Recasting the History of Thought: J.G. Frazer's 'Golden Bough'

In the 1980s I had read the two volume version of The Golden Bough, miraculously reduced from thirteen volumes by the expedient of removing all the footnotes, and was struck by the absence of any discussion of a relationship between magical patterns of thought and ideas of divinity and Being. I knew about the existence of this relationship principally from an interest in Platonism in the European Renaissance. But there was a puzzling absence of discussion of these ideas. In The Golden Bough, patterns of magical thought are discussed in terms of the association of ideas; as a phenomenon of human thought, rather than as something which is a corollary of a model of reality.

Frazer was a disciple of John Locke, who originated the idea of the association of ideas, and he understood the functioning of the human mind in such terms. His earlier criticism of Plato is largely along the lines that, since he did not have this understanding of the nature of mind, he mistakenly converted an epistemology into an ontology. Since having the capacity to think of a thing and give it a name, does not give it reality, Plato had made a fundamental error.

 Frazer also shared Locke’s interest in the progress of man, and imagined that the technical and industrial production of the British Empire represented how far the human race had come. Philosophy for Frazer was about practical things. It is clear in the text of The Golden Bough that the idea of progress was seen by him in two ways - he drew a parallel between the gulf between the ideas of the ancients and of modern man, and the social and intellectual conditions in contemporary society, where the intellectual difference between those at the top and those at the bottom was likely to be just as great. In both cases, we should find frightful things, if we dig down deep.

Finding and providing explanations for both the existence and the nature of those frightful things was a major part of his work. He wanted to put unbridgeable distance between ourselves, the inheritors of enlightenment rationalism, and the ancient cultures whose ways of understanding the world were based on intellectual error. And that intellectual error he in part explained in The Golden Bough, treating magical thought entirely in terms of ideas of sympathy and contagion, or the faulty association of ideas in the ancient mind.

Did Frazer not know about the relationship between magic and the idea of Being?  He was extremely well read, as his work testifies, so this is hard to believe. And I do not think I believe it. He wrote a study of  Plato's  work early in his career.  He ought to have noticed the crucial passage in the Laws (XI, 933), where Plato clearly distinguishes between two levels of magic, and the penalties for each:

...it is not easy to know the nature of all these things; nor if a man do know can he readily persuade others to believe him. And when men are disturbed in their minds at the sight of waxen images fixed either at their doors, or in a place where three ways meet, or upon the sepulchres of parents, there is no use trying to persuade them that they should despise all such things because they have no certain knowledge about them... he who attempts to... enchant others knows not what he is doing... unless he happens to be a prophet or diviner.

Leaving out of The Golden Bough any consideration of the idea of magic as something whose nature depended on the nature of Being was a choice he made. It was not a choice forced on him by the evidence.

In writing The Golden Bough Frazer was transforming ancient thought about the world and its underlying reality into examples of intellectual error, and by the parallels he made with ‘savage’ thought, through his definition of magic, he sealed the case against the thought of the ancient world. Frazer did this by writing a thirteen volume implicit denial that magic had ever been an idea associated with the idea of Being. Though the elephant in the room (Being) was never directly discussed.

The agenda of the classicists from the outset of the (mainly German) professionalization of the discipline in the middle of the eighteenth century, was, in part, to recast the significance of classical Greece, and classical thought. They wanted to render Greek civilization as something distinctly european, and not something belonging to the cultural orbit of the east. This meant a purification of sorts, an alchemical transformation of the cultural realities in classical Greece.

This purification necessarily involved a degree of fabrication, a falsification of the actual nature of Classical Greece. Aspects of the history of this falsification were discussed in Martin Bernal’s Black Athena of 1987, which had the word ‘fabrication’ in the subtitle. A large number of features of classical civilization could not be outright denied, since they were very common in the body of evidence. The worship of divine statues could not be questioned or denied; sacrifice was a regular feature of importance in public and private life, performed at every important juncture. Magic likewise, was a feature of ancient life at all levels of society.

However classical civilization could be purified in part by changing the interpretation of how these things came to have significance to the ancient Greeks. The answer was plain: the Greeks were prone to a degree of irrationality in their public and private lives. So, the divine statue of a god as a place inhabited by the divine was a mistake, possibly the result of failing to distinguish between the image of a thing, and the thing itself.  The idea of the reality of the plethora of gods themselves was also a mistake, where the Greeks converted ideas of natural forces and powers into personifications of these things. Likewise all the other strange practices could be ascribed to an irrationality, a primitive stupidity, for which the Germans have a very ugly word.

