general relativity to the field of cosmology, we have to introduce simplifying assumptions.

A unique quality of the conformal factor (this conformal factor as a function of space-time relates to a field in the same way as an electro-magnetic field, and other fields, being dynamic systems characterised by well-defined energy) is that it corresponds to negative energy, while the energy of any given matter field is positive. Thus, the gravitation field described by the conformal factor may act as a reservoir of negative energy from which the energy to create matter is extracted.

These conclusions indicate the possibility of an irreversible process transforming gravitation into matter. The model does not suggest creation ex nihilo, as the quantum vacuum is already endorsed by the universal constants, which are assumed to hold the values we ascribe to them today. We can incorporate this into a macroscopic thermodynamic approach, where, satisfyingly, the universe has to be treated as an open system. To think otherwise is to deny the arrow of time. We are indeed compelled to modify the first law of thermodynamics. As Prigogine states on the birth of the universe, we can now associate it not with a singularity but with “an instability that is analogous to a phase transition or bifurcation.”

The ideas in these extended quotations are the sorts of stub thoughts I’d eventually relate back to my consciousness brainstorming (as indeed it would also be nice to combine Prigogine with Penrose, at a level far beyond my natural comprehension, and if such could be achieved: one would also have to include Penrose’s non-random ‘edge of chaos’ speculations, in addition to the statistical probabilities inherent to Prigogine’s understanding of unstable systems, those sensitive initial conditions that ensure continued resistance to standard deterministic explanations).

It had, from the outset, seemed unlikely to me that the future was set in stone, and already (feeding the) ‘present’, although, in another line of thinking altogether, the past is still the present in that we have a grand historical template of deeds and manners of behaviour laid out before us that both explains and concurrently shapes our contemporary decision making.

The only concession I would make again, having already found great sustenance in his refutation of determinism, is to acknowledge that, much as Prigogine does not (to my knowledge) reference it himself, I still find some secondary favour with the growing block view of time where the past and present both exist, and yet the future is undecided, with more of space-time continuously coming into being with the passage of time, an alternative both to eternalism and also to presentism (where only the present occurs). Naturally, this intuitively reasonable ‘common sense’ theory contradicts special relativity. As explained by its earliest proponent, the epistemological philosopher C. D. Broad, writing in 1923 (Broad, C. D. (2002). Scientific Thought. London: Routledge. pp. 66–67):

It will be observed that such a theory as this accepts the reality of the present and the past, but holds that the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present. On the other hand, the essence of a present event is, not that it precedes future events, but that there is quite literally nothing to which it has the relation of precedence. The sum total of existence is always increasing, and it is this which gives the time-series a sense as well as an order. A moment t is later than a moment t' if the sum total of existence at t includes the sum total of existence at t' together with something more.

Broad garnered some recognition later with his essay on “Determinism, Indeterminism, and Libertarianism” in Ethics and the History of Philosophy (1952), where he is known as the man who introduced the philosophical terms occurrent causation and non-occurrent causation, themselves vital to discussing metaphysical libertarianism, taken in the modern interpretation of agent-causal and event-causal theories of free will (the former a non-physical theory, distinguishing between events effected by prior events and the free acts of a being motivated entirely by their own prerogative – attributed only to God, in the words of Roderick Chisholm; the acts in each of us of a prime mover unmoved – and without reference to their personality, desires, or past history; the latter an incompatibilist position depending on a physical theory of the mind yet presupposing physical indeterminism, much as not all interpretations require free will, as envisaged by the deliberative indeterminism of, for example, Daniel Dennett.)

My own perspective on the matter remains in the event-causal category; a soft determinism (or partial indeterminism) rooted in a kind of ‘effort of will’ theory, by which I account for physical indeterminism, but consider the human body – and indeed primarily consciousness itself – as, perhaps unexpectedly, a hindrance to the progress of universal unfolding; of autocatalysis and gathering perfection of form; of any real ‘communion with the Gods’, unless a more aware state is attained, by application of will, and yet not via the cold, dispassionate ‘methodology’ of relentless analytical reasoning.

