A relatively new reader emailed wanting to know what my position on metaphysical questions was. He specifically mentioned Universals and the problem of the One and the Many.
The problem of universals has been around since recorded history. It's not really a problem and therefore I pretty much ignore it for reasons that will become apparent. Stated loosely, although you can get a better perspective of it at http://www.friesian.com/universl.htm, objects of experience are physical while the properties of objects, their color, hardness and so forth, are abstracts, objects of thought. Thus while an apple and a red house are real, their redness is not. Color is a universal, but it doesn't exist independent of the object, so how does it exist in the world?
Plato said universals exist in a separate reality as special objects, distinct in kind from the real objects. That separate reality is in the world of forms to which we have had access and we are only now remembering.
Aristotle agreed that universals had a separate reality, but he disagreed where that separate reality was. He said the universals existed within the objects.
William of Ockham, the author of Ockham's razor used off and on in these columns, said universals were just names, they were properties imbued in real objects by God, doing away with the invisible world conjured up by Plato and replacing it with the religious world.
All this goes on for centuries until we get to the modern day where universals represent all real possibilities and the sum of all possibilities before a particular event actualizes one of them, the square of the wave function in quantum mechanics, in short to the same sort of nonsense set forth by Plato. And this from an empirical science that claims gravity is a property like color or hardness. Seems to me gravity represents a certainty, not a possibility, and is therefore a reality. Go figure.
In any event, universals cannot be understood without understanding how the mind operates and no one from Plato to the present day even bothered to investigate how the mind operated, with empirical science simply avoiding the question by ignoring it, there is no mind. The mind operates by comparing recall with reality (see columns 34 and 35-05). When we see something, we form a picture of it in our mind. The sum total of all the elements of the picture produce a charge which is encoded into a memory unit that is stored in our neuronic storage bins. When we later see a similar object, we form the picture that has a similar charge and the measurable electrical flows in our physical brains recall the stored picture. If the recalled picture compares with the picture we have from reality, we understand what we are seeing.
However, we have the ability to recall the stored pictures when reality isn't present, and as we go about this process, we start to categorize things to give them order. The entire structure of empirical science, for crying out loud, is devoted to categorizing everything in the world. As we start to categorize, we do so by properties. When we see things that are red, we create the word red and call them red. It's as simple as that, no problem at all. As we go about naming the things we can recall, we can give them names so long as they exist in reality, which they certainly do as properties of the real things that we see and categorize. The problem with empirical science is, there are things in reality, actual things, that can't be categorized, that a mental picture can't be formed of. However, it treats these things, gravity, the cause of motion of the planets, light, electricity, magnetism and the structure of matter, just like it treats red and hard, words that merely describe a physical condition. Empirical science, a project to categorize, with nothing to categorize, just makes up words for these things, words it can use to compare with reality when it sees reality, and lets it go at that, destroying the world and our lives by its ignorance in the process.
Moving on to the One and the Many, this is just a philosophical way to ask the question, how does God fit in with the reality in which we exist and of which we are a part. As readers of previous columns well know, I consider religion to be irrelevant to the scientific pursuit of a consistent explanation for physical reality upon which to base our technology. Any question the answer to which can contribute to our technology is not religious. What is gravity is the major question in this category, a question empirical science does not even consider important. Any question the answer won't contribute to our technology is religious. It can be answered anyway we want to and it won't affect anything. The big bang bull, a subject empirical science is obsessed with, falls into this category.
However, as I told the writer of the email, this is not a question of science and therefore a question I concern myself with. I have addressed the issue of beginnings and the issue of ultimate purpose, the first in Atoms, Stars and Minds and the latter in Let's Talk Flying Saucers. We need a god or superior force simply because of the way our minds operate. When recall matches reality, we understand. If recall doesn't match reality, we are uncomfortable.
There are a number of things in reality for which we can have no experience, which produce no recall. One of those things is where the reality came from, another is why people behave the way they do. We are driven to find answers to avoid being uncomfortable and since there are no answers in reality, we produce religious systems that provide us with the answers to the things we can't know. The religious systems become common in a society because while we are forced to live together to maximize the production of the food we need to survive, we can't do so if we are always arguing about the answers to these questions.
