cCHAPTER 4
COSMOLOGY:A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
THE
SCIENTIFIC EPOCH. PART 1: COPERNICUS TO KANT
HISTORICAL DIVISIONS OF MODERN COSMOLOGY4.1.1.
From the standpoint of empirical cosmology, a cosmological overview of the scientific epoch is most appropriately organised around the most significant event in the history of science: the publication in 1686-7 of Isaac Newton’s, ‘The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’. This epoch then falls into three periods. Firstly, a formative period, culminating in 1686-7. If a commencing date is required for this period, then 1543, the date of publication of Copernicus’ ‘On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres’ is the best candidate, since a clear line of development from this to Newton’s great synthesis can be traced. Secondly, a classical period, consisting essentially in working out the detailed implications of Newtonian cosmology in the light of a flood of contemporaneous empirical discoveries. This lasted for some two centuries, and if a definite date must be selected – inevitably somewhat arbitrarily - for its termination, then 1900, the date of publication of Planck’s quantum hypothesis is as good as any - though some might feel that 1887, the date of the Michelson-Morley experiment, has a superior claim. Thirdly, a modern or post-classical period reaching from the end of the classical period to the present. This has been characterised by the inability to fit the findings of ever more subtle and detailed probing into natural processes into an even superficially coherent Newtonian framework. Yet in the continued absence of any physically (as against mathematically) coherent theory, the framework is still basically Newtonian, if broken into disjointed bits and pieces by all manner of arbitrary rules, and rife with mutually, or even internally, contradictory conceptions - mechanism run mad, in short. On the other hand, from the standpoint of rational cosmology, this epoch, for reasons which should become apparent, most naturally divides into two periods, with reference to the theories of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), whose most influential work (The Critique of Pure Reason) was published in the 1780’s, just mid-way through the second empirically based period.THE FORMATIVE PERIOD
4.2.1.
As we implied earlier (e.g. 2.4. and 3.1), the only cosmological method which holds out any hope of attaining a rational, and therefore true, conception of the Universe, is ontology (metaphysics) and science working in close cooperation, the strengths of each complementing the other’s weaknesses. And, in all important respects, up to the latter half of the sixteenth century cosmology was ontology. It was not that there had been no scientific experimentation; there had been plenty in Mediterranean Antiquity, in China, and in Medieval Europe. But this science had been essentially spasmodic, desultory, and lacking a systematic methodology. Above all, the central point had not been grasped: which was that the only hope for a detailed, rationally coherent understanding of the universe lay in a systematically conducted science. As I say, what was essentially new about the ‘new experimental philosophy’ was its true realisation that if we are ever to acquire any substantial understanding of the universe and our place within it, a far more detailed and methodologically systematic attention to experience is a necessary precondition. The older attitude of gross underestimation of scientific potential was to change completely during what we now see as the formative period of modern science. The new attitude is perfectly encapsulated in the following statement of intent by Bacon (1561 - 1626), the most rational, learned, impassioned, and eloquent advocate of the new experimental philosophy: “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.” (The New Organon, Bk.I, Aph. CXXIV). Two basic, closely related, questions arise here. Firstly: Why did systematic science emerge when it did? Secondly: Why did this emergence take the particular form it did (not, incidentally, the form envisaged by Bacon).
4.2.2.
The first question has been answered hundreds of times, and I need offer only the briefest of summaries here. It was the coming together of many factors: a decline in the stifling authority of the Church - owing principally to the Reformation, but also to the obvious exhaustion of theological disputation, as well as the advance of the Copernican Theory with its shattering implications for Christian cosmology; the great advances in technology, especially the invention of printing; the opening up of the world by navigation; the Italian Humanists’ resurrection of Antique thought and learning; and finally, the advent of men of genius able fully to grasp and exploit this great opportunity. It was the coming together of all these that made the time ripe for the true birth of science - or ‘experimental philosophy’, as it was then happily called.
4.2.3.
Answering the second question is also easy enough, though it presents important points seldom alluded to. Of all the factors we have mentioned above, it was the Copernican Theory that was most decisive in determining the form that science was actually to take. Yet there was no particular connection between the Copernican Theory and the birth of experimental philosophy as such. Copernicus (1473-1543) was, himself, no great experimenter or even observer. His theory was a product of the previous age of Renaissance Humanism, owing its inception to his study of Greek astronomical theories, a significant minority of which maintained that it was more probable that the sun, not the Earth, was the centre of the solar system. The irrelevance of his theory to the birth of experimental philosophy is testified to by the fact that Bacon was quite unimpressed by it - an attitude in which he was by no means alone. But it was the Newtonian synthesis, so great was its success, that was to prove the decisive factor in defining the mould into which scientific enquiry was finally to set. The results validated the method. And the construction of the necessary foundation to Newton’s achievement can be traced, step by giant step, through a line of great predecessors - preeminently, Descartes (1596 - 1650), Kepler (1571 - 1630), and Galileo (1564 - 1642) - back to Copernicus.
4.2.4.
This, then, determined the form that science was to take. But what, for better or worse, were the main features of that form which possessed cosmological relevance? As astronomical observations accumulated in number and improved in accuracy, the Copernican Theory, albeit in suitably modified form, was increasingly vindicated. And its immense implications for cosmology lay in the seeming fact that the laws of motion of bodies, as well as the basic composition of the bodies themselves, were the same throughout an observable universe, seemingly organised around no centre, and, to all intents and purposes, of infinite extent. Now, all five of the above great formative figures were, first and foremost, mathematicians; and naturally inclined towards conceiving a universe in which quantitative relationships played a fundamental structural role, and whose elucidation therefore required a mathematically centred methodology. There was no difficulty in finding such a conception that also harmonised with the new evidence, since Greek cosmology, now readily available, offered at least three - far, moreover, from being mutually exclusive.
