Introduction
Welcome to my introduction about my book called "Transcendental Metaphysics" (a.k.a. Technovedanta 2.0), which aims to build a bridge between science an spirituality.
The subject sounds a bit esoteric and an audience of highly qualified scientists and engineers as many of you are maybe not easily be interested in the topics I address in this book.
Nevertheless, the title of the book is very misleading, as I will explain to you in a few moments. I have made a selection from topics in this book, which form a kind of bridge between science and spirituality.
I have tried to think of a few topics in this book, that might be of relevance to you and I have found some relating to the topics of epistemology (relating to the question of what is knowable at all?), information and teleology (relating to the notion of purpose).
Metaphysics
In philosophy the terminology "metaphysical" often relates to that which is not physical; that which cannot be explained or described with physics and therefore is beyond the physical. Traditionally, topics as the presence of a soul or an afterlife belong to this realm, but also topics as what consciousness is.
Whereas physics describes the "what" and "how" of phenomena in the world, according to certain philosophers metaphysics also addresses the "why" question of the physical phenomena.
In my book, I try to argue that the dichotomy between physics and metaphysics is actually a false one and that there may not be such a clear dividing line (depending on the definition you use).
If reality includes everything that can influence reality, this means that there can be no relevant phenomena outside of reality. If there is a phenomenon outside of reality (a kind of parallel universe), it cannot influence it and therefore is irrelevant. If it can influence reality it is included by definition.
Similarly, if the metaphysical can influence the physical, it must have similar characteristics and actually belongs to the physical. If it cannot influence the physical world, it is of no relevance whatsoever, and we should not be worrying about it. I argue that most phenomena/concepts previously categorised as metaphysical actually do influence our physical world and therefore must somehow be part of it.
Transcendental
Transcendental is a terminology mostly used in theology and refers to a God wholly independent from the universe. Others use the term as "superior" and "surpassing", standing outside of. In a sense it is a kind of synonym for metaphysical. Again I repeat my reasoning: if something transcendent is fully independent and does not influence our universe, it is irrelevant. If it does, it is somehow included and therefore does not really transcend, in the traditional meaning of the word.
This is why I have chosen to upgrade the meaning of the terminology "transcendental". I use it in a sense that a transcendent concept or phenomenon encompasses concepts or phenomena which are usually considered as mutually exclusive. For instance creation and evolution are usually thought of as opposing poles, but in modern biotech we can "transcend" this dichotomy by being able to do both: We can create point mutations in the DNA of organisms or even complete artificial bacterial chromosomes and then let these organisms evolve. The one does not exclude the other in this particular context. This may be a pointer to the fact that in the grand scheme of things, both aspects are there as well.
With this type of reasoning in my book, I try to show that our technology in a certain sense forces us to rethink terminologies and concepts, which were previously clear-cut different domains.
So if you were hoping that you'll find a lot of esoteric ideas about heaven, hell, angels, afterlife etc. I must disappoint you. In fact my book is an attempt to erode the foundations of metaphysics and bring it within the boundaries of the knowable.
Epistemology and where the truth lies: What is knowable at all?
And this brings us to the very interesting topic of epistemology: the theory of knowledge which in my book is focused on the question what is knowable at all?
Traditionally in logic there are three ways to infer knowledge from facts:
Deduction, Induction and Abduction.
A deductive statement could be:
Only male humans have beards,
Socrates has a beard
Inference: Hence Socrates is a male.
An inductive statement can be:
I experientially observe that the sun rises every day,
Tomorrow a new day will start,
Inference: I predict that the sun will rise tomorrow.
An abductive statement would be the following:
When it rains the grass is wet
I observe that the grass is wet
Inference: it has rained.
The first two are a valid logical reasoning. The third is a potential logical fallacy, because the grass can have got wet in a different way e.g. by sprinklers.
Inductive statements rely on experientially derived patterns: Facts are here derived from observation. Deduction starts with known facts. But it must be realised that these known facts (which are in fact distilled abstractions of patterns) one day must have been gathered by observation, so that every deduction -except in mathematics- is based on previous inductions.
Science essentially works in an inductive experiential manner. We make many observations and try to derive a pattern a correlation from this: If we change parameter, X, it is likely that parameter Y will be changed in this or that direction or to this or that extent.
What people often forget is that scientific findings are usually made on the basis of a lot of data. Data, in which there are so-called "outliers", or observations, which do not match the general pattern. This is why we have introduced statistics. Most scientific correlations are "true" only in a fuzzy manner: there is a high probability that they will follow the distilled pattern, but no guarantee.
Moreover, when a pattern is to be distilled, it is not always clear-cut which pattern. Sometimes a more complex curve can give a better fit than a simple linear correlation. Where does the truth lie? There is a rule of thumb called Occam's Razor, which states that we should look for the hypothesis with the least amount of assumptions, which can describe a certain phenomenon. But this can sometimes unduly cast away a more complex hypothesis, which years later is found to describe the truth more accurately.
