THE DIVINE SIMULACRUM: Our whole existence is, despite its appearance, a simulacrum of the Divine realm. Aseity solves the apparent problems that are left when descriptive roles in science leave us with as many further questions as satisfactory descriptions. There is nothing in the simulacrum that is self-evident, thus nothing in the simulacrum that can be extricable from the ‘cause’.
Under these premises, to take the position that atheists takes involves being ‘caught up’ in the simulacrum to the extent that its essence becomes opaque. In this sense, the absent-mindedness in postulating ‘no God’ is a little like a character in a novel denying or failing to see or acknowledge the author of that novel. The simulacrum, which is largely made up of matter and has interrelational activity with laws (the Supreme Conceptualism) and outside spiritual activity filtrated in through the Divine hand, consists of Divinely encoded properties that make up the vastly complex universal activity that we observe in nature.
(I) The universe as we know it; that is, the interlocking system of nature, consists of the complex substance we call matter. We, as human beings that are both made up of matter and perceive matter, have tried for centuries to determine what the interlocking system is, how it came about, and how intelligent creatures such as ourselves happen to be in it. The very reason that we are able to ask this question and others like it is because we have the ability to do so (this seems obvious, but there is no reason why we should have this ability unless existence is bootstrapped by something Intelligent and Sentient).
Whatever we think about and wherever we look, thoughts of ‘intelligence’ always seem close by. A brain can make and break a million new connections each second. It can store information for as long as the person lives (sometimes over 100 years - and even longer in some other animals), automatically cataloguing, filing/refiling and editing as necessary. And even more astounding, the brain - after using a range of sensors that sample vibrations, electromagnetic radiation, chemicals and pressure, and after tapping in to memory (neurons participating in self-sustaining bursts of electricity, each possessing the ability to activate or inhibit neighbouring neurons) - can use imaginative abilities to reconstruct simulations of all sorts of things based on the external world.
In one sense ‘intelligence’ seems to be a self-referential loop, a positive circularity, because clearly intelligent minds perceiving what intelligent minds are doing at a neuronal level is different to the neuronal activity itself. When my brain remembers a day trip from my childhood, a specific sequence of neurons must fire at precisely the right time. For this to happen, neurons are connected in a certain way to chemical junctions (synapses). Moreover, considering the fact that proteins (including those that form sysnapses) are constantly destroyed and replaced, it is even more remarkable that we have any long term memory at all - after all, there are no atoms in my brain now that were there at the time of the day trip, and no atoms from the holiday that are here in my mind today. I am a different set of atoms, yet still my memory survives.
The best scientific explanation thus far (at the time of writing) is that methyl are being removed from a gene called ‘calcineurin’ and added to a neighbouring gene. When a cell divides, this cellular memory is passed on, but that of course is very different to the images themselves being passed on. The brain seems to be borrowing a form of cellular memory from developmental biology to use for what we think of as memory. But as I said a moment ago, that is an entirely different type of ‘intelligence’ to my restoring an image in my head that belongs to events 25 years ago in the past. Moreover if one needs a form of ‘intelligence’ for cognitive restoration (as in memory to imagery), that seems to suggest that when cellular memory is occurring it is itself a form of ‘intelligence;’ on which we are zooming in.
In ants we see something that gives the appearance of distributed intelligence, as we zoom in on their nest-building, fungus gardens and other forms of minute sophistication. This distributed intelligence is the result of many single components working together; each ant is like a cog in a larger unit, showing the hallmarks of a sort of corporate intelligence. In actual fact, at a reductionist level, intelligence appears to be an a priori feature at the genetic level too. A single amino acid can be encoded in as many as six different ways, and naturally this means that DNA has the flexibility to carry multiple overlapping messages. Now of course genomes contain more than just genes - they also hold instructions about where in our body and where in our lives to make each protein. But also zooming in at that level has shown that DNA also contains information that makes mutation more likely in some parts of the genome and less likely in others. This means that ‘genome’ has the potential to influence its own evolution, protecting essential DNA sequences in some places while elsewhere unleashing genetic variations that could explore evolutionary possibilities.
