We must always put our egos, our affirmations of the I, in the midst of the not-I from which all our motivations and our ways of understanding ourselves come from. We can only properly understand ourselves through the great complexity of what we are not.
Nevertheless, it is not for our differences that the not-I stand in conflict, quite the contrary … it is precisely our differences that makes what-we-are-not interesting for us and allows us to be desirable for each other. Our own I is possible only through our relationship with the not-I. The not-I is always another-I and it is within this idea of the another rather than the other, that a recognition and mutuality can be engendered between us.
The recognition of the not-I as that which is another-self is what holds the intersubjective framework of societies together. It is what makes us capable of feeling empathy for the not-I and its importance can be seen when it is lacking, as in the case of psychotic criminals who lack any kind of faculty of empathy.
We are the same and we are different. We are different and we are the same.
Presently we are witnessing the collapse of the current globalised civilisation and experiencing the advanced stages of an historic process toward a world-wide mesh of apocalyptic dystopias. For globalisation to work again it has to been made to function in a positive way and in order to do that it needs to be revaluated and reconstructed from a will to embrace what globalisation itself implied – i.e., A universal culture, by which we mean a truly human culture in which all our not-I-ness could be united in one all-embracing We.
In a lecture given in New York in 1968 on the proposed theme of Philosophy and Anthropology, Jacques Derrida brought up the relationship betwixt humanism and metaphysics.[i] We say brought up, for Derrida’s thinking is always too convoluted to ever put forward a concrete idea, instead he seems to throw concepts into a whirling vortex that hopefully will throw something meaningful out for us. In this case though there were some interesting historical scraps linking existentialism to humanism and suggesting a phenomenologist chain of humanist ontology from Hegel to Husserl, to Heidegger unto Sartre, whilst situating the same string of thinking within a murky atmosphere of philosophical rejection of the humanist idea. For example, Sartre writes a piece called Existentialism is Humanism but speaks disparagingly of it in his novel Nausea and while with Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, he anchored the essence of Being within human-reality, he also rejected humanism, complaining that it remained too metaphysical. But it seems to us that the post-war rejection of humanism has had very little to do with metaphysics and is much more deeply rooted in the ideological dictates of liberalism and certain tyrannies of freedom. Which is of course ironic, because shouldn’t liberalism be rooted in humanism?
The problem of humanism that arose in the second half of the last century is centred around the idea of the commonality of humanity, and the possibility of our being driven toward a common purpose, because, for liberalism after World War II, which was a war on totalitarianism, the idea of shared meanings and purposes became associated with the same totalitarianism that had shaken the world during the 1930s and was being perpetuated through communist dictatorships. After the war, therefore, humanism was seen as suspiciously Marxist and, therefore, anti-capitalist and anti-liberal.
But now, when the hypocrisies and dictatorial tendencies buried in the fabric of the capitalist paradigm are becoming increasingly apparent and the noxious effects of consumerism have become a dangerous threat to the health of the biosphere, we have reached a stage when a common, purposive rally and reaction to the systemic madness is necessary, and the common, purposive façade of humanism needs to be at least reconsidered.
The truth is, societies have always infringed on our personal reasons for doing things – if not, society itself would never have evolved. Or in other words, the very definition of society is equivalent to individual compromise.
Imagine if human beings had never become social: while one individual picked berries because he or she found great personal gratification in eating sweet fruit, another would have discovered meaning by feeling the sun on his or her skin and would have left the group in search of sunnier weather, etc. Although this is also a superficial analogy because meaning and purpose would never have been possibilities for these antisocial humanoids, simply because they would have lacked self-consciousness. They would have had no need for it in their non-social lives, just as they would never have developed a need or ability for languages of any kind. The idea of humanity is tied to the concept of the homo sapiens or the zoon logon ekhon (that living being whose Being is essentially determined by its potentiality for discourse). So, for human beings to exist, there had to first be a humanity born out of a social reality that developed the need for self-conscious, intersubjective communication, and once that communication took place so began a process of communal development of shared necessities, the most pressing and relevant of which was the simple need of ensuring their own survival and the survival of those they felt tied to through the bond of community: friendship, kinship, and/or some other totemic connection.
