CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
THE
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
THE CONVENTIONAL WISDO
Postmodern Pessimism
1.1.1.
What makes our postmodern generation unique is its official renunciation of all attempt to understand the universe. Far from regarding this renunciation as an admission of some radical defect in his understanding, postmodern man prefers to believe that it proceeds from precisely the opposite cause: the acquisition of an understanding superior to that of all previous generations. This superior understanding, not only of the object of knowledge – the universe - but also of himself, the knowing subject, has, he believes, enabled him to establish definitively that this whole cognitive aspiration is ultimately delusory – arguably the most powerful delusion that has ever obsessed the human mind. And that therefore his finally turning his back on it is no more an acceptance of failure than the arrival of maturity, with its realistic facing-up to inbuilt limitations, can be said to be a failure in having outgrown the delusions natural to thoughtless and inexperienced youth. This supposedly greater knowledge of the universe is, of course, the consequence of four hundred years of intense scientific enquiry; and our greater understanding of the nature of knowledge, qua knowledge, to two and a half centuries of ever more penetrating epistemological analysis. So that the conventional wisdom sees these two great bodies of knowledge as mutually corroborative in establishing the futility of aspiring to comprehend the universe in a single rationally coherent conceptual system.
1.1.2.
Four centuries of intense scientific enquiry gave rise in the mind of modern man to what is widely known as the scientific world-view. This had many great and obvious defects; yet there was still hope that, in the fullness of time, more precise, fundamental, and comprehensive knowledge would be forthcoming which would enable these defects to be overcome. But, instead, so postmodern man contends, the opposite occurred: more precise and comprehensive knowledge of natural processes has served only to expose ever more obviously this world-view’s fatal deficiencies. And the marked absence of any significantly more satisfactory theory, taken together with the persuasive antimetaphysical arguments of our most influential epistemologists, precipitated the arrival of our own era with its ex cathedra renunciation of all attempt to bring the universe within the compass of human understanding.The Postmodern Worldview
1.1.3.
What, then, are the main features of our scientific and epistemological knowledge as postmodern man understands it that have impelled him to take up this negative position? Most basic is the breakdown of classical physics. The two great theories which, taken together, all but define post-classical physics – quantum theory and relativity - both involve conceptions that are remote indeed from the mechanistic simplicities of classical physics. In relativity, space and time have been conflated into an unimaginable space-time continuum, from which the objective existence of simultaneity is banished. In quantum physics, the old solid billiard ball particles have dissolved into waves, though waves of what, no one can intelligibly define. Probability waves is the answer usually given: the probability that the ‘particle’ is at a certain point. Indeed, the notion that ‘particles’ possess at any time a precise spatial location is rejected as meaningless. The ether has gone, and radiation is envisaged now in the form of sharply localised oscillating non-material particles (photons), now as radiating waves (of what?) according to the requirements of the physical situation. Even non-locality, where ‘particles’ can act upon distant particles instantaneously, would seem to be implied by the empirical results – in direct conflict with relativity, which stipulates that forces cannot travel faster than the speed of light. And so on. In the final analysis, quantum theory reveals itself to be no more than a set of ad hoc recipes for experimental procedures; nor are all physicists agreed that, as a physical theory, relativity is free from internal contradictions. Indeed, so contradictory, chaotic, and obscure does the whole physical world now appear that many physicists have accepted that it cannot be understood in the normal sense of the word. They are more than content to settle for mere mathematical coherence. This takes the form of coherent fabrics of measure-number equations (formalisms) derived by mathematical operations from purely quantitative constancies and regularities holding between numbers read off calibrated measuring instruments, or obtained by counting. A most impressive mathematical achievement, but not requiring any coherent physical understanding.
1.1.4.
And an impenetrable barrier has also met our empirical investigations of the origin of the universe – a universe, so far as astronomy can tell, unimaginably vast, devoid of any discernible purpose, and to whose processes life, far from abundant, appears quite incidental. According to the current, but far from satisfactorily established, theory, it is supposed to have originated in a Big Bang; but since our astrophysicists have no idea where the materials of this Bang came from, nor how they came to be so compactly assembled, nor what triggered their explosion, nor whence the particular laws governing their motions issued, and so on, this account leaves the mystery of the universe’s origin untouched.
1.1.5.
