9. The Unknowable Is the Ground of Whatever Is Known

If Possibilities Are Open, Then the Universe Is Mysterious 

A different version of this “Mysterian” position, which is simply the position that knowledge is necessarily incomplete, is the position that knowledge is necessarily incomplete because it holds a place for human freedom beyond the material determinations of Einstein's Block Universe, so that complete knowledge isn’t possible because the Universe isn’t finished. This position that the possibility spaces of the Universe are relatively open doesn’t necessarily mean that there are any actual choices because a choice requires a selector with enough degrees of freedom that it could have chosen differently. The incompleteness at the quantum level of the Universe is the incompleteness of indeterminacy, but there doesn’t seem to be a selector making any deliberate choices, or determinations, about how to realize the actual possibilities of this indeterminacy, except in the case of the collapse of the wave function, in which case a conscious observer effects the phase state of whatever it was that was previously in an indeterminate position, sometimes called “interposition,” or wave-particle duality. However, barring the strange case of a conscious observer, the Universe seems to make its decisions without the deliberations of a selector, which is why cause and effect break down at the quantum level. Quantum fields are characterized by quantum fluctuations, which are random and described by probabilities. 

However, there are some who believe in a fundamentally incomplete Universe who hold that there are selectors within this Universe who can realize actual possibilities, so that this version of what there is, is open because it includes choices and not just whatever openness is given by probabilities. This camp believes that these selectors have some relative access to degrees of freedom, so that a selector can intervene in the material determinations of the Universe. Some point to the strange effect that a conscious observer has on the “incompletion” of quantum interposition as part of the picture of how consciousness effects what is. Quantum measurements seem to contain the choice of whether to look for a wave or a particle because if one looks for a wave, then she will find one, and if she looks for a particle, then that is what she will find, and according to the famous “double slit” experiments, if both are sought, then both will be found.  

For those who believe in actual choices, a wave reflects an open possibility space of spread-out potential; whereas a particle represents a collapse of the wave function to a particular point in space-time. The collapse of a wave into a particle is called “decoherence” in physics and “realization” in philosophy. The determinist must show that realization is never the result of an actual choice by a conscious selector. So, the assertion that a conscious observer can affect the state of the Universe by choosing how to observe it is problematic. The determinist solution has generally been that of “multiple universes,” which holds that all possibilities of any apperant choice are simultaneously realized in different actual universes whenever an apparent decision is made. The assertion of multiple universes eliminates the concept of an actual choice by eliminating the possibility that something could have been otherwise because everything is “selected” at once. 

However, for those to whom multiple universes are not a solution because there are the actual possiblies of a choice, a wave might be thought of as indicating an actual possibility space, and a particle might be thought of as indicating a realized possibility in the Universe. By choosing to make a measurement, one has affected the state of the Universe or added information to it that couldn’t have been known before the decision to measure for a wave or for a particle was made, so that what is, is in some sense added to by this observation. However, nothing countable in a physical sense was added by this observation because whether one seeks to find a wave or a particle, the measurement is always of something that was already there. This is the ontological oddity that is the central question of what is, or of what is countable about what is. If thought about, or consciousness of, or the virtuality of an actual possibility space counts as a part of what is, then these immaterial entities have some sort of ontological status. The determinist must deny the existence, or ontology, of what isn’t physically countable, so he claims that thought, and consciousness and the virtual possibilities that they contain are “hallucinations” that some higher order material processes have about themselves, so that choices are the “illusions” of freedom in a determined Universe.  

Who Chooses What to Count? 

The determinist argues that the choice about measurement was itself determined in an unending chain of causality back to some necessary and sufficient reason that is just the “raw” fact of the matter. In modern science this raw fact from which whatever there is, arises, is the quantum field that just is without any previous cause or reason for it, so that the Quantum field is an absolute ground because it is grounded in nothing, just like the singularity that was before the Universe is the ground of space-time but not in space-time. For both the determinist and those that hold that the Universe’s determinations contain some relative degrees of freedom, this absolute nothing is the ground of any possible ground, which leads to the strange conclusion that whatever there is, came from nothing, which Samuel Beckett put humorously as “the incontinence of the void.”  

For those that believe there are actual choices in the Universe, and that there are actual selectors to make them, this absolute nothing that both preceded and somehow  produced the determinations of the material Universe is the original indeterminacy that grounds both whatever material determinations there are and whatever freedom from determinations there is, so that the material Universe is the relationship between the nothing of absolute indeterminacy and determinacy that structures the virtuality of an actual possibility space. And this determinate indeterminacy allows for enough degrees of freedom to make an actual choice. For those that count thought, consciousness, and the virtual as a part of what is, the material determinations of the Universe contain something that isn’t physically countable, but which is nonetheless ontologically real or “actual,” which is the freedom that GWF Hegel called “spirit.” This combination of determined material and undetermined spirit is what characterized the German Idealism of Hegel, which stands in opposition to today’s modern scientific notion that material is entirely determined without any degrees of freedom or spirit.  

