`` As if - the explanation of Emergence

Tools with which to Live Life and Answer the Questions


There is no such thing as a free lunch - Robert A. Heinlein, Milton Friedman, and others


Index


  1. My Philosophy

  2. Defining Nothingness

  3. Defining Truth

  4. Closer to Truth

  5. Mythology - telling a story

  6. Philosophy - thinking it through

  7. Philosophers

  8. Religion - convincing others

  9. Politics

  10. Science - experimenting

  11. Experience - exploring

  12. Mysticism - imagining and art

  13. Other Resources

My Philosophy


For me the answers start to arrive with my own philosophy - my take on what 'it' is all about. This provides for me the basic framework on which to pin any concepts that I find others have discovered, or invented. We all have our own personal philosophy of life, some more rigidly held than others, but for each of us it is the first spanner we pull out in order to deal with anything: Here's mine, as simply as possible,


  1. Something exists, and I know this because I exist, in some form or another.

  2. Even though supported by an external environment of some sort, my thoughts appear to be my own, in a way in which my body maybe is not. My thoughts appear to be at the command of my self, although my thoughts appear, to me, to be my self - or the part that matters, anyway. My body, like my house, seems to be the property of my thinking self.

  3. My senses, especially vision [when my eyes are open], hearing, touch, but less so smell and taste, and always my seventh sense - my sense of self - these are all an immediate a part of me, although all are experienced as thoughts, and crucially I have no command of them - they can't just be turned off.

  4. My feelings, especially pain, and the urge to breathe, wee, or shag [more so than shit, eat, or drink, I think], feelings of cold, heat, sorrow, joy - these are all as immediate a part of me as are thoughts, but I have less command of them.

  5. But at times my command of my thought is lessened, memory is not immediate, and sometimes thinking cannot find the answer that comes at another time, and at all times my thoughts are subject to being automatically overridden by many of the aforementioned feelings and senses.

  6. Given the above, I could as easily paraphrase Rene Descartes and claim, I am therefore I think and feel and function. But above all these things I am conscious. The thing that is me is the thing that is aware of all these things that appear as thoughts.

  7. The Hard Problem, as per David Chalmers, is understanding what it means to be aware of a thought, to be conscious.

  8. Using thought as any explanation will not suffice, because it is largely thought that we wish to explain, and how can it be possible to explain a thing through solely that thing itself?

  9. How else could Descartes have proceeded? He needs to heve gone as far as he can away from the 'I' that thinks, and then, because this thought exercise can only be done in imagination, he needs to have imagined what must necessarily be.

  10. The farthest we can imagine from the something that we know exists, such as our self, is the non-something of nothingness. Therfore we must ask ourself, in imagination, not 'Why is there anything?' [as so many others have phrased it], but 'What if there were nothing?'

  11. In imagining Nothingness, we can join the dots to complete the journey back to our thinking self.

  12. That journey may lead to a drab and disappointing Ithaca of our self, bereft of circus animals, but along the way we will have discovered much about what there is in the wide world of our Existence.

  13. The first step is to discover how Emergence functions on Nothingness, the remaining steps then create themselves, more or less automatically. In the process they collectively gain coherence and credence from each point of experience that is validated and explained by the path that is being discovered.

  14. It may be that Descartes could have proceeded in a different direction. In imagination he can go anywhere that he can imagine, so having imagined what must necessarily be, he could use that knowledge to imagine, as Albert Einstein did [when imagining what travelling as light might be like], to discover previously unknown truths about many of the emergent properties of things that are created by life and consciousness - of wisdom, and truth, and beauty, and love, and music.*

* This is paraphrasing Frank Zappa in Joe's Garage, Acts II & III. Some, rather foolish, people denigrate the opinions of entertainers, but truth may be found anywhere, and one doesn't have to be an academic in order to make informed and valid statements. What's more, artists and comedians frequently put things more clearly and succinctly, than do other more expert voices, and I for one won't be apoligising for referencing them at every opportunity.


The overall answer, that I find, is that everything emerges into Existence on an 'as if' basis. However, causation is a necessary principle, the alternative being random uncaused events, which we don't see - it must be then, that emergence must be forced, I say by paradox prevention, and there really is no free lunch.


Defining Nothingness


It may seem that Nothingness is impossible to define, in terms of things that are, and because there clearly is something, but we can at least start by outlining what Nothingness includes as not being.


