6. The Unknowable Is the Ground of Whatever Is Known

The Intention to Know 

The truth conditions of the world without the evolved subject of an intention must mean without a motivated intention because the evolutionary motivations of survival and reproduction warped the intention to such a degree as to not be capable of corresponding to the truth. But if truth is not related to the evolved intention, then to what intention can it be related? Is there an intention that is beyond the motivated intentions formed by the evolutionary pressures of natural selection? The intention is the relation between motivation and awareness, which is why it includes both in its definition. The absolute limit of intention is the limit of whatever motivates awareness, which in this case is survival and reproduction. The correspondence of truth must be either the difference related by, or unified by, a sensation, or by a concept.  

Information Theory’s definition of informative here is the “difference that makes a difference,” or what is counter to the continuity of expectation, famously formulated by Claude Shannon as “surprise.” Without the disruption of continuity, there is no awareness. For example, the difference outlined above as the baby’s surprise at the temperature shift from the womb to the outside is a disruption of continuity that produces the baby’s consciousness of temperature. There is no information about temperature in the womb because information’s sensory or conceptual truth is the correspondence that unifies the temperature of the womb with the difference of the delivery room. This unification of difference occurs according to the evolved intention of a sensory apparatus. Whatever truth without a motivated intention is, it isn’t an accessible truth, because beyond this threshold, there is no difference of which to be aware or for which truth to correspond to. It is certainly imaginable that there is truth beyond our particular intentions because there may be other intentions in the Universe besides ours.  

But there is no truth outside of intention because truth is the correspondence between intention and the Universe that unifies difference and in so doing constructs both the unity of the intention and of the Universe. Absolute truth is like the absolute information of the Planck Unit because it is both the limit and the horizon of truth. Whatever is beyond the relation of intention to the Universe, is both beyond awareness and truth because it is beyond the motivated unification of difference given by the evolved, or relational, intention. If the relation of the intention to the Universe is motivated by something other than survival or reproduction, then there would be some other ground of truthas is claimed by the poet about the truth of beauty. But there is no truth beyond intention, poetic, scientific, or otherwise. 

Evolutionary biology demonstrates another way to conceptualize the unbridgeable gap between being and knowing that renders knowing not just incomplete but not related to an absolute truth, but rather to a relative truth of a motivated intention. Effots to make truth absolute by relating it to an absolute limit work in so far as they establish truth on the ground of a universal limit, but they fail to eliminate the relativity of intention. We see the world how we need to see the world to survive and to reproduce and not how it is “in-itself.” Whatever else the “noumenal” might mean, it seems to mean that our knowledge doesn’t correspond to “reality” in whatever way that might be defined without the intentional unification of difference into the objects of perception. Our knowledge corresponds to the structures of our sensory and conceptual intention, which according to evolutionary biology is for the maintenance of biological homeostasis and genetic advantage and not for the truth of whatever there is, without this motivated intention. 

What may appear as “necessary and sufficient” to our intention, doesn’t correspond to any necessary and sufficient reasons in some ultimate sense, but only in relation to what appears as if in casual relation according to our biological goals. The psycho-phenomenological intention can be reduced to the intention for biological homeostasis and the continuation of our genetic lines. If we are, as evolutionary biology depicts us, prediction machines, knowing can only ever disclose that which relates to the evolutionary advantages of accurate predictions relative to our biological goals of uncertainty reduction. As has been noted by several thinkers, most famously by Nietzsche, the “Will to Truth” is a disguised “Will to Power.” 

A third type of pessimism about complete knowing is that held by some Quantum Theorists that the Universe itself is fundamentally incomplete, so that part of what is, can’t be determined because it has neither been actualizedfrom potential into the virtual realm of the possible, nor has it been determined as a conceptual or phenomenal object. The first two pessimist views about the possibility of complete knowing had to do with a limit within knowing itself, which may or may not reflect a constitutively incomplete Universe, which would be a limit within being itself. But this third sort of pessimism is pessimistic about more than knowledge but also being because it holds that the constitutive incompletion within knowing reflects the incompletion within being, but this pessimism can be understood positively as the incompletion that constitutes the Universe, in much the same way that the nothing of the beyond of relation constitutes the limit and ground of the relationality necessary for knowing outlined above.  