4.2.5.
Firstly, there was the school of thought, initiated by Pythagoras, and reaching its apogee in Plato, which held that mathematics was in some way fundamental to the structure of the universe: that, ultimately, all differences between things resolved themselves into differences in mathematical structure. Secondly, and most importantly, there was the atomism of Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, very familiar to the sixteenth century in the form of Lucretius’ celebrated book, ‘On the Nature of Things’. As most definitively envisaged by Democritus, atoms, the ultimate particles of matter, differed from one another only in shape, size, and state of motion. Moreover, the theory of primary and secondary qualities, first adumbrated by Democritus, was enthusiastically adopted by Galileo, just because it was precisely the qualities adjudged to be primary - that is, to belong to the bodies themselves, and not merely to our perceptions of them - which were most amenable to measurement, and hence to mathematical development. Thirdly, the philosophy of Empedocles, which asserted that bodies moved as a consequence of attractive and repulsive influences issuing from other bodies; and also that all bodies were composed of different proportions of a few basic elements - a theory which, as Plato saw, is capable of harmonious synthesis with atomism.THE NEWTONIAN SYNTHESIS
4.3.1.
This way of seeing the universe, then, seemed to find its complete vindication with the Newtonian synthesis. The central points of Newton’s world conception were: that all material bodies were constructed out of ultimately small and intrinsically unchanging bodies of different sizes and shapes - the atoms; that all bodies existed within an all-enveloping, independently existing, extensive medium, space; that they continued indefinitely to move through this spatial medium at a constant speed in a straight line unless and until accelerated by influences (attractive or repulsive forces) issuing solely and continually from other bodies; that these motions and their changes under the action of forces obeyed precise, mathematically expressible, laws. The marriage of atomic with element theory had to wait a century or so longer, but when it did come, proved to be perfectly assimilable into this Newtonian framework.
4.3.2.
The Newtonian conception of the physical world has, in one way or another (v. 4.1.1.), dominated the physical sciences ever since. But, even more, the immensely significant discoveries in the biological sciences during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have effectively established that the human world has evolved out of the biological, which, itself, has evolved out of the physical. Hence, our conception of the physical world has had profound influence on our conception of ourselves and our place in the universe. Newton’s synthesis is, in fact, still at the centre of that popular conception of man and the universe known as ‘the scientific world-view’.
4.3.3.
Earlier (2.3.), we outlined the essence of the scientific method. Unlike the ontologist, the scientist does not take noumenal/phenomenal distinctions very seriously. He accepts the distinction, but, working as he does at the commonsense level of a world of interacting bodies in space, is content to identify the noumenal with the primary qualities, and the phenomenal with the secondary. Newton (1642-1727) followed Galileo and Democritus in embracing this simplistic view of things. This basic ontological weakness of science means that, of itself, it is quite unable to arrive at a rationally coherent theory of the universe. For this to be achieved it requires ontology to complement it, just as much as ontology requires science. As Schopenhauer (1788-1868), who understood the importance of noumenal/phenomenal distinctions as well as anyone, wrote (The World as Will and Idea, Book 4), “Physics cannot stand on its own feet, but requires a metaphysic [an ontology] to lean upon, whatever airs it may give itself towards the latter”.
4.3.4.
This slaphappy approach to ontological truth leaves the scientist wide open to the perpetration of subjectivist error. And this, as I pointed out (2.3.6), might conceivably be of great significance. And, indeed, at the very heart of the Newtonian conception, there resides an error of such surpassing magnitude as to far outweigh the great truths which this conception undoubtedly contains. I once described this error as “… perhaps the most vicious – because most humanly destructive – fallacy ever to hold sway over the intellect of man … “ (The Listener, October 24th 1974, Letters {The Ghost of a Billiard Ball}). I have since dubbed it ‘The Fatal Trap’ since it is fatal to any coherent understanding of the world. Indeed, the conviction of the current cognitive establishment that it is impossible, by the very nature of things, for humanity ever to achieve a rationally coherent conception of the universe, owes more to falling into this trap than to all other factors put together. We will now examine this fundamental error in some detail.THE FATAL TRAP
General Nature.
4.4.1.
The essence of the Fatal Trap is to believe that all physical bodies are composed of ultimate constituents (atoms), which themselves endure changelessly, but which create change (without which time would have no meaning) by their motions through an independently existing, extensive medium, space. The deadly potency of this conception arises from the fact that it weds one of the profoundest of structural truths - to which it owes all the very considerable explanatory success it has enjoyed - to an unsurpassable structural blunder. The profound truth - in the form of a combination of atomic, with element theory - is that of explaining all complex entities as syntheses of simpler, and, ultimately, of a minimal number of simple, entities: thereby conforming to the analyticosynthetic form of all true explanation (2.2.5-9.;3.3.1-4.). The unsurpassable blunder - to which its many surpassing failures are due - lies in its utterly false notions of the nature of these fundamental entities. This falsity has, of course, arisen as a consequence of the token, rudimentary ontology which, as we have seen (2.3.2-6.) is necessarily built into science, and which can be corrected (2.4.) only by means of that synthesis with ontology which a satisfactory cosmology must necessarily comprise.
4.4.2.