In one regard there is this meditative release, and in another there are a series of necessary good choices (and we do rely on choice in the face of so many brutish naysayers, clustered in ranks of armoured rocks around their hard deterministic a priori excuse-making; their deus ex machina for the egotistic avoidance of personal responsibility in the wake of so much poor behaviour, so many blatant poor choices of their own), namely, to excise that worthless, primitive, emotionally insensate animate matter such as is detrimental to our own passage towards the foothills of the One, coupled to the simultaneous (and synonymous – necessary if not sufficient) necessity to improve our own bodies in a conscious – and complimentary – evolutionary augmentation, to return something long-lost (and I would argue that it has been lost since the time of the Cro-Magnons, that future potential never developing as Nature would intend). One serves the Gods through their actions after all, as much as – if not more so than – by their thinking.

There is no real way to account for all this to my father. In general, too much of our modern research effort has been placed on a mechanistic understanding of the brain, all thought rendered computational or informational, akin to the linear algorithms of machines, reality boiled down to a balancing act of chemicals in flux, and limited effort is spent to instead understand the mind – let alone the broader world it inhabits – with a more realistic and meaningful investigation into this rich phenomenon, divorced from the inert void of neurochemistry, as if, bizarrely, biological matter (or indeed energy, a synonymous descriptor) were to some degree irrelevant, life poured into a petri dish and vivisected by gloved hands, broken into tiny pieces and picked at by descending instruments until the whole is forgotten, until there is nothing there at all and the cosmos is dead.

As final thoughts, Russellian neutral monism does appeal to me philosophically, and a position of idealism that I do not find in conflict with my cosmological natural world 'panpsychism’, perhaps more accurately understood as a spiritual panexperientialism (with the additional agnostic panentheism – the panexperiential still remaining the background ‘plane’ to traverse after all, more than any direct participation in the sacred), yet radically empirical, shying away from mystical animism, hylozoism, non-physical epiphenomena, and anything overly idealistic or incorporeal at the expense of simply recognising mind as a unique and irreducible property of matter, even if it has some unusual caveats: perhaps monism is still not quite true, or not quite enough, and instead I should clarify by stating that, as far as I can ascertain, I am, so far – and as if to play devil’s advocate – a substance monist but a property dualist, at least when I think in line with Galen Strawson’s writings on ‘micropsychism’, as explained in Consciousness and Its Place in Nature (and I am not even sure if, ultimately, that does not boil down to monism anyway – and I feel my take on it does – albeit with that strange, spiritual, abstract caveat – again, this would require me to formulate another book, this time with a proper delineation of my own ideas).

Ultimately, I would be more comfortable at a later date to adopt a metaphysically monistic position in its entirety, drawing primarily from the model(s) of consciousness explored by Francisco Varela, Antonio Vella and Charles D. Laughlin (a complicated neurophenomenological account which bears thorough investigation).

I'm afraid I cannot yet entirely embrace complete idealism as put forward by Federico Faggin with his concept of ‘seities’ – and it is very unlikely that I ever will – much as I keep my mind open to it. A suitably piqued reader can, of course, explore all these latter ideas in their own time. Again, I regret that the limited space constraints of this chapter preclude me from elaborating further, much as I would have very much liked to.

At ultimate conclusion, I reject hylomorphism. It comes originally from the writings of Aristotle that posit a dualistic mind/matter split, popularised by the ‘ghost in the machine’ theories of Descartes, applicable in my context to the understanding in revealed religion of a disembodied 'soul', and crucial to the metaphysics of transcendentalism.

Surely we should view this as a cowardly, irresponsible belief, stimulating its adherents to devalue the physical world, charging through it, destroying it, and destroying each other, captivated by otherworldliness, a harrowing bind of deep threat and undefined pleasure, the promise of eternity coupled to a fear of death. Far better after all to understand the soul as a tangible phenomenon indistinct from the physical body, an intrinsic property of our race more than our insidious inherited religion!

