Character and Operation

(I) The Distinction
When it comes to mental artefacts there are two classes of object we identify in the world - what I call ‘Character’ and ‘Operation’. Character involves things like personality, socio-personal, feelings, emotions, etc, and Operation involves logic and mathematics (although, of course, the two can overlap).

Almost all of our thinking about operations is formalised using mathematics and logic (again, with much overlapping). However, when anticipating ‘character’ the interworkings of our consciousness are always bringing things together by making subliminal appeals to subsets of consciousness itself; in other words, we control very little and know very little about past processes and influences and why such sublimity has entered into consciousness at all. Under the conditions of ‘character’ often this is accountable only to our preconscious or subconscious states. Our ability to apprehend and act upon consciousness itself, both ours and other people’s, seems to be inherent in personhood itself - that is to say, we need not construct a theory of character from first principles in order to be capable of understanding ‘character’ in a wider domain. Our brains needed to evolve into personality brains far more than mathematical brains - survival and reproduction via natural selection required far more of the former (the latter seems very deliberately installed by the Divine, which I’ll come to in a moment). Survival and reproduction is a much broader spectrum than what one might call “binary true/false systems within survival and reproduction”

(II) Certainty and the Apprehending of Knowledge
On the subject of certainty and the apprehending of knowledge, I ought to say one or two things here. We go through life feeling certain of many things and doubtful of many other things. One of the reasons why sceptics think it so hard to get a good firm cognitive grip on knowledge of absolutes is that life gives us few certainties, particularly in the universal sense. Some philosophers go so far as to say that virtually no induction can be justified, certainly not with any degree of certainty - the polar dictum ‘there is no certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow’ is often used as the model used to describe the uncertainty in which we live. Roughly, just because the sun has risen every morning since way back when does not mean that it is certain it will rise tomorrow. However we need not become bogged down with all the fine details of the ‘for and against’ argument here; suffice to say, it isn’t very difficult to justify induction to a variety of satisfactory degrees. We are able to justify inductive arguments by appealing to particular epistemological regulations - regulations which are necessary if we are to know anything, particularly as our vast history of human knowledge has been based on such regulations. In order to accept these regulations we must accept our inductive methods on pragmatic grounds; that is, as inductive methods have been so successful in the past we must not abandon them for the sake of pedantry. Of course we cannot simply employ this method without being wary of circularity or self-referencing, but we do know how to make inferences by examining prediction about frequencies and pattern apprehension, and, given the foregoing, that is clearly the best method we have.

We must also be wary when drawing conclusions that the premises have to be correct before we can draw a sound conclusion; for sometimes a conclusion can be drawn correctly but with faulty information underlying the premises. Deductive arguments from premises that are universally true (or accepted as universally true) have to, by definition, be valid inferences. Therefore we have to have a firm base on which to postulate; and we ought to be careful about invoking probability estimates injudiciously, for they only add unnecessary scepticism, again for the sake of pedantry. The question of whether the sun will rise tomorrow morning is a good case in point. Technically we cannot be certain that it will; but the foundations on which we postulate and infer are strong enough for us to discard the term ‘uncertain’ for such events, activities, laws and constants that are so well established. In this sense both the deductive and inductive arguments have much in common in that both require high quality regularities (and hopefully high quality premises) for the conclusions to be sound.

Moreover, I think Thomas Reid’s common-sense philosophy has a lot going for it; the fact that human minds possess pre-reflective principles - a sense of reliability about ‘thinking’ itself, strongly suggests that common sense is an a priori feature of personhood - a feature that is naturally developed from childhood to adulthood. Furthermore, the fact that self-evident truths and the reliability of our own senses are as a rule harmonious strongly indicates that there is a place for common-sense which supersedes even the most sophisticated scepticism.

Having admitted that there are fundamental common sense principles that override deeper enquiries because they are justified by human nature itself, there are certain caveats attached to this.

