BPW -- Contents
(chronological up to 7/3/02)
0. The Best Possible World Page
- naturalism vs. supernaturalism
- possible worlds and their selection processes
- the deconstruction of mind and reason
- the search for mental atoms
2. Taking Stock
- only two-and-a-half worldviews
- intellectual and spiritual void
- deus ex machina?
- emergent entities
- the only claim to existence of these immaterial forms lies in their perceptibility
5. Naturalism
- atomism vs. holism
- an immaterial realm that is of material consequence?
- why not imagine an emergent intelligence beyond our own individual emergent selves?
- why the secular philosophers have already jumped through virtually every hoop in order to avoid even one actually emerging entity....
7. Post-Theology and-or Pre-Millennium
- if the intercosmic Genii is so smart why are we so stupid?
- But all is well that ends well.
8. Creation?
- the power of creation is almost certain to emerge somewhere
- when it does there is a powerful bootstrap mechanism in place
- creation is likely to be the predominant source of all life
9. Something Wrong with this Picture?
- If the creative impulse is not to run amok there will be sources of restraint.
- [page to be omitted?]
10. So Bring on Chicken Little!
- the fragility of materialism
- about popping the balloon that is materialism
- and bringing down the Newtonian sky
11. Behind the Void
- A Newtonian reality still undergirds the entire apparatus of modernism.
- relationalism
- turning the world inside out and standing it on its head
- According to Leibniz, there can be but one void and one absolute.
13. How Many Worlds?
- Who needs a sub-optimal world?
- striving for plausibility, not proof at this point
- The Metanarrative is the only coherent alternative to materialism
- best for everyone
- This world is the center of spiritual gravity.
- a dramatic finale
- the teleology thereof
17. Only One Show?
- History goes around once.
- But it can reexperienced if necessary.
- We are all artifacts of the one, absolute experience.
- The microcosmic alignment of the Metanarrative replaces Darwinism.
19. Explaining Science (part 2)
- distributed intelligence
- metabolic atomism
20. Dream Atom
- The 'atom' is merely a stand-in for a mathematical superstructure...
- e.g. the Monster group
- the teleology of atoms
21. Concealment
- Nature is the veil of God.
- We would have to be weaned from the parental God.
- this alpha/omega bootstrap process
- We were so busy tracking dinosaurs and planets...
- the image of God planting dinosaur bones, like so many Easter eggs...
- The material Alpha of paleontology, and astronomy, embodied in the almost tangible Atom, will be amply reflected in the spiritual Omega that is our Eschaton.
23. Eschaton
- In the popular mind, eschatological doomsaying is the favored cliché for depicting fundamentalist irrationality and radicalism.
- Its allotted time is determined by the parameters of its teleological creation.
- 'Let's get this show on the road!'
- Is there anyone out there who would not agree that there has never been a more auspicious time for the Millennium?
- The fact that the primary result of all our technology has been the wiring of our global brain may not be incidental in the larger scheme.
- In the best possible world our demand for truth will subvert the materialist Juggernaught well before it pushes us further into tribulation.
- I would suggest that it could all come down to Google.
- Does anyone have a better plan?
25. Revelation
- From an epistemic point of view, separation entails ignorance and concealment.
- This is the primary source of 'evil' in creation.
- It is the function of the pre-millennial messianic event to overcome these historical accidents and biases.
- I am looking to the Internet.
- The concept of the Millennium has been integral to the prophetic tradition since its inception nearly thirty-five hundred years ago with Zoroaster.
- The notion of supernatural armies clashing in the heavens is replaced by the clash of paradigms.
- The potency of the Internet implies that the final messianic trigger could be the merest of 'butterfly' effects.
- Our sojourn into the limited dimensions of matter will be completed.
27. Genesis
- Every engineer knows that a bridge needs two anchor points, and in our case they are the Alpha and the Omega.
- The Alpha Anchor is to be found in Angkor and in Giza.
- The actual time span of creation is framed in the stars.
28. Christocentric?
- If we take teleology quite seriously, Jesus has not existed yet.
- The X-event was the death of God. This was the necessary self-sacrifice.
- The X-event is to the geodesics of of the Spirit, rather as Angkor, Giza, etc., are to the geodesics of the Earth.
- The idea of a coherent cosmos has simply fallen through the political and logistic cracks of academia.
- A dozen people knowing the truth and using the Internet can easily take this world away from the materialists.
30. Mere Words
- We do seem to posses an innate grammatical ability that is not reflected in any of the brute force procedures used to instruct machines in the use of language.
- What seems intrinsic to words is their ability to refer to other things.
- The fact is that there is nothing physical about referring.
- Any act of reference must transcend a purely causal nexus.
31. Straw Man
- The previously mentioned deconstructors of the mind will be our straw man until the warm bodies appear.
32. Strategy
- Divine minimalism in history is exemplified in the prophetic tradition.
- In our case the Internet should minimize the problem of disseminating the message, and thus we have the concept of the mini-messiah.
- ... nothing other than the dictionary definition of salvation.