An incomplete Universe is posited by those who believe that the Universe isn’t a determined “Block Universe,” but a yet-to-be determined, or open, Universe that contains actual degrees of freedom, so that part of what is,includes what isn’t yet, as well as what might never be. What isn’t yet is the nothing from which whatever there is, is birthed, or what Hegal called the “nonbeing” that constituted being. Some physicists have begun to realize that something and nothing are really two modes of same thing, just as matter and energy, or body and spirit, are now mostly considered under this same formulation of “Dual Aspect Monism.”  

The nonduality of Dual Aspect Monism can be applied to the relation of something and nothing, so that each is a different mode of the same monad. Nothing can be defined as an indetectable homogeneity of being without difference. Something is then differentiated being because it is the same nothing but now marked by heterogeneity and therefore perceivable, much like how temperature emerges out of the nothing of the womb in the difference of the delivery room. In whatever sense temperature was there before its perception, it had the ontology of any other absence. It was the part of what is that isn’t, or it was the imperceivable mode of the relation of what is to what isn’t, which means that it was a potential that hadn’t been actualized into a possibility yet. But its ontological status hasn’t changed whether it is actualized into possibility or not, so “isn’t” is just as ontologically real as “is.” Just as possibly is a part of what is whether it is realized or not, so is the nothing of potential that is ontologically prior to that possibility. The sensory apparatus of the in-utero fetus was designed by an evolutionary process that related potential to the limit of adaptive necessity, so that its body’s sensory apparatuses form actual possibility spaces.  

A sensory system is a possibility space for the realization of bodily intensities, which is the relation of different sensory percepts via a bodily category or rule like temperature, but a body’s sensory systems aren’t necessary categories, which is the disjunction in evolutionary biology and truth. Temperature may seem like a necessary category, which is what some philosophers call a “natural kind,” but it is contingent because it is a relation of difference or a contingent unity of multiplicity that is more like a habit than a classical cause. All categories, kinds, or identities relate differences like a differential equation. The “necessity” of a differential equation is arbitrary because its “equality” is the relation of difference, which forms a temporary unity from difference like a set in Set Theory groups a series according to a rule or definition.  

The unity of a set relates contingency to necessity because the conditions of belonging are contingently defined but once defined become necessary. This is the same for any unified multiplicity, which is why objects of any kind are often described in terms of sets. An object is a series of parts unified by its intention, or its definition. The whole isn’t a necessary grouping, but to be whole, a conditional object must establish its internal necessity by setting up thenecessary conditions of its wholeness. For example, the relations of the parts of a body are necessary but only relative to the intention of the body to be whole, or to be one unified multiplicity, in relation to the evolutionary intentions of survival and reproduction.  

This relation between necessity and contingency is the relation between unity and multiplicity, or repetition and difference, as Deleuze would have it, that was first explained by Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem as the relation between the contingent definition of the set and the series of differences unified by the set. The necessity of the definition of the set, or of the truth of the definition, can’t be established from within the set itself. The outside of the set, which is its definition, or intention, is contingent while the inside of the set, which is what belongs or doesn’t, is necessary, or “true.” And this internal truth is only necessary, or “provable,” in relation to the contingent, or arbitrary, definition, which unifies the multiplicity of parts into a contingent whole. The openness of truth, or of knowledge, is in the necessary relation between the external contingency of intention versus the internal necessity orconsistency of its truth.  

Another way to think about the irreducible incompletion of knowledge about what is, is to consider this relation between necessity and contingency further. The gap within knowing cannot be determined because the Universe is a contingent becoming and therefore constitutively indeterminate, or incomplete. The Universe limits what can be known about it because indeterminacy is built into its becoming. Whether those degrees of freedom are available to an actual conscious selector is a bone of great contention in the many forms of the classical as well as the modern, philosophical debate about freedom versus determinism. The determination of causality breaks down at the subatomiclevel in which electrons seem to flicker in and out of existence without cause on a quantum field, so that probabilistic descriptions replace necessary and sufficient reasons.  

