On the Reason for Being
“Reason is the conscious certainty of being all reality. This is how Idealism expresses the principle of Reason.”[i]
There is nothing alien about Being, for it is created by us. Being is the beings of its particular beings, just as humanity is the composition of all human beings. Being is made possible through consciousness and is enriched by the high stage of consciousness that is reason. It is via consciousness and Being that we are inextricably linked to the Universe, and through reason our contribution to that partnership becomes an invaluable one.
Just as we do listen to ourselves, so does the Universe listen to us.
This is not to say that we believe the Universe to be omnipresent, or that it has an all-encompassing consciousness. What we are saying here is that the Universe is as conscious of itself as human beings are conscious of the Universe: The Universe knows itself through us.
But how can this be possible? If this were the case, the Universe must receive a load of noise, a quantum cacophony if you like, and so the question for this kind of metaphysical physics has to be: How can the quantum information transmitted by our consciousness be processed and understood by the inanimate, unconscious physical body that is the cosmos? This may seem like an absurd question, but it is the same basic problem that lies in the existence of life itself: How can life evolve from the inanimate? Or: How can DNA be read and comprehended by brainless, unconscious cells?
Our experience with computers gives us a way of conceptualising how this information exchanging process could take place by thinking of the enormous noise of the Internet and how search-engines are so swiftly capable of sifting through all the chatter to make sense of it and find what is being looked for. So, following our original premise that the Universe knows itself through us, the Universe must be capable of knowing what to look for because we know what to look for. And it must know how to find and understand what it finds in the same way that we know and understand what we find.
But what would be absurd, we believe, would be the absence of any purpose behind this universal exchange of information. If this communicative partnership exists it is for a reason and the DNA of our unconscious Universe must be infused with purposiveness, even though we are not.
This idea is sublimely optimistic: the Universe does not play dice. The fact that it has managed to evolve in a way that has been able to create conscious and self-conscious organisms within it capable of fashioning creative, technological developments to the same physical nature of the Universe, implies that it is deeply prejudiced towards Being and the perdurance of Being.
[i] G.W.F. Hegel, THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, Trans. J. B. Baillie, Dover, New York, 2003, p. 133
