1. The Unknowable Is the Ground of Whatever Is Known.

Part One: Is Whatever There Is, Knowable? 

Is there still a place for mystery in the age of “natural” science? Or another way to frame this question might be, are the techniques of science sufficient for disclosing whatever there is? This isn’t exactly the either/or proposition that it may at first appear to be. Those who believe that complete knowing is possible may be thought of as optimists and those who hold that the “total” or the “all” of existence can never be completely grasped, may seem pessimists, but as with all things, there are subtilties about each position that can confuse negation and affirmation, so that total-knowledge pessimists are often optimistic about sorts of knowing that scientific positivists are not, which means that total-knowledge optimists are pessimistic about sorts of knowing that pessimists are not. And it is often the case that total-knowledge pessimists are optimistic about the absolute mystery of existence, or being, because they are optimistic about incomplete knowing, because they are optimistic about the incomplete, or “non-all,” nature of being that incomplete knowing may reflect. For some total-knowledge pessimists, incomplete knowing may reflect an excess in being beyond what can be known through concepts, but which can be experienced, not as a lack of knowing but as the excess of being, which Philosopher GWF Hegel thought of as the dialectical flow of becoming. Being’s internal relation to nonbeing is the constitutive incompletion of being that allows being to continually exceed itself in realtion to the failure of its concepts of itself.  

Aristotle’s “Law of Noncontradiction” or of the “Exclude Middle” asserted that knowledge must be without contradiction, or that a thing can’t be more than one thing at once. But Experimental Philosophy shows that people have contradictory experiences and beliefs all the time, which don’t lack for anything, except for the sort of total-knowledge that scientific determinism holds as its gold standard. For example, when someone just turns thirteen, it’s hard to say whether they’re a teenager or not since the concept of teenage usually entails more culturally than can be said of someone who’s technically in their teens but still very young. Wherever there’s an identification, or a determination, there’s some level of ambiguity about it. Another notorious example is the difficulty around mental health diagnoses. For instance, the diagnosis of “addiction” is determined by crossing a somewhat arbitrary threshold of enumeratedcriteria, which reflects the difficulty of knowing when someone transitions from a frequent user to an addict.   

GWF Hegel formulated total knowing, or “Absolute Knowing” as knowing through dialectical contradiction, so that it was “absolute” in the strange sense of including what couldn’t be known as constitutive of being’s self-knowledge. There is a point at which someone has clearly become an addict but trying to put together just when that happened and how doesn't seem to reflect the continuous nature of becoming. And even in full blown addiction, there must somehow be some intention that isn’t totally determined by the addiction; otherwise, addicts couldn’t recover. This is the classical philosophical quandary about the discreet and the continuous. In logical empiricism, the incomplete knowing of incomplete determination is considered “vague,” which on the empiricism side refers to transition experiences of gradual change, and on the logical side, to rational paradoxes, especially those that follow any of the paradoxes of self-reference, like the dialectic of identity and difference, the liar’s paradox, and Godel’s “Incompleteness Theorem.”  

Vague objects are usually explained by the famous “Sorites Paradox,” in which there is either a vagueness about language, or about reality itself in terms of the distinctions between categories. The Sorites Paradox is about the category boundary between a heap and not a heap. At what point does a heap of grain become not a heap if grains are slowly removed from it? But this paradox applies to any vaguery, such as when does a man become bald, or when does a child become an adult, or, in a particularly famous one, when does Theseus's ship becomes a different ship if each plank of it is replaced one at a time? This paradox of determination has stubbornly plagued the sciences since at least when Aristotle began dividing the Universe into discreet identities and categories according to their essential qualities. Scientific knowledge requires discontinuous thresholds for things to have distinct identities. There are those in the sciences that think that “natural kinds” are categories that are in nature, like distinct “species,” for example. And then there are those who think that natural kinds are projections of language into reality and not in reality itself because reality is continuous rather than discreet. And then there are those who believe that the vagaries of language reflect the ambiguity of being itself. 

