God and Eternal Objects

A Panentheist Approach to the Frame Problem

I have been having a lot of conversations with other people and with myself, and I have been watching many conversations as well. There seems to be no doubt—perhaps because of the bias implicit in my own personal search algorithm—that a convergence is occurring. I recently watched a conversation between Brendan Graham Dempsey and Anna Riedl about what Anna calls “autopoiethics” (building on autopoesis). Autopoiethics is a kind of application of autopoetic theory and enactive and 4EA cognitive science to ethics, politics, and economics. A couple of days ago, I recorded a dialogue with my friend Tim Jackson about a paper by Chris Buckley, Mike Levin, Richard Watson, and others called “Natural Induction,” which is related.

In their conversation, Anna and Brendan discussed approaches to what is called the frame problem in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Essentially, the frame problem asks how organisms—or a cognitive system of some kind—are able to realize relevance in a contextually contingent situation, given that the initial data always permits more than one way of generalizing. To understand how a cognitive system is able to effectively navigate its environment, one needs to account for its capacity to realize relevance; that is, its capacity to solve the frame problem.

One of the issues that Tim Jackson and I have been discussing—and indeed have been directly confronting for years—is whether the frame problem can ultimately be solved only by a sort of cosmic inductive bias. In Whitehead’s terms, this means that there is a primordial envisagement of the realm of eternal objects that grants the network of possibilities a kind of hierarchy of value. This hierarchy organizes the possibilities according to aesthetic and moral gradations, such that there is a tilt toward truth, beauty, and goodness in the very nature of the field of potentialities that structure cosmogenesis.

Of course, this is a big ask. It can feel like an unnecessarily extravagant and speculative posit to propose the idea of a primordial nature of God, which envisages the realm of possibility and gives it this necessary goodness. However, this “necessary” goodness is only necessary after the fact, as originally It is a contingently emergent consequence of Creativity. God becomes a necessary condition upon Creativity for us only after Its accidental emergence. We do not live in a perfect world; even God is limited in Whitehead’s scheme. In this view, the primordial nature of God is not the creator of the world but rather the relator of the possibilities that allow the world to unfold in an organized way. For Whitehead, relevance realization is a function of this initial aim provided by a primordial envisagement, which gives some axiological texture or teleological tilt to the structure of possibility. How finite actual occasions, or creatures, respond and decide how to become in their unique situations is not determined solely by this primordial envisagement. There is a gradation of possibility, but the gradients that actual occasions follow in their historical routes—which form the enduring societies that give rise to the morphological structure of the world we share (our own bodies, the other plants and animals, the mineral and astral worlds, and so on)—are a function of actual occasions gnawing into this topos of tilted possibilities, harvesting relevant eternal objects.

We are immersed in this situation as self-creating creatures, and it seems to me both necessary and admittedly somewhat awkward to acknowledge that we need to make reference to God to make sense of this problem in cognitive science. To solve the frame problem, we might need to conjure a divine being that orders the structure of possibility in advance. This can sound like a throwback to a premodern way of thinking, but I believe it is less a throwback and more a recollection of the conditions that make science possible. A thinker like Plato had a lot to tell us about these conditions—one being that nature is intelligible. Can science explain why nature is intelligible? No; science is engaged in the process of trying to understand nature, arriving at laws of nature, and uncovering the formal patterns that, at least probabilistically, shape the unfolding of nature, allowing us to make predictions. Science cannot explain the source of intelligibility itself—science presupposes that intelligibility exists. In this way, to say that science has presuppositions is just to say that science is a branch of philosophy.

When we do natural philosophy and try to understand what makes science possible, we have to ask why nature is intelligible. We can talk about fine-tuning in this case—that the fundamental constants were arranged just so that heavier elements, complex life, and eventually intelligent minds like ours could emerge. Another conversation I listened to recently on this subject was John Vervaeke’s dialogue with Philip Goff. Fine-tuning suggests either that there is a multiverse and that we just happen to be in one of infinitely many sub-universes of this multiverse, with the vast majority not giving rise to life and mind; in this case, I’d say we are bypassing the actual metaphysical task by simply punting to statistical probability. We are shirking the responsibility to explain by positing an undetectable multiverse.

The other choice regarding this apparent fine-tuning and the anthropic principle is to say that there is a cosmic constraint—namely, a primordial envisagement that gives a tilt to the field of possibilities and primordially shapes it. This primordial envisagement does not determine what actually happens; what occurs remains free and continues to be subject to creative advance, the accumulation of history, and the refreshment of relevant novelty. This refreshment comes from the primordial envisagement of the infinite realm of eternal objects and acts as a persuasive lure rather than a coercive force.

I have a good friend named Adam—

Adam Robbert

—who has a great Substack (look him up at The Base Camp). He told me years ago, when I was first getting into Whitehead (or more precisely, when I really started to become a Whiteheadian), to “go hard on eternal objects and God.” He had the intuition that those concepts were important and that they were why Whitehead’s work was especially relevant, because modern science really needed to rejuvenate, recuperate, and recollect the importance of these ideas: eternal objects—in other words, formal causality—and God, which, in essence, has to do with final causality. God is that by virtue of which the universe’s teleological aim is the production of beauty. There is a cosmos because there is an aesthetic order implicit in the nature of things.

I appreciate Adam’s suggestion, and I have been going hard on eternal objects and God ever since, despite their unpopularity. The process point of view is popular, but the ideas that accompany Whitehead’s process view—namely eternal objects and God—are less popular because they sound like Platonism. Indeed, they are a form of Platonism, though it is an esoteric and, in some ways, a “mathematical” form of it, in the sense that “math” really means “learning.” There is a pedagogical principle at work in Plato’s philosophy that often gets missed; people refer to “Platonism” and the various doctrines associated with it and forget that Plato’s dialogues are themselves pedagogical tools. They are meant to guide students through a process of initiation into the caves of imagination and the caverns of the conceptual mind, showing us how the sausage is made, that is, how concepts are created. Plato does not provide finished doctrines or definitive answers; instead, he offers some answers, some problems, and some criticisms of any doctrine one might extract from his dialogues.

Thus, to say that we are inheriting Plato—that all of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, as Whitehead famously put it—is not to say that those footnotes represent a finished doctrine. Rather, it suggests that there is always something to be learned and that learning is an ongoing process. The very nature of human life is educational—a process of ever-deepening understanding, of being in constant contact with wonder and responding to that wonder with openness, trust, faith, and love. This is the philosophical path and also the process by which we come to realize relevance. There is a connection here among ethics, aesthetics, politics, psychology, sociology, biology, chemistry, physics, and theology. When we engage in metaphysics, we are trying to surface that connection, articulate it, and give it a voice, because we are attempting to produce a sense of purpose and shared aspiration.

That, I believe, is the real rub. Right now, the source of the meaning crisis is our lack of any shared aspiration. We have lost touch with what we have in common, and as a result, we have become alienated. We have become incapable of communion—with each other, with the universe, and with God. We have lost touch and have become disintegrated, incapable of intimacy. Yet God is always inviting us back. To speak in that way might sound religious, but I think we need to find a way to speak in that common language again and not feel embarrassed about it. The modern individual, with his science, technology, and freedom, has grown embarrassed of faith in God, and I believe that is a problem. We need to humble ourselves because our hubris will be our downfall. The human being is not all-powerful, and neither is God. We are made in the image of God; therefore, how we imagine God is how we imagine ourselves. The image of God as a divine dictator is destroying us. Instead, we can imagine God as a poet, as a tragic poet, as a companion, and as a fellow sufferer. That might better motivate our journey into the future together.