When it comes to writing grand theories (like the Theory of Everything above) one must be mindful of good logical discernment regarding HOW we do our knowing and what limitations we have. One of the most important admissions I make - one that is worth reiterating - is that there are many tenets to existence that are not amenable to the test/refute procedural analysis and are therefore not disposable in the sense that many wish for. Psychological, sociological, emotional and a great many historical aspects of life are but four examples. Our perceptive qualities and, more importantly, our ability to assess the validity of a theory based upon its appearance in front of our perceptive tools is usually how we reach sound conclusions. The vast non-testable domains covered by our best efforts for analysis, along with the limitations of human perceptual resources, only allow a very sparse interrelational sampling of life. The success of test/refute procedural analyses is based on a formalisation of the theoretical notions that are at least amenable through systematic simulation and conflated with experience to provide us with ideas of validity. As you will see in my Christianity and science articles - in an elementary Popperian sense, many atheists attempt to decide which out of theism and evolutionary theory makes the more easily refutable claims and then form an allegiance with the side that is an obvious stand out. The sheer magnitude and vast nexus of complexity of morphospace makes it, in my view, much easier to reconcile the two. Moreover, the ontological complexities of what is basically a subject amenable to philosophical investigation and historical analysis will leave many atheists disappointed as they search for absolute falsification or unequivocal verification, while at the same time attempting to lay some sort of ‘burden of proof’ on the theist - ‘if it is true then sound investigation will reveal one way or the other’. And I think it does. It’s only the foolish practitioners of religious faith that settle for a fideist system of belief that is scared of being percolated by the threat of any external scrutiny.

The vast complexity of interpersonal relations conceals so many things that consciousness itself cannot apprehend; that is, it defies an elementary arrangement of its mental cognita into binary true and false propositions, and indeed into logical or mathematical systems. As most people know, many other factors impact ‘character’ domains beyond what is simply judged ‘logically explicable’. Even in one’s interaction with ‘operation’ there is a lot more ‘character’ complexity’ involved than brute assent to the formal propositions of operation itself. Thus, when a man says he is only going to embrace Christianity if it is ubiquitously accepted by the masses (often stated as ‘Why can’t God make Himself known to everyone?’), he is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, for this is Christianity - Divine revelation itself, the a priori knowledge of which is axiomatically bound up in the self-same ‘character/operation’ overlapping system used for all other types of secure knowledge. In doing this he is setting himself an impossibility.

(III) Do Christians deal with proofs?
In the strictest sense, no - although in my columns page I do have a two part article on what I call ‘proof by experience’ which offers a step by step examination of a priori certainty that is the result of a relationship with God. Those that ask for empirical proof seem to overlook the fact that, in one sense, Christians do not believe what they believe because of empirical proof, although empiricism does play a part in the totality of a Christian’s psychological make-up. The Bible talks of certainty, that we can be certain of Christ in us, therefore even a posteriori empirical evidence of some kind would not be as powerful as the relationship with God from within a priori selfhood. The man that knows God but hasn’t seen empirical evidence has much greater certainty (impregnable certainty) than the man that has been shown a miracle but has no relationship (see Matthew 11:21-24). Absolute Certainty, as the book of Galatians implies, can only occur a priori.

Let us say that a man observes an event which by ordinary definitions of empirical investigation could be construed consensually as a miracle. Let’s say that it happened to some of the biggest sceptics in the public domain - would that be the certainty they are looking for? Perhaps in the sense of satisfying evidential demands, but even the event or, more accurately, their observing the event has connotations which cannot help but diminish slightly the content of certainty. Their observation would be a proprietary event, and as long as they continue to analyse the evidence or certainty, and as long as they attempt to convey it linguistically, they will be in the slightest sense letting go of the a priori certainty, for in the strictest sense a priori certainties involve no adulteration whatsoever - an absence of cognitive or descriptive embellishment. Remove from the activity the certainty and you are left with the event, in the same way that you do not have at the exact same time certainty that a mountain exists and certainty that an existing thing is a mountain. The act of being certain of empirical events involves a cognitive contribution from the first person selfhood ontology, therefore the instantaneous moment of certainty is only a constituent part of the reckoning.

So when we talk of certainty, that is, being certain that God exists and that we can have a relationship with Him, the certainty that one searches for is the certainty that involves no a posteriori facts. Of course, the fantastic evidence for Christianity being true is overwhelming and a likely catalyst in one’s searching for this a priori certainty, but when folk talk foolishly of ‘no evidence for God’ or they overlook this greater reality of the situation they are guilty of emphatic errors of thinking. I understand that it is hard to reconcile for those who are sceptical, but the Socratic physio-teleological paradox about lacking the courage to venture out upon so perilous a voyage of discovery without God behind him is not far from the truth. The trouble is, those that do not understand the situation properly go gunning for the theorist who says this and accuses him of irrationality. It is the hunger in his heart and his knowledge of the true inner-self that makes him cast his net in the hope of finding the purpose behind this lining; that is, if the event of man knowing God has to come from God first he trusts that the casting of his net will be fruitful.

