THE WHAT, HOW, AND THUSNESS OF REALITY
Raphael Neelamkavil, Ph. D., Dr. phil.
1. A CAVEAT WITH EXAMPLES OF ABNORMALITIES IN SCIENTISTS AND THINKERS
Merely because I am trained and publish in philosophy and philosophy of physics, I do not denigrate other disciplines or pronounce them as useless. Dispassionately to the conclusions but with passion for research, I have studied also the various Western and Indian philosophies for long.
Does that mean that I accept everything in Indian philosophy and try to tilt all thought towards the Indian? Or, should I try to interpret Indian philosophies in terms of Western categories of thinking or in terms of the philosophy of the sciences? No. But I have the right to develop my own categories and interpret these philosophies and philosophies of science accordingly.
In a similar vein, I believe that the reader will not now pronounce me to be talking nonsense in the following text. If you can read it through, good. Please find out whether there is some reason in it. If you do not feel good, leave it without accusing me of being religiously nonsensical! There exists the talk of the Divine in most of the ancient and modern Indian schools. This possibility is not yet closed forever in Western philosophy and cosmology too.
The sad thing is that there are many Eastern philosophers who become charlatan physicists and attribute quantum physical notions to Vedānta and Buddhism. I know many Westerners who adore much that is Eastern as great supra-rationally rational philosophy. I have always been conscious of studying any philosophy, religion, or science without misjudgments in advance. Hence, I have the right to say the following.
There are many scientists and philosophers who poohpooh Christian philosophical concepts as if they belonged to thought patterns that involve a humanly thinking superhuman God. Read through the works of Wittgenstein, and you will find how silly it is to believe in the notions that he learned as a child in the simplistic religious presentations at the school and perhaps at home and from friends. For example, the ridiculously childish notions and the ex cathedra statements based on such religious notions in his Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (lecture notes by his students), and, although sparsely, in many other works like Culture and Value, Philosophical Investigations, The Tractatus, etc.
Show me any scientist or philosopher who ridicules philosophy or religion, and I shall show you in his or her writings childish misinterpretations of philosophy and religion.
The worst of them in recent times has been Stephen Hawking. He was religiously derisive of philosophy. He must be questioned on the validity of the philosophy of science and we will obtain other ex cathedra pronouncements as if his reason about philosophy is all that we are permitted to possess.
He even concluded in 1999 that all that physics has to achieve has already been reached theoretically, and hence only some experimental and minor theoretical elaborations remained! If persons of such ideas pronounce statements on philosophy, would these statements be acceptable? Would they not taste some psycho-socio-cultural illnesses in their education and intellectual work?
I say all these not to defend religions with all their beliefs or any one of their beliefs and practices. Instead, I want to explore here a possible religious aspect of all human thought, BEYOND ALL RELIGIONS AND THEIR BELIEFS. Perhaps all religions must be redefined and their belief systems reworked. But I seek whether there can be a dimension of religiosity that is acceptable to all science, philosophy, and religions. To begin with, I do a philosophical reflection in the following. I already know that religion has already been an opium for a majority of humans until recently, and in some nations it continues to be a political opium. Our discussion now is not about that.
2. THE RATIONAL FUNDAMENTALS
We know that the whole Reality is not inside our heads. We can, nevertheless, admit that Reality is whatever it is – this is its Stuff. This is its What and How put together, because we have no way of dealing with its What or How separately – be it in philosophy or science. We are familiar with scientific explanations, say, of electrons, in terms of how they work, how they give rise to fields and photons, etc. These and similar explanations (the how) remain the explanations as to what electrons are (the what).
This is the case also in the various philosophies East and West. We not only cannot have a discourse isolating the What from the How of Reality, but cannot ever isolate these two from each other, although the questions and the notions are distinct.
The existence of Reality as whatever it is, is a different matter. Let us call it its Thusness or To Be or That. But we can only generalize meagerly at the level of To Be. At this level we cannot speak of Reality or the possible existence or not of the Divine. If at all reason should function on the existence or not of the Divine, the only way is to have recourse to the discourse of the What and How of Reality in an intermingled manner.