Frazer was a late contributor to this process of purification. But in writing The Golden Bough, he applied Locke’s theory of the association of ideas to the relatively new subject of anthropology. So the strange beliefs were ascribed to a failure to distinguish between things which had the appearance of similarity, but were in fact different, or to a mistaken notion of contagion, in which things which were once in contact, are understood to be still in contact (the lock of hair, the parings of fingernails, etc.)

All ritual action throughout history could thus be explained as intellectual error, along with the very idea of the sacred. Even now, patterns of behaviour and belief are understood by anthropologists in terms of the product of intellectual associations, which may be the outcome of local cultural social dynamics, or even some kind of pathological response to the world. They aren’t looking for a rational explanation for ritual and sacred phenomena arising from an idea of Being.

By the process of purification it became possible to argue that the real achievement of the Greeks could be understood in terms of the quality of their philosophical thought; and the interpretation of their sculpture, along with their architecture, in terms of aesthetics and proportion. Their literature and language could be appreciated in terms of style. All of which could be approached with minimal taint from the irrationality of other aspects of Greek culture. What resulted from this process was the cultural gold which the scholars were after.

[revised text, April 10, 2016]

The Idea of the Plenum in Babylon

The Babylonian Creation was twofold. The first creation was the product of a plenum, and describes a hail of impossible animals tumbling out of it, with features and limbs which were interchangeable, resulting in some creatures which were utterly fantastic. The creation is from a plenum, because all the characteristics of living creatures are already present, though the way these characteristics are distributed is the stuff of nightmares. This first creation was without reason and rational order, and chaotic.

We are also told that the creatures shared each others features. This is another characteristic of a plenum. All things can pass into everything else. Nothing is fixed. The initial state of the world does not have fixity of any sort.

Were the gods already present? Some of them were, at least in a sense. The Babylonians had the idea that they could call gods into existence, by naming and describing them, and performing ritual which set them up in the Babylonian Heaven. 

There is a curious aspect to the Babylonian creation story, in that the god Marduk, who became the head of the pantheon of Gods, and was the defining power for the organisation of the second creation, was said to have been ‘held prisoner’ during the time of the first creation. This imprisonment can be understood in at least two ways. First of all, if Marduk had been active at the time of the first creation, why would he have allowed its irrational nature? Therefore it was decided that the explanation for his inaction was that he was not free to act. A second interpretation of his imprisonment may be that the initial irrational creation was inevitable, and had to happen before it was possible to establish good order. Something about the first creation resulted in his release and his presence.

In either case, the idea of the plenum is indicated, and in its most pure form.

The gods in the Babylonian creation story are indicative of abstract powers and properties, and some of them have reality before the advent of the second creation. Anshar, is King of Heaven for example (in fact he has no name as such, since An Shar is the description ‘King of Heaven’. It is important to know what he is).  The Babylonian Heaven is clearly the underlying plenum, where all things are present as potencies, so Anshar is the abstraction of the potency of the plenum. In the complex narrative of the liturgy for the New Year Festival, Anshar is father to Marduk, but Marduk is also presented as the equal of Anshar. In fact as Anshar himself. Marduk is also the equal of other important gods representing abstract ideas in the earliest times of the creation.

Description of these early gods natures, associations, and actions is a way for the Babylonians to discuss and understand the nature of the plenum from which the gods emerged. What Marduk eventually became as head of the Babylonian pantheon, described in the passage in the liturgy known as 'The Fifty Names of Marduk', is the totality of the powers of Anshar and the other gods, and therefore signifies that Marduk embodies the character of the underlying pleroma. 

After Marduk established control, and began to call the other gods into existence, these later gods now represent something like a human understanding of the world, and how it might be made.  The gods represent in abstract form the good things in human life and social organisation. Each god is represented as an aspect of Marduk and his exemplification of good kingship. Thus the gods names and descriptions indicate that he supplies places of refuge for man, the cultivation of crops, the provision of quays and landings for trade, the maintenance of good order in the world, and so on.

Sometimes the gods are brought into being as twins, with slightly different names. This can indicate a division between an abstract concept and a state. Marc Van De Mieroop in his book ‘Philosophy Before the Greeks’ gives an example of a pair of these names from a genealogy of divine names, one of which means ‘mud’ and the other means ‘muddy’.

