Why Some Scientists Embrace the ‘Multiverse’

To those who are perishing, these other dimensional realities are 'realities without reason'.

Just to add to my earlier post: These "other dimensional realities" are "realities without reason" to minds who think of "reason" in its instrumental sense. That is, as an analytical tool. Yet reason as an analytical tool only works if there is Reason understood as the ordering principle of the cosmos (or universe, or God's Creation) — which is what the classical Greeks, especially Plato, thought Reason — Nous — is. It is Reason — the ordering principle of the cosmos — that makes the world intelligible to minds capable of reasoning in the instrumental sense.

Minds suffering from the "disease" of aspernatio rationalis — contempt of reason — basically aren't interested in the way the world actually is, preferring to construct alternative or "second" realities that they find more personally gratifying. By this maneuver, however — which Whitehead calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness — they manage to reduce the world to the measure of their own thinking about the world. Any psychotic can do this. We expect better from scientists and other responsible parties in society.

In the process of this reduction, they also reduce Time to the way mortal man directly senses Time — as linear, serial, irreversible, "moving" from past to present to future. They fail to recognize that any universal concept (such as a physical law, or pi, for example) does not rise from, or reside in this "flat" temporal line.

As you suggest, dear brother in Christ, our nominal sense of time is insufficient to grasp the meaning of all that there is (to pan). Upon further reflection, it seems to me an honest thinker will admit at least one other temporal dimension/extension; that is, volumetric time — a "time" that can account for (1) universals and (2) human experience as it is actually lived in its fullness — as necessary to rational analysis.

We get a tremendous insight into this situation in the wonderful observation of a very great poet, T. S. Eliot:

Man lives at the intersection of time and timelessness.

Of course, science cannot "measure" timelessness. But it seems to me it will pile up errors if it refuses to take the problem of timelessness into consideration, not to mention that such refusal denies the very reality and provenance of universal law that its own methodology absolutely depends on.

Time is the realm of particularity and mortality; timelessness of universality and immortality. Man lives in the "in-between" — the only creature in God's Creation that does so.

At least, I do believe Plato came to this conclusion. And personally, after much reflection, I find this assessment of the problem quite convincing.

Don't know if I should be embarrassed to admit that I never read Plato's or Aristotle's writings and thus know not what they thought....

It is doubtful to me that many people read Plato anymore. But I have been reading him since age 17, which is to say over four decades by now.

It's funny how I got started with him. At the time (age 17), I picked up Plato — Symposium — for the first time. And, at the very same time, decided to read Sigmund Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis.

Well, to make a long story short, even at that tender age, I figured one of these two guys must be totally nutz. I decided the nutty one was Freud. And I've been reading Plato ever since — with great difficulty at first.

So don't feel "embarrassed" about not reading Plato. Practically no one does nowadays. Folks just don't have the patience for it, or see it as relevant to the times we live in.

But Plato was the very first psychologist; he pioneered the field which arguably Freud abandoned. Few psychologists — with the notable exception of Viktor Frankl and his "logotherapy" approach to curing psychic disorders — now follow his (to me enormously valuable) lead.

Unfortunately, what people do "know" about Plato nowadays often is gotten second hand from thinkers like Ayn Rand — who doesn't have a clue about where Plato is coming from, or what his life's work means....

Oh well.... life is short....

Thanks so much for writing, Robert DeLong! (Have we met before?)

I do not see how they can continue to ignore it.

Time is the realm of particularity and mortality; timelessness of universality and immortality. Man lives in the "in-between" — the only creature in God's Creation that does so.

So very true!

Thank you for all your wonderful essay-posts, dearest sister in Christ!

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