[This text is from The Double Nature of Reality, which will be published at some later point. Two other texts are also included which formed part of a correspondence with George Shiber in 2016]
Dear George,
It occurs to me that I might have bowled you a bit of a
googly with my opening gambit. So I’m going to explain a bit more of where I
think I’m going with that gambit, why the route is worth pursuing, and how we
are likely to end up talking physics.
As I suggested, there isn’t much we can say about the
initial state of physical reality at a notional time of its emergence, if the
various parameters of what can be said of it don’t have any existence. That’s
the problem physics has when it is looking for causes and mechanisms.
However it is possible to talk about the initial state of
reality in terms of logical argument, which is how it was done in antiquity.
That’s why I chose to start the discussion from that point of view. They were
familiar with talking about reality in terms of extreme states: does it exist?
What is it? Is it one or two? If it is two is reality other than itself? Is
reality complete in itself? Is physical existence a copy based on the pattern
of reality itself? If it is a copy, has the nature of reality itself been
compromised?
Whatever the initial conditions might have been, we can say
that those conditions are at the edge of physical existence. Which is not to
suggest that they actually occupy some kind of space at the edge of physical existence.
Just that, since the initial conditions don’t participate in the conditions of
our physical existence (extension, vectors, time, etc), then these conditions
will, to us, appear to be something which we can find at the extremes of
physical existence.
This is the root of the idea of the telos. It is about
beginnings and endings – how things start and finish. When what is ultimately
real is considered in this way, it is susceptible to logical analysis, and an
idea of a prime mover beyond the properties of the telos itself is not
required.
A discussion of this conception of the telos should be
untarnished by the general deprecation of teleological argument in any kind of
scientific analysis. We aren’t looking for purpose. But we are looking for the
beginning, and how things might have unfolded from that beginning. The concept
of the telos as a plenum, a pleroma undefined by the kind of parameters we find
in our physical existence, as opposed to the idea that physical existence just appeared ex nihilo, can be discussed.
Nothing as absence is very hard to discuss, except in the context of its
opposite. In fact it cannot reasonably be conceived without that context.
The discussion of Aristotle places his laws of thought into
a wider context. The laws represent tools in the Greek dialectical armoury. So
do the techniques used by Plato. But they are quite different and produce
different kinds of argument and result in different conclusions. They belong to
the same armoury (a discussion for another time). It is possible to understand
some things with Plato’s approach which would not be possible with a rigorous
application of Aristotle’s laws of thought. It isn’t the case that one logical
approach is correct, and the other not. But they are appropriate to different
contexts.
A plenum can be understood as identical with itself, and so,
in that sense, can be thought of as consistent with the first of the laws of
thought. But its properties, as understood from the point of view of physical
reality, cannot be self-consistent, since it is beyond definition in physical
terms. So the plenum must have a paradoxical aspect (literally meaning it is
beyond human understanding), and therefore must breach the other two laws of
thought (it can be one thing or its opposite; and it may also be neither one
thing or its opposite).
There are several ways we can go from here. One is to take
the view that physical reality represents a partial view of the plenum. Or can
be understood as an assemblage of partial views of the plenum. It contains
consistencies and regularities, but at a granular level (particularly), it
behaves with apparent inconsistency, being best understood in terms of
probability. That is how the plenum is, or at least the best way it can be
understood by us. It isn’t one thing or the other. But occasionally its
granularity looks like one thing or the other. And sometimes both at the same
time. We can describe what is going on in terms of probabilities, which is how
physics handles it, but it is not understood except in terms of mathematical
description. The idea of the plenum, as established through a purely logical
analysis, gives us insight into how the universe is actually operating.
It could be argued that physical reality behaves as it does
at the quantum level because, for all practical purposes, the plenum has no
size. So, at the quantum level, we are looking more closely at the nature of
the plenum as it is, or rather as it must, on account of its nature, look to
us.
Quantum entanglement might have a similar basis, on the
ground that what is happening is actually happening in the plenum, rather than
in physical space. Despite it having no size, it must necessarily be (in a
sense) distributed throughout space and time.
You see where I’m going. So, in addition to talking about
initial cosmological conditions, we could, on the basis of this notion of the
plenum, talk about Bell’s Theorem; Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen; and Klein-Kaluza.
We could also talk about how and why Maxwell’s equations can be derived from Klein-Kaluza,
and why the maths of Klein-Kaluza has two states.
Best, Thomas
(Fall, 2016)
