The Mind and Intelligence Framework

Commenting on Tim Reeves' article on Heideggerian Intelligence, and exploring the nature of mind and cosmological potential, I had the following thoughts:

Regarding Heideggerian Intelligence et al - I have reads papers on these subjects in the past. I am currently working through some papers on physics and some on neuroscience - looking for similarities and patterns that will give extra support to ideas about mind giving the appearance of a small cosmos (or if you prefer, cosmos giving the appearance of one vast mind).

Commenting on the quote Tim extrapolated....

“Acting is experienced as a steady flow of skilful activity in response to one's sense of the situation. Part of that experience is a sense that when one's situation deviates from some optimal body-environment gestalt, one's activity takes one closer to that optimum and thereby relieves the "tension" of the deviation. One does not need to know what that optimum is in order to move towards it. One's body is simply solicited by the situation [the gradient of the situation’s reward] to lower the tension. Minimum tension is correlated with achieving an optimal grip.”

Yes, any envisaging done within the mind is it seems sublimely implicit in ‘mind’ - in fact, terms such as ‘goals’ and ‘aims’ are, I would say, accretive; that is, mind exploring some of the greater potential of its own artefacts. However, if Dreyfus’ ideas are to be realised in cosmological models - hardware and software - analogues with ‘mind’ phenomenology are only sparse idioms found in ‘software’ itself. That is to say, if the totality of created ‘mind’ is the extent of the Simulacrum (the created simulation of the Divine realm) then yes, the “Cartesian problem surrounding the ontological distinction (if any) of noumena and cognita” is non-existent. If conscious cognition is the primacy of the Divine simulation, and we have only God and creation, anything in the latter must itself qualify as conscious cognition.And yes I agree with you that regarding the systemic whole, the objects among which we live are not a model of the world stored in our mind or brain; they are the conscious cognition itself - it’s all mind!!.

Now of course, from my own position, attempting to conflate mind and cosmos, it is very difficult to do justice to the infinitely complex as there is no scientific equivalent beyond abstract reasoning, which seems to tie in with your next comments.The Simulacrum does seem to be our model, and our sparse sampling of the systemic whole does not require that we internalise a model of how it interrelates with each first person selfhood - it is already internalised in selfhood. I suppose it is a bit like ‘personality; in that one cannot ever sample the whole (not even one’s own) and yet the ramifying effects on other parts of reality seem to be internalised within personality itself. In other words, it is aspectual, yet it contains its own interrelational mechanism that automatically reconfigures itself irrespective of which aspects of outer reality it interrelates with.

Just as a comprehensive aspectual model of reality includes the cognitive mechanism required to model these effects, personality includes all the aspectual models of reality that cater for its own essence.I like your term ‘absorbed coping’. The mathematical ‘absorbed coping’ is clearly found in intelligent organisms like ourselves - even at the most basic level, geometrical and numerical knowledge would have helped with survival; and because of the stable contour lines that run through morphospace, evolutionary diversity has given us a ‘framework’ view that organisms are dynamic systems coupled to their environment via stimuli which are not processed using representations and models. That these stimuli succeed in soliciting the right responses without the use of representations and models does not mean that there is no wider model framework into which degrees of intentionality operate; for in fact, human minds have a degree of computational and informational content that suggest a representative modeling framework somewhere, particularly bearing in mind that the cosmos itself is amenable to computational and informational explanations.

Is this the biggest clue yet that matter IS mind - that the whole cosmos is one vast mind? The fact that when it comes to noumenal things we can predict and logically infer suggests that with mind we have the potential to explore the aspectual nature of mind while knowing that ‘mind’ as a whole is beyond us. Not only is this what separates us from the animals, but this probably explains why we can anticipate X, Y or Z without coming into contact with X, Y or Z. Could this be what separates modern man from his proto-human progenitors - the point at which God really did put something into man - the first Adam? Because one thing seems certain, regarding proto-humans, we know of various ‘external contrivances’ that help prompt thinking, but it seems pretty clear that if the proto-human mind did any symbolic modelling it wasn’t very good at it, not as an intrinsic aspectual system. In other words, the only creatures that could apprehend the mathematical whole and, perhaps more importantly, enough of the concept of ‘mind’ to apprehend ‘mind’ are the creatures into which God put the requisite parts of Himself, namely Adam and his descendents (which, of course, includes us).