It is no god, nor gods.


No time, nor space, nor anything that requires time or space, such as fields.


No laws, nor rules, so no mathematics nor numbers, and no basis for physics.


Nothing that could conventionally be considered a cause of something.


Yet, this state of nothing is paradoxical. Why? Because it is necessarily complete, and so is a whole state. It has the virtual property of wholeness, despite not existing as an actual thing, so it also exists as an actual thing. Therefore, as with all paradoxical situations, there is no paradox, that would only be so if there were true nothingness.


Our experience of paradox is that it causes emergence, or to be more precise, paradox is emergence. The cause and effect are one. They only take on the appearance of separateness when observed from a distance, such as the distance of imagination. NB. This does not mean that the resolution of paradox by emergence causes illusion. Virtualism holds that everything that exists, both the real and the ideal, are caused as actualities by emergence. Illusion is a situation where one reality or truth, has been mistaken for another reality or truth. Illusion is only possible because of the manner in which brains function, i.e. by guessing to produce thoughts, and then confirming the veracity of those thoughts.


Defining Truth


Truth can be defined as coincidence, or as coherence, or as usefulness [among many other things that may be claimed, whether validly, or not]. Which is the best?


The answer is not any single one of these, they all have their place in our experience of truth.


No doubt there are truths of coincidence out there, the kind of truth that is true because of the similarity between two things - when thay are the same then they tell on another's truth. But such truths can frequently be hard to perceive.


Coherent stories tell a truth that may apply to the coincident truth, but only because the truth is contained within the coherence of the parts, and it is then considered plausible that such a truth applies to the actual, but occult coincident truth. This kind of coherent truth is the truth of theory, whether philosophical or scientific.


For coherent truth to be of any value it has to be useful in some way, so in general we are happy to take a moderately coherent truth [theory], that is testable and passes some tests, as a useful truth, even though we don't know the whole truth.


The first truth is too pure to be applicable in much more than pure mathematics, although it is a necessary part of the other kinds of truth.


The last truth is unreliable if we want to extrapolate, and thereby answer difficult questions. It is the truth of Subjectivism and Relativism, and those just can't help us with global questions.


The middle way, the truth of coherence is the most adaptable, having a foot in both other camps, and a sufficiently wide and coherent theory will span [most of] the gulf between types one and three, and in the process allow reliable extrapolation. That is how we got the Big Bang, and other extrapolatory truths.


My contention is that emergence, following the mechanisms of Virtualism, allows us to bridge the chasm between Science and Rene Descartes, thereby answering all the mysteries of Existence. The claim is 'some emergence is true' can be extrapolated to 'all emergence is true', once we understand the rules of emergence. Then we can be reasonably sure of the coherent truth of the emergence of everything, just as we can be reasonably sure of the truth of science.


(External Website) More discussion of the nature of Truth


Closer to Truth


'Consciousness is a singular that has no plural' - Deepak Chopra says Erwin Schrödinger said this. Either way, I consider it mistaken.


Chopra is also very wrong about the afterlife being an upgrade on physical life. It seems to be the way everyone sees it, except Homer. I think Homer was right.


Deepak Chopra seems to be a strange case. Mostly a forceful presentation of standard oriental ideas, which in a sense are not that wrong, but lack justification.


He was talking to Robert Lawrence Kuhn, who is also a bit odd, in as much as he sells interviews, but also claims to be on a search for the Truth. What would I say to him?


Hi Robert,


I have watched many of your interviews, and it seems to me that you are not really getting the satisfactory answers that you are seeking.


So many of your interviewees talk of consciousness, emergence, or the soul, without ever showing any inkling of what these terms properly mean and imply, making their points little more than word salad.


You might ask what gives me the temerity to denigrate such an illustrious company? Well, in reply I would claim that I can provide good convincing answers to all of your questions:


  1. Why there is anything [despite some philosophers' objections that this is not a proper question].

  2. How we know there is something. What consciousness is, and how it functions.

  3. The full implications of emergence, the emergence of space, then gravity, and time.

  4. The nature of the self as a narrative of consciousness, emerging from emergent mind, with personal time, and eternal memory forming a growing soul. NB. There are specific and important differences between each of these phenomena.