Purposiveness has always been imbued through a serious sense of necessity, but capitalism has created the same effect via the want manufactured through its desire-creating machinery. Even the unnecessary can be made to feel universally needed and, as such, universally purposeful, if the right kind of advertising campaign is imposed.
A society centred around the idea of human commonality would not so much infringe on individual purposes but would in fact reveal the unnecessary purposes in our lives and guide individuals toward more meaningful authenticities rooted in what humanity is and what it needs to do in order to become fulfilled in what it should be.
An authentic human society would be very different to any of those which have been created so far, and imagining such an authenticity is generally the work of science-fiction. Likewise, a good dose of sci-fi imagination is required in order to conceive of what the authentic human being would look like, because, due to our inauthentic human societies the authentically human has never properly come about – we are but shadows of what we should be, because we should be far better connected within the sphere of our commonality.
While part of us tells us that we have reached a good place, where at we should stay, other forces are transforming this good place around us in ways that are not geared to any human purposiveness at all. Currently, we live immersed in a teleology of greed and our lives are despotically controlled by the plutocratic paradise dreamed of by Wealth.
[i] Jacques Derrida, MARGINS OF PHILOSPHY, Tr. Alan Bass, The Harvester Press, Chicago, 1982, pp.114-117
All organisms are embedded with a survival instinct, and yet all organisms are mortal; death is only a matter of time. Vanity of vanities … but does this really mean that nature is devoid of purposefulness? If the natural process treats life forms so cruelly as to bring them into existence only to eradicate them some time later, does this imply that nature has no real interest in life? But if this were so, all living organisms would have perished eons ago. The truth is there is a life-caring spirit in nature, and that this preserving power manifests itself through evolution. While evolution does nothing to preserve the individual members of any species, it does cares for the species itself. If ‘being worthy of preservation’ defines the ultimate worthiness and purposefulness of something, then this means that the ultimate aims of individual organisms have to be for the species which is perdurable.
The mystic who claims to have reached enlightenment is always mistaken because he or she has searched for it in a transcendental concept like the cosmos or God, leaping over the immediate singularity that is humanity. Authentic human enlightenment lies firstly in what we are, human beings, and secondly, in the partnership (unity) that humanity has with the world and the Universe.
The search for meaningfulness and purpose beyond the Human One in superior concepts like the divine is a vain betrayal of our humanity.
The road of enlightenment, therefore, has to pass through the human, not by placing humanity in opposition to the world, but through an understanding of the ontological partnership that humanity has with the entire Universe.
On the other hand, by embracing the significance of the individual, human culture negates the significance of humanity, and this also means that by embracing the significance of humanity, human culture would negate the importance of the individual. But despite the antilibertarian sentiments embedded in this idea, for reasons of purposeful perdurance this has to be considered a positive thing.
The only positive end to humanity can be imagined through its disappearance in an evolutionary way, into a superior species. Any other kind of end would be negative and profoundly sad.
The meaning of humanity as a whole, must take precedence over the possible other meanings of its individual parts. What this implies is the necessity for a human-politics, driven by authentic human necessity, and powered by human creativity and world-healing human technologies.
At the moment humanity is infirm because humanity’s parts work against each other and, ultimately, against humanity. The body politic has to be shifted out of the perspective of the State and developed toward a pan-humanity reach and scope. Once this is done, the profoundly inhuman side of the System is made more transparent and its absurdities become more obvious.
The politics of humanity has to be based on an idea of: ‘Tell me what you want to contribute to humanity, and we will give you the means and tools to carry it out.’
In this idea there should be no question of money. The abolishing of money has to be of prime concern, and the idea of money must be transcended before any progressive leap forward can take place. To imagine and implement a pan-human economic system without the competitive technology of anything like money should be the first priority for solving the current disaster humanity is facing and allow all humanity the comfort that will come from a better, human-survival designed world. Only through understanding and explaining will we achieve the change and improvement that is necessary for the ultimate survival of our species.
In order to try and imagine and discuss the metaphysical first cause, or prime mover, Hegel used the term ‘Force’. He describes his force as that which can move the inanimate, or that which can either bring two parts together or separate them, or that which can bring about any change at all in the form or nature of something. Really he is just giving a name to that which had been usurped by the concept of God, and he was making an attempt to bring metaphysical thinking back to pre-Christian reasoning, but Hegel’s choice of the term ‘Force’, just as Nietzsche’s use of the word ‘Power’, become dangerous terms once metaphysical thinking inspires the political spheres as both terms transmit an unfortunate violence that we do not think was intended by either philosopher.