In general, the scientific world view holds that whatever ambiguity, or mystery, is left in the world, it is theoretically determinable because complete knowledge about whatever there is, or complete knowledge about the Universe, is comprised of a finite amount of information, so that with enough research and time and, perhaps, with the help of AI’s storage and processing capacities, a complete map of reality is hypothetically possible. This view holds that what the Universe is, is a collection of provable facts, so that what is true, is true according to the correspondences of rational determinations to objective situations, or “states of affairs.” This positive view of knowing, sometimes called a “Theory of Everything,” is in line with modern Information Theory’s belief that whatever there is, is either in-itself a quantity or is quantizable in the sense that it can be represented as digitized “bits” of information. Whatever vaguenessthere is about the Universe, or whatever indeterminacies remain after the determinations of the modern sciences, they are the results of the non-coincidence between amounts, or quantities, of information and computational capacities, and not inadequacies inherent to information nor to the Universe to which information corresponds. And whatever there is that isn’t quantizable, doesn’t exist, but “is” a kind of illusion that “is” somehow “epiphenomenal” to whatever there is. 

However, there are also those in the sciences who hold that information is inherently incomplete because determination is paradoxically, but necessarily, constituted by indetermination. Biologist Stuart Kaufman gave the famous example of the swim bladder from evolutionary biology to show how the “choices” of natural selection weren’t completely determined from the beginning, nor from any other point along the way. If true, this would mean that in whatever ways the natural laws govern the relations between matter and energy, particularly as that relation relates to evolution by natural selection, they don’t determine them completely. Quantum Theory also seems to demonstrate this incompletion with its “superposition” and “nonlocality,” and those sorts of inherent, or constituent indeterminacies will be covered shortly. Kaufman considered the swim bladder a biological organ that demonstrated the inherent indeterminacy of not only biology but also of whatever there is, which is that “isness,” or being, is comprised of “isn’t-ness,” or nonbeing, as was the case for Hegel.  

The dialectical nature of being, if true, would mean that no categories, not even Immanuel Kant’s most basic category of “being,” was entirely without the ambiguity of contradiction, which would challenge the possibility of having complete knowledge of the Universe because the casual descriptions of being would include what wasn’t caused, which is the nonbeing of chance, or of pure potential. A swim bladder couldn’t have been determined beforehand from “perfect,” or complete, knowledge of prior conditions or factors because the indetermination of chance was the ground of its becoming.  

This indeterminacy inherent to evolution by natural selection is the failure of “La Place’s” famous, physicalist “Demon” to predict a future state of a affairs based on total knowledge of the present position and momentum of every atom, or particle. If there is a remainder of irreducible indeterminacy, or ambiguity, about the Universe, then the material reduction to purely physical causality, and Information Theory’s reduction of knowing to quantizable bits of code,cannot be said to be a complete descriptions of the Universe because it doesn’t account for the inherent incompletion, or internal contingency, that “produced” whatever there is. La Place’s Demon faced a significant challenge to its total knowledge and subsequent determinations, when Werner Heisenberg asserted his famous “Uncertainty Principle,” which held that it wasn’t possible to perfectly determine both the position and momentum of a particle. The more accurate the measurement of the particle’s location, the less accurate the measurement of its velocity, and vice versa. At the macro level, this uncertainty also seems to be inherent to any evolutionary process, where location can be thought of synchronically, as a particular organ, or organism, and velocity can be thought of diachronically as evolution’s historical trajectory. The more accurately one determines a particular organ’s, or organism’s, casual history, the more indeterminacy emerges as its ground. The intersection of a particular product of evolution and the determination of its history is ultimately indeterminate because evolution like any diachronic history of change is a dialectic between determination and indeterminacy, certainty and uncertainty, and limits and flows.  

A swim bladder controls the buoyancy of many boney fish, but this wasn’t the function for which it originally evolved, so this organ is said to be an “exaptation.” The determinations of natural selection may be able to account for the evolution of lungs, which was the “original,” respiratory function of the organ that became the swim bladder. However, there were purely contingent, or unforeseeable, developments in the niche of certain boney fish that produced the swim bladder from what had been for breathing. The lungs filled with water and so there was a need to push it out, which also happened to allow the fish to control its buoyancy better by controlling the relative ratio of water to air in its lungs. Eventually, this unintended use became the primary use of what had been lungs. There was no way to predict that this adaptation would shift its function in this way because the shift occurred relative to the chance circumstances of the fish’s body and its incomplete, or indeterminate, niche.  

