grumpyThe Metaphysics of Clunk (LINK)
January 4th 2008 10:37
From ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggety beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!
The Metaphysics of Clunk
Animism and belief in spirits arise from the projections of primitive consciousness. We know this. We also know that there is no way to falsify such beliefs. The notion, once asserted to me by a sincere individual, that God’s cherubim are responsible for the transmission of information between a wireless antenna and a receiver, or that old tale where friction can be described entirely via the attributes of tiny invisible demons, are not only metaphysically viable concepts, but cannot be disproved.
Normally, our commonsense tells us that such things are foolish; that the obvious reasons for such phenomena have been established by scientific experiment and that there is no need for a multiplication of dynamics or entities which cannot be established by observation or measurement. Yet some areas of human inquiry remain fraught with such entities; entities which arise from our seeming inability to think in terms beyond those of our three dimensional, sense based imagination.
The metaphysics of clunk arise quite simply when we try to explain unknown and apparently “non-physical” phenomena by known physical or pseudo physical concepts. By so doing, we place such concepts into a realm in which they must be either fundamentally self explanatory or where an ever receding chain of explanation conjures an army of conceptual entities, which remain to seethe about the edges of our ideas like a legion of tiny invisible demons.
The notions of etheric and astral bodies, souls, psychic “fluids”, realms, spirits, heavens, hells and all the paraphernalia attached to such “ghost in the machine” ideas all arise from the metaphysics of clunk.
Yet even here we cannot make any real distinction between the projective metaphysics of even the most rat bag of belief systems and those of quantum physics or cosmology.
Clunk metaphysics abounds at the edges of even the most reasonable inquiry into the dynamics of the universe. For example: “fields” or particles with specific, yet invisible or immeasurable properties posited because their existence is necessary to establish a theory within an accepted consensus are no more or less valid entities than those posited by the spiritualists who claim an “astral body’ is the true seat of awareness or that there are specific “vibrations” of the ether which cannot be physically measured.
Sorting the rational from the irrational has till now been the work of a scientific method which has led us to our current level of knowledge about the universe and ourselves. This process has a boundary however, albeit an invisible one, which once crossed takes both scientific and rat bag speculation into a realm where unexplainable concepts begin to pile up and yet cannot co-exist within any theory which tries to take account of all known phenomena. Because of this, it becomes utterly pointless to continue to speculate or advance further theories about the nature of human consciousness or the nature of the universe in which it exists by the continuing application of clunk metaphysics.
A new approach is necessary, an approach which accepts not only the unity of the universe as an entity, but also that the nature of this unity exists within all things, that nothing can be exempt from nor discontinuous with any or all other entities, both apparent or assumed to exist, within such a universe. The psychological jump necessary to make this approach possible is immense and requires an inversion of our deeply rooted sense based approach to phenomena. The idea that the world is not as it seems, that our spatially oriented and time lined perceptions are specifically human interpretations of an altogether different and completely unknown reality has been bandied about in scientific and metaphysical circles since the time of Adam, but never in a way that has not continued to endlessly multiply the entities which arise from the metaphysics of clunk.
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!
The Metaphysics of Clunk
Animism and belief in spirits arise from the projections of primitive consciousness. We know this. We also know that there is no way to falsify such beliefs. The notion, once asserted to me by a sincere individual, that God’s cherubim are responsible for the transmission of information between a wireless antenna and a receiver, or that old tale where friction can be described entirely via the attributes of tiny invisible demons, are not only metaphysically viable concepts, but cannot be disproved.
The metaphysics of clunk arise quite simply when we try to explain unknown and apparently “non-physical” phenomena by known physical or pseudo physical concepts. By so doing, we place such concepts into a realm in which they must be either fundamentally self explanatory or where an ever receding chain of explanation conjures an army of conceptual entities, which remain to seethe about the edges of our ideas like a legion of tiny invisible demons.
The notions of etheric and astral bodies, souls, psychic “fluids”, realms, spirits, heavens, hells and all the paraphernalia attached to such “ghost in the machine” ideas all arise from the metaphysics of clunk.
Yet even here we cannot make any real distinction between the projective metaphysics of even the most rat bag of belief systems and those of quantum physics or cosmology.
Clunk metaphysics abounds at the edges of even the most reasonable inquiry into the dynamics of the universe. For example: “fields” or particles with specific, yet invisible or immeasurable properties posited because their existence is necessary to establish a theory within an accepted consensus are no more or less valid entities than those posited by the spiritualists who claim an “astral body’ is the true seat of awareness or that there are specific “vibrations” of the ether which cannot be physically measured.
Sorting the rational from the irrational has till now been the work of a scientific method which has led us to our current level of knowledge about the universe and ourselves. This process has a boundary however, albeit an invisible one, which once crossed takes both scientific and rat bag speculation into a realm where unexplainable concepts begin to pile up and yet cannot co-exist within any theory which tries to take account of all known phenomena. Because of this, it becomes utterly pointless to continue to speculate or advance further theories about the nature of human consciousness or the nature of the universe in which it exists by the continuing application of clunk metaphysics.
A new approach is necessary, an approach which accepts not only the unity of the universe as an entity, but also that the nature of this unity exists within all things, that nothing can be exempt from nor discontinuous with any or all other entities, both apparent or assumed to exist, within such a universe. The psychological jump necessary to make this approach possible is immense and requires an inversion of our deeply rooted sense based approach to phenomena. The idea that the world is not as it seems, that our spatially oriented and time lined perceptions are specifically human interpretations of an altogether different and completely unknown reality has been bandied about in scientific and metaphysical circles since the time of Adam, but never in a way that has not continued to endlessly multiply the entities which arise from the metaphysics of clunk.
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