But perhaps it is the seemingly total failure, despite our vast accession of knowledge, to have made any progress in resolving the age-old mind-matter problem which has most brought home to postmodern man the hopelessness of arriving at a comprehensively systematic theory of the universe. On the one hand, as even postmodern man concedes, the life sciences provide incontrovertible evidence that human beings have evolved, via an aeons-long, step-by-step process, out of the physical world. It is likewise true that the evidence strongly suggests that this process was purely fortuitous and opportunistic; revealing no sign of being directed by any orthogenetic nisus. On the contrary, it seems to have occurred against the natural grain – despite, rather than because of, natural processes: a brutal, unremitting struggle to survive within an inhospitable world. And according to all the most respected scientific authorities, nothing but the same physical entities and forces that operate in the inanimate world were involved: living organisms, and, a fortiori, human beings, being no more than immeasurably more complex dynamic systems of these same inorganic forces and particles. On the other hand, when we contemplate the seemingly limitless vistas and abysses of the human spirit as revealed particularly by works of imaginative genius, visionary and psychedelic experience, and depth psychology, it is impossible to believe that no more is involved than the orthodox scientific account – particularly when the physicists themselves admit that our conceptions of the physical world have dissolved into incoherence. In short, there is nothing in the physical world as physicists have conceived it that in any way suggests that it could eventually give rise to human experience. Here, then, is another seemingly insoluble mystery.
1.1.6.
Finally, there are paranormal phenomena - telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, communication with discarnate beings, memories of past lives, etc. – to name but a few. These seem to contradict the scientific world-view so unequivocally as to imply that, if they are true – and the jury is still out on all of them – the universe must be utterly different from that conceived by scientific orthodoxy. But, because of the major discrediting of the scientific world view, this incompatibility is not now nearly so damning to acceptance of the paranormal. In a world where science has been largely overrun by nescience there exists no criterion for assessing what irrationalities it may contain.Epistemological Roots of Pessimism
1.1.7.
And modern critical epistemology, grounded on the negative insights of Hume and their systematisation by Kant, has advanced some very powerful arguments as to why solutions to these fundamental problems have not been found. Hume’s epoch-making discovery, effectively sounding the death knell of metaphysics as a valid mode of cognitive inquiry, was essentially as follows. Our only watertight rational criterion for rejection of a judgment is self-contradiction. But there is nothing self-contradictory in postulating causeless events. Therefore, because “The only connexion of relation of objects which can lead us beyond the immediate impressions of our memory and senses is that of cause and effect, and that because it is the only one on which we can found a just inference from one object to another.” it follows that our belief that every event has a cause is, at bottom, no more than an article of faith, possessing no firmer evidential ground than the dogmas of religion. Kant basically accepted this argument and went on to systematise it by establishing that human knowledge is necessarily confined to how the world appears to us (that is, to phenomena). Hence we have no way of knowing what the world is in itself (that is, as a noumenon); consequently, while our rational processes work well enough among phenomena, they have no legislative validity at all when applied to noumena. As persuasive evidence for this, Kant adduced a number of traditional metaphysical problems that he called ‘antinomies’, for which (at least) two equally plausible, but mutually contradictory, solutions can be found. Subsequent epistemology has served only to confirm the essential truth of these negative conclusions. It could also be claimed that they have received some confirmation both from evolutionary biology and depth psychology. The former has shown that the human brain evolved merely as an aid for the strictly practical business of survival; and the latter, that much of human reasoning reveals itself, under searching investigation, to be no more than the rationalisation of imperious, genetically inbuilt, psychophysical needs buried deep in our unconscious minds.A Closed Case …
1.1.8.
So much then for what I hope is a not untruthful summing up of how postmodern man, at the dawn of the third Christian millennium, views the relation between the universe and our knowledge of it. And from it, or something like it, he has come to the conclusion that metaphysics must now be placed in the same category as alchemy or astrology - one more quaint superstition belonging to the intellectual childhood of the race, exploded and left behind by the advance of knowledge. Whatever the fate that awaits humanity, we can at least take comfort in knowing that it will henceforth be free from any further enslavement to the obsessive delusions of metaphysics. The case is closed by the consent of every educated adult, and anyone attempting to reopen it thereby proclaims himself an ignoramus, who can be safely ignored by all serious persons.
FUNDAMENTAL ERRORS
Defeatism Wholly Unjustified
1.2.1.
However, notwithstanding the seeming sophistication - especially when couched in technical language – with which it has been promulgated, and the all-but-universal assent that it now commands, this conviction that the universe must for ever remain inexplicable to the human mind rests on nothing more formidable than shallow and confused thinking and simple ignorance. Postmodern man’s assessment of metaphysics as fit only to be consigned to history, is as wrongheaded as any judgment could well be. His two basic assessments on which this judgment rests – the empirical and the epistemological - are both based on radically false premises. The failure of science to reveal a rational universe is to be assigned to causes very different from those cited by the conventional wisdom. Out and away the chief obstacle to a rational synthesis is a catastrophic, but far from necessary, blunder built into the foundations of theoretical physics. Once this obstacle has been overcome, as it easily can be, our empirical knowledge is transformed into a source of genuine enlightenment – even as Bacon (incidentally, the first modern to draw attention to this blunder) had confidently hoped - and the way is wide open to a coherent theory of the universe. As for the antimetaphysical position adopted by Hume, Kant and their epigoni: far from being unassailable, this, too, is based upon a blunder, as fundamental, and as corrigible, though perhaps not quite so easy to see, as the mechanist’s.