The Thusnessand the Stuff of all that exist resist being fathomed, however well separately or together the Divine and the universe are conceived as part of Reality-in-total. Why? Just because there is an infinite difference between the Thusnessand the Stuff of Reality-in-total and the thusness and the stuff of mine as a being that fathoms them and formulates the results in statements. The infinity involved here can in fact be only an infinity of infinity of … ad infinitum, since all other forms of infinities do not vouchsafe for the variety of consideration of infinities involved in the said difference.
This fact always brings in contradictions of various kinds in religious and philosophical experiences, utterances, and statements, and even in cosmology the situation is not different. The attempt to fathom their meaning with respect to religion constantly brings contradictions. This is especially so if religion is the expression of the relationship of humans to the Divine, in terms of humans’ experience of Divine’s relationship to humans, because religion deals not merely with love of the Divine and of humans, but also with love of Reality-in-total.
If the Divine is in existence, how to know it, let alone deal with the relationship? How to speak of a relationship with a Divine that we do not even know the existence of? To those who do not try to fathom anything, there are no contradictions at all. To those who know the fact of the infinite difference and tend to be at home with the Thusness and the Stuff of Reality-in-total in rational thought, the spiritual state of experience of contradictions remains intellectually alien or at times merely acceptable.
Now, do these contradictions remain in some way only in this infinite difference, or do they express themselves at all in this difference, or are they clear in the Stuff of Reality-in-total in terms of its What and How? When the logic we use to understand this is to be two-valued at best, this infinite difference can be experienced only at the worst form and that too in contradictions. This in my opinion is the origin of certain religious philosophies that rest on contradictions and nullity.
But as such there need not be contradictions in the very Thusness and the Stuff of Reality-in-total. Here is the origin of the attempted rational explanations in philosophy and science for the Divine.
We do not have a way of defining the infinite difference between the Thusness and the Stuff of Reality-in-total, between these and the thusness and the stuff of our person in terms of non-contradictions. Nor do we have a way of defining our statements of the Thusness and the Stuff of Reality-in-total and of the thusnessand the stuff of human persons as involving contradictions.
By definition, Reality-in-total is just what it is. It is in the very kind of process that it is in, and in the very manner it is. Its Thatness is just the fact that it is, namely its To Be. Statements of its Thusness and its Stuff, therefore, need not at all be expressed in an exact 1-1 form of representation of the two sorts of realities. Note that here ‘realities’ are either the parts within the Stuff of Reality, or one of the most universal or less universal implications of the Thusness or Thatnessor To Be of Reality.
The Thatness of Reality is just the fact that Reality just is what it is. It is merely its Thusness. But the Stuff is both the What and the How of Reality, because, as the sciences show, what something is, is in the final analysis a description of how it functions. Also the vice versa is true. The What and the How of Reality are not equivalents, but are the ways of approach for each other. This shows that the contradictions of ordinary or higher order logic are all at the level of the What and the How of Reality in parts and in the whole.
So, it is both philosophically and scientifically safe to state that the so-called contradictions originate basically from the level of the most infinite differences between the highest transcendental To Be and the highest transcendent Reality-in-total, if statements regarding these can preoccupy themselves with the two aspects of Reality-in-total, namely, the processual parts and the ontological universals that belong to them in general in groups.
When it is attempted to rationally think in terms of the To Be of Reality, it is a very general sort of science that the positive or formal sciences are not used to be involved in. This general science is what I would call the foundation of philosophy. Discourse merely of the To Be of Reality does not exist as more than a few statements. The Thusness of anything is just its Thatness, which is not expressible in a long discourse.
But the possible mode of philosophical discourse can be in terms of the implications of To Be for Reality and the various part-processes and their pertinent ontological universals. This is what I have put forth in some of my papers and discussions, and in some of my books. I call it metaphysics, general ontology, and physical ontology in accordance with the sort of emphasis required.
I have suggested that the exhaustive and unique implications of To Be for all existents are Extension and Change, called Extension-Change-wise existing as Universal Causality, and interpreted many philosophical and (much more so) scientific problems in terms of these.
Although fundamentally the implications of To Be should be such, we still tend to find contradictions and inconsistencies in all discourse, because we take as true all that is known to us in some way as an exact 1-1 representation of the states of affairs, which are just groups of processual entities according to certain ontological universals.