But if this is the case, does that mean that not all genetic mutations are random (even random with respect to improvement)?. Not necessarily. Remember we live in a stochastic universe where at a quantum mechanical level we perceive randomness that is ordered enough to produce greater regularity in the cosmos - randomness underwritten by a created order and a uniformity of nature. This probably gives the universe the ability to fine-tune itself, as the intentionality is not found in the subsystems, and I see no reason why the same wouldn’t be true at a genetic level. Even bacteria contains information that seems to randomly focus mutations in certain areas and direct it away in others, but I don’t expect to see the intentionality at that level; in fact, I expect that the cosmic blueprint level in the Creator’s mind, containing every ‘single bit’ plan for every single bit of information, has an overall order and regularity (a Divine plan) that is beyond the comprehension of man.
Therefore when something appears wasteful or uncreated one must realise that that ‘wastefulness’ or ‘uncreatedness’ is the human mind perceiving at a microscopic level something that should be perceived in this sense at a macroscopic level. This is particularly pertinent given that ‘wasteful’ and ‘uncreated’ both involve the imputing of the mind’s own interpretative qualities onto something and the claim that this selfhood proprietary measuring stick is the only thing with which one must do the measuring. But I do not expect reliability or judiciousness from the mind of the man whose first instinctive anti-creation measuring stick is deployed at all times just because the intentionality happens to be embedded in a deeper mystery.
To see how foolish such an approach is, think of it like this. Using William Paley’s old ‘Watchmaker’ argument (an argument brilliantly and comprehensively refuted by Richard Dawkins in his book The Blind Watchmaker) imagine a man zooming in on the intricate details of a watch, observing the atomic motions. He would see at that componential level appearances of seemingly random and unpredictable behaviour in quantum mechanics - in fact, even with the knowledge of all the forces acting between atoms, he would be unable to compute the atoms’ orientation or the overall energy of the system. The ‘order’ of the watch, the clockwork mechanisms and the design as a whole is not observed at a microscopic level but at a holistic level - one can observe the parts at a reductionist level, but putting them together to make a working watch implies intelligent design.
Having seen how silly a man would be if he zoomed in at the random quantum mechanical level and decided that this doesn’t look designed by a watch designer at all, we must observe that the same applies to all things within the Simulacrum and that when we talk of ‘wasteful’ or ‘uncreated’ we are imputing the same misjudgement and injudiciousness as the man zooming in on the watch is. In actual fact, even at the deepest quantum levels, looking for God’s ultimate intentionality seems futile as the cosmos is not amenable to such analysis of ultimate intentionality. Organisation merges in systems of many interacting parts, but it does not follow in the same way for the properties of those parts; therefore if one were to understand the absolute whole - a mathematical picture of every particle in the cosmos - one would still be ill-equipped for understanding organisation at the highest cosmic level, let alone understand God’s cosmic blueprint.
But what we have seen here is 1) that existence itself seems to imply ‘intelligence’, and 2) that the Simulacrum appears to simulate intelligence at every level, as we are able to sample a little bit of what might be a vast intentionality in a cosmic blueprint designed by God.
(II) As soon as we start to analyse human knowledge we find that it is either ideas from the senses, or perceptions, imagination or memory from within the mind. Avoiding as best we can semantic issues when describing the phenomenon that is the human mind, we do all know what the concept ‘mind’ is and we know the difference between various feelings and activities from within the mind.
The first thing we must admit is that neither thoughts, nor knowledge, nor ideas, nor perceptions, nor imagination exist without the mind. Furthermore, our sense-data cannot exist without the mind’s perceptivity. Now outside of the mind we know that physical things exist - my hand, my computer, my bedroom window, etc, and we know that physicality goes on existing despite human minds. In other words, if I died tomorrow the physical objects I described will exist, despite my not being able to perceive them any longer. In human terms objects do not have to be perceived to exist, although it is, of course, true that if I died tomorrow the physical world outside will no longer exist in my own mind; that is, the ideas, perception, imagination and memory of such things will have ceased to exist in MY mind, even though the objects continue to exist.
Now if the interlocking system of creation is a Simulacrum of the Divine Realm; that is, if creation is one great thought sustained by the Divine mind (similar to Berkeley’s Idealism), then obviously it would be contradictory to say that ‘mind’ could cease to exist and yet still objects within the interlocking system could carry on existing. But even though nothing in the Simulacrum exists without the Divine mind, there are simulations of the Divine activity (admittedly much weaker simulations) occurring in our minds, for we are creatures that are part of the interlocking system. Imagination, ideas, perceptions and memories can be nothing but imagination, ideas, perceptions and memories inside of a mind, an a priori part of the self’s first person ontology. Of course these things can be conveyed linguistically so as to resemble a simulation of the original imagination, idea, perception, or memory, but each of these things are exclusive to the mind to which they belong - the same is true of colours, tastes, etc.
