We can’t control without assuming a context and the context we assume is never going to be true – it’s only ever going to be propositional in nature, it’s only ever going to be ‘a convention that we adopt purely for practical purposes’. In order to be able to control we have to simplify reality down to a handleable level; if we didn’t do this then we would neither be able to identify a ‘starting-off point’ to what we’re doing nor a ‘finishing-up point’, which means that the idea of control just wouldn’t be applicable. It would be entirely irrelevant.

We don’t need to be able to comprehend the comings and goings of the universe in order to change a light bulb or empty a dishwasher, in other words – if we felt that we did need to have this global comprehension then the light bulb would never get changed and the dishwasher would never get emptied. Although we are necessarily sandwiching everything between a defined starting-off point and a defined end point, we aren’t getting hung up on this simplification that we have made, we aren’t getting trapped within the context that we ourselves have had to assume. We’re not taking it too seriously because it’s just a thing we had to do. We are therefore free to carry out the practical tasks that we want to engage in without seeing the whole world in concrete, black and white terms, even though the problem or task in question is being framed in this way. Just because I am a watchmaker doesn’t mean that I have to envisage the entire universe as a giant mechanism every time I fix a watch in other words, even though the watch itself can be legitimately understood in this way. Classical mechanics can account for how the watch works, even though it can’t tell us anything about the universe as a whole…

This is a telling example, however. We don’t have to assume a mechanistic, cause-and-effect type universe in order to understand an ordinary, common-or-garden wristwatch, but if we aren’t wary enough then we could very easily fall into this trap all the same. Christian theologians have – of course – going out on record is doing just this. This is the celebrated ‘argument by design’, which states there can’t be such a thing as ‘a watch’ without there also being ‘a watchmaker’ (i.e., there can’t be such a thing as a universe without there being a ‘universe maker’). Every effect needs a cause, so we argue.

Because we have to assume a linear / mechanical paradigm in order to build or repair a watch, we also have to assume the mechanical paradigm when considering ‘the Totality of Everything’, therefore. The same principle must apply – or so we argue, at any rate! If the Totality of Everything is ‘the effect’ then there must be a cause (or a causal agent). This argument doesn’t come across as being a particularly strong one when we express it like this, however – why should the same principle apply when we’re talking about what are clearly two very different things. How can we possibly assume that the same rules that apply to ‘a fragment or subset of the whole’ apply to the Whole itself? How indeed could we be so flippant as to suggest that any rules apply to the whole, given that there isn’t at convenient framework containing it in relation to which these rules might be elucidated. Wholeness can’t be ‘contained’, after all – that would incur a massive paradox. If we do argue that a network of ideas or axioms can conveniently frame the Whole of Everything (whatever that might be) then we would only have to pause and reflect for a few moments on what we’ve just said. There is after all nothing outside of Wholeness to contain or frame it. We can’t get outside of the Universal Set to see what it is because the Universal Set contains everything, including our heroic efforts to get outside it…

The mechanical can exist within the context of the non-mechanical (which is to say ‘purposefulness’ can exist within the greater context of the ‘purely accidental’) but this can never happen the other way around. the one thing purposeful activity cannot do is give rise to the non-mechanical. Or as we might also say, order cannot give rise to randomness – anything produced by an orderly system is by definition also going to be ordered. Only randomness can give rise to randomness; for chaos to be present in a system it must always have been there. Randomness – we might say – is always associated with the Whole (unfamiliar as we might be with this association); the reason being that only random movement is free to map out the totality of everything – the deliberate or the purposeful can never escape from the premises that it is predicated upon. This is after all what linearity is all about – the inability of the process in question to ever depart from its starting-off point. To leave our starting off point behind we need randomness, we need chaos, we need something ‘messy,’ something that doesn’t obey rules…

We aren’t familiar with this way of looking at things – our rational culture, as mathematician Rudy Rucker points out, absolutely doesn’t want to have any truck with chaos, in any shape or form –

The Greek word for infinity was apeiron, which literally means unbounded, but can also mean infinite, indefinite, or undefined. Apeiron was a negative, even pejorative word. The original chaos out of which the world was formed was apeiron. An arbitrary crooked line was apeiron. A dirty crumpled handkerchief was apeiron. Thus, apeiron need not only mean infinitely large, but can also mean totally disordered, infinitely complex, subject to no finite determination. In Aristotle’s words, “. . . being infinite is a privation, not a perfection but the absence of limit. . .”