If natural selection shows that organisms are dynamic systems coupled to their environment via stimuli which are not processed using representations and models, there must be something else to explain why it seems to human minds that ‘mind’ IS the frame. This would be remarkable, it would mean that the cosmic blueprint contained within it an algorithmic program that took care of every eventuality that was to be part of the Creator’s plan, and that ‘mind’ itself already contains all the potentiality for everything within the Simulacrum because the Simulacrum IS mind. Every bit of relevant information necessary for the simulated realm must be already present - in mathematical terms, all possibilities are embedded somewhere in the mathematical accretions contained within the Simulacrum. So when the mind registers something ‘new’ we are only speaking of ‘new’ in the sense of being ‘new’ to the senses, not new to the Simulacrum. And given the qualitative difference between ‘minds within mind’ and ‘mind’ itself, it seems that acquisition of knowledge and intellectual supplementation are truly open ended, at least as far as our limitations are concerned within the vastness of the Simulacrum.

This means, of course, that there is (by definition of ‘open ended’) always more effort yet needed in order to crystallise this work, but the similarities between mind and cosmos seem emphatic, particularly as the Simulacrum, if my model is correct, gives the appearance of its own up and running intelligence. You touch on something very important when you say that ‘intelligence’ is isotropic (it has properties with the same values in all directions). Because it is all embedded in the algorithmic whole, it does not attempt to impose any a priori limitations on which knowledge resources belong to which aspects of the whole because it is all part of the systemic whole. If it is true that whenever we talk of something within the Simulacrum we are talking about ‘mind’ then naturally human intelligence need not interrelate resources to other aspectual situations because the nature of ‘mind’ already takes care of that problem.

A Different Origin Of Life?

Biologist Nick Lane’s latest theory has created a splash, by throwing a great spanner in the primordial soup - a big splash indeed – it involves the view that proton power is no late innovation but evolved much earlier in the tree of life than we first thought. He claims the tree of life supports his theory, which is ironic because the tree of life may not be so solid a theory anymore (although it remains a good approximation, just as Newtonian mechanics remains a good approximation to the theories propounded by Einstein, Schrödinger and Heisenberg).

The first branch in the tree is between the two great groups of simple cells, bacteria and archaea, and Lane reminds us (rightly) that both of these groups have proton pumps and both generate ATP from proton currents, using a similar protein. It seems very likely indeed that both inherited this machinery from a common ancestor, and that this source was the progenitor of all life on earth, including you, me and the oak tree down the road.

It must be said though that although traits found in both the archaea and bacteria are most likely inherited from the common ancestor of all life, a few must have been acquired later by gene exchange, thus giving credence to our belief that ‘distinct’ means in many cases ‘evolved independently’. We know that this common ancestor possessed DNA, RNA and proteins, a universal genetic code, ribosomes (which are protein-building mechanisms), ATP and a proton-powered enzyme for making ATP. Some IDists contest with the (what I believe to be mistaken) view that the detailed mechanisms for reading off DNA and converting genes into proteins could not have been in place at that time, but given that this structure was, as far as we know, rather like a modern cell, I think they are clutching at a very thin straw..

Yet there are nuanced differences as well - in particular, the detailed mechanics of DNA replication would have been quite different. Moreover, it looks as if DNA replication evolved independently in bacteria and archaea; that is, most scientists seem to agree that the defining boundaries of cells evolved independently in bacteria and archaea.

So the question ‘what sort of a cell was this common ancestor?’ is, as Nick Lane concedes, a difficult question. Clearly not a cell with no boundaries, that would defy every known chemical law – but seemingly it was a very simple yet sophisticated entity in terms of its genes and proteins, and was powered by proton currents rather than fermentation, but with membranes that are no longer seen in cells today. To compound the point, back then the oceans were very different to what they are now; the primordial oceans were saturated with carbon dioxide, making them acidic, whereas the seas today have more alkaline. Also there was practically no oxygen, and without oxygen, iron dissolves readily – and we can see from our geological studies that the vast banded-iron formations around the world are a result of iron that once dissolved in oceans. As oxygen levels slowly rose, billions of tonnes of iron precipitated out as rust. This almost certainly means that the interface between the alkaline vents and the primordial seas would have been much more conducive to biochemistry than they are today – in fact scientists have found ancient vents with a similar structure and even reproduced them in the lab.