There is another thing to consider regarding proof, and in particular, hasty demands for proof - one might be quite startled to learn that there are mathematical conditions under which the opposite is true - there are statements that are true if and only if they are unprovable. Most people have heard of Godel’s incompleteness theorem; well this is a sort of meta-theorem in that it depends crucially on an object-meta-level distinction. Godel considered a simple formal system containing the basic axioms of the arithmetic of whole numbers (stress, WHOLE numbers). He assigned each object-level statement a unique code number, and then he assigned a code number to each proof of an object-level statement. By means of this encoding, object-level statements about numbers can also be understood as expressing meta-level statements about the system, or about individual object-level statements.

Given the foregoing, doesn’t this mean that an extension of this system can be used to show that if in most cases there are formal systems incapable of proving some truths there must be a self-same system which insists that no formal system can prove all truths? Yes, in principle that is true, but it is a bankrupt enterprise trying to impute this onto the non-mathematical subjects in place, in the ‘God or no God’ debate. I said that in mathematical terms this object-level statement abut whole numbers says of itself, via the numerical coding, that it is not provable. If the axioms are all true and the system is consistent, it is possible to conclude that such statements (that are true if and only if they are unprovable) is neither provable nor disprovable from the axioms - that it is independent of them. Therefore I would be cautious about using the ‘P’ word when using inductive techniques to consider whether or not God exists, particularly bearing in mind that the warrant for the use of the inductive principle of inference is the inductive principle itself.

Of course, as atheism shows, understanding the self does not come without distractions and, again as atheism has shown, some of the distractions are strong enough to turn a man into trouble - nature’s digressions and distractions lead folk away from the truth. There is a better chance of a man realising this if he remembers that Christ does not just claim to have access to the truth, or that He is able to lead a man to the truth, in fact, He claims to BE the truth. That is why, if Christ is the truth, it is impossible to hold on to satisfaction, fulfilment, blessedness, wisdom, etc without Him. By definition every act that recedes from the Truth must be arbitrary or pernicious, for you can be sure that all the very best things on earth will be from Him. Even the caprice that lurks in the hearts of those that follow false religions is entirely knowable the moment one steps outside looking for the truth. The only false gods that really exist are the ones that have been created by the self, usually as a result of some arbitrary thinking process or pattern; that is, the falsity attaches itself to human reasoning like a leech to skin and confounds the reasoning process so that even clear thinking can be transposed into some muddled perceptivity, all the time not affecting the proprietary convictions and supposed certainty felt from within. The sensible man knows how important the truth is, but equally he knows how dangerous falsehood is, and that if Christ is the Truth, falsehood must underpin every instance of badness that we see in the world. If one searches for the Truth then things like moral goodness, wisdom, good judgement, character development, greater vision, tangible life goals and awareness of reality in a wider and more glorious framework will follow.

(IV) The Search for Life’s Missing Chords
Knowledge of the risen Christ is certainly a miracle, but it is not a complete departure from cognition itself; that is, Christ uses our own cognisance to impart thoughts, visions, etc - it is all part of the same selfhood rationality that we use for everything else - that is why one needs to ask for revelation oneself before one realises the truth. If we define rationality in terms of only what has proprietary accountability in relation to our own selfhood, then on this definition, cross-personal relations will automatically classify as intuitive. But of course, that is not how it is in everyday life.

Back to the ‘F’ word again…’Faith’, if you are an atheist distrusting my faith, the reason it is harder for you to trust me about Christianity is very obviously because you do not believe supernaturalism to be true. And bound up in that analysis is a whole host of other partisan-factors swaying your decision. However, if your neighbour told you that she had visited the post office at lunchtime, your brain would go through a far less complex system of searching and analysis, as she is not asking you to believe anything peculiar. The fundamental difference between the first and second is not rationality or intuition per se (as Tim Reeves and I discussed in my ‘Getting To The Real Truth About Faith’ article) but the difference between an the explicit and implicit nature of rationality, both of which differ in terms of being readily accessible to mindful examination, and in the case just mentioned, only one of which (the second) could be mindfully examined. In fact, I think that goes some way to explaining people’s inherent resistance to faith-based belief systems. It also causes one to become rather distracted by things that are readily accessible to mindful scrutiny - what one might call the '‘easily-manageable things'’.

