Explaining Science (part 2)
We can get at least some feeling for how space, time and history may be fashioned in a continuous manner out of an otherwise merely latent and otherwise chaotic cosmic potency. A virtual intelligence is always present, striving for self-realization. The Metanarrative congeals out of an experiential background foam, mainly in a teleological manner.
The cosmic organizing principle is always redistributing itself throughout an expanding network of microcosmic nodes, namely us creatures. These would also be similar to Leibniz' monads. To facilitate the redistribution of potency, it is natural to equip at least some of the monads with gonads. But more generally we are looking for there to be an arena with some sort of game plan to support the overarching History. The background game is necessarily metabolic in nature.
Why metabolism? It is impossible to imagine a natural ecology being based on anything else. Any other networking or relational schema would have a top-down organizing principle. Granted that reality is ultimately organized in a top-down fashion, there would be no dynamical independence from God without a seemingly independent and parallel system. I am not talking about an ontological dualism, merely a dynamical dualism.
This is the most important single point to grasp in order to justify the transition from materialism to immaterialism. I will continue to harp upon the cosmic necessity of this dynamical dualism. The upshot of which is that there are two logically necessary pillars of reality: God and Atom, truly the dynamic duo. Until you fully grasp this logic you will be justifiably dubious of any other effort on my part to rationalize or deconstruct science. Please note that my emphasis on this duality should in no way suggest an ontic parity between God and atoms. Any such parity would immediately dissolve into an incoherent Cartesian dichotomy.
With the background of the eternal cosmic potency, the primary problem of creation is the drawing of distinctions. In order to keep everything from happening together and at once, there will be a spatial manifold. Given any such manifold, any creative logistic will require the concept of the atom. It was no accident that the concept of the atom emerged in philosophy long before the concept of science.
In order for a dream to exist it must persist. In order to persist it must cohere both meaningfully and logically. Any surviving dream of the world, any metanarrative will by necessity have the atom as one of its logical foci. All of science is then a straightforward elaboration of that basic logic. Of course, we will be revisiting this point frequently.
Our dream Atom is nothing absolute. It cannot be a Newtonian atom. It will, like everything else in our dream, have a purely relational existence. It will, like Leibniz' monads, be microcosmic. It may not have gonads, but it will have 'hair'. That microcosmic 'hair' is what quantum physics is trying to describe. The metaphysical panic engendered amongst the materialists by the quantum is very understandable. They are seeing over the edge of their playpen into our upside-down and inside-out dream world. Yes, I would panic too, if I were them.
5/23/02