1.2.2.
The whole of the two and a half millennial history of the cosmological venture can legitimately be viewed as an ongoing struggle for supremacy between rational (and therefore true) and irrational (and therefore false) conceptions. More explicitly, the history of systematic thought is the history of its struggle to emancipate itself completely from its irrational origins - above all, from theism and naïve realism. Second only to its actual genesis in the first half of the first millennium B.C., the most significant development in its history occurred some four centuries ago. The leading thinkers of the age were convinced that what had most held back this enterprise hitherto was its insufficient grounding in experience. So that if it was ever to attain its supreme goal of a fully rational account of the universe, including man’s place therein, then a far more detailed and systematic dwelling with experience was essential. As the most eloquent of these thinkers put it: “ For I am building in the human understanding a true model of the world, such as it is in fact, not such as a man’s own reason would have it to be; a thing which cannot be done without a very diligent dissection and anatomy of the world”. (Francis Bacon, The New Organon, Bk.1, Aph. CXXIV). This essential, all-embracing programme, which Bacon’s contemporaries called experimental philosophy and which we, somewhat less happily, know as science, undoubtedly offered the most substantial hope of one day attaining the ultimate goal. But, as things have turned out, it has, to date, fallen far short of this – rather than bringing light, seeming only to have made the darkness more visible. And the reason for this failure, according to the received wisdom, is that it set the human mind a task which, owing both to the overwhelming size, strangeness, complexity and – only too conceivably - a-rationality of the universe, and the inbuilt limitations of the human intellect, is intrinsically unachievable. My diagnosis is very different.Radical Errors in Theoretical Physics
1.2.3.
As I have just remarked, throughout its history the cosmological enterprise has had to struggle against those irrational conceptions, arising principally from theism and naïve realism, in which it is rooted, and out of which it first emerged. And while the empirical venture, which it was hoped, would raise it to unprecedented heights has been refreshingly free from theism, this has most certainly not been the case with naïve realism. This gave rise to an ontological blunder so devastating that four centuries of the cosmological enterprise have been fatally crippled by it. This Fatal Trap as I term it (since to fall into it is certainly fatal to any chance of understanding the universe), has been made doubly lethal by not only being built into the very place where it could do the most damage - the foundations of theoretical physics – but by being part of an ideas syndrome which contains profound ontological truths. Surprising as it may seem, all our postmodern bewilderments have their origin in this single root source – though perhaps not so surprising when it is recalled that all the empirical evidence points unequivocally to the human world’s having emerged out of a biological world which has itself emerged out of the physical. Error in the foundation leads to worse error in the superstructure.
1.2.4.
Fortunately, there is nothing in this Fatal Trap that human rationality cannot surmount - indeed, among science’s founding fathers both Bacon and Leibniz, in their different ways, at least drew attention to its falsity. It is easily located, analysed, and dismantled; and out of this critical process there naturally emerges the form that a new and wholly rational substance theory must take. With this new substance theory firmly in place, our empirical knowledge takes on a very different significance, in the light of which it is no great matter to body forth conceptually a rationally coherent universe.
1.2.5.
We shall be looking at this Fatal Trap in detail in Chapter 4. Here, I will do no more than indicate its origin and general nature. It arose very early in the history of systematic thought. Among the fundamental ontological problems that exercised a compulsive fascination over the Greek mind was that of the relationship between permanence and change. We appear to live in a world, consisting principally of material bodies, which evinces a certain permanence underlying all its changes. And we are conscious that these bodily changes are of two very different kinds. One is intrinsic, where the essential properties of the body undergo fundamental change, as when food transmutes into flesh and faeces. The other, much more common, and seemingly much less mysterious, is where bodies merely change their spatial location. And one major attempt to solve this problem of the relation between permanence and change consisted, in effect, in wholly assimilating intrinsic change to spatial change: that is, in claiming that, at bottom, spatial changes alone existed. This was achieved very simply: by postulating that all bodies were composed ultimately of invisibly small, intrinsically unchanging bodies, or atoms, and that all intrinsic change was, in reality, no more than the spatial rearrangements of these permanent atoms. So that one way of defining the Fatal Trap is: the notion that all physical change finally reduces to change of location within an all-pervasive, indefinitely extensive spatial medium, of intrinsically unchanging ultimate material particles (atoms) existing within it. This notion, as we shall see, despite all the evidence that can seemingly be adduced in its support, is the precise opposite of the truth.Radical Errors in Epistemology
1.2.6.