I continue to hold a profound disdain for parapsychology and shy away from spurious ‘research’ into extra-sensory perception and telekinesis, considering the fantasy of miracles, as with the acceptance of all paranormal phenomena, to be obscenely unscientific. Much as I have time for these theoretical speculations if they incorporate real physics, at the point where quantum mechanics is usurped by New Age mysticism, where the literature is often sensationalist, fallacious or unfalsifiable, and poorly presented, I draw the line.

A reading of Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science helps one to distinguish between genuine science and the crank madness of the occult and the evangelical. Nicholas Humphrey’s Leaps of Faith delves into the irrationality and theoretical impossibility of miraculous occurrences and psychic acts. They explore the psychology of belief, these consolatory religious myths and quasi-religious delusions based on an emotional response, such as a desire for certainty regarding the future, and the easy answer showmanship and charlatanry of practitioners backed up with a veneer of respectability by gullible peers, this way of thinking implanted at all by an early exposure on the parts of their parents, an unconscious internalisation of parental values and attitudes, and very difficult to relinquish in adulthood (much as with Christian religious and moral belief itself).

A last note on introspection: The pre-Socratic philosopher and mathematician, Thales of Miletus has been regarded as the first philosopher to break with the Ancient Greek tradition of utilising mythology to explain the world, instead settling on a systemic, research-based natural philosophy to explain reality. For this reason, he is seen as the first scientist; the first to engage in mathematics and deductive reasoning in European history. His view of nature was that it consisted of a single ultimate material substance, the originating ‘arche’ of the world (which he considered to be water).

It is interesting to note that Herodotus described Thales as “a Phoenician by remote descent” rather than an Aryan Greek, although Nietzsche interpreted this only as being that his ancestors emerged as seafarers from the Cadmeia citadel of ancient Thebes, to the northeast of the Gulf of Corinth. However, the matter is complicated, as his father Examyas possessed an Anatolian name, rendering him potentially a half-Greek. It would make no difference to my point were he to be of pure Greek ancestry though.

In his lifetime, Thales calculated the height of the pyramids, predicted the weather, anticipated the arrival of a solar eclipse in 585 BCE, and discovered the position of the Ursa Major constellation. The Roman (initially Greek) Platonist philosopher Plutarch, a writer refreshingly more concerned in general with character than with history, remarked in his partially-lost work Moralia: “at that time, Thales alone had raised philosophy from mere speculation to practice.”

But again, here, we find our problem (which does not seem to have occurred to Plutarch) – and as before, it is frustrating also that the full Moralia remains unavailable to us, given that Plutarch’s lost essays on Pyrrhonian philosophy would have been useful for us in evaluating that psychological pre-condition necessary for the vital epoché I referred to earlier.

Inscribed into the side of the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi are the three sacred Delphic maxims (and, nearby, the 147 additional maxims): “Know thyself”, “Nothing in excess”, and “Give a pledge and trouble is at hand”, said to have been authored by Apollo himself, although also ascribed to the ‘seven sages of Greece’ of whom Thales is the first to be recognised, associated as he is with the command to “Know thyself”.

Thales of Miletus failed to know himself though, falling into a well and humiliating himself as he was out walking, so fixated was he on looking up at the stars.

As Plato narrates in Theaetetus (174 A):

Thales was studying the stars and gazing into the sky, when he fell into a well, and a jolly and witty Thracian servant girl made fun of him, saying that he was crazy to know about what was up in the heavens while he could not see what was in front of him beneath his feet.

Learning from this lesson, we should not make the same mistake ourselves. How, after all, does one know the Gods if they do not start with that most obvious first principle – ourselves? Without deep introspection and reflection on who we are, as individuals; as an individual, and only then in our collective power, no amount of complicated theorising over the unreachable galaxies outside us and the vast voids of darkness beyond – and past the scope of human faculties: while we are what we are, we will not solve this problem – will suffice. We are here, now, on this wholesome ground, and it is from here, and for here, that we should emerge. That was the real answer to the questions I asked myself in this chapter (though there is much work remaining to be done).

It bears repeating:

Know thyself, and the rest will fall into place.