Anatomy of Cosmology
Why cosmology?
What I seek to represent is a developing worldview. Cosmology is the practice of submitting such a worldview to the rigors and integrety of conceptual modelling. The scope of cosmology is the scope of concept itself. This is less inclusive than the scope of knowledge or consciousness or awareness. The experience of mind may include concepts and conceptual models but there are many other domains of experience. These other domains of experience may well be sufficient for understanding the world; for operating a worldview. However, the academic medium requires literary, linear, and therefore conceptual translation. So for this audience, in this linear medium, I will stick with cosmology as a defining structure for the presentation. For another audience I may well wish to represent the same knowledge musically, somatically, or in the silence of raw awareness.
Whitehead's defense of 'speculative philosophy' is a defense and definition of metaphysics that not only validates cosmological pursuits but defines those pursuits as metaphysical. Applicable and adequate. Cosmology is metaphysical in that it seeks to present models and statements that are as general and inclusive as possible and yet are explicit as possible. Science's eternal attempt to uncover the 'laws of nature' is an example of metaphysical inquiry.
Prevalence of Cosmology
Everyone maintains a worldview. An overwhelming majority maintains at least part of this worldview as a conceptual model. A cosmology is an attempt to reconcile and articulate such a model.
According to Alan Watts we are all metaphysicians. All of us create generally applicable metaphors to understand and navigate the world that we live in. So playing with metaphysical models may be far less unique than actually calling that behavior metaphysical. And so metaphysical models may be a dime a dozen.
In this introduction I want to take the idea of cosmology out of the ivory tower context and out of the religious context by showing it as human heritage. Cosmology in literature is a case in point.
excerpt from Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons by Kurt Vonnegut:
Here is my understanding of the universe and mankind's place in it at the present time:
the seeming curvature of the universe is an illusion. The universe is really as straight as a string, except for a loop at either end. The loops are microscopic.
One tip of the string is forever vanishing. Its neighboring loop is forever retreating from extinction. The other end is forever growing. Its neighboring loop is forever pursuing Genesis.
In the beginning and in the end was Nothingness. Nothingness implied the possibility of Somethingness. It is impossible to make something from nothing. Therefore nothingness could only imply something's. That implication is the Universe --- as straight as a string, as I've already said, except for a loop at either end.
We are wisps of that implication.
The universe does not teem with life. It is inhabited only one point by creatures who can examine it and comment on it. That point is the planet Earth, which is forever at the exact center of the implication, midway between tips.
All the twinkles in glints in the night sky might as well be sparks from a cowboy's campfire, for all the life or wisdom they contain.
Orson Scott Card has a cosmology articulated in the Ender's Game series. J.R.R. Tolkien's cosmology is perhaps most directly represented in the Silmarillion. Frank Herbert in Dune, Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials,
Parliament Funkadelic, founders of funk music and culture, maintain a cosmology within the philosophy of transcenfunkadentalism.
Myths are cosmological. They present archetypal stories that illustrate metaphysical properties and structures which are used to orient the individual within their environment. (Joseph Campbell)
One thing we can say about cosmologies is that they are abundant. As grand as they may or may not make themselves out to be they are truly a dime a dozen. They may be considered hubristic in the sense of "the height of arrogance is the creation of god in one's own image."
Limitations of Cosmology A cosmology is a conceptual model. It is an interpretation and a map. As the map is not the territory, so a cosmology is not the cosmos. There is a fundamental distinction between the qualia of lived experience in the conceptual models that we construct to reflect them. And so a personal extension of "A map is not the territory," and, "A cosmology is not the cosmos," would be, "You are not your self."
fallacy of misplaced concreteness - Whitehead
Structures of Cosmology
Symbols are how we relate to cosmology - a shared understanding of personal situation in process.
Logic is a recognition of the mental processes involved when working with concept. At the heart of logical and conceptual structures are axioms. When we begin to model our experience conceptually we develop and use axioms. Axioms are assumptive interpretations of experience to be understood as self- evident, expressed and articulated conceptually. Logic allows for conceptual constructions to follow from axioms as axioms represent the criteria for the structural integrity of the model.
When we talk cosmologically we use big inclusive words like universe or being as axioms.
Some cosmologies are articulated concisely and then expanded on. The yoga sutras illustrate the entire model in a single aphorism at the beginning and then expand on it throughout the several books- usually with plenty of commentary. The Tao Te Ching also does this.