One way to think of this distinction between the complete determinations of the scientific, material reduction and incomplete determination, is via Giles Deleuze’s distinction between the relative incompletion of unrealized, but actual, possibility and the absolute incompletion of unactualized potential. For Deleuze, an actualized possibility space was the relation between limits, or constraints, and the complete limitlessness of potential. Potential without relation to a limit is the nothing, or void, of space-energy without relation to the constraints of matter governed by the physical laws. The material reduction of the sciences admits to the actual possibility of what is referred to as a “Hilbert Space,” which isn’t “raw” potential, but actualized, or structured, possibility, which might be thought of as determined but with a remainder of indeterminacy, which allows for the realization of possibility that wasn’t previouslydetermined. Realization is the concretization either of a material or of a conceptual possibility, as in a virtual possibility space, but for a determinist, there is no actual choice about which possibilities to realize because any possible chooser is itself entirely determined, as is the case for the entirely determined selector of natural selection, which isn’t really even a selector, or an intention, but a principle.  

Physicalism does not admit to the “open” possibility of indeterminate possibility because this would be a virtual possibility space that includes degrees of freedom, at least enough freedom to make what we normally would consider to be a choice because to make a choice would be to make a choice without the complete determinations of the intentions of the biology of an organism in relation to the intentions of its environment, which is the determinate relation described by niche construction. These are not the “degrees of freedom of statistical analysis”; although, they are related. Asking if niche construction contains any degrees of freedom is to ask, to what degree its possibilities are constrained, or determined. For the determinist, there are no degrees of freedom in niche construction because the goals of the organism are in determinate relation to its niche, so its possibilities are entirely determined, which creates the seeming contradiction of predetermined possibility.  

When a determinist talks about degrees of freedom in the possibility space of niche construction, she isn’t talking about freedom to realize a freely chosen possibility because, as stated above, the selector of natural selection is entirely determined. “Degrees of freedom” in statistics refers to limits on interferences about the relations of specific observations to a predictive model. The fewer degrees of freedom in a statistical analysis, the fewer inferences need to be made about the relation between the analysis and actual outcomes. In general, the more parameters in a model, the more subtle, or accurate, its predictions are, which means that there are fewer degrees of freedom in the model. No degrees of freedom means a perfectly determinate model, which means that the map is the territory. 

A statistical model’s possibility space contains degrees of freedom because it has incomplete information, and not because the possibility space of the Universe that it maps contains any degrees of freedom in-itself. However, the multiple realizability of particular intentions in the possibility space of niche construction seems to point to degrees of freedom beyond the lack of determination in the statical model of it, and to actual degrees of freedom in niche construction itself, which would reflect the freedom of indeterminacy that grounds the Universe as a whole for those who hold that the Universe is incomplete. The possibility space of niche construction may offer degrees of freedom as different possibilities that if realized would each accord with the organism’s intention, like how the swim bladder realized the biological intention of the fish in relation to its niche with the same organ that was used for respiration. The organism’s intention for its organs is evolutionary advantage, which in the case of the repurposing of the lungs for a swim bladder was multiply realizable, so that the possibility space of the organ contained some relative degrees of freedom. The organism’s intention was somehow able to step outside the predetermined intention of its lungs and use the degrees of freedom in this organ’s possibility space for this intentional repurposing of the organ. However, in whatever way this was accomplished, for the determinist, it didn’t require any indeterminacy in the intention of the organism or in the organ. 

Stuart Kauffman gave a further example of the niche relation between a predator and its prey. They seem to have evolved in a determinate relation with each other, but there is no way to get either organism without indeterminacy.Lions and gazelles aren’t the necessary outcomes of the evolutionary process because their determinate, casual relations are grounded in necessary contingency. Casual necessity is the covariable relation of “if / then” logic. Put rather crassly, if lions evolve big, sharp teeth, then gazelles need to evolve speed and agility to avoid them. However, both big sharp teeth and speed and agility, like any evolutionary adaptation, were selected from the “random” variations of genetic mutations. The intentions that determined which variations to select were bound to select the ones that gave them an evolutionary advantage relative to the organism’s niche. The available selections were contingent rather than necessary, so the selector was bound by necessity, but the selections weren’t. This doesn’t mean that there were any degrees of freedom in this possibility space, at least yet, because the “natural” selector was bound to choose certain genetic variations that provided particular, niche advantages.  

