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By admin | September 17, 2008
I am delighted you are reading the text. The book first describes a non-random pattern, the eonic effect, or ‘eonic sequence’, then sets up a simple model to reflect the data. The model can be taken simple as a scheme of periodization, without any theory, but shows a remarkable relationship to some basic ideas of Kant. The key to the whole book is his so called very famous third antinomy, cited in bold in the quote below from Chapter Four, section Six.
Imagine my amazement on discovering that Nature follows this logic exactly, as we clock the so-called ‘eonic sequence’, with an especial bonus in the so-called Discrete Freedom Sequence (See the end of Chapter three). The result is stunning, but beyond the capacity of most scientists, probably because they refuse to read the text beyond the criticism of Darwinism, or are trained to reject the idea of freedom in relation to causality.
Take it in slow does, the argument fits together like a watch.
You can also defer on this interpretation, and simply think in terms of ‘punctuated equilibrium’, something everyone talks about, but the text shows an example: think in terms of three punctuations and the middles between them. This sets up the distinctions of macroevolution/microevolution, or macro-action/micro-action.
If you wish have look at a Very Simple historical version of Kant’s philosophy, just to get a bird’s eye view, and some background for the Third Antinomy. Don’t try and wolf down Kant’s texts unless so inclined, to start.
Basically the issue is that science/determinism can’t do history, because it must take into account freedom. But the eonic effect shows nature’s way to reconciling the contradiction in oscillations of degrees of freedom.
You have the whole argument as part of your instinctive repetoire of spontaneous behaviors. One example is a computer and a user with a mouse. The computer is deterministic, but the user responses with free options using the mouse. This relationship of user ‘free action’ and computer ’system determination’ resembles in essence the eonic effect (there are many other examples), and the result is an elegant hybrid of two types of thinking (as with the computer/user) example. Since nothing like this has been offered before,
(although Hegel almost said something like this, and ended in a muddle of his confused ‘dialectic’ and religion), the argument can draw a blank.
The whole thing is the application of a very simple ‘discrete-continuous’ model (i.e. something switches on and off, drumbeat style) and the fit to world history is remarkable.
The result shows how to harmonize the factor of evolution with the factor of history, with evolution representing the system determination part, and history the free action part.
It is genuinely new territory. And at risk from being lost to intellectual discourse. But I think not. Schopenhauer waited thirty five years before anyone saw his point. So I can wait.
“Causality according to laws of nature is not the only kind of causality from which the phenomenon of the world can be derived. It is necessary, in order to explain them, to assume a causality through freedom.” Its antithesis is: “There is no freedom: everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature.”
We confront the enigma of the thesis, that freedom generation and physical causality somehow are both the case. The dilemma is immediate from the periodization of our model, remembering that this is only an empirical discovery, not a deduction.
Kant’s Third Antinomy is reflected in our pattern, but on such a large scale, and such a different mode, that we must proceed with caution. From the way we set up our model (for another purpose) we can see how the stream of history seems interrupted by a second different ‘causal initialization’ that has no continuous lead up or antecedents. Our transitions are formally analogous to the noumenon, but quite different. They stand in conjunction to the limits of historical representation.
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