In other words, there are, in human terms, things in the Simulacrum that do not require a human mind to exist (motion, substance) and other things that do (ideas, perception) - thus we can say confidently that as there are things with certain qualities that are inseparable from, say, ideas and perception, there are some things that exist only in the human mind, and exist only in the human mind because of the Divine mind. But we also know very well that there are some things the mind cannot do without the real object with which to do it. Picture your own face in your mind, pull some faces and try to imagine exactly what those faces look like and the mind will be limited as to what it can do. Go to a mirror and do the same thing and of course your sense of sight will convey to the mind a better simulation of the real face-pulling event - but it will be to the cost and detriment of the imagination. The face-pulling is its existence in matter and in mind but there is complex dialectic between the two, for the actual pre-conceived imagination of the images is not of course the face-pulling itself.
When I touch a horse chestnut or suck an orange there are certain facts in the activities which are affections only of the mind and are wholly extricable from the material substances themselves. All this is obvious when thought about, but also apparent (although less obvious) is that there is commonality amongst all minds that has an intriguing dialectic with everything else in the Simulacrum. Two people touching a horse chestnut or sucking an orange do not have the exact same experience; in fact their experiences would be different even if the objects were identical. But there seems to be a mind-collectivity in the Simulacrum which is able to distil its first person selfhood ontology from a source greater than the self; in other words, something in the interlocking system that has no other meaning annexed to selfhood ontology except through universal facts - the Divine source itself - that is, the vast thought sustained in the Divine mind.
Just as there are things that cannot be sustained without the human mind, equally there are things attached to the human mind that cannot be sustained without underwritten logic or Absolute Truth - which, as I say in my Theory of Everything, strongly suggests they are ideas from an Absolute Mind with the properties of Aseity. In other words, just as there are parts of the horse chestnut and the orange that have no distinct meaning without human minds, the whole Simulacrum itself has no meaning without sustenance from the Divine mind. If the vast thought from the Divine mind were to cease, the Simulacrum itself would be no more.
However, this leaves us with difficulties. God makes it clear that He is separate from, and above and beyond, creation, therefore if we are to see the Simulacrum as a vast thought in the Divine mind, are we supposed to infer that this vast thought is separate from God Himself; that is, a thought emanating from the Divine mind but not the Divine Himself? At first glance, it might seem so, otherwise He wouldn’t be separate from creation. But I don’t think this necessarily follows. It could be the case that terms like ‘separate’ and ‘over and above’ refers to the greatness of His position and the qualitative distinction between the Simulacrum and the Divine Realm; therefore I can conceive of a situation where God is both sustaining a thought and simultaneously ‘separate’ from that thought and ‘over and above’ that thought. You only have to think of a playwright acting out his next scenes in his head and the vast imaginative potential in his human mind to see the analogue situation of a concept being inextricable and yet having a ‘separate’ and ‘over and above’ demarcation boundary.
If this is the case, it does not necessarily follow that the human mind is separate from physical matter in a similar way, even if our reasoning, ideas, perceptions, imagination and memory are simulations of the Divine properties. In earthly terms, we know things because of our reasoning and because of our senses, but only our reasoning tells us that things exist outside of the human mind. Moreover, because of the Divine activity in the created system it is easier to see how activities outside of the mind can be excited in the mind, as all of these things are occurring in the Divine mind anyway. Thus the dialectal relations between any two things or sets of things within the Simulacrum need not be explicable or receivable in terms of human minds. In other words, the material activity in my brain when I look at a poster and the activity in my mind while this is occurring are probably relational at the top level - in as much as they are part of mind itself - the Divine thinking process.
How spirits can act upon other things in the Simulacrum will always be beyond us in this lifetime, of that I am sure - although there are, of course, ways that such activity can be made manifest through our senses (I myself have seen spirits and other ‘out of the ordinary’ events). So while we admit that physical things do exist according to the mind, it seems that ‘physicality’ is merely a fact about how human minds perceive external things in the Simulacrum. The fact that certain objects feel rough, smooth, hard, soft, hot, and cold, is because that is how the Divine mind caused them to be in relation to our own minds within creation, for almost certainly such concepts need not exist in the Divine realm, they are concepts specific to Simulacrum minds. In other words, the vast thought in the Divine mind transmits to our minds concepts such as rough, smooth, hard, soft, hot, and cold - and while they are physical reality to us, they are still a thought in the Divine mind. To us that IS reality.