33. Saving the World
- You will notice that I am taking a recognizably Tom Sawyerish approach to this salvational fence painting.
- Publish or perish....
34. Hot Topic?
- If materialism is going to implode, this would be ground zero for that event.
- They are letting the materialists choose the battlefield, and set the terms of the engagement.
- Meanwhile, the theists are implicitly letting the pantheists continue their hegemony over immaterialism.
36. Never Mind?
- A very important lacuna among theists is the mind.
- Rationalism has almost never found fertile soil in either the east or the west.
37. Rational Theism
- Imagine the bloke who first figured that out.
- Would it not be much more difficult to prove that it is impossible for God to exist?
- What is to suppose that accessibility to universal mathematics is not a condition of existence?
- We cannot understand the meaning of one word without, potentially at least, understanding the meaning of every other word.
- The history of science is a steady progression in our appreciation of the complexity and interdependence of all existence.
- Given the apparent holographic, relational, bootstrapped nature of all existence, it would be incomprehensible that any part of creation or existence could be isolated from the creator....
- Knowing God and having a buck seventy-five will get you a cup of coffee in Times Square.
- Any physicist will tell you that space is something awfully contrived.
- Why is there something rather than nothing?
- There must be a lower limit of some kind on what it means to be a world.
- If the principle of sufficient reason is possible, non-optimal worlds are impossible.
- All relations are ultimately subjective.
- Not only is mind possible, but it is the generator of all possibility.
- Is a kitten excluded from all contact with the Monster group?
- God can never be further from us than our own reason and feeling.
42. Coherence
- The most mysterious thing about the world is its comprehensibility.
- The basis for existence is the process of relating.
- Where's the substance, if it is not in the matter? The substance is in the coherence.
- Coherence exists only in relation to a subjective pole.
- The atoms, while they are current, provide a centrifugal balance to the centripetal subject.
- In the eschaton, the centrifugal force is overcome.
43. Distinction
- Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form
- The Kabbalah speaks of the Zim-zum
- 'seven thunders' that also play a central role in Joyce's Finnegan's Wake
- witnessed within history as the syzygy
- the stem cell of language
- this historical process is reversed and accelerated
- Somehow the pantheists miss the nodal structure of the world.
- There is the even more fundamental dialectical dynamic
- As in the monadology, every node is a microcosmic hologram.
- The preordained harmony is the agape betwixt the Alpha and Omega
45. Pantheism
- Pantheism has served as a bit of a strawperson in these pages
- those pantheists are not real strong on rationalism, nor on the Metanarrative
- And remember there is no substance.
- The megalithic Angkor sailed right by them.
46. Islam
- If the modern materialist establishment needed a thorn in its side...
- [They] seem a bit impatient with my Metanarrative, bless their hearts.
- Without McCluhan how could they have known that the message was in the medium?
47. Emergence
- If physics is unable to reduce itself...
- no one can point to any vital force
- but all the correlations in the world will not explain the existence of what is at least a very fortuitous dual aspect of matter.
- It is not for nothing that people are reluctant to rock the intellectual boat that is modernism.
48. Relations
- If numbers can exist then certainly relations can.
- Is the past real? If it is, it is only in relation to some actual present.
- If science is teaching us anything about the world it is the almost unlimited functional intricacy
- The isolated object, fact or word mean virtually nothing without regard to its relations.
49. Relatedness
- The degree of existence, however, is not something that can be directly observed.
- Physics works because it is so totally insinuated into our lives.
- And it is so insinuated just because it does its work. Is this circular?
- As long as astronomers are able to keep pushing the telescopic limits, they will not run into any cosmic or logical brick walls.
- In like manner, the PSR implies the BPW hypothesis as Gottfried was able to deduce several centuries ago.
50. Recap
- The poor reader may be getting a bit dizzy from going around in these circles.
- I am not writing a thesis.
- I am casting a loopy net into this vast ocean.
- Like those fair maidens of yore, I just keep on spinning.
51. Immaterialism
- Down thru the ages, immaterialism and idealism have always been prevalent in philosophy and religion.
- The successes of science have managed to keep a heavy lid on idealist speculation
- We should wonder why the theists cannot find their way to the high road of idealism.
- For almost five years I struggled to find wholeness within a quantum dualism of mind and matter.
- Once one has opened the door to the possibility of mind on a cosmic scale, all the qualities are drained out of matter
- I realized that my leap from science to immaterialism was a luxury that my fellow scientists could ill-afford.
53. Rationalism
- Part of the rationale for irrationality is the scientific view that mind is an accident of nature
- Deep ecology, fundamentalism and postmodernism are the disparate responses.
- Historically, rationalism has been based in theism.
- In practice, however, the religious establishments have never been comfortable with the political possibility of free thought.
- along came science to provide a tremendous outlet for a sustained but restricted intellectual endeavor
- Now with the advent of the Internet, will the authorities find another stratagem to keep human reason in check?
54. [Some introductory pages came here chronologically. They are in the Topical Index.]
55.