  

Physics and the Origins of the Universe (III)

This is the third in the series of posts on Physics and the Origins of the Universe, and contains a discussion of the Kaluza-Klein hypothesis, which is a hypothesis which brings Einstein's field equations together with Maxwell's equations for Electrodynamics. Its proposition, that there are five dimensions of space and time, not four, and that it is hard to characterise the fifth spatial dimension in terms of size, may point to the presence of a plenum beneath physical reality. 

The Plenum and its Properties (II)

How many dimensions are there? It depends on what you are doing and how many you need to describe and understand physical reality. The number will change according to what phenomenon is being explored.

We are accustomed to thinking that, for most of recorded history, the human race has made do with three dimensions of space, plus time, in order to make sense of the world. If we treat time as a dimension, that gives us four dimensions. Three separate dimensions in which things can exist, and in which they can move. And whether these things are motionless or moving, they are also moving through time, at the same rate, irrespective of whether they are travelling left or right, backwards or forwards, or up or down.

In fact four dimensions is an inadequate number to explain how the world of physical reality actually works, and how its component parts fit together. For the most part, our understanding of what physically exists is described in scalar and vector terms within four dimensions, because that seems to work. Most of the time. Unless you are working in Fermilab or CERN, where their descriptions of physical reality concern the quantum level of physical reality, and things are more complicated there. But even at the anthropic scale, sometimes four dimensions can be found wanting. A description is not an explanation, and some things are therefore not explained.

I will borrow a little from the Wikipedia article on the Kaluza-Klein theory, which has been described as a unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism built around the idea of a fifth dimension beyond the standard four of space and time. The article describes how this five dimensional theory was developed, and breaks it down into three steps.

The original hypothesis came from Theodor Kaluza, who sent his results to Einstein in 1919,^[1] and published them in 1921. Kaluza's theory was a purely classical extension of general relativity to five dimensions. The five-dimensional metric has 15 components. Ten components are identified with the four-dimensional spacetime metric, four components with the electromagnetic vector potential, and one component with an unidentified scalar field.

This extension to five dimensions for Einstein’s equations yields

 …the four-dimensional Einstein field equations, the Maxwell equations for the electromagnetic field, and an equation for the scalar field.

Now that is pretty interesting, and it is surprising that physicists were not falling over themselves at the time to understand the mechanics of this mathematical description which tied electromagnetic vector potential with Space and Time.

It would be intriguing to know what was in Theodor Kaluza’s mind when he came up with this five dimensional model, which involved an unidentified scalar field.  His model involved a hypothesis which is described as the ‘cylinder condition’, which means that

 that no component of the five-dimensional metric depends on the fifth dimension. Without this assumption, the field equations of five-dimensional relativity are enormously more complex.

In other words, the five dimensional model of physical reality has two potential states – one of which results in impossibly difficult field equations. The cylinder condition is the other state for the model, which results in relatively simple and intelligible equations.

The article suggests that

 standard four-dimensional physics seems to manifest the cylinder condition.

Which may be the case, or it may be that there is a fundamental problem with the five dimensional model, and that it is a conception which doesn’t reflect physical reality. Kaluza

… set the scalar field equal to a constant, in which case standard general relativity and electrodynamics are recovered identically.

Meaning that Kaluza knew how the equations should turn out, and he knew how to characterise the unknown scalar field in order for the equations to turn out correctly.

The second step in the development of Kaluza’s theory was a quantum interpretation, supplied by Oskar Klein in 1926. This to enable the theory to

accord with the then-recent discoveries of Heisenberg and Schrödinger. Klein introduced the hypothesis that the fifth dimension was curled up and microscopic, [my emphasis] to explain the cylinder condition. Klein also calculated a scale for the fifth dimension based on the quantum of charge.

The third step happened in the 1940s, when the classical theory was completed, and the

full field equations including the scalar field were obtained by three independent research groups

The introduction to the article concludes by saying that even under the cylinder condition the full Kaluza equations are quite complex, and that

The complete Kaluza equations were evaluated using tensor algebra software in 2015

Here is a section from the main body of the Wikipedia page. I can understand the concepts involved, but I’m not remotely competent to evaluate the equations.  I’ve left the links to the Wikipedia references intact. [this version of the document presents the Wikipedia text as graphics, so the links are not functional. The original article is at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaluza-Klein_theory]

I’ll pick out some parts of the text -

So far, this decomposition is quite general and all terms are dimensionless. Kaluza then applies the machinery of standard general relativity to this metric. The field equations are obtained from five-dimensional Einstein equations, and the equations of motion are obtained from the five-dimensional geodesic hypothesis. The resulting field equations provide both the equations of general relativity and of electrodynamics; the equations of motion provide the four-dimensional geodesic equation and the Lorentz force law, and one finds that electric charge is identified with motion in the fifth dimension.