Such concepts (along with many others) are the method God has chosen to tell His story of creation and restoration, and I doubt we can have the first clue about how different Heaven will be to this life, as we have, at the moment, only earthly metaphors and earthly imagination and earthly sentience with which to form the cognitive framework and paint the Heavenly picture. What we must remember, as far as such broad subjects go, is that we are only sparsely sampling the Simulacrum, thus the Simulacrum certainly will consist of complexities that could very well support seemingly imperceptible activities through a complex process that was never intended to be fully perceived by the created minds in it. The man that expects to know everything about God’s creation will always be disappointed - and that, I think, adds to the excitement.
While there are different things within the Simulacrum that share the same essence (the essence of all is that the self identifies the essence) - the totality of Simulacrum properties are part of the Divine mind receivable to us with some degree of cognitive externality; that is, in the Aquinasian sense they are ‘universals prior to objects’ - universals in the sense that they are an essence of the Simulacrum itself whether we perceive them or not. Our awareness is the result of universal elements being given to us as ‘sense-data’. When I speak in my Theory of Everything of ‘three’ realms - the Divine Realm, the Simulacrum (everything created) and the Supreme Conceptualism (ultimate laws and sheer potentiality) I mean, of course, with regard to our understanding within the Simulacrum itself, with regard to ‘mind’; for it naturally follows that as there exists only two things 1) God, and 2) creation ex nihilo (everything that is not God, including Supreme Conceptualism), we cannot postulate something that is not God but not created either, for that would be erroneous.
Now with ‘mind’ we must be careful to make an important distinction (for communication purposes within the Simulacrum) between what is ordinarily perceived as miraculous and what is ordinarily perceived as non-miraculous. Now of course everything that is not God is technically a miracle, but in making the distinction, we are following what Christ did and demarcating boundary lines between what should be seen as ordinary or uniform (such as laws of physiology) and what should be seen as ‘contextually’ miraculous - or if you prefer - miracles with the grand miracle (such as when anomalous events happen in physiology - ‘the virgin birth’ and ‘the raising of Lazarus’ are two prime examples). As Jesus Himself clearly intended to show that there are subset miracles with the grand miracle of creation itself, clearly there is an important distinction to make, and it is ‘with’ mind and ‘within’ mind that we are making these distinctions, solely for descriptive purposes and, as I said, for sense-making communication within the Simulacrum. The mind needs the concept of ‘ordinary’ to show that ‘out of the ordinary’ things can happen, otherwise we would have less reason to suspect that there exists anything outside of the interlocking system of nature. Even though the whole of the Simulacrum is a miracle, the ‘out of the ordinary’ things happen for epistemological reasons, for sense-making purposes such as when the (what are to our minds) ordinary laws of physiology are broken or suspended for some ‘out of the ordinary’ event
So, in my view, the idea that when a miracle happens God is ‘interfering’ with creation, and the idea that creation is one big miracle with no anomalous acts are both wrong. I suppose with concepts such as ‘time’ we could say that God has already written the book but He is turning a page at a time - or perhaps more accurately - He created the Simulacrum which has the mechanisms to turn its own pages. But either way, the Simulacrum is being sustained by God, but I do not expect us to understand how He is doing it, other than with metaphorical conjecture. But what we know from the concept of mind is that there is important communicative distinctions that need to be made within the Simulacrum, and I think these distinctions are important steps to our seeing God’s plan for creation - after all, if things like virgin births and resurrections were commonplace, no one would question their context in a wider framework. It is because they are so anomalous that we question the bigger picture and What, or Who, might lurk behind it.
So how does the Supreme Conceptualism (SC) fit in with this? Well, unlike the physiological examples, SC presents us with a different distinction, the distinction between the reified and the non-reified; the distinction between ‘abstract concepts’ and ‘physicalism’. As laws do not seem to be real reified things and are certainly not (in many cases) physical things, SC seems inextricably linked to ‘mind’ - an active sentience on which SC can run. Even in simple terms, if I picture in my mind a snowy day outside and it is, in fact, a warm sunny day with no snow, the first image remains a non-reified concept. But as the concept could not exist without a ‘mind’ on with such a concept would run - this, as I argue in my Theory of Everything, gives us a big hint that ‘mind’ is the ultimate primacy behind existence itself. And as you have also seen in my Theory of Everything, if we have the Divine mind, and if SC is inextricable from mind and SC is interrelational and isomorphic with the Simulacrum, I have contended that the Simulacrum IS ‘mind’, particularly given the fact that human minds have direct isomorphisms with noumenal reality.