Are There Any Degrees of Freedom? 

On the macro level, the behavior of some complex systems still must be described probabilistically, but this lack of information about direct, material causality is assumed to be a limitation of the inputs, and not a lack of determinacy about complexity itself. In the “human” sciences, the lack of causal description in favor of corollaries has to do with the “hidden variables” of human psychology and their subsequent behavioral outcomes. For example, criminology’s use of statistical analyses has yielded a great deal of information about “causes and conditions,” but only as correlations and not as the necessary and sufficient reasons of physical causality. Criminology’s probabilities are like Quantum’s in that they are determinate in the sense that they are accurate predictors of general outcomes but can’t determine the outcome of any particular instance. In as much as Criminology is a science, it must hold that with more information about the “hidden variables” of human psychology and behavior, its determinations will be less corollary and more causal. 

However, the relation between indeterminacy and determination outlined above demonstrates that indeterminacy is necessary to any determination in as much as a possibility space is the relation of indeterminacy todetermination. The realization of a possibility is the determination of the relation between indeterminacy and determination. However, a strict Determinist would insist that its determination all the way down. Whatever appears as if indeterminate is an illusion of psychology or of the intentionality of thought. For the Determinist, the apparently random pobablities of quantum fluctuations only appear as if random because there are “hidden variables” that are yet to be uncovered, but once they are, then knowledge about their causes will be complete as in completely determinate. For the Criminologist who takes science seriously, as the neuro-biologist Robert Sapolsky does, then an individual’scriminal behavior is completely predictable given enough information about his environment and biology. Criminology’s continual reliance on probabilities could hypothetically be resolved as more information, particularly about human psychology and sociology, is discovered. 

Sapolsky doesn’t necessarily deny that indeterminacy means that things could have gone one way or another. The definition of freedom or of choice is the actual possibility that “things could have gone otherwise.” However, most Determinists deny that there are any actual degrees of freedom given by indeterminacy, so that whatever “selections” are made, they were necessarily made, either by a blind selector, like a physical principle, or by a selector sufferingfrom the delusion of freedom. So, things could have gone differently, but only if the prior determinations had been different, which is why the “multiple universes” of modal logic and now of some forms of deterministic quantum theory are contingent in the sense of multiple, or infinitely many, but completely determined in themselves. For the Determinist, the extraordinary resolution of the relation between contingency and necessity, or between indeterminacy and determination, is a split at each point of the realization of a possibility into many novel, physical universes. It may seem odd that physicalists have resorted to a solution that is without a physical explanation, like any hint at an explanation of the physical basis for, or substrate of, the creation of these multiple universes, or any account of how one might verify of falsify their physical existence, but this is the present situation for most Determinists. The only information currently available about any of these other universes is that which can be obtained through the markedly non-physical thoughts of modal logicians. 

Regardless of whether actual possibility contains any degrees of freedom or if its freedom is only the user’s illusion of psychology, there can be no complete knowledge about the becoming of the Universe because the indeterminacy of its becoming hasn’t been fully determined or realized yet. The becoming of the Universe is the relation of determinate being to the indeterminate nonbeing. Again, even if the indeterminacy of becoming is an illusion made by the inaccessibility of the other determinate universes created at the moment of any given realization, complete knowledge about whatever there is, isn’t possible. Although Einstein did not accept multiple universes, they can be made to  accord with his “Block Universe” because each universe is fully determined by the realization of possibility, but knowledge of the whole, or of the Universe of all the other universes, is limited by the observer’s location in space-time.  