So the theory that ancient alkaline hydrothermal vents were the incubators for life looks very plausible, particularly if hydrogen and carbon dioxide did in fact react in those vents to form simple organic molecules and also release energy. But I see a problem. hydrogen with carbon dioxide may well be central to life, but energy is required in the first place to engender this process, so much so that it is probably nigh-on impossible for bacteria to grow by chemistry alone without the catalysing energy. Let me offer an analogy. Think of the energy stored by ATP as equivalent to £1. If it takes £1 to kick-start a reaction, which then releases £2, in theory a cell has gained £1. However, if the only way a cell has to store energy is to make ATP, it can make only one molecule; to make two new ATPs would cost £2. So one ATP would have been spent to gain one ATP, and the spare change wasted as heat. That's not consistent with being alive. Yet Nick Lane is suggesting that the hydrothermal vents would provide a good explanation to this problem, claiming that::

“The fluid from the vents would have contained reactive molecules such as methyl sulphide, which would generate acetyl phosphate, a molecule that some bacteria today still use interchangeably with ATP. What's more, the natural proton gradient would have supplemented this energy source by spontaneously generating another primitive form of ATP called pyrophosphate. Pyrophosphate also acts in much the same way as ATP and is still used alongside ATP by many bacteria and archaea. These bacteria speed up its production using a simple enzyme called pyrophosphatase”.

So the common ancestor of life could harness the natural proton gradient of ancient vents to produce energy, and by some reversing process store energy too, as this system seems to allow cells to save up small amounts of energy, much the same as we save up our loose change and buy something so it no longer becomes waste, which is equivalent to saying that the proton gradients enable cells to grow and then, by their accumulative energy, leave the vents. This means it may well be true that the last common ancestor of all life was not a frivolously spending cell at all, but a thrifty rock riddled with bubbly iron-sulphur membranes that engendered the energy for primordial biochemical reactions. This natural flow reactor, power-driven by hydrogen and proton gradients, catalysed organic chemicals and brought about proto-life (both bacteria and the archaea) that would become the first living cells – eventually producing you, me and the oak tree. Given the intractability of this subject and the vast domains of time, it may never be possible to know for sure whether or not life evolved by this mechanism, or whether the initial elemental organism with the properties of self-replication happened just once (maybe only once in the entire history of the universe) or several times. But a good case may have been made that hydrothermal vents had the answer.

Humans: The Culmination Of Biological Evolution

Cambridge cosmologist Martin Rees thinks that human evolution is just the beginning of what we might become. He says:

"The stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture. We and the biosphere are the outcome of more than four billion years of evolution, but most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. That's not so. Our Sun is less than half way through its life. We're maybe only at the half way stage. Any creatures witnessing the Sun's demise 6 billion years hence won't be human — they'll be as different from us as we are from bacteria."

I disagree, on two counts:

1) Theological disagreement = God says we are the purpose of His creation, intended to be made in His image; thus if we could look forward a few million years henceforward and still find ourlselves here, we would, in my view, still find almost all of the commonalities that make us 'human'.

2) Scientific / Philosophical disagreement = Mankind has reached a stage at which we have enough control over our evolution to see that we remain the culmination of progressive evolution; that is to say, we have acquired the knowledge and intelligence to reap the benefits of human states but to also curb dangerous advancements and deploy optimal science.

Is The Universe Friendly?

As I was looking through some of my old writings, I found some thoughts about existence that I had written in my early twenties – several years before I became a Christian. I had pondered the question once posited by Einstein – he enquired ‘Is the universe friendly?’ – A question on which he placed great importance. Here are a few of my ponderings on the subject.

The Purposeful Universe by James Knight
There is a misconception in humanistic terms; it is the belief that ‘improvement’ is part of the universe’s immutable law. But really, this is not how the grand theories of evolution work. It is a mistake to regard progression as the predominant rule of evolution, for in fact, in the domain of Darwinism, degeneration outnumbers progression. Moreover, everything suggests that organic life, in comparison to the timescales we are using here, is going to be quite transient - if the sun doesn’t make us a crisp, and the andromeda galaxy doesn’t collide into our own, the big crunch will get us all eventually.

