Monism, the multiverse, and why we Kant know anything (a continuting series)

Monism

Talking about the Greek Milesian philosophers of the 6th century BCE (Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes), I made the statement that these thinkers are generally considered to be "material monists". That is, they are "materialists" because they believed everything to be made of matter; and they are "monists", in that they conceived of everything as one unity or as composed of one substance.

Now, as I said before, I think that the assertion that the Milesians were, indeed, "materialists" in any dogmatic sense is at best highly questionable. But each of their systems does seem to imply a kind of "monism." And I wanted to look at that concept more closely.

I went ahead and looked up the article on "monism" in Wikipedia to see what all it had to say. I thought that could start us off on some basic ideas that we could then work to clarify and examine more thoroughly. Here is how the article begins:

Monism is the philosophical view that a variety of existing things can be explained in terms of a single reality or substance. The wide definition states that all existing things go back to a source which is distinct from them (e.g. in Neoplatonism everything is derived from The One). A commonly-used, restricted definition of monism asserts the presence of an underlying substance or essence.

Okay, basically it is saying that "monism" asserts that everything, can ultimately be explained by, or reduced to "one thing." This is that great Greek insight (though it’s certainly not limited to the Greeks), that "all is one." Or, to put it another way, these thinkers happened upon the very powerful and all-embracing concept of "Unity."

When we start looking at the world in a large, abstract sense, the notion generally arises that everything that exists all fits together into some kind of enormous, all-encompassing system in which all things works together. There are a number of good reasons for this kind of thinking. I have already pointed out the idea of a dog (or any other living thing) that is composed of different parts. But in the larger picture of things, all these parts work together so that the animal - the sum of all these parts, so to speak - can function as a single entity. And that conception is one of a unity of all these various parts.

And that’s not all. When we look around us, at the world, we begin to notice how everything in reality itself seems to "fit together", to function, as it were, as a colossal whole. In nature, for example, we see how there are vast and multifarious relationships between things in general that keep the world going. There is birth and death, the recurring cycle of the seasons, there is growth and decay. One generation comes along to succeed the previous one. Living things need nourishment - and there is a vast system of different plants and animals that live off one another. Plus, all living things need water, and we get a constant cycle of water sources heating, condensing, forming clouds, then returning back to the earth as rain, so animals and plants can continue to grow. I could go on and on about this, as could anyone. The point is, that even very primitive humans could look at the world of nature around them and see everything as being inter-connected into one giant system of which we are all a part.

So the ancient Greeks didn’t come up with anything unique here simply by forming the notion of a unity in nature, or the world. No, what baffled them is the question: "How can there be so many different things if everything is really just one big thing?" This question, which they pretty much all tried to solve, is known as the problem of the one and the many - or the problem of diversity within unity.

Let’s go back to the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on "monism". There, a distinction is made between a "wide definition" of the term and a "restricted definition". "The wide definition states that that all existing things go back to a source which is distinct from them." See why that’s a problem? How can everything "go back to a source" that’s "distinct" from it? In other words, How can one thing become something else? And not only that - if there was originally only one source, how or why would it ever turn into anything else?!!

Well, that’s what got guys like Thales thinking. I mean, there doesn’t seem to be a very obvious answer to this question. And that’s precisely why his attempted answer - along with the answers of his fellow Milesians - was such a big step to try to think on such a generalized, abstract level.

Now let’s look at the "restricted definition" of the term: "monism asserts the presence of an underlying substance or essence." Whoah! Now, that definition carries with it not only the question of the one and the many and diversity within unity, but it implies a definite answer to these baffling questions. And the very nature of that answer is nothing less than an abstraction at that!

Monism asserts the presence of an underlying substance or essence. Well, what on earth is a substance? And what the hell is an essence?

Let’s take a look:

According to Wikipedia, a substance is matter - anything that takes up space. Hmm. That seems pretty vague. Setting aside for the moment how modern science defines the word "matter," I think we all have a pretty general idea what the term means. But generally, when we talk about matter - and even more so, when the ancient Greeks talked about matter - what we really mean is one kind of matter or another. You know: metal, rocks, water, sticks, whatever. Just the idea of matter by itself is pretty darned abstract.

But we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. What about . . . essence? Okay, hang on:

In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an entity or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity.

Well, I’m not sure, but I don’t think that the Milesians got quite this far along in their thinking.

You know what this suggests to me? It goes back to what I was saying before about how the Milesians were looking for what has been called a single physis to describe the entire world. And we noticed that Aristotle, writing a good deal later, and a lot of hard-core thinking had been done after the Milesians, called it an arche; or a principle.