Commonsense man, because he directly perceives unchangingly enduring bodies and a spatial medium, assumes that these must be part of the real world; overlooking the fact that his perceptions belong to a world of appearances which has constructively arisen over aeons of time as a radically local, highly specialised part of this real, or noumenal, world. Little ontological insight is needed to perceive where the man of science, the commonsense systematiser, has gone astray. In accounting for all complex entities as syntheses of ultimately simple entities, the entities which he has in mind are bodies: bodies which have been formed by the convergence and aggregation of intrinsically unchanging, ultimate bodies traversing space under the dictates of universal laws of motion. Now, regarded in the light of a true - which is to say, analyticosynthetic - explanation, this conception incorporates an absolutely fundamental defect. This analysis of bodies into particles (or the synthesis of particles into bodies) has left space and time completely out of account! In this paradigmatic Newtonian, or classical, conception, time and space are conceived as independently existing particulars which would remain essentially the same irrespective of the intrinsically unchanging ultimate bodies that respectively endure through, and are located and move around within, them. They have to be accepted as brute facts - as indeed, as an inevitable consequence, does matter (physical substance): impossible of rational explanation, in themselves and, a fortiori, in their interrelationship. It is from this radically false way of conceiving the physical world that a host of notoriously insoluble problems arise. We will briefly comment upon the most fundamental of these.
Basic Insoluble Problems.
4.4.3.
The classical concept of a void - extended nothingness - is doubly absurd. It is absurd, firstly, because extended nothingness is a direct contradiction in terms. The only attributes that nothingness (no-thing-ness) could conceivably possess must be wholly privative - the lack, absence, or negation of all intrinsic attributes. But extension is not privative - it is not the lack of anything. Somewhat less obviously, the void is also absurd - and it is this which renders unacceptable the attempt to overcome its deficiencies by replacing it with some substantial medium, or aether - because it entails what I term, naively conceived extension. Essentially, this is the notion that any extended region is sub-divisible into regions of lesser extension. Since the magnitude of the first region is arbitrary, this notion necessarily implies that any extended region (however small) is composed of an infinity of infinitesimally extended sub-regions. But ‘infinity’ does not refer to an unsurpassably large number, but to that which is larger than any number (however great). How what is not itself a number can be larger than any conceivable number is inconceivable. Clearly, ‘infinity’ is only a convenient mathematical fiction. So that naively conceived extension involves the self-contradictory notion of an extended region consisting of ultimate parts which can never be attained by any process of sub-division; with the corollary that the original region cannot be a contiguous aggregation of such hypothetical parts. Hence this conception is false: but no more false than the alternative hypothesis of extension’s being built up by continuous adjacency of non-extended ultimate parts; since, if the ultimate parts are non-extended, adjacency - at least, in the spatial sense - has no meaning. And all the above objections apply no less to the atoms - which, since they are conceived as possessing shape and size,1 must be extended - than they do to the void or aether. Therefore, however much it may seem an obvious inference from our phenomenal world, naively conceived extension cannot be an attribute of the noumenal world. That this (to the commonsense mind) surprising conclusion is correct is strongly suggested by a further, and very obvious, consideration: namely, that naively conceived extension, by conceiving the structure of any extended region in terms of the contiguous aggregations of component extensions, never tells us anything about what extension, as such, is. In this conception it is an irreducible datum, a mere brute fact. A satisfactory, which is to say, rational ontological theory must be able to explain extension, and this, of course, it can do only by showing it as in some way arising as a structural consequence of the non-extended. And - to repeat - this will emphatically not entail any considerations of spatial adjacency.
4.4.4.
Another conception in this physical theory which analysis exposes as no less absurd than that of naively conceived extension, is that of change. One might equally say “of time”, since the notion of time passing where nothing is changing is nonsensical. Without change there is, and can be, no time. In this classical conception change is not intrinsic to the ultimate particles but is necessarily confined solely to the motions of the atoms through the void. If an aether is postulated, presumably the changes therein are also those of motion - of the aetheric elements through an extensive medium. In short, change is wholly ascribed to motion. Now, this motion cannot be conceived in terms of particle relative to void. Nothing changes in the hypothetical case of a singly existing particle moving through a void - in fact, the very notion is nonsensical. And this must hold true for each particle individually however many particles exist. Hence change can only be relative, as between the particles. But what relates, or unites, the particles? We can perceive relative motion, but “we” are not included in this ostensibly purely objective conception. So far as individual atoms are concerned, nothing changes; so what collectivises the atoms and somehow conjures collective change out of the individually unchanging? The answer, of course, is, “Nothing”. Change, and hence, time, in this theory is unaccountable. The explanatory essence of the atomic theory is that it accounts for all intrinsic change in terms of spatial changes (motions) of intrinsically unchanging elements. But to make change (and hence, time) a reality, it is clear from the above considerations that something, somewhere, somehow must be changing intrinsically. Zeno’s paradoxes arise from this conception of the motion of bodies through a spatial medium. These have never been satisfactorily resolved, because they are irresolvable; that is, they are not really paradoxes – apparent contradictions – but actual contradictions, arising from the fact that, as a noumenon, space is a nonsense.
4.4.5.
Another obvious objection to the theory is revealed by the question: “What unites a particle and the void?” The ‘matter’ of which the particle is composed is presumably fully solid; the void, on the other hand, is pure emptiness: hence they have nothing, substantially, in common. All they possess in common is the empty abstraction: spatial location. Much might be said, too, about other problems - for example, that of accounting for the individuality of each atom; but as all such insurmountable difficulties are rooted in the basic absurdities we have already dealt with, there seems little point in pursuing them.
Further Insoluble Problems.
4.4.6.
On a slightly less fundamental level, this Newtonian conception is unable to account for the transmission of force between particles. Newton himself was acutely aware of this, writing to Bentley some six years after the publication of the Principia: “ … that gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else through which their action may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.” As an arch mechanist, Newton believed that the only rational way by which momentum could be transmitted was by some form of material impact. But ballistic transmission and an ether offer equally insoluble problems.
4.4.7.