- Ubiquitous Principle
Cosmologies often have a single variable which is universal and ubiquitous. It is omnipresent. Everything in the universe becomes relative to and describable in terms of that variable. In Taoism it is the Tao (ch'i is differentiated Tao). In Yoga it is prana, the direct experience of which is the "unconditioned mind". In Western science they are the constant and elusive laws of nature. Einsteinian relativity theory makes the universe relative to the speed of light. (Whiteheadean Creativity or experience?) To Phenomenology it is experience. Douglas Adams makes the point in his novel, The Restaraunt at the End of the Universe, that this single variable may be rather arbitrary:
To explain -- since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to o the whole of creation -- every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The universal variable is also unitive thereby the (dis)organizing principle in a cosmology. It represents the hierophanic organizing hub for the cosmology using the variable.
In the previously cited Vonnegut cosmology, the ubiquitous element would be the line with looped ends. Everything is included in this description
- unity (the one) - The harmonic spectrum and the relative ubiquity of anything DeBroglie, Tesla, musical perception and resonance, holographic perception
Most information about harmonic spectra focus on the peaks and try to define a sound by wourking mathematically with only the peaks. What often gets neglected is that there is always some amplitude at any position. This means that any sound carries the resonation of all frequencies to at least some small amplitude.
It is our perception that picks the "fundamental" frequency out of the mix and identifies, categorizes the sound for digestion, assimilation.
Quantum positioning suggests that any particle exists everywhere to some degree of probability. An electron has the potential as a wave function to exist anywhere in space until it is observed to be in a particular position. So, in a sense the physical reality of an electron is ubiquitous.
resonance and Indra's net
These pieces of evidence lend credibility to the thought that any observeable thing in the universe exists to some degree everywhere in the universe prior to the filter of perception
- Perception
Perceptual mechanisms remove constant stimuli by habituation and categorization. We readily perceive change and filter out constance. This is reflected in the Tao. The Tao is at the heart of all change as the ubiquitous element. Whatever is ubiquitous is also the most difficult element of our experience to perceive categorically.
(Naranjo & Ornstein) Dehabituation is an inversion of one's point of view
Objective Description - differentiation and integration of the one and the many
Differentiation (or individuation)/integration
In this first verse of the Tao te Ching differentiation occurs by "naming". This suggests that the categorical function of our coneptual mind is responsible for the differentiation.
Extrapolation, breaking out from a central state or position, is another way of describing differentiation which emphasizes the central and unitive aspect of a model. Extrapolation and differentiation may also be described in terms of symmetry breaking. Symmetry and complexity are inversely related in systems theory. "Formation of, or an increase in, complexity is characterized by a breaking of the complexity of the precursor state." (Cambray 52)
This model represents an objective description because it includes the universal element as an object, implying a perspective that is outside of even that. This would be a God perspective.
Subjective Description
As "The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao," so trying to explicitly describe the fundamental principle of a cosmology may be futile. The subjective description of a cosmology implies a central idea that rather than directly approaching it.
Whitehead describes his cosmology as a philosophy of organism into his tome Process and Reality. The categoreal scheme represents a a set of ideas that imply the nature of process thought. The problem with presenting this as a book is that to talk about any one of those points you must talk about the others. Since this is a cosmology, the points circumscribing it are axiomatic. They rely only on each other. But it is impossible to describe one without putting it into terms of the others. Process and Reality, the book in which Whitehead disseminates his cosmology, is not supposed to make sense until you have read the whole thing. This is because it is so recursive (Self-referrential) that each part makes reference to the other parts of the book even before you've read them.
I will in an HTML document use a set of six ideas within the context of the general model that I have laid out heirarchically. Each of the concepts in the model will refer to the other concepts in the model. I would intend this to mean that the concepts are well adapted to each other and do not create a cognitive dissonance by holding them together.
Polar Subjective/Objective Experience
Buddhism and the Tao te Ching inform us that the experience of the One occurs in nonattachment, free from desire. The experience of the many occurs by entangled in desire and attachment. The experience of self and other, or the experience of "I" is of desire and attachment. Free from desire there is no I-and-thou. This is depersonalization.
Annie Dillard uses the image of a knitted scarf to describe her experience with this idea. Having a depersonalized experience, she sees humanity as a superorganism interrelated and bound to each other by passion, emotion, and attachment. She allowed that she was granted this perspective by a degree of dispassion and unattachment.
In Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's research on near death experiences, wherein people who had been clinically dead and revived are questioned about their experiences, a similar image arises. The common experience of having one's life flash before their eyes occurs by seeing one's life in the context of their emotional impact on the network of beings they have been involved with. This moment is an empathic experience of the collective impact of one's life on the emotional web.
- Cosmologies and Medical Models Imply Each Other
As a cosmology is a way of relating to the universe it is specifically relevant to the individual.
The boundary between self and other is maintained by cosmology and worldview.
Commonalities in medical models imply commonalities in cosmologies in a way that is particularly relevant to the individual.
a sense of balance - homeostasis
structure/flow
stagnation - a commonality in all medical models that I have seen. represents disease process. In terms of structure and flow, stagnation is maladaptive structure which inhibits flow.
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