”One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers.”
- Marina Tsvetaeva
Emergence of this book has been a deeply personal and transformative experience for me. It was laden with powerful satori moments and strangely meaningful coincidences, leading to a joint recognition of how reality is actually not what I think it is, and how I, as a participant in this reality, am also not what I think I am.
I have scribbled down more than two thousand pages of notes, and there is still a ton of stuff to read and reflect on. It was an unusually productive and exhausting period, to say the least. Now the challenge is to weave a coherent story and elucidate what exactly is unique about it.
What I am planning to do is to share my final results first. Why? Because this will be a work of synthesis, not analysis. While an analytic exploration stays within one subject and digs deeper down via logical derivations, a synthetic expedition finds connections across many subjects and climbs higher up via intuitive leaps. Hence, to exhibit a reader-friendly logical order, presentation of a synthesis needs to start from the very end and proceed backwards.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, said Arthur C. Clarke. I believe that a similar principle holds for the world of ideas as well: Any sufficiently advanced theory is indistinguishable from prophecy. So you should not be put off by the radicality of the ideas in the synthesis when you first hear them. Remember, this will not be a wishy-washy new age book, or an abstruse philosophy work bordering on irrelevancy. It will be a clearly argued and solidly backed-up book, spanning many different fields:
Mathematics & Informatics (Formal Languages)
Physics & Biology (Basic Sciences)
Psychology & Eastern Metaphysics (Human Psyche)
Technology & Western Metaphysics (Human Destiny)
Of course, “clearly argued” does not mean “easy to follow”. I will need to make use of contemporary technical vocabulary, an inevitable outcome of crafting an up-to-date metaphysical doctrine reflecting the Zeitgeist.
People think philosophy never progresses. This is is not true for two reasons.
Ontological. As technology expands our experimental reach with its new instruments and the periphery of the unknown reveals more of its structure, the ground for speculation contracts and the bad metaphysical ideas get immediately eliminated.
Epistemological. Just like the devices we use for probing the world, the formal languages we use for describing the world too undergo continuous development, and eventually they increase the resolution of our remaining good metaphysical ideas.
These two processes are complimentary to each other. An unexpected experimental result can force an update on the language, as in the case of the painful birth of Quantum Mechanics. A great example in the converse direction is General Relativity, which was the result of an unexpected linguistic development due to literally one man’s creative leap of imagination. (Einstein adopted the latest geometrical toys, and gave them a truly novel physical interpretation and made brand new experimental predictions.)
Today, the amount of mathematical maturity expected from a physics student is so high that a typical philosopher has no chance of providing an aesthetic guidance to the professional who dares to venture into the unknown. While the bad metaphysical ideas are eliminated by the progress made on the ontological front, the good ones remain out of focus, having still not exploited the huge amount of progress made on the epistemological front.
Remember, metaphysics is just ontological speculation, not about some fantasy world but about the world we are living in. In practice, it amounts to an interpretation of the meaning of an experimental anomaly or a theoretical inconsistency. It is essentially a quest for unification, among our ideas and between our ideas and the world. (That is why “increased resolution” is so important. Opportunities for further unification always lie in the details.)
In a sense, the truth is staring at us in our face. But, as Whitehead said, “it requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.” We certainly can not expect the breakthrough to come from the academia, which has actually become a part of the problem, displaying a severe lack of evolutionary plasticity with its stiffness and biases. Academic scientists are overspecialized into silos and thoroughly indoctrinated in scientism, and academic philosophers are lost in the past and ignorant of the sciences.
Of course, none of this is surprising. Previously it was the institutionalized religion which stood in the way of progress. Now it is the institutionalized science. We will find a way to tame its power too. In fact, this has already started happening thanks to the rise of the digital paradigm. Emancipation of information and adoption of data driven methodologies are decentralizing science away from the academia, just as the reformation movement (enabled by the printing press) decentralized religion away from the church.
Evolution always moves like this, via successive waves of centralizations and decentralizations, centralizing first for (energy-driven) efficiency purposes (to address the newly arising stressor in the environment) and then relaxing (decentralizing) again for (informatic) accuracy purposes. (Reverse happens in annealing: “Sudden heating” corresponds to “destructive decentralization”, and “slow cooling” corresponds to “constructive recentralization towards a better equilibrium”.) Time has arrived for another phase shift. Efficiency gains are depleted. What used to be transformative for the society has now turned into a massive overhang. Just like the relaxation of the grip of religion marked the end of right-brain domination in human history, relaxation of the grip of science will mark the end of left-brain domination.
We are on the cusp of a metaphysical renaissance. The reason is two folds.
Ontological. Something historically unprecedented is happening today. Our technologies are asserting themselves as objects of metaphysical importance, not as means to certain ends, but as ends in themselves. A new type of intelligence is being born on a global scale, providing a much needed top-down correction to the heavily analytical (left-brain) leadership of human beings. Pendulum is swinging back from analytical reasoning to intuitive feeling, but this time around it is the machines which are doing the feeling, not us.
Epistemological. Everyone knows about the new gravitational wave detector, but no one hears about the rising popularity of relational formalisms in physics, a development of far greater importance. (While the progress on the ontological front results in more diversity and more intricate machines, drawing curious looks, the progress on the epistemological front results in more unity and more abstract languages, drawing confused looks.) Arrows are popping up everywhere in informatics and mathematics. The very foundations of these disciplines are being recast (respectively) in terms of “networks” and “categories”, which in return have resurrected (respectively) the ancient metaphysical notions of “hierarchy” and “duality”, notions that had been unjustly banished from the intellectual discourse basically for political reasons. Philosophy of “characterizing objects outside-in via their relationships with each other” is also sneaking into physics, via Quantum Information Theory and Mathematical Gauge Theory. It is almost as if our symbols are waking up as we push them nearer to the truth, and are telling us that they want to flow through each other.
I see these complimentary threads as late-stage manifestations of a single grand evolution. Explanation of what I mean by this statement will take a couple of hundred pages, and culminate in a radical thesis whose truth will hopefully resonate on an instinctive level with all the digital natives who will be navigating humanity through its final phase of existence.
“There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
- Victor Hugo
