Multiplicity of the Quite Unseen “Seen”
Where science and metaphysics collide is the limit of materialist-complete explanations for the greatest and most fundamental phenomena that defy reduction. Naturalist explanations own the roost of the daily ins and outs of the physical world, as grounded by the mysteries in the absolutes that, in turn, defy naturalism. We are told by those that ignore this reality that consciousness is an emergent property of neural activity and that life arises from non-living matter through chemical processes, or that gravity is a consequence of mass curving spacetime. Yet these explanations remain tantalisingly incomplete while entirely unsatisfactory in their eager conclusions guided by presumptions of mediocrity.
Take, for instance, the problem of biogenesis: the origin of life. Despite decades of research, scientists have yet to demonstrate how life could emerge from non-living chemicals under any conditions let alone those presumed to have ever existed on earth. The seemingly most plausible theories each carry their own uncertainties and unexplained gaps. What of consciousness?
Neural activity is seen in the way we are able to detect it with the instruments we have been able to conceive of given all known and unknown limitations to our own natural senses. We know there is manifold insensible things, yet can we perceive all the ways we are insensible? The difficult problem remains: how does physical matter give rise to subjective experience across memory and time? There is no clearly reductive principle, and therefore we simply don’t recognise the irreducible or pretend that it is still theoretically reducible despite it not being actually because “we simply lack the ability to reduce it currently given current definitions in observation.”
Gravity is the classic invisible force, apparently binding the bodies of the cosmos together. While Einstein’s theory of general relativity describes its effects with mathematical precision, it offers no observable mechanism for how gravity exists at all, merely conjecture as part of a larger system which is reliant upon its own unobserved reductions. The Standard Model of particle physics accounts for three of the four fundamental forces, yet gravity remains the outlier, a mystery that defies our constructed understanding. It also still fails to explain the quite impossible earthly or planetary odds of the amiable conditions for abundant in life, outside of multiversality. They replace God with many invisible things to explain away contradictory evidence.
We are told we have a grasp upon all the big answers and to ignore these gaps and proceed without caution. This is not merely a scientific oversight; it is a philosophical choice. Accepting materialism as the sole framework for understanding reality is to deny even the limits to comprehending our limits. So we deny anything beyond the physical? Deny the consciousness, deny purpose, and deny design? But then accept other unobserved things as stopgaps to our makeshift understandings? We treat the universe as an inert machine with parts unseen merely pushing it around like a carcass, rather than part of a wider living mystery. We reduce ourselves willingly and demand mediocrity, for what? What if all this denial is itself a form of arrogance? What if our refusal to consider the greater reality is the purpose in pushing demoralising lies that blind us to the moralising truths beyond our full comprehension? Maybe there is more to energy itself than we could ever recognise as energetic beings ourselves in time and across energetic imprints. The question is not whether we can explain everything, but whether we are willing to admit that some things may forever remain beyond our grasp and that some things are outside of it, not out of malice but for legitimate reasonable limitations to do with the basic reality of our material existence.