The point is not about level of complexity in identifying the efficacy of the first and second, that is obvious, it is about realising that very often other people’s claims cannot be rejected by intuition, nor by explicit rationality (although many things can be rejected by explicit rationality), nor by conscious inspection (although Christianity itself can stand up to any amount of conscious inspection - but, as with any form of explicit rationality, you will need to travel some distance to see how well it stands up). I have a theory that because one of the belief systems is true (Christianity) it makes it easier for the parasitic religions to feed off its truth, but that is very involved so we’ll save it for later. Suffice to say for now, if there were no such thing as the supernatural, I do not think ‘belief in God’ would have survived very long.

At the root of the distinction between operation and character is a vast ravine of complexity of behaviour, a heady mix of separating and overlapping, and it is easy to see why the two become crossed in a way that prevents clarity if one fails to enquire about things in the right way. Operations are relatively simple systems of behaviour, whereas character is vastly complex in terms of its possibilities to generate a system - you can never have a complete cognitive purchase on character (even your own), and it ought to be remembered that we only really use aspectual elementals to get a cognitive purchase on character. Although operation can be vastly complex, character remains much more complex due to the fact that operation almost always has the potential to be reified (as in logic and mathematical equations, figures, symbols, integer systems, syntactical illustration, and metaphors), character often remains abstract and non-reificatory

If a ravine of complexity is what differentiates operation and character then both are going to amount to a nexus of complex ‘shifting and shoving’ activity in our own rationality and intuition. Perceptive handling of both the operation and the character is bound to be at its most active when trying to assimilate something as complex as the Divine, because due to His a priori infinite complexity, for those that look to the same system of thought to justify rejecting Him or trivialising His existence - such rejecting or trivialising can only come under the constricting forces of a very woolly single category of rationality (or in this case - ‘irrationality’). A relationship between a human and his or her Creator is interpersonally unsymmetrical, whereas the relationship between human and human is, to the largest degree, symmetrical; that is, the qualitative differences are minimal, certainly in relation to creature/Creator relationships. Now what do I mean here by symmetrical and unsymmetrical? Due to human limitations the impartations to us from God have to be of an unsymmetrical nature; that is, the interrelation between what is put into nature by God and what is received by us has to be classified as an unsymmetrical relation. If I have two pennies, one in each hand, the value of each is a symmetrical relation - if L is equal to R then R must be equal to L. If however I have a pound coin in one hand and a penny in the other, there would be an unsymmetrical relation - one is greater than the other. Admittedly the interrelation between coins is of a different kind to that of the interrelation between creature and Creator, but the relation between Creator-to-creature impartations is of the second kind; that which is given is greater than that which is received.

Now it is because of this that one must realise that the common objection, often posited in the form “what you believe and have experienced is not enough to convince - that’s not good enough evidence” is fraught. No, of course it doesn’t qualify as good enough evidence, but the key point is being missed every time; such a relationship with the Divine cannot possibly be qualitatively satisfactory in any by proxy communicative system of information sharing. In other words, if I tell you there is a documentary on Somalia on BBC THREE tonight, that type of ‘information sharing’ is easily verifiable by your looking in the Radio Times. But you know very well that there are many types of feelings, emotions and first person selfhood experiences that do not fall under the same category, even in human-human interactions. Therefore if human-human relations are the subject of such an abstruse application of rationality that it defies conscious cognition to be self-aware of its underlying processes, then it is perfectly understandable why those that miss the distinction between operation and character are unsure how to interact with the Divine personality and how to harmonise the correct logical interpretation and intuitive rationality with the vast nexus of emotional complexity that might be holding him back (anything from a bad religious experience, to worrying how your wife/husband might react + things like fear of vulnerability, fear of the numinous, fear of commitment, the spectre of ridicule, fear of abandoning comfort zone properties, fear of the unknown, fear of new social groups, fear of radical change, subliminal hatred of authority, repudiation of things beyond instinctive understanding, etc etc - there are so many underlying forces at work that can impede a man’s foray into investigating Christianity).