Please do not misunderstand me, I am not for one moment suggesting that the transient nature of human life provides any ground for diminishing our attempts to make a harmonious existence. If the universe is unremittingly thoughtless, there is no reason why we should imitate it. So this futility from which the universe is made up should not affect our outlook towards fellow human beings, but it should most definitely affect our outlook towards our own and thoughts and feelings regarding existence.

Now it seems to me that mankind could take three different approaches to this news. In the first place, one could become overly pessimistic and live life as negatively as it is humanly possible, giving in to all kinds of instincts lusts and desires. In the second place, one could claim that human reality is much greater than the vicissitudes of our universe, and that far beyond what we know lies a very different reality, perhaps even Deity. This method could be used to alter the view that the universe is ultimately futile, and replace it with a view that there might be hope after all, while still doing nothing about it. Or thirdly, one could accept the situation that we are faced with and endeavour to do something about it – something that ensures to the best of our ability that whatever the extent to which the universe is unfriendly, we will make the very most of out time on earth..

Straight away I imagine the third method is most pleasing to your ears. But I think the biggest problem with our feeling towards the futility is this. In calling the universe futile, we are really applying to it the same thought pattern that we might apply to a machine or a political policy. We are, in fact, treating it as if it were designed by someone or something or that it were underpinned by something purposeful. In calling it futile we are incredulously reacting to something that really should be obvious, that the entire cosmos is in no way like something man himself might create. If the universe has produced man then the universe has engendered in him the ability to think. This pattern increases over time, so that now, these past few thousand years, man has gotten into the habit of thinking and has become pretty good at ontology.

And of course our remarkable abilities for cognition adds another angle to the spectre of the futility of the cosmos; where once we thought it was running down and that life was comparably transient, we are now faced with the prospect that we are been guided by something that transcends nature. This seems to be a commonly held belief among many – after all, how many times have you heard someone say “I’m not sure I believe in God, but I believe in ‘something’”?

Now we know full well that we cannot accuse the cosmos or indeed this ‘something’ of being good or bad without admitting the existence of a standard by which it can be measured. And if this standard exists, then something has to be certainly right. If we say that nothing is certainly right, we then have to admit that nothing is certainly wrong either, thereby we would have to give up measuring. And even if we do form a judgement of that ‘something’ behind the universe, we would soon I think be forced to admit that He had to be good – or at least, that is the standard argument on this matter..

It goes roughly like this:

If we, even for a second, accuse the Creator of the universe of being bad, we would have to admit that a bad thing was responsible for creating us, including our mind and reasoning power. And if He created our reasoning power, He also created the part of our reasoning that is rejecting Him for being bad. How then can we trust our judgement if it came from a bad Creator? We cannot reject Him because if we do we would have to reject everything He created, including the moral standard by which He is being judged. If we accept the standard by which we are to judge Him, we then have to concede that He must be good, in fact, He must be a higher standard of good than we actually know. And there is the contradiction that pervades through all theories of supernatural beings that exist, but that the name God cannot be ascribed to them. You have to respect the ultimate good before you even start to criticise Him, and therefore you are admitting the existence of a Supreme Goodness - the existence of one God that stands above good and evil.

What the argument really amounts to is that we have no grounds for saying that our own system of values has a purely naturalistic explanation, for if we do, we should stop using our moral judgements as criticism, because we are saying that they are based on nothing substantial. And we also find that men must stop making values of judgements at all, because if a man is under the impression that all value judgements originated from a malevolent force, he has no moral reason for saying that his mindless judgement is better than the next man’s mindless judgement. The corollary of this, as is often posited, is that even the atheists have to admit that the universe, and man’s place in it, is a lot more ordered, and has a much greater direction, than that which theories of a malevolent creator seem to suggest.

In other words the universe does have a sense of friendliness about it and a background agenda that seems to be made of underwritten rationality. This feeling affects us in a subliminal sense; those who claim that the cosmos is futile also claim that man has a moral obligation to make it less-futile - and that really implies a subliminal desire that the cosmos it not futile after all.