However, the necessity of random variations in natural selection demonstrates a sort of casual contingency or determinate indeterminacy. Causal necessity seems to determine the possibility space of niche construction, but this possibility space isn’t completely determinate because its possibilities depend on the contingences of random mutations, which are the irreducible, or necessary, remainders of indeterminacy upon which natural selection’s determinations depend. Necessity and contingency form a contradictory but productive relation in the process of becoming, which reflects the constitutive contradiction of a continuous flow. If a flow, like Heraclitus’s famous river, is determinable by casual necessity, then it has an identity and isn’t really a flow but a static or substantial object. But if what Heraclitus thought was true, that a flow isn’t determinable from one moment to the next, then it isn’t identical to itself, and any identification of it is provisional because it is an incomplete determination defined by causal contingency rather than causal necessity. 

 Incomplete determination doesn’t contradict causal necessity, but it means that contingency plays a role in necessity. In classical philosophy and theology, all beings were contingent, but their ground was in a necessary being, which was a one-way relation in which only “The One” or “God” was necessary because only God was without a cause. God was thought of as an absolute substance because God was before any covariable relation, and therefore, the ground of every other casual necessity. Process philosophy and theology rejected any absolute substance as the ground of creation, and instead, asserted the covariable relation itself as the ground of all things, so that there were no longer any things-in-themselves but rather only provisional things, with the fleeting identities of temporary relational intentions, like the covariable intentions of niche construction and Heraclitus's river. What Hegel contributed to Heraclitus’s original insight that a river is never identical to itself was that this nonidentity was the result of nonbeing, or the constitutive incompletion of a flow, or of a process of becoming. AN Whiteheads “Process Philosophy” then outlined the primacy of the relation to the identity of a thing, or objects, including those things that are not normally considered flows, or processes.  

There is growing, “scientific” evidence to back up Whitehead’s assertion that objects aren’t substantial “things-in-themselves," which includes, perhaps most significantly, the materially determined intentions that used to hold objects together as one thing. Famously the sciences rid themselves of all Aristotelian causality except for one, “material causality.” Aristotle’s material cause now includes, and subsumes, the “formal,” “efficient,” and, mostly significantly for this conversation, the “teleological cause.” All teleological, or goal directed, behavior must be grounded in material causality for there to be scientific accounting of a material object’s end, or purpose, which is the death of meaning that is bemoaned by the Romantics at the hands of the material reduction. An object is still held together by its end, or intention, in the material reduction, but this intention must be ultimately a material concern. 

However, objects, especially biological ones, seem to be incompletely determined by the casual necessities of physical relations than pure physicalism would allow because the indeterminacy of causal contingency runs both ways. How can the selector of natural selection be completely “blind” if it must “see” to choose which random variations to select for its advantage? Scientific determinism uses the terms “blind” and “selector” metaphorically, but it may be the case that there is some real sense in which these terms, especially the latter, return some nonphysical intention to the selector of natural selection. If the selections of natural selection aren’t entirely determined, then neither is the selector, which would mean that the statistical degrees of freedom inherent to our models of genetic variation aren’t merely the aberrations of our lack of perfect information about the actual possibility space of niche construction, but that these aberrations are the degrees of freedom inherent to the Universe that contains the probabilities of evolution's possibility space. Evolution may not be the entirely “blind” process of predetermined choices, but an open and creative process of becoming, at least partially, guided by the choices of the intentions within its dialectical flow. 

For there to be the actual choices of an open, or co-creative becoming, beyond the mere co-variability of physicalism, the selector, or the intention, must be somehow “outside” the casual chain, so that its end isn’t already determined by the blind, predetermined end of material causality. Natural selection is a principle whose determinations are ineluctable, but its causal nexus may be grounded in something beyond, or outside of, what is already predetermined by it. Not only may this principle be grounded in the relation between matter-energy and the natural laws, but also by an intention that is slightly less bound by physical determination. There seems to be breaks in the causal chain, or gaps of indeterminacy, something like the open space of Hegel’s nonbeing, that need to be leapt over or projected into by a determinate being that itself isn’t already entirely determined. Fredrick Nitsche's active, participatory becoming required just such creative proximity to the void of determination and of meaning.   