It has been an objection to the original Kaluza hypothesis to invoke the fifth dimension only to negate its dynamics. But Thiry argued that the interpretation of the Lorentz force law in terms of a 5-dimensional geodesic mitigates strongly for a fifth dimension irrespective of the cylinder condition. Most authors have therefore employed the cylinder condition in deriving the field equations.

…It shows that the electromagnetic field is a source for the scalar field. Note that the scalar field cannot be set to a constant without constraining the electromagnetic field. The earlier treatments by Kaluza and Klein did not have an adequate description of the scalar field, and did not realize the implied constraint on the electromagnetic field by assuming the scalar field to be constant.

In the Kaluza theory, the gravitational constant can be understood as an electromagnetic coupling constant in the metric. There is also a stress-energy tensor for the scalar field. The scalar field behaves like a variable gravitational constant, in terms of modulating the coupling of electromagnetic stress energy to spacetime curvature. The sign of phi in the metric is fixed by correspondence with 4D theory so that electromagnetic energy densities are positive. This turns out to imply that the 5th coordinate is spacelike in its signature in the metric.

***

So what are we actually looking at with this five dimensional model of physical reality? The theory unifies Einstein’s field equations, and Maxwell’s equations, and does appear to be describing physical reality, even if there are problematic aspects to it.

The fifth dimension is invoked, and then dismissed as a functional component in the model, which reduces it to a dimension on a par with the other four. But it is very small, and may be rolled up. It is practical to treat it as if it is on a par with the other dimensions, which is what physicists generally do. But ignoring the complexity the model may have beyond the cylinder condition – one of the two states of the model - doesn’t mean that it does not have this complexity, and that the fifth dimension does not have an important role in how the physical world functions.

It is possible that what has been identified in the course of the development of the theory is in fact the plenum, and not simply another dimension on a par with the other four.

Thomas Yaeger, 22 February 2016.

Physics and the Origins of the Universe (II)

Current popular understanding of how the universe came into physical existence depends on some improbable ideas, such as the existence of physics where physics cannot be present, and that there was a physical explosion of something into a place which did not yet exist. This doesn't seem to trouble the popular understanding. More importantly, it does not seem to trouble most physicists. 

I've written elsewhere about how we got into this difficulty. In short, the west ditched certain ideas about reality between the time of Newton and the Enlightenment, and consequently also ditched the intellectual tools necessary to understand how and why we have physics and a physical existence.

What follows is a description of creation as it might have been framed, if the west had not offloaded the concepts and tools which enable an understanding of the origins of the universe not requiring us to believe several impossible things before breakfast.  

Essentially this argument proposes that physical existence is the consequence of an underlying plenum, whose nature transcends our understanding of what is real. The nature of this plenum is what gives rise to physics and the physical world, through the necessity of retaining its own nature. As a result, the physical world has a logical origin, rather than an origin requiring a strange pre-existence of physical laws.  

The second part of this discussion (Physics and the Origins of the Universe III) concerns the Kaluza-Klein hypothesis, whose implications suggest that the idea of a plenum, in the form of a fifth dimension, is critically important in connecting Einstein's field equations, and Maxwell's equations for electrodynamics. 

The Plenum and its Properties (I)

The Plenum is, as it is, undefined in any way. We can say that it is what it is, and that its properties are those which can be said to characterise the plenum: it has no shape or form, or size. It does not move (there is as yet no space), and it has no age (there is as yet no time, which is a vector of change).

What are the properties of the plenum? It is one undivided thing, which has no physical existence, no location, and is something which remains unaltered and unalterable. It is literally eternal. It is utterly transcendent of the categories of our understanding, and is not subject to the laws of physics. Though it is one undivided thing, it is beyond characterisation as one undivided thing. It is just that which is, before dimensions and time, and categories of understanding.

It is neither one thing nor another.  It can be understood as a fullness, since it is not an absence. But in itself, it is not a presence either. It has potential. This does not mean that its nature will change, but that there is potential within its nature for the appearance and perception of change, size, form and shape.