While miracles would not categorically prove that Christianity is true, their occurrence would certainly remove the obstacles of hostility already felt against its claims of supernaturalism. I am not enquiring as to whether the vast array of putative experiences of a religious or miraculous nature can aid us in finding comfort or consolation, we are only interested (at least I am only interested) in what is true and what is false. If the Christians who claimed to have seen miraculous events were merely saying that their imagination of them evoked in them some form of pleasurable psychological hysteria or delirium, I would not be at all interested (save of my interest in human psychology). No, my interest is whether they really happened or not. Whether they did or not, one thing seems abundantly clear – there is an order to existence that seems to hint at some purpose behind it. The universe may seem unfriendly at times, but there seems every reason to believe there is friendliness outside of it.

As a Christian, looking back on this all these years later, I am reassured that even when I had no relationship with God, I had acknowledged a sense of purpose about existence. The indignant atheist who has antipathetic feelings towards what seems to be an unfriendly universe is really, if the truth be known, offering veneration to something that transcends nature; something which he acknowledges as morally authoritative. For if justice and rectitude were really personal opinions that came straight from his own cognition, he would have no business being indignant at the apparent badness of nature.

This sense of purpose is, of course, in accordance with what the Bible says about man’s desire for something greater than the world. Christ says that He is the bread of life, but also that He has overcome the world, thereby asserting that He is the answer both to life on earth, and our eternal existence after it.

In this modern day science has, to many people, taken over from where religion left off. It is thought that science is here to answer all of the questions that religion used to answer wrongly. But this is simply not true. Science covers a great many number of things, but it does not probe beyond the descriptive nature of our immediate observations – it cannot answer the deeper questions of existence.

It is often thought that the whole method of contriving a convincing argument for the supernatural consists in initiating means whereby the incongruities - that is, mistaken assumptions and irrelevancies, can be fractionated and then investigated - with each fraction of the whole put in its rightful place until a proper demarcation, not just of natural and supernatural things is in place, but also between physics and metaphysics. But I do not think this is always clear – after all, if there is a creator God, then the only entities will be Him and creation; the physical and the metaphysical will likely blend together into one creation ex nihilo (out of nothing). Even our abstract thinking can be a progressive shaping of spiritual reality so long as the abstractions are seen in their proper context – reality is creation. Every real physical event, much more every supernatural experience, has behind it, in the long run, the entire Divine plan in which we have a significant role.

Christians attribute meaning to reason by admitting an external force bigger than that of natural law. And as I have argued before in this article here, when atheists attribute thinking to mere events without any external structure, they immediately invalidate thinking in a way that the Christian never does. If thinking was merely an event not conditioned by something outside of itself, we should be forced to admit that a cough or a sneeze could be viewed in the same way as a thought or an idea. Do the naturalists accept this? Of course not, and you can be sure that at every step they will make giant strides towards attempting to add something external to reason while at the same time denying its immaterial nature.

Naturalism is a little like house of cards, the more you try to pile onto it the more vulnerable it becomes, until eventually the structure will come crashing down on the table. Either we must give up hoping to understand anything about ultimate existence – the ontology beyond the descriptions of science - or we must ascribe to thought and reason some external cause; a cause which explains reason and validates its reliability. In doing so we admit that the house of cards is structured by something bigger than itself (as it is in a literal sense in the metaphor). Of course, al this does not prove that Christianity is true - we must rely on other things for this. But it does show that naturalism chops off its own head. It is simply pointless to think of the universe in naturalistic terms and then try to smuggle in thought as a later event within the system. If we want to see reason as reliable we must look outside of the interlocking system; reliable thought cannot be an accidental event in natural universe. Whatever else we are going to decide about our existence, it must be underpinned by this fundamental principle. All these years later I still concur with my thoughts at the end of the essay:

“One thing seems abundantly clear – there is an order to existence that seems to hint at some purpose behind it. The universe may seem unfriendly at times, but there seems every reason to believe there is friendliness outside of it.”

The difference now is that I have discovered this supreme force behind creation is more than just a friendly ‘something’ – He is an all-loving, all-knowing and all-powerful God that can be found in the person of Jesus Christ. The power of God really is upon any who search for His revelation.