Niche construction requires both the determinations of the relations that describe the evolution of a niche, but also the indeterminacy that describes the contingency of the exaptation of things like swim bladders. As discussed above, potential without relation to limits means the total lack of constraints that make possibility possible, or realizable. Potential needs the constraints of limits to be actualized into the accessible, or local, possibilities of niche construction, but this relation is between the proximal possibilities of niche construction, such as the local organ originally intended for breathing, and nonlocal potential, such as the intention that re-conceives lungs for a swim bladder. When an actual possibility is realized, it determines possibility in a concrete way, which might be a material or conceptual realization, but it also actuates new, local possibilities from nonlocal potential, which is an open or undetermined intention “outside” of the realized possibly, in the current example, of lungs.  

Each realized possibility may “close” a particular possibility in its realization, but this concretization also expands the overall possibilities of being’s becoming by relating potential to a limit in a new way, in this case, the potentialfor a lung to become a swim bladder becomes an actual possibility, even if never realized, by the relation of the lungs to the watery environment of the fish. These newly actuated possibilities could not have been determined from “before” this particular realization, which is a break in the absolute determination of the causal chain given by chance, or contingency. This gap in determinacy is the indeterminacy of open potential, which is the incompleteness in the intention of the lungs for respiration. The determinate intention of lungs did not completely determine that organ’s possibility space, so there was “space,” or a void of intention, from which to determine, or imagine, the organ differently. 

The actual possibility space formed between lions and gazelles is like that between the fish’s swim bladder and its niche. These possibility spaces have “locations,” which is like the location of any possible possibility space located between open potential and the closer of limits. Evolution’s possibility space is metaphorically “between” an organism’s open intention, and its closure, or limit, which is its place within a niche. Possibility must be realized in relation to the possibility “adjacent” to it, which is the sense in which evolution produces “necessary” organisms, but the necessity of localization in the realization of a possibility is grounded in the contingency of the nonlocality of an “outside” intention. The way in which a determinist describes possibility is that it is not only actuated from the potential to the possible, but that it is also already determined, even if it hasn’t been realized at a given point in thecompletely determined, “block” history of material causality. Whatever appears as if indeterminate is only open from the local perspective of the observer from within an already completed Universe that can’t be seen in its entirety from any given, embedded perspective, from with it. In effect, there is no difference between determination and realization, or the completion of the becoming of being from the beginning of time. The indeterminacy of the void along with the open possibility of choice associated with free will have been banished completely in this closed Universe. 

What is generally taken for granted about possibility, namely that it is contingent until it is realized, or that any particular, local concretization could have gone otherwise, is not how a determinist conceives of it. However,unrealized, actual possibility is the relation between the absolute contingency of chance, or of the open potential of the void, and the relative contingency of determination, or of Giles Deleuze’s “actual possibility.” GWF Hegel’sdialectic of becoming outlines the processual relation of indeterminate nonbeing to determinate being. A complete determination of the necessary and sufficient reasons for lions and gazelles paradoxically requires the indetermination from which their determination emerges, so the determination of a niche relation like that of predator and prey is a contradictory combination of necessity and chance, or the paradox of causal contingency. 

The necessary and sufficient reasons for the lion’s strength and the gazelle’s speed and agility, to make a crude, metonymic analogy, seem to be exhausted by their determinate relations with each other according to the physicalism of the material reduction to the determinate identification of a predator and prey relationship. But the basic contingency of niche construction’s determinations can’t be reduced entirely to material relations because material relations are in this strange dance between necessity and chance, so that evolution by natural selection isn’t entirely determinate, or isn’t entirely determined by the physicalism of causal relations. There must be some other determiner, or “selector,” or there must be an indeterminate intention beyond the completely determined intention of the principle of natural selection because there is a differential relation between a determinate adaptation and a contingent exaptation. The evolutionary story given by the material reduction cannot render the necessary and sufficient reasons for lions and gazelles in a totalizing way because the causal relations of niche creation are necessarily open or incomplete; otherwise, there couldn’t be the flexible, adaptive response to contingency.  

Predetermined evolution doesn’t describe the exaptation necessary for the necessary role of chance in niche construction. And a completed process without the indetermination that makes its determinations move, would be something like a river without a flow, contra Heraclitus, which is the point of biologist Terrence Deacon’s “Incomplete Nature,” and even more basically, of Physicist Yoichiro Nambu’s “Broken Symmetries.” If nature weren’t incomplete, it wouldn’t be in motion, which is Parmenide’s point when he asserts that all movement is an illusion because being is a one that is at one with itself and not a multiplicity becoming. For Hegel, being’s oneness is becoming multiple through the indeterminacy of the nonbeing internal to it. For Terrance Deacon, nature’s simplicity becomes complex and intentional, or teleological, through the incompletion inherent to it. 