Under these premises, to take the position that atheists takes involves being ‘caught up’ in the simulacrum to the extent that its essence becomes opaque. In this sense, the absent-mindedness in postulating ‘no God’ is a little like a character in a novel denying or failing to see or acknowledge the author of that novel. The simulacrum, which is largely made up of matter and has interrelational activity with laws (the Supreme Conceptualism) and outside spiritual activity filtrated in through the Divine hand, consists of Divinely encoded properties that make up the vastly complex universal activity that we observe in nature.
(I) The universe as we know it; that is, the interlocking system of nature, consists of the complex substance we call matter. We, as human beings that are both made up of matter and perceive matter, have tried for centuries to determine what the interlocking system is, how it came about, and how intelligent creatures such as ourselves happen to be in it. The very reason that we are able to ask this question and others like it is because we have the ability to do so (this seems obvious, but there is no reason why we should have this ability unless existence is bootstrapped by something Intelligent and Sentient).
Whatever we think about and wherever we look, thoughts of ‘intelligence’ always seem close by. A brain can make and break a million new connections each second. It can store information for as long as the person lives (sometimes over 100 years - and even longer in some other animals), automatically cataloguing, filing/refiling and editing as necessary. And even more astounding, the brain - after using a range of sensors that sample vibrations, electromagnetic radiation, chemicals and pressure, and after tapping in to memory (neurons participating in self-sustaining bursts of electricity, each possessing the ability to activate or inhibit neighbouring neurons) - can use imaginative abilities to reconstruct simulations of all sorts of things based on the external world.
In one sense ‘intelligence’ seems to be a self-referential loop, a positive circularity, because clearly intelligent minds perceiving what intelligent minds are doing at a neuronal level is different to the neuronal activity itself. When my brain remembers a day trip from my childhood, a specific sequence of neurons must fire at precisely the right time. For this to happen, neurons are connected in a certain way to chemical junctions (synapses). Moreover, considering the fact that proteins (including those that form sysnapses) are constantly destroyed and replaced, it is even more remarkable that we have any long term memory at all - after all, there are no atoms in my brain now that were there at the time of the day trip, and no atoms from the holiday that are here in my mind today. I am a different set of atoms, yet still my memory survives.
The best scientific explanation thus far (at the time of writing) is that methyl are being removed from a gene called ‘calcineurin’ and added to a neighbouring gene. When a cell divides, this cellular memory is passed on, but that of course is very different to the images themselves being passed on. The brain seems to be borrowing a form of cellular memory from developmental biology to use for what we think of as memory. But as I said a moment ago, that is an entirely different type of ‘intelligence’ to my restoring an image in my head that belongs to events 25 years ago in the past. Moreover if one needs a form of ‘intelligence’ for cognitive restoration (as in memory to imagery), that seems to suggest that when cellular memory is occurring it is itself a form of ‘intelligence;’ on which we are zooming in.
In ants we see something that gives the appearance of distributed intelligence, as we zoom in on their nest-building, fungus gardens and other forms of minute sophistication. This distributed intelligence is the result of many single components working together; each ant is like a cog in a larger unit, showing the hallmarks of a sort of corporate intelligence. In actual fact, at a reductionist level, intelligence appears to be an a priori feature at the genetic level too. A single amino acid can be encoded in as many as six different ways, and naturally this means that DNA has the flexibility to carry multiple overlapping messages. Now of course genomes contain more than just genes - they also hold instructions about where in our body and where in our lives to make each protein. But also zooming in at that level has shown that DNA also contains information that makes mutation more likely in some parts of the genome and less likely in others. This means that ‘genome’ has the potential to influence its own evolution, protecting essential DNA sequences in some places while elsewhere unleashing genetic variations that could explore evolutionary possibilities.
But if this is the case, does that mean that not all genetic mutations are random (even random with respect to improvement)?. Not necessarily. Remember we live in a stochastic universe where at a quantum mechanical level we perceive randomness that is ordered enough to produce greater regularity in the cosmos - randomness underwritten by a created order and a uniformity of nature. This probably gives the universe the ability to fine-tune itself, as the intentionality is not found in the subsystems, and I see no reason why the same wouldn’t be true at a genetic level. Even bacteria contains information that seems to randomly focus mutations in certain areas and direct it away in others, but I don’t expect to see the intentionality at that level; in fact, I expect that the cosmic blueprint level in the Creator’s mind, containing every ‘single bit’ plan for every single bit of information, has an overall order and regularity (a Divine plan) that is beyond the comprehension of man.