However, if we accept that sometime during the evolution of the cosmos the Universe became imbued with a purposeful teleological idea, a will toward the creation of a consciousness – and an intelligent consciousness – capable of understanding its own being, then this kind of telos cannot be imagined to have come about through any kind of force or power. It has to be born from the kind of energy that is geared to stimulate that knowledge of its own being. We know that such a thing exists, it is the same vitality that moves every creative human act, and we even have a name for it, we call it inspiration. So, for our own metaphysical understanding of the first cause, we think Inspiration is a better choice of terms than force or power.
Inspiration is a more positive and more consciousness orientated concept. It is the means that brings something that is lacking into being via the awareness that such a lack exists. Awareness here could be defined as a conscious notion of the potential of something. And, if we can imagine this conscious notion of the potential of something, can there not also be an unconscious notion of the potential of something? In trying to imagine the prime cause this is fundamental, because in order to imagine the kind of inspiration that could create something from nothing or consciousness from non-consciousness, the potential for that consciousness has to exist in a non-conscious or subconscious form.
Embedded in the very concept of the laws of physics is the idea of unconscious notions for in an unconscious universe the fabric and form of that cosmos must have been built unconsciously, and yet the fact that there is so much harmony in nature must imply that there is an unconscious mechanism (like our own DNA) which has organised and is constantly reorganising things to evolve in a sustainable and meaningful way.
It is precisely because of this apparently rational organisation of the Universe that the need for God arose, because the idea of an unconscious cosmos organising itself in the harmonious way that it has seems irrational. But God itself is equally irrational, condemned by the vicious circle of the chicken and the egg, and does nothing much but distract us from the crux of the problem by offering an easy but rationally flawed solution to the conundrum.
To maintain the idea of the Creator, we could imagine our universe being the successful result of a laboratory experiment carried out at a greater dimension of reality by one or a group of scientists in that greater reality. Traditionally God is thought of as being omnipotent and omnipresent, but this is unnecessary from the perspective of metaphysics. Metaphysically we only need a creator or creative mechanism to produce the universe, but if we are really serious and truly looking for a reason for the First Cause of everything, then we need something else than a Creator, something much simpler. All that is needed is a notion, the first unconscious notion that inspired the first change from nothing into something, producing the first particle point which is itself infused with a capability of being inspired by that which it lacks, which is a multiplicity beyond its singularity, and this creates an enormous multitude of particle points which themselves are all imbued with the notion of what they all lack – which is a purposeful meaningful Being.
So, in a non-space (in this imagined pre-universe space has not been created yet) full of non-dimensional parts, the same inspiration brings them, now an almost infinite number of them, back together through a unifying will to gain together what they all lack. Compressed, the inspiration that pulls them all together creates an immensely compact point of energy until has to explode – the Big Bang.
Everything from then on is inflationary, but inspired by the singular notion to obtain what it most absolutely lacks – the purpose of this Universe is to obtain the meaningfulness of purposeful Being.
But the great metaphysical question is still unanswered. How can an inspiration come from nothing? Again, we are thrown back into the unresolvable conundrum of cause and effect – it seems we need a Creator, but the Creator also needs a Creator.
However, the idea of particles arising out of nothing is a perfectly acceptable concept from the point of view of quantum mechanics, and once we take the reality of quantum fluctuations into consideration quantum mechanics tells us that the only possible way to understand the Universe is that in the beginning there was empty space (space as a void is eternal), and that into that empty space emerged a tiny something. And from a philosophical point of view, through reason, it seems the most logical way of understanding what that something would be, would be to imagine it as the simplest kind of something that our intelligence can conceive. Or, even better still, the most basic kind of something existing today in the Universe – and in this way metaphysics becomes inextricably linked to the quantum theories and revelations of physics.
Using philosophical rationalisation, we can now propose that lack itself could be seen as an inciting force behind this primordial quantum process. Lack inspires. It is therefore an active force. Perhaps it is even capable of activating nothingness – after all, the inspiring force generated by lack will be more potent when there is nothing, for what the void lacks is everything.