As regards the origins of matter, space, and time, the theory has no answer save “God”. How could it have any other? Extension, as we have seen, must be accepted as a brute fact. And so must the ‘matter’, or whatever, of which the atoms supposedly consist. The classical mechanist can answer the question, “What are bodies made of?” by “Atoms”; but to the question, “What are atoms made of?” he has no answer save, “Matter”, which is no answer at all, since one could only define matter in this conception as, “What atoms are made of”. Finally, there is obviously no hope of this theory, with its inert, insentient, intrinsically unchanging atoms, even so much as beginning to account for the vital, mental, or spiritual attributes of bodies - and that includes its own genesis within the body of the mechanist.
Common Sense Inferences Mistaken for Facts of Experience.
4.4.8.
This total cosmological impasse which I am calling the Fatal Trap is the inevitable consequence of systematically developing commonsense man’s way of conceiving the world as primarily a complex of interacting bodies in space. Now, to many, it might seem that we directly perceive both intrinsically unchanging bodies and a spatial medium. If these are indeed components of objectively existing physical reality, we would, in view of our analysis, appear to be living in a self-contradictory world. But, of course, there is no empirical evidence whatever that they are part of the noumenal world. As we saw earlier (2.3.3-6.) we cannot justifiably assert that just because something is an attribute of our perceptions it must also be an attribute of the objectively existing world. If we can acquire any knowledge of this world it must be inferential. Even the classical scientist did not commit “the vulgar error” (as Newton termed it) of contending that the so-called secondary qualities possess objective physical existence, and certainly there are no sound arguments in favour of undifferentiatedly enduring bodies and an independently existing extensive medium. We have already exhibited the radical absurdities to which such conceptions lead when the attempt is made to incorporate them into a systematic ontology. And when we come, ourselves, to develop what I hope will be a truly rational ontology we shall find them conspicuous by their absence. But even the evidence afforded by our more searching empirical discoveries unexceptionally points to the falsity of these conceptions.
4.4.9.
The belief that there are such things as undifferentiatedly enduring bodies arises, of course, from the everyday experience of looking at a body for an appreciable length of time without one’s being able to detect any change in its appearance. Or, equally, of returning to a body after a considerable lapse of time and finding it apparently unchanged. Most changes in our perceptions are, in any case, ascribed by us to changes in ourselves, the perceivers, and only a minority to the bodies themselves. But, merely because we cannot detect any changes does not mean that they cannot be occurring - at any stage of the perceptual process. Thus, all branches of physical science have adduced compelling evidence that the minute parts of bodies are in a state of perpetual motion of one kind or another. And, indeed, one of the few indisputable conclusions to have emerged from post-classical physics is that substance and change are far more intimately welded than was suspected in classical times. And all this, of course, applies to the processes of our own bodies. Thus, neurophysiology discloses that the central physical component of our perceptual response takes the form of streams of discrete neuronal impulses each member of which is separated from its predecessor along any neuronal axon by an interval of at least a millisecond. The obvious inference is that the neurophysiological basis of perceptual constancy is a period of undeviating regularity of such transmission. In fact, the most sensible conclusion relating to our sensations to be drawn from neurophysiology is that they are all rapid patterns of change, the different patterns being experienced holistically as different qualities. If our consciousness, evolving, as all the evidence indicates, out of our sensory experience, is itself some complex pattern of changes, then it would be as unreasonable to expect it to be capable of detecting changes below a certain level of minuteness or rapidity as it would be to expect a knife to be capable of cutting up atoms of iron. To sum up: the reflective inability to detect changes in our perceptions - changes which all the empirical evidence indicates are occurring - in no way implies that such changes do not exist. There is thus every reason to believe that we do, in fact, experience these changes, though not as changes. What, objectively, must be defined as change is capable of being experienced as what, subjectively, on the basis of our powers of discrimination, we accept as change, only above a certain threshold of temporal separation between its components.
4.4.10.
Commonsense man asserts that he directly perceives space. Yet he doesn’t see it or touch it or otherwise sense it as he does the bodies it contains. He cannot describe it, in itself, but only by reference to these bodies. Such reference centres on the concept of absence, as defining, relative to other bodies, a potential place of occupation: where no body is at present, but where one could be if it moved from some other location. So that bodies and space are intimately interrelated, motion being, in effect, their perpetual interchange. Such intermingling reaches its zenith in the case of vapours, where bodies and space seem constantly to be melting into one another. Moreover, if only privatively, space can take on volume and shape no less than the bodies themselves. All this being the case, it is only natural that commonsense man, rightly predicating a direct objective source for his perception of bodies, does the like for his perception of space. And, in so doing, he commits an ontological blunder of the first magnitude, since, unlike the bodies it appears to contain, the extensive medium, space, has no objective existence whatsoever. Whatever our perception of space may be it is certainly not a response to an external source on all fours with our perception of bodies. What, then, is happening when we ‘perceive space’?
4.4.11.