Hegel’s “Spirit” was material, but it was undetermined, so Spirit was a mode of being that was fundamentally undetermined, but nonetheless this undetermined mode of being could determine which material determinationswould be determinate. The determinist simply denies that any material determination is free of a previous determination, so that any selector’s selection is already determined by the causal chain of necessary and sufficient reasons.One way that this necessary chain of causal determinations is put by the determinist is in terms of the “Interaction Problem,” which is the problem of how something immaterial like spirit could interact with matter, or have any sort of causal relation with it.  

If Hegelian spirit is how we access whatever degrees of freedom material being may contain, then spirit must also be material for the determinist, as was also the case for Hegel, which was what his strange formulation “Spirit is a Bone” was meant to communicate. However, for the material determinist, whatever is material is determined, but for Hegel matter had a mode commonly called “subjectivity” in which it alienated itself from itself by making itself an object for itself.  Hegel described how this interaction occurs as the exstatis of determined being standing outside of itself as undetermined being, or spirit, which would be something like what is physical or countable about what is, becoming an object for itself through what is non-physical or uncountable about what is, which is self-awareness. This does not solve the interaction problem because it does not explain in any scientific way how the self-alienation of material processes from themselves occurs, but it is an attempt to include consciousness as a part of what is, even though it isn’t physical or countable.  

For Hegel and those who believe that matter “contains” undetermined degrees of freedom, the indeterminacy of this actual possibility space, reflects the absolute indeterminacy of whatever was before the physical determinations of matter. This absolute state of indeterminacy is described as the “void,” or the nothing that proceeded whatever there is. What there is, is a dialectic between something and nothing, which means that neither something nor nothing is absolute because neither are things in themselves. Something and nothing are only comprehensible in relation to each other, so whatever caused the dialectic of something and nothing is by nature incomprehensible and not anything like the sort of causes that are relative to previous causes.  

Absolute Nothing 

Many thinkers have noticed that this seems to be how the most basic level of reality, a quantum field, is described as an unstable nothing because electrons flicker in and out of existence “on” it without cause. But the phrase “absolute nothing” is incomprehensible because it means what isn’t relative to anything, or what is relative to nothing. It is the absolute nothing “before” the fundamental relation of the quantum field to the electrons that appear “on” it. Even this relation is not like other causal relations because electrons appear on the quantum field according to probabilities rather than the necessary “if / then” relations of physical causes. The physicist says that the quantum field isn’t in anything, or that it doesn’t have a substrate or a cause, but it just is, which is something like a raw fact. Similarly light itself doesn’t have a substrate. One of the more famous errors of physics that Einstein cleared up was the misconception that because light was a wave that it must have a substrate, the “luminescent ether,” because all other waves were waves of something but light just is a wave per se, unless it is measured in a particular location ofspace-time as a particle. But it was discovered that light waves were waves of nothing because they were composed of nothing but themselves, which means that they are “composed” of electrons.  

However, saying that light is composed of electrons or that light is a wave of electrons is just a manner of speaking because electrons are not light’s substrate, like water is the substrate of an ocean wave or like air is the substrateof sound. Electrons are just what light is, and when whatever light is measured as a wave, it will appear as a wave, and when it is measure as a particle, it will appear as a particle. Electrons are the most basic building blocks of whatever else there is, and their origins seem to be ‘in’ and ‘of’ nothing as is asserted when the physicist says that “quantum fields” are ‘in’ and ‘of’ nothing, and that elections appear on these ephemeral “fields” without cause and therefore without a reason or explanation from this nothing. There is no way to detect or measure the field in-itself, unless an electron appears to establish a relation between the electron and the field that somehow “emitted” it. The presence of a field is detected through the probabilistic appearances of electrons because the field in-itself is nothing. It becomes something, namely a “field,” when it emits an electron, so there wasn’t anything before that event.  

Even though we can retroactively assert that there was a field there before it emitted the electron, the “field” was a pure absence “before” it became the present absence of a possibility space. The “laws” that form the rules of a possibility space are present absences because they can’t be detected in themselves but only through their positive effects. A field is a possibility space composed of rules, so until something appears according to its wave-like probabilities, its ontology is problematic, which is to say that using the copular “is” as in the sentence “a field is in and of nothing” isn’t the normal use of the copular, but a use of “is” that positivizes an absence rather than indicating a presence. The virtuality of a possibility space “is” the virtuality that make the copular possible, so it is comprised of the preconditions for whatever there is. Describing the possibilities of a possibility space is always after a possibility has been realized. However, for a possibility to be realized, it must already have been actualized, which is like structuring potential into actual possibilities according to rules.  

