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Joe Corbett has been living in Shanghai and Beijing since 2001. He has taught at American and Chinese universities using the AQAL model as an analytical tool in Western Literature, Sociology and Anthropology, Environmental Science, and Communications. He has a BA in Philosophy and Religion as well as an MA in Interdisciplinary Social Science, and did his PhD work on modern and postmodern discourses of self-development, all at public universities in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. He can be reached at [email protected].

SEE MORE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY JOE CORBETT

The Fundamental Structural-Process of the Kosmos

Joe Corbett

In previous essays I have spoken of a dynamic pattern or structural process at the heart of the universe that I have called Kosmic Dynamics. In this essay I will bring together in summary form some of those ideas and expand upon them.

But first, the reader should know that it will be taken as a metaphysical axiom that the subjective, objective, inter-subjective and inter-objective domains are ontological categories that go all the way down, meaning that even the most fundamental level of reality and all levels in-between have individual and collective interiors and exteriors. This metaphysical assumption is opposed to the metaphysical assumption that that isn't the case. Either way, it can't be proven, but it's a frame or lens by which we can analyze reality as being one way or the other.

One of the ideas that comes from this “all the way down” view of reality is what I call Evolutionary Kosmic Dynamics, and it can be mapped using the AQAL as a guide to what is happening as the fundamental pattern-process within the evolution of species. In the UL quadrant is individual mutation and variation, an association that can be made from Beauty to creative mind to novelty to the adjacent possible of a random mutation. In the LL is the collective memory of past mutations that were stabilizing and harmonious (literally morphically resonant) or Good for the internal coherence of an organism, and these were sacralized, ritualized, or probablistically habituated into the genome, which is essentially the value system of the organism.

In its simplest expression, evolution occurs as an oscillation between mutations and the genome, where traits get projected from the genome in the LL to the body in the UR, whereas the body and its traits are always already part of the environment that tests and selects the traits in the LR. This is the fundamental pattern that repeats itself not only within evolution but at multiple levels of existence, with variation or difference in the UL of possibility in oscillation with habit and repetition in the LL of probability.

Indeed we see this pattern operating all the way down to the sub-quantum level of abstract Hilbert space where the Schrodinger wave function is working to compute the state of quantum systems at the foundation of our physical existence from moment to moment. Here quantum fields in the UL extend to infinity and exist in a superposition of potentials as the original or foundational adjacent possibles. These potentials rapidly oscillate and resonate with a holographic space-time memory field of quantum probabilities in the LL (an akashic field of memory based on the holographic principle according to Hawking, Susskind, and others), that get projected or collapsed into particles in the UR that are always already within a network of particles in the LR, which ultimately selects what individual particles will be manifested and persist.

Again we see the same pattern at the sub-quantum level as we see at the biological level of evolution. On the one hand there is an oscillation in the interiors of reality, and on the other hand there is an oscillation between the interiors and the exteriors from moment to moment, and at different rates depending on the level of reality we are considering. Hence there is a double and simultaneous oscillation between the individual and the collective and the interior and the exterior, which we might call the fundamental structural-process or dynamic pattern of the Kosmos.

From this we can see that the AQAL-Kosmos is a structure undergoing an active process from moment to moment for its subsystems from the planck scale on up, otherwise known in Wilberian terms as spirit-in-action or emergence into increasing complexity. Fundamental to this movement is the oscillation between Possibility-Beauty-Subtle-Mind and Probability-Goodness-Causal-Soul on the one hand, which is the active information of the implicate interiors defined by the wave function, and the oscillation of this informational interior with the explicate order of Actualities-Truth-Gross-Body and the Relational Networks of Justice-Nondual-Spirit itself. These two simultaneous movements, between the individual and collective orders of interior and exterior existence, is the holomovement in Bohmian terms by which the Kosmic Witness speaks Itself into Existence (a reference to integral semiotics that I will leave for now to other essays).

With the “all the way down” view of things we can make some remarkable associations that wouldn't otherwise be possible, and in doing so we can gain insight into how the empirical universe of science might be united in unexpected ways with the spiritual world of traditional philosophical systems. Another example of this kind of unity can be seen just one level up from the sub-quantum to the quantum realm of forces. Here the UL is the ontological domain of the weak force, the force of radioactive decay in physical matter just like a mutation in biological matter. In addition, the LL is the strong force, the force of strong intimate bonds that holds things together at the most intimate level of matter. The LR is the electro-magnetic force, the syntactic ordering of material structures through the power and force of different classes of objects and their charges. And gravity is the UR, the body of nature that attracts and grounds things in their physical dimensionality.

These are not just coincidental associations between the four forces and the four domains of subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, objectivity, and inter-objectivity, respectively. They describe a continuity in the characteristics of reality within each domain at all levels of existence. This way of looking at reality allows us to ask what it would mean for the universe to have interiors at the lowest level, and at all levels in-between. My answer is that the weak and strong forces are the interiors of the universe at the quantum level, and at other levels it has other kinds of interiors appropriate to those levels, for instance, the molecular, biological, and social levels. So this isn't about stacking and comparing unrelated categories of reality, it's about correlating a continuity between different levels of reality, all the way down. Moreover, given the pattern of oscillation I have described above we would expect, by prediction, that there may be something about the interaction between the weak and strong forces that results in the emergence gravity, and hence to a unified theory of quantum gravity.

Finally, at the cognitive and socio-cultural levels we see the same pattern at work, and of course while it's not the only pattern, it's a pattern that is foundational to how these levels of reality work. In cognition we operate with our model of the world, which is our LL, and this gives us our past expectations about the world that we will use to infer or predict among future possibilities (in the UL) that are closest to (resonant with) the expectations or probabilities we have as our model of the world, thus minimizing any disruption to our cognitive stability in a principle of least action. Again, the oscillation between variation and difference on the one hand and habit and repetition on the other, within cognitive functioning. In socio-cultural interaction, the pattern is the same, individual ideas are in constant oscillation and dialectic with their cultural milieu, bringing an on-going developmental trajectory between the individual and collective interiors that get manifested in different iterations of external individual and societal formations, with those exteriors feeding back into the interiors in a double oscillation, from moment to moment.

As the example of Bayesian cognitive-inference described above shows, the universe is seeking its lowest energy state by the principle of least action (the lazy universe principle), by which it selects and is attracted to different configuration states that are most probable, and that have the highest or at least an optimal resonance with the past (the conservative universe principle). It does this by virtue of the oscillation of the wave function between possibility (contingency, discontinuity, instability, difference, mutation) and probability (necessity, continuity, stability, repetition, genome) at the ground level of reality, which in Wilber's model is an oscillation between the UL of creative subtle mind and the LL of the cultural causal habits of the soul, the intimate bonds that go all the way down, and that are as strong and as old as the universe itself, like an Akashic memory field of holographically encrypted source code containing the karmic ghosts of infinite possibilities.