One, Two, Three...

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The intersection between philosophy, physics and the wider cosmos would appear to lie in mathematics. Not just any old mathematics, though, but the reductive mathematics of Boolean Algebra and the Calculus of G. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form. In his book "Analog", Robert Hassan reiterates the notion that mankind '...evolved with technology to become Homo Sapiens. We did not discover it.' Therein lies a singular truth. We are born 'unfinished' in his words, and I don't think there's much arguing that the newborn, left to its own devices, will die unfinished. It is a tabula rasa whose surface can only be filled by experience and with the nurturing of its parents and society. This much is a given.

We are not born replete with all the tools we require; not just those needed for survival beyond infancy, but also those that will allow us to flee the nest and become active members of wider society as we mature. This includes the human proclivity for invention: the truth is that there is no novel 'moment' of pure invention in anything we do as humans; it is all learned experience passed down to us, generation after generation, in a cycle of refinement that echoes the Darwinist notion of evolution through natural selection almost exactly. However you want to cast it, and I'm aware that religious people will find the notion uncomfortable at best, the development of the human intellect is a function of that very process.

The old adage that 'Talent borrows, Genius steals...' doesn't fall far from the truth of the matter, and we all do, whatever we achieve, stand on the shoulders of giants. Improvisation and invention are simply where the legacy of an existing idea or ideas is seen, out of context, in the light of the other, forming the next advance in thinking, either technological, metaphysical, or philosophical. The Enlightenment was built on just this natural, human, modus operandi. This is the way we have developed from proto-human into the chaotic, wonderful, flawed, unfortunately often barbaric, species that we are today.

But back to the beginning, so to speak: we discover the technologies we find in the world around us. We discover the mathematics that is inherent in the world around us, and we develop our ideas from there; building an ever more complex picture of the Universe we inhabit. And yet, at its heart, there lies a simplicity which underlies and forms the foundation for the ever-increasing complexity of our reality. This essential, reductive nature of the origins of all that we are and know is pretty much agreed upon by scientists and the fundamentally religious alike. The devil, as they say, is in the detail. Except that we cannot know the detail; we can only posit theories based on our inherently flawed human grasp of things. We do the best we can with the tools and knowledge that are available to us. It was ever thus: for the fatally-flawed counter argument see " The End of History" by Francis Fukuyama.

Ultimately, the philosophical nub upon which the entirety of existence rests is one that pretty much both sides of the religious/rational divide agree: the differences between the various factions on either side are pretty much split between God or Gods/No-God or Gods. But what is widely accepted across the philosophical/scientific divide is the notion of creation from nothing at some point. Either from a physical singularity: a point of no substance; or at the hand or hands of God[s], whose insubstantiality or not is the matter of religious debate; or indeed from the cleaving of a void by a distinction which renders that void into substance.

This latter lies at the foundation of both the philosophy of Taoism [principally, but among others], and of certain branches of mathematics, as mentioned above. That both are the products of the evolution of the human intellect and millennia of evolution renders all of it as mysterious as the magic we took to be at work in the world in more primitive times. Boole and Spencer-Brown both demonstrate in their respective reductive mathematics that from simple unary, binary and tertiary beginnings, complexity grows naturally. We are ultimately the product of that mathematics, not the other way around....

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