So we are building up a picture of the plenum, or the initial state of the cosmos. It is one not two, (there is no ‘two’). It is beyond definition. It is unmoving and is not subject to change. It contains the potential for all of these things, including time and space, since it is undefined. It can contain these things as entities which appear, in the context of other things which can perceive entities which appear. At the earliest stages, perception can mean as little as detection of, and response to, things which appear. Not consciousness of any sort that we would understand.

All physical reality that may ever have existence is, in a sense, already present within the plenum. That is, physical reality is already present in potential.

All possibility is present in the plenum. Nothing is fixed or determined, at least initially (we are looking back at the initial conditions, so ‘initially’ references our own point of view, not that of the plenum. It is not in development. It does not change).

So the plenum is, conceived from the outside, is a formless, churning and foaming potency.

What other things can we say of the Plenum? It is infinite, in that it not finite, since it is undefined. It is also infinitesimal, for the same reason.

The parameters in which the apparent realities of the physical world can have their existence include binary opposites.  We can oppose the ideas of the infinite and the infinitesimal, but we can also oppose the ideas of the infinite and the finite. These are different oppositions involving the same concept. We can do the same with other oppositions, such as the unlimited and the limited, and the limitless and the limited. These may appear to be the same, but the unlimited is something which has not been subject to limit. The limitless is simply that which is without limit.  Likewise with the ideas of great and small. But the great can be contrasted with the not-great, which is not limited to the idea of small.

These may appear to be footling distinctions between abstractions, but the abstractions are the earliest things which can be present in the plenum, before the plenum can give rise to the appearance of a physical reality (abstractions are by definition beyond particular physical instances). So the churn in the plenum is in a sense a logical one, rather than anything resembling a physical reality. It is a chaos of logical possibilities, and also of logical contradictions. The Plenum does not have a consciousness, at this level of the creation.

The plenum has been defined as one, and itself. What may the one be contrasted with? The many? Or the absence of the oneness of anything? The idea of the many can be contained within the plenum as an abstract idea, without compromising the oneness of the plenum. Likewise, the absence of oneness. Each of these opposing abstractions within the plenum represents a potential subdivision of its nature, by which a physical creation increasingly becomes a possibility. All of this is present in the plenum from the beginning. This chaos of conflicting abstractions is eternal.  For a physical and ordered world to exist the conflicting abstractions need to marshalled.

The formless abstractions are ideas, which are subject to the power of other ideas. This stage can be understood as a second creation, in which logical decisions are made. At this point we could speak of the presence of a consciousness, though all that is meant is that an ordering process begins to take place, replacing a senseless churn of abstractions and oppositions.

The oppositions represent the sameness of the plenum with its difference. In the case of the infinite and the finite, the infinite is the sameness, and the finite is the difference. In both cases, the same and the different are the same plenum, understood differently, and looked at with different categories of understanding.  In a sense the plenum begins to understand itself after the second creation. The idea of finitude is crucial to the creation of physical reality, and is created as a qualifier of the idea of infinity.

Another property of the plenum is the completeness of what it is. But completeness can imply boundedness, rather than the boundless. Is the plenum bounded and therefore limited and finite because it is complete? Again, it is a matter of the categories of understanding which are brought to bear.

With finitude, and the idea of the many, physical reality becomes possible. The abstractions can be understood in terms of number, while still being abstract.  With the presence of number, all kinds of processes and constructs become possible.  But we are still (from our point of view) before space and time in any sense we would understand. 

The unmoving abstract concept of the plenum gives rise to the idea of a possible opposite, which is a cosmos of movement. So space and time become abstractions by which numbers and their interactions may be represented. Once you have space and time, the representation of numbers can move beyond points to geometrical shapes, and eventually three dimensional form.

Space and time are generated by the same process of opposing the same and the different. Ultimately they are both representations of understandings of the plenum.

So what populates the cosmos? The earliest occupant of the newly generated physical cosmos will be hydrogen, since it is the simplest element, made up of two different electrical charges. These charges will have been created as a consequence of the same principle of opposing the same and the different. A myriad of representations of one or more of the original polarities contained (as a possibility) in the plenum. 

It is possible to see opposing electrical charges as a representation of the same and the different in the context of finitude.  Whereas the raw state of the plenum is foaming and churning (from our point of view), hydrogen represents a stable opposition of electrical charges in a dynamical relation. The foaming and churning has, in this representation, been reduced to a resonance. Order has emerged from chaos.