Of course, this kind of reasoning is also flawed: in the void there is, logically, also a lack of lack. And even if there were a notion of lack, there is nothing for that lack to act upon. Lack, for example, cannot force nothing to become something. In order for something to emerge out of empty space there needs to be some very subtle, energy flows within that emptiness, what quantum physicists call quantum fluctuations or vacuum state fluctuations, and ‘which are a temporary random change in the amount of energy in a point in space’[i]. Speculating philosophically then, we propose that these fluctuations are inspired by an absolutely unconscious sense of what is lacking (which from the point of view of the void is Being). In this way lack inspires something, the most necessary thing in its simplest form, out of nothing.[ii] It defies the logic of cause and effect only because we do not know the true first law of cause and effect. Mathematically, a first law must be expressed something like 0 ≡ 1 when 0 is absolute. Philosophically, this 0 ≡ 1 means Nothingness MUST BE the notion of Being, and the sequential result of this could be expressed as:
0 ≡ 1; 1 ≡ 2; 2 ≡ 3 … ∞ ≡ BEING
Being therefore, is that which is always Becoming, and it is driven by the imperative of Necessity. Natural laws will also evolve in the process of Becoming in order to ensure that the potential for Absolute Being in the Universe is always being intensified. The Universe, it could be said, operates in a future continuous way, inspired by the purpose of ‘we are going to make absolute Being.’ Laws then are determined by the necessity of becoming Being.
This imperative also makes absolute nothingness impossible, and this impossibility may be the only way to conceive of the Universe being possible.
[ii] Another way to look at the primordial, pre-inflationary universe would be to imagine it as a conditional universe. In the beginning there was Either nothing Or something. However, conditionality would be too chaotic to have formed natural laws. To have natural laws there needs to be a simple imperative factor that creates a tendency to evolve towards more complex versions of the same factor (to develop in an evolutionary way).
Hegel regarded his Absolute as ‘the organically articulated system, a self-contained structure of notions’[1]. In our concept of the interactive-objectifying relationship between knowing, self-conscious beings and the unknowing universe we see an interaction of notions within that structure. In Hegel’s terms, a notion is a ‘supreme achievement of thought’[2]. Of course, the problem here is the mechanical process that would be needed to refine the immense, almost infinite amount of information, the greater part of it innocuous, in order to come to this supreme achievement of thought. How can an unknowing universe decipher and/or separate the important ideas from the unimportant?
If we think of this in terms of cybernetics, we can posit the problem as one of a hard disk in need of software. In this way, we can imagine the physical essence of the universe-as-computer (UaC) as a hard disk that stores all information that is generated by the workings of the mechanism of the computer itself. But our UaC receives no input from outside of itself; it is a completely self-sufficient apparatus, depending only on its own mechanisms and the organisation of those mechanics for its self-maintenance. But for this to happen the hard drive needs to be programmed firstly with a self-evolving operating system and later with additional software that can deal with the incredible amount of information that this infinitely complex system needs to purposively decipher and interpret, sifting through the irrelevant and unnecessary information it contains and by so doing make it functional in a persevering way.
Seen in this way, we would have to assume that our own UaC possesses an operating system that allowed not only its basic start up procedure but also an evolutionary process that has created conditions within itself that has allowed a software to be developed within it. A software that can perceive and interpret the mechanical processes of the operating system and develop other software from that understanding which in turn develops the UaC in a meaningful direction, in which complexity unfolds toward order and further creativity rather than meaningless chaos. We call this software ‘life’.
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The problem now becomes stickier: How can we imagine the UaC as a hard disk with an OS without a notion of a programmer, the one who created the OS for the UaC in the first place, i.e., God. But if the programmer/God existed, why would the UaC need to create its own software (complex sapiens organisms) to interpret and creatively develop its own version of existence within the basic OS driven mechanisms of the hard drive? The logical answer is that it wouldn’t. If a programmer that was an eternal being existed, that eternal creator would logically want to have control of the processes and fashion and operate the software itself (just as we would not want to lose control of the software on our own PCs).