Also the perspective and the set-up may strongly influence what is observed. If two cars have an accident and there are multiple witnesses standing at different corners of an intersection, their accounts may be quite different. In this context the parable of the elephant springs to mind: different blind men are touching an object. One says it's a broom, another says it's a hose, yet another says it's a pillar and in fact it's an elephant and each man touches a different part of it. Similarly in science, we often don't see the whole of a phenomenon but merely measure certain aspects from certain metaphorical angles. It reveals aspects of the truth, but not the entire truth. This is the problem of "perspectivism" (see the figure at the start of this post).
Many scientists are also conservative and dogmatic in their approach and will believe in a certain theory even if anomalous data shows that the theory cannot be maintained. If often lasts until all the adepts of the old theory are dead, until a new paradigm can be accepted.
And then we come to the point of measurement. Measurements always have a certain degree of inaccuracy and can be subject to mistakes or instrumental artefacts. Worse, in the very small, not everything is possible to measure with high accuracy simultaneously: You cannot simultaneously determine the position and the speed of an elementary particle: a notion known as the Heisenberg relation.
Certain numbers are not computable (Turing's incomputability) and there are even certain mathematical statements, which can be true, but for which it is impossible to prove this. Moreover, it can be proven that it is impossible to prove this! This is known as Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
Why is this so important? Because it shows us that our ways to gather knowledge have an inherent degree of uncertainty. That there may not be such a thing as absolute knowledge. That our foundations of knowing things for certain are built on thin ice.
If we can't be 100% certain about what we think to know, we may become more forgiving towards others. After all, their point-of-view, just like ours, is also based on incomplete information, on a perspective which only sees part of a whole which is more than the sum of its parts.
Whatever you believe, I respect it, but I do ask you to question your beliefs. How can you be so sure that what you believe is true?
The Metaphysics of Information
An interesting bridge between science and spirituality can perhaps be found in "information theory".
Information on Wikipedia has a double definition:
1) Anything that provides the answer to a question of some kind
2) Anything that resolves uncertainty.
The first definition is more intuitive, what we as non-technical people would understand as information: It has a certain meaning, which can be understood and/or decoded by the receiver of the information.
The second definition is the consequence of the appropriation of the terminology "information" by computer science. In fact Claude Shannon -one of the first "computer scientists", "avant-la-lettre" (before the terminology computer science even existed) -published his "information theory" in 1949. Shannon was looking for a way to quantify information in a manner independent of its meaning. Forget the meaning, Shannon said.
If a sequence of numbers has a pattern, it is more predictable and less uncertain. Then it has not so much information. To Shannon, the more uncertain and less predictable a sequence of numbers was, the more information it contained. The simplest way to convey information is in a binary code. We can't reduce it any further.
Outside of this abstract realm, For us however, information does have meaning, and the more meaning it has, the more information we consider it conveys. This has also been called the "logical depth" of the information. For us, information is not information if it does not transmit us a meaning. There has to be a conscious decoder to make sense of information it seems. Or perhaps if not conscious at least sentient to a certain extent. The information DNA carries is meaningful because it can be decoded by a living (and hence sentient) cell, to translate this information into the generation of RNA and ultimately proteins.
Scientists these days quarrel about the question, whether energy/matter or information is more foundational to existence. One of the most famous physicists John Archibald Wheeler argued that whatever exists is a product of information and in this sense he spoke of "It from Bit".
Nevertheless, all information, even digital information cannot exist without a carrier to transmit the information). The carrier can be material (a book, written words or other symbols, electronic, like in telephones, telegraphs or computers) or purely energetic (electromagnetic radiation in wave patterns like in Wi-Fi), but we don't know of any information that can be transmitted without a carrier. Interestingly, information is however independent of the type of carrier.
So on the one hand it is physical in the sense that it must have a physical carrier (and I count pure energy as in Wi-Fi also as a carrier), on the other hand there is this strange independence from the type of carrier. As if information can almost exist independent of the physical as an idea. Perhaps we should reserve the terminology "metaphysical" for this type of phenomena, which express ideas and which -although needing a physical carrier- are independent of the type of physical carrier.
Can anything exist without information?
Imagine we start from a complete nothingness. Everything is the same everywhere. Now in order for something to exist, it must stand out from this otherwise homogeneous background. There must be a difference. If there is only one such object, there is not much to say about it. But as soon as we have two objects, they have relative positions with regard to each other and possibly other characteristics, like speed, spin etc. They can be described in terms of their differences, giving rise to a binary set of information. In fact all elementary particles that make up the material universe together form an elaborate set of information.
The particles or whatever exists, is at least characterised by some positional or extension information, possibly some movement information and a kind of energetic content. The particles can also influence each other, which gives rise to what we call forces; in a certain way they sense each other.
Certain religions claim that the metaphysical world is unlike the physical world; that we cannot imagine how or what it is because it is unlike our physical world. And on the other hand the esoteric schools teach the so-called "as above, so below" doctrine, which basically states that everything in our material world is a reflection of something in a higher dimension. Whatever this metaphysical substrate is like, it seems difficult to me to believe in anything being able to exist without information content at all. In other words, if there is no information content, it is nothing. If there is information, well, then maybe it is not so different from our "physical world" at all, and in fact belongs to it. Some say it is a world of ideas- a mind of a God, of which our world is a material instantiation. Even if that would be true, there must be some information processing going on, otherwise it is not more than a static library. Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist has perhaps one of the best theories to explain consciousness- the so-called hard problem. To Tononi, consciousness involves the integration of information. In many Eastern religions, the soul is a kind of consciousness or sentience.