Most obviously, space is something that separates bodies from one another, more especially from our own. But how do we experience this separation? For us, as embodied causal agents, pursuing our interests within this world of bodies-in-space, much the most important situations are contact situations: situations where our own body is in direct contact with some other - feeding, mating, handling etc. etc.. So that this separation takes the form of a translocation, or journey, from one contact situation to another. The journey is experienced as a sequence of changes - primarily kinaesthetic, accompanied by a sense of effort, together with visual changes. But, far more frequently than it is made, the journey, under the stimulation of the distance cues, is only imagined. In which case it is composed of a rapid, radically schematised, sequence of memories both of actually making the journey and of merely watching others make it, reinforced by all manner of obscure but highly relevant sensations arising from eye movements, minor body movements and muscular tensions, attentions, intentions, and shifts of interneural excitation, together with all their memories. Fundamentally, therefore, spatial separation, or distance, the root component of that fabric of distance constraints we call space, is duration, whose magnitude is defined by number of successive experiential changes, rooted ultimately in kinaesthetic sensation. But since, visually, we can simultaneously perceive all those locations to successively visit which composes the journey, sequential change is experienced in a context of the unchanging. We thus experience the bodies composing our environment existing in one sense simultaneously and in another, successively. And it is precisely this welding of translocational succession to visual simultaneity which constitutes our experience of the spaced-out-ness of bodies. But, still, it may be asked, “Why, if there is no space, does it take time to journey from one simultaneously existing body to another?” The answer to this, as we shall see, must be sought in the internal constitution of bodies - an answer, since ‘time’ is abstracted from change, wholly unattainable by those who believe that this constitution involves undifferentiated endurance. Finally, in all this, it must never be lost sight of that, however much the sources of our perceptions lie outside us, the perceptions themselves, no matter how panoramically remote they may appear to be, are all within us, and hence, in a bodies-in-space conception of the world, are all to be located at the one location of our own body. All the researches so far conducted in the fields of neurophysiology, neuropsychology. developmental psychology and psychology of perception confirm the essential truth of this outline account of spatial perception.
Process Misconceived as Particle.
4.4.12.
It is clear, then, that the Fatal Trap - the unchanging-bodies-in-space syndrome - has no more empirical support than it has rational - and that, as we have seen, is none at all. Today, it does not require much ontological insight to perceive the essential nature of the mechanistic blunder. We noted earlier (2.2.6-8.) that the ultimate simples must be steps in a process of some kind, deriving from the Ultimate One. Hence, the ultimate particles of mechanistic science, are, in reality, ultimate processes of some kind. The ultimate ‘particles’ are thus intrinsically changing, each successive change defining one instant of time. They are thus sequences of instant events. And the kinds of relation we term spatial must then take the form of exquisitely precise coordinations among these instant events on different sequences. In which case, mechanistic thought stands the physical world on its head. Whereas atomic theory explains intrinsic change in terms of spatial change, the true theory ultimately explains spatial change in terms of intrinsic change. The real physical situation is not that differences are conferred upon otherwise identical intrinsically unchanging ultimate particles by their locations in, and motions through, some independently existing medium, space - which, in fact, possesses no objective existence whatever; but that similarities and differences among intrinsically changing unmoving ultimate ‘particles’ collectively generate those kinds of relationship we term spatial.
4.4.13
What the advance of empirical knowledge has been revealing ever more plainly to the perceptive student is that nature is a process of some kind. But owing to the fatal mechanistic mind-set of the physicist, all the abundant evidence for the periodic nature of matter has simply been misconstrued as unintelligible ‘waves’ and the vibrations of intrinsically unchanging particles. From this evidence it is no great step to infer that the elements of the physical world are organised into a process primarily through certain interrelationships which we term temporal and spatial. But owing to this naively obsessive bodies-in-space conception of the materially practical man - of which the scientific world-view is the systematically elaborated consummation - these two kinds of interrelationship have been abstracted and reified as the independently existing absolutes, time and space, thereby reducing the now disconnected processive elements to featureless, unintelligible bits of ‘matter’. It is therefore hardly surprising that the three altogether fictitious disjecta membra created by so crude a dismemberment of this process, defy all attempts to bring them into intelligible relation: not only with one another, but also with the life and mind that science has indisputably shown to have grown out of ‘them’. No wonder the scientifically educated ontologist, Leibniz (1642-1715), in his celebrated controversy with the, merely scientific, Newtonians castigated an independently existing space as a “fancy”. He, himself, defined space and time relationally: “Space is the abstract of all relations of co-existence; Time is the abstract of all relations of sequence”. This is correct enough as far as it goes, but doesn’t go far enough unless one can define “sequence” without falling into circularityby involving the notion of time - and this Leibniz never did. Leibniz is being echoed in our own day by an increasing number of ontologically oriented scientists - for example, David Bohm (1917-1992): “I say the actual processwhich takes place is fundamental and space and time are the means of describing the order in this process.”2CONSEQUENCES OF THE FATAL TRAP
4.5.1.
With this monstrous blunder of The Fatal Trap at its heart, the future of physics as it probed ever more minutely into physical processes, was bound to be a series of successive revelations of its increasing theoretical inadequacy as a coherent account of the physical world. During the two centuries of the classical epoch, with its ever fuller practical acquaintance with the ‘subtle fluids’ - electricity, magnetism, heat, and light (to say nothing of gravitation) - the insoluble problems mounted, until, inevitably, the time arrived when it became clear to even the most diehard mechanist that this simple classical conception was incapable of intelligibly accounting for the experimental findings. But the physicist, qua physicist, is unable to think about the world save in this naïve bodies-in-space fashion. So, perforce, he had to go on doing so, but, equally perforce, as a congeries of mutually, and even internally, contradictory bits and pieces - mechanism run mad, in short: precisely similar clocks each working steadily slower than the other simultaneously, particles which were also waves and vice versa, waves of nothingness, mass (defined by Newton as the measure of the amount of matter in a body) attributed to the forces acting between material particles, effects preceding causes, the invention of numerous arbitrary ad hoc rules, indeterminacy - an attribute of our knowledge of the world - attributed to the world itself, matter that hovers between existence and non-existence, and so on relentlessly.
4.5.2.