We are left with two possibilities. Either:
The supreme programmer (God) exists and the software that the Operating System has evolved (sapient organisms like humanity) are superfluous and unnecessary … or
The supreme programmer does not exist, and the Operating System is somehow able to programme itself to create what it lacks … or even:
The supreme programmer existed, but not in an eternal form. The first creator has perished but has programmed the Operating System with an ability to programme itself and create what it lacks.
Option (a) is an absolute pessimistic view for humanity and it would be absurd for human beings to accept such a fatalistic and anti-human vision of existence. However, even if we accept either (b) or (c) we are still faced with the initial conundrum: How does the hard disk (inanimate universe) process the information it receives from the creative mechanism of the software (sapient beings)? Or, in other words: How does the inanimate and unconscious universe meaningfully process and understand the information it receives from the consciousness of the sapient organisms within it? To find the answer to this we need to understand the idea that at the quantum level, the Universe is basically information, and quantum particles carry simple bytes of information in the same way that information is shared and stored in a computer. How this information becomes meaningful therefore, depends on the software that is installed. By seeing humanity as a meaning-making-software withing the hardware of the Universe, we can imagine the importance of this humanity in the process of the Universe’s own purposive development. An importance so great in its magnitude, and so abysmal in its lack of perception by humanity itself. Perhaps what is needed is a software that programmes the software (us) and makes it (us) aware of its (our) own great importance.
[1] J.B. Baillie in the Translator’s Introduction of G.W.F. Hegel THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, Dover, New York, 2003, p. xx
First, imagine an immature human brain, a baby’s brain for example, that has been carefully and expertly extracted (for whatever reason) from the rest of the baby’s body and kept alive and operative in a laboratory, fed in such a way that it is also able to keep growing.
Next, imagine the brain is injected with self-reproducing nano particles, each of them a tiny quantum computer that can assimilate and transmit vast amounts of information to a massive central computer that the brain is wired to. Despite this immense gathering of information, the brain itself has no sensory input and the mind created by the brain is sensorially-speaking, completely ignorant to the reality in the space that surrounds it. Nevertheless, the mind does receive stimulation from the information transmitted by the nano particles that are self-producing in a certain, tiny section of the brain.
From this information the brain’s mind starts to gather its own perception of things and, one could say, it begins to live its own experience which would have been impossible without the input it receives from the nano particles inside it.
As the nano particles gather more and more information about their own physical environment (which is confined to the interior, organic mechanics of the brain itself) so does the brain develop its own picture, both in the real and the imagined sense of itself.
Much of this scrambled perception is retransmitted back to the individual nano particles in a scrambled way in the forms of dreams, which the artificial intelligence, used in the programming of the software embedded in the nano particles, usually has no trouble distinguishing from the physical reality of the environment that is being explored. Nevertheless, the dream experiences do influence in an incrementive way the creative capacity that is a necessary element in the programming of the nanos for the artificial intelligence of their software to work. And so, from these dreams, the artificial intelligence operating in the brain is able to imagine possibilities.
Gradually the artificial intelligence driving the interconnected nano probes learns how to use the physical resources of the brain it occupies. By doing this, it is able to tap into the brain’s own neural energy sources to develop the nano machines own technologies and build a comfortable environment, territorialising the tiny location they have in the brain. Along with this territorialisation process the nano particles, through their artificial intelligence minds, can begin to relate to their segment of the brain in a fashion not unlike what we would call being at home.
Eventually, however, the initial home space becomes crowded as the nano particles reproduce themselves at rapid rates, and the nano particles are able to reprogramme themselves in ways that allow them to explore and territorialise other regions of the brain, even coming into contact with other nano particles that had been injected into other parts of the brain in the initial days of the experiment.
With time, the artificial intelligence deduces that the world they inhabit will eventually deteriorate, become dysfunctional and perish, annihilating what the artificial intelligence of the nano particles understood to be the entire conglomerate of existence itself (for what could possible exist outside of this universe – the brain – that they inhabited).
By this time, the nano particles have become more and more individualistic and have started to disassociate their own intelligence from the central intelligence they all feed into and draw from. Because of this, the tremendous discovery that existence is ephemeral is able to spark debate between the individual particles. This discussion develops into philosophical conclusions and an evolution toward a collective belief in the moral necessity of existence itself as that which is all-good, as well as a cultural preoccupation with the problematic of non-existence, as that which is evil.