One thing that always strikes me is that in the Bible God declares His existence to not be inconspicuous or concealed throughout creation; He says His existence should be manifestly obvious to EVERYONE, not just those that know Him. That being the case, I had given some thought as to what it is in creation that has axiomatically attached to it the imputation ‘Designer God’. And aside from the vast quantities of evidence we share of God working miraculously in people’s lives, the three things that cannot escape me on this point are logic, mathematics, and Reason itself (or perhaps four – the cosmos itself – but that’s a big ‘perhaps’). Nothing in naturalism caters for the first three very well. The fecund capabilities of human cognition are qualitatively disproportionate to anything else in natural selection. It may even be true to say that ‘existence’ itself is all the evidence we need that God exists and there is a sinuous logical pathway that seems to affirm that view - however, I tend not to use it because it naturally culminates in a stalemate, and I think it is quite understandable why that happens.

Regarding the qualitative difference between operation and character, one must admit that cognisance seems to be a property that sheer operation, no matter how much it is broken down componentially, just doesn’t have; it is as though creaturely sentience is itself is simulation of Divine sentience, in fact, the whole Simulacrum is like an active mind. I am certain that human selfhood requires a distinctive place of grandeur all on its own. When faced with character we impute an ontological framework of cognisance and a set of elementals behind the composite frontage with which we interface - it is as though character is instantiated in existence itself.

There must be something rather than nothing to boot strap existence - a fact of some kind that is self-evident. And seeing as though the software (science) is more about systems, patterns, description and algorithmics, and it explains nothing at all about the hardware (in absolute terms), this ‘obviousness’ of the Divine seems only to be available to first person selfhood. Moreover, due to the self affirming and self referencing nature of underwritten logical necessity, once we drop mere possibility down to its secondary level we are left with the primary irreducible truth, and the primary irreducible truth seems to demand a consciousness to think it. But if this self-evident ‘fact’ was systematically elemental, I see no reason why it should exist, let alone be self-evident, for the truth of the matter is, a self-evident, self-sustaining fact would logically suggest a power and complexity that contains within it the explanation for existence itself. And as I explain in my Theory of Everything, I think that self-affirming logical necessity is the Aseity of God. That being the case, anyone that wants to know if God really exists will HAVE to take the route that presumes He has an interest in His creation. One might humorously suggest that if you do not believe in Him, you will have to tell Him you don’t believe in Him and ask Him to change your mind. Otherwise it’s not ‘fair game’ - the atheist is, in effect, building a brick wall between the goalposts and then sitting back and asking the star striker to hit one in the top corner. But in my experience Divine grace supersedes all forms of ambivalence and all forms of procrastination - and for those that have already built their walls in between the goalposts, if you ask God, He will knock down the wall brick by brick; and furthermore He will even act pre-emptively; that is, He will hide the bricks from those who are thinking about building a wall.

(V) Why I think man is over-engineered for mere selection.
The foray into mind (the gun-toting mathematical and logical monster that encapsulates mind) has never been a more exciting foray than right now. The incursion into those mysterious pockets of existence that reflect back a fairly clear picture of the mind is and, of course, has been all along, the way to go in understanding existence - not only with the greatest potentiality in mind but also in taking a scientific perspective in what the Bible has said all along - that man is God’s special creation.

Of course the insights formulated in existentialist armchairs seemed like bad news for those trying to formulate a better understanding of what has been frankly a bit of an embarrassment for so many existentialists; that is, the enormous towering structure whose bricks consist of heavily cemented solipsism and isolationism - in fact, if I may be frank, a complete confusion on various, what they call, ‘logical modalities’ such as necessity and possibility - two of the most confusing words in philosophical parlance. I am sure that even in their worst nightmares they didn’t envision this (at times) rather facile proprietary wagon train atheistic cult that non-modal thinkers such as professors Dawkins and Dennett have popularised (although admittedly many could do with curbing their enthusiasm when it comes to proliferating modalities) - but the consequences of which is that these ‘horsemen’ acolytes have collectively built this great big structure and now many atheists do not really know what it represents, why it was built in the first place and, most important, how they could even knock it down if they realised it needs bringing down (the atheists’ biggest impediment when it comes to seeing the truth about Christianity). Unless one understands about modality in logic, and the classification of logical propositions according to the ‘possibility’, ‘impossibly’, ‘contingency’, or ‘necessity’ of their content, then he or she will be stuck in pretty fruitless hamster’s wheel of logic. Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, can be applied here, although one must frame it a wider (Fregian) concept to see its real modal benefits.