  5. Why such concepts as chi [ki], chakras, gods, and Astrology should all be taken seriously.

  6. How reincarnation is both necessary and a privilege.

  7. What love is, and why it produces extra-special phenomena.

  8. Why there is good and evil, but probably not personalities we would call God and the Devil, except as the spirits of good and evil.

  9. What the purposes of life are, broadly.

You may have other questions, but I am pretty sure that, once the framework of full emergence is understood, then any reasonable question can be answered through simple coherence with that explanation.


What demands do my answers make on your credence? What would you have to accept? - along with the doxastic risk to your extant world view.


I think that there are only two things:


  1. That all of Existence is emergent. That is; Emergence is a phenomenon, one that occurs weakly in an example such as Roger Sperry's Wheel, but strongly in the cases of number, space, time, etc. I would conclude that emergence is simply necessary response to paradox [incompatibility].

  2. That Leibniz' Law is correct, despite Max Black's refutation [which I consider invalid due to both spatial position making Black's spheres discernible, and the unreality of his proposed universe]. The fact is that in any universe, no such situation could arise, because the balls Black refers to would not, and could not, emerge as separate entities. It is one thing to describe a situation with words, but quite another thing to show that the words mean any more than salad.

I am of the opinion that a good case can be made for both of these points, although I suspect that agreeing with them would make anyone appear to be both a dualist and a Cantor Crank. That much can't be helped, but it does shed light on which parts of mathematics are discovered, and which are manmade.


Beyond that, everything else seems to naturally fall into place, once you start to see how Existence operates.


Mythology - telling a story


St Barnabas Bright

People know nothing [much] about the meaning of things, on the whole, for instance Wikipedia has no explanation for 'barney' as rhyming slang for an altercation. But it is a fight, and the obvious origin has to be St Barnabas Bright, the longest day of the year [under the old calendar], and this illustrates the problem we all have with translation; words are very fluid in their meaning, and that is especially true in English, where often the meaning of a phrase may be completely reversed by the way that it is spoken. Therefore, any distance, be it time or space, between author and audience leads to misunderstanding.


Another thing that appears to me to have been misunderstood at one time and then stuck, is the 'Hunter's Moon', a piece of folklore that has no rational justification, but seems an obvious mistake as it names the Full Moon after the Harvest Moon, equating the Hunter's Moon with the Sun in Libra, and Moon in Aries, whereas any rational mind would place the Hunter's Moon with the Sun in Sagittarius, i.e. late November, early December, so that the Full Moon was located in or near Orion, the constellation of the Hunter, between sidereal Taurus and Gemini, i.e. in the current position of astrological [Tropical] Gemini, opposite Sagittarius. In Roman times, when the Sidereal and Tropical zodiacs aligned, it would have made sense for the Hunter's Moon to follow the Harvest Moon, but no longer.


This 'Lost in translation' is not just at the level of language, but of culture. There are things that various groups understand simply because they are all of the same culture. For instance, the Russian habit of 'vronya' - when a lie is told, and is undertood to be a lie by all concerned, but which is emotionally more acceptable than openly facing the truth. Such cultural assumptions and 'inside tracks' make it harder for an outsider to comprehend correctly how a society or group tends to think, also making translation problematic.


Parables and Clichés

One way around the problems of mis-translation, and mis-understanding, is for the author to frame what they have to say in the form of a story- as a parable, which may go on to become a myth. Myth has the great advantage of establishing clichés in the minds of large parts of a society, and clichés have the great advantage of conveying ideas that are more complex than simple words, and easier to take on board [to grasp the meaning of] than are complex arrangements of words conveying strange and novel meaning. This is why it is a good thing to use clichés when appropriate, and for example is the main reason behind commentators contrasting evil political behaviour, at any time during the past century, with that of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. There are always some voices that will object to the use of such clichés, but then you have to ask yourself 'why?', and it seems to me that generally it is not the cliché that is objectionable, rather that the objectors are simply attempting to support the target that was being attacked by the use of a particular cliché.


We don't seem to appreciate mythology, we used to, as societies, in the West there has been an overarching myth of Jesus the mythological figure [standing alongside Jesus in his other, more religious, guises - son of God, saviour of Mankind, etc.] The mythological Jesus has one message, and that is 'Love thy neighbour', and by that he meant everyone, not just your own kind, but everyone, including Samaritans. Jesus was so committed to this cause that, apparently, he was prepared to die for it, in order that we would remember that one message and so be saved. It is 'as if' Jesus knew that he had to create his own myth, so that the message would stick.


