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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].

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Why the Axiom "All the Way Down" is not Physical Reductionism

Notes on a pan-psychist dual aspect monism

Joe Corbett

One criticism that keeps arising regarding my essays on Kosmic Dynamics is that I'm reducing the interior quadrants to physical quadrants, so that in effect what I'm doing is an URQ analysis of the AQAL. Thus it is necessary for me to briefly clarify why this is not the case.

First, the axiom that subjectivity, objectivity, inter-subjectivity, and inter-objectivity go all the way down means that these domains are not simply human constructs, but rather properties of the universe itself, even at the lowest levels or scales of existence. But it would be ridiculous to claim that atoms and molecules have interiority in the same way as humans or animals do. Rather, all levels have interiors appropriate to their own level.

For example, the standard model says that particles of matter exist as excitations in quantum fields that are described and defined by their wave function in the subquantum vacuum. Matter (things) are the effects of super-positional potentials fluctuating between their future possible states and their past probable states from moment to moment within the totality of interacting things. The interiors at the quantum level is the abstract informational space from which concrete things in the exterior arise and feedback into the interiors from moment to moment. At the fundamental subquantum level, then, the interiors are subtle and causal information and the exteriors are gross matter, all of which is oscillating and arising within the totality of interrelated things, or non-dual Spirit.

Likewise, genetic mutations have physical correlates in the individual molecules of the body in the UR that manifest as phenotypic traits, but the mutations themselves are an alternative set of encoded information in the gene. Thus a genetic mutation is a property of information or mind, not simply a physical property. And just as the brain is the physical correlate of mind, so is the genetic trait or phenotype (and the configuration of the molecules of the gene or genotype) the physical correlate of the information encoded by the gene. Moreover the genome is not just the physical configuration of genes, but is the morphic resonances of gene networks in intimate communication or informational coherence with each other, which is their interiority to the exteriority of their physical configurations.

This view postulates the interiors as information and the exteriors as physical matter, which over time evolves things into more complex subsystems that allow for different levels of structure, and ultimately into the emergence of life and consciousness. The metaphysical basis of this view is dual aspect monism, a version of panpsychism that sees information and matter as two sides of the same coin, neither existing without the other. Just as the physical universe would not exist without the vacuum, so it makes no sense to imagine one of these without the other, like imagining the lover without the beloved.

Hence animals, molecules, and atoms have interiors that are irreducible to one another because of the different levels of complexity at which they exist and experience the world alone, and interpret it together with others like them. An atom does not experience the world as a human does, obviously. This is the discontinuity between levels in the all the way down view of things. And yet, there is still continuity between levels insofar as they all have interiors that can be loosely and generally correlated to one another such that we can truly say, “as above, so below”.

An atom experiences the world, but that experience is nothing like our experience of the world. The only thing we can be certain of is that its experience will have the quality of uniqueness about it, or precisely subjectivity, beauty, novelty, creativity, or mutational adjacency by any other name. And that experience will have its physical correlate, as any presence needs its absence to even exist, as Derrida might say. Alas, Saussurian cosmology where the universe Mysteriously speaks itself into existence must be deferred to the topic of another essay.