In fact, when it comes to putting our own structure on the plot of land on which the naturalist hoped to build his, and having taken the best bits of representationalism, conceptualism, formalism, and logical atomism into a melting pot, those that think mind is rather more special than a mere ‘naturalistic fact’ are up against the problem of representing significance and relevance - this was implicit in the Cartesian ‘values’ ascribed to quite random facts to which the mind assigned modal demarcation lines (a much more trenchant development of this idea is found in John Searle’s ‘function predicates’).

I have some ideas which might go some way to synthesising ‘significance and relevance’ with ‘necessity and possibility’ - much of it is inextricably linked to the ‘character and operation’ cognitive distinction that we have just been discussing. Compared with everything else in nature the human ‘mind’ is rather an especial tool, and the human rather a special agent himself. Now I do not mean for you to think that this means I favour a non-evolutionary viewpoint, because the human genome project has clearly defined our place in the evolutionary picture, and as physical organisms I have no objection whatsoever. But mind, it seems to me, is rather too special to have been left alone in selection - the set up of mind very strongly suggests that ‘mind’ has been supplemented by a special agent (in fact, a Divine agent). In fact taking everything into account - mathematical and algorithmic apprehension, imagination, foresight, fecundity, intelligence, etc, I think the said term ‘very strongly suggests’ is too weak an imputation. Our skill is, it seems to me, too great for mere selection. As an agent of Cartesian ‘values’, those values are consigned, not as modal values in the mind, but as a cognitive fact that seems isomorphic with the world itself.

For example, what we have learned from our experience of, say, finding a particular CD we are looking for in a department store is sedimented in a variety of things such as alphabetisation, image awareness, memory, geometrical apprehension, and every other perceptive tool that causes an interrelation between the agent or set of object and perceptivity. And as I have just said, we seem over-skilled and over-endowed in our cognitive capacity for the task at hand - there seems to be a supplementary facet to task-management that goes well beyond simple agent and action.

I am not, of course denying the obvious interactions between cognition and how it is coupled with environment, but it is soon apparent when zooming in on the vast evolutionary trajectory (as best we can with our perceptive tools, deduction and imagination - for its time-span is too great to do it empirically) that when ‘reasoning’ is separated from Reason itself, the dynamics of the interaction of the agent and its surroundings are primary determinants of bit by bit accumulative development of its reasoning, and thus we reach an unsatisfactory logical dead end because we are trying to justify the fecundity of the human mind using mental artefacts that arrived through natural selection. In fact, as I have said in my Theory of Everything, we can put the problem further back - explaining reasoning as the result of a set of naturalistic cosmic flukes undermines the very foundations on which reasoning sits.

Moreover, it should be noted that when it comes to the complexity of ‘software’ analysis (science and metaphysics) - the Christian, in many cases, finds it all just as enriching as the atheist; more so in fact, for he denies not only that our everyday managing could be understood solely (stress, solely) in terms of inferences from symbolic representations, or brains converting stimulus input into reflex responses, but also why it can’t be understood simply in terms of responses caused by a simple interrelation between agent and object. The Christian favours an even more enriching approach to human intelligence – an approach much more compatible with physics, the strangeness of quantum mechanics, and grounded in the neuroscience of intelligence, perception and action.

The most stupendous thing of all regarding mathematics is how it seems to merge with nature and overlap in much the same way that Character and Operation overlap, to designate, not a particular object in the world, but rather how that object is isomorphic with an already subtended perceptive pattern of interaction between ‘reasoning’ and ‘world’ and how the dialectic embeds into a mathematical whole. I do not say that this mathematical whole is anything other than abstract to brains as limited as ours - but this apprehension or awareness does seem isomorphic with the ‘operation’ prime component in our character and operation mind set up. When choosing a CD from a large rack I am not dealing with the CDs, the rack, the alphabet or the imagery in the same way that I am exploring greater possibilities of how these things fit into my overall perceptual toolkit, and with each thought I am opening up vast swathes of what Hume called ‘perception bundles’, but which are at an abstract level isomorphic with something concrete - some underwritten logical concomitant that has a truth value beyond anything in ‘reasoning’ and beyond any object in ‘environment’. When we are pressing into mathematical possibilities, there is no experience of an entity doing the soliciting in basic cognitive engineering (via natural selection alone); just the solicitation - the pulling in of something connected to a much more concrete logical concomitant. And I presume that such solicitations disclose the world on the basis of which we sometimes do step back and perceive things as things through mathematical systems, but we haven’t evolved with the need to apprehend the more complex nature of the system.