Now, of course, no one possessing the most rudimentary ontological insight takes such conceptions seriously as valid descriptions of the world. For the sensible physicist they serve a useful purpose, but one that necessarily degrades their epistemological status. They are no more than crude models having a purely heuristic function. The physicist, qua physicist, confined to the phenomenal level, and conceptually grounded on the monstrous blunder of the Fatal Trap, cannot possibly give a coherent account of the world as it is in itself - the real or noumenal world. The genuine theoretical substance of modern physics is its mathematics. And the quasi-physical theories merely fulfil the humble function of a ground – that, however absurd, is at least better than nothing – to which to anchor the great systems of measure-number equations which experimental physicists actually work with. Correlated variations between measure numbers (a necessary consequence of an orderly universe), taken in conjunction with the virtually infinite plasticity of mathematics, means that physicists are always able to discover and work ‘successfully’ with ramifying systems of measure-number equations, despite their inevitably absurd physical interpretations.
4.5.3.
The fact that chemical structures and interactions have become ever more minutely conceived in terms of the positions and motions of atomic and sub-atomic particles has meant inevitably that theoretical chemistry has partaken as comprehensively as theoretical physics in the ontological absurdities of the Fatal Trap. The position in the life sciences is much more interesting. The virtual establishment over the last two centuries of the fact of biological evolution, and the central part played therein by the natural selection of genetic variations, constitute a scientific triumph of the same order of ontological significance as the Newtonian synthesis. That the human world has arisen by natural processes from the biological, which has, in turn, similarly arisen out of the physical world is no longer open to doubt. But the comprehensive misunderstanding of the nature of the physical world means that not only is it impossible to understand how and why the biological world – and, a fortiori, the human world – emerged out of it, but also, save in the practical, manipulative sense, how living organisms function. Here are two quotes, highly pertinent to each of these points respectively.
“At present, even in these days of ‘molecular biology’ there is still not one single inferential chain which leads from anything important in physics to anything important in biology, despite decades of concerted effort by some very clever people. … biology forces physics to transform itself, perhaps ultimately out of all recognition.” (Professor Robert Rosen, “Essays in Honour of David Bohm”, 1987)
“The capacity somehow to maintain order and system in physico-chemical conditions which ordinarily tend to dissipate and destroy them presupposes some influence able to mobilise and direct the available free energy in such a way as to build up organised structure in higher and more complicated forms than those at the physical level … That there is some such influence at work in living processes is clearly evident from the facts, but what precisely it may be, and how precisely it functions, are matters not yet scientifically understood.” (Errol Harris, “The Foundations of Metaphysics in Science”, p.175. George Allen and Unwin, 1965).
4.5.4.
On the human level also, the empirical method in the last two centuries has been applied to two domains of the highest significance for cosmology. I refer to psychical research and depth psychology. The first purports to have discovered facts of experience so utterly at variance with mechanistic materialism that all orthodoxy can offer by way of dissent is silence, denial of the evidence, feeble temporising, and feebler ridicule. Although, as I say, of the highest significance to cosmology, the paranormal, on account of its comparative disjunction with everyday consciousness, does not lend itself readily to systematic thought. Certainly, much less readily than the central subject matter of depth psychology – the unconscious mind - which also provides the gateway to the understanding of the paranormal. But understanding of this has progressed only because it has dismissed mechanistic physics to the realm of superficial practicality.
4.5.5.
Hence we see that science without ontology is, as is obvious anyway, incapable of any deeper rational understanding. The most that science, going it alone, can do is register the orderly, and hence repetitive, sequences of events in ever fuller detail. The closest approach that science can make to rational explanation takes two forms. The first is that of showing the more specific regularities as instances of the more general manifesting under local conditions. The second is to show that, given certain (inevitably inexplicable) fundamentals, certain consequences inevitably follow. The most striking instance of this is NeoDarwinism. Biology, without being able to give any intelligible explanation of how living organisms function, is yet able to show that NeoDarwinism must figure centrally in any future rational explanation of biological evolution. But the central form of systematic knowledge in science is the discovery of constant, or at least highly probable, conjunctions and sequences among classes of events; and progress in such knowledge has been the achievement of this in ever more minute detail. Of course, if science could do this in anything approaching total detail, this would, of necessity, be a rational explanation. But it cannot do this because of its necessary confinement to phenomena. The knowledge so obtained enables science to manipulate, to the level of virtuosity, these minutely registered processes – thus giving rise to the delusion among the semi-educated, that it is in possession of rational understanding.
4.5.6.
The ultimate goal of cosmology is, of course, to incorporate all our empirical knowledge into a rationally coherent conception of the universe – understanding the universe on an empirical level of detail. And we have said (1.2.2.;3.2.1.) that the history of cosmology can be illuminatingly viewed in the form of a struggle between rational and irrational conceptions. Now, as we pointed out earlier (1.2.), there have been two profoundly important irrational theories with which any advances towards a rational ontology has had to contend. The first, of course, is the simplistic, interacting-bodies-in-space atomism incorporated into the Newtonian synthesis, which we have just been considering. The other is the so-called critical philosophy, the dominant academic philosophy of our day (at least, in Britain and America) which claims to have demonstrated that careful analysis of the knowledge situation reveals it to be such as to render the whole ontological venture necessarily invalid as a means of acquiring knowledge. But just as mechanistic materialism is grounded on one of our six great errors – the subjectivist; so, too, is critical philosophy – but, this time, the atomistic. The two, going naturally together, wed bad ontology to bad epistemology. With this in mind, we turn now to consider the most significant ontological developments of our scientific age.EARLY ADVANCES IN ONTOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY
4.6.1.
Bacon was the great exception among the founding fathers of the new experimental philosophy in seeing the Fatal Trap for what it was. "Nor shall we thus be led to the doctrine of atoms, which implies the hypothesis of a vacuum and that of the unchangeableness of matter (both false assumptions); we shall be led only to real particles, such as really exist." (The New Organon, Bk II, Aph.VIII). But Bacon never lived to tell the world what these "real particles" were like.
4.6.2.