But knowledge is not only limited by that for the followers of the “Copenhagen Interpretation” of Quantum indeterminacy, forwarded most famously by Neils Bohr as well as for those who follow Godel’s Incompleteness to the end of its implications for multiple universes. Although Bohr and the Copenhagen Interpretation are called “mysticism” by most physical determinists, the mysticism of multiple universes becomes apparent when one considers multiple universes in the light of Godel’s incompleteness, if not well before then. A universe is a set in the sense that the truth conditions that it contains are established from the outside, like all truth conditions according to the Incompleteness Theorem. The physical laws that govern any given universe are given as if from the outside without the infinite regress of further explanation because they are the ground of any given universe. The mode of Gravity’s explanation can change according to perspectival shifts in understanding from within a given universe, but what is meant by its universality is that it has a given value or a given set of properties that are given without necessary and sufficient reasons. Gravity becomes a necessary and sufficient explanation of certain phenomena within any given universe, but Gravity in-itself is a “raw” fact of any given universe, which is why modal logical can assert that it is a necessary component of any possible universe.  

However, the “raw” givenness of its necessity is its pure contingency, which is something like saying that a physical law like gravity determines but doesn’t determine itself, or that gravity determines whatever is within its domain, but whatever it is that determines gravity as gravity is outside of its domain. Incompleteness is a version of the very old problem of the casual chain. If everything that is, was caused by something previous, then there is either an infinite causal chain or there was something that caused everything else that wasn’t caused by anything else, classically formulated as an “uncaused cause,” or a “prime mover.” Incompleteness uses Set Theory to explain the relation between necessity and contingency in the casual chain. Whatever is in the set has a necessary or causal relation to whatever defines the set, but sets don’t define, or cause, themselves. Incompleteness proves that the truth conditions that established a set’s necessary, casual relations weren’t caused, or determined, by those same truth conditions, so that there is a sort of indeterminacy that establishes a set that can only be determined by the infinite regress of larger and larger sets, like the infinite regress of the causal chain. At some point there is either a contingency that can’t be determined, so that it is a raw given, or it is necessary contingency, like the necessary being that determines all other contingencies at the end of the classical causal chain. 

Incompleteness determines that the ultimate ground of whatever there is, must be Quentin Meillassoux’s “necessary contingency,” necessary because something must ground contingency, and continent because this grounddoesn’t ground itself. The classical formulation of this necessary contingency is the groundless ground of a necessary being, but modern philosophy doesn’t hold this ground to be a being but simply the chaotic givenness of contingencyitself, something like the probabilistic indeterminacy of an infinite probability space. Whatever casual necessity arises out of this radical contingency, it isn’t like the grand intention of an ultimate creator. However, there are many who are not content to stop with the simple assertion of the raw fact of a necessary contingency. These insatiable inquirers want to know about the ground, or cause, of this necessary contingency, which is something like asking about the ground of the groundless ground, or about the cause of the uncaused cause. The materialist would say there isn’t one because groundless means that it is grounded in nothing, which is what the modifier “raw” is supposed to indicate in the phrase “raw fact,” which is something like how a theist would respond if an intrepid inquirer would try to push beyond the prefix “un” in the phrase “uncaused cause.”  However, this question that is one step beyond the “no” of thing has been with us for a long time and doesn’t seem easily dispelled by the simple assertion that everything there is, including the “necessary contingency” of the mysteriously given differential background of everything there is, just appeared “out of nowhere,” as the expression goes. 

This is the same question that arises when the quantum field is considered as a set. What grounds its probabilistic indeterminacy? Most quantum theorists will simply tell you with a straight face that “nothing” grounds it, that, much like light that quantum fields produce, they don’t have a ground or a substrate. So then, travelling back up to the macro level, what grounds any given universe is the pure indeterminate contingency of nothing sometimes called “potential.”  The necessary ground of all possible things and of all possible universes of things is nothing according to both the modal logical out of which multiple universes sprang and according to the related reasoning of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem.  

The set of all possible universes, or the Universe of all universes, establishes its necessity by the gratuitous contingency of its radical givenness. Since the necessary contingency of the outside of the set or of that which groundsthe field of any possible possibility space, can’t be determined, knowledge will always be incomplete. The constitutive indeterminacy of the Copenhagen Interpretation is consistent with that of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. However, the question remains as to whether this indeterminacy is accessible to a selector as actual degrees of freedom rather than the inaccessible probability of predetermined possibility.  