Now very obviously anyone that thinks for a second about character and operation would see that there is no easily assessable demarcation line between where I perceive and act, and the outside world itself; that is, where internalism breaks off from externalism. I cannot perceive external things without the external nor, of course, without the internal. But the burring of the demarcation boundaries seem to suggest that the idea that we are one vast thought in a vast and complex mind is not as absurd as it first sounds. Mind shows that all forms of externalism need internalism to be apprehended - that being the case, I see no reason why a distinction needs to be made, other than the metaphorical and analogical distinctions made between thinking and the outside world, themselves demarcated by language and, to a small degree, sentience. It seems very probable to me that the reason an organism (animal or human) interacts with the physical universe, and in such a way as to experience it as a set of external facts systematised in terms of that organism’s need to make sense of everything it meets (and possesses the ability to get a cognitive purchase on the system in its broadest logical and mathematical terms), is because ‘mind’ is embedded in the self-same system and underwrites the logical and mathematical platonic whole - the Simulacrum itself.

Describing the phenomenon of being in and a part of the Simulacrum coupled with being able to be geared into interrelating with its external components suggests a dynamic relation between the self and the Simulacrum, that does not describe the exchanging of ingress and egress, rather the relation is better understood as one ‘reality’ whole - explainable via the extraordinary notion of synthesising or harmonising or conflating (whichever you prefer) mathematical and logical apprehension ‘Operation’ with a vast nexus of complex personality itself bound up in a long evolutionary history of survival and reproduction - ‘Character’. In fact, the ingress and egress is so subtle that thought itself seems to transcend the representational terms with which ingress and egress are modelled. Even in evolutionary terms, giving thought to man being too fecund for mere selection, cognition seems so vastly over-engineered in its harmonisation with the ‘environment’ that ‘thinking’ itself appears to be a miracle. And as I have already said, ‘mind’ seems to be embedded in existence itself, therefore ‘thinking’ is a sort of subsidiary miracle of nature herself, as nature appears to be one vast thought coming from, I think, the Divine mind. Moreover, I’ve already explained in my Absoluteness of Reason contention that there seems to be a substratum which allows the embedding of all thought and logic. Now admittedly there probably would be no hint of this in basic ‘selection’ itself only in logic and mathematics, but that also strongly reflects something that we know a priori to be true - that selection itself offers no explanation for anything outside of ‘selection’ - thus we are back to my big accusation against the naturalist ‘putting their hands over the eyes in the hope that the sun will go away’.

The Leibnizian idea of a ‘universal characteristic’ is, I think, a simulation of a broader truth - that is, acknowledgment that there is probably is a systematic character of all knowledge, certainly in the sense that if the world has been rationally constructed, reason will uncover its secrets. The amazing thing about existence is that Reason itself importantly couples Character and Operation with the always underwritten ‘truth’ primacy that we live in a sense-making but also ‘sensible’ universe. Moreover, we discover things in the same way that those things reveal themselves to our cognition - it is a bit like filling in a crossword - we understand what the whole will be before we have filled in any words, and as we begin to fill in more words we know more about what’s in the whole. It is important to remember that with Absoluteness of Reason I am not grappling with bifurcatory models of surface level intelligence, I am imputing into intelligence a substratum that embeds these two seemingly bifurcatory aspects of cognition. The problem I have if I accept naturalistic cognitive science is working out an ontology, phenomenology, and mind (Simulacrum) model that cuts off the computational and informational processing in apprehending the logical whole, and supports a naturalistically evolutionary model that is bootstrapped by a series of cosmic flukes - and I cannot do that - much less get in such a thing as the human fecundity that we see in minds, or even basic things like imagination and logical imperatives. To do that would involve the abandonment of the notion that existence itself has some a priori rationality and that reasoning itself can and does reveal its secrets when employed - and that is nothing like the world in which I live, or represents in my mind nothing that corresponds to reality as I know it.