Ben,
The cognitive science link didn’t work. The discussion of philosophical theism is the sort of thing I like wrapping my brain around. When it isn’t tired, or busy.
I sort of started reading and and skimmed a bit as it is long and tends to cause my mind to spiral off into various of its own rabbit holes.
If I may make a point to try to frame the problem, it goes to my observation that reality is this dichotomy of energy and form. Energy driving/manifesting. Form defining/directing. As biological entities, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us, while the central nervous system sorts the forms.
Which means constantly distilling, ordering and judging them. Which is in itself a process of reductionism. We can’t escape it, it’s what our brains do.
So then we distill out these conceptual “nodes” and wonder where they fit, or if they do fit and how they fit. Which raises this whole true/false question. How do we put the puzzle pieces back together, when we are one of the pieces and have no idea of the bigger picture. Along with an imagination that is constantly postulating alternative interpretations, as both necessary for our sorting and judging process, as well as just exercising a healthy brain.
So step back and consider the essential dichotomy between energy and form.
The form of a wave/waves is frequency and amplitude, but they are not the energy manifesting and driving the wave. They emerge as the limits of that energy are reached and expressed. One could posit the same for a flower. It’s form emerges as the billion year old feedback mechanisms of its genes give direction to the energy of light it is absorbing and when the form is filled out, the flower has bloomed. Then it cycles back into consolidating its genes into seeds and pollen and the cycle goes on.
Which also goes to my point about time. That it is an effect of the dynamic energy that is the present. So the energy goes past to future forms, as the forms rise and fall, future to past. Potential, to actual, to residual. Like the wave, or the flower. Or us.
I think the cycle between this relationship between energy and form might go deep into physics. Consider the issue of “dark matter.” That there is more gravitational attraction, than there is matter to explain it. So what if we were to posit the relationship in reverse; That “matter” is an effect of gravity, not gravity a property of matter. That this coalescing/condensing of form is a wave collapse that extends all the way out to where photons condense out of wave fronts of energy. Then this extra “gravity” is the contraction much further out the spectrum, than mass. Galaxies as convection cycles of energy radiating out, while form coalesces in.
Given this last idea is probably out in left field for you and requires some processing, I will step back and observe it goes to the truth issue, that the context from which we distill these nuggets of insight is far broader and deeper than we can hope to encompass. So we map out these models/frames/theories/beliefs/ideologies/etc and try to pass them along and they become their own rabbit holes of specialized knowledge, ever more distilled and abstracted from their context.
We seek signal from the noise, but the noise is context for the signal. Like we try to extract money from the economy, but lose sight of the money being the medium for the economy. Then keep having to add ever more and find ways ever more precarious ways to store what has been extracted.
We are linear, goal oriented creatures, whether the goal is the truth, or the bottom line. In a cyclical, feedback driven reality.
The parameters are the absolute, where all form cancels out and energy radiates back out, and the infinite, where all energy fades to background radiation.
Here is an essay I wrote;
https://medium.com/@johnbrodixmerrymanjr/the-confessions-of-a-cosmic-heretic-5cd4c044b8ea