The natural world needs intentionality that can improvise from lungs to a swim bladder without prior, physical determination, which is a teleological intention that is not ultimately grounded in physical determination but in a virtual possibility space that can project its possibilities into or across the void of intention. So, Deacon’s work on how intention, or the goal directed behavior of teleology, emerges from “blind,” or mechanistic processes, will be necessary to consider shortly, especially his work on how an intention can extend itself to reach a distant goal, particularly the semiological distantiation of the signifier to the signified in language. But for now, it is clear that natural selection isn’t the only intention at work in evolution because the virtual distance between lungs and a swim bladder wasn’t bridged by the physical relations of determinate causality alone. It was the under-determinacy, or irreducible ambiguity, of the lungs that allowed them to become swim bladders.  

Stuart Kauffman gave many examples of aspects of organs that are “extra,” or indeterminate, “add-ons” that haven’t been realized for evolutionary advantage, yet, but might, given the relation between whatever virtual degrees of freedom there are in a particular intention and the contingencies of the circumstances of niche construction. For example, the sounds that a beating heart produces, or the vibrations of its pericardial sack might be the basis of a novel exaptation, given some particular set of circumstances or chance state of affairs. The term “exaptation,” coined by biologist Steven J. Gould is the combination of the prefix “ex,” meaning outside as in “exterior” and the word “adaptation,” which in niche construction means something like an advantageous, biological response. In classical evolutionary theory this biological response is “blind” in the sense of without a conscious intention, as has already been discussed. “Advantage” is a relative term, which in niche construction, is the relation between a particular organism’s predetermined intention and its exterior environment.  

How does a predetermined, unconscious intention realize the advantage of an exaptation? The “Ex” of “exaptation” might be thought of as the outside of the predetermined intention of the organism and its organs, which means the intention of an adaptation, as well as that of the intention that contains, it must travel outside of itself to become something like an “ex-tension,” or an intention that is external to itself. There is no way to know in advance how these useless extras, like the noises that heart produces, or the vibrations of the pericardial sack, might become useful in advanced, but only a self-alienated ex-tension can imagine the virtual possibility space of this sort of on the fly realization because this intention must be outside of the predetermined, covariable relation between an organism and its environment. 

The swim bladder was realized by the determinate proximity of the lungs to its intention for buoyancy regulation. It was able to realize the same organ for different ends because the swim bladder’s intention emerged contingently and without fully predetermined ends from the incomplete, or open, determination of the lungs. The virtual distance between the swim bladder and the lungs was too great to be entirely determined by the predetermined intention of the principle of natural selection, so this virtual distance had to be bridged by an intention that could project itself across or into the void between them. Even if the fish’s intention for lungs was entirely predetermined, its intention for swim bladders leaped across the abyss of the indeterminate void to ex-tend this exaptation.   

A total explanation and identification of whatever there is, isn’t possible because part of evolutionary determination is its relation to indeterminacy, which means that lungs and swim bladders, as well as lions and gazelle, weren’tpossible at every point in evolutionary history, and they certainly weren’t in the cards from the beginning, primordial conditions. The determinations of the actualized, but not yet realized, possibilities that describe the Universe are paradoxically, contingently necessary because they are not sufficient, “in-themselves,” to account for the constant flow of difference that comprises the becoming of being, which is the dialectical relation between the realization of adeterminate identity and the irreducible ambiguity of difference that each determination not only doesn’t reduce but also multiplies in the manner of complex systems according to Complexity Theory. Physical causality isn’t complete, as it is in Einstein’s “Block Universe,” because it is grounded in the relation between completion and incompletion, or in the limits of the actual and the pure chance of potential, which is the actualized possibility of a Hilbert Space, and which is why classical philosophy and mystical theology both ground the causal chain in the nothingness of an “Uncaused Cause,” which Meister Eckhart called “Abgrund” (un-ground) and which is the same word that gets translated in Nietzsche’s German as the “abyss.”