Our myths are the stories we tell, in books and on television, and in films. They used to be fairy stories, teaching us the rudiments of psychology, and how life operates. Now they encompass much greater complexities, because our lives are more complex. But we might ask, why in the old days did the stories always end,'and they all lived happy ever after'? I'd suggest that the only 'ever after' a person could hope for was their children, and their children's children.


(External Website) More about Faery


Love one another. Is that such a complicated message? Well, it is highly confusing when you don't understand what love is, and you'll see me explaining love in such a way that makes it clear that we have not understood love, or at least that very few of us have lived as if we do.


Love, as do all human faculties, has political consequences, because it transpires between things, notably between the inner prisoner of the self, and any of those other billions of prisoners out there in the World.


If love was central to Jesus' mythology, it is also central to that other defining myth of the Anglophone world, that of Robin Hood. Robin Hood is a political Jesus. In his myth he taxes the rich so that the poor may have a better life. He doesn't do this for personal gain, but because it is the right thing to do.


We must have lost touch with our own myths, or how else could we, in democratic countries, have voted in the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Donald Trump; people whose very being stands diametrically opposed to our cultural roots that are deeply embedded in the ethos of Jesus and Robin Hood.


The modern mindset is too literal. We have clearly often misunderstood the mindset of the ancients. The ancient mindset was probably also too literal and seems to have misunderstood what came before. Even Socrates, as voiced by Plato, takes the myths of his society's own gods literally, so little wonder that he is accused of impiety. In Euthyphro, his dialogue with Euthyphro [literally straight thinker], Socrates seeks advice on piety, but fails to be convinced. His problem appears to be failing to understand the nature of gods; that they are abstractions of behaviours, that each hero is an embodiment of the nature of particular gods, and that to do as one is to not do as the others. Why does all this matter? Because in more recent times we have adopted monotheistic religion, and then adapted that to Christianity [in the West, anyway] and then lost sight of the roots of piety.


So, while we may appreciate that we do not translate well from myth, we may also justifiably take any licence we care to, to interpret myth as is suitable to our purposes, because frankly, they cannot be relied on to be a foolproof guide to life, in the manner that perhaps they were originally intended. Mythology should always be subject to Trotskyist revision, in the sense of keeping the revolution vibrant.


We must tell our own story, a mythology for today, one that explains in an approachable manner suitable for today's audience.


Philosophy - thinking it through


The nature of truth, as we have seen in the questions, is manifold, but to reach a coherent version of truth, the only one available to our purpose here, we have to subject our story to the rigour of philosophical reasoning. Actually, that is not quite so dry as it sounds, all it really means is that each step of the story has to be cobbled together with the others to produce a coherent whole.


The idea of coherent truth is not so very odd, really all I am claiming is that the final argument will end up as being as functional as a computer program that runs, rather than a program that crashes. That is; I am hoping for a theory that works, rather than some documentation that just sits on a shelf gathering dust. You never run documentation.


Unfortunately, I can't think of any one philosopher, or school of philosophy, that has the answer I am aiming to present, especially so one in current vogue, so I can't appeal to authority. My philosophy will be homespun, and if it relies on anyone, then it is probably Leibniz. But, I am no expert, and what's left of my life is too little for me to pursue an academic route to certainty, and anyway, what good has that done others? Appeal to authority never works as proof.


My philosophy stands on its own two feet, and if that leads me to state the 'bleedin' obvious', then that is the way it has to be. Anyway, I'd be as likely to misrepresent the stance of individual philosophers if I attempted to take on their arguments, so I will mainly stick to my own.


Philosophers


However, maybe I ought to mention a few influential thinkers who have had some bearing on the issues that concern us here, although I most certainly do not aim to repeat their ideas [or mistakes]. Anyway, the point is not how correct they were, or not, nor how well I have understood some of their ideas, rather it is that throughout history some people have wondered about 'the questions', and provided a variety of answers, although none have yet answered everything.


(External Website) More about Philosophers


Religion - convincing others


Religion, literally the tying together of strands, or maybe with strands.


I think it unfortunate that religion has so frequently been allowed to be prostituted in the cause of political control. Yes, and I do mean your religion too. However, because religion is a thing, we then are obliged to ask if it has anything to tell us about Existence. Equally, what can Existence tell us about religion?