Therefore when something appears wasteful or uncreated one must realise that that ‘wastefulness’ or ‘uncreatedness’ is the human mind perceiving at a microscopic level something that should be perceived in this sense at a macroscopic level. This is particularly pertinent given that ‘wasteful’ and ‘uncreated’ both involve the imputing of the mind’s own interpretative qualities onto something and the claim that this selfhood proprietary measuring stick is the only thing with which one must do the measuring. But I do not expect reliability or judiciousness from the mind of the man whose first instinctive anti-creation measuring stick is deployed at all times just because the intentionality happens to be embedded in a deeper mystery.
To see how foolish such an approach is, think of it like this. Using William Paley’s old ‘Watchmaker’ argument (an argument brilliantly and comprehensively refuted by Richard Dawkins in his book The Blind Watchmaker) imagine a man zooming in on the intricate details of a watch, observing the atomic motions. He would see at that componential level appearances of seemingly random and unpredictable behaviour in quantum mechanics - in fact, even with the knowledge of all the forces acting between atoms, he would be unable to compute the atoms’ orientation or the overall energy of the system. The ‘order’ of the watch, the clockwork mechanisms and the design as a whole is not observed at a microscopic level but at a holistic level - one can observe the parts at a reductionist level, but putting them together to make a working watch implies intelligent design.
Having seen how silly a man would be if he zoomed in at the random quantum mechanical level and decided that this doesn’t look designed by a watch designer at all, we must observe that the same applies to all things within the Simulacrum and that when we talk of ‘wasteful’ or ‘uncreated’ we are imputing the same misjudgement and injudiciousness as the man zooming in on the watch is. In actual fact, even at the deepest quantum levels, looking for God’s ultimate intentionality seems futile as the cosmos is not amenable to such analysis of ultimate intentionality. Organisation merges in systems of many interacting parts, but it does not follow in the same way for the properties of those parts; therefore if one were to understand the absolute whole - a mathematical picture of every particle in the cosmos - one would still be ill-equipped for understanding organisation at the highest cosmic level, let alone understand God’s cosmic blueprint.
But what we have seen here is 1) that existence itself seems to imply ‘intelligence’, and 2) that the Simulacrum appears to simulate intelligence at every level, as we are able to sample a little bit of what might be a vast intentionality in a cosmic blueprint designed by God.
(II) As soon as we start to analyse human knowledge we find that it is either ideas from the senses, or perceptions, imagination or memory from within the mind. Avoiding as best we can semantic issues when describing the phenomenon that is the human mind, we do all know what the concept ‘mind’ is and we know the difference between various feelings and activities from within the mind.
The first thing we must admit is that neither thoughts, nor knowledge, nor ideas, nor perceptions, nor imagination exist without the mind. Furthermore, our sense-data cannot exist without the mind’s perceptivity. Now outside of the mind we know that physical things exist - my hand, my computer, my bedroom window, etc, and we know that physicality goes on existing despite human minds. In other words, if I died tomorrow the physical objects I described will exist, despite my not being able to perceive them any longer. In human terms objects do not have to be perceived to exist, although it is, of course, true that if I died tomorrow the physical world outside will no longer exist in my own mind; that is, the ideas, perception, imagination and memory of such things will have ceased to exist in MY mind, even though the objects continue to exist.
Now if the interlocking system of creation is a Simulacrum of the Divine Realm; that is, if creation is one great thought sustained by the Divine mind (similar to Berkeley’s Idealism), then obviously it would be contradictory to say that ‘mind’ could cease to exist and yet still objects within the interlocking system could carry on existing. But even though nothing in the Simulacrum exists without the Divine mind, there are simulations of the Divine activity (admittedly much weaker simulations) occurring in our minds, for we are creatures that are part of the interlocking system. Imagination, ideas, perceptions and memories can be nothing but imagination, ideas, perceptions and memories inside of a mind, an a priori part of the self’s first person ontology. Of course these things can be conveyed linguistically so as to resemble a simulation of the original imagination, idea, perception, or memory, but each of these things are exclusive to the mind to which they belong - the same is true of colours, tastes, etc.