Our rational way of looking at the world is to say that apeiron is the ruination of our plans, the destruction of our ideals. Looking at this from the point of view of rationality, chaos is dreaded because it threatens the integrity of our ability to represent the world to ourselves in an orderly fashion, a fashion that makes sense to us (i.e., is understandable in terms of categories, in terms of concepts). Chaos inevitably results in leaky categories – everything intermingles with everything else with the result that the thinking mind just can’t operate anymore. Everything turns into endlessly recursive fractals and that’s not something we’re not able to make sense of.

Chaos is not the bogeyman we all live in fear of just because it spoils all our plans and fatally glitches all our nice orderly systems, but also because it completely disables our ability to ‘know’ stuff, therefore. Apeiron is the bad guy, therefore – it’s the thing no one likes, the thing that no one has a good word for. The key point about ‘the accidental’ – as we have said – is that it serves no master (that it is ‘unprejudiced’ in other words). It is unlimited in terms of where it can go – it’s open to all possibilities, without exception. The accidental serves no master, but the purposeful always does; the purposeful has to assume a context, as we started off by saying, and it is this ‘assumed context’ that becomes our master, that becomes the autocrat or tyrant we can’t disobey. This is how things ‘flip over’ for us – we assume the basis that we’re going to see the world from, but once we do assume it then it becomes our master in all things. The device that we ourselves created traps us. We get unceremoniously ‘hoisted by our own petard’ (or ‘ignominiously stunk out by our own malodorous farts’, as we might also say).

We can’t control without a purpose or goal and we can’t have a purpose or goal without assuming a context, and this ‘context’ is our rational impression of the world. Our rational impression of the world is however an artefact, a construct that has no relationship with the intrinsic nature of reality, and so the moment we start controlling (or choosing) is also the moment we enter into a false version of the world, a false version of reality. The false word that we enter into is ‘the logical / tautological development of our arbitrarily chosen context’ – there’s nothing in it that was not already in the context, in other words. Nothing can happen in the game other than what is permitted by the rules of that game, and it is in this sense that we can say that we are the slaves of that game, that we are the slaves of the projected world, the projected reality. First we project the positive / defined reality, and then we get hopelessly stuck in it, and it’s all because of our unexamined urge to control.

The assumed context – we might say – casts a shadow – and that shadow equals – we might say – ‘a lack of freedom that we can’t see as such’. The artificial reality that we have created is only what it is defined as being – it’s a ‘logical statement’, in other words. The projection or extension of this logical statement is what we have been variously calling the Known World or the Finite World or the Mind-Created Virtual Reality and it – needless to say – contains no more freedom in it then the original formula did. There’s no space there for anything to happen in any other way than the way in which the rules say it must happen. Because we don’t – as conditioned creatures – have the capacity to comprehend or in any way appreciate the essential nature of space (or ‘openness’) we don’t know that we have been short-changed. We have cut ourselves off from the real world (which is ‘forever new’) and the consequence of this action is that we are now incapable of knowing that there actually is such a thing as ‘the genuinely new’. Only the petty is real to us now, only the fake is to be given any consideration – that there could be something bigger or more interesting than our self-obsessed games is something that we absolutely refuse to countenance. The ‘shadow’ that we fall under when we box ourselves in with our concepts and categories is also – therefore – ‘a lack of reality we can’t see as such’…





Image credit – clockwork_universe_by_inkimagine_dgw0f2v-pre, deviantart.com