Character and Operation: The Crossword of Logic

My explanations about things within the system of creation are roughly similar to Hempnel’s adaptation of John Stuart Mill’s scientific explanation, which appears in the form of a ‘covering law system’ - a dialectal relation between a set of initial conditions and a underpinning law that forms the explanation. My own view, one that allows the greater potential for prediction and perceptive expansion, consists of ‘facts’ that belong to the whole and the set of ‘axioms’ that regulate these ‘facts’ and have direct isomorphisms with the underwritten logical truth of ‘mind’ itself. I use facts and axioms because they result in a more expansive picture than simple laws and conditions, which do not really have much relation to the ‘character’ part of my ‘Character and Operation’ model. Given that this is all going on in one vast Berkeley-esque ‘mind’, I call these ‘axioms’ and ‘facts’ Informational Nexus. A simple explanation takes the form of the following:

A = Axioms
F = Facts
E = Explanation

A1, A2, A3, A4….An
F1, F2, F3, F4…..Fn
Therefore E

A1 to An regulate F1 to Fn, and enable minds to apprehend an ordered set of regularities = the Simulacrum - which is made of an interlocking system of nature that is underwritten by logical truth.

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.

THE ABSOLUTENESS OF REASON.

Unless Reason is seen as an Absolute, all thoughts about ultimate existence are self-discrediting. If Reason came about from purposeless forces in a naturalistic universe then we cannot know anything. If Reason is to mean anything, it must be seen as an original thing, imparted into the simulacrum from God. We have no laws in the universe unless they are operated through a medium complex enough on which, and because of which, they can function. The same must be true of Reason - it must have a primacy, a self-existent primacy from which Reason itself is filtrated into the simulacrum. The Absoluteness of Reason is our biggest reflection of the Aseity of God. The whole universal system could cease to exist and there would be no contradiction (therefore the universe should not exist at all) - the same cannot be said of the Aseity of God or of Reason itself. Reason is the central factor in the interrelation between Creator and creature; that is, if Reason is not underwritten by the primary truth of existence, then we cannot know anything. It is true that the Aseity of God requires that His existence is necessary, but that fact depends on underwritten logic and certainty that our perception of necessity is correct. That is why I think the Absoluteness of Reason is a leap and our perception of necessity only a step (the former provides more certainty than the latter). That is to say one can always claim Anselm’s contention to be one link in the chain, whereas one must always claim that Reason itself ‘is’ the chain - a necessary attachment between Creator and creature. If Reason is valid then it must come from a source of equal validity, a self-evident source of Aseity, which could never be described as ‘non-reason’. To make a claim to the contrary is to invalidate Reason, including the claims of the self*. The truest statement one can make about existence is to say that we exist because God exists. The Absoluteness of Reason is, on its own, strong enough to provide an insurmountable problem for naturalism.

* Because rationality is something attributable to the self.

Annotation: To deny the Absoluteness of Reason is to leave yourself in a self-referential hamster’s wheel of analysis - for all claims to the truth (however small or large) contain within them an attempt to attach themselves to a foundational truth. Any objection to the Absoluteness of Reason leaves the objector with no place to go. To deny the Absoluteness of Reason is to make claims that its origin lies in a past configurational entropy. Whatever form this entropy took and whatever its properties, it was at some stage ‘non-reason’ according to the objectors. This claim by itself ultimately invalidates every form of human reasoning including the claims of the objector himself, as Reason ceases to have any necessary attachment to truth at all. Having seen this, if ontological investigation is to mean anything, Reason must be seen as an Absolute; this being the case, Reason cannot be Absolute unless it is part of an Absolute Source - an echo that belongs to the melody found in Aseity.

My theory about Absolute Reason emerged from two ideas. In the first place, that if reasoning itself is the result of a set of cosmic flukes in a naturalistic cosmos, 1) why should we trust it? And 2) how can it be used to justify a naturalistic explanation and explain anything about ultimate realities? In the second place, if one is to make any sophisticated attempts at solving the ontological problem there must exist propositions that are necessarily true other than by virtue of mere definition emanating from the minds that are defining them. In other words seeing as though it is impossible for minds to transcend the cognitive interface boundaries that separate phenomena and noumena, and seeing as though mental concepts are justified by mental concepts, it seems like a solecism against ‘mind’ - the very toolkit we are using - to postulate a world without some kind of a priori sense to existence - what I call the Absoluteness of Reason.