In other words, there are, in human terms, things in the Simulacrum that do not require a human mind to exist (motion, substance) and other things that do (ideas, perception) - thus we can say confidently that as there are things with certain qualities that are inseparable from, say, ideas and perception, there are some things that exist only in the human mind, and exist only in the human mind because of the Divine mind. But we also know very well that there are some things the mind cannot do without the real object with which to do it. Picture your own face in your mind, pull some faces and try to imagine exactly what those faces look like and the mind will be limited as to what it can do. Go to a mirror and do the same thing and of course your sense of sight will convey to the mind a better simulation of the real face-pulling event - but it will be to the cost and detriment of the imagination. The face-pulling is its existence in matter and in mind but there is complex dialectic between the two, for the actual pre-conceived imagination of the images is not of course the face-pulling itself.
When I touch a horse chestnut or suck an orange there are certain facts in the activities which are affections only of the mind and are wholly extricable from the material substances themselves. All this is obvious when thought about, but also apparent (although less obvious) is that there is commonality amongst all minds that has an intriguing dialectic with everything else in the Simulacrum. Two people touching a horse chestnut or sucking an orange do not have the exact same experience; in fact their experiences would be different even if the objects were identical. But there seems to be a mind-collectivity in the Simulacrum which is able to distil its first person selfhood ontology from a source greater than the self; in other words, something in the interlocking system that has no other meaning annexed to selfhood ontology except through universal facts - the Divine source itself - that is, the vast thought sustained in the Divine mind.
Just as there are things that cannot be sustained without the human mind, equally there are things attached to the human mind that cannot be sustained without underwritten logic or Absolute Truth - which, as I say in my Theory of Everything, strongly suggests they are ideas from an Absolute Mind with the properties of Aseity. In other words, just as there are parts of the horse chestnut and the orange that have no distinct meaning without human minds, the whole Simulacrum itself has no meaning without sustenance from the Divine mind. If the vast thought from the Divine mind were to cease, the Simulacrum itself would be no more.
However, this leaves us with difficulties. God makes it clear that He is separate from, and above and beyond, creation, therefore if we are to see the Simulacrum as a vast thought in the Divine mind, are we supposed to infer that this vast thought is separate from God Himself; that is, a thought emanating from the Divine mind but not the Divine Himself? At first glance, it might seem so, otherwise He wouldn’t be separate from creation. But I don’t think this necessarily follows. It could be the case that terms like ‘separate’ and ‘over and above’ refers to the greatness of His position and the qualitative distinction between the Simulacrum and the Divine Realm; therefore I can conceive of a situation where God is both sustaining a thought and simultaneously ‘separate’ from that thought and ‘over and above’ that thought. You only have to think of a playwright acting out his next scenes in his head and the vast imaginative potential in his human mind to see the analogue situation of a concept being inextricable and yet having a ‘separate’ and ‘over and above’ demarcation boundary.
If this is the case, it does not necessarily follow that the human mind is separate from physical matter in a similar way, even if our reasoning, ideas, perceptions, imagination and memory are simulations of the Divine properties. In earthly terms, we know things because of our reasoning and because of our senses, but only our reasoning tells us that things exist outside of the human mind. Moreover, because of the Divine activity in the created system it is easier to see how activities outside of the mind can be excited in the mind, as all of these things are occurring in the Divine mind anyway. Thus the dialectal relations between any two things or sets of things within the Simulacrum need not be explicable or receivable in terms of human minds. In other words, the material activity in my brain when I look at a poster and the activity in my mind while this is occurring are probably relational at the top level - in as much as they are part of mind itself - the Divine thinking process.
How spirits can act upon other things in the Simulacrum will always be beyond us in this lifetime, of that I am sure - although there are, of course, ways that such activity can be made manifest through our senses (I myself have seen spirits and other ‘out of the ordinary’ events). So while we admit that physical things do exist according to the mind, it seems that ‘physicality’ is merely a fact about how human minds perceive external things in the Simulacrum. The fact that certain objects feel rough, smooth, hard, soft, hot, and cold, is because that is how the Divine mind caused them to be in relation to our own minds within creation, for almost certainly such concepts need not exist in the Divine realm, they are concepts specific to Simulacrum minds. In other words, the vast thought in the Divine mind transmits to our minds concepts such as rough, smooth, hard, soft, hot, and cold - and while they are physical reality to us, they are still a thought in the Divine mind. To us that IS reality.