Certainly, no such enlightenment emerged from Descartes. Instead, we have the Galilean doctrine of primary and secondary qualities systematised into a dualistic universe, composed of a res extensa (‘matter’) and a res mensa (‘mind’). These two halves of the duality were supposedly held together by God, which was no more than the most acceptable way for Descartes to confess that he could see no way of rationally associating them. The achievement of Spinoza (1632-1677) was at least to throw some light upon this impasse, even if he couldn’t resolve it. In his “Ethics” he established satisfactorily “that in the nature of things only one substance exists” (Pt.I, Prop. X , Note); from which it follows that ‘God’ is wholly immanent. It also follows that the more we succeed in bringing the two substances of Cartesian dualism into coherent relation, the more we shall be exhibiting them as two sets of attributes of this single universal substance. Matter is mind viewed from the outside; mind is matter experienced from the inside. Our contemporary centre state identity theory is no more than Spinozism in modern dress. But Spinoza made no progress beyond this in rationally relating mind and matter.
4.6.3.
The way such progress could be made was clearly indicated by Leibniz – though emphatically not in his notorious theory of psychophysical parallelism. No, the Leibniz I have in mind is the Leibniz who rejected as conceptual fictions the ontological naiveties underlying the Newtonian synthesis, and who also grasped the immense ontological potentiality of Taoism. Probably inspired by Taoism in general, and the I Ching in particular (we know that he was in regular contact with Jesuit missionaries, and that his library contained as many as 50 books on China), he suggested that the whole universe might be constructed out of ones and zeros; one representing God (T’ai Chi?) and zero, The Void (Wu Chi?). But, as we noted above (4.4.13.), he failed to identify the nature of the structural attribute of the process he is clearly adumbrating which provides the ontological ground of that sequentiality we call the passage of time. Some strong clues as to what this attribute might be are to be found in the work of an ontologist who was no less intrigued than Leibniz by the ontological suggestiveness of ancient Chinese cosmology. I refer to Hegel (1770-1831), whose contribution to a rational synthesis we shall be noting later (5.3.2.).
4.6.4.
Meanwhile, during the eighteenth century, great progress had been made on the epistemological front, more particularly with the question of noumenal/phenomenal relationships. Berkeley (1685-1753) and Hume (1711-1776) convincingly established that though the primary qualities of Galileo and Descartes might conceivably be closer to the actual nature of the objective world than the secondary, to assume that they could be regarded as attributes of this world involved one in all manner of absurdity. Berkeley showed that the world-as–perceived was essentially a mental construct: our exteroceptions organised by means of a quasi-stable framework of kinaesthetic and proprioceptive sensations and memories – a theory that the progress of developmental psychology has since all but confirmed.THE ADVENT OF CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Grounded on the writings of Hume and Kant
4.7.1.
But the eighteenth century also saw the inception of so-called critical philosophy, which, in Britain and America, at least, was to become the dominant philosophy of academia in the twentieth century. The essence of this non-constructive mode of thinking is to assert that a critical examination of the knowledge situation discloses that metaphysical speculation - what we are calling rational cosmology – can never lead us to any knowledge of the world beyond our experience. So that objective knowledge, inevitably very limited, can be attained only by empirical cosmology (science). The role of philosophy can only be purely epistemological, monitoring, as regards its meaning and truth, the findings of science. From what I have written in Chapters 1 and 2, the reader will have gathered that I reject, as profoundly erroneous, this view of the knowledge situation. It is grounded on the writings of Hume and Kant3, but since Kant’s work is really little more than a systematisation of Hume’s theory of causation and its cognitive consequences, to refute Hume is effectively to have refuted Kant. Now, as I claim to have already exposed the fatal flaws in Hume’s position - both directly (1.2.6-7.) and indirectly (2.2.1-4.) and (3.4.6-7.) - all I shall do here is to re-state Hume’s central error and the essence of its refutation, and finally add two further relevant points.
Hume’s Essential Error
4.7.2.
Hume claims that “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” – that is, cause and effect as Hume essentially conceived them: as either the transmission of momentum by impact, or force-at-a-distance in the case of inanimate bodies, or willed purposive exertion in the case of human beings. He then argues with some degree of cogency, that, despite our imperious feeling of their necessary linkage, the relation between cause and effect is not essentially different from any other spatio-temporal or sympathic conjunction in the continuous flux of impressions of our senses and memory. Which conjunctions, for all we know to the contrary, may be fortuitous. But what he completely fails to see is that every association, because it is something more than its parts in mutual isolation, must necessarily be a unity, and, as such, necessarily possess a ground that incorporates the parts associated. What rational, systematic knowledge always seeks is precisely to render explicit these grounds of unification. And it is this, not cause and effect as Hume understood them, which leads “us beyond the immediate impressions of our memory and senses”, since while we may not be able to detect any ground of unity, we know that, because it is necessarily implied by the fact of association, it must exist. Hume, altogether artificially, for purposes of analysis, abstracts the different elements of the association, and then, as he examines them one by one, finding no reason why they should be associated as they are, naively concludes that their particular association may be purely fortuitous. But, of course, the whole point is that they do not occur separately, but only as elements of a diversified unity.
Experience and the Conscious Discrimination of its Components
4.7.3.
In the phrase “beyond the immediate impressions of our memory and senses” the word “beyond” is ambiguous. Empirical evidence overwhelmingly confirms what elementary reasoning power would suggest: that what, to naïve inspection seem uniform sensations are, in reality, syntheses of component experiences too small or faint or rapid or otherwise obscure for us to consciously discriminate as individuals. If these indistinguishable experiences are not “beyond the immediate impressions of our memory and sense” then they vastly enlarge the meaning of “impressions”. As we know from such sciences as neurophysiology, microbiology and biochemistry they greatly aid us in understanding the structural links between our experiences – an understanding impossible in Hume’s day. This is particularly apposite for metaphysics if, as reason dictates, and empirical evidence makes ever more plain, we live in a universe where nature is essentially structure. Moreover, now that biologists have established, in very precise terms, that living organisms are open systems in a state of continual interchange of material and energy with their environment, inferences from our experience to what lies beyond it seem much less formidable to us than they would have done for Hume.