Likewise, the communities of individual nano particles find a new incentive and turn their artificial intelligence motors and creative abilities toward solving the problem of how to maintain the brain in a fully operative, healthy existence for eternity. This is the beginning of a new and truly fantastic era for the nano-particle civilisation as they realise the unlimited aspects of their potentials, both as individual particles and as a harmonious whole in tune with the desires of the greater intellect of the artificial intelligence software that was the basic force driving them all.
Whether or not the Universe’s evolution has been a deterministic process, the existence of life-forms produced by that evolution that are capable of perceiving and understanding the mechanics and intricacies of the Universe’s form, indicates a directional drive in that same evolution (accidental or not) toward a state of being perceived and understood.
So, if the first cosmological miracle came with the process of something out of nothing that in turn has evolved into the immense cosmos we inhabit now, then the second marvellous miracle is the fact that the same something can be known and appreciated for what it is. It is through its being perceived that the Universe properly exists in a qualitative way, and via its appreciation that we can say that that existence comes to be endowed with love.
(in other words: the first miracle was the Big Bang; the second cosmological miracle was the evolution of conscious living organisms.)
If this evolution has been an accidental process, without a Creator or Grand Designer, this only makes the Universe’s evolution even more miraculous, although at the same time it tells us that there are no miracles in nature, just developments that can create, impede or destroy incredibly complex mechanisms and organisms, and which may well allow for the development of all possibilities. Or at least until the possibility of its complete annihilation is realised.
The positive essence of the Universe lies in this drive for unlimited evolution, and what we can intuit is a cosmological will for existence (by which we mean existence in the Ideal sense, as that which is known). The purpose behind this drive is to develop conditions in which complexities like living organisms and other possibilities of perceiving, knowing, intelligent entities can be created.
That negative conditions, in which evolutionary processes are impeded or destroyed, and in which possibilities may never be realised, indicates the accidental nature of the Universe’s drive and its mechanics. It seems therefore, that there is no God, and if there were a Creator, It would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb. No, there is no intelligence driving the process, as all intelligence is a result of the process.
Nevertheless, even without any divine force, the Universe develops in a seemingly purposive way, and the Universe’s drive has developed qualitatively purposeful benefits for itself. Sapiens entities, like humanity, have evolved into the eyes and ears of the Universe itself. This is such an exorbitant idea that, while it may at first seem too enormous and metaphysical to be of any practical use, it is also too tremendous to be ignored.
Once it is grasped we see that we are the window the Universe has unto itself, that we are the roots of its ability to know it exists, that our minds are to the Universe, what we think our souls are to we ourselves. We are in a sense the essence of the Universe’s existence. This is certainly an exorbitant conclusion, and it needs to be a sobering one. That we, who are so important, should be on a negative path, whether that be through decadence, over-consumption, laziness or lack of vision, now becomes not just a question of human concern (social, political or economic) but one of enormous existential implications. By existing dangerously we are not only threatening the existence of human civilisation, we are endangering the existence of everything (and by everything we mean not only that which exists now, but the existence of everything that has existed before us, and after us).
One of the many paradoxes underlying our nihilist age, is our need for certainty in order to be able to believe, although this could also be seen, not as a paradoxical condition enveloped in nihilism, but rather as an end result of that same nihilism. The very fact that everything is relative makes us yearn for that which the relativity denies us, and that is certainty. When everything is equally meaningful and therefore meaningless, a need for authentic meaning (i.e., certainty) becomes vital. Belief itself is not enough to believe in things anymore.
Cosmological Fine Tuning [i] has taken us one step closer to believing in the unbelievable by opening the door of certainty to the question of the deterministic universe or, the purposeful cosmos. What Cosmological Fine Tuning (CFT) suggests is that the Universe is too specifically controlled to be purely accidental. And if it is not purely accidental then it has to have been programmed in some way – either by a God-like entity, or by the Universe itself.
But even if we affirm that ‘yes, the Universe has certainly been programmed,’ we cannot say with any certainty that it has been programmed by a God-like figure. We cannot move from programmed to programmer without leaping over self-programming, although those cosmologists who wanted to avoid the idea of any determinism whatsoever came up with the escape of the Infinite Multiverse that would bring even the finely tuned Universe back into the field of accidents, and, as such, return it to the framework of nihilistic reasonability again.