Such concepts (along with many others) are the method God has chosen to tell His story of creation and restoration, and I doubt we can have the first clue about how different Heaven will be to this life, as we have, at the moment, only earthly metaphors and earthly imagination and earthly sentience with which to form the cognitive framework and paint the Heavenly picture. What we must remember, as far as such broad subjects go, is that we are only sparsely sampling the Simulacrum, thus the Simulacrum certainly will consist of complexities that could very well support seemingly imperceptible activities through a complex process that was never intended to be fully perceived by the created minds in it. The man that expects to know everything about God’s creation will always be disappointed - and that, I think, adds to the excitement.
While there are different things within the Simulacrum that share the same essence (the essence of all is that the self identifies the essence) - the totality of Simulacrum properties are part of the Divine mind receivable to us with some degree of cognitive externality; that is, in the Aquinasian sense they are ‘universals prior to objects’ - universals in the sense that they are an essence of the Simulacrum itself whether we perceive them or not. Our awareness is the result of universal elements being given to us as ‘sense-data’. When I speak in my Theory of Everything of ‘three’ realms - the Divine Realm, the Simulacrum (everything created) and the Supreme Conceptualism (ultimate laws and sheer potentiality) I mean, of course, with regard to our understanding within the Simulacrum itself, with regard to ‘mind’; for it naturally follows that as there exists only two things 1) God, and 2) creation ex nihilo (everything that is not God, including Supreme Conceptualism), we cannot postulate something that is not God but not created either, for that would be erroneous.
Now with ‘mind’ we must be careful to make an important distinction (for communication purposes within the Simulacrum) between what is ordinarily perceived as miraculous and what is ordinarily perceived as non-miraculous. Now of course everything that is not God is technically a miracle, but in making the distinction, we are following what Christ did and demarcating boundary lines between what should be seen as ordinary or uniform (such as laws of physiology) and what should be seen as ‘contextually’ miraculous - or if you prefer - miracles with the grand miracle (such as when anomalous events happen in physiology - ‘the virgin birth’ and ‘the raising of Lazarus’ are two prime examples). As Jesus Himself clearly intended to show that there are subset miracles with the grand miracle of creation itself, clearly there is an important distinction to make, and it is ‘with’ mind and ‘within’ mind that we are making these distinctions, solely for descriptive purposes and, as I said, for sense-making communication within the Simulacrum. The mind needs the concept of ‘ordinary’ to show that ‘out of the ordinary’ things can happen, otherwise we would have less reason to suspect that there exists anything outside of the interlocking system of nature. Even though the whole of the Simulacrum is a miracle, the ‘out of the ordinary’ things happen for epistemological reasons, for sense-making purposes such as when the (what are to our minds) ordinary laws of physiology are broken or suspended for some ‘out of the ordinary’ event
So, in my view, the idea that when a miracle happens God is ‘interfering’ with creation, and the idea that creation is one big miracle with no anomalous acts are both wrong. I suppose with concepts such as ‘time’ we could say that God has already written the book but He is turning a page at a time - or perhaps more accurately - He created the Simulacrum which has the mechanisms to turn its own pages. But either way, the Simulacrum is being sustained by God, but I do not expect us to understand how He is doing it, other than with metaphorical conjecture. But what we know from the concept of mind is that there is important communicative distinctions that need to be made within the Simulacrum, and I think these distinctions are important steps to our seeing God’s plan for creation - after all, if things like virgin births and resurrections were commonplace, no one would question their context in a wider framework. It is because they are so anomalous that we question the bigger picture and What, or Who, might lurk behind it.
So how does the Supreme Conceptualism (SC) fit in with this? Well, unlike the physiological examples, SC presents us with a different distinction, the distinction between the reified and the non-reified; the distinction between ‘abstract concepts’ and ‘physicalism’. As laws do not seem to be real reified things and are certainly not (in many cases) physical things, SC seems inextricably linked to ‘mind’ - an active sentience on which SC can run. Even in simple terms, if I picture in my mind a snowy day outside and it is, in fact, a warm sunny day with no snow, the first image remains a non-reified concept. But as the concept could not exist without a ‘mind’ on with such a concept would run - this, as I argue in my Theory of Everything, gives us a big hint that ‘mind’ is the ultimate primacy behind existence itself. And as you have also seen in my Theory of Everything, if we have the Divine mind, and if SC is inextricable from mind and SC is interrelational and isomorphic with the Simulacrum, I have contended that the Simulacrum IS ‘mind’, particularly given the fact that human minds have direct isomorphisms with noumenal reality.
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