****

There was a well-known toy for drawing complex patterns when I was a child (Spirograph). It had its limitations as a toy, but it taught me that a simple ratio could imply something very complex, depending on how that ratio was expressed. Similarly so with the development of patterns in animal fur, which Alan Turing investigated at the end of his life – the underlying mathematics were often simple, but the process could produce startlingly complex patterns.  The complexity we see in physical reality can have its roots in something very simple, such as the generation of numbers (real or imaginary).

I learned to use log tables and a slide rule while at school. That taught me that a process such as multiplication could be represented as addition, depending on the adopted point of view.  In the case of logarithms, through the use of reciprocal numbers.  Again, the same, represented in both form and process, by the different.  And patterns emerge from the encounters of the same with the different. So interaction between the plenum itself with its difference, and the representations of its relationship with its difference, can be understood in terms of ratio. The old sense of what is rational descends from this idea – what accords, what is consonant, etc. 

Two logical modalities underpin the descent of aspects of the plenum into physical reality. One can be understood in terms of entities possessing identity with itself, of not being something else while it is itself, and not partaking of itself and something else while it is itself. The other logical modality is startlingly different, but it is a completely rational modality. Since the encounter of the same with the different is happening within the underlying plenum, and is in a sense powered by the properties of the plenum, it is the case that all things can pass into one another. That is, what is the same as itself, can pass into what is different from itself.

It is not possible however for the same to always pass directly into something which is different from it. It must pass from itself to what is different through a rational process. It is possible for the same to do this, since it necessarily shares aspects of its nature with the plenum within which it has its reality. This is how this logical modality is rational, and not chaotic.

When I learned music, I found that the possible scales were patterns within the octave which reflected mathematical ratios based on the octave itself. That is, each of the notes possessed a relationship with the root note of the octave which expressed a ratio which existed outside the octave. Music works because we are hearing the intervals, and the progressions of the intervals, all of which are in a sense beyond the actual notes played. So we are appreciating the rationality of the relationship of one to the other.  The expression of those relationships can be understood as a rational and logical interplay between what is the same, and what is its difference; multiplied, and in different sequences, both horizontally and vertically.

One particular ratio, is defined by ‘the smaller is to the larger, as the larger is to the whole’. This is of course the golden ratio, where each of the parts bears a relationship to the whole, and, is not dependent at all on any scalar values. So it has a reality which exists apart from any particular instance in which this ratio may be expressed. It refers to itself, without necessary reference to anything which has physical reality. It is an abstraction which refers only to sameness, and to difference. It is therefore a conception of great importance, and we should expect to find it often represented in the continuum of reality. And we do.  It is the plenum, the thing which is itself, reminding us of how the world of physical reality came into existence.

***

The two logical modalities both draw their natures from the properties and characteristics of the plenum. They appear to be contradictory, but then the nature of the plenum contains a number of apparent contradictions. Nevertheless, it must be itself, whatever itself is. But it must also share its identity with every aspect of itself, since, in reality, there is nothing other than the plenum. Accordingly, the world of appearances is just that – the world of abstractions and concrete instances, of ideas, number and physical form, is just an array of different perspectives on the plenum. The plenum is the one true thing, and all that there is.

***

The plenum is complete, and whole. Every other thing which has reality has it because it participates in the plenum through its completeness. Anything which is whole participates in wholeness, and wholeness is an abstraction which provides connection with the ultimate abstraction of wholeness, which is the plenum. All parts of things also participate in the plenum through the wholeness they share as the parts of things which are whole. If they are whole or completed parts, they again participate in the wholeness of the plenum. So in sense, the part and the whole are not entirely separable concepts. They can be understood as the same and the different. They may also pass into and out of one another.

Because nothing can have reality or existence, or come to be and pass away, change, or move, without the underlying ground of reality, it can be argued that the plenum must be real for the illusion of these finite things to function.

***

This is an account of a creation from abstractions, which have no firm location in time or space, even where there is time and space present. So it is possible to conceive of them having reality before time and space came to be.  The need to explain the presence of the physical world in terms of a physical creation is removed, which is plainly a species of category mistake: the presence of the physical world does not need to be explained in terms of a physical creation, which approach has saddled our understanding with the need to find a prime mover.

There is also no need for the idea of a creation ex nihilo. The presence of a plenum (which is neither presence nor absence) allows for a rational creation from the interplay of abstractions. The plenum contains all things which may be thought, and which may come into existence. Hence we can understand reality by studying its properties, as well as come to understand why the physical world is the way it is. This approach is not the opposite of a scientific understanding of reality, it is the root of a scientific understanding of reality, and of its subset, the physical world.

Thomas Yaeger, 21-2 February 2016.