Turning now to epistemology: Hume fell for what Bradley (Logic BK.1, Ch.2, § 64) rightly referred to as “… this cardinal principle of error and delusion”. What this relates to basically is stressing the separateness of entities at the expense of their togetherness – a mistake only too easy to make, since differences naturally stand out. Hume rightly sought for necessary connections, since, if these cannot be established, metaphysics, which relies upon an experienced A necessarily implying an unexperienced B, is deprived of evidential cogency. Hume unsuccessfully sought them, for the reason quoted earlier (1.1.7.), in the relation of cause and effect. But, because of the universal fabric of relationships in which a cause and its effect are embedded, we cannot just abstract them without any sort of regard for the rest of this fabric without falsifying the whole situation. It is in the much more fundamental relation of association that we cannot, without falling into absurdity, deny necessary connection.
1.2.7.
An association is something more than the sum of its elements as these would be in mutual isolation. It is a unity, and, as such, must have a ground; this ground being precisely what is over and above the individual elements considered separately. An association without a ground is a contradiction in terms. Moreover, this ground must in some sense necessarily incorporate the natures of those elements it associates; to contend otherwise would be to postulate a unifying factor that does not unify. It can easily be seen that such considerations must embrace a cause and its effect since these are associated in time and space, and must necessarily therefore possess a ground of unification. Thus, in Hume’s favourite instance of a sequence of events comprising: billiard cue striking cue ball, cue ball rolling forwards, cue ball striking object ball, object ball rolling forwards, Hume can see only a sequence of events, not one of which conveys any idea of necessity. And why should it? Nevertheless, these events are united as a sequence: they are not mutually isolated. What associates them? Something must – the ground of the temporal association; which, with equal necessity, must incorporate the natures of the constituent events.
1.2.8.
To know that our experience and anything which, however indirectly, is associated with it, possess a ground of association which must in some way incorporate their natures, is to know that the universe is rational. Hence, metaphysics, whose basic function is precisely to establish such grounds, is thus so far sound: though the extent to which it is humanly possible to establish these grounds is, of course, another question. But certainly, pace Hume, there exist no a priori grounds invalidating the attempt. Though Hume’s blunder is not the Fatal Trap, one suspects that his conceptions of time and space were those of one who had fallen into it. His theory of causality would seem to take for granted that time and space are mere passive containers possessing no influence over the nature of the events that occupy them; that these might, so far as their spatial and temporal containers are concerned, be caused or causeless, or, indeed, anything at all. It is interesting to note in this respect that even so staunch a Humean as A. J. Ayer has observed (A.J.Ayer, Hume {O.U.P. 1980, p.47}), “ … our hard data include not only individualised patterns but the spatial and temporal relations which they bear to one another. This is a feature of our experience to which Hume pays surprisingly little attention.”
1.2.9.
But the reasonings of Hume’s successor, Kant, an ardent champion of Newtonian physics, were self-evidently those of one who had fallen into the Fatal Trap. This is most obvious in his dealings with the two abstractions space and time, of whose independent reality he was convinced, as is clearly evinced (to look no further) by his first two cosmological antinomies. With the realisation (as, for instance, by Leibniz) that space and time have no reality independent of the process of which they are abstracted attributes, these two antinomies are seen to possess no antimetaphysical cogency at all. Also, in Kant’s day, there may have been some excuse for believing that there exists no inferential bridge from phenomena to noumenon, as represented respectively by mental events and a postulated physical substance. But not today, after two centuries of undreamed of advances in the life sciences. These have brought the two halves of the mind-matter dichotomy into the closest possible relation: in point of their similar, shared, and constantly interchanging constituents, and the aeons-long, step-by-step emergence of the one out of the other. All this just cries out to be unified at a basic structural level – which, but for the Fatal Trap, it surely would have been. And such a mind-matter synthesis makes a coherent cosmological synthesis seem a much less impracticable proposition.
A NEW SUBSTANCE THEORY1.3.1.
This work, then, essentially comprises the derivation of a new rationally coherent substance theory, followed by the demonstration of how the world as we know it empirically derives from it as a natural consequence. Finally, it provides definite evidence for the existence of those highly controversial regions of the universe whose existence mechanistic science effectually denies, but which mystical, religious, and paranormal experience have always tended to confirm. But we prelude all this with four introductory chapters dealing with the nature and history of cosmology – both empirical (science) and rational (metaphysics).