I’ve got a pretty good idea that that the notion of an arche - which I’m going to say is something very much like an essence - is kind of an anachronistic notion to pass on back to the Milesians. I’m thinking they were pretty much stuck on the physis level. Which means that they were thinking, in general, about matter (or substance). (Don’t get me wrong - that’s still really advanced for the time.)

And that also explains why the Milesians are so often referred to as "material monists." It’s just that they were thinking in terms of matter only because they had not yet risen to the more "sophisticated" level of thinking about essences or arches or any other such grand abstract ideas. They weren’t asserting that everything was material in the sense that they were denying the existence of anything ideal or spiritual or purely conceptual, or whatever else. They just hadn’t gotten to that level yet. Everything for them was still "full of gods" (whatever that meant), remember? But it was still a big jump to say that everything came about from one kind of matter or substance instead of just going along with Homer and Hesiod and saying "this god made this, and that Titan created that."

I think that as we go along, we’ll see that this kind of "materialistic" thinking among these early Greek thinkers gave the West a kind of "head start" in thinking on a level that we might today call "scientific." Because what we’re going to see as "monism" in the East was definitely more "spiritually oriented" than "material" - and that was going to give things an entirely different shade of meaning and emphasis.

Still, we’ve got people in all parts of the world coming up with ideas that one can describe as "monistic" in one way or another. It makes one wonder. Is there something in the human mind - or even something in nature (or reality) itself that makes us tend to think in terms of a unity? And if so, what does that imply - if anything?

We’ll come back to all this, but let me just go ahead and make a little distinction that I made before. Fast-forward to the present day. We can think about a unity existing in the physical universe. Now, that’s scientific thinking, and really it’s not so very controversial (unless you talk to a select few philosophers of science).

But, wait just a minute. Why don’t you take it just a step further and try to start talking about a unity existing in Being itself! Now, Being itself is a much more general, abstract concept, isn’t it? And the way things are these days in the philosophical world, you just might find that you’ve stirred up quite a fuss with certain critical thinkers. Now there are some very good reasons for that, and we’ll come back to them later. Right now, though, I’d like to go a little further and investigate this monism idea a little more thoroughly.

Wikipedia continues:

One must distinguish "stuff monism" from "thing monism". According to stuff monism there is only one kind of stuff (e.g. matter or mind), although there may be many things made out of this stuff. According to thing-monism there exists strictly speaking only a single thing (e.g. the universe), which can only be artificially and arbitrarily divided into many things.

Now, this distinction may seem a little technical and confusing at first, but if we look at it just a little more closely, I think we can see the difference clearly enough.

"Stuff monism" seems to be asserting that there is only one kind of thing that exists; everything that is, is made out of one shared nature or substance.

"Thing monism", on the other hand, maintains that there is only one existent thing, period. (But could it be made of different "stuffs?")

I think it appears obvious that our Milesian philosophers were concerned, primarily, at least, with the first kind of monism - "stuff monism". Each of the Milesians thought that everything was ultimately made of the same basic stuff. Thales thought it was water. Anaximander thought it was the indeterminate or the apeiron. And Anaximenes thought that it was aer.

This kind of "stuff monism", once again, shows a basic interest in material reality, which in turn could lead later Western thinkers down the road to a more science-based type of thinking, where the ultimate object of thought is nothing more or less than "the material universe" itself.

"Thing monism", is not only larger, but it’s a little more vague of a concept, isn’t it? Here, we’re not addressing what everything is made of; we are, rather, trying to figure out just exactly what everything is, aren’t we? I mean, this is where we start asserting that everything is material, or everything is an idea, or even that everything is an illusion. This just seems to be a bigger, more philosophic idea, doesn’t it?

And perhaps we’ll see that this "thing monism", so to speak, could carry with it some kind of spiritual implications as well. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s just hang on here for a minute before I get carried away in all sorts of directions.

We’ll talk more about "thing monism" later. But what I really want to point out is that either way we look at it, the idea of "monism" itself clearly suggests a unity of one kind or another. And as I posed the question earlier, does not all this tendency to think about "reality" as a whole constructed as a kind of "unity" not suggest something very fundamental about that reality itself? Or at the very least, doesn’t it say something about how our minds relate and respond to that reality?

Now, empirically speaking (that is through the use of our senses or the methods of science), we can’t actually observe such a thing as "unity," can we? No, "unity" isn’t a thing we can observe at all. It’s more of a relationship between things, right? And can we observe relationships?

Hmm . . . It seems like we can observe some relationships. Like, for instance, we can observe spatial relationships: like one thing sitting on top of another. Right?

And we can observe temporal relationships, too, can’t we? Like we can observe one thing occurring after another. Isn’t that true?

Well, what about . . . causality? Can we observe one thing causing another to happen?