The ontological status of a possibility space is not “establish” until it produces something according to its probabilities. When a field emits something, it retroactively establishes the relation between something and nothing that allows this field “of” and “in” nothing to be “seen” or detected as the present absence of a . This is the problem with the preposition “before” when discussing whatever was “before” whatever there is, or the absence before there was presence. Nothing but pure absence was before there was the presence of something, so there is no “before” there was something because something is the necessary relation that retroactively establishes the nothing from which it appeared. The so called “singularity” that was “before” the Universe, was in and of nothing. Therefore, it was an absolute nothing, and in effect wasn’t anything, not even a positivized absence that might be called “nothing” until this absolute nothing comprised of every particle of the Universe was somehow injected with the space-time necessary for all of this matter to become something by entering into relationships among themselves. How this absolute nothingspit up a Universe isn’t knowable because whatever is before “is,” or before any of the relations of matter, isn’t anything, not even a singularity. The statement that “before” the “Big Bang” there was a singularity in which all of matter was packed together into a baseball sized whole, is incomprehensible because that means that the singularity was an absolute nothing indescribable by any means, including math, because it is without any relations.  

If whatever there is, is built from the most basic component of matter, which is an electron, then whatever there is, comes from nothing. The sentence “light waves are ‘in’ and ‘of’ nothing,” or “quantum fields are ‘in’ and ‘of’ nothing,” give a positive attribute to nothing that can only be given by the relationship between something and nothing, so whatever was “before” isn’t really even a nothing or “before” anything for that matter, but “something” that is both unspeakable and unknowable because both language and knowing require the relations of difference of oppositions to operate. 

The incomprehensible, absolute nothing that preceded the dialectic of something and nothing seems to have made an absolutely free choice that there be the present dialectic of something with nothing that comprises whatever there is. that the question about why there is a Universe at all is not answerable by causal necessity, which is classically considered to be the ultimate ground of a “necessary being,” but by the gratuity of an actual choice that somehow preceded necessity itself. Before there was being, there was an impossible choice that there should be something rather than nothing, which is something like saying that necessary and sufficient reasons completely break down before the beginning of all things, in a similar manner as cause and effect breaks down at the quantum level, and somelike how all physics and mathematics break down at the level of the singularity into the indescribable state of affairs in which there is neither matter nor energy because whatever it is, it a is state without the relata necessary to describe physical reality.  

To say that the singularity was “all the matter of the Universe compacted together at one point,” as is sometimes asserted, or to describe its relative size as “about the size of a baseball,” if it took up any space before there was any space to take up, or even to claim that the singularity was what was “before” time, is to say nothing. Immanuel Kant already outlined these limits on speech as the “Antinomies of Reason,” but hubristic, determinist materialists largely ignore the works of philosophers believing that philosophy has nothing to offer the empirical sciences. 

A different sort of full knowledge is possible even if whatever there is, isn’t known in a countable totality, but is known according to the underlying principles that govern whatever there is. In this view knowing it all isn’t possible but knowing the fundamental mechanisms that generate it all is, which would be a Theory of Everything that functioned like any map or diagram in that it reduced the sheer amount of information by describing the basic causal structures of the Universe. In classical philosophy this reduction of knowing is to the “necessary and sufficient reasons” of whatever there is. In this formulation of reduced knowledge “necessary” describes a causal relation, and “sufficient” reduces the description of what is to whatever information is necessary to disclose an intrinsic principle. Reducing knowledge to necessary and sufficient reasons avoids the problem of the “territory becoming the map.” Jorge Luis Borges’s famous parable “On Exactitude in Science” explains why this reduction is necessary. If a mapmaker were to construct a perfectly accurate map, down to the last, minute detail, then the map would be as large as whatever it was supposed to be a map of, and it wouldn’t be of any use for geographic endeavors. 

Science is based on the “material reduction” because this reduction of knowledge is a reduction to physical causality. Modern science is a physical science because it seeks the “objectivity” of third-person verifiability. The material reduction is designed to reduce subjective, or non-falsifiable, conjectures. Aristotle, for many the father of scientific inquiry, formulated “Four Causes” for whatever there is in the Universe. The material cause of the modern, physical sciences was one of them, but he also included a “formal cause,” which was an object’s structure; an “efficient cause,” which was the process by which an object was produced; and a “final cause,” sometimes called “teleological,” which was the reason or purpose for which an object was produced. The final cause, and teleology in general, has been eradicated by the material reduction’s elimination of subjective intention, but both the formal and efficient causes have been folded into material causality. A modern notion of what is, is the rule governed (formal) process (efficient) of matter-energy (material), so that physics grounds chemistry, and chemistry grounds biology, and biology grounds whatever else may appear at higher levels of complexity. The subjective intention somehow emerges out of its material causality and can be reduced back to it through biology to chemistry to physics, so that teleological purpose vanishes.