I, and I revert to "I" because this is not really The Real Skeptic's mission, I was force fed the religious themes of my society. They didn't take because I have, from childhood, only been interested in the nature of reality, how things work, how the universe works. That doesn't mean I'm not a part of society and uncomfortable with its belief system. I'm very grateful to belong to a society that permits different beliefs. However, enough of the belief system imbued itself in me to cause me some problems when I started to get answers to the questions I was asking, answers that actually conformed to what we know about reality and were consistent. The breakthrough came when it dawned on me that instead of explaining things using multiple particles, with multiple properties, converting to a single particle with opposing properties of attraction and motion would explain just about everything. I describe that experience in Transparent Realities, the ideography of how I got to where I got that will be published in several years as the 10th and final volume of The Copernican Series.
As I started applying the particle to actual reality and the particle worked, however, I began to get the feeling I was treading in God's domain. I had the feeling that perhaps I was finding out things we shouldn't find out. That feeling lasted almost a decade until I was driven, at the end of writing Atoms, Stars and Minds, to confront one of the basic questions that face us, how our minds work. In writing The Model Mind, I came to realize there was really no sacred territory to tread upon because, as explained above, God is a necessity once we can hold pictures of reality in our minds.
That still didn't mean I could avoid confronting the question, although it is not a question of God, but rather a question of where the universe came from. Why we act the way we do is covered in Human Nature, but my real problem was to deal with the source of the particle I had hypothesized. I confronted the question in ASM by pointing out something that is very difficult for people to understand. When we are young, we sit in bed and wonder where the end of the universe is and when we say, this is the end, we then say, what's outside the end. This is a product of the mind's operation. We see reality and we need recall to understand reality. There is simply no way we can produce recall that can answer the question, where is the end of the universe. However, if we understand how our minds work, we can address the question. We know there is matter and there is the nonexistence of matter. As space is the nonexistence of matter, space is, in effect, nothing. Nothing is nothing pure and simple. There is no question about how far nothing stretches because the question doesn't apply to nothing. Nothing doesn't stretch anywhere. It simply doesn't exist. Because our minds operate to match recall with reality, and there is no way to put nothing in our recall, we have no recall of nothing and we are totally bamboozled when we ask a question that isn't the appropriate question.
However, we can go on to assume that, at one time, there was just that, nothing. Then comes the leap of faith. Nothing simply can't exist, so something created the original particle. In ASM I use the ruse that nature deplores a vacuum, the ruse of course being if there is nothing, there is no nature. But it was the only way I could avoid the question of God. In this scenario, admittedly contrived, but one that really doesn't make any difference in the development of our technology, the particle comes into existence to define nonexistence.
As a result, it need only be big enough to define nonexistence. However, a single particle defining nonexistence would not actually define nonexistence because there would still be no time. It takes two particles in motion with respect to one another to define time, so another particle would come have to come into existence to define nothing. By this time, I'm not explaining anything about the origins of the universe, I am simply trying to explain the properties of the particles. Because time doesn't exist except with respect to the movement of the matter in the universe, there was forever for particles with the right amount of opposing forces to come into existence to successfully create the universe we see around us (see column 20-05 dealing with the cycle of the universe).
After going through all of the actual explanations for physical reality, however, we are still confronted with the question of why that particle would develop into us. The only answer I have is there is little reason to define nothing unless it creates something that perceives it, which is us. In The Cooling Continuum, I conclude that the universe was designed to create life. Once matter combusts, it emits electromagnetic emissions that cause the matter to move with respect to other matter. Thus, the matter is in continual disbalance, and the attempt to balance the disbalance is what leads to life.
Life is not the exception, it is the purpose of the universe, and therefore producing the technology that can extend that life past the survival of the disbalanced matter, in our case, the Earth, that produced it, is the goal of the mind evolved to allow animate matter to perceive reality. And here is where I get into the speculative purpose that Let's Talk Flying Saucers leads to (and which I discuss in column21-05). If the purpose of the universe is life, there must be a purpose to life. Now I leap into stuff that isn't in any of the books. I can only conclude that the purpose of life is to comprehend the universe, which means that the operation of our minds adds particles, matter to the universe. With perception, understanding, the use of our minds for their intended purpose, producing more matter, that means the purpose of life is to increase the matter in the universe, or to put it more succinctly, to fill the nothingness with something, a process that would, of course, be endless in nothing.
This like the bookend ruse of a vacuum creating the particle, is just the other bookend to the explanations of physical reality that sit on the shelf, but they tie everything up in a neat little bundle for me. In the end, the answers don't make any difference in the creation of our technology and can be answered anyway we want.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com