Oh, crap. I’m getting carried away again. It’s just that for the idea of "unity" to have any meaning at all, then there has to be some principle of causality at work in it somewhere. I mean things don’t just act in a "unified" manner at random, do they? For something to be a true unity, the things inside it have to be able to cause other things to happen, right? Isn’t that what we really mean by a "unity" in the first place?

Hey . . . maybe - just maybe - the concept of "unity" itself is some kind of transcendent principle that leads us, somehow, to an intuitive grasp of something extremely fundamental and meaningful about the very nature of reality itself!

Aaagh! Forget you read that! That’s bullshit! There’s no way I can prove something like that, and neither can you. So just calm down, goddam-it!

I mean it!

Whew . . .

Okay, there.

No, we can’t prove that some concept like "unity" actually means anything about reality itself.

We can’t even prove that causality exists.

A very smart Scotsman by the name of David Hume taught us that a long time ago, and by golly, he was right. But we’re not going to talk about him right now. (We’ll come back to him, eventually - I promise.) For now, let’s just kind of take it for granted that there really is at least something like what we call "unity’, okay? Just for now.

Hey, after all, we use the concept of "unity" in science all the time, don’t we? When astronomers just look at our solar system (not our whole friggin’ universe, now, but just our crappy little solar system!), they have to make assumptions about how the whole thing works together, right? Every planet orbits the sun in a regular pattern, following self-regulating laws of physics (like gravity), and things like mass and weight have to be taken into account, or the whole thing wouldn’t run smoothly. That’s why we call it a solar system. It is an example of . . . you guessed it: a "unity." It follows steady, predictable principles.

In fact, all of science assumes the existence of causality and predictable, regulatory principles of action in order for things to function at all. So, in the grandest scheme of all things, our most advanced scientific minds look at our entire universe as one, self-contained, functioning system. In other words, the universe itself is a "unity." Wrap your heads around that. (I am not stoned! But it wouldn’t hurt.)

Now. What happens if we extend this principle of "unity" beyond the physical universe? What if we take the intellectual leap to the notion that Being itself, of which the empirical construct that we refer to as our "physical universe" is just a part?

What do I mean? Well, what if there is more than one universe? What if there’s something called . . . a multiverse?

Okay, I’m going to go back to Wikipedia just one more time in this article:

The multiverse (or meta-universe) is the hypothetical set of infinite or finite possible universes (including the Universe we consistently experience) that together comprise everything that exists: the entireity of space, time, matter, and energy as well as the physical laws and constants that describe them. The various universes within the multiverse are sometimes called parallel universes or "alternate universes".

The structure of the multiverse, the nature of each universe within it and the relationships among the various constituent universes, depend on the specific multiverse hypothesis considered. Multiple universes have been hypothesized in cosmology, physics, astronomy, religion, philosophy, transpersonal psychology, and fiction, particularly in science fiction and fantasy. In these contexts, parallel universes are also called "alternate universes", "quantum universes", "interpenetrating dimensions", "parallel dimensions", "parallel worlds", "alternate realities", "alternate timelines", and "dimensional planes," among others . . .

The multiverse hypothesis is a source of debate within the physics community. Physicists disagree about whether the multiverse exists, and whether the multiverse is a proper subject of scientific inquiry . . . critics . . . have argued that the multiverse question is philosophical rather than scientific, that the multiverse cannot be a scientific question because it lacks falsifiability, or even that the multiverse hypothesis is harmful or pseudoscientific.

Personally, I think that the multiverse is not only an exciting notion, but I believe that it is far more likely to be true than not! But I’m not going to tell you why right now. For the time being, let’s just recognize that there is no consensus within the scientific community that this idea is even a scientific question, let alone true or false.

But even if we take a possible multiverse into consideration, would that, in itself, exhaust the possibility of everything in such a way that we have truly defined or described Being itself?

Hmm . . . what about transcendent Being?

What?

I don’t know. All kinds of things.

Like what?

Like, for instance . . . God?

Oh, shut up!

No, I’m serious. From time immemorial, humanity has postulated the existence of a transcendent dimension of Being, sometimes defining it as God (or the gods), Brahman (we’ll get to that), or even the Platonic World of Ideas (we’ll definitely get to that!). As a matter of fact, there is no cultural tradition on this planet of which I am aware that has not developed some sort of notion of the transcendent . . . something which goes beyond the physical, empirical world that we know through our senses.

And whether a transcendent realm of Being exists or not, it certainly cannot be determined or described (or refuted or "falsified") by the methods of physical science.

So keeping all that in mind, can we ask ourselves: "Is Being itself a "unity?"

Well, according to this guy here, we can ask the question all we want. But we’re never going to get a definite answer:

 

Coming soon: more wacky things to think about!

 

- petey