Science abhors determinism because it suspects that if it did prove that everything is derived from a blueprint (traditionally attributed to the handiwork of God), science would be thrown out of the window by the same design it had given certainty to. But how valid is this fear of determinism when applied to the case of Cosmological Fine Tuning?
One of the main reasons for the existence of determinist-phobia lies in the fact that a pre-planned cosmos implies the existence of destiny and, subsequently, a loss of free-will, for if the Universe is fine-tuned in order to make a certain, desirable future possible, then we cannot alter that fact. However, CFT does not imply that at all. What CFT suggests is that the Universe is ordered in such a way that has allowed conditions for life to be made possible. And if we consider the complexity of conditions needed to allow the existence of complex life-forms in our cosmos, we find that, even with CFT the experiment has been a very tenuous one, the success of which depends more on chance than on necessary results. So, while CFT implies a purposeful aim to the Universe through fine tuning, the accomplishment of that goal is, in the practical sense, shaky. It is certainly not destiny-unfolding and deterministic in an omnipotent God-like sense. In fact, it may very well be certain that complex life in the Universe is extremely rare (the Rare Earth hypothesis).
If things have been programmed to make life possible in the Universe then, yes, we know it has been successful, for our existence is proof of that success. But our certainty can only make that affirmation in a minimal way, and, in order for the life experiment that the Universe is fine-tuned for to work, the cosmos had to be made enormous in order for the minimal chances of success to bare fruition. And even that success itself hangs on a very fine thread over the yawning abyss of absolute failure.
Once the slim chances of success in this fine-tuned but still essentially chaotic Universe are calculated, then the image of the omnipotent creator and the destiny-filled blueprint of determinism is drastically diminished. The enormous fragility of creating and preserving complex life-forms only indicates one thing – CFT helps life by creating conditions in which it is made possible, but it gives no certain guarantee of it. Without CFT life would be impossible, but that does not mean that life has to emerge with it.
In other words, even with CFT, the accidental and co-incidental still plays a major role in reality. We still have free will. What CFT gives us, however, is a firm grip on reality. It tells us that the creation of complex life is a fundamental purpose for the Universe itself, and because of that it points toward what human purposiveness should be. It is an affirmation of humanistic anthropocentricism and gives us a purposive pointer toward what our positive role in the Universe could be. Firstly, to survive, because without complex life-forms in the cosmos the Universe has no purpose for its existence, and secondly to develop our civilisation in harmony with the necessities implied by the imperative of that survival.
Cosmological Fine Tuning provides a simple but profound reason for existence, which, in a metaphysically reasoned way, provides a basis that can make the certainty of existential convictions concrete. Its simple but profound idea lies in its affirmation that yes, a purposeful meaning to the Universe certainly exists. And it is from this simple thesis that we should develop our greater ethical beliefs that are so necessary now to lift us beyond this age of nihilism into a meaningful future perfectly tuned-in to the fine-tuned cosmos around us.
[i] Cosmological Fine Tuning, is a cosmological concept which implies that the Universe is deliberately fine-tuned in a way that makes the creation of life possible. We have discussed this idea and the humanistic purposefulness embodied in it in many of the articles posted on this site. Here are some links to a few more of our own many articles related to this theory:
Truth depends on context. We can say this pen is for writing and that is the pen’s truth, but what it will write, and how and why it writes, will depend on the context (the hand) it is placed in. Of course, there are contexts imaginable in which the pen may never be used at all, or never used again, and when it runs out of ink it becomes purposeless and must be either refilled or thrown away. What this shows us is that truth is made fragile by being placed in a context which has no intention of putting it to its proper use.
Contexts are never absolutely permanent things: truths may be established that are devoid of purposes (the truth is we don’t need anything), but it is more likely that they are tied to purpose and needs (we need to develop our humanity), or non-needs (we need to have less crime).
Purposes and needs give truth more weightiness and form, making it easier to grasp and accept.
The current general context for truth that we find ourselves in is directly conditioned by three major factors: at the immediate surface area is the constant flow of the capitalist economy and its expansionist will, but this plane has been currently swamped by the condition of the pandemic, while underneath this superficial lies the much deeper systemic problem related to the fragility of our eco-system. It is this triple-faceted context that gives truth today its awkward complexity and, because of that complexity, makes it muddy with relativity and opens the door to Fake News.