The Rationality of the Universe as a Working Hypothesis
4.7.4.
It must be clearly stated that Hume did not claim to have established that there were such things as arbitrary events, but only that we could never obtain valid evidence that there were not. So that even if one acquiesced in the soundness of Hume’s analysis, one might have supposed that it was still the most sensible thing to do to accept the necessity of causal connections as a working hypothesis to be justified by results. Common sense, science, and metaphysical philosophy have always shared the same basic criterion of truth: theories must make sense of our experience. The more a theory can make sense of experience, that is, the more it can organise experience into a rationally interconnected or systematic structure, the more likely it is to be true. Intelligent persons have always, implicitly or explicitly, believed this and lived by its light, and to refuse to exercise one’s intelligence out of deference to some recherché cognitive criterion is to fall victim to the higher silliness. But it was the de facto failure of metaphysics, due to the far from clearly perceived errors which we have been studying, that led to Hume’s analysis, and its subsequent systematization by Kant, being so eagerly seized upon as the ideal release from “ the whole wretched game of speculative metaphysics”. Had these errors been clearly understood for what they were, and, as a consequence, metaphysics been more successful, I don’t suppose any serious attention would ever have been accorded the negative arguments of critical philosophy.
KANT’S SYSTEMATISATION OF HUME’S ANTIMETAPHYSICAL CONTENTIONS4.8.1.
Awoken from his ‘dogmatic slumber’ by Hume’s analysis of causation, Kant made it the centre of a pseudo-systematic theory of knowledge. This pivoted upon a clear cut distinction between appearances (phenomena) and things-in–themselves (noumena). Knowledge must be confined to appearances, since Hume’s analysis established that there existed no trustworthy inferential bridge beyond them. Within the world of appearances Kant included not only sense data, but also the “intuitions” space and time and certain built-in, or a priori, categories of the understanding, such as substance and cause whose essential function was the rational ordering of sense data. Metaphysics was built upon a fallacy: that of falsely assuming that these built-in regulative faculties which enabled us to legislate coherently within this world of appearances could be just as successful when applied to the world of things-in-themselves. In support of this radically limiting contention Kant instanced four antinomies: four metaphysical problems in each of which two seemingly equally plausible trains of inference led to mutually contradictory conclusions. So that the noumenal world for Kant transcended human reason; we could deduce that it existed, but that was all.
4.8.2.
We would hardly expect such a cumbersome, arbitrary, artificial, restricted, and disjointed view of things to contain much truth; and, indeed, centred as it was upon the radically flawed arguments of Hume, Kant’s theory of knowledge had a like validity. As we shall see, there is no fundamental difficulty in rationally relating noumena to phenomena: in effect, in deducing the contents of the physical world (noumena) from those of the knowing mind (phenomena). Advances in the life sciences since Kant’s day have brought the two halves of the psychophysical dichotomy into the closest possible relation: in point of their similar, shared, and constantly interchanging constituents, and the long evolution of the one half (the psyche) out of the other (the physical world). All this just cries out to be unified at a basic structural level - which, but for the Fatal Trap, it surely would have been. Neither is there any problem in resolving all Kant’s cosmological antinomies. The lifelong handicap which Kant laboured under was that of being cemented solidly into the Fatal Trap. Revering Newton, and resenting the domination of contemporary German philosophy by the, admittedly mediocre, epigoni of Leibniz, he came down heavily, in retrospect, on Newton’s side in the celebrated controversy between the Newtonians and Leibniz on the nature of time and space, and their relation to substance. But, as we have seen (4.4.13), so far as ontological basics were concerned, Leibniz was right and Newton wrong. To make bad worse, Kant never fully outgrew his pietistic Lutheran upbringing, with the result that theism, as a theory to fall back upon, was never far from his thoughts. To sum up: the real importance of Hume and Kant lies in their having irrefutably succeeded in establishing that metaphysics is cognitively invalid - and that thought is hence confined to the phenomenal level - unless a valid method of establishing the nature of noumena can be found. But the contention that they succeeded also in establishing that such a method is, by the very nature of the knowledge situation, unattainable, is wholly false.
NOTES & REFERENCES:
1. There is no doubt that Newton believed in the literal reality of classical atoms since the very last words he wrote on a physical subject (The last of his ‘Queries’, itself an addendum to his last scientific book – the ‘Opticks’ of 1704) detailed how he conceived them: “All these things being consider’d, it seems probable to me that God in the Beginning form’d Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles, of such Sizes and Figures, and with such other Properties, and in such Proportion of Space, as most conduced to the End for which he Form’d them; and these primitive Particles being Solids, are incomparably harder than any porous Bodies compounded of them; even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary Power being able to divide what God Himself made one in the first Creation.”
2. Unfortunately, Bohm went on to talk of the noumenal process as a “holomovement”. But movement - whether ‘holo’ or any other – is part of the phenomenal world, and, as such, requires explanation in terms of noumena that are ontologically prior. Hence this hypothesis of Bohm’s while perfectly correct in advocating a fundamental process, is only pseudo-noumenal, and so takes us no closer to resolving the fundamental physical problems.
3. It was anticipated by Descartes in his raising the problem of the “ego-centric predicament”: the difficulty, if not impossibility, in the thinking mind’s quest for knowledge of the external world, of escaping from the circle of its own ideas.