(External Website) More about Religion


Politics


Politics may seem like a strange category to include, but maybe it is an anti-category. These days there is much that is subject to cancellation, and has to be seen as politically correct. Not only that, but as much as Politics may be influenced by an understanding of the virtual and emergent nature of Existence, but that very nature, as mapped by the Mandala, can be tested and confirmed by the unfolding of political developments around the World, for example the war in Ukraine that exemplifies both politics as hard currency, and astrological transits - specifically of Uranus.


(External Website) More about Politics


Science - experimenting


The search for certainty


A history of refinement, that is a history of strokes of genius that prove each earlier scientific truth to be limited, and in some ways plain wrong.


If we were to consider just Newton and Einstein, certainly the biggest names in the history of science, we'd quickly see that the discoveries of both are still very much in use - after all rocket science is all about Newton - but that Einstein superseded Newton, and has in turn been superseded by quantum theories. Even then, those same quantum theories are not yet complete, and so in time will surely be added to by someone


Hamstrung by materialism, Science has been condemned to a life of reductionism, one that means that the more complex things become, the greater difficulty Science has in explaining them. Just consider the confidence we have in Biology and Chemistry, yet the problems that arise when we move into Psychology, Sociology, and Economics - all of which emerge from Biology.


(External Website) More about Science


Experience - exploring


Motivation to ask and answer questions can only come from experience, especially when we are faced with the mysterious, or anything that we simply don't understand. The urge to explore, to answer the questions that are really just voids in our knowledge, must ultimately originate from that personal curiosity of wanting to know, but the 'what' we want to know depends largely on what we encounter in life. The more mysterious the experiences we have, then the more we have to ask questions about.


There are broadly two possible responses to experience, one is to ignore anything that doesn't fit what we believe we know, and the other is to adapt to new knowledge, to grow from experience, by absorbing the new, and by discovering how to explain what we initially find to be mysterious.


Mysticism - imagining and art


'Use your loaf!' was a commonly heard expression when I was young, and growing up in London. Loaf of bread, head, in Cockney rhyming slang, so I was being told to think, whenever it was aimed at me. Thinking being our greatest gift, as homo sapiens. We are such very clever apes, surely we ought to have had the World all figured out by now!


Well, for all the progress that we have made, we don't yet seem to have pulled all the strands together to create the explanation of everything, something reliable that all people in the World can count on to form the foundation on which to build their lives.


Various religions have had a go, various political ideals, even various sciences have been appealed to as justification for a way of life. But, I'd suggest, because we have not been able to see these things holistically, nor clearly, we humans have failed totally to learn the lessons right there in front of us.


In order to live right, we need to combine all the proper ideas that we could have, and have the wisdom to discard all the bad ideas, and then live - and vote - according to those ideas. We do need to dare to dream, but not aimlessly, not of fairytales [excepting we use them for inspiration]. We need to dream of a better world, and given the way climate change is heading towards wiping us out as a species, we need to get with the programme PDQ,


Utopias have been imagined by many, since Tudor times when Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia [1516], although idealized ways of living had been imagined since ancient times. Plato's Republic is one such ideal, and it could be argued that earlier, Pythagoras, in putting forward rules on how to live, was also promoting utopian living of a sort.


More recently some writers have suggested that a utopia is an inherently contradictory concept, but the argument is usually that so many different ideas exist of what constitutes Utopia. So here the fault is in the people, not in the idea that there could be a utopia.


Unless we understand the true nature of Existence, and consequentially the true nature of life [including inevitable death], and from these the true nature of every kind of thing we are [so far] exposed to, we have no hope of recognizing what constitutes the perfect utopia, let alone of deciding whether 'tough love' is the best sort of love, or just an excuse to inflict abuse on the defenceless.


Imagining the ramifications of any and all possibilities is therefore a vital tool in our box of gadgets with which we decipher life. Imagining is in essence a mystical process, informed but not limited by our experience of reality. Art, acting hand in hand with imagination, is the method by which we make our imaginings knowable, both to our self and to others. Science is how we discover whether what we imagine stacks up against reality.


Other Resources


The following pages contain various descriptions of things that, while not directly about Virtualism, are on point enough to warrant inclusion, and which may be helpful.




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