Nevertheless, the climate emergency is such a serious, indeed existential crisis that all honesty has to affirm that we live in an era conditioned by that greater, underlying necessity. And, whether we want to look below the surface of the system or not, it is this great necessity that is our basic common truth, the truth that our contemporary context is inevitably tied to.
When necessity arises, the right action is also to stand before it, deal with it, and, if the possibility is discovered, resolve it. And, when the necessity is great, this is truth is amplified. Like it or not, this is the deadly-serious kind of truth our context has given us.
The time has come for humanity to set itself a goal and plant the seeds of its highest hopes. There is an urgency. The anti-human has plundered the earth and now the earth groans with the pain of its scars. Very soon, the Mother Earth that has engendered us will hate us and turn against us, turning its back to us and making itself inhospitable for us. The terrain for planting our hopes is already barren and the soil will need to be turned over and well-watered for it become fertile again. The Wasteland needs the planting of trees in order to cool the terrain. Trees create conditions for growing trees in. The anti-human has become obsessed with cutting and clearing and that must now change. But what form must such a change take? To answer this we need to look more closely at what it is that needs to be altered.
Anti-human history has given birth to the most contemptible species of anti-human beings – the ones who can no longer have contempt for themselves. Nietzsche called this species The Last Men, the last humans, but really they are the last of the anti-humans.
“What will our profit be from theses high hopes?” groaned the last of the anti-humans: “Why change our anti-humanity? What can we hope to gain by changing what has always been?” the anti-humans bleated. “We want jobs so that we can make money, but your hopes only point to poverty,” screamed the last of the anti-humans with his hands pushed firmly into his pockets.
The Earth has become small, and upon it hops the anti-human, who makes everything small. He is a pestilence, like the locust, turning fertile forests into deserts.
“We civilised the world,” say the anti-humans in a whimpering chorus, blinking and forgetting that what they really did was surrender themselves to perpetual slavery and misleading themselves that they themselves are really human and not anti-human at all – they actually think of themselves as human beings whilst constantly acting in a humanistically antagonistic way over and over again.
Becoming ill and being mistrustful are considered sinful by them, even though they no longer know what sin is. In general, they proceed with caution, lest they should be tempted to lose their anti-human traits and become human again. Anti-humans allow themselves a bit of poison every now and again, that makes for pleasant dreams, but they know not why they are living, for they are terrified of death. This horror encourages them to prolong their lives as long as possible. Even when their bodies and brains hardly function at all they are kept alive by artificial means, misleading themselves that the mere act of breathing can be interpreted as a genuine mark of authentic human (i.e., anti-human) activity.
They hate work but cannot renounce it as they lust after the money that can only be found by working. They think it is labour and toil that gives them the moral right to live, but it really merely enslaves them to jobs that are actually unnecessary. The only aim of work is to enable the anti-human civilisation to participate in the anti-human game of wealth distribution. This game is obligatory, and because of that there is an effort to make work never too burdensome, although it should always be stressful. This paradoxical situation is taken for granted by nearly all anti-human societies. They no longer become rich or poor, which are both too burdensome.
The anti-humans are nihilists. They either live for no good reason at all or lose themselves in religious fantasies of nihilistic paradises beyond this world.
They despise their governors but have no idea how to get rid of them. Politics has no interest for them except when they can reduce it to the most simple and absurd levels, otehrwise it is just too intellectual and difficult. Because of this the political class has to be, or at least appear to be, as simple and ignorant as the vast majority of anti-human voters who elect them. It is for this reason that politicians have no sincere interest in the people, except in their capacity as voters, which is what presumably determines the kind of government each society obtains.
Anti-humans are a homo economicus, but the economy too is too complicated to worry about. The anti-humans hate using their brains to think. They believe there is something anti-natural and anti-life in any abundance of intellect and in anything provoking a need to think. But there is hope in the current existential misery we face …
The anti-human can only change in one direction, it must become human, must become a sapiens organism again rather than the herd animal it presently is, now subjected to the tremendous lies of our anti-human course of history. For humanity to be reborn there needs to be a new enlightenment, a rebirth of the intellect and reason. We need to put argumentation back into the argument again.
pauladkin 