Another way to think of whatever is before the indeterminacy of an actual possibility space like a quantum field, is as the “raw” indeterminacy of pure potential, which has the same ontological status as any other negativity like nothing or nonbeing. Potential is something like energy without relation because it is only made present and or countable in relation to something that registers it, usually by limiting or resisting the negativity in some way. For example, there is no way to know that a black hole is “present” until the objects that draw near to it are warped by it. This is the sense in which a negativity or an absence exists or is made present by relation to a positive resistance. But negativity’s necessary relation to positivity works both ways. It is often thought that what is positive is what stands by itself, like the classical version of substance, because it appears as if it is a countable or distinct object. However. positivity is also bound by its necessary relation to negativity, as has been shown by Jacques Derrida’s “Differánce,” or as has been shown by Structuralism in general. Whatever appears to an intention must appear through the text-like relations of differences necessary for language, or the “Symbolic” in general.  

The sciences have had to come to terms recently with the semiotic nature of all knowledge, so that something like a possibility space is defined by a negativity like potential and matter is defined by its relation to its negative modeas energy. There are many concepts in the physical sciences that can’t be measured independently at all, but which must be inferred by their apparent effects, such as dark matter, dark energy, and black holes. In phenomenology, the observer or the subject is often thought of as the negative pole in relation to what is intended, or what appears as phenomena, or in the above case of scientific knowledge, of what is known. Although the myth of third-person, “objective” observation hasn’t been totally dispelled from the sciences the effect of the selector, or of the observer, on the observed is now mostly conceptualized as the relation between a selector and a possibility space. The selectordoesn’t need to physically choose, or even consciously select anything to either actualize possibility as the relation between potential and some selected limited, or to realize actual possible as the relation between the possible and the selected limit, or closer, of a realization. An observer doesn’t just observe but selects what to attend to and how to attend to it and therefore affects the observed, or the object of knowledge. This is the relation between a particular observer and the truth. There is no third-person omniscience because one must locate any given observation of whatever there is, in the facticity of a given place and time, and of most importance to the present conversation, to the Symbolic of that place and time. Scientific description isn’t a metalanguage and doesn’t escape the blind spot of the embeddedness of perspective. 

For a selector to realize a possibility, again, whether it is a blind selector or a conscious chooser, can be bracketed for now, that realization is of actual possibility, which is thought of as a “possibility space” or a “field” of possibility in modern science. Giles Deleuze taught that potential is simply an inaccessible nothing until it is actualized, which means that it is put into relation to a limit through a temporary determination of some kind that he called a “repetition.” The limit of a repetition is the relation of a repetition to difference. For AN Whitehead, a repetition could be picked out or foregrounded against the background of difference, something like Deleuze’s differential background. Whitehead called these immanent repetitions “rules” or “generals.” Differences can be intentionally put into relation via a rule. The simplest intentional perception was the relation of two percepts via a rule for Whitehead, which is like his definition of the simplest sort of concept as two perceptions joined by a rule. This relationship according to a rule was the relation of the limits of categories or generals to the limitless potential of unrelated differences, so it was something like the relation of the finite to the infinite or the determinate to the indeterminate. 

Deleuze’s terms for unlimited potential without relation was “Difference-in-itself." When Difference-in-itself was related to itself via a repetition it became “Difference-for-itself.” Potential must be actualized by this self-relation of difference via an immanent repetition, or Whiteheadian “General,” which is the self-relation that Deleuze called the “actual” possibility. Only actual possibility is accessible to a selector of some kind. Possibilities that can be imagined have already arisen from the void via this self-relation of difference. But there are no guarantees about what is to come because the relation between whatever there is and what will be is an indeterminate relation between being and the void of nonbeing, so that even a hypothetical omniscient observer couldn’t know where this process of becoming through differentiation will lead because the differentiation of being as a process of becoming is given by the relation of the determinate finite to the indeterminate infinite, which is another way in which unknowing is built into the becoming of the Universe and can’t be reduced by any amount of quantized bits of information.