Tying this in with what we were just talking about at a genetic level - if Absolute Reason is an a priori fact of existence and that Absoluteness comes from God, it seems the most sensible approach to begin analysing the world with that fact in place and working outwards from there; for in doing so, one can see clearly that with something like, say, natural selection, genomes might have evolved information that allows them to influence genetic change and affect their own survival chances, and that does not in any way transgress the Darwinian boundaries of ‘random’ genetic variation and the many other mechanisms in evolution. If genomes can learn about the world though information carrying in natural selection, one must see that intelligence is occurring at every level possible, and therefore in a world underpinned by ‘Reason’ those who are most sensible are the ones that construct their hypotheses and theories by seeing these building blocks both TO reasoning, and OF reasoning, in their proper context.

Moreover, considering that the Simulacrum itself seems to have ‘intelligence’ woven into its subatomic fabric, one ought to be a little more precautionary in what one ascertains holistically. Empty space is unstable, and from nothingness quark-antiquark pairs crystallise and fill space, actually lowering the energy of the vacuum in the process. But quantum uncertainty will not allow the antiquark to reside precisely next to its quark partner, and that wiggle room between them leaves disturbance and, thus, creates energy (the same energy that endows matter with about 95% of its mass). Now we know that all matter is wrapped up in atoms and that itself is only a tiny fraction of a universe dominated by dark matter and dark energy. But effectively, this means that everything we see in space that is (holistically) a different mass to that at a quantum level (for example the earth does not orbit the sun like an electron orbits an atom) came from this same energy; mass such as chairs, tables buildings, etc, comes from energy crystallised out of nothing - even space and time is a condensate that similarly crystallised from nothingness in the earliest moments of the big bang singularity and, further, the tiniest most compressed singularly itself - did that come ex nihilo (from nothing)?

This ought to change our view of Absolute Reason - certainly with respect to the problem of reason coming from non-reason. If chairs, tables and buildings come from energy crystallised out of nothing, then so do bodies - bodies that are able to use reasoning at a supremely advanced level. At a physiological level an intelligent ‘reasoning’ human body is a colony of trillions of cells, each with their own vinculum of components, able to be observed at the quantum level of uncertainty. These cells communicate and cooperate with each other, jointly working towards goals of which the ‘reasoning’ individuals themselves are largely unaware. From the synchronised firing of neurons in the brain and the brainwaves that are testament to them, to the changes in gene expression which underscore the slow pulsation of the circadian rhythm, to the concerted firing of the heart muscle cells which produce the heartbeat necessary for growth and sustained living. The vastly complex interconnections form a vast distributed network which spontaneously takes in sensory information, processes it, forms an ordered cognition, and compels the brain to use intelligent ‘reasoning’ in apprehending fine details about the external world, itself the self same quantum mechanical system that I have just described.

Although it is a complex set of circumstances at the atomic level that makes a human body different from, say, a cloud, a tree, a chainsaw, even stardust, if one zooms in at the lowest levels we are all made up of the same stuff. Now this, it seems to me, leaves us with only two possibilities. Either there is not an Absolute Reason to underpin all of this or there is. If there isn’t then all this subatomic activity at the gritty lower levels is not emergent reasoning, it is simply inert non-intelligent matter serendipitously producing an organism that can self-replicate and (eventually) creatures like us that can use the highest form of rationale in any living thing. Remember that according to the naturalist this comes from gritty non-sentience, in fact, all this comes from energy crystallised out of nothing, and yet it goes on to produce the type of reasoning and extraordinary abilities that we have seen in human beings from our initial bipedal days right through to men and women that can understand the primary principles of nature herself.

When asked by the naturalist to believe that all that came about by accident, I am asked to believe that this stupendous thing we call ‘reasoning’ emerged from something that was once non-reason - a set of cosmic flukes that were never embedded with the designed mechanism to engender any kind of ‘reasoning’ yet went on to engender minds like our own; I am being asked to betray everything that makes sense to me, and in the process, when it comes to the reliability of the naturalist’s position, saw off the only branch that is supporting me. No I find it makes much more sense - the ONLY sense, in fact, if I treat Reason as an Absolute, emanating from a mind that has the properties of Aseity and contains His own explanation - the self-affirming, self-evident truth that we see in Jesus Christ - the one who has made Himself known and can be known by any mind that wishes to know Him.