How It Works!

David Cowles
Jan 28, 2025
“Events constitute the response of the cosmos to entropy. Like an army in retreat, order regroups… before it resumes its inevitable flight.”
From any point on the slope of a mountain, there is only one straight line to the summit but there are an infinite number of straight lines to the base.”
There is only one Universe, but the unity inherent in ‘Universe’ can be superficially shattered, perhaps in one way only, perhaps in many ways, perhaps in an infinite number of ways.
What we call cosmos is the product of one such shattering. 20th century British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, applied the phrase ‘cosmic epoch’ to describe the shatter pattern.
To what can we liken this cosmos? Perhaps to the I Ching, where yarrow stalks are thrown, forming a pattern that signifies the future. Or perhaps it’s like a snowflake, so many yet no two the same.
Perhaps the Universe is sampling Parmenides who imagined a spaceless timeless featureless Ground of Being (Aletheia) refracted into various colors, sizes and shapes (Doxa). Or perhaps Universe is captured in Hasidic Judaism: it has shattered into shards, each one containing a spark of divinity. It is ‘our job’ to liberate those sparks and reunite them with their Source. Christians have a similar concept: Opus Dei (the ‘work of God’).
Bottom line, everything we think we know concerns just one shatter pattern…ours. Here’s what we can say about Universe experienced as cosmos:
It exists, it’s real.
It’s a pattern made up of innumerable mini-patterns (Whitehead called those mini-patterns actual entities or events).
Each event is connected to every other event. It has to be! The shattering of Universe cannot destroy its fundamental, substructural unity. That fundamental unity is what allows us to find (or impose) structure among the actual entities in a shatter pattern.
That same unity also allows us to find structure within those entities. Ultimately, the events in our cosmic epoch form a ‘fractal pattern’.
In our cosmic epoch, events are structured according to an ordering principle we know interchangeably as entropy or time. It is possible, but not certain, that relations among these same events could have been or could still be structured differently; but so long as this cosmic epoch is our cosmic epoch, it’s characterized by entropy (aka ‘time’).
The events of our cosmic epoch can be conceived as a multidimensional lattice with the spacetime position of each entity in the lattice determined by entropy relations. In such a structure the Alpha Point (Big Bang) would be the region of minimal entropy and the Omega Point (Heat Death or Big Crunch) would be the region of maximal entropy. According to mathematician and cosmologist, Roger Penrose, Alpha and Omega can be shown to be mathematically equivalent, i.e., the same event!
Stephen Hawking theorized that we experience Universe as an entropic cosmos because ‘experience’ is ‘entropy’. It is possible, but not certain, that Universe can only experience itself in an entropic environment. If so, this would be an expression of the so-called Anthropic Principle: we see the world the way we do because that is the only way a world can be seen. The spacetime relationship between two events in time is a function of an entropy differential.
This progressive reduction of order (entropy) creates an opening for choice and intentionality, aka freewill. It is a given that order will decay but the forms it will take as it decays are not determined. If the products of decay were determined, there would never be any reduction in the quantity of order; order would be conserved...and it is not!
Simply put, from any point on the slope of a mountain, you can draw at most one ‘straight’ line back to the summit (maximal order) but you can draw an infinite number of straight lines to the base (minimal order). Ergo entropy! That said, there are no actual straight lines in our cosmic epoch. Order does not decay evenly but in fits and starts that correspond to what we experience as events.
Freewill in turn imposes its own set of requirements. Freedom is the antithesis of randomness or chaos. There must be values in terms of which freewill can meaningfully be exercised. Freedom from and freedom to are both value driven.
Those values must originate at the level of Universe. In fact, they must be Universe! The same values must be operative in every cosmic epoch. Values are ‘values’ if and only if they are objective, transcendent, universal, and eternal (Nietzsche). Otherwise they are just habits (Hume)…or tastes.
Freewill operates at the level of entities (or events). Entities are eddies of order. How the cosmos forms such eddies is determined by events themselves, powered by free will and guided by values.
Events constitute the response of the cosmos to entropy. Like an army in retreat, order regroups, takes a stand, reasserts itself, and makes itself felt… before it resumes its inevitable flight.
Mortality is the apparent triumph of decay over order. H. Dumpty, sitting proudly atop the wall that protects his bourgeois estate from the chaos beyond, was a poster boy for cosmic resistance…until he had a great fall.
Finally, events must include an element of awareness – awareness of the world, awareness of self-in-world, awareness of self as other-than-world. What we call consciousness is a particular flavor of awareness, but awareness is in no way limited to entities that are conscious. It is an integral component of every actual entity.
So that’s how it works! What do you think?
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