When I was younger I read a science fiction comic in which there was a people called the Eternauts. The Eternauts had discovered all the secrets of matter and almost all the secrets of the soul. This got me thinking. What if the secrets of matter and the soul are somehow connected and together form the same secret? What if consciousness or at least sentience can only be there, if there is an integration of information going on? What if material particles coming into existence are somehow part of a process of sentient energy exploring itself? What if matter is the manifested form of the hard problem of consciousness?
For something to exist long enough to be detected, it must be stable long enough to be detected. Energy as you may know can exist in wave form. Energy packages or quanta, also called wavicles can be considered as a kind of standing waves. Standing waves occur when a whole number of waves fits on a string. In string theory these strings can be loops. If the energy goes round in the same loop wave all the time it somehow explores and senses itself. It reminds me of the alchemical symbol of the Ouroboros, the snake that bites its own tail, which is also a symbol of consciousness getting to know itself: A self-referential feedback loop.
Figure: If a whole number of waves fits exactly in a loop, you get a standing wave.
Figure: The Ouroboros
What if particles are sensing entities, miniature souls so to speak, with a very primitive form of awareness?
If you are a patent examiner, you have probably often encountered the phrase "incorporated by reference".
What if what is the matter is incorporation by self-reference? What if the arising of particles is a process of sentient energy becoming embodied in a physical form? This leads to a philosophy, which is known as "Panpsychism". More and more scientists are starting to consider Panpsychism as a potential rationale for the hard-problem of consciousness or sentience.
In my book I describe how matter on the one hand may be such a sentient from of energy and how at the same time it has informational content and is processing information. If true, the secrets of Matter and Soul are thus the same, each being a different side of the same coin; or rather: Sentience being the inside subjective experience and matter the outside objective experience. This leads to my so-called hypothesis of "Pancomputational Panpsychism". I don't say that this is necessarily the way things are. It's just an alternative hypothesis, which offers a perspective to bring science and spirituality under the same denominator.
Unveiling the Purpose in the Mystical Marriage
But is this knowledge of any avail to us? Can we use it; make a technology out of it? In a certain way we are already doing that. When we are manipulating particles with certain energies to bring them in resonance or excite them- as it is called in physics and chemistry- you could say in a certain way we are summoning them.
But jokes aside, if there is information, there is the decoding and the sensing of this information. It somehow makes sense to a more or less conscious entity. In that sense it also has a purpose. Where we see subsystems capable of becoming more and more complex -as in living systems- we cannot deny that against all the odds of the second law of thermodynamics (the law that entropy or disorder of a total system must always increase), there is something almost magical going on here: an equilibrium is found between chaos and order. A system that is neither too rigidly ordered so as to become static, nor too chaotic to dissipate into oblivion. Rather, a metastable equilibrium is established, that constantly changes state, but still works according to a kind of self-modifying self-improving algorithm, a self-modifying code that strives to achieve ever more complexity and variegation to improve its chances of survival -not as individual instance- but as concept of life. Life therefore has a purpose: to propagate itself. And it is also this purpose that is ingrained in us, as we are part of this life. And this inherent sense of seeking this purpose also provides us with purpose, cascading down to our mental life. In that way I describe reality as a kind of teleological search engine or self-modifying search algorithm. Is this idea bonkers or can we see examples in nature of systems that are codes that can modify themselves? Yes we can, at the simplest level we find the self-modifying self-splicing RNA, which again as the Ouroboros bites its own tail. The same can be said about life as a whole and perhaps this same motif can be found even at the level of the most elementary strings.
Interestingly enough, in latent semantic analysis, context and meaning are provided by proximity co-occurrence of terminologies, similarly all interactions of particles and life forms are a kind of dance, a communicative play of interacting with each other at a certain proximity and providing each other with meaning -not only in context, but also affectively- in a kind of communion and mystical marriage within micro, meso and macro dimensions. Only if there is more than one particle can it have a relation, information, a meaning and possibility for experience. The meaning of life thus becomes "being together".
Nature as a self-processing code or language of a communion of informative particles/souls. Perhaps this is the new metaphysics we should be looking for, one that unites science and metaphysics within one and the same information processing framework.
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You can find my books on Amazon in paperback or ebook format:
Technovedanta (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07D92DZYZ),
Transcendental Metaphysics (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07D912ZW7),
Is Intelligence an Algorithm? (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1785356704),
Is Reality a Simulation? An Anthology (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07D7JX4RS)
Figure sources:
Perspectivism: "i.imgur.com/WwHj7G4.jpg"
Elephant parable: "areasonablefaithdotme.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/6-blind-men-hans.jpg"
Standing wave in loop: "upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/Electron_wave_doubling_over.png/500px-Electron_wave_doubling_over.png"
Ouroboros:
"upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/71/Serpiente_alquimica.jpg/220px-Serpiente_alquimica.jpg"
