The following is the gist of a topic currently featured in the 21st revised edition of V.H. Ironside, Behold! I Teach You Superman (see below):
“In the
original unity of the first thing lies the secondary cause of all things, and
the germ of their inevitable annihilation.”
Thus Edgar Allan Poe.
Equally
emphatic is the contemporary physicist: “The same grand unified theories that
provide a mechanism for matter to come into existence also hold the seeds of
its demise.”[1]
And to presume otherwise is instantly to abandon any prospect of the rational
understanding of what is meant by cosmic evolution. What happens next, though,
is a matter of considerable disagreement. It is
difficult to imagine that a
lone ‘irrelative’ atom, a single quantum of energy in its purest and most
concentrated form, should have sprung fully formed from the stupendous brow of
God. A difficulty which is illuminating in itself as it demonstrates the extent
to which, in the Big Bang, matter and mind were fused into one. “If the
universe is a universe of thought,” wrote the astrophysicist James Jeans, “then
its creation must have been an act of thought.”
Thought
becomes deed, deed becomes word, building to a tremendous climax. The Big Bang
is the climax also of the conceptual principle. The more so, since for my own
part I am rather concerned to argue that the notion of a ‘beginning’ is a
perceived truth and not a fact; not residing in any special mechanism of
nature, in other words, but in a moment which
resolves itself into one of conceptual
distinction. The most crucial
facet of which is the way the observer seems to play a pivotal part in determining
the nature of reality at the cerebral or - in what is
known as the measurement paradox - quantum level. On this I have no contemporary
comment, except of course that physics has long since come to terms with the
fact that because such initial conditions as the Big Bang would, from the classical point of view, always require
antecedent conditions to back them up, first principles may never in truth be
reached. It is a decisive moment, for if macroscopic objects do have associated
waves, then the moment we collapse the wavefunction of the universe, the concomitant reality is bound to reflect the anthropomorphism of the observer. As James Jeans succinctly
pointed out, “reality is no
longer the object of the subject-object relation, but
the relation itself”. It is, as things now stand, the product of ‘many minds’. Some sense of which is best conveyed, perhaps, by the so-called many universes (or
alternative histories) theory according to which such
quantum superpositions play a leading role in the great conceptual struggle
between order and chaos. In effect, I believe that one consequence of
this is the inescapable necessity that, whatever judgement may be formed with subsequent respects, there is no need
for a prime over an ‘uncaused’ cause, or some such act of self-revelation. Things
are not linear as they would be in time, and
to assume that the past can be described in terms of initial conditions alone
is a conceptual fallacy.
Because of the inherent uncertainty regarding
subnuclear activities, Heisenberg supposed that the past as well as the future
were unknowable until determined by observation. And I can see when it comes to
suggesting that the conditions we observe today are both, the effect as well as
the cause of the past, it seems to be
purging the cause to infinity. But
contemporary physics, after a flurry of mathematical manipulation, appears all
but committed to the idea that the ‘universe’ has no pre-set objective,
but is determined only by the instructions of its ultimate condition – the one
we happen to be in now – or its cognitive tendency. ‘Cognitive tendency’ bears
some elaboration, but it is precisely because the objective is created only by
the nature of the questions asked that its evolution rests upon manifest
necessity, rather than having an ‘initial’ epistemological basis in history.
Moreover, when the Cambridge mathematician Roger Penrose first demonstrated
that the universe began as a ‘singularity’ - a state of infinitely curved space
in which the laws of relativity had broken down - he clearly meant a beginning
conceived and formulated as an abstract, multidimensional configuration of the
mind - or its sum-over-histories, if
you prefer – in which material concepts and systems do no longer figure or
count.
Nor
need we solve innumerable differential equations. The best advice that
cosmologists have
today, suggests that the fundamental diversification of the
entire inflationary process is a necessary corollary of its ever increasing
dimensions. A living web of causal interdependence, it creates its own
etiology as well as its own explanation. And no one put this aspect of its
succession more succinctly than Edgar Allan Poe who, in 1848, clearly
anticipated the cosmological scenario of the Big Bang:
“Multiplicity out of
unity - diversity out of sameness - heterogeneity out of homogeneity -
complexity out of simplicity - in a word, the utmost multiplicity of relation
out of the emphatically irrelative One” (Eureka!).
This
language is not, one may suppose, the orthodox interpretation of astrophysics
on this topic. But it requires no great insight into the formal terminology of
the theoretical physicist to perceive that he is not only cognate with this
philosophy, but heading for a potentially anthropomorphous transition. The question of where mind ends and matter begins has been eternally argued over by epistemologists and will never be solved,
admittedly. Yet, at the same time the idea that forms must be
‘material’ is so firmly fixed in human consciousness, that the notion of a
conceptual function representing not the actual specific state of matter but
rather the likelihood of its being in this state or another, is being
thoroughly ignored. Indeed, to me it seems highly improbable that science will
ever be able to formulate a theory of knowledge in a perfectly consistent and
logically adequate way, when the toleration of dissimilar or conflicting views
is no longer an alternative to the truth but a condition under which ‘the
truth’ operates. And if the
assignment of scientific provenance is rarely an easy matter, the simple
conclusion is nevertheless that every new ‘discovery’ emphasizes the extent of
our inherent ignorance of the fact that we are the causes of ourselves, chief
of the fundamental forces known to man. That we discover very little. For what
actually happens here is that, as mass can be created from energy, matter can
be created from knowledge. That is, from the desire for order in all aspects of
its own intellectual evolution. Thus, there is no escaping the conclusion: if reality
at the quantum level is categorically indeterminate, matter is mind that has
arrived at self-expression in intelligible structures, and these structures are
cognizant and evolving...
[1]
Paul Davies/John Gribbin, The Matter Myth. Viking (1991), p 253
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VH Ironside is the author of the fabled Willers of the Will, first published in 1996, now out of print!
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VH Ironside is the author of the fabled Willers of the Will, first published in 1996, now out of print!
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