Then all that do not belong to the conclusions of the discourse become for us not true, partially true, and hence at least partially false. In such a logic, there is the anomaly of misplaced concreteness of the fluent values of falsity’s meaning in respect of what is considered as true in ordinary two-valued logic.
So, the direct conclusion from this is that two-valued logic as the method of thought is inadequate for statements of any detail of experiences, utterances, and statements in science, philosophy, and religion – and for that matter exactly in the metaphysics behind all these.
But the question of the existence of the Divine is replete with contradictions and inconsistencies because it is not self-evident at the To Be level of Reality. Instead, I believe that this question must be treated at the level of the What and How of Reality. Naturally, this involves the physical study of the cosmos.
We tend to use two-valued logic in all our thought and discourse. Without it no discourse is possible. But these must be more necessary at the level of the use of the basic principles of two-valued logic, namely, Identity, Non-difference, and Excluded Middle. Hence, we are unable to follow the logic of Reality as such in our reasoning. The logic of Reality is Universal Causality, not Identity, Non-difference, and Excluded Middle. But even here we tend to use these three and related principles of logic at least at the level of the formation of conclusions. This is one source of contradictions and confusions in discourse.
This does not mean that two-valued logic has no real function and should be dispensed. It is relevant at least as far as we can use them on the most fundamental facts of Reality-in-total, e.g., that it exists and is not inexistent, that a certain fundamental or less fundamental conclusion is of relevance or not, etc. To that extent, as regards all other matters in philosophy and religion, we may have to adopt a systemic logic that may tend to relativize the absolute meaning of ‘Identity’, ‘Contradiction’, ‘Excluded Middle’, etc., in which case the statements could look better than just two-valued.
Nevertheless, we have no hope that the human situation of having to use two-valued logic will greatly improve – for we are like an iota of sand, ratiocinating of the possibilities of the ocean and of immersion in it, but refusing to immerse ourselves in it to fathom the ocean until we reach the ocean bed by ourselves and get pushed into the ocean. This might give our consciousnesses the food and method to approach in a better manner Reality in its What and How. Such fathoming too is not of much worth, because the whole What and How of Reality cannot be in my mind. I can at the most enter and speak about it a little: in particular, about a few parts and layers of it and in general about all of them – nevertheless, to a highly limited extent.
Now arise the questions: (1) Does the Divine exist as a part of Reality-in-total? (2) If there is, how to rationalize on it? (3) If there is not, how to understand the cosmos as all that there is to Reality-in-total? Question number (2) may be discussed first, and then number (3). But how and where to begin? Any suggestions on a rational point of departure? Can we find a philosophical and cosmological manner of reasoning which remains absolutely neutral as to a logically two-valued Yes or No to these questions all through and develops a viable method that can finally evaluate the truth probabilities in favour or not of the existence of the Divine?
3. THE COSMOLOGY
Continues.
Bibliography
(1) Gravitational Coalescence Paradox and Cosmogenetic Causality in Quantum Astrophysical Cosmology, 647 pp., Berlin, 2018.
(2) Physics without Metaphysics? Categories of Second Generation Scientific Ontology, 386 pp., Frankfurt, 2015.
(3) Causal Ubiquity in Quantum Physics: A Superluminal and Local-Causal Physical Ontology, 361 pp., Frankfurt, 2014.
(4) Essential Cosmology and Philosophy for All: Gravitational Coalescence Cosmology, 92 pp., KDP Amazon, 2022, 2nd Edition.
(5) Essenzielle Kosmologie und Philosophie für alle: Gravitational-Koaleszenz-Kosmologie, 104 pp., KDP Amazon, 2022, 1st Edition.
For the time being, here further reference is given to:
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Gravitational_Coalescence_Paradox_GCP_Introduction_to_Gravitational_Coalescence_Cosmology
https://www.researchgate.net/post/The_Irrefutable_Argument_for_Universal_Causality_Any_Opposing_Position
https://www.researchgate.net/post/If_the_cosmos_is_1_finite-content_or_2_infinite-content_Is_there_finite_or_infinite_creation
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Mathematics_and_Causality_A_Systemic_Reconciliation